Hotchpotch 22

BSD

• OpenBSD 5.9 songs released.
• OpenBSD: The VAX platform is no more.
• PlayOnBSD (run Windows software).

Elixir

• Elixir maps have built in syntax for updating.
• Simple Web Servers with Plug and Cowboy.
• Notes on Elixir: Templating with EEx.

• Joe Armstrong: Calling Elixir from Erlang.

  And as Alan Kay said - “If you don’t fail at least 90% of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.”

• Joe Armstrong: Managing two million web servers.

  We do not have ONE web-server handling 2 millions sessions. We have 2 million webservers handling one session each.

  If there is a software error and the server software crashes we lose either two million connections or one depending upon the model. In Erlang if the web server software itself is incorrect we’ll lose a single connection, which is OK. Since the software is incorrect and crashes we don’t know what to do so crashing is a good alternative. What is important is that one session crashing does not effect all the other sessions. This requirement, goes way back to when we designed Erlang in the mid 1980’s. In Telecoms systems, losing one connection due to a software error was acceptable, losing them all due to a bug was big time bad news.

  To make a fault tolerant system we use two or more processes per user; One is the master process, the others are replicas on different machines. They must be on different machines since the entire machine where the master runs might crash. We can make it scalable by just buying more machines and spreading the processes out over the machines.

Gamedev

• Ingenious: Responsive pixel art.
• Ouya, failure, regret, death.
• Haxe game engine round-up.
• From Dark Souls to Manifold Garden: How games tell stories through architecture.
• Starting Your Own Game Development Studio – One Year On.
• Game Design Framework: On the way to good Game Design.
• The scripting language that drives 80 Days is now open-source.
• Serious Sam dev Croteam releases classic engine source code.
• The Use of Gameplay Progression in Game Design.
• Beyond the State Machine: Building a framework for AI in games.
• Subverting Player Expectation.
• The Lottery - Why People Favor Worse Odds.
• Game Literacy: Games in Education - Should We Teach Game Basics?

Other

• Let’s Encrypt has issued its millionth certificate
• You can pre-order Day of the tentacle remastered on GoG! See Tim Schafer talking about the announcement: Pre-Order Day of the Tentacle at GOG.com!
• Clang 3.8 and LLVM 3.8 have been released.
• Lasp is a new programming model designed to simplify large scale, fault-tolerant, distributed programming. It leverages ideas from distributed dataflow extended with convergent replicated data types, or CRDTs. This supports computations where not all participants are online together at a given moment. The initial design supports synchronization-free programming by combining CRDTs together with primitives for composing them inspired by functional programming. This lets us write long-lived fault-tolerant distributed applications, including ones with nonmonotonic behavior, in a functional paradigm.
• Is node.js the future?
• Anita Sarkeesian's new video series is a feminist take on history.
• The Journey Down published some screenshots of episode 3.
• Working Draft of the HTML specification is now available at GitHub!
• The World's First 5.5 Inch Handheld PC/Gaming Console Based on Windows 10 System.
• Opera introducing native ad-blocking feature for faster browsing.
• Scientists Have Discovered a Bacteria That's Evolved to Eat Plastic.
• Why the German language has so many great words.