jgneff

I'm so happy to see this change. I got involved with reproducible builds in 2021 after reading in horror about the SolarWinds attack. [1]

I think Magnus Ihse Bursie said it best while working on reproducible builds of OpenJDK: "If you were to ask me, the fact that compilers and build tools ever started to produce non-deterministic output has been a bug from day one." [2]

[1] https://www.linux.com/news/preventing-supply-chain-attacks-l...

[2] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/9152#issue-1270543997

That might have been Thunderbird doing its initial indexing of your existing messages. It's the first thing I disable after installing Thunderbird: go to Settings > General > Indexing (at the bottom of the page) and uncheck the setting for "Enable Global Search and Indexer." I always found it extremely slow and CPU intensive, and just not worth it, especially when you have IMAP server-side search.

I'm pretty sure this is the computer that my mom had hooked up to an old TV set back in the early 90s. She used it all the time to communicate with me by e-mail, printing out each message she received. I always knew a message was from her because the text was wrapped at something like 25 columns in width. It worked great! It was like a fancy typewriter.

Then I upgraded her to an IBM PC with Windows, and she stopped using the computer altogether! She just never made the jump to a windowed system with a mouse.

Yes, I have had a similar experience. I eventually gave up on finding a competent cross-border tax accountant and just learned it all myself. I would rather make my own mistakes than pay someone quite a bit of money to make even more mistakes. It took a lot of reading and research, and I needed to make my finances as simple as possible, but so far so good in the past 15 years.

I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building.

I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.

That's actually pretty fast. It took 10 years for Java[1] and 5 years for JavaFX[2] to fix some trivial but rather severe text rendering bugs. Most of that time was getting enough courage to fix them myself. :-)

Reporting text rendering bugs is frustratingly difficult!

[1] https://github.com/jgneff/openjdk-freetype

[2] https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx/issues/229

I enjoyed reading both books, but especially Herman Pontzer's stories in Burn about his time with the Hadza people in Africa. The study is based in part on his research (Pontzer, 2018, Pontzer et al., 2021). His hypothesis does seem to be controversial and counter-intuitive.

Thank you for the link to the nutritionist's article. I'll read it with interest.

I think this study is related to two books I read this summer: Burn, by Herman Pontzer, presents his "constrained energy expenditure hypothesis," and Exercised, by Daniel E. Lieberman, discusses his "costly repair hypothesis."

Together, they try to explain why exercise can force your body to stop using its energy to destroy itself (inflammation, autoimmune diseases) and instead use its energy to restore itself (releasing antioxidants, repairing damage).

Try this in your '.bash_aliases' file, for example:

  alias df='df -t vfat -t ext4'

You can now completely disable automatic updates of Snap packages. [1]

[1] https://snapcraft.io/blog/hold-your-horses-i-mean-snaps-new-...

It's the 'font-family: Georgia,Times,serif;' that ends up being Nimbus Roman as a substitute for Times (on my Ubuntu system, at least), and that font looks just terrible in white on a black background. I remove Times, or the entire font-family rule, and it looks great (DejuVu Serif or DejaVu Sans).

I spent years using NetBeans, then Eclipse, then IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, and now back to NetBeans. The features that made me return were having full C and C++ support (at the time, now less supported) and super-easy remote debugging. Those features let me write, build, and debug a Java application that interfaced with a Linux kernel device driver on an ARM Kobo Touch e-reader. Neither Eclipse nor IntelliJ IDEA could do that so easily.

And as mentioned in another comment, the direct support for the Apache Maven POM can make life easier, without the messy import required by the others.

With the new Flat Look-and-Feel with dark mode and the generally much better font rendering in Java, it finally looks great, too. There was a decade-long ugly period, though, which was one of the reasons I was desperately seeking alternatives.

I think it's a great option, mostly because it can run anywhere the JDK runs. I'm building and testing the JavaFX 18 early-access builds for Linux on six Debian architectures (amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x). I should have the JavaFX 17 general-availability release built this week on all six, too. See:

https://snapcraft.io/openjfx

I built a Snap package of OpenJDK 17 and 18 for armhf (armv7l) and arm64 (aarch64), along with four other Linux architectures. See:

https://snapcraft.io/openjdk

I agree. Among all the open-source projects I've built, the OpenJDK is one of the easiest and most straight-forward I've encountered — even when cross-compiling for 32-bit ARM. They did a great job rewriting the build system a few years back.

> So how does Ubuntu differentiate itself, in 2020?

For me, by its ubiquity. It has desktop and servers images [1], cloud images for containers and virtual machines [2], and base images for all kinds of embedded devices [3], all with multiple architectures (amd64, armhf). I run it on everything from servers and desktops to QEMU ARM guests and e-readers.

[1] https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04.1/ [2] https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/focal/current/ [3] http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-base/releases/20.04.1/relea...

The "About GitHub Sponsors" help page states, "To be eligible for the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund, you must apply to GitHub Sponsors by January 1, 2020." This is the first time I see a deadline for the matching funds during the developer's first year. I also see that the "zero fees" pledge extends only through May 2020 (https://github.com/sponsors).

I use Mozilla Pocket to do essentially just that. I add articles to Pocket with Firefox Desktop and then read them on my Kobo e-reader. I find it much more pleasant to read long articles a page at a time instead of scrolling.

I reported a bug on Launchpad last week for the missing JavaFX support in the Ubuntu OpenJDK package.

For details, see "JavaFX support is in upstream OpenJDK 9 but missing in Ubuntu OpenJDK 9" (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openjdk-9/+bug/172...).

I came to the same conclusion just this week. I got the best print simply by matching the density of my black and white laser printer with the black dots I wanted it to print.

Specifically, I used the ImageMagick operations "-dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome" for more contrast or "-dither FloydSteinberg -remap pattern:gray50" for more fidelity to the original image.

I was surprised that the prints were better without adjusting for gamma. If I converted the image to a linear color space before the dither operation, the print came out too dark. I'm guessing that the gamma in the non-linear color space compensated for the dot gain on the printer to cancel out the effect.