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The weekly digest for developers   
ISSUE 3 - February 22, 2012

A big welcome to new subscribers this week, in particular those from Hacker Newsletter! Issue 2 got some great responses so check it out if you missed it.

I don't plan for all issues to be this big but Status Code is still finding its feet content-wise. If you want to send any feedback, though, just fill out this single text box and I'll be sure to read all of your ideas and opinions. Thanks! - Peter.

headlines

Apache httpd 2.4 Released — Apache has released the first public release of the new generation 2.4 branch of its popular HTTP server, the first major release since 2005. Lots of new stuff but a new Lua embedding module, cloud-focused improvements and runtime loadable MPMs are all wins. // ReadWriteWeb
Julia: A New High Level Language — Julia is a new high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing. It includes a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, and an extensive mathematical function library. Why? They wanted 'the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby.'
Amazon Latest AWS Service: Simple Workflow Service — Amazon has unveiled the latest in its long line of Amazon Web Services, the Simple Workflow Service (SWF). It's a fully managed service for managing workflows and distributed tasks within your apps.
Apple Releases 'Command Line Tools for Xcode' — Apple has released a 171MB download that includes GCC, proprietary headers, and everything you need to enable 'UNIX-style development via Terminal' without doing a full Xcode install.

reading

Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More) — A profile of the popular GitHub code hosting service, how it was founded, how it's run, and how the ideas it's spreading are affecting the world of software development. // Wired
The future is Polyglot Persistence [PDF] — 11 page slide deck by Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage of Thoughtworks about the future of data storage in the enterprise, all in anticipation of their forthcoming book, 'NoSQL Distilled.'
Coding tricks of game developers — 20 interesting bite-sized stories or examples of coding tricks or workarounds that game developers have used over the years. // Dodgy Coder
Understanding JVM Internals — The English is not too great but an interesting dig into how the JVM works nonetheless. // Se Hoon Park
Insane calculations in bash — In order to improve Zach Holman's bash-based charting utility 'spark', Mark Dominus sets out to do some decimal math in bash, which isn't as easy as it sounds. // Mark Dominus
Interview with Ward Cunningham — Up-to-date interview with the creator of the wiki. Ward digs Sinatra, Node, and d3.js. // Markus Eisele
Various ways to get randomness wrong — A look at measuring the distributions of random shuffling algorithms to determine their effectiveness. // Cedric Beust
How Mailinator compresses email by 90% — Mailinator is a free disposable e-mail service. The creator of Mailinator explains how he approached the problem of compressing the large amounts of e-mail it receives.
Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed // Brian Beckman (ACM)

releases

Xcode 4.3 — The latest release of Apple's IDE and development tools for OS X.
MySQL Cluster 7.2: Boasts 1bn Queries per Minute
Sublime Text 2 build 2181 — Cross platform programming text editor. Unimpressive sounding build number but a landmark release nonetheless.
Riak 1.1 — Erlang-based clustered NoSQL database.
ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta — Microsoft's MVC and HTTP services APIs.
Django 1.4 beta 1 — The popular Python Web framework.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 — Linux distribution
RubyMine 4.0 — JetBrains' cross-platform Ruby and Rails IDE
Java SE 7 Editions of Java Language and JVM Specs — Alex Buckley, Oracle's specification lead for the Java language and JVM, has announced the availability of the JLS7 and JVMS7 specs to read or download online. // Alex Buckley

watching

Inventing on Principle — A stunning presentation that has raced around programming circles this last week where Bret Victor demonstrates some excellent real-time visualizations during the act of programming. // Bret Victor
Introduction to Type Level Programming (in Scala) // Alexander Lehmann
Pair Programming with tmux Screencast

useful

Gitbox: Version control 'as easy as Mail' on OS X — An OS X GUI app for working with Git repositories including branching, submodules and rebasing. Lots of screenshots to check out first.
musicForProgramming(); — A series of mixes intended for listening while programming to aid concentration.
Vivify: Online Color Scheme Editor for Vim
Git Immersion — A guided tour through the fundamentals of the Git version control and source management toolset.
nocache: Minimize Filesystem Caching Effects (on Linux)
Incanter: Clojure-based R-like statistical computing and graphics environment

upcoming developer events

Bacon — London, Apr 20-21 // progressive dev
RailsConf — Austin, Texas; Apr 23-25 // ruby on rails
EuroClojure — London, May 24-25 (CFP is open) // clojure
MADExpo: Mid Atlantic Developer Expo — Hampton, VA; Jun 27-29 (CFP is open, no reg yet) // software dev
Strange Loop — St Louis, Sep 23-25 (no CFP or reg yet) // software dev
Aloha Ruby Conference — Honolulu, Hawaii; Oct 8-9 (early bird reg and CFP open) // ruby

lighter bites

What's New In Xcode 4.3 // Apple
Literate Programming Matters // Reg Braithwaite
Connections between computer science and relativity? // Reddit
How key-based cache expiration works // David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
Luerl: Lua in Erlang — Lua interpreter written in Erlang. Not a full Lua but implements most of the language and a sizeable portion of the standard libraries. // Robert Virding
PHP Parser — A PHP parser written in PHP itself.
FANN – Neural networks made easy
Unsigned Integer Arithmetic API now in JDK 8 // Joseph D. Darcy
Web Capabilities: A Better Way To Secure Your Apps? // Spire.io
52 Things People Should Know To Do Cryptography // University of Bristol
Preprocessor magic: Default Arguments in C — Two ways to implement 'default arguments' in C99.

quote

"Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification." // Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month)