PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

LiteCLI is a new open source command line client with many good features. Built in Python it is hosted on GitHub. There are quite a few SQLite GUI clients, such as DB Browser and Sqliteman, but not that many command line/terminal ones. Despite being command line, the new offering, LiteCLI, is feature rich, including: full article here

A historical recollection of the Postgres project and its impact on the DBMS industry provides an insight into the key features of the object-relational database as conceived by Mike Stonebraker. Looking Back at Postgres,   freely available as an arXiv.org pdf, is an essay that also forms part of the just released book  "Making Databases Work The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker" . It comes from Joseph M. Hellerstein, a prominent research member of the UC Berkeley Postgres project, which was led by the Stonebraker think tank from the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's, and takes us on a magnificent tour through the evolution of the Postgres project. During that journey, Hellerstein pauses on its milestones to elaborate on its forward thinking that planted the roots of the technologies that shape the database industry today, decades after the project's conception. full article here

A fun and practical introduction to the underpinnings of AI.  Working with AI is increasingly easier thanks to new and versatile libraries which encapsulate all the logic so you don't have to, to the extent that  your AI skills are worth less than you think : As exciting as the progress is, it’s bad news for both companies and individuals who have invested heavily in AI skills. Today, they give you a solid competitive advantage, as training a competent ML engineer requires plenty of time spent reading papers, and  a solid  math background to start with. However, as the tools get better, this won’t be the case anymore. It’ll become more about reading tutorials than scientific papers. If you don’t realize your advantage soon, a band of interns with a library may eat your lunch The truth is that it is the combination ... full article here

Like bread and beer, free software development is not for free: developers need some incentives, let’s say just the money they need for purchasing their bread and beer or for ensuring their family a decent way of life. In order to provide these incentives, the European Commission is launching in January about 15 bug bounties on Free Software projects that the EU institutions rely on. A bug bounty is a prize for people who actively search for security issues. The amount of the bounty depends on the severity of the issue uncovered and the relative importance of the software. This EU initiative is part of the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project. "Software Security as a Civil right", Nikos Vaggalis wrote in i-programmer news, quoting the scheme that Julia Reda (MEP) pushes forward. Mission-critical F/OSS applications' audits should be state funded in order to serve the wider good. full article on joinup.ec.europa.eu

A State-sponsored bug bounty comes as refreshing news in that it shows that amongst the bureaucrats there are tech savvypeople who understand the true value of OSS software to society, and as such the impact when its security goes wrong.  This EU initiative is part of the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project, thanks to Julia Reda MEP of the EU Pirate Party, who started the project thinking that enough is enough after severe vulnerabilities were discovered in key infrastructure components like OpenSSL. This prompted her to involve the EU Commission in contributing to the security of the Internet. full article here