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26 January 2023

Matt Brown: Goals for 2023

This is the second of a two-part post covering my goals for 2023. See the first part to understand the vision, mission and strategy driving these goals. I want to thank my friend Nat, and Will Larson whose annual reviews I ve always enjoyed reading for inspiring me to write these posts. I ve found the process articulating my motivations and goals very useful to clarify my thoughts and create tangible next steps. I m grateful for that in and of itself, but I also hope that by publishing this you too might find it interesting, and the additional public accountability it creates will be a positive encouragement to me.

2023 Goals My focus for 2023 is to bootstrap a business that I can use to build software that solves real problems (see the strategy from the previous post for more details on this). I m going to track this via three goals:
  1. Execute a series of successful consulting engagements, building a reputation for myself and leaving happy customers willing to provide testimonials that support a pipeline of future opportunities.
  2. Grow my product development skill set by taking several ideas to MVP stage with customer feedback received, and launch at least one product which generates revenue and has growth potential.
  3. Develop and maintain a broad professional network.

Consulting Based on my background and experience, I plan to target my consulting across three areas:
  1. Leadership - building and growing operationally focused software teams following SRE/devops principles. A typical engagement may involve helping a client establish a brand new SRE/devops practice, or to strengthen and mature the existing practices used to build and operate reliable software in their team(s).
  2. Architecture - applying deep technical expertise to the design of large software systems, particularly focusing on their reliability and operability. A typical engagement may involve design input and decision making support for key aspects of a new system, providing external review and analysis to improve an existing system, or delivering actionable, tactical next steps during or immediately after a reliability crisis.
  3. Technology Strategy - translating high-level business needs into a technical roadmap that provides understandable explanations of the value software can deliver in that context, and the iterative series of appropriately sized projects required to realise it. A typical customer for this would be a small to medium sized business outside of the software industry with a desire to use software in a transformative way to improve their business but who does not employ the necessary in-house expertise to lead that transition.

Product Development There are three, currently extremely high level, product ideas that I m excited to explore:
  1. Improve co-ordination of electricity resources to accelerate the electrification of NZ s energy demand and the transition to zero carbon grid. NZ has huge potential to be a world-leader in decarbonising energy use through electrification, but requires a massive transition to realise the benefits. Many of the challenges to that transition involve coordination of an order of magnitude more distributed energy resources (DER) in a much more dynamic and software-oriented manner than the electricity industry is traditionally experienced with. The concept of improving DER coordination is not novel, but our grid has unique characteristics that mean we re likely to need to build localised solutions. There is a strong match between my experience with large, high-reliability distributed software systems, and this need. With renewed motivation in the industry for rapid progress and many conversations and consultations still in their early stages this a very compelling space to explore with the intent of developing a more detailed product opportunity to pursue.
  2. Reduce agricultural emissions by making high performance farm management, including effortless compliance reporting, straightforward, fun and effective for busy farmers. NZ s commitments to reduce agricultural emissions (our largest single sector) place increased compliance and reporting burdens on busy farmers who don t want to report the same data multiple times to different regulators and authorities. In tandem, rising business costs and constraints drive a need for continuous improvements in efficiency, performance and farm management processes in order to remain profitable. This in turn drives increases in complexity and the volume of data that farmers must work with. Many industry organisations and associated software developers offer existing products aimed at addressing aspects of these problems, but anecdotal feedback indicates these are poorly integrated, piecemeal solutions that are often frustrating to use - a burden rather than a source of continuous improvement. It looks like there could be an opportunity for a delightful, comprehensive farm management and reporting system to disrupt the industry and help farmers run more profitable and sustainable farms while also reducing compliance costs and effort.
  3. Lower sickness rates and improve cognitive performance by enabling every indoor space to benefit from continuous ventilation monitoring and reporting. Indoor air quality is important in reducing disease transmission risk and promoting optimal cognitive performance, but despite the current pandemic temporarily raising its profile, a focus on indoor air quality generally remains under the radar for most people. One factor contributing to this is the lack of widely available systems for continuously monitoring and reporting on air quality. I built https://co2mon.nz/ to help address this problem in my children s school during 2022. I see potential to further grow this business through marketing and raising awareness of the value of ventilation monitoring in all indoor environments.
In addition to these mission aligned product ideas, I m also interested in exploring the creation of small to medium sized SaaS applications that deliver useful value by serving the needs of a specialised or niche business or industry. Even when not directly linked to the overall mission, the development and operation of products of this type can support the strategy. Each application adds direct revenue and also contributes to achieving better economies of scale in the many backend processes and infrastructure required to deliver secure, reliable and performant software systems.

Developing my professional network To help make this goal more actionable and measurable I will track 3 sub goals:
  1. To build a professional relationship with at least 30 new people this year, meaning that we ve met and had a decent conversation at least a couple of times and keep in touch at least every few months in some form.
  2. To publish a piece of writing on this site at least once a week, and for many of those to generate interesting conversations and feedback. I ll use this as an opportunity to explore product ideas, highlight my consulting expertise and generally contribute interesting technical content into the world.
  3. To support the growth of my local technical community by volunteering my experience and knowledge with others through activities such as mentoring, conference talks and similar.

Next Steps Over the coming weeks I ll write more about each of these topics - you can use the box in the sidebar (or on the front page, if you re on a phone) to be notified when I post new writing (there s also an RSS feed here, for the geeks). I d love to have your feedback and engagement on these goals too - please drop me an email with your thoughts or even book a meeting - it won t be a distraction to me, you ll be helping me meet my goal of developing and maintaining my network :)

Shirish Agarwal: Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023, Tinnitus, Cooking, Books and Series.

First up is Minidebconf Tamilnadu 2023 that would be held on 28-29 January 2023. You can find rest of the details here. I do hope we get to see/hear some good stuff from the Minidebconf. Best of luck to all those who are applying.

Tinnitus During the lock-down of March 2020, I became aware of noise in ears and subsequently major hearing loss. It took me quite a while to know that Tinnitus happens to both those who have hearing loss as well as not. I keep running into threads like this and as shared by someone nobody knows what really causes it. I did try some of the apps (an app. called Resound on Android) that is supposed to tackle Tinnitus but it hasn t helped much. There is this but at least for me, right now pretty speculative. Also this, and again highly speculative.

Cooking After mum passed away, I haven t cooked anything. This used to give me pleasure but now just doesn t feel right. Cooking is something you enjoy when you are doing for somebody else and not just for yourself, at least that s how I feel and with that the curiosity to know more recipes. I do wanna buy a wok at sometime but when, how I just don t know.

Books Have been reading books quite a bit. And due to that had to again revisit and understand ISBN. Perhaps I might have shared it before. It really is something, the history of ISBN. And that co-relates with the book I read, Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam is the 40th Book in the Discworld Series and it basically romanticizes and reminisces how the idea of an engine was born, and then a steam engine and how actually Railways started. There has been a lot of history and experiences from the early years of Steam Railway that have been taken and transplanted into the book. Also how Railways is and can be successful if only it is invested wisely and maintenance is done. This is only where imagination and reality come apart as maintenance isn t done and then you have issues. While this is and was in the UK, similar situation exists in India and many other places around the world and doesn t matter whether it is private or public. Exceptions are German, French but then that maybe due to Labor movements that happened and were successful unlike in other places. I could go on but then it will become a different article in itself. Suffice to say there is much to learn and you need serious people to look after it. Both in UK and India we lack that. And not just in Railways but Civil Aviation too, but again that is a story in itself.

Web-series Apart from books, have been seeing web-series that Willow is a good one that I enjoyed even though I hadn t seen the earlier movie. While there has been a flurry of movies and web-series both due to end of year and beginning of 2023 and yet have tried to be a bit partial on what I wanna watch or not. If it has crime, fantasy, drama then usually I like it. For e.g. I saw Blackout and pretty much was engrossed in what will happen next. It also does lead you to ask questions about centralization vs de-centralization for both power and other utilities and does make a case for communities to have their utilities apart from the grid as a fallback. How do we do over decades or centuries about it is a different question perhaps altogether. There were two books that kinda stood out for me, the first was Ian Rankin s Naming of the Dead . The book is about a cynical John Rebus, a man after my own heart. I am probably going to buy a few more of his series. In a way it also tells you why UK is the way it is right now. Another book that I liked was Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. This is one of the books that Mum would have clearly liked. It is pretty unusual while at the same time very close to 1984 and other such dystopian novels. The main trope of the book is what color you can see and how much you can see. The main character is somebody who can see Red, around the age of 20. One of the interesting aspects of the book is de-facting which closely resembles the Post-Truth world where alternative facts can be made out of air and they don t need any scientific evidence to back them up. In Jasper s world, they don t care about how things work and most of the technology is banned and curiosity is considered harmful and those who show that are murdered one way or the other. Interestingly, the author has just last year decided to start book 2 in the 3 book series that is supposed to be. This also tells why the U.S. is such a precarious situation in a way. A part of it is also due to the media which is in hands of chosen few, the same goes for UK and India, almost an oligopoly.

The Great Escape This is also a book but also about experiences of people, not in 19th-20th century but today that tells you slavery is alive and well and human-trafficking as well. This piece from NPR tells you about an MNC and Indian workers. What I found interesting is that there barely is an mention of the Indian Embassy that is supposed to help Indian people. I do know for a fact that the embassies of India has seen a drastic shortage of both people and materials even since the new Govt. came in place that was nine years ago. Incidentally, BBC shared about the Gujarat riots 2002 and that has been censored in India. They keep quiet about the UK Govt. who did find out that the Chief Minister was directly responsible for the killings and in facts his number 2, Amit Shah had shared that we would do 2002 again in the election cycle barely a month ago. But sadly, no hate speech FIR or any action was taken against Mr. Shah. There have been attempts by people to showcase the documentary. For e.g. JNU tried it and the rowdies from ABVP (arm of BJP) created violence. Even the questions that has been asked by the Wire, GOI will not acknowledge them. Interestingly, all India s edtechs have taken a beating in the last 6-8 months including the biggest BJYU s. Sharing a story from 2021 where things were best and today all of them are at bottom. In fact, the public has been wary as the prices of the courses has kept on increasing and most case studies have been found to be fake. Also the general outlook on jobs and growth has been pessimistic. In fact, most companies have been shedding jobs truckloads, most in the I.T. sector but other sectors as well. Hospitality and other related sectors have taken a huge beating, part of it post-pandemic, part of it Govt s refusal to either spend money or do any positive policies for either infrastructure, education, medical, you name it, they think private sector has all the answers which has been proven to be wrong again and again. I did not want to end on a discordant note but things are the way they are

Matt Brown: Vision, Mission and Strategy

This is the first of a two-part post, covering high-level thoughts around my motivations and vision. Make sure to check out the second part for my specific goals for 2023. A new year is upon us! My plan was to be 6 months into the journey of starting a business by this point. I made some very tentative progress towards that goal in 2022, registering a company and starting some consulting work, but on the whole I ve found it much harder than expected to gather the necessary energy to begin that journey in earnest.

Reflection I m excited about the next chapter of my career, so the fact that I ve been struggling to get started has been frustrating. The only upside is that the delay has given me plenty of time to reflect on the last few years and what I can learn from them and draw some lessons to help better manage and sustain my energy going forward.

Purpose A large part of what I ve realised is that I should have left Google years ago. It was a great place to work, and I m incredibly grateful for everything I learned and received during my time there. For years it was my dream job, but my happiness had been declining, and instead of taking the (relatively small) risk of leaving to the unknown, I tried several variations of team and role in the hope of restoring the dream. The reality is that a significant chunk of my motivation and energy comes from being able to link my work back to a bigger purpose that delivers concrete positive impact in the world. I felt that link through Google s mission to make information universally accessible and useful for the first 10-11 years, but for the latter 4-5 years my ability to see that link was tenuous at best and trying to push through the challenges presented without that link providing a reliable source of energy is what drove my unhappiness and led to needing a longer break to recharge. I expect the challenges of starting a business to be even greater than what I experienced at Google, so the lesson I m taking from this is that it s crucial for me to understand what the link between my work and the bigger purpose with concrete positive impact in the world that I m aiming to contribute to is.

Community The second factor that I ve slowly come to realise has been missing from my career in the last few years has been participation in a professional community and a variety of enriching interpersonal relationships. As much as I value and need this type of interaction, fostering and sustaining it unfortunately doesn t come naturally to me. Working remotely since 2016 and then taking a 9 month break out of the industry are not particularly helpful contributors to building and maintaining a wide network either! The lesson here is simply that I m going to need to push past my comfort zone in reaching out and introducing myself to a range of people in order to grow my professional network, and equally I need to be diligent and disciplined in making time to maintain and regularly connect with people whom I respect and find energising to interact with.

Personal Influences Lastly, I ve been reflecting on a set of principles that are important to me. These are not so much new lessons, more confirming to myself what I value moving forward. There are many things I could include here, but to keep it somewhat brief, the key influences on my thinking are:
  • Independence - I can t entirely explain why or where it comes from, but since the start of my professional career (which I consider to be my consulting/freelancing development during high school) I ve understood that I m far more motivated by building and growing my own business than I am by working for someone else. Working for myself has always felt like the default and sensible course - I m excited to get back to that.
  • Openness - Open is better than closed, in terms of software, business model and organisational processes. This continues to be a strong belief and something I want to uphold in my business endeavours. Competition should be based on superior technical quality or service, not artificial constraints or barriers to entry that lock customers and users into a single solution or market. Protocols and networks should be open for wide participation and easily accessible to new entrants and competition.
  • People first - This applies both to how we work with each other - respectfully, valuing diversity and with integrity, and to how we apply technology to our world - with consideration for all stakeholders it may affect and awareness of both the intended and potential unintended impacts.

Framework Using Vision, Mission and Strategy as a planning framework has worked quite well for me when building and growing teams over the years, so I plan to re-use it personally to help organise the above reflections into a hopefully cohesive plan than results in some useful 2023 goals.

Vision Software systems contribute direct and meaningful impact to solving real problems in our world. Each word has a fair bit of meaning behind it for me, so breaking it down a little bit:
  • software systems - excite me because software is eating the world and has significant potential to do good.
  • contribute - Software alone doesn t solve problems, and misapplied can easily make things worse. To contribute software needs to be designed intentionally and evaluated with an awareness of risks it could pose within the complex system that is our modern world.
  • direct and meaningful impact - I m not looking for broad outcomes like improving productivity or communication, which apply generally across many problems. I want to see software applied to solve specific blockers whose removal unlocks significant progress towards solving a problem.
  • real - as opposed to straightforward problems. The types of issue where the acknowledgement of it as a real problem often ends the sentence as it feels too big to tackle. Climate change and pandemic risk are examples of real problems. Decentralising finance or selling more widgets are not.
  • in our world - is mostly filler to round out the sentence nicely, but I do think we should probably sort out the mess we re making on our own planet before trying to colonise anywhere else.

Mission To lead the development and operation of software systems that deliver new opportunities for individuals, businesses and communities to solve the real problems in their community. Again breaking down the intent a little bit:
  • lead - having a meaningful impact on real problems is a big job. I won t succeed as a one man band. It will require building and growing a larger team.
  • development and operation - development is fun and necessary, but I also wanted to highlight that the ongoing operation and integration of those software systems into the broader social and human systems of our world is an equally important and ongoing need.
  • new opportunities - are important to drive and motivate investment in the adoption of technology. Building or operating a system that maintains the status quo is not motivating for me.
  • individuals, businesses and communities - aka everyone! But each of these groups (as examples, not specific) will have diverse roles, needs and interactions with the software which must be considered to ensure the system achieves the desired contribution and impact.
  • their community - refines the ambition from the vision to an achievable scope of action within which to execute the mission. We won t solve our problems by targeting one big global fix, but if we each participate in solving the problems in our community, collectively it will make a difference.

Strategy Build a sustainable business that provides a home and infrastructure to support a continuous cycle of development, validation and growth of software systems fulfilling the mission and vision above.
  • Accumulate meaningful impact via a portfolio of systems rather than one big bet.
  • Focus on opportunities that promote the decarbonisation of our economy (the most pressing problem our society faces), but not at the expense of ignoring compelling opportunities to contribute impact to other real problems also.
  • Favour the marathon over the sprint - while being first can be fun and convey benefits, it s often the fast-followers who learn from the initial mistakes and deliver lasting change and broader impact.
In keeping with the final bullet point, I aim to evaluate the strategy against a long-term view of success. What excites me about it is that it has the potential to provide structure and clarity for my work while also enabling many future paths - from operating a portfolio of micro-SaaS products that each solve real problems for a specific niche or community, or diving deep into a single compelling opportunity for a year or two, joining with others to partner on shared ventures or some combination of all three and other variations in between.

Your Thoughts I consider this a first draft, which I intend to revise and evolve further over the next 6-12 months. I don t plan major changes to the intent or underlying ideas, but finding the best words to express and convey that intent clearly is not something I expect to get right on the first take. I d love to have your feedback and engagement as I move forward with this strategy - please use the box in the sidebar (or on the front page, if you re on a phone) to be notified when I post new writing, drop me an email with your thoughts or even book a meeting to say hi and discuss something in detail.

Goals for 2023 Next up - check out part two of this post to see my goals for 2023.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppTOML 0.2.1 on CRAN: Small Build Fix for Some Arches

Two weeks after the release of RcppTOML 0.2.0 and the switch to toml++, we have a quick bugfix release 0.2.1. TOML is a file format that is most suitable for configurations, as it is meant to be edited by humans but read by computers. It emphasizes strong readability for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing as well as immediate and clear error reports. On small typos you get parse errors, rather than silently corrupted garbage. Much preferable to any and all of XML, JSON or YAML though sadly these may be too ubiquitous now. TOML is frequently being used with the projects such as the Hugo static blog compiler, or the Cargo system of Crates (aka packages ) for the Rust language. Some architectures, aarch64 included, got confused over float16 which is of course a tiny two-byte type nobody should need. After consulting with Mark we concluded to (at least for now) simply override this excluding the use of float16 . The short summary of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.2.1 (2023-01-25)
  • Explicitly set -DTOML_ENABLE_FLOAT16=0 to permit compilation on some architectures stumbling of the type.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppTOML page page. Please use the GitHub issue tracker for issues and bugreports. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

22 January 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.10 on CRAN: Regular Update

rcpp logo The Rcpp team is thrilled to announce the newest release 1.0.10 of the Rcpp package which is hitting CRAN now and will go to Debian shortly. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was prepared a few days ago, but given the widespread use at CRAN it took a few days to be processed. As always, our sincere thanks to the CRAN maintainers Uwe Ligges and Kurt Hornik. This release continues with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, around 2623 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 252 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.7% of all packages depend (directly) on CRAN, and 58.7% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 67.1 million times. This release is incremental as usual, preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly. Of particular note is the now fully-enabled use of the unwind protection making some operations a little faster by default; special thanks to I aki for spearheading this. Kevin and I also polished a few other bugs off as detailed below. The full list of details follows.

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.10 (2023-01-12)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Unwind protection is enabled by default (I aki in #1225). It can be disabled by defining RCPP_NO_UNWIND_PROTECT before including Rcpp.h. RCPP_USE_UNWIND_PROTECT is not checked anymore and has no effect. The associated plugin unwindProtect is therefore deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
    • The 'finalize' method for Rcpp Modules is now eagerly materialized, fixing an issue where errors can occur when Module finalizers are run (Kevin in #1231 closing #1230).
    • Zero-row data.frame objects can receive push_back or push_front (Dirk in #1233 fixing #1232).
    • One remaining sprintf has been replaced by snprintf (Dirk and Kevin in #1236 and #1237).
    • Several conversion warnings found by clang++ have been addressed (Dirk in #1240 and #1241).
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • The C++20, C++2b (experimental) and C++23 standards now have plugin support like the other C++ standards (Dirk in #1228).
    • The source path for attributes received one more protection from spaces (Dirk in #1235 addressing #1234).
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Several GitHub Actions have been updated.

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2932 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.81.0-1 oon CRAN: New Upstream, New Library, sprintf Change

Boost Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over one hundred individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 32.6 million package downloads. Version 1.81.0 of Boost was released in December following the regular Boost release schedule of April, August and December releases. As the commits and changelog show, we packaged it almost immediately and started testing following our annual update cycle which strives to balance being close enough to upstream and not stressing CRAN and the user base too much. The reverse depends check revealed about a handful of packages requiring changes or adjustments which is a pretty good outcome given the over three hundred direct reverse dependencies. So we opened issue #88 to coordinate the issue over the winter break during which CRAN also closes (just as we did before), and also send a wider PSA tweet as a heads-up. Our sincere thanks to the two packages that already updated, and the four that likely will soon. Our thanks also to CRAN for reviewing the package impact over the last few days since I uploaded the package earlier this week. There are a number of changes I have to make each time in BH, and it is worth mentioning them. Because CRAN cares about backwards compatibility and the ability to be used on minimal or older systems, we still adjust the filenames of a few files to fit a jurassic constraints of just over a 100 characters per filepath present in some long-outdated versions of tar. Not a big deal. We also, and that is more controversial, silence a number of #pragma diagnostic messages for g++ and clang++ because CRAN insists on it. I have no choice in that matter. Next, and hopefully this time only, we also found and replaced a few remaining sprintf uses and replaced them with snprintf. Many of the Boost libraries did that, so I hope by the next upgrade for Boost 1.84.0 next winter this will be fully taken care of. Lastly, and also only this time, we silenced a warning about Boost switching to C++14 in the next release 1.82.0 in April. This may matter for a number of packages having a hard-wired selection of C++11 as their C++ language standard. Luckily our compilers are good enough for C++14 so worst case I will have to nudge a few packages next December. This release adds one new library for url processing which struck us as potentially quite useful. The more detailed NEWS log follows.

Changes in version 1.81.0-1 (2023-01-17)
  • Upgrade to Boost 1.81.0 (#87)
  • Added url (new in 1.81.0)
  • Converted remaining sprintf to snprintf (#90 fixing #89)
  • Comment-out gcc warning messages in three files

Via my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to the previous release. Comments and suggestions about BH are welcome via the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

21 January 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.9 on CRAN: New Upstream

The RcppSimdJson package was just updated to release 0.1.9. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon. This release updates the underlying simdjson library to version 3.0.1, settles on C++17 as the language standard, exports a worker function for direct C(++) access, and polishes a few small things around the package and tests. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.9 (2023-01-21)
  • The internal function deseralize_json is now exported at the C++ level as well as in R (Dirk in #81 closing #80).
  • simdjson was upgraded to version 3.0.1 (Dirk in #83).
  • The package now defaults to C++17 compilation; configure has been retired (Dirk closing #82).
  • The three main R access functions now use a more compact argument check via stopifnot (Dirk).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastFloat 0.0.4 on CRAN: New Upstream

A new release of RcppFastFloat arrived on CRAN yesterday. The package wraps fast_float, another nice library by Daniel Lemire. For details, see the arXiv paper showing that one can convert character representations of numbers into floating point at rates at or exceeding one gigabyte per second. This release updates the underlying fast_float library version. Special thanks to Daniel Lemire for quickly accomodating a parsing use case we had encode as a test, namely with various whitespace codes. The default in fast_float, as in C++17, is to be more narrow but we enable the wider use case via two #define statements.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2023-01-20)
  • Update to fast_float 3.9.0
  • Set two #define re-establish prior behaviour with respect to whitespace removal prior to parsing for as.double2()
  • Small update to continuous integration actions

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

19 January 2023

Antoine Beaupr : Mastodon comments in ikiwiki

Today I noticed bounces in my mail box. They were from ikiwiki trying to send registration confirmation email to users who probably never asked for it. I'm getting truly fed up with spam in my wiki. At this point, all comments are manually approved and I still get trouble: now it's scammers spamming the registration form with dummy accounts, which bounce back to me when I make new posts, or just generate backscatter spam for the confirmation email. It's really bad. I have hundreds of users registered on my blog, and I don't know which are spammy, which aren't. So. I'm considering ditching ikiwiki comments altogether. I am testing Mastodon as a commenting platforms. Others (e.g. JAK) have implemented this as a server but a simpler approach is toload them dynamically from Mastodon, which is what Carl Shwan has done. They are using Hugo, however, so they can easily embed page metadata in the template to load the right server with the right comment ID. I wasn't sure how to do this in ikiwiki: it's typically hard to access page-specific metadata in templates. Even the page name is not there, for example. I have tried using templates, and that (obviously?) fails because the <script> stuff gets sanitized away. It seems I would need to split the JavaScript out of the template into a base template and then make the page template refer to a function in there. It's kind of horrible and messy. I wish there was a way to just access page metadata from the page template itself... I found out the meta plugin passes along its metadata, but that's not (easily) extensible. So i'd need to either patch that module, and my history of merged patches is not great so far. So: another plugin. I have something that kind of works that's a combination of a page.tmpl patch and a plugin. The plugin adds a mastodon directive that feeds the page.tmpl with the right stuff. On clicking a button, it injects comments from the Mastodon API, with a JavaScript callback. It's not pretty (it's not themed at all!), but it works. If you want to do this at home, you need this page.tmpl (or at least this patch and that one) and the mastodon.pm plugin from my mastodon-plugin branch. I'm not sure this is a good idea. The first test I did was a "test comment" which led to half a dozen "test reply". I then realized I couldn't redact individual posts from there. I don't even know if, when I mute a user, it actually gets hidden from everyone else too... So I'll test this for a while, I guess. I have also turned off all CGI on this site. It will keep users from registering while I cleanup this mess and think about next steps. I have other options as well if push comes to shove, but I'm unlikely to go back to ikiwiki comments. Mastodon comments are nice because they don't require me to run any extra software: either I have my own federated service I reuse, or I use someone else's, but I don't need to run something extra. And, of course, comments are published in a standard way that's interoperable with everything... On the other hand, now I won't have comments enabled until the blog is posted on Mastodon... Right now this happens only when feed2exec runs and the HTTP cache expires, which can take up to a day. I should probably do this some other way, like flush the cache when a new post arrives, or run post-commit hooks, but for now, this will have to do. Update: I figured out a way to make this work in a timely manner:
  1. there's a post-merge hook in my ikiwiki git repository which calls feed2exec in /home/w-anarcat/source/.git/hooks/ took me a while to find it! I tried post-update and post-receive first, but ikiwiki actually pulls from the bare directory in the source directory, so only post-merge fires (even though it's not a merge)
  2. feed2exec then finds new blog posts (if any!) and fires up the new ikiwikitoot plugin which then...
  3. posts the toot using the toot command (it just works, why reinvent the wheel), keeping the toot URL
  4. finds the Markdown source file associated with the post, and adds the magic mastodon directive
  5. commits and pushes the result
This will make the interaction with Mastodon much smoother: as soon as a blog post is out of "draft" (i.e. when it hits the RSS feeds), this will immediately trigger and post the blog entry to Mastodon, enabling comments. It's kind of a tangled mess of stuff, but it works! I have briefly considered not using feed2exec for this, but it turns out it does an important job of parsing the result of ikiwiki's rendering. Otherwise I would have to guess which post is really a blog post, is this just an update or is it new, is it a draft, and so on... all sorts of questions where the business logic already resides in ikiwiki, and that I would need to reimplement myself. Plus it goes alongside moving more stuff (like my feed reader) to dedicated UNIX accounts (in this case, the blog sandbox) for security reasons. Whee!

18 January 2023

Arnaud Rebillout: Build container images in GitLab CI (iptables-legacy at the rescue)

It's 2023 and these days, building a container image in a CI pipeline should be straightforward. So let's try. For this blog post we'll focus on GitLab SaaS only, that is, gitlab.com, as it's what I use for work and for personal projects. To get started, we just need two files in our Git repository: Here is our Git tree:
$ ls -A
Containerfile  .git  .gitlab-ci.yml
$ cat Containerfile 
FROM debian:stable
RUN  apt-get update
CMD  echo hello world
$ cat .gitlab-ci.yml 
build-container-image:
  stage: build
  image: debian:testing
  before_script:
    - apt-get update
    - apt-get install -y buildah ca-certificates
  script:
    - buildah build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE .
    - buildah login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - buildah push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE
A few remarks: Now let's push that. Does the CI pass? No, of course, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this blog post ;) The CI fails at the buildah build command, with a rather cryptic error:
$ buildah build --tag $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE .
[...]
STEP 2/3: RUN  apt-get update
error running container: did not get container start message from parent: EOF
Error: building at STEP "RUN apt-get update": netavark: code: 4, msg: iptables v1.8.8 (nf_tables): Could not fetch rule set generation id: Invalid argument
The hint here is nf_tables... Back in July 2021, GitLab did a major update of their shared runners infrastructure, and broke nftables support in the process, as it seems. So we have to use iptables instead. Let's fix our .gitlab-ci.yml, which now looks like that:
$ cat .gitlab-ci.yml 
build-container-image:
  stage: build
  image: debian:testing
  before_script:
    - apt-get update
    - apt-get install -y buildah ca-certificates
    -  
      # Switch to iptables legacy, as GitLab CI doesn't support nftables.
      apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends iptables
      update-alternatives --set iptables /usr/sbin/iptables-legacy
  script:
    - buildah build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE .
    - buildah login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - buildah push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE
And push again. Does that work? Yes! If you're interested in this issue, feel free to fork https://gitlab.com/arnaudr/gitlab-build-container-image and try it by yourself. It's been more than a year since this change, and I'm surprised that I didn't find much about it on the Internet, neither mentions of the issue, nor of a workaround. Maybe nobody builds container images in GitLab CI, or maybe they do it another way, I don't know. In any case, now it's documented in this blog, hopefully some will find it useful. Happy 2023!

17 January 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Night and Silence

Review: Night and Silence, by Seanan McGuire
Series: October Daye #12
Publisher: DAW Books
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 0-698-18353-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 353
Night and Silence is the 12th book in Seanan McGuire's long-running October Daye Celtic-inspired urban fantasy series. This is a "read the books in order" sort of series; you definitely do not want to start here. Gillian, Toby's estranged daughter, has been kidnapped. Her ex-husband and his new wife turn to her in desperation (although Miranda suspects Toby is the one who kidnapped her). Toby of course drops everything to find her, which she would have done regardless, but the obvious fear is that Gillian may have been kidnapped specifically to get at Toby. Meanwhile, the consequences of The Brightest Fell have put a severe strain on one of Toby's most important relationships, at the worst possible time. Once again, this is when I say that McGuire's writing has a lot of obvious flaws, and then say that this book kept me up way past my bedtime for two nights in a row because it was nearly impossible to put down. The primary quality flaw in these books, at least for me, is that Toby's thought processes have some deeply-worn grooves that she falls into time and time again. Since she's the first-person narrator of the series, that produces some repetitive writing. She feels incredibly lucky for her chosen family, she worries about her friends, she prizes loyalty very highly, she throws herself headlong into danger, and she thinks about these things in a background hum through every book. By this point, the reader knows all of this, so there's a lot of "yes, yes, we know" muttering that tends to happen. McGuire also understands the importance of plot and character recaps at the start of each book for those of us who have forgotten what was happening (thank you!) but awkwardly writes them into the beginning of each book. That doesn't help with the sense of repetitiveness. If only authors would write stand-alone synopses of previous books in a series, or hire someone to do that if they can't stand to, the world would be a much better place. But now I'm repeating myself. Once I get into a book, though, this doesn't matter at all. When Toby starts down a familiar emotional rut, I just read faster until I get to the next bit. Something about these books is incredibly grabby to me; once I get started on one, I devour it, and usually want to read the next one as soon as possible. Some of this is the cast, which at this point in the series is varied, entertaining, and full of the sort of casual banter that only people who have known each other for a long time can do. A lot of it is that Toby constantly moves forward. She ruminates and angsts and worries, but she never sits around and mopes. She does her thinking on the move. No matter how preoccupied she is with some emotional thread, something's going to happen on the next page. Some of it is intangible, or at least beyond my ability to put a finger on. Some authors are good at writing grabby books, and at least for me McGuire is one of those authors. Describing the plot in any detail without spoilers is hopeless this far into the series, but this is one of the big revelation books, and I suspect it's also going to be a significant tipping point in Toby's life. We finally find out what broke faerie, which has rather more to do with Toby and her family than one might have expected, explains some things about Amandine, and also (although this hasn't been spelled out yet) seems likely to explain some things about the Luidaeg's involvement in Toby's adventures. And there is another significant realignment of one of Toby's relationships that isn't fully developed here, but that I hope will be explored in future books. There's also a lot about Tybalt that to be honest I found tedious and kind of frustrating (although not half as frustrating as Toby found it). I appreciate what McGuire was doing; some problems are tedious, frustrating, and repetitive because that's how one gets through them. The problem that Toby and Tybalt are wrestling with is realistic and underdiscussed in fiction of this type, so I respect the effort, and I'm not sure there was way to write through this that would have been more engrossing (and a bit less cliched). But, still, not my favorite part of this book. Thankfully, it was a mostly-ignorable side thread. This was a substantial improvement over The Brightest Fell, which was both infuriating and on rails. Toby has much more agency here, the investigation was more interesting, and the lore and character fallout has me eager to read the next book. It's fun to see McGuire's world-building come together over this long of a series, and so far it has not disappointed. Followed by The Unkindest Tide. As has become usual, the book ends with a novella telling a story from a different perspective. "Suffer a Sea-Change": The main novel was good. This was great. "Suffer a Sea-Change" retells a critical part of the novel from Gillian's perspective, and then follows that thread of story past the end of the novel. I loved absolutely everything about this. Gillian is a great protagonist, similar to Toby but different enough to be a fresh voice. There is a ton of the Luidaeg, and through different eyes than Toby's which is fun. There's some great world-building and a few very memorable scenes. And there's also the beginning, the very small beginning, of the healing of a great injustice that's been haunting this series since the very beginning, and I am very much here for that. Great stuff. (9) Rating: 8 out of 10

16 January 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Truth

Review: The Truth, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #25
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: November 2000
Printing: August 2014
ISBN: 0-06-230736-3
Format: Mass market
Pages: 435
The Truth is the 25th Discworld novel. Some reading order guides group it loosely into an "industrial revolution" sequence following Moving Pictures, but while there are thematic similarities I'll talk about in a moment, there's no real plot continuity. You could arguably start reading Discworld here, although you'd be spoiled for some character developments in the early Watch novels. William de Worde is paid to write a newsletter. That's not precisely what he calls it, and it's not clear whether his patrons know that he publishes it that way. He's paid to report on news of Ankh-Morpork that may be of interest of various rich or influential people who are not in Ankh-Morpork, and he discovered the best way to optimize this was to write a template of the newsletter, bring it to an engraver to make a plate of it, and run off copies for each of his customers, with some minor hand-written customization. It's a comfortable living for the estranged younger son of a wealthy noble. As the story opens, William is dutifully recording the rumor that dwarfs have discovered how to turn lead into gold. The rumor is true, although not in the way that one might initially assume.
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise. For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.
The dwarfs used the lead to make a movable type printing press, which is about to turn William de Worde's small-scale, hand-crafted newsletter into a newspaper. The movable type printing press is not unknown technology. It's banned technology, because the powers that be in Ankh-Morpork know enough to be deeply suspicious of it. The religious establishment doesn't like it because words are too important and powerful to automate. The nobles and the Watch don't like it because cheap words cause problems. And the engraver's guild doesn't like it for obvious reasons. However, Lord Vetinari knows that one cannot apply brakes to a volcano, and commerce with the dwarfs is very important to the city. The dwarfs can continue. At least for now. As in Moving Pictures, most of The Truth is an idiosyncratic speedrun of the social effects of a new technology, this time newspapers. William has no grand plan; he's just an observant man who likes to write, cares a lot about the truth, and accidentally stumbles into editing a newspaper. (This, plus being an estranged son of a rich family, feels very on-point for journalism.) His naive belief is that people want to read true things, since that's what his original patrons wanted. Truth, however, may not be in the top five things people want from a newspaper. This setup requires some narrative force to push it along, which is provided by a plot to depose Vetinari by framing him for murder. The most interesting part of that story is Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, the people hired to do the framing and then dispose of the evidence. They're a classic villain type: the brains and the brawn, dangerous, terrifying, and willing to do horrible things to people. But one thing Pratchett excels at is taking a standard character type, turning it a bit sideways, and stuffing in things that one wouldn't think would belong. In this case, that's Mr. Tulip's deep appreciation for, and genius grasp of, fine art. It should not work to have the looming, awful person with anger issues be able to identify the exact heritage of every sculpture and fine piece of goldsmithing, and yet somehow it does. Also as in Moving Pictures (and, in a different way, Soul Music), Pratchett tends to anthropomorphize technology, giving it a life and motivations of its own. In this case, that's William's growing perception of the press as an insatiable maw into which one has to feed words. I'm usually dubious of shifting agency from humans to things when doing social analysis (and there's a lot of social analysis here), but I have to concede that Pratchett captures something deeply true about the experience of feedback loops with an audience. A lot of what Pratchett puts into this book about the problematic relationship between a popular press and the truth is obvious and familiar, but he also makes some subtle points about the way the medium shapes what people expect from it and how people produce content for it that are worthy of Marshall McLuhan. The interactions between William and the Watch were less satisfying. In our world, the US press is, with only rare exceptions, a thoughtless PR organ for police propaganda and the exonerative tense. Pratchett tackles that here... sort of. William vaguely grasps that his job as a reporter may be contrary to the job of the Watch to maintain order, and Vimes's ambivalent feelings towards "solving crimes" push the story in that direction. But this is also Vimes, who is clearly established as one of the good sort and therefore is a bad vehicle for talking about how the police corrupt the press. Pratchett has Vimes and Vetinari tacitly encourage William, which works within the story but takes the pressure off the conflict and leaves William well short of understanding the underlying politics. There's a lot more that could be said about the tension between the press and the authorities, but I think the Discworld setup isn't suitable for it. This is the sort of book that benefits from twenty-four volumes of backstory and practice. Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork cast ticks along like a well-oiled machine, which frees up space that would otherwise have to be spent on establishing secondary characters. The result is a lot of plot and social analysis shoved into a standard-length Discworld novel, and a story that's hard to put down. The balance between humor and plot is just about perfect, the references and allusions aren't overwhelming, and the supporting characters, both new and old, are excellent. We even get a good Death sequence. This is solid, consistent stuff: Discworld as a mature, well-developed setting with plenty of stories left to tell. Followed by Thief of Time in publication order, and later by Monstrous Regiment in the vaguely-connected industrial revolution sequence. Rating: 8 out of 10

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.3.1 on CRAN: Updates

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1034 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 27.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 509 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings another upstream bugfix interation 11.4.3, released in accordance with the aimed-for monthly release cadence. We had hoped to move away from suppressing deprecation warnings in this release, and had prepared over two dozen patch sets all well as pull requests as documented in issue #391. However, it turns out that we both missed with one or two needed set of changes as well as two other sets of changes triggering deprecation warnings. So we expanded issue #391, and added issue #402 and prepared another eleven pull requests and patches today. With that we can hopefully remove the suppression of these warnings by an expected late of late April. The full set of changes (since the last CRAN release 0.11.4.2.1) follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.3.1 (2023-01-14)
  • The #define ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER remains active to suppress the (upstream) deprecation warnings, see #391 and #402 for details.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.3.0 (2022-12-28) (GitHub Only)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.3 (Ship of Theseus)
    • fix corner case in pinv() when processing symmetric matrices
  • Protect the undefine of NDEBUG behind additional opt-in define

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

14 January 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiDatetime 0.0.8 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN. RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change. This release accomodates a CRAN request (as one does) to change (one single) instance of sprintf() to snprintf(). No more, no less.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.8 (2023-01-14)
  • Update one use of sprint to snprintf
  • Minor edits to DESCRIPTION

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is are comparisons to the previous release. More information is on the rapidatetime page. For questions or comments please use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Ian Jackson: SGO (and my) VPN and network access tools - in bookworm

Recently, we managed to get secnet and hippotat into Debian. They are on track to go into Debian bookworm. This completes in Debian the set of VPN/networking tools I (and other Greenend) folks have been using for many years. The Sinister Greenend Organisation s suite of network access tools consists mainly of: secnet secnet is our very mature VPN system. Its basic protocol idea is similar to that in Wireguard, but it s much older. Differences from Wireguard include: secnet was originally written by Stephen Early, starting in 1996 or so. I inherited it some years ago and have been maintaining it since. It s mostly written in C. Hippotat Hippotat is best described by copying the intro from the docs:
Hippotat is a system to allow you to use your normal VPN, ssh, and other applications, even in broken network environments that are only ever tested with web stuff . Packets are parcelled up into HTTP POST requests, resembling form submissions (or JavaScript XMLHttpRequest traffic), and the returned packets arrive via the HTTP response bodies.
It doesn t rely on TLS tunnelling so can work even if the local network is trying to intercept TLS. I recently rewrote Hippotat in Rust. userv ipif userv ipif is one of the userv utilities. It allows safe delegation of network routing to unprivileged users. The delegation is of a specific address range, so different ranges can be delegated to different users, and the authorised user cannot interfere with other traffic. This is used in the default configuration of hippotat packages, so that an ordinary user can start up the hippotat client as needed. On chiark userv-ipif is used to delegate networking to users, including administrators of allied VPN realms. So chiark actually runs at least 4 VPN-ish systems in production: secnet, hippotat, Mark Wooding s Tripe, and still a few links managed by the now-superseded udptunnel system. userv userv ipif is a userv service. That is, it is a facility which uses userv to bridge a privilege boundary. userv is perhaps my most under-appreciated program. userv can be used to straightforwardly bridge (local) privilege boundaries on Unix systems. So for example it can: userv services can be defined by the called user, not only by the system administrator. This allows a user to reconfigure or divert a system-provided default implementation, and even allows users to define and implement ad-hoc services of their own. (Although, the system administrator can override user config.) Acknowledgements Thanks for the help I had in this effort. In particular, thanks to Sean Whitton for encouragement, and the ftpmaster review; and to the Debian Rust Team for their help navigating the complexities of handling Rust packages within the Debian Rust Team workflow.

comment count unavailable comments

Matt Brown: Rebooting...

Hi! After nearly 7 years of dormancy, I m rebooting this website and have a goal to write regularly on a variety of topics going forward. More on that and my goals in a coming post For now, this is just a placeholder note to help double-check that everything on the new site is working as expected and the letters are flowing through the pipes in the right places.

Technical Details I ve migrated the site from Wordpress, to a fully static configuration using Hugo and TailwindCSS for help with styling. For now hosting is still on a Linode VM in Fremont, CA, but my plan is to move to a more specialized static hosting service with better CDN reach in the very near future. If you want to inspect the innards further, it s all at https://github.com/mattbnz/web-matt.

Still on the TODO list
  • Improve the hosting situation as noted above.
  • Integrate Bert Hubert s nice audience minutes analytics script.
  • Write up (or find) LinkedIn/Twitter/Mastodon integration scripts to automatically post updates when a new piece of writing appears on the site, to build/notify followers and improve the social reach. Ideally, the script would then also update the page here with links to the thread(s), so that readers can easily join/follow any resulting conversation on the platform of their choice. I m not planning to add any direct comment or feedback functinoality on the site itself.
  • Add a newsletter/subscription option for folks who don t use RSS and would prefer updates via email rather than a social feed.

13 January 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.13 on CRAN: Mandated Update

A new release 0.3.13 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package. This release contains one change (made at the request of a CRAN email in light of possible future changes for C standard C17 and then C23) and removes a compiler-check from configure.ac. It is both a fair point as our src/Makevars does not actually set a compiler yet also a little marginal? The NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.3.13 (2023-01-12)
  • Remove 'AC_PROG_CC' from 'configure.ac' per CRAN wish

Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes in the most recent release is also available. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 232 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 232. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Allow ICC tests to (temporarily) fail.
* Update debian/tests/control after the addition of PyPDF 3 support.
[ FC Stegerman ]
* Update regular expression for Android .APK files.
[ Sam James ]
* Support PyPDF version 3.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

12 January 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RDieHarder 0.2.5 on CRAN: Mandated Update

An new version 0.2.5 of the random-number generator tester RDieHarder (based on the DieHarder suite developed / maintained by Robert Brown with contributions by David Bauer and myself along with other contributors) is now on CRAN. This release contains one change (made at the request of a CRAN email in light of possible future changes for C standard C17 and then C23) and removes a compiler-check from configure.ac. It is both a fair point as our src/Makevars does not actually set a compiler yet also a little marginal? Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at the most recent diff. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: linl 0.0.5 on CRAN: Extended Background Support

A new release of our linl package for writing LaTeX letters with (R)markdown is now on CRAN. linl makes it easy to write letters in markdown, with some extra bells and whistles thanks to some cleverness chiefly by Aaron. This version add extended header and footer placement support thanks to an included copy of wallpaper.sty as added in a nice PR by I aki. As the previous release was well over three years ago, we also enhanced continuous integration in the process. The repository README.md shows some screenshots of input and output files. The NEWS entry follows:

Changes in linl version 0.0.5 (2023-01-11)
  • Several updates to continuous integration and testing
  • Enhanced placment functionality for images in header and footer via wallpaper.sty and new x and y offset variable (I aki Ucar in #30)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the linl page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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