Java 8 lands: So, after what feels like an age and after its been through the thresher of reality, Java 8 has officially arrived. What’s changed? Lambda expressions, functional interfaces, default methods for interfaces, streams, a new Date API, repeatable annotations, the Nashorn JavaScript engine… there’s a good quick intro to some the language features but theres going to be plenty of settling in to do. For all the docs go to the release notes, downloads can be found on the Java SE downloads page. There’s also a NetBeans 8.0 release to go with the Java 8 release which includes JDK 8 support, including features like Lambdas and Streams, among many other enhancements.
Firefox 28 slips out: Quieter than ever, Mozilla’s Firefox 28 release has some interesting tweaks; VP9, the H.265 competitor, gets video decoding implemented; Mac OS X’s notification center becomes the destination for web notifications; WebM now gets Opus audio support; SPDY/2 is obsoleted by SPDY/3… oh and there’s 5 critical security fixes, three high, seven moderate and three low. If you’re running Firefox, you’ve probably updated already, if not you can download it for your system and language.
Wibbly wobbly timey wimey: An intruiging StackOverflow question asked why the difference between two times one second apart was over five minutes. The times were in 1927 and this was happening in a Shanghai locale - who knew there was an adjustment of 5 minutes 52 seconds to the clock there in that year? Well, one commenter did and it sheds light on how hard time can be to work with and how much information is wrapped up in those timezone files.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog