Tech News - Programming

GNU nano 3.0 was released this Sunday. Linux Terminal nano is a popular text based editor. While veteran users may prefer vim, nano is simpler to use and beginner friendly. It is also easier to save and exit from a file on nano, unlike Vim. Termed as "Water Flowing Underground", nano 3.0 sees improvements in speed, usability, and improvements. The major improvements include: Faster file reading by upto 70 percent Roughly twice the speed for ASCII text handling New shortcuts; Ctrl+Delete deletes the previous word and Ctrl+Shift+Delete deletes the previous word Various key bindings like M-Q to find previous, tabs to spaces toggle is placed on M-O, the toggle for more space is removed completely On opening multiple files, the correct number of lines are shown on the status bar The formatter command and searchagain function is removed, M-W is now bound to findnext by default The No-Convert toggle is now under the Insert menu The Backup and New-Buffer toggles are removed from the main menu, but remain on the Write-Out and Insert menus Higher precision in accepting a rebindable key name Any Esc key pressed before a valid command keystroke is ignored More escape sequences are recognized rcfile error messages on a Linux console are not hidden now The ‘copytext’ function is now ‘copy’ and ‘uncut’ is now ‘paste’ There are also improvements made to avoid a hang while performing a full-justify on text Nano is the default text editor on many popular Linux distributions and is preinstalled. For nano 3.0 your Linux distribution will update it. It will take some time before you’ll see this in your system updates. These are the major changes in GNU nano 3.0. For a full list and a changelog and bug fixes, visit the GNU website. GIMP gets $100K of the $400K donation made to GNOME GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more Is Linux hard to learn?

Now for some personal news: Packt has passed 2000 repositories on GitHub. This milestone, which has taken significant effort from some of the Packt team, has been a direct response to customer demands. It means the code inside Packt books and videos can now be easily accessed by readers and viewers, making the step between learning and doing that little bit easier. You can find Packt's GitHub portal here.  Packt's GitHub portal: some dates and statistics Packt's first official GitHub repo was created in March 2016 for Swift 2 by Example. You can find it here. Since then, more than 90,000 people have used our repositories - a number which is growing every day. The top programming languages represented on Packt's GitHub portal The most popular languages on Packt's GitHub largely indicate the areas that are most popular with Packt readers. However, it does also offer an insight on the most popular languages today. Over time, Packt should be able to track changes that will allow us to see how the popularity and usage of languages changes over time. The most popular GitHub repo The most popular Packt GitHub repo is the repo for our book Deep Learning with Keras. This repo (which you can find here) has (at the time of writing) 408 Stars, 340 Forks, and 51 Watchers.         Making Packt products more practical - and making learning easier The initiative is designed to make Packt products more practical. In theory, it should make it easier to bridge the gap between learning a new skill and solving a problem. Product Manager Erol Staveley explains: "By making our code assets open source, we’re letting people build and explore our hands-on examples, giving back to the community a little, and helping them learn by doing. This is a small but valuable step in the evolution of our products as we seek to ensure they remain relevant to the needs of our readers." If you're a Packt customer, it's well worth diving into the code for any products you already have.  Read next GitHub parts ways with JQuery, adopts Vanilla JS for its frontend GitHub open sources its GitHub Load Balancer (GLB) Director Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition is good for the open source community

The Haiku OS project initially launched in August 2001, then named as “OpenBeOS”, is nearing a beta release expected later this month. It's been over 17 years since the project launched, and more than 18 years since the last release of the operating system- BeOS that inspired it. BeOs launched in 1995 by Be Inc, almost became the operating system for Apple’s hardware. However, the negotiations between Be Inc and Apple turned into nothing and the iPhone giant decided in favour of NeXT. Used primarily in the area of multimedia by software developers and users, BeOS had an impressive user interface, pre-emptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing and a 64-bit journaling file system. Cloning BeOS, Haiku's boot performance is very good. The Haiku user interface is modeled entirely after BeOS, acquiring its signature variable-width title bars and spatial file management. Be Inc was shuttered in 2001. Although BeOS is dead- Haiku is very much alive, with around 50 people contributing to a patch every year. The biggest challenge that Haiku faces is the length of time between its releases. The most recent release, Haiku R1 Alpha 4.1, dates back to November 2012. In response to the considerable amount of time taken for this release, Haiku developer Adrien Destugues asserts that they needed to figure out various details regarding the project. From how to get the process back on track, to figuring out the buildbot setup, how to distribute the release to mirrors, where to get CDs pressed , and how to ship these to users who want to buy them. While the expected release date is somewhere towards the end of this month, Destugues is also open to delaying the release for another month or so in order to ship a quality product.  However, he confirms that, beginning with the first beta, there will be more frequent releases and continuous updates via the OS’s package manager. Why Should Haiku users stick around? Right after the first release of Haiku, the development team released a poll with a list of features, for which developers and users would vote to decide if they were ‘R1’ or ‘not R1’ Along with fixing a lot of bugs encountered in the previous version, users can now look forward to new features, including- Support for Wi-Fi A modern web browser with CSS and HTML5 support Improvements to the APIs which include support for system notifications, applications localisation, easier controls in the GUI, ‘stack and tile’ window management ‘Launch daemon’ in charge of starting and monitoring system services 64-bit CPU support, support for more than eight CPU cores USB3 and SATA support Support for more than 1GB of RAM Haiku now includes Package manager. All of these features will help the 200 odd users to run Haiku on a modern machine. The Haiku OS is famous among its users for its ease of use, responsiveness, and overall coherence. HaikuPorts and HaikuArchives currently include a range of software that can be used with the OS- including small 2D games, porting tools for embedded systems and the occasional Python library needed. Haiku has also made it possible to achieve porting Qt, LibreOffice, or other large applications over from the Linux world. While working with Haiku, developers often encounter system bugs in the process. This means if one is developing an application and is faced with resolving a bug, sooner or later they will be fixing the OS as well. Naturally, there are some viewers who are apprehensive of the timeline committed by Haiku, as they have waited long enough for the release. Source: Reddit After a span of 17 years, it would be interesting to see the number of Haiku users that have stuck around for the Beta release. Head over to computerworld for deeper insights on this project. Sugar operating system: A new OS to enhance GPU acceleration security in web apps cstar: Spotify’s Cassandra orchestration tool is now open source! Storj Labs’ Open Source Partner Program generates revenue opportunities for open source companies

The Ripgrep team released a minor version Ripgrep 0.10.0 last week. It explores features such as PCRE2 support, multi-line search and a JSON output format among other minor updates. Ripgrep is a command line search tool that recursively searches your current directory for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore rules. It offers first class support on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Major Updates The minimum version which was required to compile Rust has been changed to track the latest stable version of Rust. The new minor versions will be using the current stable version of the Rust compile as its minimum supported version. Ripgrep 0.10.0 has now got libripgrep which helps with fast searching over arbitrary streams of data.  A new feature offering multi-line support has been added, which allows matching over multiple lines. There’s another new feature PCRE2 and JSON Lines format. The PCRE2 feature provides support for look-around and backreferences ( match the same text as previously matched by a capturing group ) and JSON lines format makes use of --json flag which helps print results in that format. Other changes A --one-file-system flag has been added to skip directories on different file systems. Two new minor features namely --sort and --sortr flag have been added for more sorting. --crlf flag is added in Ripgrep 0.10.0 to permit $ to work with carriage returns on Windows. A --null-data flag has been added to ripgrep 0.10.0 that makes ripgrep use NUL as a line terminator. --line-buffered and --block-buffered have been added for forcing a buffer strategy. A --pre-glob feature has been added for filtering files through the --pre flag. Bug Fixes A bug in ignore crate, where first path was treated as a symlink, has been fixed in ripgrep 0.10.0. Compile time and runtime CPU features have been added to --version output. ripgrep is more robust now when it comes to memory maps failing. For more information, check out the official ripgrep 0.10.0 release notes. Arduino now has a command line interface (CLI) Command Line Tools for DevOps Command-Line Tools

JetBrains announced on Wednesday that they’re starting an Early Access Program (EAP) for their popular IDE IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3. The IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 EAP explores features such as better IDE navigation, revamped plugin preferences page, Run Anything, and multiline TODO comments among others. You can download the IntelliJ IDEA 2019.3 EAP with the help of Toolbox App. Let’s discuss the key features in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 EAP. Better IDE navigation The IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 offers better IDE navigation with an all-new Search Everywhere dialog. The new search dialog has an enhanced UI which is resizable and movable. It comprises of Go to class, Go to file, Go to symbol, and Find action. This new feature has made the search process faster. Run Anything dialog There’s a new Run Anything action in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3. Run Anything lets you run a command in the IDE, launch any run configuration, and run any terminal commands. This dialog allows you to select a recent command, a preconfigured run configuration and reopen recent projects. With the Run Anything dialog, you can hold down the Shift key to switch to the Debug Anything mode, which allows you to run a debug configuration. Multiline TODO comments There’s an added support for multiline TODO comments in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 EAP. Earlier, only the first line of a multiline TODO comment was handled as a todo comment. Now, the first line along with all the other todo comment lines can be highlighted in the editor and listed in the TODO Tool Window. Plugins page Now there’s a new Plugins page in Preferences/Settings, making it easier to manage, install, uninstall, and update plugins. You can now search for plugins by name or tags, and sort the results by downloads, name, rating, featured, or updates. Additionally, you can also view the new and updated plugins, top downloaded plugins, as well as top-rated plugins. Installed Tab allows you to check all the downloaded and bundled plugins in different areas.  You can view all the plugins that need to be updated in the Updates tab. Structural Search There’s a new simplified Structural Search & Replace dialogs in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3. Structural Search comes with a drop-down menu under the search icon to display the search history. There’s also a Scope configuration which is easier and more flexible. Editing variables/filters is possible with the help of Structural Search & Replace dialogs. The Edit Variables dialog is replaced by a Filters panel. JVM Debugger IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 comes packed with various debugger improvements. You can now see all the available processes for attaching in the “Attach with Java Debugger To” action list. Now, there’s a new Auto restart option for the remote debug configurations so the IDE can automatically restart a configuration while debugging a remote process. Maven You can now delegate all your build and run actions to Maven in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3. To enable the new option, delegate the IDE build/run actions to maven, by going to Preferences / Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Maven | Runner. Editor There’s now a way to configure the default indent in projects on the Tabs and Indents tab in Preferences / Settings | Editor | Code Style | Java. There’s also a newly added status bar indicator which points out if the current file indentation differs from the project’s default. To choose actions that control the current indentation, there’s a status bar popup. Java There are a lot of new Java inspections and quick-fixes in the IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 EAP. The inspection support for Java Stream API has been improved.  IntelliJ IDEA is now capable of detecting cases where redundant sorted calls are made before the subsequent min call. You can quickly remove the unnecessary sorted call with the new IDE. You can convert streams into loops when the downstream collector is collection-based (toSet/toList/toMap/toCollection/groupingBy) and can be processed by itself. Also, to completely remove static import, use * and add qualifiers to the usages in the code instead. Run Configurations There’s an added support for macros in run configurations. Currently, the IDE supports only the “Application” and “npm” run configurations. You can use text/log file as input by enabling the Redirect input in the Run/Debug Configurations dialog, After this, simply specify the path to the file which has the input data. Version Control Earlier, the IDE only showed file history up to the selected commit. With InteliJ IDEA 2018.3 EAP, it can now display the full history. You simply need to switch “Show All Branches” on the toolbar. This step is particularly useful in case the file gets deleted later. Other than that, you can now ignore the whitespace changes while merging with a new ignore Whitespaces option. It also comes with a new Ignore drop-down menu with options to hide or trim whitespace changes that occur on merge. You can also copy a file easily from one Git branch to another. For more information, check out the official IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 EAP documentation. Reading Next What’s new in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 How to set up the Scala Plugin in IntelliJ IDE [Tutorial] How to work with the Selenium IntelliJ IDEA plugin

OpenFaaS announced on the 5th of September 2018 that they have released support for stateless microservices in OpenFaaS 0.9.0. They assert that managing FaaS functions and microservices will now be easier. A stateless microservice can be deployed as if it were a FaaS Function and managed by a FaaS framework or Platform such as OpenFaaS. Hence, no special routes, flags or filters are needed in the OpenFaaS CLI, Gateway API or UI. Source: OpenFaaS The upgrade came as a follow-up to two requests from the microservices community. One of the users at Wireline.io raised a feature request to enhance the HTTP route functionality of functions and write functions to run on both, AWS Lambda and on OpenFaaS, without any additional changes. Then came the request from the CEO of GitLab, Sid Sijbrandi who wanted to learn more about Serverless and how it could benefit Gitlab. He was apprehensive whether OpenFaaS could be used to manage both, FaaS Functions and the microservices his team was more familiar (eg. Sinatra apps). He wanted to know more about scaling to zero when idle. To address these requests, the OpenFaaS blog has given its viewers an example of deploying a Ruby and Sinatra guestbook backed by MySQL deployed to OpenFaaS with Kubernetes. This is how the task can be done- Users have to start of by creating the Sinatra stateless microservices. They can then go on to create a hello-world service by supplying their own Dockerfile and executing the following commands $ mkdir -p sinatra-for-OpenFaaS/ \  && cd sinatra-for-OpenFaaS/ $ faas-cli new --prefix=alexellis2 --lang dockerfile frank-says They need to replace alexellis2 with their Docker Hub account or another Docker registry. This has to be followed by creating a Gemfile and the main.rb file: ./frank-says/main.rb: require 'sinatra' set :port, 8080 set :bind, '0.0.0.0' open('/tmp/.lock', 'w') { |f|  f.puts "Service started" } get '/' do  'Frank has entered the building' end get '/logout' do  'Frank has left the building' End   Things to note on OpenFaaS workloads while doing this- Bind to TCP port 8080 Write a file /tmp/.lock when ready to receive traffic The Dockerfile will add a non-root user, add the Ruby source and Gemfile then installs the Sinatra gem. Finally, it will add a healthcheck on a 5-second interval and set the start-up command. Users can now deploy the example using the OpenFaaS CLI. Login with account details $ docker login Run the up command which is an alias for build, push and deploy. $ faas-cli up --yaml frank-says.yml Deploying: frank-says. Deployed. 200 OK. URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/function/frank-says To Deploy the Sinatra guestbook with MySQL, they need to execute- $ git clone https://github.com/OpenFaaS-incubator/OpenFaaS-sinatra-guestbook \  && cd OpenFaaS-sinatra-guestbook Configure MySQL database details in ./sql.yml. $ cp sql.example.yml sql.yml Finally deploy the guestbook: $ faas-cli up http://127.0.0.1:8080/function/guestbook The  URL given by the command above should be used to access the microservice. Now, Sign the guest book using the UI and then reset the MySQL table at any time by posting to /function/guestbook/reset. Source: OpenFaaS The guestbook code stores its state in a MySQL table. A key property of FaaS functions and stateless microservices is that it can be restarted at any time without losing data. For a detailed implementation of the guestbook example, head over to the OpenFaaS Blog post How to Enable Zero-Scale? To enable scaling to zero simply follow the documentation Next, users have to add a label to their stack.yml file to tell OpenFaaS that your function is eligible for zero-scaling: labels:      com.OpenFaaS.scale.zero: true Finally, redeploy the guestbook with faas-cli up. The faas-idler will now scale the function to zero replicas as soon as it is detected as idle. The default idle period is set at 5 minutes, which can be configured at deployment time. OpenFaaS has also deployed a stateless microservice written in Ruby that will scale to zero when idle and back again in time to serve traffic. It can be managed in exactly the same way as OpenFaaS existing FaaS functions. Thus, we have seen how the support for stateless microservices has made it easier for users to manage their microservices easily. Head over to the OpenFaaS blog for a detailed explanation of deploying a simple hello-world Sinatra service and to gain more insights about the upgrade. 6 Ways to blow up your Microservices! Google, IBM, RedHat and others launch Istio 1.0 service mesh for microservices Welcome Express Gateway 1.11.0, a microservices API Gateway on Express.js

Many of you may remember GIMP from school if you weren’t using MS Paint instead. The open-source cross-platform image editor is free to use and to modify the source code. GIMP is associated with the non-profit GNOME, a Linux desktop environment. The $100K donation given to them is a part of the $400K donation made to GNOME by Handshake.org in early August. Now 25 percent of this donation will go to GIMP. After the release of GIMP 2.10.6, hopefully, this donation helps them to accomplish their next GTK3-ported GIMP 3.0 release. In May this year, an anonymous donor pledged $1M to the GNOME foundation over the course of next two years. This donation enabled them to put up job listings for four additional roles of Development Coordinator, Program Coordinator, DevOps/Sysadmin, and GTK+ core developer. Their website states “We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.” Handshake.org was launched on August 2 this year. It is a decentralized certificate authority and peer-to-peer DNS service. Handshake.org is donating about $10 million to non-profits and free/open-source projects. Handshake’s purpose is not to replace the DNS protocol. But it aims at replacing the root zone file and root servers with a public commons. Their website states: “Handshake’s original incubators, Purse.io and Private Internet Access, provided enough support to build and launch the platform without additional funding. In the spirit of free software and radical gifting we’ve taken the validation value from this project and shared it with the world.” The details are posted on the official GIMP website. A Tour Around GIMP GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more Creating a quick logo for a company with GIMP 2.6

Mastodon 2.5 is here, a social network often viewed as an alternative to Twitter. The 100th version of the social network has a variety of software improvements in UI, media and a bunch of fixes including security and performance fixes. UI changes in Mastodon 2.5 The web interface in Mastodon 2.5 has been redesigned for public areas. The design and color scheme is now more consistent when logged in to your account. A better use of space is made with a new profile layout with prominent follow buttons for new users. The public pages now display reply, favorite and boost buttons. The actions can open a remote interaction dialogue. You can interact with the dialogue from your home server and interact with the toot from your account. This is a simpler approach than the previous approach where users had to copy paste permalink to the server’s search bar. You can also choose to feature specific people you follow, on your profile. They can be displayed randomly or as a recommendation to your profile visitors. The count of replies to toots is now displayed enabling you to know if a question has been already answered or if a discussion is happening. Mastodon 2.5 now also accepts MOV video files from iOS, and other large video files. It also has better image resizing. Admin and deployment changes For admins who moderate Mastodon servers, a new dashboard is available providing an overview of important information like weekly sign-up and activity numbers. The e-mail notifications generated from reports have been cut down and report notifications can be disabled for your account now. Suspending users now has a confirmation screen where you can type the name of the account you want to suspend. The temporary lock-out is now reversible and works as an alternative to suspensions. For admins who run Mastodon servers, the database schema has been changed to reduce disk write operations and CPU load of PostgreSQL. For scaling, there is support for red-replicas baked into the software, you only need to change the configuration. There is also a new command-line interface for making it easy Terminal easy to use These were a select few updates. For a full list of changes, take a look at the changelog. PrimeTek releases PrimeReact 2.0.0 Beta 3 version Babel 7 released with Typescript and JSX fragment support Node.js announces security updates for all their active release lines for August 2018

Yesterday, Mozilla released the latest versions of Firefox for desktop, Android, and iOS. The latest version for desktop and Android users is Firefox 62.0 and for iOS users it is Firefox 13.2. They have made some changes for faster page loads, better scrolling performance, a newly added Dark theme for iOS users, and much more. They have also laid foundation for upcoming release, Firefox 63, by allowing users to distrust certificates issued by Symantec. In Firefox 63, all trust for Symantec-issued certificates will be removed. What’s new for desktop users? The default New Tab, Firefox Home, now can display up to 4 rows of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights. The Reopen in Container option is added for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container. Dark theme is automatically enabled in macOS 10.14 dark mode. Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware. Users opting to disconnect from Sync can now wipe their Firefox profile data, including bookmarks, passwords, history, cookies, and site data from their desktop computer. FreeBSD support is added for WebAuthn. The Description field for bookmarks is removed. Added support for CSS Shapes for richer web page layouts. Added support for CSS Variable Fonts to create beautiful typography with a single font file. What’s new for Android users? Scrolling performance is improved. Page loading is now faster over WiFi connections by loading from the network cache if disk cache is slow. Notifications settings provides a toggle button, Product and feature tips, to allow more control over which notifications are shown. What’s new for iOS users? New dark theme: Firefox for iOS now supports dark and light theme. According to your preference, you can easily switch between the two themes either manually or automatically. To enable this manually, tap Settings in the menu panel, then, tap Display, and choose either Light or Dark. To automatically turn it on you can use Automatic switch. Source: Mozilla Improved searching experience: They have made some improvements to make searching content easier. Tab settings can now be managed in a single view allowing  you to make changes easily and quickly. You will also be able to search your open tabs and seamlessly switch between normal and private browsing. Source: Mozilla To know more, read Mozilla’s official announcement and also check their release notes. Mozilla, Internet Society, and web foundation wants G20 to address “techlash” fuelled by security and privacy concerns Mozilla’s new Firefox DNS security updates spark privacy hue and cry Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature

The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. GNOME 3.30 features many significant performance improvements. In total, the release incorporates 24845 changes, made by approximately 801 contributors. GNOME is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux and most BSD derivatives. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Fun Fact: 3.30 has been named “Almería” in recognition of this year’s GUADEC organizing team. GUADEC is GNOME’s primary annual conference which was held in Almería, Spain this year.[/box] Improvements to Desktop performance The entire desktop now uses fewer system resources. Users can now run multiple apps at once without encountering performance issues. Improved Screen Sharing With GNOME 3.30, it is now easier than ever to control screen sharing and remote desktop sessions. A newly added system menu displays an indicator when a remote connection is active, making it easy to stop the session when finished. Update Flatpaks Automatically Flatpak is an emerging technology that makes getting apps fast and secure. Many new apps are already available on Flathub which is a repository of curated Flatpaks. GNOME software manager, can now automatically update installed Flatpaks. Focus on Content Web, the GNOME browser, now comes with a new minimal reader view. Web can toggle between the normal view and the clean, minimal reader view when viewing a compatible web page. The minimal reader view removes irrelevant menus, images, and content not related to the article or document. Updates to GNOME Virtual machine application Boxes, the GNOME virtual machine application, can now connect to remote Windows servers using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Boxes also now has the ability to import OVA files, making sharing virtual machines even easier. Gaming Application changes Games, the retro gaming application can now be navigated by gamepad making it faster to use: The keyboard is mappable to gamepad inputs. Additional details about each available game is displayed in the collection view. The Flatpak bundles 4 more emulator cores. GNOME 3.30 introduces a new podcast app called Podcasts that lets you subscribe and listen to your favorite podcasts, right from your desktop. These are just a select few updates. For a complete list of updates, read the GNOME Blog. Deploying HTML5 Applications with GNOME. Install GNOME-Shell on Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Is Linux hard to learn?

Yesterday, Facebook made its video-streaming service named, Facebook Watch globally available. It was first launched in August 2017 for a limited group of people in the US. Facebook Watch's content is produced by its partners, who can earn 55% of advertising revenue while Facebook keeps 45%. How Facebook Watch is different from other streaming rivals like YouTube, Twitch and more? Facebook believes that Watch is unique as compared to its rivals, such as YouTube, Amazon’s Twitch, Netflix because it has an added advantage of how Watch helps viewers interact with each other. Fidji Simo, Facebook’s vice-president of video, told BBC: “It is built on the notion that watching video doesn’t have to be a passive experience. You can have a two-way conversation about the content with friends, other fans or even the creators themselves.” Facebook Watch comes with a feature called Watch Party that lets its users to coordinate themselves to watch a show together. Creators can boost engagement with the help of Interactivity Platform that allows them to run polls, challenges, and quizzes. How will it support its content creators? Facebook has laid out a plan to support their publishers and content creators in two main areas: Ad breaks to generate revenue from their videos Creator Studio to understand how their content is performing Ad breaks eligibility criteria and availability Ad breaks are launched across four markets and is only available to pages that publish videos in certain languages and countries right now. It will support more countries and languages by the end of the year and in 2019. Eligibility: Your videos should be 3-minute long Videos that have generated more than 30,000 1-minute views in total over the past two months Pages should have at least 10,000 Facebook followers Meet their Monetisation Eligibility standards Should be located in a country where ad breaks are available Availability: Currently, ad breaks are supported in the US, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. Over the next few months, availability will further expand to more countries and languages. Manage your video content with Creator Studio Creator Studio provide creators a central place for Pages to manage their entire content library and business. You can do the following: Manage content and interactions: Look through the insights, manage interactions across all owned Pages, respond to Facebook messages or comments on Facebook and Instagram. Streamline video publishing: Compose, schedule, and publish content across owned Pages and also do bulk uploads. Access ad breaks: Review monetisation insights and view payments. Along with this, you can access Rights Manager, use sound collection, and take advantage of new features and monetisation opportunities that they may be eligible for. To know more about the recent updates and your eligibility on Facebook Watch, check out their official announcement. A new conservative employee group within Facebook to protest Facebook’s “intolerant” liberal policies Facebook bans another quiz app and suspends 400 more due to concerns of data misuse Facebook is reportedly rating users on how trustworthy they are at flagging fake news

On the second day of GopherCon, 28th Aug, Microsoft announced contributions to the open-source Project Athens and their involvement with GopherSource. These announcements add to Microsoft’s efforts to better enable Go developers for making better apps and services. They support GO in Microsoft Visual Studio and on Azure cloud. Project Athens Package version changes in Go causes the current builds to break. This happens when the changed packages are dependencies for a working project. Project Athens stores and serves packages outside of Github, which means that Athens holds dependencies. It is an open source project released under the MIT license and is hosted on GitHub. Microsoft’s current focus is on improving the whole module experience. The aim is to ensure seamless working of Go modules with all proxy servers. They are working to set up a federated and diverse proxy network to include features like: Proxy server implementation for edge deployments in Go modules A new protocol for authenticated module proxies Adding module notary servers for source code authentication An include/exclude list for companies using Go to filter external Go packages Project Athens has been open-source and community owned since it was formed. While Microsoft engineers remain the core maintainers of the project, Athens is supported by many developers from the open-source community now. GopherSource Go can be confusing and intimidating to start using for both new and experienced developers. GopherSource is an initiative to enhance and expand the Go ecosystem by building up more contributors to contribute to Go and key Go projects, this includes Project Athens. GopherSource is like a community for Go developers, to contribute for upstreaming Go, give feedback, make proposals, and provide mentorship. Go at Microsoft There are many users at Microsoft who use Go to build products at scale. They implemented the core services behind Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in Golang. Aaron Schlesinger, developer at Microsoft Azure, and core maintainer of Project Athens, stated in Microsoft’s blog post: “Internally, we contribute a significant amount of Go code to the cloud native ecosystem, including Virtual Kubelet, which enables scheduling Kubernetes workloads to off-cluster resources such as IoT Edge or Azure Container Instances; and Helm, the Kubernetes package manager.” For more, visit the Microsoft Blog. Go 2 design drafts include plans for better error handling and generics Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates GoMobile: GoLang’s Foray into the Mobile World

Github has introduced “Project Paper Cuts” that was inspired from a lot of refined GitHub additions. This project aims to fix smaller code related and UI issues that users face during a project development workflow.   Source: Twitter Project Paper Cuts is committed to working directly with the community in order to fix small to medium-sized workflow problems. It aims to improve UI/UX and find ways to make quick improvements to nagging issues that users often encounter in their projects. The project aims to find fixes on issues that have the most impact but are supported with hardly any or no discussions. Most “paper cuts” will have a public changelog entry associated with them so users can keep pace. The few “lesser talked issues” that GitHub has already managed to solve are: #1 Unselect markers when copying and pasting the contents of a diff The + and - diff markers are no longer copied to the clipboard when users copy the contents of a diff. #2 Edit a repository’s README from the repository root If a user has the permission to push to a repository,  they can edit a README file from the repository root by clicking the pen icon to the right of the README’s file header. #3 Users can access their repositories straight from the profile dropdown Users can use the profile dropdown, on any page, to quickly go straight to the “Your Repositories” tab within their user profile. #4 Highlight permalinked comments When following a permalink to a specific comment in an issue or pull request, the comment will be highlighted so that a user can easily find it among other comments in the thread. #5 Remove files from a pull request with a button If a user has a write permission, he can click on the ‘trash’ icon for a file right in the pull request’s “Files changed” view to make a commit and remove it. #6 Branch names in merge notification emails The email notification from GitHub about a merge will also include the name of the base branch that the change was merged into. #7 Users can create new pull requests from their repository’s Pull Requests Page In order to quickly create a pull request without having to switch back to the “Code” tab, when a user push branches while using the “Pull requests” tab, GitHub will now display the dynamic “Compare and pull request” widget. #8 Add a teammate from the team discussions page Users can add an organization member to a team directly from the team discussion page by clicking the + button inside the sidebar. #9 Collapse all diffs in a pull request at once When a pull request contains a lot of changed files, code reviewers find it hard to isolate the changes that are necessary/ important to them. Project paper cut allows them to collapse or expand the contents of all diffs in a pull request. This can be done by holding down the alt key and clicking on the inverted caret icon in any file header. They can also use the “Jump to file or symbol” dropdown to jump to the file that they are interested to review to automatically expand it. #10 Copy the URL of a comment Previously, in order to grab a permalink to a comment within an issue or pull request, users would have to copy the URL from a comment’s timestamp. They can now click Copy URL within the comment’s options menu to quickly copy the URL to the clipboard. Project Paper Cuts is solely aimed to help all developers do their best work, faster. By incorporating customers feedback into making this project, GitHub is paving the way to make small changes in the way it works. You can read the detailed announcement on the Github Blog to know more about Project Paper Cuts. Git-bug: A new distributed bug tracker embedded in git Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition is good for the open source community GitHub open sources its GitHub Load Balancer (GLB) Director  

In the annual Go user survey, the three top requests made by users for Go version 2 were better package management, error handling and the inclusion of generics. Following these requests, the Go 2 draft designs were shared yesterday to include error handling, error values, and adding generics. Note that these are not official proposals. The features, error handling and generics are in step 2 according to the Go release cycle, shown as follows. Source: Go Blog Yesterday, Google developer Russ Cox, gave a talk on design drafts for Golang 2. Go 2 draft designs were also previewed at Gophercon 2018. In his talk, he mentions that the current boilerplate contains too much code for error checks and that the error reporting is not precise enough. For example, an error while using os.Open in which the name of the file which cannot be opened, isn’t mentioned. As proper error reporting only adds to the code, most programmers don’t really bother with this despite knowing that such a practice may create confusion. The new idea, therefore, aims to add a check expression to shorten the checks while keeping them explicit. Cox also stresses on adding experience reports. These reports are difficult but necessary to implement new features. Experience reports turn abstract problems into concrete ones and are needed for changes to be implemented in Golang. They serve as a test case for evaluating a proposed solution and its effects on real-life use-cases. Regarding the inclusion of Generics, Cox mentions: “I've been examining generics recently, but I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve. As a result, I can't answer a design question like whether to support generic methods, which is to say methods that are parameterized separately from the receiver. If we had a large set of real-world use cases, we could begin to answer a question like this by examining the significant ones.” Go 2 is not going to be a single release, but a sequence of releases adding features as and when they are ready. The approach is to first make features backward compatible to Go 1. Minor changes could be seen in Go 1 in a year or so. If there are no backward incompatible changes, Go 1.20 may be just declared as Go 2. The conversation for Go 2 has started, and there is a call for community help and contribution to converting the drafts into official proposals. Visit the Go page and the GitHub repository for more details. Why Golang is the fastest growing language on GitHub Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates GoMobile: GoLang’s Foray into the Mobile World

Splinter, the open source tool for testing web applications using Python has now leveled up to Splinter 0.9.0. Browser actions such as visiting URLs and interacting with their items can be automated. Apart from providing a simple api, Splinter has multiple webdrivers including chrome webdriver, firefox webdriver, phantomjs webdriver, zopetest browser, and remote webdriver. It provides support to iframe, alert and executes javascript while working with both, ajax and async javascript. Two ways to install Splinter 0.9.0 Step 1: Install Python In order to install Splinter, you need to make sure that Python 2.7+  is installed. Step 2: Install Splinter There are two ways to install Splinter: Install a stable release For an official and almost bug-free version, use the terminal: $ [sudo] pip install splinter Install under-development source-code For splinter’s latest-and-greatest features and aren’t afraid of running under development code, run: $ git clone git://github.com/cobrateam/splinter.git $ cd splinter $ [sudo] python setup.py install Head over to the install guide for additional notes. Upgraded features in Splinter 0.9.0 Support for phantomjs is removed. With Chrome and Firefox headless, phantom is no longer needed. Users can now add custom options to the chrome browser. The bug related to element.find_by_text  stands resolved. When trying to do a contextual search for text, the result would include all matching text for the whole DOM instead of just those nodes that are children of the contextual node. Support was added for zope.testbrowser 5+, Flask 1+, selenium 3.14.0. Splinter can now handle webdriver StaleElementReferenceException. The lxml and cssselect has been updated  to 4.2.4  1.0.3 respectively. For a detailed explanation of features visitits  Github page. Visual Studio code July 2018 release, version 1.26 is out! OpenSSH 7.8 released! JDK 11 First Release Candidate (RC) is out with ZGC, Epsilon and more!