Weekly Digest & Annual Review – datawookie’s blog

A quick review of the year.

I published 55 posts (including this one).
I spent a lot of time working with GatsbyJS for one of my clients. At first I was quite out of my depth, but I slowly figured out more or less how it works. I documented some of my learning in a series of posts.
My most popular post is still about Shared Memory & Docker. The runner up looks at how to Install GitLab Runner with Docker.
I spent some time compiling data on kayak specifications in the hope of producing a definitive table. It’s a work in progress but it’s already getting quite a lot of interest.

Now onto a few interesting articles from this week, mostly announcements of new versions.

Firefox 121.0
OpenSSH 9.6
Julia 1.10
Keras 3.0.2 and
Love Songs.

Firefox 121.0

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A new release of the venerable Firefox browser is available. This version defaults to the Wayland compositor on Linux. Developers might also be interested to know that the :has() CSS selector is now implemented, while new keywords are supported by the text-indent and text-wrap CSS properties.

OpenSSH 9.6

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OpenSSH 9.6 was released on 18 December 2023. The release patches a few security issues and adds a few new features, notably support for reading ED25519 private keys in PEM PKCS8 format. ED25519 became the default key format in the previous version of OpenSSH.

Some recent posts which relate to SSH:

Julia 1.10

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A few years ago I got quite stuck into Julia and produced a series of posts. The language has moved on substantially since then. Julia 1.10 was released recently. The release notes can be found here or check out just the highlights.

Keras 3.0.2

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Keras 3.0.2 was released on 21 December 2023. Notable updates are:

support for Binomial and Beta distributions in the keras.random module;
an implementation of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss for sequence alignment; and
support for gradient accumulation on all backends (TensorFlow, JAX and PyTorch), so that you can conserve memory with smaller mini-batches but accumulate the gradients over multiple mini-batches before making more meaningful weight updates.

Love Songs

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Got a good chuckle out of this and was rather satisfied to recognise most of the songs. Take a look at the explanation for further discussion.