Codepope's Development Hell

Graph Edited: The Directed Graph Editor is a rather stylish implementation of a graph editor in JavaScript ising the D3 library. It’s part of a more extensive project, the Modal Logic Playground published under an MIT licence. PostGIS 2.1.0: For those who like their databases geographically aware, the latest 2.1.0 update to PostGIS, which brings spatial and geographic objects to PostgreSQL, has been announced. The update’s headline features are performance improvements and a wide range of new or enhanced functions.

If you are just getting around to looking at MongoDB – the NoSQL, JavaScript driven, JSON document database – then 10gen’s new MongoDB Web Shell at try.mongodb.org may be of use. It’s a tiny shell designed to help in education for the NoSQL database by offering a subset of the JavaScript and MongoDB API that users would find with a full MongoDB installation. That means you can create data and manipulate it from the comfort of your own browser.

So, we’re one week in on Codescaling.com and hopefully you are finding it useful. If you have any feedback… drop it off in the comments here, or on Google+ or even on Twitter where we’re @codescaling. Its been mentioned to me already that it might be useful to touch more on operating systems, updates and the like, treating them like the petri dish of code. Agree? Disagree? This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

In one of the less typical cases of licence compliance, last month, code for an exFAT driver from Samsung landed on GitHub. ExFAT is an improved version of the FAT filesystem which is covered by a patent. LWN covered the immediate fallout as the code appeared to be GPL licensed but also appeared to be have been released only as proprietary binary code. One suspicion was the code had been developed based on existing FAT code for Linux while others noted that as code linked to the kernel, it should be GPLv2 licensed.

QEMU 1.6.0: The machine emulator and virtualiser, QEMU, has been updated. More live migration support and options, more ARM instructions supported, PowerPC Mac OS X guest support are among the highlights. Full details in the change log. Listening to Github: Choir.io is a realtime event monitor for Github which converts the events into an ambient soundscape to give developers a different way of interacting with the flow of change. There’s a preview of the system with the public GitHub events too.

Mavibot: A new project to create a replacement for JDBM in the Apache Directory Server, Mavibot, just released the first milestone code for its MVCC BTree implementation. They aim to offer a faster alternative with concurrent reads and writes, transactions, bulk loads, multi-version support and in-memory BTree. Brackets: Adobe’s web-centric open source editor Brackets is now available to preview on Linux. The editor depends on the Chromium Embedded Framework and has required work to make that deliverable on Ubuntu and Debian.

Meteor is a very clever Node/JavaScript framework which I will admit to have been using in the recent past. It allows developers to create live updating, multiple screen apps without having to delve too much into the required magic of how the data gets from A to B,C and D - check out the screencasts and examples for a better idea. Now the developers have announced the latest update, version 0.

As we previously mentioned, there have been problems with Bitcoin wallets on Android due to implementation problems with SecureRandom on Android not having enough entropy to be cryptographically useful and this has lead to Bitcoin theft. But, the problem has got worse. It was assumed by many, us included, that this was traceable to Android’s use of the broken Apache Harmony code for Secure Random. Now though, a posting on the Android Developers blog lightly titled “Some SecureRandom Thoughts” shows that Google did pick up on the problem with the Apache Harmony code and replaced it in 4.

Basho have announced that the freshly available Riak CS 1.4’s highlight feature is better OpenStack integration. If you’ve heard of Riak but not Riak CS, CS stands for cloud storage and it basically builds on top of Riak’s capabilities to offer a highly available storage system with an S3 compatible API. Great if you want to get into the storage business or replace AWS S3 with your own systems.

Firefox sharpens tools: Mozilla just detailed the new developer features for Firefox 25, just going into alpha/aurora. The ability to “black box” common libraries so that they are no longer in the stack trace, an option to edit and resend network requests in the network monitor, CSS autocompletion in the inspector (hussah!), in-frame Javascript execution and profile data import and export. Set your timers, in 12 weeks these will be in stable Firefox.