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Tag: release

  • Python 3.9

    Python 3.9 is available. What’s new:

    New syntax features:

    • PEP 584, union operators added to dict;
    • PEP 585, type hinting generics in standard collections;
    • PEP 614, relaxed grammar restrictions on decorators.

    New built-in features:

    • PEP 616, string methods to remove prefixes and suffixes.

    New features in the standard library:

    • PEP 593, flexible function and variable annotations;
    • os.pidfd_open() added that allows process management without races and signals.

    Interpreter improvements:

    • PEP 573, fast access to module state from methods of C extension types;
    • PEP 617, CPython now uses a new parser based on PEG;
    • a number of Python builtins (range, tuple, set, frozenset, list, dict) are now sped up using PEP 590 vectorcall;
    • garbage collection does not block on resurrected objects;
    • a number of Python modules (_abc, audioop, _bz2, _codecs, _contextvars, _crypt, _functools, _json, _locale, math, operator, resource, time, _weakref) now use multiphase initialization as defined by PEP 489;
    • a number of standard library modules (audioop, ast, grp, _hashlib, pwd, _posixsubprocess, random, select, struct, termios, zlib) are now using the stable ABI defined by PEP 384.

    New library modules:

    • PEP 615, the IANA Time Zone Database is now present in the standard library in the zoneinfo module;
    • an implementation of a topological sort of a graph is now provided in the new graphlib module.

    Release process changes:

    • PEP 602, CPython adopts an annual release cycle.

  • Off Facebook Activity

    Off Facebook Activity is a tool, that let’s Facebook users see which sites they used outside of Facebook. The tool is as creepy as you would think it would be. Facebook, through it’s like buttons and other embeds, has sheer unlimited insight into personal browsing behaviour.

    Facebook Company Logo
    Facebook Company Logo / Wordmark

    In an attempt by the company to create more transparency, it discloses how much curiosity in a negative sense is driving the social network in trying to understand their audience. And actually sell this gained knowledge to their customers.

    The release of Off Facebook Activity a reminder we are living in an increasingly connected world that is watching us. There is entirely no point for any company to collect this type of data outsire of making us a product.

    The Washington Post writes about how creepy and scary this feature is, and even more important, how to work with privacy settings. While the article deals with Facebook internal settings alone, the amout of data transferred to Facebook won’t stop. At this point, you may want to consider personal privacy tools like uMatrix (for Firefox or Chrome). Or, to leverage protection for the entire network, e.g. for your family, Pi-Hole is worth taking a look, too.

    via: Washington Post

  • AWS CloudFront Monitoring Update

    AWS CloudFront Monitoring Update: AWS released an early & small Christmas Gift to their CloudFront Customers. CloudFront now supports eight more metrics to monitor content distribution. These include:

    Cache Hit Rate via HTTP POST and PUT requests, via the percentage of all cacheable requests for which CloudFront served the content from its cache, including errors not considered cacheable requests.

    Origin Latency as a quota and the total time spent for requests that are served from the origin, not the CloudFront cache. Origin Latency allows to monitor the performance of your origin server.

    Error Rate by status code as a percentage of requests for which the response’s HTTP status code is in the 4/5xx range, in particular 401, 403, 404, 502, 503, and 504.

    AWS CloudFront Monitoring Update via AWS Blog.

  • Kubernetes 1.17 released today – Open Source

    Kubernetes 1.17 released today
    Kubernetes Logo

    Today Kubernetes released it’s version 1.17. The software is one of the most popular open source projects ever. It allows managing containerised applications and micro-services. The release arrives at the end of a regular development cycle.

    After the project was announced in 2014 by two Google employees, it hit a first 1.0 milestone on July 2015. The project gained massive popularity in the cloud world because it enables scalable infrastructures and service. With the Kubernetes 1.0 release, Google partnered with the Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a new home for the technology.

    Since Kubernetes became publicly available, it gained popularity quickly and today is commonly used as the main way to host microservice-based implementations, mostly because Kubernetes and its associated ecosystem provide a rich choice of tools with all the capabilities that are needed to address key concerns of any modern software architectures.

    With Kubernetes 1.17 released today, the package comes with more details on the release in the Release Schedule or in particular on the Changelog.

  • The Road to Python3

    When Python3 came out in 2009, it was already heavily debated. Python3 would be incompatible with previous versions of the popular language, but fix many drawbacks. While the vision was clear and the community initially planned to move forward much quicker. The demand for having a 2.x branch was so huge, however, that the community decided to extend support for 2.7 until the end of 2019. Stack Overflow took a look on why the path took so long.

    https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/14/why-is-the-migration-to-python-3-taking-so-long/
    The Road to Python3: Stack Overflow took a look.

  • Python 3.8.0 is now available

    Here is what’s new.

    Source: Python Insider: Python 3.8.0 is now available

  • Microsoft is all in on Hardware

    thenextweb.com has a rundown of Surface Laptop, Surface Duo, Surface Earbuds, Neo and everything else Microsoft announced at their Surface event this week.

    Here’s a quick rundown of Microsoft’s exciting new hardware for the coming year, including Surface laptops, earbuds, a foldable phone, and more.

    Source: Surface Duo, Neo, and everything else at Microsoft’s packed hardware event

    The Verge has a summary in 11 minutes:

  • Kubernetes 1.16 released

    Kubernetes, the container orchestration and hardware abstraction framework, reached Version 1.16. Custom Resources, Overhauled Metrics, and Volume Extensions are the mentionable new features in the new release.

    We’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.16, our third release of 2019! Kubernetes 1.16 consists of 31 enhancements: 8 enhancements moving to stable, 8 enhancements in beta, and 15 enhancements in alpha.Major Themes Custom resources CRDs are in widespread use as a Kubernetes extensibility mechanism and have been available in beta since the 1.7 release. The 1.16 release marks the graduation of CRDs to general availability (GA).

    Source: Kubernetes 1.16: Custom Resources, Overhauled Metrics, and Volume Extensions – Kubernetes

  • Django 3.0 alpha1 released

    A major version bump, with the largest change being built in support for ASGI, the Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface, that previously could be included via channels.

    The biggest benefits ASGI offers over the traditional WSGI, is the possibility to build asynchronous operations in webapps, and leverage e.g. WebSockets to push information to the client.

    Here are the in-development release notes: Django 3.0 release notes – UNDER DEVELOPMENT | Django documentation

  • Go 1.13 released

    Some of the highlights include:

    https://blog.golang.org/go1.13