If machine learning and ML models are to pervade all of our applications and systems, then they’d better go to where the applications are rather than the other way round. Increasingly, that means JavaScript – both in the browser and on the server.
TensorFlow.js brings TensorFlow and Keras to the the JavaScript ecosystem, supporting both Node.js and browser-based applications. As well as programmer accessibility and ease of integration, running on-device means that in many cases user data never has to leave the device.
On-device computation has a number of benefits, including data privacy, accessibility, and low-latency interactive applications.
TensorFlow.js isn’t just for model serving, you can run training with it as well. Since its launch in March 2018, people have done lots of creative things with it. And since it runs in the browser, these are all accessible to you with just one click!
Version control is an important tool for anyone looking to track their changes these days. It’s especially helpful for programmers, sysadmins, and site reliability engineers (SREs) alike. The promise of recovering from mistakes to a known good state is a huge win and a touch friendlier than the previous strategy of adding .old to a copied file.
But learning Git is often oversimplified by well-meaning peers telling everyone to “get into open source.” Before you know it, someone asks for a pull request or merge request where you rebase from upstream before they can merge from your remote—and be sure to remove merge commits. Whatever well-working contribution you want to give back to an open source project feels much further from being added when you look at all these words you don’t know. …
Knowing where you are in a Git project starts with thinking of a tree. All Git projects have a root, similar to the idea of a filesystem’s root directory. All commits branch off from that root. In this way, a branch is only a pointer to a commit. By convention, master is the default name for the default branch in your root directory.
Since Git is a distributed version control system, where the same codebase is distributed to multiple locations, people often use the term “repository” as a way of talking about all copies of the same project.
If you ask some people, they’ll tell you that blockchain technology — an entirely reimagined approach to records, ledgers, and authentication that is helping to protect trust in transactions — is as dramatic as the creation of the Internet. Countless organizations across industries are aligning around it and there is huge demand for training and certification focused on the tools and building blocks that drive the blockchain ecosystem.
The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project has created many of these key tools and is providing leadership around these complex technologies. At top business schools ranging from Berkeley to Wharton,students are flockingto classes on blockchain and cryptocurrency. Additionally, job postings related to blockchain and Hyperledger are taking off, with knowledge in these areas translating into opportunity.
“In the span of only a year or two, blockchain has gone from something seen only as related to cryptocurrencies to a necessity for businesses across a wide variety of industries,” said The Linux Foundation’s Clyde Seepersad, General Manager, Training & Certification, in introducing the course Blockchain: Understanding its Uses and Implications. “Providing a free introductory course designed not only for technical staff but business professionals will help improve understanding of this important technology, while offering a certificate program through edX will enable professionals from all over the world to clearly demonstrate their expertise.”
Hyperledger offers numerous other training and certification options, and its certifications are respected across industries. The project has just introduced a new certification for Hyperledger Fabric and also offers certification for Hyperledger Sawtooth—with both platforms playing central roles in the blockchain ecosystem.
The following courses are key to building your blockchain and Hyperledger skills:
Blockchain: Understanding Its Uses and Implications (LFS170)— Understand exactly what a blockchain is, its impact and potential for change around the world, and analyze use cases in technology, business, and enterprise products and institutions.
Hyperledger Fabric Administration (LFS272)—This course will provide a deeper understanding of the Hyperledger Fabric network and how to administer and interact with chaincode, manage peers, operate basic CA-level functions, and much more. It will help prepare you to pass the Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator (CHFA)exam.
Hyperledger Sawtooth Administration (LFS273) —This course offers insight into the installation, configuration, component lifecycle, and permissioning-related information of a Hyperledger Sawtooth network. It will help prepare you to pass the Hyperledger Sawtooth Administrationexam.
You’ve probably heard of Go. Like any new programming language, it took a while to mature and stabilize to the point where it became useful for production applications. Nowadays, Go is a well established language that is used in web development, writing DevOps tools, network programming and databases. It was used to write Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and Ethereum. Go is accelerating in popularity, with adoption increasing by 76% in 2017, and there now are Go user groups and Go conferences. Whether you want to add to your professional skills or are just interested in learning a new programming language, you should check it out.
Go History
A team of three programmers at Google created Go: Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. The team decided to create Go because they were frustrated with C++ and Java, which through the years have become cumbersome and clumsy to work with. They wanted to bring enjoyment and productivity back to programming. …
Go is designed to be a simple compiled language that is easy to use, while allowing concisely written programs that run efficiently. Go lacks extraneous features, so it’s easy to program fluently, without needing to refer to language documentation while programming. Programming in Go is fast, fun and productive.
In an earlier installment of Linux Fu, I mentioned how you can use inotifywait to efficiently watch for file system changes. The comments had a lot of alternative ways to do the same job, which is great. But there was one very easy-to-use tool that didn’t show up, so I wanted to talk about it. That tool is entr. It isn’t as versatile, but it is easy to use and covers a lot of common use cases where you want some action to occur when a file changes.
The program is dead simple. It reads a list of file names on its standard input. It will then run a command and repeat it any time the input files change. There are a handful of options we’ll talk about in a bit, but it is really that simple. For example, try this after you install entr with your package manager.
Open two shell windows
In one window, open your favorite editor to create an empty file named /tmp/foo and save it
In the second window issue the command: echo "/tmp/foo" | entr wc /tmp/foo
Back in the first window (or your GUI editor) make some changes to the file and save it while observing the second window
If you can’t find entr, you can download it from the website.
Frequently, you’ll feed the output from find or a similar command to entr.
Configure your desktop as you want with Budgie, the 18th in our series on open source tools that will make you more productive in 2019.
Budgie Desktop
There are many, many desktop environments for Linux. From the easy to use and graphically stunning GNOME desktop (default on most major Linux distributions) and KDE, to the minimalist Openbox, to the highly configurable tiling i3, there are a lot of options. What I look for in a good desktop environment is speed, unobtrusiveness, and a clean user experience. It is hard to be productive when a desktop works against you, not with or for you.
Linux has come a long way from its original offering. But, no matter how often you hear how easy Linux is now, there are still skeptics. To back up this claim, the desktop must be simple enough for those unfamiliar with Linux to be able to make use of it. And, the truth is that plenty of desktop distributions make this a reality.
No Linux knowledge required
It might be simple to misconstrue this as yet another “best user-friendly Linux distributions” list. That is not what we’re looking at here. What’s the difference? For my purposes, the defining line is whether or not Linux actually plays into the usage. In other words, could you set a user in front of a desktop operating system and have them be instantly at home with its usage? No Linux knowledge required.
Believe it or not, some distributions do just that. I have five I’d like to present to you here. You’ve probably heard of all of them. They might not be your distribution of choice, but you can guarantee that they slide Linux out of the spotlight and place the user front and center.
The very philosophy of Elementary OS is centered around how people actually use their desktops. The developers and designers have gone out of their way to create a desktop that is as simple as possible. In the process, they’ve de-Linux’d Linux. That is not to say they’ve removed Linux from the equation. No. Instead, what they’ve done is create an operating system that is about as neutral as you’ll find. Elementary OS is streamlined in such a way as to make sure everything is perfectly logical. From the single Dock to the clear-to-anyone Applications menu, this is a desktop that doesn’t say to the user, “You’re using Linux!” In fact, the layout itself is reminiscent of Mac, but with the addition of a simple app menu (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Elementary OS Juno Application menu in action.
Another important aspect of Elementary OS that places it on this list is that it’s not nearly as flexible as some other desktop distributions. Sure, some users would balk at that, but having a desktop that doesn’t throw every bell and whistle at the user makes for a very familiar environment — one that neither requires or allows a lot of tinkering. That aspect of the OS goes a long way to make the platform familiar to new users.
And like any modern Linux desktop distribution, Elementary OS includes and App Store, called AppCenter, where users can install all the applications they need, without ever having to touch the command line.
Deepin not only gets my nod for one of the most beautiful desktops on the market, it’s also just as easy to adopt as any desktop operating system available. With a very simplistic take on the desktop interface, there’s very little in the way of users with zero Linux experience getting up to speed on its usage. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a user who couldn’t instantly start using the Deepin desktop. The only possible hitch in that works might be the sidebar control center (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Deepin sidebar control panel.
But even that sidebar control panel is as intuitive as any other configuration tool on the market. And anyone that has used a mobile device will be instantly at home with the layout. As for opening applications, Deepin takes a macOS Launchpad approach with the Launcher. This button is in the usual far right position on the desktop dock, so users will immediately gravitate to that, understanding that it is probably akin to the standard “Start” menu.
In similar fashion as Elementary OS (and most every Linux distribution on the market), Deepin includes an app store (simply called “Store”), where plenty of apps can be installed with ease.
You knew it was coming. Ubuntu is most often ranked at the top of most user-friendly Linux lists. Why? Because it’s one of the chosen few where a knowledge of Linux simply isn’t necessary to get by on the desktop. Prior to the adoption of GNOME (and the ousting of Unity), that wouldn’t have been the case. Why? Because Unity often needed a bit of tweaking to get it to the point where a tiny bit of Linux knowledge wasn’t necessary (Figure 3). Now that Ubuntu has adopted GNOME, and tweaked it to the point where an understanding of GNOME isn’t even necessary, this desktop makes Linux take a back seat to simplicity and usability.
Figure 3: The Ubuntu 18.04 desktop is instantly familiar.
Unlike Elementary OS, Ubuntu doesn’t hold the user back. So anyone who wants more from their desktop, can have it. However, the out of the box experience is enough for just about any user type. Anyone looking for a desktop that makes the user unaware as to just how much power they have at their fingertips, could certainly do worse than Ubuntu.
I will preface this by saying I’ve never been the biggest fan of Linux Mint. It’s not that I don’t respect what the developers are doing, it’s more an aesthetic. I prefer modern-looking desktop environments. But that old school desktop metaphor (found in the default Cinnamon desktop) is perfectly familiar to nearly anyone who uses it. With a taskbar, start button, system tray, and desktop icons (Figure 4), Linux Mint offers an interface that requires zero learning curve. In fact, some users might be initially fooled into thinking they are working with a Windows 7 clone. Even the updates warning icon will look instantly familiar to users.
Figure 4: The Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop is very Windows 7-ish.
Because Linux Mint benefits from being based on Ubuntu, it’ll not only enjoy an immediate familiarity, but a high usability. No matter if you have even the slightest understanding of the underlying platform, users will feel instantly at home on Linux Mint.
Our list concludes with a distribution that also does a fantastic job of making the user forget they are using Linux, and makes working with the usual tools a simple, beautiful thing. Melding the Budgie Desktop with Ubuntu makes for an impressively easy to use distribution. And although the layout of the desktop (Figure 5) might not be the standard fare, there is no doubt the acclimation takes no time. In fact, outside of the Dock defaulting to the left side of the desktop, Ubuntu Budgie has a decidedly Elementary OS look to it.
Figure 5: The Budgie desktop is as beautiful as it is simple.
The System Tray/Notification area in Ubuntu Budgie offers a few more features than the usual fare: Features such as quick access to Caffeine (a tool to keep your desktop awake), a Quick Notes tool (for taking simple notes), Night Lite switch, a Places drop-down menu (for quick access to folders), and of course the Raven applet/notification sidebar (which is similar to, but not quite as elegant as, the Control Center sidebar in Deepin). Budgie also includes an application menu (top left corner), which gives users access to all of their installed applications. Open an app and the icon will appear in the Dock. Right-click that app icon and select Keep in Dock for even quicker access.
Everything about Ubuntu Budgie is intuitive, so there’s practically zero learning curve involved. It doesn’t hurt that this distribution is as elegant as it is easy to use.
Give One A Chance
And there you have it, five Linux distributions that, each in their own way, offer a desktop experience that any user would be instantly familiar with. Although none of these might be your choice for top distribution, it’s hard to argue their value when it comes to users who have no familiarity with Linux.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Some of us have been zipping files on Unix and Linux systems for many decades — to save some disk space and package files together for archiving. Even so, there are some interesting variations on zipping that not all of us have tried. So, in this post, we’re going to look at standard zipping and unzipping as well as some other interesting zipping options.
The basic zip command
First, let’s look at the basic zip command. It uses what is essentially the same compression algorithm as gzip, but there are a couple important differences. For one thing, the gzip command is used only for compressing a single file where zip can both compress files and join them together into an archive. For another, the gzip command zips “in place”. In other words, it leaves a compressed file — not the original file alongside the compressed copy. Here’s an example of gzip at work:
$ gzip onefile
$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 shs shs 10514 Jan 15 13:13 onefile.gz
And here’s zip. Notice how this command requires that a name be provided for the zipped archive where gzip simply uses the original file name and adds the .gz extension.
Let’s Encrypt is a free and open certificate authority developed by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). Certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt are trusted by almost all browsers today.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to use the Certbot tool to obtain a free SSL certificate for Nginx on Debian 9. We’ll also show how to configure Nginx to use the SSL certificate and enable HTTP/2.
As we enter 2019, we asked some of our O’Reilly authors and training course instructors for their thoughts on what’s in store for established players and fast-growing languages.
Python
Python’s incredible growth over the past decade shows no signs of slowing. In addition to maintaining its position as the most popular introductory language for students, scientists, and knowledge workers, Python will continue its widespread adoption in web development, DevOps, data analysis, and machine learning circles. Matt Harrison, who runs the Python and data science training and consulting company MetaSnake (and is a frequent instructor of Python courses on the O’Reilly online learning platform), offers his take:
Python has traditionally been more focused on small data, but I think that as other tools that enable big data—such as Dask and flexible Python solutions on top of Kubernetes—continue to improve, we will see Python dominate in big data as well. I’m continuing to see large companies that have traditionally used Java or proprietary languages replacing those with Python.
