Codepope's Development Hell

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

POODLE yips: In what was a glorious nail in the coffin of SSLv3, the POODLE vulnerability(PDF) made sure no one would trust SSLv3 again. The simple fix is to turn off SSLv3 where its used. The bug itself is bad in terms of cryptography, in that it gives an attacker a route to completely decode a stream that has been encrypted, but in practice its not as bad because the attacker has to be a man in the middle to get started.

First of all a catchup on some of my making. I presented a short talk at Oggcamp 2014 on using the 1Sheeld with an Android phone to make experimenting with Arduino much simpler. The 1Sheeld sits on Arduino’s serial ports and using Bluetooth, talks to an Android phone app. The app is able to emulate a whole range of devices, like keypads and LEDs, and sensors, such as gyroscopes and barometers, and act as a proxy to web services like Twitter and Facebook.

Bashed: So the Bash bug is out there and real. These quick notes are still valid. The point is that this hideous feature (really, exporting function definitions through environment variables) is horrid and leaky by design and it’s only this bug in how that feature is implemented thats bringing it to the fore. CGI scripting, Qmail, some SSH and DHCP services are all potentially vulnerable, so patch away but be prepared to patch again because the lid is off this can of worms.

HTML5 getting closer: Over at the W3C the HTML5 spec has got close with the publication of the Proposed Recommendation of HTML5. By the end of the year, HTML5 will, according to the activity statement and barring madness, be a W3C recommendation. Then it’ll be onto the HTML 5.1 track as it sees a Candidate Recommendation out at in early 2015 and wrapping up in a recommendation at the end of 2016.

Node.js synchronously: Node.js is sweet if you can adapt to the asynchronous model of start thing, say what you want to do when its done, do everything else anyway. Good for web request handling but bleh for trying to emulate a shellscript. Turns out that in Node.js 0.12 (coming soon? anyone? Bueller?) we get synchronous child processes to now you can run that curl or find or whatever and just wait till its returned with its results.

ECMAScript 6: It’s coming, for mid 2015, and its full of features. In this video, Alex Rauschmayer talks about all those features. If you prefer slides they are available too. It covers most of the language features (skipping promises and proxies), outlines the timetable for standardisation and how you can use ES6 features now. Bonus link, do checkout his blog. Policy and Scala: Scala has been forked, and forked by one of its most active contributors.

Let’s go fly a Kitematic: There’s plenty of command line tools for Docker and command line driven ways to run it on Mac OS X. The latter’s harder because you need to run a VM and load it with an image and… well there’s boot2docker to help but… Enter Kitematic which takes the previous tools and rolls them with a neat UI and some extra neat tricks to make it a lot easier to start playing with the idea.

ChainDuino: An interesting Arduino varient now gathering funds on Kickstarter is the ChainDuino project. Simply put it allows a number of Arduino-style microcontrollers to be chained together over CAT5 cable with that cable delivering power, using a passive Power over Ethernet mechanism, and communications, using RS-485. This could be incredibly useful in creating a large area sensor net (current max, 32 boards) as it can stretch for up to quarter of a mile and there’s no need for power sockets along the entire length apart from where you inject the power.

ODROID-W: Hardkernel are more known for their Exynos based single board computers which pack quite a punch in a small space - enough that a meaty heatsink is needed. But their latest product eschews the Exynos chippery for a Broadcom chip, the same chip as the Raspberry Pi. The ODROID-W is apparently the result of a wearable research project which saw Hardkernel minimise the Pi design down to a wearable module.