As many of our readers know, Qrator.Radar is constantly researching global BGP connectivity, as well as regional. Since the Internet stands for “Interconnected Networks,” to ensure the best possible quality and speed the interconnectivity of individual networks should be rich and diverse, with their growth motivated on a sound competitive basis.

The fault-resistance of an internet connection in any given region or country is tied to the number of alternate routes between ASes. Though, as we stated before in our Internet Segments Reliability reports, some paths are obviously more critical compared to the others (for example, the paths to the Tier-1 transit ISPs or autonomous systems hosting authoritative DNS servers), which means that having as many reachable routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure adequate system scalability, stability and robustness.

This time, we are going to have a closer look at the Russian Federation internet segment. There are reasons to keep an eye on that segment: according to the numbers provided by the RIPE database, there are 6183 autonomous systems in Russia, out of 88664 registered worldwide, which stands for 6.87% of total.

This percentage puts Russia on a second place in the world, right after the USA (30.08% of registered ASes) and before Brazil, owning 6.34% of all autonomous systems. Effects of changes in the Russian connectivity could be observed across many other countries dependant on or adjacent to that connectivity, and ultimately by almost any ISP in the world.

New betas are here and these are some of the most important things that I have learned about them.

Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta

Swift

Firstly, the latest Xcode beta is bundled with the following Swift version:

Apple Swift version 5.0 (swiftlang-1001.0.45.7 clang-1001.0.37.7)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin18.2.0
ABI version: 0.6

Let’s start with the most exciting news:

Swift apps no longer include dynamically linked libraries for the Swift standard library and Swift SDK overlays in build variants for devices running iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, and tvOS 12.2. As a result, Swift apps can be smaller when deployed for testing using TestFlight, or when thinning an app archive for local development distribution.

Application Binary Interface stability is coming! And this is excellent news. I think this is the one of the most significant issues at the moment with Swift. Not because of side-effects but because of Swift’s failure to deliver on previous promises. Anyway, I even know people who rewrite their Apple Watch extensions to Objective C to reduce the size of binary (something like 15MB vs ~1MB in Objective C). If you want to know more about the state of ABI, follow the links: Swift — ABI Dashboard and Swift ABI Stability Manifesto.

This article reviews the results of a second check of the Orchard project with the PVS-Studio static analyzer. Orchard is an open-source content manager system delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the non-profit Outercurve Foundation. Today's check is especially interesting because both the project and the analyzer have come a long way since the first check, and this time we'll be looking at new diagnostic messages and some nice bugs.

The PVS-Studio 7.04 release coincided with the release of the Warnings Next Generation 6.0.0 plugin for Jenkins. Right in this release Warnings NG Plugin added support of the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. This plugin visualizes data related to compiler warnings or other analysis tools in Jenkins. This article will cover in detail how to install and configure this plugin to use it with PVS-Studio, and will describe most of its features.

Hi everybody! I’m a research engineer at the Mail.ru Group computer vision team. In this article, I’m going to tell a story of how we’ve created AI-based photo restoration project for old military photos. What is «photo restoration»? It consists of three steps:

• we find all the image defects: fractures, scuffs, holes;
  
• we inpaint the discovered defects, based on the pixel values around them;
  
• we colorize the image.
  

Further, I’ll describe every step of photo restoration and tell you how we got our data, what nets we trained, what we accomplished, and what mistakes we made.

Popularity of mobile applications continues to grow. So does OAuth 2.0 protocol on mobile apps. It's not enough to implement standard as is to make OAuth 2.0 protocol secure there. One needs to consider the specifics of mobile applications and apply some additional security mechanisms.

In this article, I want to share the concepts of mobile OAuth 2.0 attacks and security mechanisms used to prevent such issues. Described concepts are not new but there is a lack of the structured information on this topic. The main aim of the article is to fill this gap.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PF:K for short) is a role-playing video game created by Owlcat Games, released in Fall 2018 on Steam and GoG. Inspired by classic Bioware games, this project uses a popular board game system ruleset, combat takes place in Real-Time with Pause, follows an isometric camera, and has a non-linear story with multiple unique endings.

In this article, I will share a little about how we worked on designing the audio throughout the game’s development including task management, the search for inspiration, and troubleshooting. An experienced specialist may not find anything particularly groundbreaking in this recap, but beginners and enthusiasts will definitely discover some points of interest.

Hello Habr! I'm Miloš from Badoo, and this is my first Habr post, originally published in our tech blog. Hope you like it, and please share and comment if you have any questions

So… React, amirite???

It appeared in the middle of the decade (plagued by the endless JavaScript framework wars), embraced the DOM, shocked everyone by mixing HTML with JavaScript and transformed the web development landscape beyond recognition.

All those accomplishments, without even being a framework.

Love it or hate it, React does one job really well, and that is HTML templating. Together with a great community and a healthy ecosystem, it’s not hard to see why it became one of the most popular and influential JavaScript libraries, if not the most popular one of all.

Talking to people at conferences and in comments to articles, we face the following objection: static analysis reduces the time to detect errors, but takes up programmers' time, which negates the benefits of using it and even slows down the development process. Let's get this objection straightened out and try to show that it's groundless.

RUVDS and Habr continue the series of interviews with interesting people in IT field. Last time we talked to Richard «Levelord» Gray, level designer of popular games Duke Nukem, American McGee’s Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, Serious Sam, author of well-known «You’re not supposed to be here» phrase.

Today we welcome Randall Steward «Randy» Pitchford II, president, CEO and co-founder of Gearbox Software video game development company.

Randy started in 3D Realms where contributed to Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition and Shadow Warrior. Then he founded Gearbox Software and made Half-Life: Opposing Force, which won D.I.C.E in 2000. Other Gearbox titles include Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Decay, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Halo: Combat Evolved and of course Borderlands.

The interview team also includes editor of Habr Nikolay Zemlyanskiy, Richard «Levelord» Gray, Randy’s wife Kristy Pitchford and Randy’s son Randy Jr.

First, let’s talk about Reference Types and Value Types. I think people don’t really understand the differences and benefits of both. They usually say reference types store content on the heap and value types store content on the stack, which is wrong.

Let’s discuss the real differences:

• A value type: its value is an entire structure. The value of a reference type is a reference to an object. – A structure in memory: value types contain only the data you indicated. Reference types also contain two system fields. The first one stores 'SyncBlockIndex', the second one stores the information about a type, including the information about a Virtual Methods Table (VMT).
• Reference types can have methods that are overridden when inherited. Value types cannot be inherited.
• You should allocate space on the heap for an instance of a reference type. A value type can be allocated on the stack, or it becomes the part of a reference type. This sufficiently increases the performance of some algorithms.

However, there are common features:

• Both subclasses can inherit the object type and become its representatives.

Let’s look closer at each feature.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview

By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:

In this article, we invite you to try to find a bug in a very simple function from the GNU Midnight Commander project. Why? For no particular reason. Just for fun. Well, okay, it's a lie. We actually wanted to show you yet another bug that a human reviewer has a hard time finding and the static code analyzer PVS-Studio can catch without effort.

In the seventh version of the PVS-Studio static analyzer, we added support of the Java language. It's time for a brief story of how we've started making support of the Java language, how far we've come, and what is in our further plans. Of course, this article will list first analyzer trials on open source projects.

It is new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

This article is an authorized translation of the original post. The translation was made with the kind help of the guys from PVS-Studio. Thank you, guys!

What encouraged me to write this article is considerable quantity of materials on static analysis, which recently has been increasingly coming up. Firstly, this is a blog of PVS-Studio, which actively promotes itself on Habr posting reviews of errors, found by their tool in open source projects. PVS-Studio has recently implemented Java support, and, of course, developers from IntelliJ IDEA, whose built-in analyzer is probably the most advanced for Java today, could not stay away.

When reading these reviews, I get a feeling that we are talking about a magic elixir: click the button, and here it is — the list of defects right in front of your eyes. It seems that as analyzers get more advanced, more and more bugs will be found, and products, scanned by these robots, will become better and better without any effort on our part.

Well, but there are no magic elixirs. I would like to talk about what is usually not spoken in posts like «here are things that our robot can find»: what analyzers are not able to do, what's their real part and place in the process of software delivery, and how to implement the analysis properly.


Ratchet (source: Wikipedia).

Known now as a «motherboard speaker», or just «beeper», PC Speaker has been introduced in 1981 along with the first personal IBM computer. Being a successor of the big serious computers for serious business, it has been designed to produce very basic system beeps, so it never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device in numerous entertainment programs of the emerging home market. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly served as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware.

«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retro computing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more.

Tips and tricks from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc, November 2019

It is a new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

← Previous publications.



PATH is an environment variable that stores paths where executables are looked for. When you ask your shell to run ls, the shell looks for the ls executable file across all paths that are presented in PATH.

We have already presented Tarantool Cartridge that allows you to develop and pack distributed applications. Now let's learn how to deploy and control these applications. No panic, it's all under control! We have brought together all the best practices of working with Tarantool Cartridge and wrote an Ansible role, which will deploy the package to servers, start and join instances into replica sets, configure authorization, bootstrap vshard, enable automatic failover and patch cluster configuration.

Interesting, huh? Dive in, check details under the cut.

It is a new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

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