Pie in the Sky (April 11th, 2014)
It's been a pretty busy week, what with security vulnerabilities among other things. Here's a few links (including a few on security vulnerabilities,) for your weekend reading.
Cloud
Azure and heartbleed: Mostly unaffected. Except the real world is more complex than that. Azure escapes unscathed? Probably not. As noted in the article, cloud solutions are complex beasts, and while your web site hosted on Azure may be safe, you might be front-ending it with a load balancing solution that is vulnerable.
OpenSSL vulnerability (heartbleed) addressed by VM Depot Publishers: VM images that use OpenSSL are being patched.
April updates to the Azure toolkit for Eclipse: Tomcat 8, new Zulu version and more.
FTP2Azure: Had a question about scaling FTP in the cloud and was looking for a better solution than "make a bunch of VMs". This lets you spin up Azure Cloud Services running FTP, backed by a Blob store.
.NET runtime for Azure Mobile Services: Some first impressions of the new .NET support for Mobile Services.
Client/mobile
Flight is the right choice for your existing website: I hadn't heard of the flight framework before this. Going to have to read more on it.
SEO friendly infinite scroll: Because you want people to find your content.
Fourier series visualization with d3.js: I just enjoy watching the animation.
Accesssible web components: Improving accessibility of web components.
Bing translator plugin lets users localize your WordPress site: An easy way to localize your WordPress site.
Wearable
- Pebble watch development with JavaScript: Pretty nifty.
Node.js
Scaling Node.js applications: A discussion of ways you can scale a Node.js app. Or you can just find a cloud provider that does all that for you.
Express 4: The new version is out, some changes, and some things to pay attention to when migrating.
npm and Heartbleed: npm doesn't appear to have been compromised, but are regenerating SSL keys anyway
Is Node.js affected by Heartbleed?: Short answer is no for recent versions. Long answer is "are you using other stuff that might be?"
PHP
- Abstract file systems with Flysystem: Lets you treat various non-file system stores as if they were file systems. Dropbox, S3, FTP, etc.
Ruby
Rails 4.1.0: Some of the new things in 4.1.0.
Opal: Ruby in your browser.
Misc.
.NET to TypeScript and JavaScript compiler: JavaScript all the things!
Machine learning for JavaScript hackers: Cat head detection.
How the heartbleed bug works: Nice illustration of the problem.
Heartbleed test: Check if a website is vulnerable.
Enjoy!
-Larry