Codepope's Development Hell

Google’s Creative Lab has released Coder, an operating system image for the Raspberry Pi which can be booted from an SD card and offers an easy to use environment for learning about coding in JavaScript, HTML5, CSS and working with Node.js. It is in fact a relatively portable Node.js application which could be hosted on the desktop, in the cloud or wherever it is needed. Google have crafted the image for the Pi so that its an easy to deliver, and dare we say attention grabbing, way of putting the technology in educators hands.

WordPress 3.6 vulnerability explored: The serialisation vulnerability which was fixed in WordPress 3.6.1 is looked at in detail by its discoverer in a blog posting which explores the issue of passing user content through unserialize() and why it can blow up so badly. Container power: Containers revolutionised the shipping industry… could they do the same for the cloud? There’s a lot of activity around container based clouds which we’re looking into.

Linus vs SSDs: It appears that Linus Torvalds is now working off his laptop to finish the Linux 3.12 merge after his desktop’s SSD drive died on him. Linus doesn’t have backups though as he’s moved to using “replaceable machines” instead. Oh, and apparently he’d upgraded the rest of the machine ten days ago. FirefoxOS Security: Trend Micro took a look at FirefoxOS’s security model and have some examples of how it could be exploited, via direct attacks on the B2G process in the Gecko layer and what mitigates against that.

Although Java 8’s Developer Preview was just released, Oracle has been busy making sure that Java 7 is still well maintained with the release of JDK 7 Update 40, the first update release under the new update versioning scheme. The new update is more about bug fixes and features and although there are security changes, there’s no security fixes in it. JavaFX has now become part of the JDK with this release, though it remains to be seen if JavaFX will gain traction as a GUI platform before Oracle engineer Swing to depend on it.

The Developer Preview for Java 8, aka Milestone 8 of JDK8 on Oracle’s schedule, has shipped. Mark Reinhold, Oracle’s Chief Java Architect, posted on his blog that this was a good time for developers who have been holding off trying out any of the previous 7 development milestones to give it a go as it is “intended for broad testing by developers”. Java 8 hit feature complete in June but the security issues that have been grabbing headlines and in some cases control of systems have been pushing the timeline out for Java 8 as developers have been pulled in to the security firefight.

If you don’t know Apache Camel, think of it like a huge set of connecting plumbing for the enterprise which comes with pumps, filters and all the other plumbing gear needed to make the data flow - and then add in a reference manual on how to perform common plumbing tasks. This is what them there city folks call an “enterprise integration framework” with “Enterprise Integration Patterns”. Yet another way to look at it is “a bunch of Java libraries which make connecting Java applications together across a network more interoperable and reliable”.

The PostgreSQL team have released PostgreSQL 9.3 ending the beta cycle which started in May. 9.3’s headline feature is the newly writable Foreign Data Wrappers (fdw). In 9.1 and 9.2, foreign data wrappers were read-only, allowing the database to only ingest information made available through an “fdw” driver, taking them from a legacy source or other database and materialising them as a table. In 9.3 though, these “fdw” drivers can be enhanced and support changes to the fdw tables being reflected back in the source.

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

In this bumper snippets pack, Perl for iOS, the end of Thunderbird ESR sort of, the new CLI for Amazon Web Services, Adafruits tiny Trinket, Google’s F1 database on paper and a missed update to a classic UNIX book: This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

Version 2.0 of the Apache Cassandra database has just been released. The Apache Software Foundation are leading on the addition of lightweight transations and triggers to the database. Cassandra originated at Facebook who donated it to Apache in 2008. It is designed to work with massive data sets and mixes Google’s Big Table data model with Facebook’s own distributed architecture Dynamo. Datastax, who produce a commercial version of Cassandra, have the detailed blog entries on lightweight transactions which can ensure an update is committed to all replicas through a prepare/promise/propose/accept process, on triggers which can start processing tasks as changes in tables are detected and on the enhancements made to CQL, Cassandra’s SQLish query language.