Codepope's Development Hell

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.

TypeScript hits 1.0: Microsoft’s take on reworking JavaScript, TypeScript, has hit version 1.0 and is now accepting pull requests on the open source compiler (though it’s bug fixes only for now.). Meanwhile, Microsoft have embarked on an open source fest with the creation of the dotNet Foundation, now home to a .NET compiler, micro frameworks, Couchbase for .Net, various SDKs, ASP.NET modules and other stuff. And to top it all off there’s WinJS, a set of UI controls and scaffolding for making Windows applications.

Linux 3.14 lands: And another ten week dev cycle of Linux ends with the release of Linux 3.14. There’s a new realtime scheduler (deadline), event triggers for tracing, graphics driver updates (stablised Broadwell support, NVIDIA GK110 support, dynamic power management for newer AMD hardware), new TCP autocorking for better small packet handling and the usual gamut of driver improvements, patches and enhancements. For a good list, check LWN.net’s three part listing (1, 2, 3) (and if you are interested in Linux and don’t subscribe to LWN.

GNOME 3.12: And so GNOME 3.12 has arrived with updates all around. Over here at Codescaling, we’re looking forward to the improvements to HiDPI display support . We had been spoiled by Apple’s fairly smooth switch to HiDPI support but on Linux and Windows its all, surprisingly, a work in progress. Our GNOME desktop on a HiDPI dispay brings a range of font sizes to the screen, only some of which are appropriate.

Java 8 lands: So, after what feels like an age and after its been through the thresher of reality, Java 8 has officially arrived. What’s changed? Lambda expressions, functional interfaces, default methods for interfaces, streams, a new Date API, repeatable annotations, the Nashorn JavaScript engine… there’s a good quick intro to some the language features but theres going to be plenty of settling in to do. For all the docs go to the release notes, downloads can be found on the Java SE downloads page.

Python 3.4 is here: After many months of development, no changes to the language but lots of enhancements in the CPython implentation and standard library improvements, Python 3.4 has arrived. Before you dash off to the Python 3.4 download page, reflect for a moment that now Python now has pip as its bundled installer and should always be available or that there’s an OO API to filesystems (pathlib), a new async I/O API, support for enumeration types, fresh pickle and more and then go to the What’s new in Python 3.

Docker 0.9 unloads: Docker bumps its version number to Docker 0.9 and as it approaches version 1.0 makes a big change. Docker’s been pretty tightly tied to Linux Containers (LXC) technology to run applications packaged with it but in 0.9 there’s now execution drivers so the option to plug in any one of a range of isolation systems is now available. “OpenVZ, systemd-nspawn, libvirt-lxc, libvirt-sandbox, qemu/kvm, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones, and even good old chroot” are on Docker’s planned list with more to come from various projects.

Python 3.3.5 released: The latest update to Python 3.3 fixes two regressions, in zipimport and executing scripts and alleviates a potential denial of service. Mac users should pay specific attention as this 3.3.5 version now fully support OS X 10.9 fixing a bug which could cause “previous versions of Python to crash when typing in interactive mode”. Persona (non grata): Mozilla’s Persona is being “transferred to community ownership”. As yet another project is cut adrift from Mozilla in a fuzzy, vaguely friendly way, its worth making a note that you shouldn’t bet on Mozilla projects for the long term, unless they are called Firefox or run on a phone.

Node-RED updated: The most excellent graphical UI for connecting the Internet of Things (or just things in general), Node-RED has been updated to version 0.6. The announcement notes the process of separating the admin and server authentication to make deployment more robust has begun. Node-RED has nodes that accept HTTP connections and has a HTTP admin front end and previously these were all under one HTTP authentication mechanism - now the UI and nodes are more separate with the option to set a user/password for each.