- Slackware updated: The venerable Slackware Linux has had its annual update for 2013 announced by Patrick Volkerding and a fine update it appears to be. A 3.10.17 Linux kernel, X11R7.7 X Windows, 64-bit UEFI installation support and updates across the board for dev tools, applications, desktops (Xfce 4.10.1 and KDE 4.10.5) and more. And Slackware ARM 14.1 is also available.
- MariaDB 10.0 goes Beta: As MariaDB, the community-supported and developed MySQL fork, branches away from MySQL with version 10.0, the first 10.0 Beta has been released with enhanced replication, more storage engines supported, engine independent query statistics, regexps with PCRE, admin improvements with roles and more. Google sponsored one enhancement (parallel replication) and blogged about the release noting it is already deploying 10.0 into non-production MySQL instances to aid the MariaDB debugging and development process. In beta, the focus should be on stabilising the 10.x feature set, so if you are considering MariaDB 10.x for future use, now is a good time to check it out.
- Glassfish goes open only: Oracle have pulled commercial support from the Glassfish server for future releases and are pointing users over at their commercial WebLogic Server. They are carrying on development of the server as the reference implementation of future Java EE platforms, but the fear is the quality of the RI will suffer with no commercial imperative to keep quality and performance high. Oracle may well have backed the wrong Java EE web server from a community point of view – I know no one who goes “Hey, lets do that on Weblogic” – but now the competitive field is wide open. The X-EE Factor auditions for series… One other takeaway comes from Tomitribe – Open source isn’t free and if we want it to be industrially healthy, then the industry needs to make sure some money ends up in the open source communities.
- Android Crypto Misuse: Develop for Android (or Java in general)? Write code that uses cryptography? Then read this paper – An Empirical Study of Cryptographic Misuse in Android Applications(pdf). From the abstract, “We develop program analysis techniques to automatically check programs on the Google Play marketplace, and find that 10,327 out of 11,748 applications that use cryptographic APIs – 88% overall – make at least one mistake”. Scary eh. Very worth a read though.
Codescaling 
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