Codepope's Development Hell

Web Storage API: The W3C have moved the Web Storage API to the Recommendation stage which means its pretty much done and in as a standard. The API gives web applications a local key/value store in the browser. The user typically has to grant permission for storage and its strictly limited to a maximum of between 2.5 and 10MB though that has been abusable. Web Storage should though provide a handy tool for application developers.

The important things for developers in a rush… Enable JavaScript as a preference setting checkbox is gone. The logic behind this, according to the bug report is “If a user unchecks this box, they’ll effectively render the browser unusable on a large number of sites. We should not ship this option to hundreds of millions of users”. It doesn’t lock JavaScript on though; you can still switch it with about:config, NoScript or similar.

FreeBSD: FreeBSD 9.2 is on schedule and with the release of 9.2 RC1 is ready for extensive testing. If all goes to plan then we should see a release at the end of August. OpenMP: From last month but important, the OpenMP 4.0(PDF) specification has been released. The updated API for parallel programming on shared memory systems has support for hardware based accelerators, SIMD handling, new error handling, the ability to set thread affinity, parallel task groups and synchronisation, Fortran 2003 support and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, master of kernel stable releases, has declared Linux 3.10 to be this years long term stable kernel. That means he’ll be keeping releasing patches for it for “at least two years”, so folks putting together Linux distributions or products based on Linux can count on 3.10 for two years without a need to hop up a version or two to get a fix. Kroah-Hartman also mentions that LTSI, the project which manages a stable patchset for Linux in consumer electronics, is rebasing on 3.

Discussions appear to have begun on a plan to integrate the Tor anonymous browsing network software with Mozilla’s Firefox. In the wake of the use of a Firefox vulnerability to expose users of Freedom Hosting’s “hidden services” site, Mozilla’s CTO tweeted “Maybe we should just adopt, support, and bundle Tor in Firefox… “. A positive response for the proposal from Jacob Applebaum led to Eich saying he is getting “key Mozillans on board” with the idea.

Hello, and welcome to Codescaling. These are very early days for the big idea, but what we hope to create is a site of interest to coders at all scales, from the smallest embedded systems, the handiest of mobile devices, the still default desktops, the essential servers and the accumulating clouds. Why such a wide coverage? Well, consider how computing has covered all these different scales of system, yet they are often treated as silos of knowledge but at the same time are becoming increasingly interdependent - The mobile phone that relies on servers and clouds, the clouds that use arrays of embedded sensors to build big data, the desktops where the code typically crafted for these applications.

Hello, and welcome to Codescaling. This started off as a big plan, then things changes and now, it’s going to be me, Dj Walker-Morgan, aka Codepope (it’s like my version of “Starlord”) writing about the things I’m doing, including the interesting bits of work and the fun bits of domestic creation I engage in. There’ll be a bit of HackWimbledon in here, a pop up hackspace I run. There’ll be code, planning and probably some nonsense.