Codepope's Development Hell

It seems like less than a year ago when Eben Upton told Ars Technica that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was “a year or two away from thinking about” building new hardware. In less than a year, we’ve had the Model B+, the Model A+ and now, as a “Well-actually-we’ve-been-thinking-about-it-lots”, here’s the Raspberry Pi 2. The good? It’s a quad core 900Mhz A7 ARM chip, it’s got 1GB of RAM and it looks just like a Raspberry Pi B+.

And it’s another catchup as the world whizzes by… Cool 6502 Builds: Dirk Grappendorf has built a lovely looking 6502 based microcomputer but more importantly takes you step by step through the entire build process from generating the clock to getting Basic running on it. Illustrated with schematics and downloads, this is a great article to read if you want to get a feel for what’s involved in recreating a machine which never existed in the 80s.

Io.js is the spork of Node.js which is trying to put features the developers think have languished too long in development hell into a production codebase. We talked about it at the end of last year. Well, now there’s something tangible - a 1.0.0 in development release. What thats means is, top of the list, ES6 support with generators, templates and new string methods and more. Boom, huge improvement in JavaScript for developers living the Node thing.

An ESPtoy (the ESP8266 is the little blue board) from RaysHobby.net. Lots going on with the intriguing ESP8266 board. Coming out of China with no english documentation, this tiny board has the brains to run Lua and connect to WiFi, manage some GPIO and all it takes is… a lot of fiddling. But for $2 on ebay, you can get hacking the firmware, flashing exisitng firmwarefrom Windows like nodemcu (thats the one with the lua) or just have fun running it as a serial controlled Wi-Fi adapter.

Raspberry Pi’s are great little Linux devices but they have plenty of limitations when it comes to comes to wiring up to the analog world or just behaving like a micro-controller. There’s been various attempts to weld Pi and Arduino together (I have some) like the Dexter Industries’ BrickPi that plugs you into the Lego bricosystem or their Arduberry which brings Arduino shield connectors out the top of the board.

Did you know Mac OS X 10.10 had a hypervisor framework? No, me neither, but it does and that means you can do things with hypervisors without the need for kernel extensions and stuff. Pagetable.com shows you how to tap into it with an example of building a simple DOS emulator but goodness, this is backed with potential for some clever, easy to install, apps. Want some smooth animation in your JavaScript driven pages?

Collaborative editors are one of the mainstays of remote working… and they tend to have pad in the name. Just updated is Etherpad, in the form of Etherpad 1.5. This is a mostly bug fix and performance release but heck, it’s already packed full of goodies. Latest tricks include being able to HTTP POST files via curl into an Etherpad (handy if you are automating a documentation process) and a fast switching plugin.

For 2015, I thought I’d shake up the Codescaling site and see if I could get a bit more, well, life into things - catchups have become a chore so I’m going to try to shorten the distance between brain and keyboard. So, from now today I’ll be doing shorter, more regular posts on things which have just come onto my radar, but which should be worth having a look at.

What’s up with Node: So there’s been a fork in Node.js land with the appearance of IO.js. A group of core contributing developers have lost patience with Joyent, the developmental home of Node.js, and have set out to accelerate the development of the Async-JavaScript server side platform. This is the world of open source where people can vote with their time and effort. It’s easy to see both sides of the fork.

Facebook Go: When you develop a lot in Go, you make a lot of libraries and tools in Go. Facebook must be doing plenty because their new Facebook Go repository is full of code, much of it useful utilities for managing HTTP connections, mocking for tests, apps to test libraries like MySQL and MongoDB drivers and so on. Add to your resource list. HTTP2 Go: While we’re talking Go, there’s a HTTP2 library in development by Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick.