Codepope's Development Hell

Perl 5.20: After 12 months of development work, Perl 5.20 has arrived with around 470,000 lines of changes from 124 authors. Your first port of call is the perldelta for 5.20 which lists all the changes - Unicode 6.3 support, a new slice syntax, better 64 bit support, better locale handling, more consitent tainting, do subroutine made a syntax error, quotey escape changes, performance enhancements, lots of module upgreades and some new modules too… the list is huge and if you’re a Perl developer you’ll have plenty to dig into there.

Qt 5.3: The folks at Digia seem to be keeping the Qt development pace up, and not forgetting to take a breather and getting the stability story right. The latest release, Qt 5.3 appears to be one of those breather releases with lots of fixes for the desktop platforms and a supported beta for the Windows 8 Runtime. There’s some new additions too; a QtQuickWidget lets Qt Quick UIs be embedded into older Qt Widget based applications for a smoother transition between the old to new development style and there’s now WebSockets support for plugging into more web applications.

Arduino Zero: It’s looking like the next Arduino will be the focussed refresh we’ve been waiting for. Makezine has all the details on the Arduino Zero, announced at Makercon. It’s a 48Mhz ARM cored Atmel chip with 256KB flash memory, 32K SRAM and no EEPROM. There’s 12-bit ADCs, PWM on all digital pins, support for an embedded debugger, a second USB port (who knows!) and it’s all 3.3V. Looks super interesting, but the real questions will come when we find out how pricing works out and how hard it’ll be to use recreate the Zero from raw components.

XBMC and OpenElec updated: The XBMC Media Centre app has been updated to version 13.0 with hardware decoding support for Android, performance improvements on Raspberry Pi and Android, support for stereoscopic 3D rendering and better touchscreen, UPnP and Audio Engine handling including “real pulseaudio support”. And with the release of a new XBMC comes an update to OpenElec, the small Linux distro built to turn machines into XBMC boxes. With OpenElec 4.

Tails 1.0: The developers of Tails, the Linux distro built for anonymity and privacy, have declared the latest version Tails 1.0. Tails wires all its networking through Tor and leaves no traces on machines where its been livebooted. Its ideal in situations where you want your digital footprint minimised. Version 1.0 sees browser updates, Tor patches including a Heartbleed vulnerable blacklist, bug fixes and a new logo for the project.

Go 1.3 goes Beta: The first beta of Go 1.3 has been announced. This update will have no language changes, and instead sees improvements to the Go ecosystem like experimental support for Solaris, Plan 9 and, probably most significantly, the return of support for Google’s Native Client (on Intel only for now). The release notes pick out the major goodies – faster builds and binaries thanks to a refactored toolchain and precise garbage collection and a fix to TLS skipping verification – along with the less major changes such as updated Unicode support and tweaks to net/http.

QEMU 2.0.0: The QEMU emulator and virtualiser has reached version 2.0.0 with its latest release. QEMU provides the emulation of one machine on another or, when provide that more authentic environment in a virtual machine There’s lots new, like the first support for KVM on AArch64 (but plenty still to implement) and support for the 64-bit ARMV8 instructions (and other 32-bit ARM enhancements) – things likely to become important as the desktop class 64-bit ARM chippery makes a play for the server and desktop space.

[caption id=“attachment_716” align=“alignright” width=“300”] The Embest BeagleBone Black looks like it’ll be appearing outside China now[/caption] It’s been hard to get the BeagleBone Black(BBB); limited production capabilities have fought with some big adoption stories. If you are unfamiliar with the BBB, its a small board computer in the same size factor as the Raspberry Pi, but with eMMC storage, micro-SD slot and lots of I/O pins - what it lacks in media player cores, it makes up for in clock speed.

Fresh Varnish: Varnish Cache, a popular HTTP reverse proxy, has had version 4.0 released – version 3.0 came out two and a half years ago. The new version can now cache streamed objects, refetch expired objects in the background and security has been hardened up. There’s also a new query language to help dig through Varnish’s extensive logs. Erlang Enhanced: Version 17.0 of Erlang/OTP has been published - The new version of the languag –, renown for its support for concurrency, high availability and scalability – and its middleware libraries (the OTP) now runs on OSE, a POSIX compliant multicore real-time and fault tolerant operating system.

Heartbleeds out: So the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability is out and about and everyone is checking their systems and updating to OpenSSL 1.0.1g (go straight to the [source]/source or wait for your OS distribution to update - it won’t be long and if it is long, consider another distribution). It’s tempting to use the various Heartbleed test sites out there, it is much safer and trustable to test for it yourself.