Tux Machines

Programming Leftovers

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 14, 2023

today's howtos

Security Leftovers

Colour-based object tracking with Raspberry Pi

↺ Colour-based object tracking with Raspberry Pi

> She worked with Shafat Insha and Midhat Munira to develop a smart colour-based object tracking system, using OpenCV and Raspberry Pi 3. The autonomous Smart Object Tracking Robot can detect and track objects of a specific colour in real time.

Transcoding Unicode strings at crazy speeds with AVX-512

↺ Transcoding Unicode strings at crazy speeds with AVX-512

> In software, we store strings of text as arrays of bytes in memory using one of the Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF), the most popular being UTF-8 and UTF-16. Windows, Java, C# and other systems common languages and systems default on UTF-16, whereas other systems and most of the web relies on UTF-8. There are benefits to both formats and we are not going to adopt one over the other any time soon. It means that we must constantly convert our strings from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and back.

If you work on a big language, I'd like to talk

↺ If you work on a big language, I'd like to talk

> Directed graphs are ubiquitous, so it's incredibly weird to me that not a single mainstream programming language has a built-in directed graph type. And it's even weirder that not a single mainstream programming language has them in the standard library.

Pull requests are great

↺ Pull requests are great

> I have recently been seeing an increasing amount of chatter about and against pull requests. These especially often come from the crowd that advocates for pair or mob/ensemble programming. I saw a great one in Mastodon the other week but failed to save it so I can’t reference it. In essence, that toot asked: What legit benefit is there for pull requests for teams that trust each other?

> And I’ve seen this sentiment quite often: some people consider that pull requests’ main or even only function is to prevent malicious or bad code from entering a codebase from untrusted sources. And in many distributed open source projects that is one of its functions. However, I’d argue that focusing solely on the trust issue and then dismissing pull requests for teams that trust each other, is short-sighted.

The New Economics of Generating Code

↺ The New Economics of Generating Code

> "The next is replace -- replace feature after feature after feature of the older Cerner system with a new Cerner system, new Millennium, which we are not coding in Java like we usually do. The new Cerner system is being generated -- as you know, generative AI generates code. We have an application generator called APEX. And we are not writing code for the new Cerner; we are generating that code in APEX, and it's going extremely well."

> This is a quote from Larry Ellison in Oracle’s latest earnings call. It should be taken with a grain of salt — Ellison is a master of narrative, and he’s addressing an audience of investors. Whether APEX works as well as he claims or if developers are simply using GitHub Copilot, the fact remains: this is the future of a good chunk of software development.

This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 512

↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 512

> Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

Security Developer in Residence Weekly Report #10

↺ Security Developer in Residence Weekly Report #10

> The past few weeks I've been finishing slides, recording my video, and collaborating with my co-presenter 🚀

gemini.tuxmachines.org