If you are developing software using Fedora Silverblue, and especially if what you are developing is a Gnome application, Gnome Builder 3.30.3 feels like an obvious choice of IDE.

In this article, I will show you how you can create a simple Gnome application, and how to build it and install it as a Flatpak app on your system.

Gnome and Flatpak applications

Builder has been a part of Gnome for a long time. It is a very mature IDE to me in terms of consistency and completeness.

The Gnome Builder project website offers extensive documentation regarding Gnome application development — I highly recommend spending some time there to anyone interested.

Editor’s note: Getting Builder

Because the initial Fedora Silverblue installation doesn’t include Builder, let’s walk through the installation process first.

Starting with a freshly installed system, the first thing you’ll need to do is to enable a repository providing Builder as a Flatpak — we’ll use Flathub which is a popular 3rd-party repository with many desktop apps.

To enable Flathub on your system, download the repository file from the Fedora Quick Setup page, and double-click it which opens Gnome Software asking you to enable this repository on your system.

After you’re done with that, you can search for Builder in Gnome Software and install it.

Creating a new project

So let’s walk through the creation of a new project for our Gnome app. When you start Gnome Builder, the first display is oriented towards project management.

To create a new project, I clicked on the New… button at the top-left corner which showed me the following view.

You’ll need to fill out the project name, choose your preferred language (I chose C, but other languages will work for this example as well), and the license. Leave the version control on, and select Gnome Application as your template.

I chose gbfprtfsb as the name of my project which means Hello from Gnome 3 on Fedora SilverBlue.

The IDE creates and opens the project once you press create.

Tweaking our new project

The newly created project is opened in the Builder IDE and on my system looks like the following.

This project could be run from within the IDE right now and would give you the ever popular “Hello World!” titled gnome windowed application with a label that says, yup “Hello World!”.

Let’s get a little disruptive and mess up the title and greeting a bit. Complacency leads to mediocrity which leads to entropy overcoming chaos to enforce order, stasis, then finally it all just comes to a halt. It’s therefore our duty to shake it up at every opportunity, if only to knock out any latent entropy that may have accumulated in our systems. Towards such lofty goals, we only need to change two lines of one file, and the file isn’t even a C language file, it’s an XML file used to describe the GUI named gbfprtfsb-window.ui. All we have to do is open it and edit the title and label text, save and then build our masterpiece!

Looking at the screenshot below, I have circled the text we are going to replace. The window is a GtkApplicationWindow, and uses a GtkHeaderBar and GtkLabel to display the text we are changing. In the GtkHeaderBar we will type GBFPRTFSB for the title property. In the GtkLabel we will type Hello from Gnome 3 on Fedora SilverBlue in the label property. Now save the file to record our changes.

Building the project

Well, we have made our changes, and expressed our individualism (cough) at the same time. All that is left is to build it and see what it looks like. The build panel is located near the top of the IDE, middle right, and is represented by the icon that appears to be a brick wall being built as shown on the following picture.

Press the button, and the build process completes. You can also preview your application by clicking on the “play” button next to it.

Building a Flatpak

When we’re happy with our creation, the next step will be building it as a Flatpak. To do that, click on the title in the middle of the top bar, and then on the Export Bundle button.

Once the export has successfully completed, Gnome Builder will open a Nautilus file browser window showing the export directory, with the Flatpak bundle already selected.

To install the app on your system, simply double-click the icon which opens Gnome Software allowing you to install the app. On my system I had to enter my user password twice, which I take to be due to the fact we had no configured GPG key for the project. After it was installed, the application was shown alongside all of the other applications on my system. It can be seen running below.

I think this has successfully shown how easy it is to deploy an application as a Flatpak bundle for Gnome using Builder, and then running it on Fedora Silverblue.

October 28, 2019

Lyon Convention Centre

69463 Lyon

France

Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) is the premier vendor-neutral technical conference where developers working on embedded Linux and industrial IoT products and deployments gather for education and collaboration, paving the way for innovation. Attend, and join 800+ technical experts paving the way for transformation in these key areas from across the globe for education, collaboration and deep dive learning opportunities.  Learn More

Click Here!

It’s been an incredible year so far for the health industry. We’ve seen the dream and the opportunity of digital transformation and AI start to really take shape in the marketplace.

We saw many examples of this last month at HIMSS 2019, many of our partners and other cloud providers are offering commoditized access to complex healthcare algorithms and models to improve clinical and business outcomes.

Trust

These examples show how cloud computing and AI can deliver on the promise of digital transformation. But for health organizations to realize that potential, they have to trust the technology—and their technology partner.

Microsoft has always taken the lead on providing cloud platforms and services that help health organizations protect their data and meet their rigorous security and compliance requirements. Recently, we announced the HIPAA  eligibility and HITRUST certifications of Microsoft Cognitive Services and Office 365.

It’s crucial for health organizations to feel utterly confident not only in their technology partner’s ability to help them safeguard their data and infrastructure, and comply with industry standards, but also in their partner’s commitment to help them digitally transform their way—whatever their needs or objectives are. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. So whether you’re a health provider, pharmaceutical company, or retailer entering healthcare, your mission is our mission. Our business model is rooted in delivering success rather than disruption for our customers.

Interoperability

Another point of vital importance as we support the movement of healthcare as an industry—and healthcare data specifically—to the cloud is ensuring that we avoid the sins of the past, specifically data silos.

To that end, we jointly announced with other leading cloud providers that we’re committed to healthcare data interoperability among cloud platforms and supporting common data standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). And I was particularly thrilled to see the excitement in the health industry in reaction to our launch last last month with Azure API for FHIR and our commitment to develop open source FHIR servers. I hope you’ll join the huge movement behind health interoperability fueled by FHIR and encourage your technologists to start actively using the open-source project to bring diverse data sets together—and to build systems that learn from those data sets.

As my colleague, Doug Seven, recently wrote, interoperability helps you bring together data from disparate sources, apply AI to it to gain insights, and then enrich care team and patient tools with those insights to help you achieve your mission. That’s a crucial step in the digital transformation of health.

Teamwork

Another crucial step is supporting health teamwork. With the changing nature of care delivery, health services increasingly require coordination across multiple care settings and health professionals. So we launched a new set of capabilities to our Teams platform that provides workflows for first-line clinical workers such as doctors and nurses that they can use to access patient information and coordinate care in real time.

The end game

Why does all of this matter? To answer that question, I always come back to the quadruple aim, which all of us in the health industry strive for: enhancing both patient and caregivers’ experiences, improving the health of populations, and lowering the costs of healthcare.

Empowering care teams and patients with data insights and tools that help them coordinate care—and that they and your health organization can trust—will help bring about the desired outcomes of the quadruple aim. Not only will this systemic change improve clinical and business outcomes, but also, at an individual level, enhance the day-to-day and digital experiences of clinical workers and patients alike—creating better experiences, better insights, and better care across the delivery system.

Learn more about real-world use cases for AI in the e-book: “Breaking down AI: 10 real applications in healthcare.”

By Malcolm Owen
Friday, March 01, 2019, 10:35 am PT (01:35 pm ET)

A hacker who pleaded guilty for his part in the ‘Celebgate’ hack, involving phishing for credentials and attempting to access more than 200 iCloud, Yahoo, and Facebook accounts controlled by celebrities and other users, has been sentenced to almost three years in prison.

The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia advises Christopher Brannan, 31, of Richmond was sentenced on Friday for participating in the social media and cloud storage hacking event known as “Celebgate.” Branna, a former high school teacher, pleaded guilty in October to charges of unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft.

While the crimes were punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison, a plea agreement with Brannan led to the United States making a non-binding recommendation to the court that he be sentenced to 34 months in prison, a decision agreed upon by Senior U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson at sentencing.

Court filings advise Brannan accessed online accounts for Apple’s iCloud, Yahoo, and Facebook, allowing him to acquire complete iCloud backups, photographs, and other private information from more than 200 victims. The “Celebgate” name refers to the fact that some of the people targeted in the campaign were famous.

Brannan acquired access in a variety of ways, including simply answering security questions in forgotten password systems that could be easily answered by reviewing the victim’s other public social media accounts. He also used phishing to acquire credentials, using email addresses that looked as if they were legitimate security accounts from Apple.

The teacher is not the only person to receive punishment for “Celebgate,” as last year George Garofano was sentenced to eight months in prison followed by three years of supervised release for accessing more than 200 iCloud accounts. In 2017, Edward Majerczyk received nine months in prison and paid $5,700 to one victim for hacking into more than 300 iCloud and Gmail accounts.

The first person sentenced for the attack in 2016, Ryan Collins, received 18 months for accessing 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts.

Posting on behalf of Prashanth Yerramilli

When we launched Azure Key Vault a few years ago, it solved a major problem users had which was that storing sensitive and/or secret information in code or config files in plain text causes multiple problems including security exposure. Users stored their secrets in a safe store like Key Vault and used a URI to fetch the secret material. This service has been wildly popular and has become a standard for cloud applications. It is used by fledling startups to Fortune 500 companies world over.

Developers use Key Vault to store their adhoc secrets, certificates and keys used for encryption. And to follow best security practices they create secrets that are short lived. An example of typical flow in this case could be

• Step 1: Developer creates a certificate in Key Vault
• Step 2: Developer sets the lifetime of the secret to be 30 day. In other words developer asks Key Vault to re-create the certificate every 30 days. Developer also chooses to receive an email when a certificate is about to expire
• Step 3: Developer writes a polling service to check if the certificate has indeed expired

In the above scenario there are few challenges for the customer. They would have to write a polling service that constantly checks if the certificate has expired and if so they wait for the new certificate and then bind it in Windows Certificate manager.
Now what if developer doesn’t have to poll. And also if the developer doesn’t have to bind the new certificate in Windows Certificate manager. To solve this exact problem we built a Key Vault Virtual Machine Extension.

Azure virtual machine (VM) extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation tasks on Azure VMs. For example, if a virtual machine requires software installation, anti-virus protection, or to run a script inside of it, a VM extension can be used. Azure VM extensions can be run with the Azure CLI, PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager templates, and the Azure portal. Extensions can be bundled with a new VM deployment, or run against any existing system.
To learn more about VM Extensions please click here

Key Vault VM Extension is supposed to do just that as explained in the steps below

• Step 1: Create a Key Vault and create an Azure Windows Virtual Machine
• Step 2: Install the Key Vault VM Extension on the VM
• Step 3: Configure Key Vault VM Extension to monitor a specific vault by specifying how often it should fetch the certificate

By doing the above steps the latest certificate is bound correctly in Windows Certificate Manager. This feature enables auto-rotation of SSL certificates, without necessitating a re-deployment or binding.

In the lifecycle of secrets management fetching the latest version of the secret (for the purpose of this article a certificate) is just as important as storing it securely. To solve this problem, on an Azure Virtual Machine, we’ve created a VM Extension for Windows. A Linux version is coming soon.
Virtual Machine Extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation tasks on Azure VMs. In this case the Key Vault Virtual Machine extension once installed fetches the latest version of the certificate at a specified interval and automatically binds the latest version of the certificate in the certificate store on Windows. As you can see this feature enables auto-rotation of SSL certificates, without necessitating a re-deployment or binding.

Also before we begin going through the tutorial, we need to understand a concept called Managed Identities.
Your code needs credentials to authenticate to cloud services, but you want to limit the visibility of those credentials as much as possible. Ideally, they never appear on a developer’s workstation or get checked-in to source control. Azure Key Vault can store credentials securely so they aren’t in your code, but to retrieve them you need to authenticate to Azure Key Vault. To authenticate to Key Vault, you need a credential! A classic bootstrap problem. Through the magic of Azure and Azure AD, MI provides a “bootstrap identity” that makes it much simpler to get things started.

Here’s how it works: When you enable MI for an Azure resource such as a virtual machine, Azure creates a Service Principal (an identity) for that resource in Azure AD, and injects the credentials (of that identity) into the resource (in this case a virtual machine).

1. Your code calls a local MI endpoint to get an access token
2. MI uses the locally injected credentials to get an access token from Azure AD
3. Your code uses this access token to authenticate to an Azure service

Now within Managed Identities there are 2 types

1. System Assigned managed identity is enabled directly on an Azure service instance. When the identity is enabled, Azure creates an identity for the instance in the Azure AD tenant that’s trusted by the subscription. The lifecycle of the identity is managed by Azure and is tied to the Azure service instance.
2. User Assigned managed identity is created as a standalone Azure resource. Users first create an identity and then assign that identity to one or more Azure resources.

In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a Azure Virtual Machine with an ARM template which also includes creating a Key Vault VM Extension on the VM.

Prerequisites

Step 1

After the prerequisites are complete, create an System Assigned identity by following this tutorial

Step 2

Assign the newly created System Assigned identity to access to your Key Vault

• Go to https://portal.azure.com and navigate to your Key Vault
• Select Access Policies section and Add New by searching for the User Assigned identity
  

Step 3

Create or Update a VM with the following ARM template
You can view full the ARM template here and the ARM Parameters file here.

The most minimal settings in the ARM template are shown below:

 {
 "secretsManagementSettings": {
 "observedCertificates": [
 "<KeyVault URI of a secret to be monitored/retrieved, in versionless format: https://myVaultName.vault.azure.net/secrets/myCertName">,
 "<more entries here>", 
 "pollingIntervalInS": "[parameters('kvvmextPollingInterval')]",
 ]
 }
 }

As you can see we only specify the observedCertificates parameter and polling Interval in seconds

Note: Your observedCertificates urls should be of the form:

https://myVaultName.vault.azure.net/secrets/myCertName 





and not:





https://myVaultName.vault.azure.net/cert...myCertName 





Reason being the /secrets path returns the full certificate, inluding the private key, while the /certificates path does not.

By following this tutorial you can create a VM with the above specified template

The above tutorial assumes that you are storing your certificates on Windows Certificate Manager. And so the VM Extension pulls down the latest certificates at a specified interval and automatically binds those certificates in your certificate manager.

That’s all folks!

Linux Version: We’re actively working on a VM Extension for Linux and would love to hear any feedback you might have.

We are eager to hear from you about your use cases and how we can evolve the VM Extension to help you. So please reach out to us and add your feature requests to the Azure feedback forum. If you run into issues using the VM extension please reach out to us on StackOverflow.

Prashanth Yerramilli, Senior Program Manager, Azure Key Vault

Prashanth Yerramilli is the Key Vault Program Manager on the Azure Security team. He has over 10 years of Software Engineering experience and brings to the team love for creating the ultimate development experience.

Prashanth can be reached at:
-Twitter @yvprashanth1
-GitHub https://github.com/yvprashanth

If you’re one of the many who’ve been eying iOS users with envy as they’ve been enjoying Farming Simulator/RPG Stardew Valley, you need not worry anymore – we now have a concrete release date for the game’s Android release.

Comes March 14^th, 2019 Android users will be able to get stuck in as they try to rebuild their grandfather’s farm in a village in the middle of nowhere. Probably Wales.

The Android version will cost the same as the iOS version ($7.99 / $7.99 / €8,99), and you can head on over to the Google Play store to pre-register right now. It will also come with the following improvements that the mobile version has enjoyed since launching on iOS:

• Save at any time – even when you close the app!
• Pinch-zoom functionality, allowing players to handily zoom in to track down your Junimos or zoom out to get a full view of your farm.
• New control systems including virtual joystick and invisible joystick options, ‘action / attack’ button option, improved auto-attack and Joypad adjuster tool with complete customization of your onscreen controls.
• Additional supported languages – Korean, Italian, French and Turkish (these will be patched into the iOS version of the game at a later date).

While ConcernedApe made the PC & Console version, the mobile version was developed by The Secret Police.

Finishing in hard cover form just in time for GTC 2019, NVidia and APress have team up to author Ray Tracing Gems, a book on real-time raytraced graphics development in the popular “Gems” format.  Even better, they are making digital chapters available as they are developed, free to those with a NVidia developer account (which is also free).  The chapters are distributed under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License and are available for download here.  Unfortunately Part 5 is currently missing and parts 6 and 7 are slated to be published later this week.

Here is the current table of contents from the RealTimeRendering homepage:

PART 1: RAY TRACING BASICS, editor: Chris Wyman

• 1. Ray Tracing Terminology, by Eric Haines and Peter Shirley
• 2. What is a Ray? by Peter Shirley, Ingo Wald, Tomas Akenine-Möller, and Eric Haines
• 3. Introduction to DirectX Raytracing, by Chris Wyman and Adam Marrs
• 4. A Planetarium Dome Master Camera, by John E. Stone
• 5. Computing Minima and Maxima of Subarrays, by Ingo Wald

PART 2: INTERSECTIONS AND EFFICIENCY, editor: Ingo Wald

• 6. A Fast and Robust Method for Avoiding Self-Intersection, by Carsten Wächter and Nikolaus Binder
• 7. Precision Improvements for Ray/Sphere Intersection, by Eric Haines, Johannes Günther, and Tomas Akenine-Möller
• 8. Cool Patches: A Geometric Approach to Ray/Bilinear Patch Intersections, by Alexander Reshetov
• 9. Multi-Hit Ray Tracing in DXR, by Christiaan Gribble
• 10. A Simple Load-Balancing Scheme with High Scaling Efficiency, by Dietger van Antwerpen, Daniel Seibert, and Alexander Keller

PART 3: REFLECTIONS, REFRACTIONS, AND SHADOWS, editor: Peter Shirley

• 11. Automatic Handling of Materials in Nested Volumes, by Carsten Wächter and Matthias Raab
• 12. A Microfacet-Based Shadowing Function to Solve the Bump Terminator Problem, by Alejandro Conty Estevez, Pascal Lecocq, and Clifford Stein
• 13. Ray Traced Shadows: Maintaining Real-Time Frame Rates, by Jakub Boksansky, Michael Wimmer, and Jiri Bittner
• 14. Ray-Guided Volumetric Water Caustics in Single Scattering Media with DXR, by Holger Gruen

PART 4: SAMPLING, editor: Alexander Keller

• 15. On the Importance of Sampling, by Matt Pharr
• 16. Sample Transformations Zoo, by Peter Shirley, Samuli Laine, David Hart, Matt Pharr, Petrik Clarberg, Eric Haines, Matthias Raab, and David Cline
• 17. Ignoring the Inconvenient When Tracing Rays, by Matt Pharr
• 18. Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the GPU, by Pierre Moreau and Petrik Clarberg

PART 5: DENOISING AND FILTERING, editor: Jacob Munkberg

• 19. Cinematic Rendering in UE4 with Real-Time Ray Tracing and Denoising, by Edward Liu, Ignacio Llamas, Juan Cañada, and Patrick Kelly
• 20. Texture Level of Detail Strategies for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Jim Nilsson, Magnus Andersson, Colin Barré-Brisebois, Robert Toth, and Tero Karras
• 21. Simple Environment Map Filtering Using Ray Cones and Ray Differentials, by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Jim Nilsson
• 22. Improving Temporal Antialiasing with Adaptive Ray Tracing, by Adam Marrs, Josef Spjut, Holger Gruen, Rahul Sathe, and Morgan McGuire

PART 6: HYBRID APPROACHES AND SYSTEMS, editor: Morgan McGuire

• 23. Interactive Light Map and Irradiance Volume Preview in Frostbite, by Diede Apers, Petter Edblom, Charles de Rousiers, and Sébastien Hillaire
• 24. Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping, by Niklas Smal and Maksim Aizenshtein
• 25. Hybrid Rendering for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Colin Barré-Brisebois, Henrik Halén, Graham Wihlidal, Andrew Lauritzen, Jasper Bekkers, Tomasz Stachowiak, and Johan Andersson
• 26. Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing, by Thomas Schander, Clemens Musterle, and Stephan Bergmann
• 27. Interactive Ray Tracing Techniques for High-Fidelity Scientific Visualization, by John E. Stone

PART 7: GLOBAL ILLUMINATION, editor: Matt Pharr

• 28. Ray Tracing Inhomogeneous Volumes, by Matthias Raab
• 29. Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer, by Aaron Knoll, R. Keith Morley, Ingo Wald, Nick Leaf, and Peter Messmer
• 30. Caustics Using Screen Space Photon Mapping, by Hyuk Kim
• 31. Variance Reduction via Footprint Estimation in the Presence of Path Reuse, by Johannes Jendersie
• 32. Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching, by Antti Hirvonen, Atte Seppälä, Maksim Aizenshtein, and Niklas Smal

Once compiled the electronic version of the book will remain freely downloadable, although in what formats has yet to be determined.

GameDev News Book

© 2019 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries.

Added some previously unavailable heroes to Ability Draft
* Beastmaster (Hawk is not draftable)
* Lone Druid
* Io
* Monkey King (Primal Spring is not draftable)
* Shadowfiend (Shadowraze Medium and Presence of the Darklord are not draftable)
* Techies (Minefield Sign is not draftable)
* Meepo (Divided We Stand is not draftable)
* Rubick (Spellsteal is not draftable)
Will-o-wisp and Tag Team are now draftable in Ability Draft