Software Development

772 Articles

Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot

July 29, 2022 by 57 Comments

The term “open source” can be tricky. For many people, it’s taken to mean that a particular piece of software is free and that they can do whatever they wish with it. But the reality is far more complex, and the actual rights you’re afforded as the user depend entirely on which license the developers chose to release their code under. Open source code can cost money, open source code can place limits on how you use it, and in some cases, open source code can even get you into trouble down the line.

Which is precisely what the Fedora Project is looking to avoid with their recent decision to reject all code licensed under the Creative Common’s “Public Domain Dedication” CC0 license. It will still be allowed for content such as artwork, and there may even be exceptions made for existing packages on a case-by-case basis, but CC0 will soon be stricken from the list of accepted code licenses for all new submissions.

Fedora turning their nose up at a software license wouldn’t normally be newsworthy. In fact, there’s a fairly long list of licenses that the project deems unacceptable for inclusion. The surprising part here is that CC0 was once an accepted license, and is just now being reclassified due to an evolving mindset within the larger free and open source (FOSS) community.

So what’s the problem with CC0 that’s convinced Fedora to distance themselves from it, and does this mean you shouldn’t be using the license for your own projects?

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Google Quantum, Virtually

July 28, 2022 by 18 Comments

Want to try a big quantum computer but don’t have the cash? Google wants to up your simulation game with their “Quantum Virtual Machine” that you can use for free.

On the face of it, it sounds like marketing-speak for just another quantum simulator. But if you read the post, it sounds like it attempts to model effects from a real Sycamore processor including qubit decay and dephasing along with gate and readout errors. This forms what Google calls “processor-like” output, meaning it is as imperfect as a real quantum computer.

If you need more qubits than Google is willing to support, there are ways to add more computing using external compute nodes. Even if you have access to a real machine of sufficient size, this is handy because you don’t have to wait in a queue for time on a machine. You can work out a lot of issues before going to the real computer.

This couldn’t help but remind us of the old days when you had to bring your cards to the central computer location and wait your turn only to find out you’d made a stupid spelling mistake that cost you an hour of wait time. In those days, we’d “desk check” a program carefully before submitting it. This system would allow a similar process where you test your basic logic flow on a virtual machine before suffering the wait time for a real computer to run it.

Of course, if you really need a quantum computer, the simulation is probably too slow to be practical. But at least this might help you work out the kinks on smaller problems before tackling the whole enchilada. What will you do with a quantum computer? Tell us in the comments.

Google, of course, likes its own language, Cirq. If you want a leg up on general concepts with a friendly simulator, try our series.

The Orbtrace debugger hardware connected to a development board t hrough a 20-pin ribbon cable. The development board has a green LED shining.

ORBTrace Effort: Open Tool For Professional Debugging

July 26, 2022 by 35 Comments

There are some fairly powerful debugging facilities available on today’s microcontrollers — if your code crashes mysteriously, chances are, there’s a debugging interface that could let you track down the exact crash circumstances in no time. Sadly, debugging tools for these powerful interfaces tend to be prohibitively expensive and highly proprietary, thus, not friendly for hobbyists. Now, there’s a community-driven high-capability debugging platform called ORBTrace, brought to us by [mubes] and [zyp].

With parallel trace, you get a constant stream of consciousness, every exact instruction executed by your CPU. [mubes] and [zyp] set out to tap into the power of parallel trace debugging for Cortex-M processors. and the ORBTrace project was born. Relying on the Orbuculum project’s software capabilities, this FPGA-based debugger platform can do parallel trace and the more popular high-speed SWO trace – and way more. ORBTrace has the potential to grow into a powerful debug helper tool, with enough capabilities for anyone to benefit. And of course, it’s fully open-source.

The ORBTrace board, with a FPGA in the center of it, a USB-C connector on the left, and two IDC debug connectors on the right (one ten-pin and one twenty-pin)The ORBTrace platform has plenty of untapped potential. There’s the battle-tested JTAG and SWD that you can already use with all the open tools you could expect. However, there’s also plenty of available resources on the FPGA, including even a currently unutilized RISC-V softcore. If you wanted to add support for any other family of devices to this debugger, sky’s the limit! And, of course, there’s cool software to go with it – for example, orbmortem, which keeps a ring buffer of instructions in memory and shows you the last code executed before your CPU stops, or orbstat, a tool for profiling your embedded code.

If you’re looking to purchase effortless feature parity with Segger or Lauterbach devices, the ORBTrace doesn’t promise that. Instead, it’s an open debugging toolkit project, with hardware available for purchase, and software just waiting for you take control of it. This project’s community hangs out in the 1BitSquared discord’s #orbuculum channel, and gateware’s advancing at a rapid pace – welcoming you to join in on the fun.

ORBTrace is a powerful tool for when your goals become large and your problems become complex. And, being a community-driven experimental effort, we’ll undoubtedly see great things come out of it – like the Mooltipass project, originally developed by Hackaday community members, and still going strong.

Looking At Fortran In 100 Seconds

July 16, 2022 by 36 Comments

Usually, when we are talking about old computers, we are thinking of BASIC interpreters. But [Fireship] reminds us that it was originally Fortran and promises to give you the essentials in 100 seconds. We didn’t think you could do much in that short amount of time, but we have to admit that they did a pretty good job.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we know Fortran — you probably aren’t going to be able to put it on your resume after watching this video. On the other hand, we were impressed with how much they did squeeze in. If you haven’t touched Fortran since the 1960s and 1970s, you should know that it has changed. Pointers, dynamic memory allocation, and even objects are all possible. It is still a very capable language and very adept at crunching large sets of numbers. Besides, there are many sophisticated algorithms you can borrow from decades of Fortran development.

If you decide you want to have a go, there is, of course, GNU Fortran. Honestly, as much time as we spent writing Fortran in years past, we don’t recommend it for new job prospects. But if you have some period hardware and want an authentic experience, it might just be the way to go. Or, just fire up a browser if you want to play.

Not everyone agrees, though, that Fortran is on the wane. There are efforts to bring it even more up to date. You can even use it for web development.

Continue reading “Looking At Fortran In 100 Seconds” →

Automate Internet Life With Python

July 12, 2022 by 19 Comments

Most of us are adept enough with computers that you know what they can easily do and what they can’t. Invent a new flavor of ice cream? Not easy. Grab the news headlines related to Arduinos from your favorite news feed? Relatively easy. But, of course, the devil is in the details. FreeCodeCamp has a 3-hour course from [Frank Andrade] that dives into the gory details of automating web tasks using Python and a variety of libraries like Path, Xpath, and Selenium. You can watch the course, below.

Topics start off with grabbing tables from websites and PDFs. But it quickly graduates to general-purpose web scraping and even web automation. These techniques can be very useful for testing browser-based applications, too.

By the end, you’ve created an executable that grabs news every day and automatically generates an Excel report. There’s also a little wind down about WhatApp automation. A little something for everyone. We also greatly approved of [Frank]’s workspace which appears in the background. Looks like he would enjoy reading Hackaday.

Honestly, while we’ve seen easier methods of automating the browser, there’s something appealing about having the control something like Python affords. Sure beats building hardware to simulate a human-in-the-loop.

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Why You Should Totally Roll Your Own AES Cryptography

July 11, 2022 by 27 Comments

Software developers are usually told to ‘never write your own cryptography’, and there definitely are sufficient examples to be found in the past decades of cases where DIY crypto routines caused real damage. This is also the introduction to [Francis Stokes]’s article on rolling your own crypto system. Even if you understand the mathematics behind a cryptographic system like AES (symmetric encryption), assumptions made by your code, along with side-channel and many other types of attacks, can nullify your efforts.

So then why write an article on doing exactly what you’re told not to do? This is contained in the often forgotten addendum to ‘don’t roll your own crypto’, which is ‘for anything important’. [Francis]’s tutorial on how to implement AES is incredibly informative as an introduction to symmetric key cryptography for software developers, and demonstrates a number of obvious weaknesses users of an AES library may not be aware of.

This then shows the reason why any developer who uses cryptography in some fashion for anything should absolutely roll their own crypto: to take a peek inside what is usually a library’s black box, and to better understand how the mathematical principles behind AES are translated into a real-world system. Additionally it may be very instructive if your goal is to become a security researcher whose day job is to find the flaws in these systems.

Essentially: definitely do try this at home, just keep your DIY crypto away from production servers :)

A New Javascript Runtime Fresh Out Of The Oven

July 8, 2022 by 15 Comments

A sizable portion of the Hackaday audience groans and runs their eyes when some new-fangled Javascript thing comes out. So what makes Bun different? Bun is a runtime (like Node or Deno)t that offers a performant all-in-one approach. Much to the Spice Girl’s delight, it is written in Zig. It offers bundling, transpiling, module resolution, and a fantastic foreign-function interface.

Node.js and Deno run on the V8 Javascript engine and provide the Node-API to access different features, such as filesystems, that don’t apply to web browsers. However, vast amounts of tooling have built up around Node.js and NPM (node package manager). Many Javascript projects have a bundling and transpiling step that takes the source and packages it together in a more standard format. Typescript needs to be packaged into javascript, and modules need to be resolved. Continue reading “A New Javascript Runtime Fresh Out Of The Oven” →