Codepope's Development Hell

GNU Make 4.0: GNU Make 4.0 is the latest version of the GNU Project’s version of the Make utility. The release’s headline feature is the integration of GNU Guile, the Scheme-based extention language recommended for GNU projects, into the compilation orchestrator. Other additions include an option to sync output to avoid jumbling results from parallel makes, tracing of targets, a switch to disable all debugging settings, various enhancements to the Windows version, the implementation of “::=” for POSIX portable make files and of “!

Say you wanted to build a games machine with an Arduino at its core, you’d might be a trifle stuck with a stock Arduino. You could do a lot of the interfacing to controllers or the logic, but what about the display and sound. Well, previously you may have got a Gameduino which gave you 400x300 512 colour VGA output, hardware sprites and audio in a nifty Arduino shield. It is pure 8 bit epicness.

Microsoft’s Monthly: It’s remote code execution holes all the way down in this months Patch Tuesday. From a bundle of Internet Explorere fixes in MS13-080 to a crunchy critical remote code execution and extra ‘important’ privilege escalation holes in Windows drivers, MS13-081 going all the way back to XP SP3 and all the way up to Windows 8. But wait, there’s more according to the cumulative advisory, MS13-Oct. Critical remote code execution holes in .

PC-BSD 9.2 arrives: Like your BSD with the sharp bits filed off for ease of use? PC-BSD is a user-friendly version of FreeBSD built for the desktop, but, as the newly released PC-BSD 9.2 shows, that doesn’t mean you get to miss out on features. For example, the FreeBSD 9.2 based PC-BSD 9.2 comes with bootable ZFS environments, so you can create a boot environment and select it from GRUB2.

Although Ruby 2.1 hasn’t been released yet, the just release Rubinus Ruby runtime’s version 2.0 is aiming towards being Ruby 2.1 compatible. Rubinus, for those who don’t know of it, is an implementation of Ruby which uses an LLVM JIT compiler, generational garbage collector and native threads to give a Ruby runtime that can run efficiently on all CPU cores of a modern platform. The developers are also maintainers of RubySpec, a 20,000 plus strong library of specifications which map MRI (Matz’s Ruby Implementation), created to assist maintain compatibility with the ‘reference’ Ruby implementation; RubySpec is now used by many other Ruby implementations to ensure compatibility.

The text-search library Lucene and Solr, the search platform built on top of it, have both been updated to version 4.5. Version 4.4 came out in July so what’s changed in this version bump? Well, first of all, for Lucene, the DocValues mechanism which allows typed storage to be associated with documents has been updated to allow for missing values and there’s now an in-memory supporting DocIDSet which is more efficient for carrying around smaller lists of documents.

[ NetBSD 6.1.2 released: The second security/bug-fix release for NetBSD 6.1 is now available with one security fix and fixes for KVM shutdown, USB device enumeration, networking with npf, udf file systems and pthreads. There’s also updated timezone data, a corrected regression for some X apps and a fix for some Emacs 24 crashes. A Lua JVM?: An intriguing experiment has appeared in the form of luje, a “toy” Java virtual machine written in Lua.

LibreOffice gets a maintenance bump: There’s an update for LibreOffice 4.1, the just announced 4.1.2 but the Document Foundation are still not up to recommending it for enterprise adoption and say a 4.0.5 (and soon 4.0.6) version of the office suite is still recommended for that. As usual they’ve scattered the changelogs over 3 different documents (at some point they might think about consolidating minor point updates changelogs into oooh a single release note), but in summary, things have been fixed most of which are listed in the RC1 changelog.

Arduino Tre - Bristling with connections. Arduino has been working with both Intel and TI to create two new boards, both of which are quite interesting departures from their previous designs. Both run Linux, in different ways but while one tries to replace the AVR microcontroller of the classic Arduino, the other hugs the classic Arduino deep into its design. The first board announced was the Arduino Galileo which is powered by Intel’s Quark SoC X1000 running at 400Mhz and in due to be available in November and, according to some reports, will be “less than $80”.

LMCTFY contains itself: A Google project, LMCTFY (Let Me Contain That For You) has emerged in the companies GitHub repository. It’s an open source version of Google’s container stack for Linux though it’s more application isolation and lacks Docker’s filesystem isolation. It’s apparently early days for the Apache licensed software but it will be one to keep an eye on as it could well turn into the basis for a Docker competitor.