We recently interviewed Ben Cotton on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming an interviewee.

Who is Ben Cotton?

If you follow the Fedora’ Community Blog, there’s a good chance you already know who Ben is.

Ben’s Linux journey started around late 2002. Frustrated with some issues on using Windows XP, and starting a new application administrator role at his university where some services were being run on FreeBSD. A friend introduced him to Red Hat Linux, when Ben decided it made sense to get more practice with Unix-like operating systems. He switched to Fedora full-time in 2006, after he landed a job as a Linux system administrator.

Since then, his career has included system administration, people management, support engineering, development, and marketing. Several years ago, he even earned a Master’s degree in IT Project Management. The variety of experience has helped Ben learn how to work with different groups of people. “A lot of what I’ve learned has come from making mistakes. When you mess up communication, you hopefully do a better job the next time.”

Besides tech, Ben also has a range of well-rounded interests. “I used to do a lot of short fiction writing, but these days I mostly write my opinions about whatever is on my mind.” As for favorite foods, he claims “All of it. Feed me.”

Additionally, Ben has taste that spans genres. His childhood hero was a character from the science fiction series “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. “As a young lad, I wanted very much to be Wesley Crusher.” His favorite movies are a parody film and a spy thriller: “‘Airplane!’ and ‘The Hunt for Red October’” respectively.

When asked for the five greatest qualities he thinks someone can possess, Ben responded cleverly: “Kindness. Empathy. Curiosity. Resilience. Red hair.”

Ben wearing the official “#action bcotton” shirt

His Fedora Story

As a talented writer who described himself as “not much of a programmer”, he selected the Fedora Docs team in 2009 as an entry point into the community. What he found was that “the Friends foundation was evident.” At the time, he wasn’t familiar with tools such as Git, DocBook XML, or Publican (docs toolchain at the time). The community of experienced doc writers helped him get on his feet and freely gave their time. To this day, Ben considers many of them to be his friends and feels really lucky to work with them. Notably “jjmcd, stickster, sparks, and jsmith were a big part of the warm welcome I received.”

Today, as a senior program manager, he describes his job as “Chief Cat Herding Officer”- as his job is largely composed of seeing what different parts of the project are doing and making sure they’re all heading in the same general direction.

Despite having a huge responsibility, Ben also helps a lot in his free time with tasks outside of his job duties, like website work, CommBlog and Magazine editing, packaging, etc… none of which are his core job responsibilities. He tries to find ways to contribute that match his skills and interests. Building credibility, paying attention, developing relationships with other contributors, and showing folks that he’s able to help, is much more important to him than what his “official” title is.

When thinking towards the future, Ben feels hopeful watching the Change proposals come in. “Sometimes they get rejected, but that’s to be expected when you’re trying to advance the state of the art. Fedora contributors are working hard to push the project forward.“

The Fedora Community 

As a longtime member of the community, Ben has various notions about the Fedora Project that have been developed over the years. For starters, he wants to make it easier to bring new contributors on board. He believes the Join SIG has “done tremendous work in this area”, but new contributors will keep the community vibrant.

If Ben had to pick a best moment, he’d choose Flock 2018 in Dresden. “That was my first Fedora event and it was great to meet so many of the people who I’ve only known online for a decade.”

As for bad moments, Ben hasn’t had many. Once he accidentally messed up a Bugzilla query resulting in accidental closure of hundreds of bugs and has dealt with some frustrating mailing list threads, but remains positive, affirming that “frustration is okay.”

To those interested in becoming involved in the Fedora Project, Ben says “Come join us!” There’s something to appeal to almost anyone. “Take the time to develop relationships with the people you meet as you join, because without the Friends foundation, the rest falls apart.”

Pet Peeves

One issue he finds challenging is a lack of documentation. “I’ve learned enough over the years that I can sort of bumble through making code changes to things, but a lot of times it’s not clear how the code ties together.” Ben sees how sparse or nonexistent documentation can be frustrating to newcomers who might not have the knowledge that is assumed.

Another concern Ben has is that the “interesting” parts of technology are changing. “Operating systems aren’t as important to end users as they used to be thanks to the rise of mobile computing and Software-as-a-Service. Will this cause our pool of potential new contributors to decrease?”

Likewise, Ben believes that it’s not always easy to get people to understand why they should care about open source software. “The reasons are often abstract and people don’t see that they’re directly impacted, especially when the alternatives provide more immediate convenience.”

What Hardware?

For work, Ben has a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Fedora 33 KDE. His personal server/desktop is a machine he put together from parts that runs Fedora 33 KDE. He uses it as a file server, print server, Plex media server, and general-purpose desktop. If he has some spare time to get it started, Ben also has an extra laptop that he wants to start using to test Beta releases and “maybe end up running rawhide on it”.

What Software?

Ben has been a KDE user for a decade. A lot of his work is done in a web browser (Firefox for work stuff, Chrome for personal). He does most of his scripting in Python these days, with some inherited scripts in Perl.

Notable applications that Ben uses include:

• Cherrytree for note-taking
• Element for IRC
• Inkscape and Kdenlive when he needs to edit videos.
• Vim on the command line and Kate when he wants a GUI

20 years ago today on 14th December, 2000, Pokémon Stadium 2 launched for the Nintendo 64 in Japan.

It was actually known as Pokémon Stadium Gold & Silver in Japan and was the third entry in the series – Pokémon’s home country has had three Stadium games in total, with the first of the trio never making it across to western shores. The game arrived in Europe and North America the following year with a new title of ‘Pokémon Stadium 2’, reflecting the fact that this was only the second game to have launched in the west.

The game allows players to battle their favourite monsters in 3D on the TV, with all 251 Pokémon from the series’ first two generations being supported. Using the N64’s Transfer Pak controller accessory, you can even make use of the Pokémon you’ve caught in the Game Boy games – Pokémon Red and Blue, Yellow, Gold and Silver, and Crystal – taking them to new heights on the big screen.

It offers a Free Battle mode where you can battle as much as you like, a Gym Leader castle challenge which sees you taking on tough opponents, an Academy which teaches you all you need to know about battling, and a nice selection of mini-games that can be played either for fun or competitively.

Do you have any fond memories of playing Pokémon Stadium 2 on the N64? Did you manage to defeat all of the Gym Leaders? Let us know down below.

The most pythonic way to convert a list of integers fs to a list of floats is to use the one-line fs = [float(x) for x in fs]. It iterates over all the elements in the list fs using list comprehension and converts each element of the list x to an integer value using the float (x) constructor.

This article shows you the simplest ways to convert a one-dimensional list consisting only of int to a list of float.

Problem: Given a list of ints [1, 2, 3]. How to convert it to a list of floats [1.0, 2.0, 3.0]?

The methods are not applicable to lists of lists, they contain rounding errors that are different in each method. If necessary, you can add cycles or define custom functions.

Method 1: List Comprehension

Suppose we have a list:

a = [1, 3, 2, 1, 5, -2]

Now, check the type of the list numbers:

print(type(a[0]))

# <class 'int'>

Let’s apply the built-in function float, and get a list of floats:

print([float(i) for i in a])

# [1.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.0, -2.0]

Check the type of numbers in the new list:

A = [float(i) for i in a]

print(type(A[0]))

# <class ‘int’>

Thus, using the built-in float function, we can get a new list of floats in one line of code.

Method 2: Map Function

The built-in function map is well optimized and efficient, when it is called, the elements of the list are retrieved upon access. Therefore, one element is stored and processed in memory, which allows the program not to store the entire list of elements in the system memory.

Apply to the same list a the following code:

print(list(map(float, a)))

# [1.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.0, -2.0]

We will not check the type of the elements of the resulting list, because when calling the ‘map’ function, we passed the ‘float’ function already described in method 1 as an argument, and wrapped the result in a list using the ‘list’ function.

Method 3: Enumerate Function

Using the built-in function ‘enumerate’, we can loop through the elements of the list and process not only the value of the element, but also its index number in the list:

for i, item in enumerate(a): a[i] = float(item)

#[1.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.0, -2.0]

Method 4: NumPy

Here’s a look at converting a list from an int to an array using the NumPy module. The difference between an array and a list is that all elements of an array must be of the same type, like “float” and “int”. Numeric operations with large amounts of data can be performed with arrays much faster and more efficiently than with lists.

Let’s turn our first list a into an array:

import numpy as np

N = np.array(a, float)

#[1., 3., 2., 1., 5., -2.]

We pass two arguments to the array function, the name of the list to convert to an array and the type for each element.

Сheck the type of elements:

print(type(N[0]))

#<class 'numpy.float64'>

Unlike the ‘float’ type of numbers in Python, the numpy module defines them slightly differently and is divided into several subgroups. For example, ‘float64’ is a numpy numeric data type used to store double precision real numbers, in which 1 bit is assigned to the sign, 11 bits for the exponent and 52 for the mantissa, ‘float32’ contains 1 bit for the sign, 8 bits for exponent and 23 for mantissa, ‘float16’ – 1 bit for the sign, 5 bits for exponent and 10 for mantissa. This must be taken into account when calculating with arrays.

The post How to Convert an Integer List to a Float List in Python first appeared on Finxter.

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Our new game Blightbound features many types of foggy effects: mist, dust, smoke and more. Such effects are often made with planes and particles, allowing us to draw fog and effect textures by hand and giving us maximum artistic control. However, one issue with this is that the place where fog planes intersect with geometry creates a hard edge, which looks very fake and outdated. My solution was to implement depth fade. This is a commonly used technique for soft particles, but we use it on lots of objects, not just on particles.

In today’s blogpost I’ll explain how depth fade rendering works. I’ll also show just how widely this technique can be applied, by going through a bunch of examples from Blightbound.

First, let’s have a look at what problem we’re trying to solve here. When putting partially transparent planes in the world, the place where they intersect with other objects creates a straight cut-off line. Sometimes that’s desired, but often those transparent planes represent volumetric effects. They’re not supposed to look like flat planes, but that’s just the easiest and most efficient way of rendering them. This is fine when there are no intersections, but when there are then the hard lines where they touch other objects break the volumetric illusion.

There’s a simple solution for this that’s used in a lot of games: depth fade. The idea is to simply fade out the plane near the intersection. This produces an effect similar to how real fog works: objects that go into the fog seem to smoothly fade out. However, actually figuring out all polygon intersections takes too much performance, so we want a rendering trick instead.

This screenshot from Blightbound shows a fog plane just above the ground. In the top image it is rendered in the standard way, resulting in hard intersections with the characters, rocks and cart. At the bottom the intersections are smoothened by depth fade.

The trick to rendering with depth fade is to first render all normal geometry, excluding any transparent objects. This fills the depth buffer, so for every pixel we know what distance it has from the camera. Then when rendering the objects that need depth fade, the pixel shader looks up the distance in the depth buffer and compares that to its own distance. If these are close to each other, then we assume that we’re near an intersection and fade out this pixel. The nearer, the stronger the fade out, until the object is entirely invisible at the point of intersection.

This technique has a few neat bonus features on top of just smoothing out intersections. By simply setting the distance over which the fade occurs, we can modify the density of the mist. Also, objects don’t need to actually intersect with the fog plane to get depth fade applied. Being just beneath the fog plane also makes the effect visible. Thus depth fade is more than just a way to smoothen intersections.

The fog’s density setting determines the width of the smoothing of the intersections. At a very high density the smoothing is almost lost. At a very low density the fog almost disappears because the ground is now also considered ‘close’ to the fog plane.

While this technique is traditionally mostly used for particles, it can easily be used for all objects with transparency. Since the world of Blightbound is covered by the blight (a thick, corrupting fog) we have a lot of types of fog in our game, including many fog planes and particles, as well as smoke and special effects. Our artists can apply depth fade rendering to all of those, not just to particles.

[embedded content]
Depth fade is also great for hiding the seams of moving objects, like this fog wall.

A nice property of depth fade is that it doesn’t cost all that much performance compared to traditional alpha blending. For each pixel of a particle or fog plane that we render, it costs one extra texture look-up (in the depth buffer) and a distance calculation. Compared to more advanced volumetric techniques, like voxel ray marching, that’s a very low price. Since the performance impact of depth fade is low, our artists can use this technique on many objects, not just on the few that really, really need it.

Depth fade can also solve problems with camera facing glow planes. The glow on this torch is always oriented towards the camera, but that makes it intersect with the wall behind it under certain angles. Using depth fade, the intersection can be hidden. This animation shows alternating with and without depth fade.

When I implemented depth fade, I thought I was being pretty clever: I had only ever seen this technique used for soft particles, not for generic object rendering. However, while searching the web a bit to write this blogpost, I found out it’s actually a standard feature in the Unreal engine. For Unity I only found the option on particles, but it might exist in a more generic form there as well.

Now that we know how depth fade works, let’s have a look at a bunch of example uses from Blightbound. Special thanks to my colleague Ralph Rademakers, who made most of the levels and is thus the prime user of depth fade in Blightbound. Ralph gave me a nice list of cool spots to show:

[embedded content]
A compilation of examples from Blightbound where depth fade is used to great effect, showing both with and without depth fade.

Another application of depth fade is to hide seams of VFX with the world. In this example the smoke effect intersects with a black ground plane.

When I initially implemented depth fade in Blightbound, I thought it would mostly be used on fog planes that float just above the ground, to give the impression of heroes walking through a low hanging, milky fog. As soon as our artists got hold of this technique however they started using it on tons of other objects. This is to me one of the most fun parts of building graphics tech: seeing how much more artists can do with it than I had originally imagined!

For more blogposts on development of Blightbound, Awesomenauts, Swords & Soldiers, Cello Fortress, Proun, procedural music, my cello album and any of the other stuff I work on, check my dev blog at www.joostvandongen.com.

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In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, media images of health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients provided some of the first glimpses into the devastating impacts of the global crisis.

Executives at Crocs not only saw those stressed, overwhelmed frontline workers, but also started getting requests from them for shoes to keep them going during the long hours. The company realized it had an opportunity to offer a little kindness and comfort to a group of loyal customers at a particularly challenging time. Crocs came up with an ambitious idea: to give away 10,000 pairs of shoes every day to people working on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic.   

Less than a week later, Crocs was ready to launch its “Free Pair for Healthcare” initiative, a 45-day event starting in late March during which the company donated more than 860,000 pairs of Crocs to workers mostly in the U.S., but also in Canada and Europe. 

Crocs’ iconic foam clogs — in black and white, in lemon and mint and leopard print — arrived on the doorsteps of grateful health care workers and frontline responders, who posted messages and photos of their Crocs, some personalized with the brand’s proprietary Jibbitz charms, on social media. 

“Thanks so much Crocs for thinking of us during this time,” Kristy Baron, a registered nurse from Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote on Facebook. “I’m a nurse working on the front lines and your caring is much appreciated.”  

Adam Michaels, Crocs’ chief digital officer, says the company created the campaign to help as many people as possible and provide comfort where it was needed most.

“It became obvious that we have a product that a group of our consumers have been buying from us for years, and that particular group had an immediate and real need,” he says. “We thought the best way to give back was to give them the footwear they needed on the front lines of fighting COVID-19.” 

Behind the scenes, the campaign was an enormous undertaking. It required building a platform that could fulfill orders, communicate with customers and handle up to 500,000 daily visitors to the site — while still maintaining enough inventory to fill orders while production was scaled back because of the pandemic. Microsoft Teams was integral to the effort, enabling employees working remotely around the U.S. to quickly share designs and documents, provide input and make decisions in real time without getting bogged down by email chains, Michaels says.  

The campaign ramp-up, he says, was “one of the fastest turnarounds we’ve had for any project, especially of that magnitude. Teams was key to that. It allowed us to iterate so much faster than traditional channels. Doing that remotely, without Microsoft Teams, in the timeframe we had, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do it.”  

Teams has been a critical tool for Crocs in other ways during the pandemic. Employees in Europe hosted a sales meeting via a live Teams event, showing and talking through the Crocs line to potential retail customers. Teams was also used to design and launch two seasons of new products, an undertaking that would typically involve flying employees from around the world to Crocs’ headquarters in Niwot, Colorado.

And regular town hall meetings on Teams have allowed employees to connect with each other and hear directly from the company’s CEO, Andrew Rees, whose dog, Cooper, sometimes makes an appearance.

Mike Feliton, Crocs’ senior vice president and chief information officer overseeing technology, chose Teams for the company’s collaboration platform because it allows users to easily work together in a shared space. Crocs rolled out Teams in the summer of 2019, and when the pandemic hit — forcing Crocs to temporarily close most of its 360 stores — employees companywide immediately turned to Teams to connect and collaborate.

“We adopted the platform from our CEO down almost instantaneously,” Feliton says. “Teams has been central to our business.”

Feliton was so impressed with how Teams helped facilitate Crocs’ health care campaign that he sent an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, thanking him for the technology.

“As we were so successful with that campaign, I couldn’t do anything but reach out to Satya and thank him for that product, because I felt like he not only heard me, but everybody else in the business world that was looking for a collaboration tool that really worked, and this did,” he says.

The pandemic also prompted Crocs to intensify the digital-first strategy it embarked on about five years ago. Recognizing that more consumers were shopping online, the company closed some stores and ramped up its marketing efforts on digital channels. When COVID-19 hit, Crocs invested heavily with Microsoft Advertising and increased its focus on paid search to target customers who might not have previously bought Crocs online.

Company official say those efforts contributed to Crocs’ reported record third quarter revenue of $361.7 million, with digital sales up 35.5.%.

Crocs has shifted almost all its operations to Microsoft Azure, with help from the Azure Migration Program, and is using Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization platform, to pull together data from various sources. Previously, if the company wanted to see, for example, how its clogs were selling compared with sandals in a particular region, it had to rely on analysts pulling data from multiple systems. Now, Crocs is getting detailed data reports several times a day through Power BI.

“The huge benefit is that we know what’s going on with our business essentially in real time,” Michaels says. “That allows us to make decisions and react much more quickly to impact the future. Power BI has democratized the data so our teams can make better decisions at every level.”

Crocs have been hailed as the ultimate pandemic shoe — comfortable and affordable, easy to clean and appropriately casual for legions of employees working from home. The New York Times declared that Crocs had “won 2020,” noting that while U.S. retail footwear sales are down 20 percent this year over the same period in 2019, sales of Crocs are up 48 percent. According to fashion search platform Lyst, searches for Crocs spiked 41 percent in Q3. 

Crocs are clearly having a moment, but the brand’s resurgence predates the pandemic. In 2016, British designer Christopher Kane debuted marbled-design Crocs encrusted with geode Jibbitz charms on runways at London Fashion Week. The next year, design house Balenciaga released an outrageously high platform version of Crocs Classic clogs that retailed for $850. 

Additional Crocs collaborations followed with the Grateful Dead, Justin Bieber and Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny, among others. The limited edition collaborations, which have also included a Kentucky Fried Chicken clog topped with a scented drumstick Jibbitz, often sell out within minutes.    

Michaels acknowledges that Crocs is in the enviable position of having the right product for a moment no one could have anticipated.   

“It would be much tougher to be in the dress shoe and dress apparel line of work right now,” he says, “but the more casual footwear has become more relevant to consumers now than it was even a few months ago. 

“And because of the work we’ve done in the health care space, I think our brand actually has even more momentum than it did when COVID hit,” Michaels says. “We’re very fortunate for that.”  

Top photo: Workers at Children’s Hospital Colorado wearing Crocs clogs donated by the company. (Photos courtesy of Crocs)