Category: News

It’s not long to FOSDEM 2024, where Guixers will come together to learn and hack.
As usual there’s some great talks and opportunities to meet other users and
contributors.

FOSDEM is Europe’s biggest Free Software conference.
It’s aimed at developers and anyone who’s interested in the Free Software
movement. While it’s an in-person conference there are live video streams
and lots of ways to participate remotely.

The schedule is varied with development rooms covering many interests. Here
are some of the talks that are of particular interest to Guixers:

Saturday, 3rd Febuary

• “Making reproducible and publishable large-scale HPC experiments“
  by Philippe Swartvagher (10:30 CET). Phillipe will talk about the search for
  reproducible experiments in high-performance computing (HPC) and how he uses
  Guix in his methododology.

Sunday, 4th February

The Declarative and Minimalistic Computing track
takes place Sunday morning. Important topics are:

• Minimalism Matters: sustainable computing through smaller, resource efficient systems
• Declarative Programming: reliable and reproducible systems by minimising side-effects

Guix-related talks are:

• “Scheme in the Browser with Guile Hoot and WebAssembly“
  by Robin Templeton (11:00 CET). A talk covering bringing Scheme to WebAssembly
  through the Guile Hoot toolchain. Addressing the current state of Guile Hoot
  with examples, and how recent Wasm proposals might improve the
  situation in the future.
• “RISC-V Bootstrapping in Guix and Live-Bootstrap“
  by Ekaitz Zarraga (11:20 CET). An update on the RISC-V bootstrapping effort
  in Guix and Live-bootstrap. Covering what’s been done, what’s left to do and
  some of the lessons learned.
• “Self-hosting and autonomy using guix-forge“
  by Arun Isaac (11:40 CET). This talk demonstrates the value of Guix’s declarative
  configuration to simplify deploying and maintaining complex services. Showing
  guix-forge, a project that
  makes it easy to self-host an efficient software forge.
• “Spritely, Guile, Guix: a unified vision for user security“
  by Christine Lemmer-Webber (12:00 CET). Spritely’s goal is to create
  networked communities that puts people in control of their own identity
  and security. This talk will present a unified vision of how Spritely,
  Guile, and Guix can work together to bring user freedom and security to
  everyone!

This year the track commemorates Joe Armstrong, who was the principal
inventor of Erlang. His focus on concurrency,
distribution and fault-tolerence are key topics in declarative and minimalistic
computing. This article
is a great introduction to his legacy. Along with
“The Mess We’re In“, a
classic where he discusses why software is getting worse with time, and what can
be done about it.

On Sunday afternoon, the Distributions devroom
has another Guix talk:

• “Supporting architecture psABIs with GNU Guix“
  by Efraim Flashner (14:30 CET). Guix maintainer Efraim will be giving a
  talk about improving Guix’s performance. Demonstrating how to use psABI
  targets that keep older hardware compatible while providing optimized
  libraries for newer hardware.

Guix Days (Thursday and Friday)

Guix Days will be taking place on the Thursday and Friday before FOSDEM. This is
an “unconference-style” event,
where the community gets together to focus on Guix’s development. All the
details are on the
Libreplanet Guix Wiki.

Participating

Come and join in the fun, whether you’re a new Guix user or seasoned hacker!
If you’re not in Brussels you can still take part:

• See the FOSDEM Schedule
• Watch the live streams
• Chat in the unofficial Guix Days Matrix room

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and
an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user
freedom.
Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux
kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution
for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64, and POWER9 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports
transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management,
per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone
GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to
operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable
and hackable through Guile
programming interfaces and extensions to the
Scheme language.

Running into a blue screen of death, but don’t want your journey to end? Well, how about dropping into a Linux shell when you hit a BSOD in Windows? We simply register a BugCheck callback. The callback function runs a tiny RISC V emulator running linux. For the video output we use bootvid.dll and for input we have a horrible simple polling based PS/2 keyboard driver. ↫ BugCheck2Linux GitHub page The gist here is that during a BSOD, drivers can reset a device to a known working state and gather diagnostic data, so what the BugCheck2Linux “driver” does is load up an incredibly small RISC-V emulator, boot a Linux kernel, and drop you in a shell. An incredibly limited shell that can barely do anything, but a shell nonetheless. And when I say “limited”, I really do mean “limited”: it only works on BIOS systems, runs at 640×480 in 16 colours, the shift key doesn’t work (you’ll need to use caps lock for that), and you can’t use backspace either. Still, this is an incredibly cool proof of concept, and I wonder if more is possible here. Who knows – this could become a valuable troubleshooting tool.

A mum was given a laugh after checking her Ring doorbell – to find a group of workmen winning a tug of war with a drain.

Laura Staunton, 40, had a notification that there was movement outside her home in Milton Keynes, Bucks.

So she clicked on her the app – in time to see five high-vis men falling over as a rope gave way.

Laura, a mum-of-three, says the incident made her “burst out laughing” at work.

The logistics worker said: “I was busy at work so ignored the notifications at first but it wouldn’t stop chiming so I took a look.

“I burst out laughing and showed my boss.

“I burst out laughing again later when I got home and saw the second guy nearly fall in the bush.

“All of them were laughing about it and no-one was hurt.

“They had put the gravel back in place so without the doorbell footage I would have had no idea anyone had been there.

“I wish I had spoken to them through the Ring.

“They drove past later and still seemed to be laughing.”

The video was shot in November 2023.

Receita Acompanhamento

Dê mais gosto a sua comida com este molho holandês feito com limão. Pode ser servido no café da manhã com ovos, no brunch…na verdade quem manda é você. Então confira nossas etapas logo aqui abaixo:

Ingredientes:
– 2 gemas
– 1 col. sopa água
– 70 gr de manteiga (sem sal)
– sumo 1/2 limão (siciliano)
– sal
– pimenta

Veja receita no site: https://pt.petitchef.com/receitas/acompanhamento/molho-holandes-perfeito-para-os-ovos-benedict-fid-1576327

Aryna Sabalenka, classée 2ème mondiale et détentrice du titre, a brillamment franchi la première semaine de l’Open d’Australie, tandis que le numéro 4 mondial, Jannik Sinner, a fait presque aussi bien.

Après deux premiers matches délicats, le N.1 mondial Novak Djokovic affronte l’Argentin Tomas Martin Etcheverry (32e) sur la Rod Laver Arena..
–
L’info en continu https://buzzplus.fr/
Infos, news & actualités – L’information internationale en direct.

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’ and happy New Year to you all!

Like many of you, our teams took some time over the last few weeks to celebrate the festive season with their friends and family, but somehow still managed to smash out a ton of work!

We made great progress on delivering our Moodle Product Vision, which focuses on empowering you for life and delivering improvements designed to help you unlock your creativity, help facilitate collaboration and optimise your business & learning outcomes.

We are excited to share a few highlights of our recent efforts with you!

Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud

We are happy to announce that Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud. Providing our MoodleCloud Plan users with the opportunity to use their own domain name, this is one of our most highly voted new feature requests and we are thrilled to say that it’s almost here. 

 

Another Plugin will be available in Moodle Mobile Apps

In a wonderful example of collaboration with our Moodle Community, the ‘mod_checklist’ plugin will soon be supported in our Mobile Applications. This will mean that all the plugins available to our MoodleCloud Plan users will also be available in our app for the first time, rounding out the proposition for those users. 

Course creation is getting simpler 

We’ve been thinking about how we can make creating course content in Moodle easier and help our users get creative. We started some deep dive research in this space to help us better understand how educators and learning designers create courses, what they need from the process and how we can make it better for them. 

We’ve also been working hard on improving how courses can be structured in Moodle to make them easier to navigate and provide more options for how content can be presented. 

Our most commonly used functions are getting better

Our activity icons and one of the most used functionalities in Moodle, the Activity Chooser, are getting a face lift. These changes are designed to help educators more quickly pick the right activities to include in their courses and make it easier for students to identify what they are working on easily. 

We are also improving the functionality provided in our ‘Browse User List’ page to make managing users faster and simpler. These updates will be incredibly helpful to Moodle Administrators who use this functionality day in and day out.

And, we continue our journey to enhance the functionality provided by our Plugin Directory, making it easier to search, find and select the right plugin for your Moodle implementations.

More opportunities to learn Moodle are here

We’ve launched a brand new ‘Moodle for Learners’ Course on Moodle Academy, with functionality built in allowing the customisation of the course content for your own Moodle implementation. We’ve also got a bunch of new Webinars coming and are getting ready to launch our new Moodle Developer course soon too.

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’, we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Products Team

Security experts Robert Former, Justin Cherry, and Claudia Mueller Thomson share tips and tricks for keeping your Drupal site safe from cybercriminals

The video of the Jan 2024 Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup A.I. talk “Building an AI Medical Scribe in Ruby” by Jean-Sebastien Boulanger (CTO of Circle Medical) has been posted. Description: “In this talk, I’ll share insights from our experience creating an AI medical scribe using Ruby at Circle Medical, a hybrid primary care provider seeing over 50,000 patients monthly. We leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a scribe to enhance clinical documentation and save doctors’ time.”