Codepope's Development Hell

mqttwarn: Don’t want to run Node-RED but do want to route MQTT messages around? Jan-Piet Mens may have the application for you in the Python based mqttwarn, a pluggable framework which can subscribe to many MQTT topics and send them on to files, other MQTT systems, Twitter, SMTP, Redis, SQLite and Mac OS X notifications. He explains that the instigator for this was being introduced to Pushover, an iOS and Android notification app… which is now also supported by mqttwarn.

ElasticSearch 1.0 springs out: The search-oriented NoSQL database, built upon Lucene, ElasticSearch has hit version 1.0. It’s a big release with a lot of changes and a lot of new features – an API for selective snapshot/restore, federated search, aggregation, distributed percolation and software “circuit breakers” to stop some more dangerous actions from overwhelming the system. An interesting post from Found.no on ElasticSearch sums up the pros and cons (like no authentication or authorisation) places ElasticSearch in the domain of “secondary store” to be used alongside a primary database.

FreeBSD Journal Edition One: The FreeBSD Journal has published its first digital edition for iPad, Android and Kindle devices. With 6 issues planned for each year, a $20 subscription and an editorial board drawn from the luminaries of the FreeBSD world, it looks like it has everything a FreeBSD fan could want. The first edition, themed around FreeBSD 10, has a five page look at that releases Clang support, ten pages on implementing system control nodes, a white paper on NYI’s use of FreeBSD as part of being an ISP, a six page guide to getting FreeBSD up and running on the BeagleBone Black, an article on ZFS and the future of storage and columns on the news from the ports tree, OS work and a look back on FreeBSD history.

Docker 0.8: As Docker, the application-packaging-with-containers platform, switches to a new release schedule, the first of the monthly releases has arrived and Docker 0.8 has couple of new goodies along with the focus on quality and . One item worth mentioning is the official support for Mac OS X. No, they haven’t added containers to OS X, but instead use a daemon as an intermediary between a VirtualBox VM populated with a 24MB Linux image based on Tiny Core.

Facebook’s Conceal revealed: Facebook have open sourced Conceal, a library for encrypting files on Android devices. The company uses the library for encrypting data that its apps store on SD cards. It uses pre-selected OpenSSL algorithms, picked for efficient memory management and speed, and gets the library down to 85KB by not trying to be a general purpose crypto kit. An interesting bit of pragmatism which means Facebook’s apps can happily encrypt on low-end Android devices, Conceal is available under a BSD licence with its source on GitHub.

LibreOffice 4.2: The LibreOffice folks have rolled out their latest release, LibreOffice version 4.2 which includes a decent selection of new features, with the headliners being improved OOXML roundtripping, a GPU/OpenCL utilising Calc engine, enhancements to Windows installation and management and better Windows 7/8 integration, an expert configuration window and a more optimal start screen. Download from the usual place. Mercurial shines: The other other distributed version control system (DVCS), Mercurial, has just has an update to version 2.

Scientific Linux 6.5: Scientific Linux has announced an update to version 6.5. SL, as it is also known, is a Linux distro based on the sources distributed by Red Hat for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux produced at Fermilab and CERN. With CentOS being brought closer into Red Hat’s ecosystem, SL may be the new barometer for the health of the Red Hat code outside the company. Anyway, the release notes mostly point you to a copy of the “Upstream Vendors” version 6.

Python 3.4’s last beta: Over the weekend, the last beta of Python 3.4 arrived. With two more release candidates and a final date of March 16, those interested should be testing now. The time scale was bumped by three weeks to allow last minute changes to the Argument Clinic, a DSL for parsing arguments, to settle in. What’s also in 3.4? A new pathlib module, standardised enums, better object finalisation semantics, a C API for custom memory allocators, non-inheriting subprocess file descriptors, new statistics, asyncio and tracemalloc modules, a new hash algorithm for strings and binary data and better pickling.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

Following up from the last post, here’s the FreeBSD 10.0 announcement. Listed highlights of FreeBSD 10 are – Clang is now the default compiler and GCC is no longer installed by default, unbound is now the local caching DNS resolver and BIND is no longer a default, make’s replaced with bmake, ZFS has TRIM support for SSDs and LZ4 compression, guesting under Hyper-V is now supported and pkg is default package manager.