Codepope's Development Hell

Catching up on Codescaling with some of the less mentioned things worth noting… This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

Cisco and Mozilla have made an announcement - Cisco will open source an H.264 implementation and Mozilla will incorporate support for a binary version of that open source code in Firefox in 2014. But what’s behind this move… Firefox has wrestled with the H.264 video bear for some time now. Initially Mozilla took the position that there’d be no patented royalty-bearing standards implemented in Firefox and eschewed H.264 support in HTML5’s <video> tag for Google’s VP8-based WebM.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

If you were using MongoHQ’s SSD backed MongoDB hosting, be prepared for them to be in touch as they’ve been at the sharp end of a security breach. But it’s not just direct users of MongoHQ’s services that should be concerned - users of services which make use of MongoHQ need to put on their worrying hat too. For example, MongoHQ hosted Buffer’s databases and that has been cited as the cause of the social media connector’s security breach.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

News arrives here that PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) 453 has been accepted. PEP 453, titled “Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations”, sets out to sort out one of the long standing problems in the Python ecosystem - not having a common modern packaging system for Python packages. Pip has become popular with Python users but for new users things have been somewhat odd. You need to use the old default installer application easy_install to install pip and then we’re ready to install packages.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

The Node developers have pushed out Node 0.10.21 and saying it “contains a security fix for the http server implementation” but gave no further details in the announcement, only asking people to upgrade as soon as possible. Elsewhere though, the problem was identified as a trivial-to-trigger denial of service vulnerability. It was explained by “meritt” in a Hacker News posting that a memory leak in the HTTP Pipelining code could make systems run out of memory if flooded with requests which were never read.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

At the opening of the conference day at Cassandra Summit Europe 2013, Johnathan Ellis, Datastax CTO, made a point of positioning Apache Cassandra as an enterprise scalable database and one that scales in a linear fashion to massive scales. Datastax is the leading developer of, and commercial vendor of Apache Cassandra in the form of DataStax enterprise. MongoDB was very much in the company’s sights as it showed benchmarks with Cassandra running 20 times faster than MongoDB – the reason was simple though the dataset for the benchmark was bigger than the available memory on the nodes.