Codepope's Development Hell

The other other open source IaaS Cloud, CloudStack, has had an update with the release of CloudStack 4.2. What’s new? reveals a lot of work which the announcement summarises as 57 new features and 29 improved features such as the ability to plug in external or internal S3-compatible storage services and support for Cisco’s UCS compute chassis and SolidFire storage arrays. A trawl through the release notes shows that there is far more than the headline items though.

The news that XMir and Mir will not be in desktop Ubuntu 13.10 is hardly a surprise. Canonical set an aggressive development schedule and its one they are going to miss on the desktop. Ubuntu Touch is already running Mir as it has no legacy X apps due to it being yet to be released as a finished product and not supporting X anyway. But XMir is critical for the desktop if Canonical want to push Mir into the space they’ve assigned it as core to their graphics strategy.

Eclipse erects Mosquitto net: The MQTT broker Mosquitto is being proposed as a new open source project at Eclipse. It not only implements the TCP based MQTT but has support for MQTT-SN, a connectionless version for UDP and other networks. The plan is to merge Mosquitto and RSMB, a previously closed source MQTT broker implementation, at Eclipse. If, or more when, this proposal is accepted, it will mean that the Eclipse M2M initiative will have a full MQTT cross platform stack under their wing.

RethinkDB gets multi-indexing: The developers of the open source, NoSQL database RethinkDB have announced version 1.10 which comes with the ability to index rows with fields of multiple values, like say an list of tags for a blog entry. Looking for all records with a particular tag previously required slow iteration, but now with the multi-index it is possible to index the set of values within the field and then to “get_all” for a particular tag value using that index.

OpenStack Hardware Calculator: Mirantis have an interesting OpenStack calculator which lets you how many and how big you want your average virtual machine, pick hardware and networking vendor and whether you want high availability or not. It comes back to you with a couple of configurations based on those requirements and $ pricing of the cloud’s hardware. Boot2Gecko on Rock and Paper: Via has announced a preview of Boot2Gecko for it’s APC single board ARM-based PCs “Rock” and “Paper”.

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.