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Developer News Slashdot.com Developer News

Slashdot: Developers

LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust



New submitter someWebGeek writes "LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits. One of the most encouraging aspects, as noted by Ryan Paul in an article at Ars, is that non-corporate code contributions by independent volunteers constitute the largest slice of the latest commit-pie."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/r98WOirh4mA/libreoffice-developer-community-increasingly-robust


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Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?



__roo writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of companies are replacing traditional meetings with daily stand-ups. The article points out that stand-up meetings date back to at least World War I, and that in some place, late employees 'sometimes must sing a song like "I'm a Little Teapot," do a lap around the office building or pay a small fine.' Do Slashdot readers feel that stand-up meetings are useful? Do they make a difference? Are they a gimmick?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/L4_zd3nBKJk/ask-slashdot-are-daily-stand-up-meetings-more-productive


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Firefox's Web Push Notification System Announced



eldavojohn writes "Describing Notifications as 'somewhere between email and IM,' Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, 'It's important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla's push notification system moves beyond that limitation.' Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/OwB6I9P4r1U/firefoxs-web-push-notification-system-announced


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Google Starts Scanning Android Apps



eldavojohn writes "A recent blog post has Android developers talking about Google finally scanning third party applications for malware. Oddly enough, Google claims this service (codenamed 'Bouncer') has been active for some time: 'The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise.' So it appears that they allow the software to be sold even before it is scanned and it also appears that no one has been bitten by a false positive from this software. Apparently Bouncer is not as oppressive as Apple's solution although given recent news its effectiveness must be questioned. Have any readers had their apps flagged or pulled by Bouncer?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/A0E0s4aB3Ko/google-starts-scanning-android-apps


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Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation



mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation. Craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course, Perl. This is a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/1t-U96SGn_w/craigslist-donates-100000-to-the-perl-foundation


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New BBC Sports Website Makes Heavy Use of RDF



New submitter whyloginwhysubscribe writes "A technical blog post describes how the BBC has rolled out the latest changes to its sports website in anticipation of the Summer Olympics in London. The innovative content management system extends the already available dynamic semantic publishing, which enables their journalists 'to spend more time creating great content and less time managing that content.' The post covers some of the technical and lots of the HCI / UI design decisions and is accompanied by a non-technical overview of the re-design."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/8CSAbzntUnE/new-bbc-sports-website-makes-heavy-use-of-rdf


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Wikipedia Chooses Lua As Its New Template Language



bonch writes "In an attempt to tackle the inefficient complexity of its current template system, Wikipedia will be adopting the Lua scripting language. Known most for its use in videogame scripting, particularly World of Warcraft, Lua is lightweight and designed for easy integration into existing applications. The transition is expected to begin after the release of MediaWiki 1.19, possibly in May." Basically, the template system started turning into an ugly programming language. There was debate over using Javascript or Lua; Lua ultimately won due to implementation concerns. The mailing list threads announcing the decision and discussing the change have further details.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/UJ9DMMXLgao/wikipedia-chooses-lua-as-its-new-template-language


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Ask Slashdot: Transitioning From 'Hacker' To 'Engineer'?



antifoidulus writes "I'm about to get my masters in Computer Science and start out (again) in the 'real world.' I already have a job lined up, but there is one thing that is really nagging me. Since my academic work has focused almost solely on computer science and not software engineering per se, I'm really still a 'hacker,' meaning I take a problem, sketch together a rough solution using the appropriate CS algorithms, and then code something up (using a lot of prints to debug). I do some basic testing and then go with it. Obviously, something like that works quite well in the academic environment, but not in the 'real world.' Even at my previous job, which was sort of a jack-of-all-trades (sysadmin, security, support, and programming), the testing procedures were not particularly rigorous, and as a result I don't think I'm really mature as an 'engineer.' So my question to the community is: how do you make the transition from hacker (in the positive sense) to a real engineer. Obviously the 'Mythical Man Month' is on the reading list, but would you recommend anything else? How do you get out of the 'hacker' mindset?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/kRjXNGV1rhc/ask-slashdot-transitioning-from-hacker-to-engineer


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Rockbox Developers Talk Open Source Firmware



angry tapir writes "I recently caught up with some of the key developers of Rockbox: An open source firmware replacement for the stock firmware shipped on MP3 players. The project, which has been active for over a decade, currently supports products from more than half a dozen manufacturers, including Apple, Arhcos, iRiver and Toshiba. It involves extensive reverse engineering to figure out how the devices' stock firmwares operate, as well as the challenge of developing for greatly varied targets. You can read the interview here (or the full Q&As with the project's founder and some of the developers involved in it)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/SqyH6Jgggr4/rockbox-developers-talk-open-source-firmware


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Ask Slashdot: Money-Making Home-Based Tech Skills?



New submitter ThatGamerChick writes "I'm a stay-at-home mom, but I'd like to be a work-at-home mom. I've done a few writing gigs, but I'm not a really good writer and cannot charge the fees needed for it to be worth my time. I'm just looking for something that I can teach myself in a few months and start taking small projects and working my way up from there. I've found that PHP, HTML and CSS to be the most demanded skills on sites like Elance, but the talent pool is flooded with overseas workers and Americans with so much more experience than me. Even when I was offering writing and virtual admin services on Elance I was having a hard time against them. So I'm asking here, because I think most of you may have a good insight on this type of thing as an employer of freelancers or as the freelancer themselves." What success have you had, either working from home, or employing those who do?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/aXnoeb74enw/ask-slashdot-money-making-home-based-tech-skills


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America's Future Is In Software, Not Hardware



New submitter tcjr2006 writes "Obama's State of the Union focused on the return of manufacturing jobs to America. This New Yorker story makes the case that the manufacturing jobs aren't going to come back, and he should be focusing on software. Quoting: 'Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum. That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop "an economy that’s built to last."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/EyiaUGlVafA/americas-future-is-in-software-not-hardware


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Yahoo's Project To Disrupt Mobile Publishing



waderoush writes "Right now, content publishers who want to reach readers through dedicated mobile apps have to hire a separate engineering team to build each app — one for iOS (based on Objective-C), another for Android (Java), a third for Windows Phone (C#), etc. Yahoo's Platform Technology Group is working on an alternative: a set of JavaScript and HTML-based tools that would handle core UI and data-management tasks inside mobile apps for any operating system, moving developers closer to the nirvana of 'write once, run everywhere.' The tools are gradually being open-sourced — starting with Mojito, a framework for running hybrid server/browser module-widgets ('mojits') — and Yahoo is showing off what they can do in the form of Livestand, the news reader app it released for the iPad in November. In his first extensive public interview about Mojito and the larger 'Cocktails' project, Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect at Yahoo's Platform Technology Group, explains how the tools work and why the company is sharing them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/IXVHvH2pGQg/yahoos-project-to-disrupt-mobile-publishing


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OzLog: Unlimited Private Data Retention For Australia?



AHuxley writes "Australia would like to follow the EU down the 'European Directive on Data Retention' path. Law enforcement agencies may have the option to request a log of all a users of interest telco usage without any review or time limits. From the article: 'The proposal — known popularly as ‘OzLog’ — first came to light in June 2010, when AGD confirmed it had been examining the European Directive on Data Retention (PDF) to consider whether it would be beneficial for Australia to adopt a similar regime. The directive requires telcos to record data such as the source, destination and timing of all emails and telephone calls – even including internet telephony.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/RTj5WY-Itx4/ozlog-unlimited-private-data-retention-for-australia


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Firefox Javascript Engine Becomes Single Threaded



An anonymous reader writes with news about work on Mozilla's Javascript engine. Quoting Mozilla engineer Luke Wagner's blog: "With web workers in separate runtimes, there were no significant multi-threaded runtime uses remaining. Furthermore, to achieve single-threaded compartments, the platform features that allowed JS to easily ship a closure off to another thread had been removed since closures fundamentally carry with them a reference to their original enclosing scope. Even non-Mozilla SpiderMonkey embeddings had reportedly experienced problems that pushed them toward a similar shared-nothing design. Thus, there was little reason to maintain the non-trivial complexity caused by multi-threading support. There are a lot of things that 'would be nice' but what pushed us over the edge is that a single-threaded runtime allows us to hoist a lot data currently stored per-compartment into the runtime. This provides immediate memory savings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/6B-Sc1tMCZI/firefox-javascript-engine-becomes-single-threaded


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Mozilla Releases Rust 0.1



MrSeb writes "After more than five years in the pipeline, Mozilla Labs and the Rust community have released the first alpha of the Rust programming language compiler. The Rust language emphasizes concurrency and memory safety, and — if everything goes to plan — is ultimately being groomed to replace C++ as Mozilla's compiled language of choice, with Firefox (or parts of it) eventually being re-written in Rust."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~3/SBHNKYVdJ7Y/mozilla-releases-rust-01


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