Wednesday, September 21st, 2016

Time	Event
1:59a	[$] The NTP pool system NTP, the Network Time Protocol, quietly and without much fuss performs the critical internet function of knowing the correct time. Using it, a computer with imperfect communications links may join a distributed community of servers, each of which is either directly attached to a reliable clock, or is trying to best synchronize its clock to one or more better-synchronized members of the community. The NTP pool system has arisen as a method of providing such a community to the internet; it works well, but is not without its challenges. (Comment on this)
2:33p	Catanzaro: GNOME 3.22 core apps Michael Catanzaro lays down the rules for which GNOME applications distributions should package if they want to claim to provide a "pure GNOME experience." "Selecting the right set of default applications is critical to achieving a quality user experience. Installing redundant or overly technical applications by default can leave users confused and frustrated with the distribution. Historically, distributions have selected wildly different sets of default applications. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s clear that some distributions have done a much better job of this than others." (Comment on this)
2:49p	The curious case of the switch statement (fuzzy notepad) The fuzzy notepad blog is carrying a post about the switch statement with just about everything one might want to know about its past, present, and possible future. "As we’ve seen, the switch statement has had basically the same form for 49 years. The special case labels are based on syntax derived directly from fixed-layout FORTRAN on punchcards in 1957, several months before my father was born. I hate it." (Comment on this)
2:52p	CouchDB 2.0 released The Apache CouchDB database project has announced its 2.0 release. New features include clustering support, a new query language, a new administrative interface, and more. "CouchDB 2.0 is 99% API compatible with the 1.x series and most applications should continue to just work." (Comment on this)
3:36p	Security advisories for Wednesday Arch Linux has updated curl (code execution), lib32-curl (code execution), and lib32-jansson (denial of service). Debian has updated wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities). Debian-LTS has updated unadf (two vulnerabilities). Red Hat has updated firefox (RHEL5,6,7: multiple vulnerabilities). SUSE has updated mysql (SLE11-SP3,4: multiple unspecified vulnerabilities). (Comment on this)
4:39p	[$] BBR congestion control Congestion-control algorithms are unglamorous bits of code that allow network protocols (usually TCP) to maximize the throughput of any given connection while simultaneously sharing the available bandwidth equitably with other users. New algorithms tend not to generate a great deal of excitement; the addition of TCP New Vegas during the 4.8 merge window drew little fanfare, for example. The BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT) algorithm just released by Google, though, is attracting rather more attention; it moves away from the mechanisms traditionally used by these algorithms in an attempt to get better results in a network characterized by wireless links, meddling middleboxes, and bufferbloat. (Comment on this)
6:36p	GNOME 3.22 released The GNOME Project has announced the release of GNOME 3.22, "Karlsruhe". "This release brings comprehensive Flatpak support. GNOME Software can install and update Flatpaks, GNOME Builder can create them, and the desktop provides portal implementations to enable sandboxed applications. Improvements to core GNOME applications include support for batch renaming in Files, sharing support in GNOME Photos, an updated look for GNOME Software, a redesigned keyboard settings panel, and many more." (Comment on this)

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