Codepope's Development Hell

Mavibot: A new project to create a replacement for JDBM in the Apache Directory Server, Mavibot, just released the first milestone code for its MVCC BTree implementation. They aim to offer a faster alternative with concurrent reads and writes, transactions, bulk loads, multi-version support and in-memory BTree. Brackets: Adobe’s web-centric open source editor Brackets is now available to preview on Linux. The editor depends on the Chromium Embedded Framework and has required work to make that deliverable on Ubuntu and Debian.

Meteor is a very clever Node/JavaScript framework which I will admit to have been using in the recent past. It allows developers to create live updating, multiple screen apps without having to delve too much into the required magic of how the data gets from A to B,C and D - check out the screencasts and examples for a better idea. Now the developers have announced the latest update, version 0.

As we previously mentioned, there have been problems with Bitcoin wallets on Android due to implementation problems with SecureRandom on Android not having enough entropy to be cryptographically useful and this has lead to Bitcoin theft. But, the problem has got worse. It was assumed by many, us included, that this was traceable to Android’s use of the broken Apache Harmony code for Secure Random. Now though, a posting on the Android Developers blog lightly titled “Some SecureRandom Thoughts” shows that Google did pick up on the problem with the Apache Harmony code and replaced it in 4.

Basho have announced that the freshly available Riak CS 1.4’s highlight feature is better OpenStack integration. If you’ve heard of Riak but not Riak CS, CS stands for cloud storage and it basically builds on top of Riak’s capabilities to offer a highly available storage system with an S3 compatible API. Great if you want to get into the storage business or replace AWS S3 with your own systems.

Firefox sharpens tools: Mozilla just detailed the new developer features for Firefox 25, just going into alpha/aurora. The ability to “black box” common libraries so that they are no longer in the stack trace, an option to edit and resend network requests in the network monitor, CSS autocompletion in the inspector (hussah!), in-frame Javascript execution and profile data import and export. Set your timers, in 12 weeks these will be in stable Firefox.

Yes, but no. GoDaddy didn’t swap Apache Web Server out for IIS resulting in the 5% drop observed by Netcraft and reported as a blow for the Apache Web Server elsewhere. As Netcraft say, the switch was from Apache Traffic Server (ATS), acting as a proxy, over to proxying with Microsoft IIS 7.5. When GoDaddy turned the Apache Traffic Server proxy on in May, after apparently testing it with content delivery networks in the previous months, 28.

Google has announced that it has past the $2 million mark in the total number of security rewards it has paid out. Thats a million for its Chrome/Chromium/Pwnium bug hunt and a million for its lower profile web application security programme. The former programme has been, predominantly, the headline grabber with headlines galore when the various cracking competitions kick off, but its the money paid out to the web application security programme which is more interesting as it demonstrates that a web surface is a rich seam of vulnerabilities waiting to be mined.

SDL 2.0: Version 2.0 of SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), the widely used zlib licensed library which offers a Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android library for driving graphics, audio and input has just been announced. New features, and there’s a lot, include 3D hardware acceleration, support for OpenGL 3.0 and ES, support for multiple windows, displays and audio devices. The Migration Guide has all the details. You can get the source and binaries from the download page and find all the other documentation on the wiki.

Been waiting for a Firefox OS phone to land in the UK or US? ZTE have announced that they will be eBaying the ZTE Open Firefox OS phone in both territories through their existing UK and US eBay stores. They have even been running auctions for pre-order collectible versions of the phone - you still have 3 days to bid on the UK pre-order auction but it’s already up to £73 (the list price in the UK will be £59.

Not Telling Tails: If you need to cover your tracks on the internet and locally, then Tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System) will help as its a Debian GNU/Linux distribution with built in Tor support and other privacy tools which doesn’t even leave local logs. Latest version is 0.20 and details can be found in the Tails 0.2.0 announcement. Vim scrubs up: Vim 7.4 was released last week. Highlights are a new, faster regexp engine, a thousand fixes and small improvements according to the announcement on the developer mailing list which also contains links to the various versions and a reminder to contribute to the ICCF Holland to help children in South Uganda if you like Vim.