Codepope's Development Hell

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.

LXC goes 1.0: Linux Containers, LXC, is now at version 1.0, a major milestone which also brings together and completes a lot of things that have been working their way through the Linux kernel, like support for unprivileged containers, long term stuff like a stable API – this’ll be supported for five years, bindings for Lua and Python3 (and Go and Ruby out-of-tree support), backing storage support for directories, btrfs, zfs and more, cloning, snapshotting… and you may wonder “Hey, doesn’t Docker do many of these things” and yes it does, so it’ll be interesting to watch how things all work out.

Systemd - the d is for dominates: The Debian Technical Committee decided that, after quite a bumpy process, that it would follow Fedora, Arch Linux, Mageia and openSUSE in planning to switch to systemd in the next release. The Debian change rippled down to Ubuntu where, probably sooner than anyone anticipated, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would switch too. Upstart, Canonical’s own init, will continue to be supported, especially as the forthcoming 14.

mqttwarn: Don’t want to run Node-RED but do want to route MQTT messages around? Jan-Piet Mens may have the application for you in the Python based mqttwarn, a pluggable framework which can subscribe to many MQTT topics and send them on to files, other MQTT systems, Twitter, SMTP, Redis, SQLite and Mac OS X notifications. He explains that the instigator for this was being introduced to Pushover, an iOS and Android notification app… which is now also supported by mqttwarn.

ElasticSearch 1.0 springs out: The search-oriented NoSQL database, built upon Lucene, ElasticSearch has hit version 1.0. It’s a big release with a lot of changes and a lot of new features – an API for selective snapshot/restore, federated search, aggregation, distributed percolation and software “circuit breakers” to stop some more dangerous actions from overwhelming the system. An interesting post from Found.no on ElasticSearch sums up the pros and cons (like no authentication or authorisation) places ElasticSearch in the domain of “secondary store” to be used alongside a primary database.

FreeBSD Journal Edition One: The FreeBSD Journal has published its first digital edition for iPad, Android and Kindle devices. With 6 issues planned for each year, a $20 subscription and an editorial board drawn from the luminaries of the FreeBSD world, it looks like it has everything a FreeBSD fan could want. The first edition, themed around FreeBSD 10, has a five page look at that releases Clang support, ten pages on implementing system control nodes, a white paper on NYI’s use of FreeBSD as part of being an ISP, a six page guide to getting FreeBSD up and running on the BeagleBone Black, an article on ZFS and the future of storage and columns on the news from the ports tree, OS work and a look back on FreeBSD history.

Docker 0.8: As Docker, the application-packaging-with-containers platform, switches to a new release schedule, the first of the monthly releases has arrived and Docker 0.8 has couple of new goodies along with the focus on quality and . One item worth mentioning is the official support for Mac OS X. No, they haven’t added containers to OS X, but instead use a daemon as an intermediary between a VirtualBox VM populated with a 24MB Linux image based on Tiny Core.

Facebook’s Conceal revealed: Facebook have open sourced Conceal, a library for encrypting files on Android devices. The company uses the library for encrypting data that its apps store on SD cards. It uses pre-selected OpenSSL algorithms, picked for efficient memory management and speed, and gets the library down to 85KB by not trying to be a general purpose crypto kit. An interesting bit of pragmatism which means Facebook’s apps can happily encrypt on low-end Android devices, Conceal is available under a BSD licence with its source on GitHub.

LibreOffice 4.2: The LibreOffice folks have rolled out their latest release, LibreOffice version 4.2 which includes a decent selection of new features, with the headliners being improved OOXML roundtripping, a GPU/OpenCL utilising Calc engine, enhancements to Windows installation and management and better Windows 7/8 integration, an expert configuration window and a more optimal start screen. Download from the usual place. Mercurial shines: The other other distributed version control system (DVCS), Mercurial, has just has an update to version 2.