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Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister gets into the holiday spirit with a post that gives thanks to technical advances for developers, including open source tools, modern IDEs, and distributed version control. 'I'm old enough to remember when performance-critical routines meant hand-coded assembly language and sometimes even keying in machine code as hexadecimal digits. We've come a long way since those bad old days, and not surprisingly we owe a lot of our progress to technology. So for this Thanksgiving, here are just a few of the modern advances for which I, as a developer, give thanks.' What are you giving thanks to?

"The PyPy development team has released version 1.7 of its 'very compliant' Python interpreter with integrated tracing just-in-time compiler. The developers say that the focus of the new update was widening the range of code that PyPy can speed up, which the developers refer to as the 'sweet spot'. In their benchmarks, PyPy 1.7 performs approximately 30 per cent faster than 1.6 and 'up to 20 times faster on some benchmarks'."

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why code analysis and similar metrics provide little insight into what really makes an effective software development team, in the wake of a new scorecard system employed at IBM. "Code metrics are fine if all you care about is raw code production. But what happens to all that code once it's written? Do you just ship it and move on? Hardly - in fact, many developers spend far more of their time maintaining code than adding to it. Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities?" McAllister writes, "Are developers who take time to train and mentor other teams about the latest code changes considered less productive than ones who stay heads-down at their desks and never reach out to their peers? How about teams that take time at the beginning of a project to coordinate with other teams for code reuse, versus those who charge ahead blindly? Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices?"

"Last week, Intel announced that it had added x86 optimizations to Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, but the text of the announcement and included quotes were vague and a bit contradictory given the open nature of Android development. After discussing the topic with Intel we've compiled a laundry list of the company's work in Gingerbread and ICS thus far, and offered a few of our own thoughts on what to expect in 2012 as far as x86-powered smartphones and tablets are concerned."

The DragonFly BSD project has recently decided to hold off on the 2.12 release to address a couple of long-standing issues. Some of the disruptive work done to address these issues has also resulted in the MP Token (giant kernel lock) and other major contention points being finally pushed out of the way of all critical paths. The result?

When I decided to take on this article I thought it would be easy. Grab a few quotes from some developers, re-hash WINE support, check out the latest version of Battle for Wesnoth... Simple stuff.

"The following are major features for Fedora 16: enhanced cloud support including Aeolus Conductor, Condor Cloud, HekaFS, OpenStack and pacemaker-cloud; KDE Plasma workspaces 4.7; GNOME 3.2; a number of core system improvements including GRUB 2 and the removal of HAL; an updated libvirtd, trusted boot, guest inspection, virtual lock manager and a pvops based kernel for Xen all improve virtualization support."

Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 8 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Firefox for Android. This release appears to be a relatively minor update. Perhaps the main feature of this update is the ability for user control over third-party addons. "At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep." A detailed technical description of this new Firefox release can be found in the release notes.

MeeGo community member Vgrade. who is involved with the Mer Core project, describes his experiences with adapting Plasma Active for ARM architecture and running in on top of Mer. Even though Plasma Active One is targeted for tablets, it runs as a usable UX on a Nokia N950 handset. Mer itself is an open, inclusive, meritocratically governed and openly developed Linux core, providing a mobile-optimised base distribution for use by device manufacturers. The Plasma Active team plans to focus on a handset UI in Plasma Active Three, which is scheduled for summer 2012.

Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying -- at least I've said it many times -- that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'

Open source history suggests vendor-backed Eucalyptus will ultimately win out over the foundation-based Open Stack as the open source cloud platform of choice for IT going forward. 'History has shown that when an open source project is dealing with a valuable layer of the software stack, that project has tended to be controlled by a single vendor that can directly make money from the project,' Rodrigues writes. 'History also shows that when an open source project is dealing with a commodity layer of the software stack, the project tends to be controlled by a foundation.' The question then boils down to whether cloud platforms are indeed a valuable layer, and thus directly monetizable, as Red Hat proved with Linux, or are they a commodity layer, like Apache HTTP Server or Eclipse. Ultimately, Rodrigues believes that the private cloud will prove to be a valuable component of the IT stack, thereby favoring Eucalyptus' AWS-based private cloud platform.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses the use of quizzes and brain-teasers in evaluating potential software development hires, a practice that seems to be on the rise. 'The company best known for this is Google. Past applicants tell tales of a head-spinning battery of coding problems, riddles, and brain teasers, many of which seem only tangential to the task of software development. Other large companies have similar practices -- Facebook and Microsoft being two examples,' McAllister writes. 'You'll need to assess an applicant's skill in one way or another, but it's also possible to take the whole interview-testing concept too far. Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind when crafting your test questions, to avoid slamming the door on candidates unnecessarily.'

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp provides a look at the best apps for boosting the battery life of your Android device. "The best place to start if you just want to survey your power usage habits is Battery Indicator. To follow that up with actual power management, Green Power and JuiceDefender are your best bets. 2x Battery is not a bad program, but it's limited to managing cell data and not Wi-Fi connections. If that feature were added in a future revision, 2x Battery would be a real contender."

User interest and bring-your-own-tech policies are pushing Macs beyond their traditional business niches. InfoWorld's Ryan Faas provides a Mac management guide to help you extend your existing support strategies to Mac workstations, providing tips, techniques, and a list of 22 essential Mac tools for embracing Macs as they become more prevalent in your business environment. 'Macs can no longer be managed independent of other processes and infrastructure. They must be integrated with your existing directory service. They require an efficient, scalable deployment model that hooks into asset management. They require secure, auditable patch management and a device and user management solution that secures each Mac's core OS components and apps.'