today's leftovers Ingo announces pta (Plain Text Accounting) Recently, i got annoyed because i still didn't have a free accounting program that was to my liking. So i looked through the OpenBSD ports tree and briefly evaluated the programs i found there. None of them convinced me. Many seemed to have awkward user interfaces, some even require a GUI, and i definitely don't want a GUI. While i found every feature i wanted in at least one program, i failed to find any program having all the desired features. Some lack cost centers, some lack subaccounts, some lack support for handling unrealized profits and so on... I'm not absolutely convinced that i did not miss a good one, but at some point, it felt like i was wasting more time evaluting inadequate programs than might be needed to write an adequate one from scratch. Consequently, i released the plain text accounting program today. Version 0.1 should still be considered experimental, but i'm already using it in production for my own bookkeeping, and a friend of mine is likely to also start using it for their business in 2021, so it is very likely that it will be actively maintained.

Open Source Contributors: Who’s Missing--and Why? Open source software has indisputably advanced the software industry as a whole in myriad ways. It has fostered faster innovation. It has helped enable new paradigms, like DevOps. It has made all sorts of important software programs, from Web browsers to video editing software, accessible to people who, in past decades, could not have afforded them. Yet, open source also exemplifies, and exacerbates, a major challenge for the software industry: achieving greater demographic diversity. When you look at open source contributors, you find that most of them look very much alike: white and male. In fact, the open source space is even less diverse than the tech industry as a whole. And that's no mean feat, given how incredibly un-diverse tech companies in general tend to be. That's a fascinating reality, and it bears some investigation for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics that determine which sorts of people are envisioning, designing and writing some of the most important software platforms today--from Firefox and Apache to Linux and Kubernetes. [...] In some ways, these trends among open source contributors may seem unsurprising. It's not news that the tech space is mostly white and mostly male, and has been for decades. Yet, the fact that open source is even less diverse than tech in general seems harder to explain. If anything, you might think open source would be more diverse. After all, in many cases, the demographic identity of people who contribute to open source projects is not even known to others within those projects, unless for some reason they volunteer it. No one knows your race or gender by looking at your GitHub profile. For that reason, it would be hard to argue that active discrimination explains the demographic trends in open source. The lack of diversity at a company could be explained by hiring committees dismissing diverse candidates. But, in open source, there are no hiring committees or other gatekeeping bodies that have much insight into the demographic profile of contributors. You get judged on the quality of your code alone. [...] Coupled with the fact that many of the prominent white men in the open source space were quite well-off before they got involved in open source (Torvalds, who wrote the Linux kernel as a penniless college student, is an obvious exception), this is the most compelling explanation to me.

Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera takes photos through thousands of straws

2020.39 The Releaser Alexander Kiryuhin has been very busy in the past week. Not only did they release a Comma Complete update (the Raku IDE of choice, now with 2020.02 IntelliJ support). They also released the Rakudo 2020.09 Compiler Release implementing the Raku Programming Language. And Claudio Ramirez made sure there are ready to download Linux packages for that release. And Timo Paulssen made sure there’s an AppImage for it as well!

Google Cloud Joins Linux Foundation Networking at Platinum Level LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, announces Google Cloud has joined as a Platinum member. Since its beginnings, Google’s mission has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, and Google Cloud’s vision is to be the most trusted, simple, innovative cloud for customers around the world. Through its membership, Google will further the acceleration of open source technologies across cloud native networking, telecoms, network automation, 5G, and more. “We look forward to working with all members and the larger community to continue to find ways to bring further value to consumers and communications services providers alike, demonstrating how public cloud can help fundamentally transform networking in new and exciting ways“, said Amol Phadke, Managing Director: Global Telecom Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “Google’s excellence in creating and sponsoring components like Kuberntes, Istio and Knative—and successfully integrating them into products like Anthos—will be a key pillar within the Linux Foundation Networking.”

Debian and Ubuntu Leftovers dnsZoneEntry: field should be removed when DD is retired When Debian Developer had retired, actual DNS entry is removed, but dnsZoneEntry: field is kept on LDAP (db.debian.org) So you can not reuse *.debian.net if retired Debian Developer owns your prefered subdomain already.

Canonical have announced a new point release for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - 16.04.7 (Xenial Xerus) Canonical have released the sixth point release of Ubuntu 16.04 Long-Term Support (LTS) as Ubuntu 16.04.7.

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 650 Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 650 for the week of September 20 – 26, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.

Canonical at OSM Hackfest MR#9 The 12th OSM Hackfest, or OSM mid-release NINE (MR#9) Hackfest, is one for the books and Canonical happily shared the presenter floor with the rest of the Open Source MANO (OSM) community. The event spanned the whole week from September 7th to 11th, with Wednesday September 9th afternoon being used for the OSM Ecosystem day. As per the last two hackfests, the remote format allowed participation of hundreds of enthusiasts. During the preparation of the hackfest, it was agreed to keep the same theme as the last one, so participants were able to use OSM to manage and orchestrate workloads in an end-to-end open source mobile network solution with the Facebook Connectivity project; Magma. [...] David Garcia, the N2VC MDL, had multiple sessions during day 2; an introduction to OSM primitives, Juju relations and a 3 hour workshop on OSM orchestration of VNFs. OSM uses Juju as a core component and leverages operators to drive lifecycle management, workload configuration, daily operations and integration functions. Juju is a universal operator lifecycle manager (OLM) that exposes events to the operators and enables users to deploy simple to complex models of applications declaring business intent instead of dealing with piles of configuration scripts. [...] The Ecosystem Day, an integral part of every hackfest, is for the community to learn about vendor-oriented solutions and projects. Among others, we had a demo of 5G Core network automation by OSM from Ulak Communications, we learned about vBNG orchestration using Juju by Benu networks and subscription and notification support in OSM by Tata ELXSI. We also presented a session on Charmed OSM, Canonical’s carrier-grade, hardened OSM distribution. Charmed OSM allows operators, GSIs and NEPs to move faster with NFV transformation through open-source technology and partner programmes.