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GNU released Guile 2.9.1 beta of the extension language for the GNU project. It is the first pre-release leading up to the 3.0 release series. In comparison to the current stable series, 2.2.x, Guile 2.9.1 brings support for just-in-time native code generation to speed up all Guile programs. Just-in-time code generation in Guile 2.9 Relative to Guile 2.2, Guile programs now run up to 4 times faster. This is due to just-in-time (JIT) native code generation. JIT compilation is enabled automatically in this release. To disable it, configure Guile with either `--enable-jit=no' or `--disable-jit'. The default is `--enable-jit=auto', which enables the JIT. JIT support is limited to x86-64 platforms currently. Eventually, it will expand to all architectures supported by GNU Lightning. Users on other platforms can try passing `--enable-jit=yes' to see if JIT is available on their platform. Lower-level bytecode Relative to the virtual machine in Guile 2.2, Guile's VM instruction set is now more low-level.  This allows expressing advanced optimizations, like type check elision or integer devirtualization, and makes JIT code generation easier. This low-level change can mean that for a given function, the corresponding number of instructions in Guile 3.0 may be higher than Guile 2.2. This can lead to slowdowns when the function is interpreted. GOOPS classes are not redefinable by default All GOOPS classes were redefinable in theory if not practically. This was supported by an indirection (or dereference operator) in all "struct" instances. Even though only a subset of structs would need redefinition the indirection is removed to speed up Guile records. It also allows immutable Guile records to eventually be described by classes, and enables some optimizations in core GOOPS classes that shouldn't be redefined. In GOOPS, now there are classes that are both redefinable and not redefinable. The classes created with GOOPS by default are not redefinable. In order to make a class redefinable, it should be an instance of `<redefinable-class>'. Also, scm_t_uint8, etc are deprecated in favor of C99 stdint.h. This release does not offer any API or ABI stability guarantees. Stick to the stable 2.2 release if you want a stable working version. You can read more in the release notes on the GNU website. GNU nano 3.0 released with faster file reads, new shortcuts and usability improvements GIMP gets $100K of the $400K donation made to GNOME Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes

Yesterday, the Go team released Go 1.11.3 and Go 1.10.6.  The Go team recommends all users to update to one of these releases. If you’re not sure which one to update to, choose Go 1.11.3. These releases have addressed the following security issues: cmd/go: Remote command execution during "go get -u" The go get -u  command downloads, updates, and builds source code and is not supposed to execute arbitrary code. With the help of custom domains, it’s possible to get a Git repository cloned to a folder named .git by using a vanity import path that ends with /.git. If the Git repository root contains a HEAD file, an object directory, a config file, a refsdirectory, then go get -u can be used for considering the parent directory as a repository root, and running Git commands on it. This will help in using the config file in the original Git repository root for its configuration. In case, the config file contains malicious commands, they will execute on the system running go get -u. cmd/go: Directory traversal in "go get" via curly braces in import paths The go get command downloads and builds source code. It is strictly not supposed to allow arbitrary filesystem writes. The go get command becomes vulnerable to remote code execution when it is executed with -u flag or with the import path of a malicious Go package, which contains curly braces (both { and } characters). It is only vulnerable in GOPATH mode and not in module mode. The attacker can create an arbitrary filesystem write, which can further lead to code execution. crypto/x509: CPU denial of service in chain validation Package crypto/x509 parses and also validates X.509 encoded keys and certificates. It should handle certificate chains which are provided by an attacker with reasonable resource use. This package does not limit the work performed for each chain verification and might help attackers to craft pathological inputs, further leading to a CPU denial of service. The Go TLS servers that accept client certificates and the TLS clients that verify certificates get affected. The functionality regression in "go get" when executed in GOPATH mode on an import path pattern containing "..."  is not present in the GOPATH workspace. This issue will be resolved in the next releases, Go 1.11.4 and Go 1.10.7. This update has received a mixed reaction from the users. As few users think that if the Go team should have used context. WithTimeout or even TLSHandshakeTimeout for safety on the old Go. Other users have appreciated the efforts taken by the Go team. https://twitter.com/Olivier_Poitrey/status/1073362114570416128 To know more about this release, check out the official announcement. The Golang team has started working on Go 2 proposals TypeScript 3.2 released with configuration inheritance and more Haskell is moving to GitLab due to issues with Phabricator

GrapheneOS, an open source privacy and security focused mobile OS comes with Android app compatibility. The GrapheneOS releases are supported by the Auditor app as well as attestation service for hardware-based attestation. The GrapheneOS research and engineering project has been in progress for over 5 years. In March, the AndroidHardening project got renamed to GrapheneOS. Two days ago, GrapheneOS released a new website grapheneos.org with additional documentation, tutorials and coverage of topics related to software, firmware and hardware as well as privacy/security features expected in the future. The team has also released a new version PQ3A.190605.003.2019.06.03.18 with device support, Auditor app and Hardened malloc among other fixes. Changes in GrapheneOS project Auditor: update to version 12 The Auditor app has an added support for verifying CalyxOS on the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL and even verified boot hash display has been added. Auditor uses hardware security features on supported devices for validating the integrity of the operating system from another Android device. The Auditor app will now also verify that the device is running the stock operating system with the bootloader locked and further will check that no tampering has occurred with the operating system. The list of supported devices for the auditor app include BlackBerry Key2, BQ Aquaris X2 Pro, Google Pixel, 2, Google Pixel 2 XL, Google Pixel 3, Google Pixel 3 XL, Google Pixel 3a, Google Pixel 3a XL, Huawei Honor 7A Pro, Huawei Honor 10, and more. Full list here. https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1125928692671057920 Hardened malloc Hardened malloc is a security-focused general purpose memory allocator that provides the malloc API along with various extensions. This security-focused design leads to lesser metadata overhead and memory waste from fragmentation than a traditional allocator design. https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1113556017768325120 It also offers substantial hardening against heap corruption vulnerabilities and aims to provide a decent overall performance focused on long-term performance and memory usage. Hardened malloc currently supports Bionic (Android), musl and glibc and it may also support other non-Linux operating systems in the future. There's custom integration along with other hardening features for which has also been planned for musl in the future. The hardened_malloc for GrapheneOS only is further expanded to workaround for Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL camera issues. GrapheneOS now needs to move towards a microkernel-based model with a Linux compatibility layer and it needs to adopt virtualization-based isolation. According to the team, the project will have to move into the hardware space in the long term. Restoration of past features Restoration of past features since the 2019.05.18.20 release include: Exec spawning while using debugging options has been disabled. Exec spawning has been enabled by default. Verizon visual voicemail support has been enabled. Toggle for disabling newly added USB devices has been added to Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL Properties for controlling deny_new_usb has been added Implementation of dynamic deny_new_usb toggle mode deny_new_usb feature is set to dynamic by default Many are happy with this latest update. A user commented on HackerNews, “They're making good progress and I can't wait to be able to update my handheld device with mainline pieces for as long as anyone who still uses one cares to update it. Currently my Samsung Android device is at Dec 2018 patchlevel and nothing I can do about it.” Few others are skeptical about this news, another user commented, “There is security, and then there is freedom. You can have the most secure system in the world -- but if there are state sponsored, or company back doors it means nothing.” To know more about this news, check out the official website. AndroidHardening Project renamed to GrapheneOS to reflect progress and expansion of the project GitHub introduces ‘Template repository’ for easy boilerplate code management and distribution Microsoft quietly deleted 10 million faces from MS Celeb, the world’s largest facial recognition database      

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?

On Monday, the Apache Maven team announced the release of the Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin, version 3.1.0. The Javadoc Plugin uses the Javadoc tool to generate javadocs for a specified project. It gets the parameter values that will be used from the plugin configuration specified in the pom. The plugin can also be used to package the generated javadocs into a jar file for distribution. What’s new in Maven Javadoc Plugin version 3.1.0? New features include the support for aggregated reports at each level in the multi-module hierarchy. The dependency has also been upgraded to parent pom 32. Changes made to the repository The aggregate goal doesn't respect managed dependencies detectLinks may pass invalid URLs to javadoc(1) Invalid 'expires' attribute <link> entries that do not redirect are ignored and those that point to a resource that requires an Accept header may be ignored Other improvements: The plugin adds an 'aggregated-no-fork' goal The Command line dump reveals proxy user/password in case of errors The plugin ignores module-info.java on earlier Java versions Additionalparam documentation has been cleaned up Element-list links from java10 dependencies are now supported Reports are now allowed to be generated in Spanish locale The default value for removeUnknownThrows is changed to true Proxy configuration now properly works for both HTTP and HTTPS Patterns are used for defaultJavadocApiLinks Typos are fixed in User Guide. Groups parameter is not compatible with Surefire Other fixes: duplicates lines are fixed in the javadoc JavadocOptionsXpp3Reader doesn't deserialize the placement element <additionalOption> input isn't escaped for double backslashes links option is ignored in offline mode, even for local links in argument file in tag Maven Javadoc Plugin can't get dependency from third-party maven repository These are just a select few updates. For more details, head over to the mailing list archives. Apache NetBeans IDE 10.0 released with support for JDK 11, JUnit 5 and more! Twitter adopts Apache Kafka as their Pub/Sub System Apache Spark 2.4.0 released

There is a new operating system in the market which is designed in anticipation of the collapse of the current economic system - Collapse OS. The goal of this project is “to be as self-contained as possible.” With a copy of this project, its developer Virgil Dupras says, a capable person will be able to easily build and install Collapse OS without external resources. It will also be possible to build a machine with an exclusive design, and from discarded parts with low-tech tools. Dupras believes that the global supply chain will collapse before 2030 and post-collapse, it would be difficult to reproduce most of the electronics due to lack of supply chain. This will make it impossible to bootstrap the new electronic technology and thus limit its growth. At this point, Dupras says, Collapse OS can prove to be a good “starter kit”. He affirms that this operating system can be designed from “scavenged parts and program microcontrollers” with sufficient RAM and storage. Basically, Collapse OS is a z80 kernel, with a collection of programs, tools, and documentation to assemble an operating system. It can run on minimal and improvised machines and enables interfacing through improvised means like serial, keyboard, display. The Collapse Operating System can edit text and compile assembler source files for a wide range of microcontrollers and CPUs. It can also read and write from a wide range of storage devices and replicate itself. What is the current status of Collapse OS? Collapse OS is built from a GNU environment with minimal tooling and only requires libz80, which is an emulator of the z80 processor. It also has a shell that can poke memory, I/O, call arbitrary code from memory. It can also read SD cards and has a text editor modeled after UNIX's ed. Two days ago, a 5K binary zasm with a 2400 SLOC and 8K RAM usage was added in the apps, with an aim to assemble kernel or itself. Currently, Collapse OS can run on an RC2014 through a serial link with a directly plugged in PS/2 keyboard. It also runs on a Sega Master System or a MegaDrive (Genesis) with video output and D-Pad input and/or a PS/2 keyboard adapter. The unique concept of Collapse OS has led to an informative discussion on Hacker News. One of the queries included the availability of a rad-hardened version of z80. A user answered, “Given the relative simplicity of a z80 compared to newer CPU designs, it should be relatively "easy" to harden it. There was definitely a rad-hardened version of the 8085 (similar to the 8080, and therefore to the z80), which was used on the Sojourner rover (among various other NASA and ESA spacecraft). Seems like RISC processors were more common for this, though (looks like most relatively-recent NASA spacecraft - including pretty much all of NASA's Mars landers after Sojourner - use(d) rad-hardened POWER CPUs, e.g. the RAD6000 and RAD750).” Many users have found the concept of Collapse OS interesting. https://twitter.com/thepanta82/status/1181395008827645952 https://twitter.com/bradneuberg/status/1181273072759762944 https://twitter.com/EvanWard97/status/1181452898296832000 https://twitter.com/indigocat/status/1181297674408124418 A Redditor says, “This is so insanely cool, definitely the coolest project I have seen in a while. I am dry interested in minimal software (void Linux and suckles fanatic) but this is taking it to a new level. I have a ton of respect for people who work on projects geared towards more advanced users, I know that most of the time it’s a thankless job but please, for the love of god keep it up. We need more devs like this in the world!” Read the Collapse OS roadmap page for more information. You can also check out its Github for more details. Understanding network port numbers, TCP, UDP, and ICMP on an operating system Google’s secret Operating System ‘Fuchsia’ will run Android Applications: 9to5Google Report macOS Catalina is now available for download FCC can’t block states from passing their own net neutrality laws, states a U.S. court The US, UK, and Australian governments call Facebook’s end-to-end encryption plan a hindrance to investigating crimes

The State of Mozilla 2017 report is out and contains information on areas where Mozilla has made an impact and its activities in 2017-18. We look at some of the important details from the report. Towards building a healthier internet In the last two years, there have been scandals and news around big tech companies relating to data misuse, privacy hindrances and more. Some of these include the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Google tracking, and many others. Public and political trust from large tech companies has eroded following the uncovering of how some of these companies operate and treat user data. The Mozilla report says that now the focus is on how to limit these tech platforms and encourage them to adopt data regulation protocols. Mozilla seeks to fill the void where there is a lack of people who can decide correctly towards building a better internet. The State of Mozilla 2017 report reads: “When the United States Federal Communications Commission attacks net neutrality or the Indian government undermines privacy with Aadhaar, we see people around the world—including hundreds of thousands of members of the Mozilla community—stand up and say, Things should not work this way.” Read also: Is Mozilla the most progressive tech organization on the planet right now? The Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation Mozilla was founded in 1998 as an open source project back when open source was truly open source, free of things like the Commons Clause. Mozilla has two organizations. The Mozilla Foundation which supports emerging leaders and mobilizes citizens towards better health of the internet. Second, the Mozilla Corporation which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the former and creates Mozilla products and advances public policy. The Mozilla Foundation Mozilla invests in people and organizations with a common vision other than building products. Another part of the State of Mozilla 2017 reads: “Our core program areas work together to bring the most effective ideas forward, quickly and where they have the most impact. As a result of our work, internet users see a change in the products they use and the policies that govern them.” Every year Mozilla Foundation creates the open source Internet Health Report to shed light on what’s been happening on the internet, specifically on its wellbeing. Their research includes data from multiple sources on areas like privacy and security, open innovation, decentralization, web literacy, and digital inclusion. Per the health report, Mozilla spent close to a million in 2017 on their agenda-setting work. Mozilla has also mobilized conscious internet users with campaigns around net neutrality in the US, India’s Aadhaar biometric system, copyright reform in the EU, and more. Mozilla has also invested in connecting internet health leaders and worked on data and privacy issues across the globe. It also invested about $24M in 2017 in this work. The Mozilla Corporation Mozilla says that to take the charge in changing internet culture they need to do more than building products. Post Firefox Quantum’s success, their focus is to better enable people in taking control of their online life. Another part of the State of Mozilla 2017 report highlights their vision stating that “Over the coming years, we will become the leading provider of user agency and online privacy by developing long-term trusted relationships with "conscious choosers" with a focus on helping people navigate their connected lives.” Mozilla pulled its ads from Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal After learning about the Cambridge Analytica incident and guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, they decided to pull their ads from Facebook. Their Manifesto says “Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional,”. After sending a message with this action, Mozilla also launched Facebook Container. It is a version of multi-account containers that prevent Facebook from tracking its users when they are not on the platform. They say that everyone has a right to keep their private information private and control their own web experiences. You can view the full State of Mozilla 2017 report at the Mozilla website. Mozilla shares plans to bring desktop applications, games to WebAssembly and make deeper inroads for the future web Mozilla criticizes EU’s terrorist content regulation proposal, says it’s a threat to user rights Is Mozilla the most progressive tech organization on the planet right now?

20 years after KDevelop’s first release, KDevelop 5.3 is now released with features like a new analyzer and improved support for some languages. A new type of analyzer plugin in KDevelop 5.3 In version 5.1 KDevelop got a menu entry Analyzer which provides a set of actions to work with analyzer-like plugins. With version 5.2, a runtime analyzer called Heaptrack and a static analyzer called cppcheck were added. In the development phase of KDevelop 5.3, another analyzer plugin was added which is available with the current release. The new analyzer named Clazy is a clang analyzer plugin specialized for Qt-using code. It can now also be run from within KDevelop by default displaying the issues inline. The KDevelop plugin for Clang-Tidy support will be released as part of KDevelop starting with version 5.4. It is released independently as of now. Internal changes in KDevelop 5.3 KDevelop's own codebase has been subject for using analyzers. A lot of code has been optimized and also stabilized in places indicated by the analyzers. There is also modernization to the new standards of languages like C++ and Qt5 with the aid of analyzers. Improved support for C++ Lot of work was done in KDevelop 5.3 on stabilizing and improving KDevelop’s clang-based language support for C++. The notable fixes include: In clang tooltips were included, range check was fixed. The path to the builtin clang compiler headers can now be overridden. Now the clang builtin headers are always used for the libclang version used. Requests are completed in a group and only the last one is handled. The template for Class/function signatures in Clang Code Completion is fixed. A workaround for constructor argument hints to find declarations. In clang, argument hint code completion is improved. Improved support for PHP With the help of Heinz Wiesinger, there are improvements for PHP support in KDevelop 5.3. There is much-improved support for PHP Namespaces. Support for Generators and Generator delegation is added. The integrated documentation of PHP internals has been updated and expanded. Support for context-sensitive lexer of PHP 7. Installing the parser as a library so other projects can use them. The type detection of object properties is improved. Support is added for the object typehint. ClassNameReferences is better supported. Improvements to expression syntax support particularly around 'print'. Optional function parameters are allowed before non-optional ones. Support for magic constants: __DIR__ and __TRAIT__ are added. Improved Python language support The focus is on fixing bugs, which have been added to the 5.2 series. A couple of improved features in 5.3 are: Environment profile variables are injected into debug process environment. The support for 'with' statements is improved. There is also experimental, but maintainer-seeking support for macOS and port for Haiku. For more details, visit the KDevelop website. Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio The LLVM project is ditching SVN for GitHub. The migration to Github has begun. Microsoft announces .NET standard 2.1

Yesterday in a blogpost, Stephen Wolfram posted about launching a free Wolfram Engine for developers. The Wolfram Engine runs on any standard platform like Linux, Mac, Windows, RasPi, and many more. It can be used directly with a script, or from a command line. The Wolfram Engine also has access to the whole Wolfram Knowledgebase by a free basic subscription to the Wolfram Cloud. “The Wolfram Engine is the heart of all our products.”, says  Wolfram. The Wolfram Engine implements the full Wolfram Language as a software component and can immediately be plugged into any standard software engineering stack. The Wolfram language is a powerful system used for interactive computing as well as for doing R&D, education and data science. It is also being increasingly used as a key component in building production software systems. The Wolfram language has 5000+ functions, including visualization, machine learning, numerics, image computation, and many more. It has lots of  real-world knowledge too, particularly in geo, medical, cultural, engineering, scientific, etc. The Wolfram language has been increasingly used inside large-scale software projects. Wolfram added, “Sometimes the whole project is built in Wolfram Language. Sometimes Wolfram Language is inserted to add some critical computational intelligence, perhaps even just in a corner of the project.” The free Wolfram Engine for developers will help make the Wolfram language available to any software developer. It will also help build systems that can take full advantage of its computational intelligence. Wolfram concludes the blogpost stating, “We’ve worked hard to make the Free Wolfram Engine for Developers as easy to use and deploy as possible.” Many developers have welcomed the free availability of Wolfram Engine. https://twitter.com/bc238dev/status/1130868201129107456 A user on Hacker News states, “I'm excited about this change. I wish it had happened sooner so it could have had more of an impact. It certainly put Wolfram Engine back on my radar.” Another user is planning to take advantage of this situation by “using Mathematica (and its GUI) on a Raspberry Pi to explore and figure out how to do what you want to do, but then actually run it in Wolfram Engine on a more powerful computer.” To know more details about the news, head over to Stephen Wolfram blog. Read More Software developer tops the 100 Best Jobs of 2019 list by U.S. News and World Report Key trends in software development in 2019: cloud native and the shrinking stack 18 people in tech every programmer and software engineer needs to follow in 2019

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

Eric Vogel uses code samples and screenshots to demonstrate how to do Entity Framework Core migrations in a .NET Core application through the command line and in code.

The Rstudio team announced the general availability of their latest RStudio professional product, namely, RStudio Package Manager, two days ago. It explores features such as CRAN access, approved subsets of CRAN packages, adding internal packages from GitHub, and optimized experience for R users among others. RStudio Package Manager is an on-premises server product that helps teams and organizations centralize and organize R packages. In other words, it allows R users and the IT team to work together to build a central repository for R packages. Let’s discuss the features of this new Package Manager. CRAN access RStudio Package Manager allows R users to access CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network) without requiring a network exception on every production node. It also helps automate CRAN updates on your schedule. Moreover, you can optimize the disk usage and only download the packages that you need. However, RStudio Package Manager does not provide binary packages from CRAN. It only provides source packages. This limitation will be addressed in the future. Approved subsets of CRAN packages RStudio Package Manager enables admins to create approved subsets of CRAN packages. It also makes sure that the subsets remain stable despite the adding or updating of packages. Adding internal packages using CLI Administrators can now add internal packages using the CLI. For instance, if your internal packages are in Git, then the RStudio Package Manager can automatically track your Git repositories. This is also capable of making the commits accessible to users. Optimized experience for R users RStudio Package Manager offers a seamless experience that gets optimized for R users. For instance, all packages are versioned which automatically makes the older versions accessible to users. This package Manager is also capable of recording the usage statistics. These metrics help administrators conduct audits and make it easy for R users to discover the popular and most useful packages. For more information, check out the official Rstudio package manager blog. Getting Started with RStudio Introducing R, RStudio, and Shiny

The release of Pharo 7.0 was announced in a blog post yesterday. The seventh major release of the object-oriented programming language, Pharo 7.0 is the most important release yet. We look at the major features in Pharo 7.0. Pharo 7.0 comes in 64-bit versions for Linux and OSX. The performance and stability have improved. The 64-bit versions are stable for Linux and OSX. For Windows, the 64-bit version is still in the preview stage. Pharo 7.0 includes the new version of the PharoLauncher. It is a very useful tool to manage distributions you are working with. The new Pharo build comes with a completely new build process that supports its full bootstrap from sources. This new build process will enable the production to some images. The git client for Pharo, Iceberg has also been significantly improved. Iceberg is now the default CMS. Calypso replaces Nautilus as the new system Pharo browser in Pharo 7.0. Calypso brings improved remote working and enhanced browsing capabilities. IoT is now an important part of Pharo. Installing PharoThings provides an impressive amount of tools to develop applications in small devices. The unified foreign function interface (UnifiedFFI) is improved significantly for compatibility with 64-bit Windows. UnifiedFFI is used for interfacing with the outside world in Pharo. The Pharo blog post says: "Pharo 70’s new infrastructure and process set the stage for a new generation of version. The visibility of GitHub combined with the powerful tools that have been validated with more than one year of beta testing is massively pay off.” About 2142 issues have been closed in this release. There were more than 75 people contributing to the success of Pharo 7.0’s main image. These were the highlights of the new features in Pharo, for more details, you can view the release notes. Future of ESLint support in TypeScript Rust 1.32 released with a print debugger and other changes Elixir 1.8 released with new features and infrastructure improvements

Dr. Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang passed away over the weekend at the age of 68. Dr. Armstrong’s wife specified that he died from an infection of the lungs which occurred due to a quite recent diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis. His lungs were donated to lung research. Francesco Cesarini, founder of Erlang solutions tweeted about Joe’s demise. https://twitter.com/FrancescoC/status/1119596234166218754 Robert Virding, co-creator of Erlang also payed his regards. https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/1119610591885307904 The developer community has also mourned the loss of Joe Armstrong with a large number of developers taking to various social media platforms to offer their condolences to Dr. Armstrong's family and paying their respects for him. Dr. Armstrong’s work with concurrency programming Dr. Armstrong was best known for helping lay foundations in the '70s and '80s to the most widely spread concurrency models as we know them today. In concurrent programming, multiple events, code snippets or programs are perceived to be executing at the same time. Unlike imperative languages, which uses routines or object-oriented languages, which use objects. Concurrency oriented languages use processes, actors, and agents as the main building blocks. Dr. Armstrong helped propel concurrency programming at a time when there was no IoT, web, massive multi-user online games, video streaming, and automated trading or online transactions. The Erlang programming language Erlang was co-created by Joe Armstrong alongside Robert Virding and Mike Williams in the 1980s at the Ericsson Computer Science Labs. While working there, Dr. Armstrong and his colleagues were looking for an approach to developing fault-tolerant and scalable systems. This resulted in the Erlang-style concurrency. He later received a Ph. D. in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003. He is also the author of a number of key books on the topic of Erlang including Concurrent Programming in Erlang, Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World, and Coders At Work. Erlang was originally built for use only at Ericsson, as a proprietary language, to improve telephony applications. It was designed to be a fault-tolerant, distributed, real-time system that offered pattern matching and functional programming in one handy package. It was then open-sourced to the public in 1998. Since then, it has been responsible for business, big and small, to create reliable systems. Since then, Erlang has been one of the most popular open source languages with compelling features like concurrent processes, memory management, scheduling, distribution, networking, etc. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform’s server is almost completely implemented in Erlang. In 2018, Erlang celebrated 20 years of its open sourcing tracing its journey from Ericcson to Whatsapp. Erlang also inspired Elixir, a general-purpose programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir is built on top of Erlang and shares the same abstractions for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications. Using Erlang modules in Elixir has helped in the creation of Nerves, which helps in building embedded software, and the web framework Phoenix. Remembering Dr. Joe Armstrong Many developers have shared their sentiments on Dr. Armstrong’s demise, with most of them describing him as a kind and compassionate developer who was more interested in teaching than his ego. Thomas Gebert, a software developer shared an email thread where he asked Joe Armstrong about concurrency. He states, “Dr. Armstrong’s enthusiasm about Erlang, distributed programming, and pretty much everything else about computers was really a good springboard for self-education.” Even though Thomas asked some serious noobie questions about concurrency, Dr. Armstrong responded back with an incredibly long, well-written email explaining a lot of the minutia of how Erlang avoids a lot of pitfalls and generic concurrency theory. Thomas adds, “He was really good about explaining things in a way simple-enough for me to understand, without coming off as patronizing or rude.” A lot of people also took to Twitter to share their experiences working with Dr. Armstrong. https://twitter.com/zxq9_notits/status/1119602063506206725 https://twitter.com/glv/status/1119706037689491456 https://twitter.com/ktosopl/status/1119612076190601217 https://twitter.com/jboner/status/1119651034933100544 “He and I discussed distributed storage. Well detailed response from him that sent me reading for days. I aspire to be like him.” reads a comment on Hacker News. Such was his popularity. Here are some of his memorable quotes on a varied set of topics of interest to him. “All significant energy gains in the last 50 odd years are the result of new hardware NOT software.” https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1115988725111169025 Prediction: One day computers might become useful https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1114558139217711104 “One on the disadvantages of having a PhD in computer science is that I get asked really difficult questions. Like - "In gmail on my iPhone I press archive - can I get my mail back?" and "Why have they changed the interface?" Why no easy questions like what's a monad?” https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1113847695612022785 The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation launched at the Code BEAM SF conference Elixir 1.7, the programming language for Erlang virtual machine, releases Introducing Mint, a new HTTP client for Elixir

This week the team behind Linux Mint announced the release of Linux Mint 19.2 beta, a desktop Linux distribution used for producing a modern operating system. This release is codenamed as Tina. This release comes with updated software and refinements and new features for making the desktop more comfortable to use. What’s new in Linux Mint 19.2 beta? Update Manager The Update Manager now shows how long kernels are supported and users no longer need to install or remove kernels one by one anymore. Users can now queue installations and removals as well as install and remove multiple kernels in one go. A new button called "Remove Kernels" has been added to make for removing obsolete kernels. There is also support for kernel flavors now. The Update Manager will now show a combobox for users to switch between flavors. Improved menu mintMenu, the main application menu, has received many bug fixes and performance improvements. Also,Even the search bar position and the tooltips are now configurable. In this release, the applet icon now supports both icon files and themed icons. Software Manager A loading screen now shows up when the cache is being refreshed in the Software Manager. Software Manager can now share the same cache and can also list the applications which were installed via other means (other than Software Manager). The cache used by the Software Manager has been moved to mint-common and is turned into a Python module that can recognize manually installed software.  New buttons added in the Maintenance section In this release, two new buttons are made available in the "Maintenance" section of the "Software Sources" configuration tool: Add Missing Keys: With the help of this button, users can now scan their repositories and PPAs and download any key that might be missing. Remove duplicate sources: With the help of this button, users can find and fix duplicated definitions in their sources configuration. Read Also: Ubuntu free Linux Mint Project, LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon, released Announcing MATE 1.22 The Mint team also announced that Linux Mint 19.2 will be shipped with MATE 1.22 which now comes with improved stability and bug fixes. MATE is the Linux desktop that started as a fork of GNOME 2 in 2011 due to the poor reception of GNOME 3.  What’s new in MATE 1.22? It comes with support for metacity-3 themes. This release features better-looking window and desktop switchers. MATE 1.22 features systemd support in the session manager. It has support for new compression formats and can easily pause/resume compression/decompression. It seems users are happy with this news. A user commented on the official post, “Hi Mint Team. Great job so far. Looks very smooth – even for a beta. Menu is crazy fast!!!”  Few others are complaining about the graphical glitches they faced. Another user commented, “Hi team and thanks for your latest offering, there is a LOT to like about this and I will provide as much useful feedback as I can, I have had an issue with graphical glitches from Linux Mint 19x Cinnamon.” To know more about this news, check out the official blog post. Ubuntu free Linux Mint Project, LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon, released Is Linux hard to learn? Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo Beta releases with support for Linux 5.0 and GNOME 3.32