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If the schools that my kids attend are anything to go by, it seems that high on Santa's list this Xmas just gone was an iTouch, iPhone or iPad depending how well off the parents were. That's understandable, they are just as attractive as gadgets for kids as they are to adults. But along with the never ending supply of free games, educational apps and the like comes the small problem of unfettered access to the Internet and all that brings with it. While adults may well have the family PC protected by parental control software to filter unsuitable content from their kids screens, the same is unlikely to be the case with a smartphone or tablet device. So how can parents keep porn, and other unsuitable online content, off the iPhone and iPad? One solution is provided by the same company, Blue Coat, that has been supplying a free and hugely popular desktop parental control solution for some years now in the form of K9 Web Protection.
Blue Coat tells me that the app utilises the same cloud-based WebPulse service that provides desktop users with up-to-the-moment protection from objectionable content and threats by continually categorizing new and evolving content driven by the real-time online experiences of more than 70 million users. On a typical day the WebPulse service identifies over 110,000 pages of new or previously uncategorized pornography and adult content.
If the schools that my kids attend are anything to go by, it seems that high on Santa's list this Xmas just gone was an iTouch, iPhone or iPad depending how well off the parents were. That's understandable, they are just as attractive as gadgets for kids as they are to adults. But along with the never ending supply of free games, educational apps and the like comes the small problem of unfettered access to the Internet and all that brings with it. While adults may well have the family PC protected by parental control software to filter unsuitable content from their kids screens, the same is unlikely to be the case with a smartphone or tablet device. So how can parents keep porn, and other unsuitable online content, off the iPhone and iPad? One solution is provided by the same company, Blue Coat, that has been supplying a free and hugely popular desktop parental control solution for some years now in the form of K9 Web Protection.
Blue Coat tells me that the app utilises the same cloud-based WebPulse service that provides desktop users with up-to-the-moment protection from objectionable content and threats by continually categorizing new and evolving content driven by the real-time online experiences of more than 70 million users. On a typical day the WebPulse service identifies over 110,000 pages of new or previously uncategorized pornography and adult content.
Every day, the ProgrammableWeb team is busy, updating its three primary directories for APIs, clients (language-specific libraries or SDKs for consuming or providing APIs), and source code samples.
write a Python function called sumList () which will receive a list of integers as input parameter.sumList() must:
a)Print the list
b)Sum all the numbers in a list and print the total.
The main section of the program must:
c)Ask the user how many numbers the list should contain;
d)Create the list accordingly (containing randomly generated integers between 0 and 100);
e)Pass the list to sumList () for processing.
A bit of colorful inspiration is always a good thing, don’t you think so? Especially in November when the days tend to be rather gray and misty in a lot of parts of the world. To bring a splash of color and some positive vibes to your desktops and home screens, creative folks from all across the globe once again fired up their favorite design tools and created unique wallpapers to welcome the new month.
This monthly tradition has been going on for many years now, and we are very thankful to everyone who has put their creative skills to the test and contributed their artworks to it — back in the early days, just like today.
The wallpapers in this collection all come in versions with and without a calendar for November 2020 and can be downloaded for free. And since so many beautiful and inspiring designs have seen the light of day as a part of this ongoing series, we browsed through our archives on the look for November goodies from the past. You’ll find a selection of almost-forgotten favorites compiled at the end of this post. Enjoy!
Did you know that you could get featured in one of our upcoming wallpapers posts, too? We are always looking for creative talent, so if you have an idea for a wallpaper for December, please don’t hesitate to submit it. We’d love to see what you’ll come up with. Join in! →
“Is there anything more romantic than watching the sunset with your loved one while listening to the beat of the November rain falling around you?” — Designed by LibraFire from Serbia.
Designed by Naveen T R from India.
“When Wikipedia says you ‘influenced virtually all modern physics’, it’s probably a big deal, right? That’s why we dedicate our November calendar issue to Albert Einstein, who, on November 9, 1921, won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Among over 300 scientific papers published during his half-a-century-long career, Einstein formulated theories such as general and special relativity, photoelectric effect, mass-energy equivalence, EPR paradox, and many more. Of course, ‘the world’s most famous equation’, E = mc2, had to find its place in our cartoony design.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.
“Spring was a little late all the way down in middle earth, but it’s warming up nicely and the summer breeze is rolling in lazily over our pristine coastlines — so here’s to celebrating a vibey summer down under!” — Designed by Kay from New Zealand.
Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Sweden.
Designed by Morgane Van Achter from Belgium.
“It’s all a matter of perspective.” — Designed by Hannah Joy Patterson from South Carolina, USA.
World Kindness Day, a bright woolen plaid on a rainy day, autumn storms, and a curious squirrel — these are just a few of the things that inspired the design community to design a November wallpaper in the past years. Are you up for a trip down memory lane? Here are some November favorites from our archives. (Please note that these wallpapers don’t come with a calendar.)
“Autumn can be dreary, especially in November, when rain starts pouring every day. We wanted to summon better days, so that’s how this colourful November calendar was created. Open your umbrella and let’s roll!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.
“Kindness drives humanity. Be kind. Be humble. Be humane. Be the best of yourself!” — Designed by Color Mean Creative Studio from Dubai.
“Let’s take extra care of colors during the autumn months. November might be gray and rainy. Outside. Don’t let it inside. Take a good book, prepare a hot ginger tea, and cover your knees with a bright woolen plaid.” — Designed by Tartanify from France.
“On December 7, we mark International Civil Aviation Day, celebrating those who prove day by day that the sky really is the limit. As the engine of global connectivity, civil aviation is now, more than ever, a symbol of social and economic progress and a vehicle of international understanding. This monthly calendar is our sign of gratitude to those who dedicate their lives to enabling everyone to reach their dreams.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.
“This wallpaper is based on screenshots from my latest browser game (I’m an indie games designer).” — Designed by Bart Bonte from Belgium.
Designed by Cedric Bloem from Belgium.
Designed by Glynnis Owen from Australia.
Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Sweden.
“The goal of Movember is to ‘change the face of men’s health.’” — Designed by Suman Sil from India.
“Universal Children’s Day, 20 November. It feels like a dream world, it invites you to let your imagination flow, see the details, and find the child inside you.” — Designed by Luis Costa from Portugal.
Designed by PlusCharts from India.
“By the end of autumn, ferocious Poseidon will part from tinted clouds and timid breeze. After this uneven clash, the sky once more becomes pellucid just in time for imminent luminous snow.” — Designed by Ana Masnikosa from Belgrade, Serbia.
“Working hard or hardly working? What will your work stats look like in November?” Designed by Photo Stats from Sweden.
Designed by Saul Wauters from Belgium.
Designed by Nicky Somers from Belgium.
“I designed some Halloween characters and then this idea came to my mind — a bat family hanging around in the moonlight. A cute and scary mood is just perfect for autumn.” — Designed by Carmen Eisendle from Germany.
“The cold, almost winter weather. So nice to have a cup of hot coffee and some sweets.” — Designed by Karetina Irina from the Russian Federation.
“No man’s your enemy. No man’s your slave. My blood is the same as yours, so why must we hurt our brothers and sisters when we are all the same? Believe in love, it will show wonders.” — Designed by Faheem Nistar from Dubai.
“We have to acknowledge that some things are inevitable, like winter. Let’s try to hold on until we can, and then embrace the beautiful season.” — Designed by Igor Izhik from Canada.
“There’s some pretty rough weather coming up these weeks. Thinking about November makes me want to keep all the warm thoughts in mind. I’d like to wish everyone a cozy winter.” — Designed by Emily Trbl. Kunstreich from Germany.
Designed by Maria Porter from the United States.
Designed by StarAdmin from India.
WordPress’ Core systems team had an eventful Friday when an error in the auto-update system caused sites to update to WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449, including live production sites with no auto-update constants defined.
Those who received an email about the update logged into their sites to see the message: “BETA TESTERS: This site is set up to install updates of future beta versions automatically.”
Shaun Rieman logged the first ticket about sites being updated to 5.5.3-alpha-49449, which was also incidentally his first WordPress trac ticket. More users and developers confirmed the issue.
“It’s worth noting that there’s no functional difference between 5.5.2 and 5.5.3-alpha, so there’s no need to worry in that regard,” core committer John Blackbourn said.
Sites that were accidentally updated also installed all the default themes released over the last decade, as well as Akismet. Developers will need to manually delete the bundled themes that they don’t need.
In under an hour, all affected sites were automatically returned to 5.5.2, but the incident has eroded trust and damaged confidence in the auto-update system. Several commenting on the ticket asked how they can explicitly disable development updates.
“The worrying thing is that a single developer can do this, seemingly without any checking or confirmation by other developers,” UK-based developer Paul Stenning said. “This is a serious security concern as a rogue developer could push out malicious code in an update that nobody else checks.”
WordPress agency owner Rob Migchels, who had approximately 50 websites affected, tracked 18 minutes between the the trac ticket (#51679) and receiving the fix.
“The 5.5.3-alpha issue is a side effect of another issue that occurred on 5.5.2,” WordPress engineer and 5.6 Triage release lead Tonya Mork said. Jake Spurlock published an official statement regarding the incident as part of the 5.5.3 release notes:
“Earlier today — between approximately 15:30 and 16:00 UTC — the auto-update system for WordPress updated some sites from version 5.5.2 to version 5.5.3-alpha. This auto-update was due to an error in the Updates API caused by the 5.5.3 release preparations.”
Spurlock elaborated on the technical details in a separate post on the WordPress development blog:
While work was being done to prepare for WordPress 5.5.3, the release team attempted to make 5.5.2 unavailable for download on WordPress.org to limit the spread of the issue noted in the section above, as the error only affected fresh installations. This action resulted in some installations being updated to a pre-release “5.5.3-alpha” version.
In a situation like this, where users who haven’t elected to run their live sites on beta releases are getting a forced update, site owners might wonder whether this update is actually arriving from WordPress, or if the system has been hijacked.
Security researcher Slavco Mihajloski, who commented last week on the lack of transparency regarding how automatic updates are tested and performed, said this incident highlights the need for more openness surrounding the process.
“Why is transparency important? Because procedure will become public and when public, the community will be able to contribute in order to improve it,” Mihajloski said. “At the moment it is more than obvious that this process and the whole security at WP.dot org lacks QA and QC. Each task is left to an individual or closed group. Imagine the following: what if an automatic security update could be pushed only if: – X out of Y (where X < Y) authorities agree that update is fine – have a pilot update on let’s say 100 different servers (I hope .org could afford this) where regression tests will be fired against each one. The current problems would not occur.”
Automatic background updates for minor releases have saved developers thousands of hours in updating sites. A UI for allowing users to opt into automatic updates for major releases is on the roadmap for WordPress 5.6, expected in early December.
This particular accidental update has betrayed for many developers what was already a somewhat fragile trust in the auto-update system. It doesn’t shore up more confidence for selling the idea of core updates when 5.6 is released, but it doesn’t mean that auto-updates are not a good idea. WordPress.org will need to put better processes in place in order to win back users’ trust.
The incident affected more than 100 sites for WordPress agency owner Robert Staddon. He reports that they all displayed the “Update now” button with the confusing and incorrect text seen below. Staddon said the incident has not yet caused him to change his approach to allowing clients to receive auto-updates.
“I was very grateful for the extraordinarily fast response time to get the problem fixed,” Staddon said. “However, it did shake my confidence in the WordPress auto-update process. Considering the number of websites using WordPress, a mistake of this magnitude could end up having a rather catastrophic effect around the web. I would hope that the core team would be able to evaluate how this happened and consider putting some checks in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Get that desk more cuter, fam. Amy (@sailorhg) has this perfectly cute minisite with assorted desktop backgrounds, fonts, editor themes, keyboard stuff, and other accessories. These rainbow cables are great.
And speaking of fonts, we’re still plucking away at this microsite for coding fonts and it’s ripe for contribution if anyone is into it.
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The post compute cuter appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
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Hi! I have existing system already, I am using ASP.NET.
I am using a separate VOIP/Softphone so we can call.
I want to know if it is possible to do predictive dialing in ASP.NET. I've heard that it is possible in C#.
I am new in Web Development, so I am quite slow a little bit, please bare with me.
Thank you for your help in advance.
Last Friday, Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark announced the Twenty Twenty-One Blocks theme project. It is a block-based version of the Twenty Twenty-One default theme that is shipping along with WordPress 5.6. It will work with the site editor available in the Gutenberg plugin. Developers will work on the two themes as separate projects.
The original plan was to explore support for full-site editing after the WordPress Beta 1 release for Twenty Twenty-One. Some had hoped that support would land in the theme itself. However, a second theme could be a better path in the long run.
As I wrote in my original coverage of Twenty Twenty-One, it did not seem likely that full-site editing would be far enough along in development for it to be a primary feature for the theme. Since the feature will not be in WordPress 5.6, it makes sense to develop for it outside of the primary theme for the time being.
“Twenty Twenty-One Blocks is an experimental theme created as an example to highlight what is possible with Full Site Editing,” wrote Nymark in the announcement. “The theme will need Gutenberg and the Full Site Editing experiment to be enabled. It will not be part of Core, but once complete it will be available in the theme directory.”
Currently, there are no plans to integrate the two themes down the road. They will be maintained as separate projects. This sounds like a smart strategy for this theme. It will allow developers to work on the Blocks theme as a separate entity in the coming months without having to worry about potential problems with merging.
I am excited about this project because it means we get a somewhat official, though not technically a default, theme that supports full-site editing. Otherwise, the community would have had to wait another year for the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, which will presumably be 100% built with blocks.
The Q theme by Ari Stathopoulos, a Themes Team representative, is a little farther along at the moment. It is a solid starting point and learning tool. However, there should be a theme project coming from core WordPress developers that is leading the way for other theme authors. There is a sense of trust, particularly for first-time theme authors, when picking apart an officially-supported theme that it is built to current standards. That is why Twenty Twenty-One Blocks is important.
Thus far, little work has gone into the theme, much of it coming from the original pull request to kick off development from Kjell Reigstad. The theme is currently stored in the WordPress Theme Experiments repository. Ideally, the team will split this theme into its own GitHub repository since it will be added to the theme directory and not merely an experiment.
For theme authors who want to cut their teeth on building block-based themes, this would be a good place to begin taking those initial steps. Or, it will at least be a good project to follow because this is as close to an “official” theme that supports full-site editing that we will see for a while.
At this point, the theme does not do a lot. It is minimal and nowhere near a block-based equivalent of Twenty Twenty-One. However, it works as well as most other themes supporting Gutenberg’s site editor.
For now, template parts do not seem to be working on the front end. However, template parts have been hit or miss in my tests for a while, sometimes seemingly working only by some randomly magical force that rears its head when I close in on the limits of my frustration — it will likely begin working immediately after publishing this post. That is often the nature of testing alpha-level software. Nevertheless, I am excited about following the development of this theme in the coming weeks and months.
TiDB, an open-source, distributed SQL database, provides detailed monitoring metrics through Prometheus and Grafana. These metrics are often the key to troubleshooting performance problems in the cluster.
However, for novice TiDB users, understanding hundreds of monitoring metrics can be overwhelming. You may wonder:
Facebook and Twitter have left most other companies around the world far behind when it comes to using machine learning to improve their business model. And while their practices haven’t always resulted in the best reactions from end-users, there’s much to be learned from these companies on what to do–and what not to do–when it comes to scaling and applying data analytics.
While Facebook seemingly uses machine learning for everything — it is used for content detection and content integrity, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and fraudulent account detection, as well as operating functions like facial recognition, language translation, and content search functions. The Facebook algorithm manages all this while offloading some computation to edge devices in order to reduce latency.
Join operations are often used in a typical data analytics flow in order to correlate two data sets. Apache Spark, being a unified analytics engine, has also provided a solid foundation to execute a wide variety of Join scenarios.
At a very high level, Join operates on two input data sets and the operation works by matching each of the data records belonging to one of the input data sets with every other data record belonging to another input data set. On finding a match or a non-match (as per a given condition), the Join operation could either output an individual record, being matched, from either of the two data sets or a Joined record. The joined record basically represents the combination of individual records, being matched, from both the data sets.
So you have multiple data sources and most of your data has ended up in the cloud, or will soon. It’s a mix of structured and unstructured, static and streaming, in many different formats, and often fractured across data warehouses, open source databases, proprietary databases, data lakes, document stores and object storage like Amazon S3. How best to unify access to that data and share it with internal and external applications and users to support the ever-widening variety of analytical and operational use cases?
It sounds challenging, but there are several solutions. One option is to try and consolidate all the data by moving it into a monolithic (or yet another) database, cloud warehouse or data lake. But this is often impractical, time-consuming, and likely to increase cost, effort, and vendor lock-in. Let’s face it, adding another vendor to the mix is not high on the CIO’s to-do list.
I updated my personal website the other day. Always a fun project since it’s one of the few where it’s 100% just me. It’s my own personal playground with no other goal than making the site represent me to have a little fun. It’s not a complete re-write, just some new paint.
I thought I’d document little bits of it here just to hone in on some of the bits of trickery in the spirit of learning through sharing.
I think the Inkwell family is super cool. I like mix and matching not just the weights but the serif and sans-serif and caps vs not.
I used Inkwell in the last design as well, but I was worried that it was a little too jokey for blog post body copy. My writing is extremely casual, but not always, and Inkwell is way too jovial for serious topics. I went with Ideal Sans for body copy last time, but the pairing with Inkwell felt a little off.
This time I went with Whitney for general body copy, which is still pretty lighthearted, but works when the copy is more straight toned.
If you’re going to zebra-stripe a table, you’d do something like…
tr:nth-child(even) {
background-color: var(--color-1);
}
tr:nth-child(odd) {
background-color: var(--color-2);
}What if you wanted to rotate four colors though? It’s still :nth-child trickery, selecting every four, and then offsetting. Here, I’ll do it with list items in Sass (the nesting is nice, not having to repeat the selector):
li {
&:nth-child(4n) a {
color: $blue;
}
&:nth-child(4n + 1) a {
color: $yellow;
}
&:nth-child(4n + 2) a {
color: $red;
}
&:nth-child(4n + 3) a {
color: $purple;
}
}That’s what I did to build the colorized blogroll:
Note the Sass used above… I used Sass because it was already in use on the project. All I had to do was open CodeKit and the processing was ready-to-go.
Oh, and blogrolls are cool again.
I used this click-to-load-YouTube-(at all) technique which is still extremely clever. Having an <iframe> that behaves just like a YouTube embed would but only loading a simple static image (rather than heaps and heaps of resources) is great for performance and behaves essentially the same as a normal YouTube embed does.
<iframe
width="560"
height="315"
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8Wp3dafaMQ"
srcdoc="<style>*{padding:0;margin:0;overflow:hidden}html,body{height:100%}img,span{position:absolute;width:100%;top:0;bottom:0;margin:auto}span{height:1.5em;text-align:center;font:48px/1.5 sans-serif;color:white;text-shadow:0 0 0.5em black}</style><a href=https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8Wp3dafaMQ?autoplay=1><img src=https://img.youtube.com/vi/Y8Wp3dafaMQ/hqdefault.jpg alt='Video The Dark Knight Rises: What Went Wrong? – Wisecrack Edition'><span>▶</span></a>"
frameborder="0"
allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
allowfullscreen
title="The Dark Knight Rises: What Went Wrong? – Wisecrack Edition"
></iframe>
I’m a big fan of giving myself structured data to work with. In WordPress-land, that often means Custom Post Types paired with something like the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for just the right data needed for the job.
Then I can loop over stuff and output it however I want. This isn’t that fancy, but it opens up whatever future doors I want to a lot easier.
There is nothing fancy about how this works:
I literally made 18 <div> elements (3 lengths * 2 styles * 3 code types = 18) and swap between with a bit of JavaScript that calculates a class string based on the current choices, selects that class, and unhides it while hiding the rest.
$(".bio-choices input").on("change", function () {
var lengthClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=length]:checked").attr("id");
var styleClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=style]:checked").attr("id");
var codeClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=code]:checked").attr("id");
var selector = lengthClass + styleClass + codeClass;
$(".bio").hide();
$(selector).show();
});jQuery! That’s what was already on the site, and the site also uses the jQuery version of FitVids for responsive videos — so I figured I’d just leave it all be.
If I was going to re-write these bits of the site, I’d probably rip out jQuery and use this for FitVids. Then I’d find a way to only have three bios (maybe six if I can’t find a nice way to handle first vs. third person with word swaps) and then get the rest by automatically converting the formats somehow (maybe some cloud function if I had to).
I used ztext for the header! It’s this kinda stuff that makes the web feel extra webby to me. I’m not sure I’d do something with quite so much movement on a site like CSS-Tricks (because people visit it more often and the time-on-site is higher). But for a site that people might land on once in a blue moon, it has the right amount of cheerful levity, I think.
I was stoked to see the SVG Backgrounds site get an upgrade lately. I was playing around in there and was like YES, I’m doing this.
I went with a background-attachment: fixed look, which I think I like. I also added the slideout footer effect on desktop, but I’m less sold that it’s working here. It’s more fun when the background changes, and that doesn’t happen here. I’ll probably either change the background of the footer, or rip the effect out.
Some of the different sections on the site use a different primary highlight color, and I’m having the links in those sections follow that color. That might be questionable (perhaps all links should be blue) but, so far, I think it makes decent sense (they still have hover and focus styles). When you have a variety of colors and styles for interactive elements though, it often means that you have to create special alternate styles for hover and focus. That could mean crafting bespoke color alterations for each color. Not the end of the world, but I really like this little trick for interactive styles that ends up with a consistent look across all colors:
a:focus, .button:focus,
a:hover, .button:hover {
filter: brightness(120%);
}Anyway! This was just a couple hours of paint on this site. Mostly because blogrolls were the CodePen Challenge that week. But I can never touch a site I haven’t in a while and just do one thing. I get sucked in and gotta do more!
The post Little Things on My Personal Site appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
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Sinch, a provider of cloud communication services, has announced the release of a new Conversation API that is designed to simplify the unification process of messaging across myriad channels and technologies. With the pandemic pushing the global workforce into remote environments communication fragmentation has increased exponentially.
If you are writing reusable code, chances are high that you will write quite some code that deals with types, generics, and interfaces. Over the years, the collection of my helper extensions for that have grown. As some of my upcoming posts use them, I share them (also) for future reference.
Deriving types is a common practice. To some extent, you can use pattern matching. Sometimes, that isn't enough, though (especially if you have a multi-level derivation path). This is when I use one of these two extensions: