Technology

100 Social Media Facts and Statistics for 2015

Back in 2013 I linked to some (not so) surprising facts about social media. Two years is a lot of time and a lot of things has changed since. So here comes 100 social media facts and statistics for 2015. These spread from general statistics to service-specific ones, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and others. Unlike many other similar collections, this one actually links to sources for every single fact, and provides an easy one-click share to Twitter button. Here are a few to get you started:

189 million Facebook users are ‘mobile only’.
There are 4 billion daily video views on Facebook.
50% of unique LinkedIn visitors access it via mobile.
There is a 50% average increase in comments when a LinkedIn page post contains a question.
Over 40 billion photos have been shared on Instagram.
Google+ has 300 million monthly active users around the world.
Google+ grows at a rate of 33% each year.
Average time spent on YouTube per mobile session is 40 minutes.
There are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Fedora 23 and upgrade issues

Fedora 23 has been released yesterday, and as a big fan and a long time user I had to upgrade my laptop (from Fedora 22) immediately. Or at least try.

Usually, the process is quite simple and doesn’t take much figuring out. This time it was somewhat different though. At first, the recommended upgrade command changed slightly from the nice and simple fedup to dnf system-upgrade.

The first attempt downloaded all packages, ended with a cryptic error along the lines of “No updates for kernel packages were found“. Hmm, weird. I thought maybe this was caused by me forgetting to run “dnf update” before the upgrade process. So I did. Some updates were installed, but there were no kernel packages among them. I rebooted the laptop just in case.

The second attempt for some reason failed to find any of the previously downloaded packages, so I had to wait until the almost 2 GB get pulled down again. Result – same error about missing kernel updates. Hmm, again.

After poking around for a bit, I realized that I had previously configured yum to exclude some packages from updates (kernel, kmod-wl, kmod-VirtualBox, and VirtualBox). These settings were picked up by dnf. Editing both /etc/yum.conf and /etc/dnf/dnf.conf to disable the exclude fixed the issue. “dnf update” now pulled some updates to the kernel. Another reboot.

The third attempt once again lost all the downloaded packages and I had to wait some more. This was annoying, especially at 1am now. The process of downloading finished OK and this time there was no errors. So “dnf system-upgrade reboot” should do the trick now, right? Wrong!

Surprisingly, there was no boot menu for system upgrade upon reboot. So I went with Fedora 22 boot option. Which resulted in a brief screen saying “Preparing for upgrade“. Which then disappeared and the system booted back into Fedora 22. Now that was interesting.

It took me a while to find the issue. The problem was that my Fedora 22 laptop wasn’t a clean install, but an upgrade from Fedora 21. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it is, due to this bug. My /etc/os-release file didn’t have the VARIANT and VARIANT_ID variables (thanks to this blog). So after adding these lines:

VARIANT="Workstation Edition"
VARIANT_ID=workstation

I’ve rebooted once again, and started the fourth attempt. Downloaded packages were gone once again, so I had to wait a bit more. This time the faster office Internet connection helped to save some time. Download finished OK. Another reboot. Once again, there is no option to upgrade Fedora, so I’m going into Fedora 22 boot. Finally, now there is the upgrade screen! After some preparation time, the packages were installed, the machine rebooted, and now I’m Fedora 23 user.

Checking my /etc/os-release file I see that both variant variables are gone now. This feels weird, but hopefully won’t cause issues in the future. If it will, I’ll probably Google for three hours before finding this very blog post.

Best WordPress Plugins – Over 40 Hand-Tested Plugins!

Best WordPress Plugins is an excellent collection of plugins for all sorts of things – from posts and comments management to podcasting and security. Some are free, others – commercial. I’m sure that even if you’ve been running a WordPress site for years, you’ll still find something new for you here.

The Definitive Guide to Natural Language Processing

“The Definitive Guide to Natural Language Processing” is an easy to follow article on what a challanging task it is for machines to understand human language. There’s also this cool video of two bots talking to each other.

27 languages to improve your Python

Nick Coghlan writes:

One of the things we do as part of the Python core development process is to look at features we appreciate having available in other languages we have experience with, and see whether or not there is a way to adapt them to be useful in making Python code easier to both read and write. This means that learning another programming language that focuses more specifically on a given style of software development can help improve anyone’s understanding of that style of programming in the context of Python.

To aid in such efforts, I’ve provided a list below of some possible areas for exploration, and other languages which may provide additional insight into those areas.

The languages and areas are:

Procedural programming: C, Rust, Cython
Object-oriented data modelling: Java, C#, Eiffel
Object-oriented C derivatives: C++, D
Array-oriented data processing: MATLAB/Octave, Julia
Statistical data analysis: R
Computational pipeline modelling: Haskell, Scala, Clojure, F#
Event driven programming: JavaScript, Go, Erlang, Elixir
Gradual typing: TypeScript
Dynamic metaprogramming: Hy, Ruby
Pragmatic problem solving: Lua, PHP, Perl
Computational thinking: Scratch, Logo