Links 4/1/2020: Libinput 1.15, Q4OS 3.10 and Shotwell 0.30.8 Released

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Tip Top Tips: Move Firefox 71′s Tab Bar BACK To The Bottom It seems like about every six releases or so, Mozilla’s Firefox developers change the format (or change something in the format) for the userChrome.css file that allows users to customize their Firefox interface.Then, Firefox users who have tweaked the Firefox interface to be…

imageTip Top Tips: Move Firefox 71′s Tab Bar BACK To The Bottom
It seems like about every six releases or so, Mozilla’s Firefox developers change the format (or change something in the format) for the userChrome.css file that allows users to customize their Firefox interface.Then, Firefox users who have tweaked the Firefox interface to be **just right** for their use have to start all over again and try to figure out the new changes to get their customizations back.The last change to the userChrome.css occurred with Firefox 65.
Right on cue with Firefox 71, Mozilla’s Firefox developers have done it again.Yep.They have altered SOMETHING in the userChrome.css file that renders previous userChrome.css file iterations ineffective and rather useless.
So, this month’s tip comes from Ramchu, where he shows us how to move Firefox 71′s tab bar BACK to the bottom-most spot on the Firefox toolbar, where many users prefer it to be, and where many users feel it should be.

Color me (Paul Arnote, the magazine’s chief editor) a believer of both.At LEAST give us a choice, amongst all the other choices users are presented with to easily make the desired change.Short Topix: Mozilla Removes Avast, AVG Firefox Extensions Over Snooping Claims
In its “infinite” wisdom, Google has now blocked certain Linux web browsers from accessing its services, according to an article on BleepingComputer.These Linux web browsers include Falkon, Konqueror and QuteBrowser.All but QuteBrowser are in the PCLinuxOS repository.

Google asserts that they “may not be secure”… as if logging into any Google service is like logging into some kind of fortress of security and privacy.
The issue was reported on Reddit by u/onedoer.Ironically, there are also several replies in the Reddit thread of other users who have had no problem using the aforementioned Linux web browsers.
BleepingComputers, in their independent tests, were able to confirm — on multiple machines — the inability to log into Google services on both Falkon and Konqueror.Clicking on the “Learn More” link reveals a number of reasons that Google provides for the possible block.They could include lack of support for JavaScript or having JavaScript support turned off, having unsecure or unsupported extensions installed, the use of automated testing frameworks, or the browser is embedded in a different application.
There is only speculation about why the web browsers work for some users, but not others.Google has not yet responded to a query from BleepingComputers with an answer of any kind.Imagine that.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra About problems in LibreOffice from Linux distro packages
Very big thank you for all people who write bug reports about LibreOffice in to our bugzilla.But sometime I see, that your problems are only in Linux distro’s (like SuSe, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) LibreOffice and we can’t repro your problem in LibreOffice from TDF site.CMS
As 2019 draws to a close and we look ahead to another exciting year let’s take a moment to review what the WordPress community achieved in December.
WordPress 5.3.1 and 5.3.2 Releases
The WordPress 5.3.1 security and maintenance release was announced on December 13.It features 46 fixes and enhancements.

This version corrects four security issues in WordPress versions 5.3 and earlier.Shortly afterwards, WordPress 5.3.2 was released, addressing a couple high severity Trac tickets, and includes 5 fixes and enhancements, so you’ll want to upgrade.You can read more about these releases in the announcements for 5.3.1 and 5.3.2.Health State saves millions with open source EHR
In the decade since they were made a cornerstone of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, electronic health records (EHRs) have become omnipresent in the US health system.

EHRs enable healthcare providers to keep track of their patients’ medical data and share it with other authorized parties.
VistA, an open source EHR solution developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is a highly rated and free alternative to expensive, proprietary EHR software.The State of North Carolina saved millions of dollars by choosing VistA, says K.S.Bhaskar, president of database company (and VistA implementer) YottaDB, in his Lightning Talk at All Things Open 2019, “VistA on Linux: A complete FOSS stack for electronic health records.” FSF A Brief History of Open Source Software, Part 2: OSS Licenses and Legalities
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the magic of open source software (OSS) is based as much on legal innovation as it is on collaboration.Indeed, the essential innovation that launched free and open source software was not Richard Stallmans GNU Project, but his announcement of a revolutionary new licensing philosophy, and the actual license agreements needed to put that philosophy into effect.

Only later did global collaboration among developers explode, riding the wave of Stallman’s licenses, Linus Torvald’s pioneering work in creating the distributed development process, and rapidly increasing telecommunications bandwidth.
In this installment, we’ll explore how Stallman’s philosophy spread and forked, and where it has taken us to today.
The legal theories, agreements, and documentation that relate to OSS, and its precursor, Free and Open Source Software (for convenience, in this installment I’ll refer to both types collectively as FOSS), are far too complex to explore more than superficially in an article of this type.But for current purposes, it is less important to acquire a deep knowledge of FOSS legal terms than it is to gain insight into why the legalities of FOSS are so important.

Allison Randal Joins Conservancy Board
We’re very excited to welcome Allison Randal to Conservancy’s Board of Directors.When it comes to free and open source software, there are few people who have had so much experience in so many different ways.Over the last 30 years, she has taken on projects that became instrumental in welcoming more people to the software freedom cause.She’s made numerous critical technical contributions in addition to her impressive leadership contributions.She’s also worked hard to get folks from very different organizations to collaborate on languages, licensing and events.

We’re very lucky that Randal has chosen to bring her uniquely broad and historical perspective to her work as a Conservancy Director.
Randal is a board member at the Perl Foundation, a board member at the OpenStack Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for free software community leaders.

At various points in the past she has served as president of the Open Source Initiative, president of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at HP, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE.She collaborates in the Debian project, and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical at the University of Cambridge.While on sabbatical, she has been teaching computer science.Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: ‘We’ve gone the wrong way with licensing’
Last year, lawyer Van Lindberg drafted a software license called the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL) on behalf of distributed development platform Holo – and submitted it to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval as an Open Source Definition-compliant (OSD) license.
The debate over whether or not to approve the license, now in its fourth draft, has proven contentious enough to prompt OSI co-founder Bruce Perens to resign from the organization, for a second time, based on concern that OSI members have already made up their minds.
“Well, it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a license that isn’t freedom respecting,” Perens wrote in a missive to the OSI’s license review mailing list on Thursday.“Fine, do it without me, please.”
Perens, for what it’s worth, drafted the original OSD.
Another open-source-community leader familiar with the debate – who spoke with The Register on condition of anonymity – claimed Lindberg lobbied OSI directors privately to green-light the license, contrary to an approval process that’s supposed to be carried out in public.
“I don’t think that’s an appropriate characterization,” said Lindberg, of law firm Dykema, in a phone interview with The Register.“I think there are number of people who from the beginning made up their minds about the CAL.

You’ll see a lot of people jumping onto any pretext they can find in order to oppose it.” Openness/Sharing/Collaboration Open source storage: driving intelligence in the small data sprawl era
Open source storage is an emerging phenomenon; data storage software that is developed in a public, collaborative manner under a license that permits the free use, distribution and modification of the source code.
Organisations are now dealing with a huge amount of data, petabytes-worth, and it all needs to be stored in manner that is flexible, accessible and secure, while allowing analytics and intelligence-driven solutions to gain actionable insights from it.
There are a three trends that have given rise to open source storage and Stephen Manley — chief technologist at Druva — has helped Information Age dissect the subject.
[…]
He pointed to two of the most popular open source storage offerings, Ceph and Lustre.Both of them have a very different architecture than file systems before, such EXT4 or ZFS.One of the big differences with them is that they separate out the data storage into “a big book object” and they store the metadata in a separate database.And to Manley, this reflects that they’re building for a cloud architecture, “because cloud storage only started being anchored on object storage and then offers database services on top”, he explained.Researchers develop new open-source system to manage and share complex datasets
A research team has developed an open-source data-management system that the scientists hope will solve all of those problems.The researchers outlined their system today in the journal PLOS ONE.
“We wanted to create a file format and a dataset model that would encapsulate the majority of datasets we work on, on all the instruments in a lab,” said Philip Grandinetti, professor of chemistry at The Ohio State University and senior author of the paper.“There’s this long-standing problem, pervasive among scientists, that you buy a multimillion-dollar instrument and the companies that make that instrument have their own proprietary format, and it’s a nightmare to share with anyone else.”
Large datasets are tricky to share, in part because software is often proprietary, but also in part because the files are often so large that they are hard to share in an email or through a cloud-based server.

And even if the files can be exported as a file type that can be shared, important metadata—the things that explain what the dataset actually is—are often lost.Programming/Development new, switch and assert keywords in Java
When we create a class in Java and decide to use this class, we need to make an object of this class and using the object of the aforementioned class we control and use the components of the class.
An object of a class works like the handle of a motorbike.If you need to control the bike you need to hold the handle of this bike.I believe you have understood why we need to create an object.
You must be thinking if the object is so important, we need to know how to create an object of a class.We create an object of a class by using the ‘new’ keyword.The ‘new‘ keyword gives instructions to the processor to holds the memory in the system to store the object of this class.The Rust Programming Language Blog: Reducing support for 32-bit Apple targets
The Rust team regrets to announce that Rust 1.41.0 (to be released on January 30th, 2020) will be the last release with the current level of support for 32-bit Apple targets.

Starting from Rust 1.42.0, those targets will be demoted to Tier 3.
The decision was made on RFC 2837, and was accepted by the compiler and release teams.This post explains what the change means, why we did it, and how your project is affected.Ruby 2.7 Now Available
As with past few releases, the last major release of the Ruby programming language before 3.0 was released around Christmas.Ruby 2.7.0 comes with new features and performance improvements “larger in scale than previous releases”, as the team behind Ruby puts it.
Among the newly introduced changes are pattern matching, REPL improvement, compaction GC and the separation of positional and keyword arguments.

One of the most highlighted additions is Pattern matching, a widely used feature in functional programming languages.Introduced as an experimental feature, it can traverse a given object and assign its value if it matches a pattern.Perl / Raku My Y2020 Bug
For reasons that must have been clear at the time, I once wrote a test in terms of epoch time, and wanted it to run on systems that did not use January 1 1970 as the epoch.So I loaded Time::Local and added timegm( 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 70 ) to the desired epoch.
This morning I got a CPAN testers report failure.It seems that if you give timegm() a year in the range 0-99 it assumes it is within 50 years of the current year, so my test suddenly thought the epoch was 2070.Python Creating Feeds with Django
Django ships with built-in syndication feed generating framework, which is used to generate dynamic Atom and RSS feeds.
RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication, it’s a way to have information delivered to you instead of you having to go find it.

RSS is basically a structured XML document that includes full or summarized text along with other metadata such as published date, author name, etc..

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