18 Feb 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.1.0 on CRAN: Easier Calendar Switching

The eighteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. There have been no calendar updates in QuantLib 1.41 or 1.42 so it has been relatively quiet since the last release last summer but we now added a nice new feature (more below) leading to a new minor release version.

qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases makes it (much) easier to work with multiple calendars. The previous setup remains: the package keeps one 'global' (and hidden) calendar object which can be set, queried, altered, etc. But now we added the ability to hold instantiated calendar objects in R. These are external pointer objects, and we can pass them to functions requiring a calendar. If no such optional argument is given, we fall back to the global default as before. Similarly for functions operating on one or more dates, we now simply default to the current date if none is given. That means we can now say

> sapply(c("UnitedStates/NYSE", "Canada/TSX", "Australia/ASX"), 
         \(x) qlcal::isBusinessDay(xp=qlcal::getCalendar(x)))
UnitedStates/NYSE        Canada/TSX     Australia/ASX 
             TRUE              TRUE              TRUE 
>

to query today (February 18) in several markets, or compare to two days ago when Canada and the US both observed a holiday

> sapply(c("UnitedStates/NYSE", "Canada/TSX", "Australia/ASX"),
         \(x) qlcal::isBusinessDay(as.Date("2026-02-16"), xp=qlcal::getCalendar(x)))
UnitedStates/NYSE        Canada/TSX     Australia/ASX 
            FALSE             FALSE              TRUE 
>

The full details from NEWS.Rd follow.

Changes in version 0.1.0 (2026-02-18)

  • Invalid calendars return id 'TARGET' now

  • Calendar object can be created on the fly and passed to the date-calculating functions; if missing global one used

  • For several functions a missing date object now implies computation on the current date, e.g. isBusinessDay()

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples.

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.

18 Feb 2026 1:14pm GMT

17 Feb 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Russell Coker: Links February 2026

Charles Stross has a good theory of why "AI" is being pushed on corporations, really we need to just replace CEOs with LLMs [1].

This disturbing and amusing article describes how an Open AI investor appears to be having psychological problems releated to SCP based text generated by ChatGPT [2]. Definitely going to be a recursive problem as people who believe in it invest in it.

interesting analysis of dbus and design for a more secure replacement [3].

Scott Jenson gave an insightful lecture for Canonical about future potential developments in the desktop UX [4].

Ploum wrote an insightful article about the problems caused by the Github monopoly [5]. Radicale sounds interesting.

Niki Tonsky write an interesting article about the UI problems with Tahoe (latest MacOS release) due to trying to make an icon for everything [6]. They have a really good writing style as well as being well researched.

Fil-C is an interesting project to compile C/C++ programs in a memory safe way, some of which can be considered a software equivalent of CHERI [7].

Brian Krebs wrote a long list of the ways that Trump has enabled corruption and a variety of other crimes including child sex abuse in the last year [8].

This video about designing a C64 laptop is a masterclass in computer design [9].

Salon has an interesting article about the abortion thought experiment that conservatives can't handle [10].

Ron Garrett wrote an insightful blog post about abortion [11].

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an insightful article about the potential of LLM systems for advertising and enshittification [12]. We need serious legislation about this ASAP!

Related posts:

  1. Links February 2024 In 2018 Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post Dude...
  2. Links February 2025 Oliver Lindburg wrote an interesting article about Designing for Crisis...
  3. Links February 2021 Elestic Search gets a new license to deal with AWS...

17 Feb 2026 8:09am GMT

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2026 (by Santiago Ruano Rincón)

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian's Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for January.

Activity summary

During the month of January, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below).

The team released 33 DLAs fixing 216 CVEs.

The team continued preparing security updates in its usual rhythm. Beyond the updates targeting Debian 11 ("bullseye"), which is the current release under LTS, the team also proposed updates for more recent releases (Debian 12 ("bookworm") and Debian 13 ("trixie")), including Debian unstable. We highlight several notable security updates here below.

Notable security updates:

Moreover, Sylvain Beucler studied the security support status of p7zip, a fork of 7zip that has become unmaintained upstream. To avoid letting the users continue using an unsupported package, Sylvain has investigated a path forward in collaboration with the security team and the 7zip maintainer, looking to replace p7zip with 7zip. It is to note however that 7zip developers don't reveal the information about the patches that fix CVEs, making it difficult to backport single patches to fix vulnerabilities in Debian released versions.

Contributions from outside the LTS Team:

Thunderbird, prepared by maintainer Christoph Goehre. The DLA (DLA-4442-1) was published by Emilio.

The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:

Other than the work related to updates, Sylvain made several improvements to the documentation and tooling used by the team.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

Thanks to our sponsors

Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

17 Feb 2026 12:00am GMT