“I’ll be damned if we’re gonna sit around and mope all day—Cayde woulda hated that. So let’s have some fun, huh? Put on this mask, and go show the bad guys they can’t keep us down.” —Amanda Holliday

For Guardians, death is usually a temporary condition, no more dangerous than a splinter and forgotten just as quickly. Even after Eva Levante first brought the City’s traditions to the Tower with Festival of the Lost, it was less a time for remembrance and more of an irreverent celebration.

The last year has changed everything. The Red Legion razed the Last City. Countless Guardians were lost. Despite victories on Mercury and Mars, morale in the Tower is low after the fall of a legend: Cayde-6. This year, death has not passed us by. It has come to stay.

More than ever, it’s important to remember loved ones who have fallen, and to celebrate the fact that we have lived to fight on in their honor. Festival of the Lost begins for all players of Destiny 2 on Tuesday, October 16.

Light in the Dark

No one has heard from Eva Levante since the City fell. Shipwright Amanda Holliday has stepped up to raise everyone’s spirits. Thanks to her, the Tower is filled with merriment, as memories good and bittersweet fill our hearts.

New Triumphs will be available for you to earn, and Holliday will offer daily bounties that award Fragmented Souls. These items can be used to purchase Festival of the Lost masks, as well as the Horror Story Legendary Auto Rifle.

But even with the Tower illuminated by spooky violet candles, there’s always something scary lurking just out of sight.

Fear and Fright

This year, Festival of the Lost brings more than just masks. For a limited time, all players of Destiny 2 are invited to the Haunted Forest. Guardians have been tasked with clearing out its ghouls and demons, which are spooking up a storm. You’ll have 15 minutes to dive as deep as you can into the Haunted Forest and clear out the Nightmares lying in wait. Be wary—the deeper you go, the more difficult your job will become.

You can jump into the dark as a solo player, with a pre-made fireteam, or through matchmaking to join other Guardians in the fight.

On the Case

Most players of Forsaken have already won justice for Cayde-6. But near the conclusion of Festival of the Lost, they’ll be called once again to avenge a fallen friend. Master Ives has been struck down. Maybe someone wanted to settle an old score, or lost their temper when receiving an Edge Transit. Whatever provoked the wrongdoing, justice must be served.

This pursuit of Master Ives’ killers will take place through a quest line, which adds an additional powerful reward for you to earn each week. The hunt begins on Tuesday, October 30.

Treats for All

Alongside the Festival of the Lost rewards from Amanda Holliday and the Festival of the Lost Triumphs, players will earn an Ephemeral Engram every time they fill their XP bar after achieving the max character level. Players will receive this engram in addition to the Steadfast Engram, which effectively awards players double Bright Engrams for the duration of Festival of the Lost. Players may also purchase Ephemeral Engrams from Tess Everis in the Tower, if they so choose.

Tess will also feature rewards from the Ephemeral Engram on the Bright Dust store throughout the event, for those wishing to purchase specific items directly.

Every Guardian is invited to shoot their way through the masquerade. Festival of the Lost begins on Tuesday, October 16, and concludes at 10 AM PST on Tuesday, November 6.

With the recent advances in machine learning technology, it is only a matter of time before developers can expect to run full diagnostics and information retrieval on their own source code. This can include autocompletion, auto-generated user tests, more robust linters, automated code reviews and more. I recently reviewed a new product in this sphere — the source{d} Engine.
source{d} offers a suite of applications that uses machine learning on code to complete source code analysis and assisted code reviews. Chief among them is the source{d} Engine, now in public beta; it uses a suite of open source tools (such as Gitbase, Babelfish, and Enry) to enable large-scale source code analysis. Some key uses of the source{d} Engine include language identification, parsing code into abstract syntax trees, and performing SQL Queries on your source code such as:

• What are the top repositories in a codebase based on number of commits?

• What is the most recent commit message in a given repository?

• Who are the most prolific contributors in a repository?

Because source{d} Engine uses both agnostic language analysis and standard SQL queries, the information available feels infinite.

From minute one, using source{d} Engine was an easy, efficient process. I ran source{d} Engine chiefly on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 14.04 but also installed it on MacOS and Ubuntu 16.04 for comparison purposes. On all three, install was completely painless, although the Ubuntu versions seemed to run slightly faster. The source{d} Engine documentation is accurate and thorough. It correctly warned me that the first time initializing the engine would take a fair amount of time so I was prepared for the wait. I did have to debug a few errors, all relating to my having a previous SQL instance running so some more thorough troubleshooting documentation might be warranted.

It’s simple to go between codebases using the commands scrd kill and scrd init. I wanted to explore many use cases so I picked a wide variety of codebases to test on ranging from a single contributor with only 5 commits to one with 10 contributors, thousands of lines of code, and hundreds of commits. source{d} Engine worked phenomenally with all of them although it is easier to see the benefits in a larger codebase.

My favorite queries to run were those pertaining to commits. I am not a fan of the way GitHub organizes commit history, so I find myself coming back to source{d} Engine again and again when I want commit history-related information. I’m also very impressed with the Universal Abstract Syntax Tree (UAST) concept. A UAST is a normalized form of an abstract syntax tree (AST) — a structural representation of source code used for code analysis. Unlike ASTs, UASTs are language agnostic and do not rely on any specific programming language. The UAST format enables further analysis and can be used with any tools in a standard, open style.

My only complaint is the (obvious and understandable) reliance on a base level of SQL knowledge. Because I was already very familiar with SQL, I was able to quickly use the source{d} Engine engine and create my own queries. However, if I had been shakier on the basics, I would’ve appreciated more example queries. Another minor complaint is that support for Python appears to only be for Python 2 right now, and not Python 3.

I’m excited to follow the future of source{d} Engine and also source{d} Lookout (now in public alpha) which is the first step to a suite of true machine learning on code applications. I would love for the documentation of this and other upcoming applications to be more comprehensive, but because they are not fully available yet, just having what’s available already is great.

In general, I’m extremely impressed with the transparency of the company — not only are the future products and applications clearly listed and described, many internal company documents are also available. This true dedication to open source software is amazing, and I hope more companies follow source{d} ’s lead.

Lizzie Turner is a former digital marketing analyst studying full stack software engineering at Holberton School. She is currently looking for her first software engineering role and is particularly passionate about data and analytics. You can find Lizzie on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter.

Today’s post was written by Sherry Neubert, chief information officer at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

Goodyear has a 120-year history of being at the forefront of an ever-changing mobility industry. From bicycles, carriages, and the first Ford Model Ts off the production line, to blimps, airplanes, and even the first tire on the moon—Goodyear has always delivered innovative solutions that keep the world moving.

Today, our industry faces even more disruption through shifting consumer behaviors and expectations, digital transformation, and breakthroughs in technology that are accelerating change at speeds unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. This is creating a new mobility ecosystem shaped by shared mobility fleets, autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles, and electric vehicles.

Harnessing the power of our associates is key to competing—and continuing to lead—in this new world. With 64,000 associates selling products in around 150 countries, we need workplace productivity tools that enable innovation and bring together all of Goodyear’s diverse knowledge and capabilities. In 2014, we began to adopt Office 365 to modernize our workplace. Since then, we’ve empowered our associates worldwide with Microsoft 365 productivity and security tools and reached the halfway point in our global rollout of Windows 10. This cloud-connected modern desktop has given us the right tools to allow our teams to be as collaborative, agile, and productive as possible, while providing a highly secure digital environment.

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Enhancing collaboration is crucial to us for improved decision making and to drive innovation, both in tires and beyond tires. Connecting associates via Microsoft 365 tools such as Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Yammer, and Skype for Business Online helps us take better advantage of our cross-functional and geographically dispersed teams. Our multigenerational and multicultural global workforce is now sharing perspectives and ideas more quickly and easily than ever.

Another focus for Goodyear is driving productivity and greater efficiencies so we can deliver the right products to the right place at the right time—faster than ever. With Microsoft 365, we stay connected and access shared content from anywhere, at any time, on any device, which allows us to innovate with greater speed. We also have an Internet of Things (IoT) proof of concept with Azure hosting big data from sensors in our factories. This allows us to use machine-learning capabilities to improve our predictive maintenance.

It is critically important for Goodyear to keep our information and systems safe so we can help protect our customers, associates, and the company and keep our focus on the changing needs of the marketplace. We safeguard our people, devices, data, and IP better with Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. This has greatly improved our security capabilities, while at the same time continuously hardening our devices by providing updates as a service.

As our Microsoft 365 environment continues to mature, we’re evaluating the use of other Microsoft technologies. We’ve been using Microsoft HoloLens in exploration mode—it represents exciting possibilities for virtual tire modeling and design as well as remote knowledge transfer. We are also making strides advancing the AI infused in Microsoft 365, including Cortana, Azure-powered chatbots, and Focused Inbox, to amplify skills and democratize knowledge. The next big initiative on our horizon is adopting Microsoft Teams—we expect this to become our associates’ go-to social and collaboration platform.

The digital world is changing fast, and we must lead with digital innovation. For Goodyear, it’s all about how we can enable everyone in the company to put the customer at the center of everything we do and ensure that we maintain our leadership position in the new mobility ecosystem of tomorrow. When you find and deploy solutions that bring out the best in your people, the possibilities are endless.

—Sherry Neubert

Indie PC sensation Stardew Valley is another one of those one-man-band success stories that inspires new generations of game makers. A deceptively deep game, Stardew has just as much in common with the Farming Simulator franchise than it does anything else.

Taking care of the farm is a serious affair in that you really need to keep on top of things, or it will all go horribly wrong. Once you’ve got the basics down though, you can start exploring the nearby Pelican Town, getting to know its residents, and you can even go questing in some cave that’s randomly filled with monsters.

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Now, you too can experience the joy of trying to restore your Grandfather’s legacy to its former glory when Stardew Valley comes to iOS on October 24^th. Pre-orders are available and the game will cost £7.99/$7.99.

An Android version is reportedly in the works, but no news on that yet. PC players will be able to transfer their save files via iTunes if they wish. Stardew Valley iOS will also feature all of the content from the recent 1.3 update on PC.

As an aside, the mobile version has actually been developed by a company called The Secret Police, who have industry legend Ian Livingstone as a chairman and key investor.

Lots of web developers want to achieve fast loading web pages. As more page views come from mobile devices, making websites look better on smaller screens using responsive design is just one side of the coin. Browser Calories can make the difference in loading times, which satisfies not just the user but search engines that rank on loading speed. This article series covers how to slim down your web pages with tools Fedora offers.

Preparation

Before you sart to slim down your web pages, you need to identify the core issues. For this, you can use Browserdiet. It’s a browser add-on available for Firefox, Opera and Chrome and other browsers. It analyzes the performance values of the actual open web page, so you know where to start slimming down.

Next you’ll need some pages to work on. The example screenshot shows a test of getfedora.org. At first it looks very simple and responsive.

Browser Diet – values of getfedora.org

However, BrowserDiet’s page analysis shows there are 1.8MB in files downloaded. Therefore, there’s some work to do!

Web optimization

There are over 281 KB of JavaScript files, 203 KB more in CSS files, and 1.2 MB in images. Start with the biggest issue — the images. The tool set you need for this is GIMP, ImageMagick, and optipng. You can easily install them using the following command:

sudo dnf install gimp imagemagick optipng

For example, take the following file which is 6.4 KB:

First, use the file command to get some basic information about this image:

$ file cinnamon.png cinnamon.png: PNG image data, 60 x 60, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced 

The image — which is only in grey and white — is saved in 8-bit/color RGBA mode. That’s not as efficient as it could be.

Start GIMP so you can set a more appropriate color mode. Open cinnamon.png in GIMP. Then go to Image>Mode and set it to greyscale. Export the image as PNG with compression factor 9. All other settings in the export dialog should be the default.

$ file cinnamon.png cinnamon.png: PNG image data, 60 x 60, 8-bit gray+alpha, non-interlaced 

The output shows the file’s now in 8bit gray+alpha mode. The file size has shrunk from 6.4 KB to 2.8 KB. That’s already only 43.75% of the original size. But there’s more you can do!

You can also use the ImageMagick tool identify to provide more information about the image.

$ identify cinnamon2.png cinnamon.png PNG 60x60 60x60+0+0 8-bit Grayscale Gray 2831B 0.000u 0:00.000

This tells you the file is 2831 bytes. Jump back into GIMP, and export the file. In the export dialog disable the storing of the time stamp and the alpha channel color values to reduce this a little more. Now the file output shows:

$ identify cinnamon.png cinnamon.png PNG 60x60 60x60+0+0 8-bit Grayscale Gray 2798B 0.000u 0:00.000

Next, use optipng to losslessly optimize your PNG images. There are other tools that do similar things, including advdef (which is part of advancecomp), pngquant and pngcrush.

Run optipng on your file. Note that this will replace your original:

$ optipng -o7 cinnamon.png ** Processing: cinnamon.png 60x60 pixels, 2x8 bits/pixel, grayscale+alpha Reducing image to 8 bits/pixel, grayscale Input IDAT size = 2720 bytes Input file size = 2812 bytes Trying: zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 0 f = 0 IDAT size = 1922 zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 1 f = 0 IDAT size = 1920 Selecting parameters: zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 1 f = 0 IDAT size = 1920 Output IDAT size = 1920 bytes (800 bytes decrease) Output file size = 2012 bytes (800 bytes = 28.45% decrease)

The option -o7 is the slowest to process, but provides the best end results. You’ve knocked 800 more bytes off the file size, which is now 2012 bytes.

To resize all of the PNGs in a directory, use this command:

$ optipng -o7 -dir=<directory> *.png

The option -dir lets you give a target directory for the output. If this option is not used, optipng would overwrite the original images.

Choosing the right file format

When it comes to pictures for the usage in the internet, you have the choice between:

• JPG or JPEG
• GIF
• PNG
• aPNG
• JPG-LS
• JPG 2000 or JP2
• SVG

JPG-LS and JPG 2000 are not widely used. Only a few digital cameras support these formats, so they can be ignored. aPNG is an animated PNG, and not widely used either.

You could save a few bytes more through changing the compression rate or choosing another file format. The first option you can’t do in GIMP, as it’s already using the highest compression rate. As there are no alpha channels in the picture, you can choose JPG as file format instead. For now use the default value of 90% quality — you could change it down to 85%, but then alias effects become visible. This saves a few bytes more:

$ identify cinnamon.jpg cinnamon.jpg JPEG 60x60 60x60+0+0 8-bit sRGB 2676B 0.000u 0:00.000 

Alone this conversion to the right color space and choosing JPG as file format brought down the file size from 23 KB to 12.3 KB, a reduction of nearly 50%.

PNG vs. JPG: quality and compression rate

So what about the rest of the images? This method would work for all the other pictures, except the Fedora “flavor” logos and the logos for the four foundations. Those are presented on a white background.

One of the main differences between PNG and JPG is that JPG has no alpha channel. Therefore it can’t handle transparency. If you rework these images by using a JPG on a white background, you can reduce the file size from 40.7 KB to 28.3 KB.

Now there are four more images you can rework: the backgrounds. For the grey background, set the mode to greyscale again. With this bigger picture, the savings also is bigger. It shrinks from 216.2 KB to 51.0 KB — it’s now barely 25% of its original size. All in all, you’ve shrunk 481.1 KB down to 191.5 KB — only 39.8% of the starting size.

Quality vs. Quantity

Another difference between PNG and JPG is the quality. PNG is a lossless compressed raster graphics format. But JPG loses size through compression, and thus affects quality. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use JPG, though. But you have to find a balance between file size and quality.

Achievement

This is the end of Part 1. After following the techniques described above, here are the results:

You brought image size down to 488.9 KB versus 1.2MB at the start. That’s only about a third of the size, just through optimizing with optipng. This page can probably be made to load faster still. On the scale from snail to hypersonic, it’s not reached racing car speed yet!

Finally you can check the results in Google Insights, for example:

In the Mobile area the page gathered 10 points on scoring, but is still in the Medium sector. It looks totally different for the Desktop, which has gone from 62/100 to 91/100 and went up to Good. As mentioned before, this test isn’t the be all and end all. Consider scores such as these to help you go in the right direction. Keep in mind you’re optimizing for the user experience, and not for a search engine.