Many companies say they listen to their users' feedback. Often, that seems like a false promise, but sometimes it's for real, and the last couple of days have turned up a few examples of this.
Last October Eben Upton, of Raspberry Pi fame, gave a talk at the RSGB Convention. But better than that, he stuck around afterwards and spent quite a while chatting to a few of us, myself and Pete 2E0SQL included.
We spoke about what features the Pi could usefully add to better support Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications, and hardware-accelerated Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) were pretty high up the list. If you're not familiar with these, they take a chunk of signal in the time domain, and transform it into the frequency domain - in other words, you give it a chunk of signal, and it breaks it down into frequency components.
This is something that the Pi's rather powerful graphics processor can do much more quickly than its main CPU. Today, they've announced a GPU accelerated FFT library. Thanks all!
At Red Gate, we use GitHub for source control. This means that someone compromising one of our developers' GitHub accounts potentially gets access to a lot of our source code.
Using 2-factor authentication reduces this risk considerably: not only must an attacker compromise a password, they must also have access to the owner's mobile phone. However, to make this defense effective, we need everyone's accounts to have 2-factor authentication enabled.
Previously, there was no way of doing this automatically, and towards the end of last year, I asked if it would be possible. This week, GitHub announced an API filter to get organization members with 2FA disabled, so now we can automatically nag people who don't switch it on!
If you use Amazon Web Services, their reserved instances provide a way of significantly reducing the cost of services you use for a long time - you trade an upfront commitment of a year or more for lower hourly rates. However, it's historically been quite tricky to see whether your reserved instances were being used efficiently - something I've spoken to Amazon about before.
Handily then, they've just announced a reserved instance utilization report, which solves the problem neatly for EC2 instance...
All in all, a rather positive week!
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