2025-02-28 06:47:01
Paul McKenney has put together a series of articles on how to improve one's ability to give a good talk at a technical conference.
On the other hand, (1) presentation skills stay with you through life, and (2) small improvements in presentation skills over months or years can provide you with great advantages longer term. An old saying credited to Thomas Edison claims a breakdown of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. However, my own experience with RCU has instead been 0.1% inspiration, 9.9% perspiration, and 90% communication. Had I been unable to communicate effectively, others would have extreme difficulty using RCU, as in even more difficulty than they do now.
There is a lot of speaking experience distilled into this set of posts.
2025-02-28 04:27:31
Version 4.0 of the Fish shell has been released. Improvements include a better key-binding mechanism, the ability to tie abbreviations to a specific command, selective ignoring of commands in the history, some scripting improvements, and more. See the release notes for details.
2025-02-28 01:39:56
Zotero is an open-source reference management tool designed for collecting, organizing, and citing research materials. It is particularly useful for those writing research papers, theses, or books that require a bibliography in standard formats like APA Style, Chicago Style, or MLA Format. Zotero stores bibliographic metadata, annotations, and user data and integrates with word processors like LibreOffice, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs to produce in-text citations and bibliographies. The core features of Zotero include metadata extraction, tagging, full-text indexing, and cloud synchronization for multi-device access, and Zotero has a plugin system to allow anyone to expand its capabilities. The most recent major release, Zotero 7, added support for reading EPUBs, brought user-interface improvements including a dark mode, performance improvements, and more.
2025-02-27 23:44:23
Intel's indirect branch tracking (IBT) is a hardware-implemented control-flow-integrity mechanism that makes it harder for an attacker to gain control of the system by way of a corrupted indirect branch. FineIBT is a software extension to IBT that is meant to improve its protection. Recently, though, Jennifer Miller reported a novel way to bypass FineIBT by taking advantage of how the kernel's system-call entry point is constructed. In response, Peter Zijlstra is working on some FineIBT enhancements to close that hole and make IBT more secure in general.
2025-02-27 23:11:20
The 6.13.5, 6.12.17, and 6.6.80 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain important fixes all over the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.
2025-02-27 23:04:23
Security updates have been issued by Debian (emacs and openh264), Fedora (rpm-ostree), Mageia (dcmtk, libcap, openssh, and proftpd), Red Hat (emacs, kernel, and pki-servlet-engine), Slackware (emacs), SUSE (chromium, ffmpeg-4, ffmpeg-7, gnutls, libiniparser-devel, procps, socat, vim, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (binutils, libsndfile, libxmltok, and php5).