fidzu : debian

Wikimedia Nederland organised a new type of event this year, the Wikimedia Hackathon Northwestern Europe 2026, which was held last weekend in Arnhem, the Netherlands. And I'm very happy they did, since unlike last years, I will unfortunately be missing from the "main" Wikimedia Hackathon (which is happening in Milan at the start of May).

I continue to believe the primary reason for these events existing is the ability to connect with old and new friends in person. That being said, I did get a bit of technical tinkering done during the weekend as well. These include a dark mode fix to MediaWiki's notification interface, fixes to some visual bugs in MediaWiki's two-factor authentication and OAuth functionality. I did also get an older patch of mine about disabling Composer's new auditing functionality merged. And, as usual, I spent a bunch of time helping various people use with the various infrastructure pieces I'm familiar with (or at least had to suddenly get familiar with) and approved a bunch of OAuth consumers and other requests.

We also managed to continue the tradition from the past two Wikimedia Hackathons of nominating more people to receive +2 access to mediawiki/*. That request is still open as of writing, as those have to run for at least a week, but looks very likely to pass at this point.

Overall, the event was very well-organized: the venue was great, except that the number of stairs was described in a rather misleading way, food was great, and the atmosphere was amazing. The pressure that you must Just Get Things Done to justify your attendance that the main hackathon seems to have recently gained was clearly missing here which was great. Also, I will clearly need to bring more Finnish chocolate next time.

The timing of Friday and Saturday works great for us with other things (like university for me) during the week, as it takes full advantage of the weekend but still only eats workdays from a single calendar week. My main gripe with the logistics was the focus on a single sketchy non-free messaging platform for all event-related communications with the IRC bridge used on the main hackathon channel notably missing.

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ps. Like Lucas, I do have Opinions about so many proudly mentioning they've used "vibe coding" tools during the introduction and showcase. Those opinions are best left for an another time, but I do want to note that all of my work and mistakes have still been lovingly handcrafted.

18 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language-and is widely used by (currently) 1235 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 44.9 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 672 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.2.4 upstream Armadillo release from yesterday. The package has already been updated for Debian, and for r2u. This release, which we as usual checked against the reverse-dependencies, brings minor changes over the RcppArmadillo release 15.2.3 made in December (and described here) by addressing some corner-case ASAN/UBSAN reports (which Conrad, true to his style of course labels as 'false positive' just how he initially responded that he would 'never' add a fix based on such a false report; as always it is best to just watch what does as he is rather good at it, and, written comments notwithstanding, quite responsive) as well as speed-ups for empty sparse matrices. I made one more follow-up refinement on the OpenMP setup which should now 'just work' on all suitable platforms.

The detailed changes since the last release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.2.4-1 (2026-03-17)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.2.4 (Medium Roast Deluxe)

  • Workarounds for bugs in GCC and Clang sanitisers (ASAN false positives)

  • Faster handling of blank sparse matrices

• Refined OpenMP setup (Dirk in #500)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

17 Mar 2026 7:26pm GMT

Another minor maintenance release version 0.1.4 of package RcppClassicExamples arrived earlier today on CRAN, and has been built for r2u. This package illustrates usage of the old and otherwise deprecated initial Rcpp API which no new projects should use as the normal and current Rcpp API is so much better.

This release, the first in two and half years, mostly aids Rcpp in moving from Rf_error() to Rcpp::stop() for better behaviour under error conditions or excections. A few other things were updated in the interim such as standard upgrade to continuous integration, use of Authors@R, and switch to static linking and an improved build to support multiple macOS architectures.

No new code or features. Full details below. And as a reminder, don't use the old RcppClassic - use Rcpp instead.

Changes in version 0.1.4 (2026-03-16)

• Continuous integration has been updated several times

• DESCRIPTION now uses Authors@R

• Static linking is enforced, RcppClassic (>= 0.9.14) required

• Calls to Rf_error() have been replaced with Rcpp::stop()

• Updated versioned dependencies

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

16 Mar 2026 9:20pm GMT