Codepope's Development Hell

Catching up on Codescaling with some of the less mentioned things worth noting… FreeBSD 10.0’s latest beta: It’s into the home/RC straight for FreeBSD 10 with the release of the third and hopefully last beta of the development cycle. The original schedule would have seen RC2 available around now, but with a focus on a quality release, there’s been a bit of slippage. Check out this FreeBSD News item from September for a feel of what’s going in.

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 tag for Google’s VP8-based WebM.

Python 2.6 signs out: Python 2.6.9 is the last source-only security fix release for the Python 2.6 family. The 2.6.9 release sees 2.6 officially retired after five years in the field. If you are still running 2.6, UPDATE! At the other end of the scale, Python 3.3.3 got its first release candidate with full support for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. dotCloud becomes Docker Inc: Acknowledging how important its Docker container software has become, dotCloud has announced it is becoming Docker Inc.

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.

Lime text editor: People love the Sublime Text editor. But being closed source does set some folks worrying. Some of them do something about it though, such as “quarnster” who has been creating Lime as an open source version of Sublime Text. Built with a combination of Go 1.1, Python3, Oniguruma and optional Qt5, Lime still has plenty to implement, including compatibility with Sublime’s Python API, keybindings and snippets, TextMate Snippits and getting solid cross platform support.

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.

JavaFX on Android and iOS: One of Oracle’s ongoing projects is getting JavaFX onto the two big smartphone platforms. An update from Richard Bair (Chief Architect Client Java at Oracle) says the work is now at “a good prototype stage”. There’s “funky” code swapping JavaFX text fields for native components and the plan is to build a more layered system for better native look and feel without Swing style theming.

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.

Hadoop 2 goes official: The Apache Software Foundation have officially announced Apache Hadoop 2. The new milestone version of Hadoop is a major rework which brings YARN, an overhauled MapReduce engine which splits resource management and job scheduling into two separate operations with their own daemons. There’s also high availability, data snapshots, NFS3 access and federation for Hadoop HDFS along with Windows support. Hadoop 2 started out in alpha way back in May 2012 as version 2.

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.