Codepope's Development Hell

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.

Mozilla updates: Firefox 24 and Thunderbird 24 landed yesterday. The release of Thunderbird sees the ESR version merged back into the main release tree and a couple of new tricks with zooming in compose windows, email supporting IDN based email addresses and ignoring message threads. There’s also six critical fixes in the update too. Firefox gets new Max scrollbars, right-closing tabs and tear off chat windows, SVG improvements, a better browser console and 7 critical fixes.

Expect the Exceptional: A system admin is faced with a regular pattern of emails arriving that confirm things have either worked or occasionally failed. The admin scans them for the “is on fire” part and acts accordingly. But there’s also the other case where no mail was generated, but how would you know that email hadn’t arrived. With that in mind, Alan Bell has just rolled out ExecptionalEmails.com. This is a system designed to detect that exceptional moment when the mails don’t appear or do appear and have trigger words in them and then make sure you realise that this exceptional thing has happened.

Urgent Django Update: There’s a security update for Django released on Sunday which has been rushed out as the issue was reported on the Django developers list and thus was already public. It’s a DoS problem wherein an attacker can use very large passwords to tie up the system as it hashes the password using PBKDF2. The fixes make passwords greater than 4K automatically fail authentication. Lua 5.1 exploitation: A detailed post on GitHub’s Gists looks at the process of escaping the Lua 5.

It most likely won’t be first but the first rippling schedule slip has arrived for Fedora 20 with its alpha release put back by a week to 24 September. Fedora acts as a trailblazer for many of Linux developments and is known for being able to slip past its original schedule with ease thanks to that trailblazing. Right now, two blocker bugs in particular are needing to be fixed to move forward to alpha and the delay means that all the subsequent milestones have moved a week too.

Qt goes with Chromium: The Qt toolkit has used a Qt port of WebKit for some time now to provide web content rendering. With Google forking WebKit to create Blink, Digia has been looking at what fork to follow and has now decided to go with Chromium and Blink. This means the QtWebKit development will be frozen after Qt 5.2 and the new QtWebEngine which will replace it is short some APIs (QWebElement and QObject embedding).