News

Best practices for Ruby on Rails data migrations

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The blog post “Best Practices for Ruby on Rails Data Migrations” https://www.monterail.com/blog/best-practices-for-ruby-on-rails-data-migrations offers practical advice on handling data migrations in Ruby on Rails applications. It covers key strategies for ensuring smooth, reliable migrations, including techniques for minimizing downtime, managing large datasets, and maintaining data integrity. The post provides actionable tips and best practices to help developers execute migrations effectively while avoiding common pitfalls.

Streamline your schoolwork with Firefox’s PDF editor

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Streamline your schoolwork with Firefox’s PDF editor

As a student pursuing a master’s degree, I’ve spent too much time searching for PDF editors to fill out forms, take notes and complete projects. I discovered Firefox’s built-in PDF editor while interning at Mozilla as a corporate communications intern. No more giving out my email address or downloading dubious software, which often risks data. […]

The post Streamline your schoolwork with Firefox’s PDF editor appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Travel and translate, the mobile life

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 01 Aug 2024, Week 31

F-Droid core

One feature that was seldom in the limelight is HTTP Basic Auth for repositories, meaning you can have your own private repo that only trusted users can access. Until the recent repository UI overhaul, when such a repo was being added a dialogue would pop-up asking the user to authenticate. In the new UI this dialogue is gone, so now when you share a private repo you’d have to provide the credentials in the actual URL, eg. https://username:password@example.com/fdroid/repo/

Community News

Fennec F-Droid and Mull were updated to 128.0.3, and the changelog is small. One of the more interesting add-ons for Firefox was launched about 2 years ago only for the Desktop app, powered by Bergamot, it provided local, private, in-browser translations. As time passed this useful functionality was merged in the main browser. In the mobile world, we got access to all the add-on just 9 months ago, yet the translation add-on was none to be found. 😠

It appears that the mobile browser is getting the same functionality too, soon. How soon? It’s called experimental, so if you open about:translations in Fennec today, you can quickly get some results. But this power is needed when viewing web pages, so the Mull developer worked their magic to enable it (as experimental as it is) right now for everyone. Just navigate to a page in a different language, and if the translation pop-up does not appear, open the menu and touch Translate. Hopefully Mozilla makes this a stable feature and adds more and more languages.

Neo Backup was updated to 8.3.7 but we had to disable this version as it is crashing. For the time being, you can expand Versions in app details and install the older version, also open the upper right menu and select “Ignore this update” so the broken one is not installed. (Upstream issue)

OsmAnd~ was updated to 4.8.3, this new release comes after they just celebrated their 14th birthday 🎉. The new version is feature-full and you can read everything about it in a new blog post.

Newly Added Apps

8 apps were newly added
  • EVIL SPIN!! – Evil Spin is a free, fun and open source App for spinning a wheel
  • FilmFacts – Fun trivia game for cinema enthusiasts
  • OPEN NGA – Third-party client for bbs.nga.cn
  • OpenLynx – Public transport companion providing real-time data
  • OpenWrt Manager – Manage your OpenWRT device from your phone
  • Paperize – A Wallpaper Changer – An efficient wallpaper changer application with a clean design
  • TermuC – A simple C/C++ IDE backed on Termux
  • VPT#018-VPC – Calculate alcohol mass, content and volume in drinks

Downgraded Apps

2 apps were downgraded
  • OpenTTD was downgraded to 13.4.rev120 as the new version was missing some assets that broke the app. We will update it as soon as possible.
  • Wulkanowy was downgraded to 2.6.16, but note that the app repo was archived by the developer and it is no longer actively maintained, so it might be gone soon enough too.

Updated Apps

100 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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Servo enables parallel table layout

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Another month, another chunk of progress for the Servo rendering engine. The biggest addition is enabling table rendering to be spread across CPU cores. Parallel table layout is now enabled, spreading the work for laying out rows and their columns over all available CPU cores. This change is a great example of the strengths of Rayon and the opportunistic parallelism in Servo’s layout engine. ↫ Servo blog On top of this, there’s tons of improvements to the flexbox layout engine, support generic font families like ‘sans-serif’ and ‘monospace’ has been added, and Servo now supports OpenHarmony, the operating system developed by Huawei. This month also saw a lot of work on the development tools.

Vocab Builder by Using Prefixes, Roots and Suffixes. Part 23: contra.

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This video is designed to help build general and scientific vocabulary for State and standardized exams by using word-part (prefix, root, suffix; many in Latin) explanation and examples.

This video is part of a series. In this video, we introduce this word parts: contra.

You can download the free student engagement worksheet / quiz that we made for this video at the following link: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Vocabulary-Builder-Part-23-Video-sheet-Google-Forms-Canvas-more-V1-11949925

If possible, we encourage you to view this video the evening before the topic is presented in class. This will help you be more familiar with the key vocabulary and may improve your long-term retention of the concepts.

For educators:
– For background on why students may benefit from completing the video worksheets at home the evening before you teach the class, please see this 3-minute video: https://youtu.be/_zZuryl1k-c
– Our worksheets are available in electronic format for free (e.g., Blackboard, Canvas, Easel, Google Forms, MS Forms, Moodle). For more info, please see https://youtu.be/ZdSb95QyByI
– We have manually edited the closed captions, so those in English are correct. Although we cannot guarantee all automated translations will be accurate, we have been very impressed by those generated by YouTube® in parts of languages that we can understand. If a speaker of your chosen language can ensure the translations are acceptable, then you may wish to turn these on for students whose first language is not English.

Other free resources we’ve made:
– For links to many free educational resources, please visit our website (no 3rd party advertising, no subscriptions, no paywalls): https://TestPrepLLC.org/

– For our free apps for Apple’s Mac and iPad (collects no data, no advertising, no subscriptions, no paywalls, no in-app purchases), please visit our page on the Apple App Store. These apps include Common Core and State based practice tests in math, and State science exams based on NGSS and State curriculums (all with detailed, colorful explanations): https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/test-prep-llc/id1727786893

Best wishes,
The staff at Test Prep LLC
https://TestPrepLLC.org

#NGSS

Drupal Association blog: Drupal launches Drupal 11, the latest version of the Open Source CMS

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PORTLAND, Ore., 1 August 2024—Drupal, the most powerful open source content management system for everyone from Fortune 500 enterprise companies to mission-driven nonprofits and entrepreneurial small businesses, is launching the latest upgrade to its popular software.

Drupal 11 continues enhancing the strengths of the platform. It makes structured content, workflows, and content governance more flexible and easier for ambitious builders.

Drupal 11 is designed to empower ambitious site builders to build exceptional websites and to accelerate Drupal’s innovation,” says Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead of Drupal.  “With Drupal 11, we’ve made Drupal more intuitive, powerful, and flexible, ensuring it continues to lead in web development and digital experience creation.”

This latest version of Drupal brings together code and design for a refreshed CMS navigation experience, with an updated toolbar and a collapsible left-hand menu, all designed to ensure a seamless development experience.

With new Recipes functionality, you can add new features to your website instantly by applying a set of predefined configuration. A recipe can provide anything that can be configured in Drupal, from a simple content type to a full suite of features. You can create your own recipes to share or reuse, or apply recipes created by other Drupal users. Recipes are experimental in this release but already usable and expected to be stable in 11.1.

Single-Directory Components simplify front-end development by consolidating all necessary code into a single directory, making components self-contained and effortlessly reusable.

Drupal’s high performance means it runs fast by default with swift page loading, and Drupal 11 is even faster than previous versions, running up to 50% faster on PHP 8.3. 

Accessible for every user

Drupal’s core strengths include its accessibility, security, multilingual capabilities, and flexible features. 

Thousands of developers worldwide contribute their expertise to ensure that Drupal is continuously pioneering the industry in these strengths. Supported by a global community of domain experts, it offers multilingual support with over 100 languages. 

Drupal 11 improves upon these core strengths with various features suitable for developing simple websites or complex web applications. 

Accessibility is a key strength of Drupal,” says Tim Doyle, CEO of the Drupal Association. “The Open Web is for everyone, and our continual focus on accessibility, multilingual capabilities, and flexibility is intended to ensure that Drupal is a beacon of inclusiveness in an online world where many try to build walls and barriers to entry.”

With more features coming soon

Automatic Updates and Project Browser are two key features slated for a future release of Drupal 11 and are currently under development as contributed modules. 

Drupal’s open source innovation keeps pressing ahead with the release of Drupal 11, including milestone features like Automatic Updates and Project Browser. These features will be key to the success of the new Drupal Starshot project, which will see Drupal become even easier to use for anyone wanting to unleash the power of the world’s leading enterprise CMS.” – Owen Lansbury, Drupal Association Board Chair

Automatic Updates module will apply patch-level updates to Drupal core in a separate, sandboxed copy of your site to keep you up and running without any interruptions. It can detect and report problems at every stage of the update process, so you don’t have to discover them after an update is live. It automatically detects database updates and helps you run them during the process.

Project Browser will make it easy for site builders to extend the functionality, look and feel of Drupal. It provides a search interface in the Extend section of the Admin UI to find contributed modules and themes and research their capabilities. Once an extension is selected, instructions are provided on installing it on your site, all without leaving your website. 

Next steps

To start using Drupal 11, visit the Drupal 11 landing page. If you have questions about upgrading to Drupal 11, check out the FAQ page. 

To get help onboarding to Drupal 11 or creating a digital experience from the ground up, connect with one of our Drupal Certified Partners located around the world.

About Drupal and the Drupal Association

Drupal is the open source content management software trusted by millions of people and organizations worldwide. It’s supported by a network of over 10k professionals and over 100 Drupal Certified Partners. The Drupal Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Drupal innovation and supporting the growth of the open source community. This work delivers value to businesses, the digital community, and users of Drupal, in alignment with Drupal’s commitment to the Open Web.