Codepope's Development Hell

ARM64 and iPhone explained: A useful look at what is actually changing with Apple’s A7 and ARM64 architecture from Mike Ash’s blog. Worth a read especially for the repurposed isa pointer. GNU Hurd Updates: On the 30th anniversary of the GNU project, the Hurd developers released an update to the project’s operating system along with an update to GNU Mach and RPC translator GNU MIG. GNU APL 1.0 Lands: APL is one of the venerable languages dating back to 1964 which has classically been associated with number crunching.

[ Ubuntu 13.10’s only beta: The “Final Beta” for 13.10’s awfully codenamed “Saucy Salamander” has been announced so those wanting to give it a try before the 17 October final release, this is your chance. There’s an Ubuntu for phones image in among the images for the first time too. The release notes have details on how to upgrade and install. With only a 9 month supported lifespan from its release, you may want to consider waiting for next April’s 14.

Ceylon goes beta: Red Hat’s own JVM-hosted language, Ceylon, has been declared feature-complete and released as a 1.0 beta. There’s a formal language spec, command line tools, SDK and a beta of an Eclipse based IDE for Ceylon too. Lots of language features have been added coming up to beta, including annotations, static methods, try for resources, switch statements that know strings and characters and more. VLC 2.1 debuts: Every coder needs a video player that can handle any format.

Mozilla’s Fira font: Mozilla has released a new open source (SIL Open Font Licence) font called Fira Sans. This is the Firefox OS typeface and comes in light, regular, medium and bold weights. There’s also a monospaced variant in regular and bold. Source for the font is available on GitHub. Fedora 20 Alpha: On schedule for the revised schedule, the alpha of Fedora 20 has been released. As previously mentioned, and in the announcement, there’s lots of updates and enhancements including ARM as a primary architecture, latest GNOME and KDE, the undefaulting of SendMail and Syslog and a better NetworkManager.

JetBrains has announced that PyCharm 3, its Python IDE, is following the route pioneered by their Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA and getting an open source community edition and a feature laden professional edition. The JetBrains idea is that the core features of an IDE, the editing and debugging, are better built in the open while they look at developing features that users can get a reasonable return on investment. “The ROI on code completion is huge” has been said by no-one ever while “Having the IDE handle my database models and framework integration has saved me hours” is a thing.

Want to build your own $366.95 tablet based on the Raspberry Pi Model B? Well, now you can with the DukePad. You’ll also need to do some laser cut acrylics to make the actual case and then assemble it; it’s inspired by the PiBow case and comes as a set of cut acrylic sheets which stack up to hold all the components. The software stack that the DukePad runs is based around JavaSE Embedded 8, JavaFX and it packages apps as OSGi modules.

Ruby 2.10 previewed: The first preview release of Ruby 2.10 has been announced. For a detailed list of features already in 2.10, check the tracker including a Generational GC for CRuby, BigNum’s that use 128 bit integers, TCP Fast Open support for client and server, frozen String literals and more. Ruby 2.10 is expected to be released before the end of the year. Let’s Play 2.2: The Play framework for Java and Scale’s version 2.

Go 1.2’s coming: The first release candidate for Go 1.2 has been released. Lots of changes though the developers say its “a smaller delta from 1.0 to 1.1”. Read up on whats coming in the Go 1.2 Release notes and look out especially for the changes in the use of nil. If you want to test it, downloads are at the project’s Google Code page. iOS7’s Multipath: There’s a difference between having code that works and having code in production and according to NetworkWorld Apple just made that jump with iOS7 and Multipath TCP.

Extra Scaling is when CodeScaling does something slightly different. In this case, we talked to NGINX Inc, the company behind the NGINX web server and reverse proxy, who recently announced they were rolling out a commercial subscription support service, NGINX Plus, which also included a number of commercially licensed, closed source modules. This, as is the way of these things, caused some controversy and consternation in the FOSS community. The devil of these things is always in the details, so we got in touch with NGINX Inc’s CEO and team to get some answers from them on those details.

Feedly API opens: Feedly, one of the web-based RSS aggregator replacements that stepped in when Google dropped the Reader ball, has announced its opening up its feedly Cloud API to all. And its quite an extensive API with realtime hubs, read-tracking, personalisation graphs and more. An existing app ecosystem may be about to get a lot bigger and diverse. RenderScript for all: Google has been adding feature to Android’s RenderScript computation framework over the recent releases and says it has been being asked for those features to be evenly available in older versions of Android.