Archives For November 30, 1999

IntelliJ IDEA 2024.3, the last major release in 2024, was released few days ago!

The release introduced new Logical code structure in the Structure tool window, allows to view classes, methods, fields, as well as links and interactions between components in your project.

K2 mode with Kotlin now it stable. With it enabled, it supports using non-local break and continue statements inside lambdas, as well as multi-dollar interpolation.

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This tutorial shows you how to install the latest GNU Octave (version 9.3.0 so far) in all current Ubuntu releases, including Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 24.04.

GNU Octave is a free open-source scientific programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It features powerful mathematics-oriented syntax with built-in 2D/3D plotting and visualization tools, cross-platform, and drop-in compatible with many Matlab scripts.

The latest version of the programming language has reached version 9.2.0. Features in the 9.x release series include:

  • Overhauled dec2base, dec2bin, and dec2hex. They now accept negative inputs and fractional inputs.
  • Re-architected the inputParser function to get a 60% performance improvement.
  • The perms function has been made faster.
  • New functions, including isenv, ismembertol, isuniform, tensorprod.
  • Removed disable_diagonal_matrix, disable_permutation_matrix, and disable_range functions. Replacements are optimize_diagonal_matrix, optimize_permutation_matrix, and optimize_range
  • Operators, such as .+, .+=, **, and .**= are removed. Replacements are +, +=, +=, ^, and .^=.
  • And, following function are obsolete: idx_vector::bool(), all_ok(const Array&) in Array-util.h, octave_base_value::count
  • Support Qt6.
  • Deprecate FLTK backend, in favor of Qt.

See the news page for more about Octave 9.

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Python, the popular free open-source programming language, finally announced 3.13.0 stable this Monday!

Python 3.13 introduced new interactive shell. It’s enabled by default and based on code from the PyPy project.

When you start the new shell in an interactive terminal, it uses colors by default for prompts and tracebacks and supports multi-line editing.

As well, it supports REPL-specific commands such as help, exit, and quit without call them as functions. And, I can finally use clear command in the shell to clear screen.

The new interactive shell also supports interactive help browsing using F1, history browsing using F2, and ‘paste mode’ with F3 for pasting larger blocks of code.

Just in case for those who don’t like the new shell, it can be disabled by setting environment variable. PYTHON_BASIC_REPL=1.

Python 3.13 shell, with colors, multi-line editing, etc support

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JetBrains announced the new 2024.2 release of its IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment (IDE).

The release uses new clean and modern UI as default, while classic one is available as plugin. For Linux, it auto-places window controls to left or right depends on your desktop settings. And, it switched to JetBrains Runtime 21 with enhanced security, performance, as well as Wayland rendering support.

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By releasing version 2.0 preview, DevToys is finally a cross-platform app that also works on Linux and macOS!

DevToys is a free and open-source tools for developers. It features a set of offline tools all in one app window. They include:

  • JSON <> YAML, Date, Number bases converters.
  • Encoders/Decoders for HTML, URLs, Base64, GZip, JWT, QR Code.
  • JSON, SQL, XML formatters.
  • Hash & Checksum, Lorem Ipsum, Password generators
  • Color Blindness Simulator, PNG/JPEG Compressor…
  • JSONPath, RegEx, XML testers
  • And text Utilities such as Markdown Preview, Text Comparer, Analyzer & Utilities…

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Oracle announced the release of JDK 22 GA this Tuesday.

JDK 22 delivers 12 enhancements that are significant enough to warrant their own JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs), including seven preview features and one incubator feature. They cover improvements to the Java Language, its APIs, its performance, and the tools included in the JDK.
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GNU Octave, the free open-source application for numerical computations, released new major 9.1.0 version! Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04.

The GNU website has not yet announced the new release, but it’s available in the download page.

According to the changelog, the new Octave 9.1.0 overhauled dec2base, dec2bin, and dec2hex. They now accept negative inputs and fractional inputs.

It re-architected the inputParser function to get a 60% performance improvement. And, the perms function has been made faster. The audiowrite function now supports writing to MPEG audio formats (including MP3) if the sndfile library supports it. The current directory of oruntests now changes to the directory containing the files with the tests for the duration of the test.

The release features new functions, including isenv, ismembertol, isuniform, tensorprod.

The disable_diagonal_matrix, disable_permutation_matrix, and disable_range functions have been removed! Replacements are optimize_diagonal_matrix, optimize_permutation_matrix, and optimize_range

Operators, such as .+, .+=, **, and .**= are removed. Replacements are +, +=, +=, ^, and .^=. And, following function are obsolete:

  • idx_vector::bool()
  • all_ok(const Array&) in Array-util.h.
  • octave_base_value::count


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Visual Studio Code announced version 1.87 as the new February 2024 release!

The release features voice dictation support in editor. With VS Code Speech extension installed, user can use voice to dictate directly into the editor.

It can be started by pressing Ctrl+Alt+V on keyboard, and stop via Escape key. Or, press and hold the key combination (Ctrl+Alt+V) to enable walky-talky mode, that the voice recognition stops as soon as the keys released.

The VS Code Speech extension now has 26 supported languages support. Each language comes as its own extension. And user can choose between them using accessibility.voice.speechLanguage setting.

Other changes in the release include:

  • Multi-cursor inline completions are previewed and applied at both the primary and the secondary cursor positions.
  • Rename suggestions from Copilot.
  • Pylance extension for Python support now has an Add Imports code action for adding missing imports.
  • Enable sticky scroll by defaul, and increase maximum display number from 10 to 20.
  • GitHub Copilot Chat suggests templates and features when adding dev container configuration files to a workspace
  • Side-by-side preview refactoring – Preview refactorings across files with multi diff editor.


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Gambas released new 3.19.0 few days ago. Here’s the new features and how to to install guide for Ubuntu users!

Gambas is a full-featured object-oriented language and development environment built on a BASIC interpreter. It’s made up of a compiler, interpreter, archiver, scripter, development environment, and many extension components, for easily developing command-line, GTK2/GTK3, Qt, Database, Web, SDL applications.

The latest version so far is Gambas 3.19.0 that includes many exciting new features. First, as you see above, it has a new app icon that’s called gambas-thin. Though, I personally prefer the old one a bit more.

old gambas3 icon

The new release brings huge improvements to interpreter, to make it faster than Python, Perl and Java interpreters in all benchmarks!
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This simple tutorial shows how to install Python 3.13 in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Python 3.13.0 was released on Oct 7, 2024 as the new major release that features new interactive interpreter, that supports multi-line editing, REPL-specific commands such as help, exit, clear, and quit, interactive help, history browsing, and ‘paste mode’ for pasting larger blocks of code.

CPython now has experimental support for free-threaded mode for running threads in parallel on available CPU cores, though disabled by default.

Other changes in Python 3.13.0 include:

  • New interactive interpreter, features multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
  • Experimental free-threaded build mode.
  • A preliminary, experimental JIT.
  • The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental.
  • Include a modified version of mimalloc, and enabled by default if supported by the platform.
  • Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files.
  • The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
  • Support for type defaults in type parameters.
  • New type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
  • New annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
  • Removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.

For more, see the official release note.

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