Jaxon Repp of HarperDB speaks with Brijesh Ammanath about distributed data infrastructure, including what it is and why it's important. They discuss the key factors that make distributed data infrastructure attractive, as well as challenges to implementing it. The episode explores the architecture and design principles, the key security considerations, and the transition factors for distributed data Infrastructure. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software.

Jonathan Crossland, software architect, author, and business owner, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the AMMERSE framework of design principles. They start by discussing the agile manifesto as a statement of values, and Jonathan shares his perspective based on his experience as a software developer and business owner. They then explore the three layers of the AMMERSE framework and how they help business and engineering leaders to align their values, thereby improving their ability to collaborate and reach common goals. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Jason C. McDonald, author of the book Dead Simple Python, speaks with host Samuel Taggart about leveraging quantified tasks to improve estimation, particularly across projects. They discuss the origin of the concept and its relationship with story points, and Jason offers examples to show how quantified tasks can capture nuances in software tasks that are often lost with story points. He also points to the ability to compare them across projects as a major advantage of quantified tasks. Among other topics, they consider also how to use quantified tasks to analyze the stability of a codebase. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Yingjun Wu, founder of RisingWave Labs and previously a software engineer at Amazon Web Services and researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center, speaks with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath about streaming databases. After considering the benefits and unique challenges, they delve into the architecture and design patterns of streaming databases, as well as the evolution and security considerations. Yingjun also talks about the future of streaming databases, including the potential impact that Amazon S3 Express One Zone will have on the streaming landscape, and how the unified batch and streaming might evolve in the database world. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Charlie Jones, Director of Product Management at ReversingLabs and subject matter expert in supply chain security, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss tackling third-party software risks. They begin by defining different types of third-party software risks and then take a deep dive into case studies where third-party components and software have had cascading effects on downstream systems. They consider some frameworks for secure software development that can be used to evaluate third-party software and components – both as a publisher or as a consumer – and end by discussing laws and regulations with final advise from Charlie on how enterprises can tackle third-party software risks. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

John Frandsen, Chief Product officer for Elebase, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of geospatial technologies. The conversation begins with a discussion of the history of mapping and global information systems (GIS) technologies. John describes the underlying technologies used in location-aware applications and the ways that developers can incorporate maps in their own applications. The conversation also highlights recent changes and innovations in the space, as well as the challenges and opportunities of incorporating your own data into existing base map providers. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Infrastructure engineer and Kubernetes ingress-Nginx maintainer James Strong joins host Robert Blumen to discuss the Kubernetes networking layer. The discussion draws on content from Strong’s book on the topic and covers a lot of ground, including: the Kubernetes network's use of different IP ranges than the host network; overlay network with its own IP ranges compared to using expanded portions of the host network ranges; adding routes with kernel extension points; programming kernel extension points with IP tables compared to eBPF; how routes are updated as the host network gains or loses nodes, the use of the Linux network namespace to isolate each pod; routing between pods on the same host; routing between pods across the host network; the container-network interface (CNI); the CNI ecosystem; differences between CNIs; choosing a CNI when running on a public cloud service; the Kubernetes service abstraction with a cluster-wide IP address; monitoring and telemetry of the Kubernetes network; and troubleshooting the Kubernetes network.

Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.

Shannon Selbert, co-founder of Soren and developer of Oban, and Parker Selbert, creator of the Oban background job framework, chief architect at dscout, and co-founder of Soren, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about robust job processing in Elixir. They explore the reliability, consistency, and observability in relation to job processing, to understand how Oban, Elixir, and PostgreSQL deliver them.

The Selberts describe why Oban was created, its history, which parts of the Elixir ecosystem they use, and why this would not be possible without PostgreSQL and Elixir. They discuss the lessons learned in the 5 years since the first release, as well as use cases, job throughput, the hardest problem to solve so far, workers, queues, CRON, distributed architectures, retry algorithms, just-once methodologies, the reliability the beam brings, consistency across nodes, how PostgreSQL is vital, telemetry data, best use cases for Oban, and the most common issues that new users face. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Michael J. Freedman, the Robert E. Kahn Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, as well as the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, spoke with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about TimescaleDB. They revisit what time series data means in 2024, the history of TimescaleDB, how it integrates with PostgreSQL, and they take the listeners through a complete setup. Freedman discusses the types of data well-suited for a timeseries database, the types of sectors that have these requirements, why PostgreSQL is the best, Pg callbacks, Pg hooks, C programming, Rust, their open source contributions and projects, data volumes, column-data, indexes, backups, why it is common to have one table for your timeseries data, when not to use timescaledb, IoT data formats, Pg indexes, how Pg works without timescaledb, sharding, and how to manage your upgrades if not using Timescale Cloud. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Jonathan Schneider, the cofounder of Moderne and the creator of OpenRewrite, talks with SE Radio's Gregory Kapfhammer about automated software maintenance. In addition to exploring the design and implementation of OpenRewrite, Schneider explains how the tool can automatically support software maintenance tasks such as framework migration and security fixes for programs implemented in languages like Java. The episode also explores how OpenRewrite uses the lossless semantic tree to support automated refactoring though the use of recipes. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata and a committer to the Kyverno projects, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of policy-as-code and the open source Kyverno project. The discussion covers the nature of policies; policies and security; policies and compliance to standards; security scans that generate reports compared to tools that allow or deny operations at run time; Kyverno as a kubernetes service; the Kyverno helm charts; the components of Kyverno; bootstrapping a kubernetes cluster with Kyverno; installing policies; implementing policies; customizing policies; packaging and installing policies; kubernetes dynamic admission controllers; the Kyverno admission controller; securing Kyverno itself; observability of Kyverno; types of reports and messages available to cluster users.

This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

Nick Tune and Jean-Georges Perrin join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about their proposed approach to modernizing legacy systems. The episode starts with some high-level perspective to set context for the approach described in their book, Architecture Modernization (Manning, 2024). From there, the discussion turns to important details, including criteria for deciding which aspects to revisit; some of the activities, processes, and tools; and the importance of data engineering in modernization efforts. Nick and Jean-Georges describe how to successfully implement an architecture-modernization effort, and how to fit that work with the teams' other priorities. The episode finishes with some warnings about the typical risks associated with modernizing a legacy system, and suggestions on how to mitigate them.

This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

Jonathan Horvath of Z-bit discusses physical access control systems (PACS) with host Jeremy Jung. They start with an overview of PACS components and discuss the proprietary nature of the industry, the slow pace of migration to open standards, and why Windows is commonly used. Jonathan describes the security implications of moving from isolated networks to the cloud, as well as credential vulnerabilities, encryption using symmetric keys versus asymmetric keys, and the risks related to cloning credentials. They also consider several standards, including moving from Wiegand to the Open Supervised Device Protocol (OSDP), as well as the Public Key Open Credential (PKOC) standard, and the open source OSDP implementation that Jonathan authored.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Today is the 20th birthday of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that publishes the RSS specification. It was formed on July 18, 2003, when the copyright of the specification was transferred to Harvard University, which immediately released it under a Creative Commons license and deferred all matters related to RSS to the new board.

At the time of the board's launch, here's how the founding members described its purpose:

Is the advisory board a standards body?

No. It will not create new formats and protocols. It will encourage and help developers who wish to use RSS 2.0. Since the format is extensible, there are many ways to add to it, while remaining compatible with the RSS 2.0 specification. We will help people who wish to do so.

What does the advisory board actually do?

We answer questions, write tech notes, advocate for RSS, make minor changes to the spec per the roadmap, help people use the technology, maintain a directory of compatible applications, accept contributions from community members, and otherwise do what we can to help people and organizations be successful with RSS.

This remains the purpose 140 dog years later. In addition to maintaining the current RSS specification, we are the official publisher of Netscape's RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91 specifications and Yahoo's Media RSS specification.

We also offer an RSS Validator and RSS Best Practices Profile containing our recommendations for how to implement the format.

There's a resurgence of interest in RSS today as people discover the exhilarating freedom of the open web. Some of this is due to dissatisfaction with deleterious changes at big social sites like Twitter and Reddit. Some is due to satisfaction with Mastodon, a decentralized social network owned by nobody with more than one million active users. As long as there are social media gatekeepers using engagement algorithms to decide what you can and can't see, there will be a need to get around them. When someone offers an RSS or Atom feed and you subscribe to it in a reader, you get their latest updates without manipulation.

Here's to another 20 years of feeding readers, unlocking gates, helping developers adopt RSS and repeatedly getting asked the question, "Can an RSS item contain more than one enclosure?"

There are a lot of libraries for processing XML data with Java that can be used to read RSS feeds. One of the best is the open source library XOM created by the computer book author Elliotte Rusty Harold.

As he wrote one of his 20 books about Java and XML, Harold got so frustrated with the available Java libraries for XML that he created his own. XOM, which stands for XML Object Model, was designed to be easy to learn while still being strict about XML, requiring documents that are well-formed and utilize namespaces in complete adherence to the specification. (At the RSS Advisory Board, talk of following a spec is our love language.)

XOM was introduced in 2002 and is currently up to version 1.3.9, though all versions have remained compatible since 1.0. To use XOM, download the class library in one of the packages available on the XOM homepage. You can avoid needing any further configuration by choosing one of the options that includes third-party JAR files in the download. This allows XOM to use an included SAX parser under the hood to process XML.

Here's Java code that loads items from The Guardian's RSS 2.0 feed containing articles by Ben Hammersley, displaying them as HTML output:

// create an XML builder and load the feed using a URL
Builder bob = new Builder();
Document doc = bob.build("https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benhammersley/rss");
// load the root element and channel
Element rss = doc.getRootElement();
Element channel = rss.getFirstChildElement("channel");
// load all items in the channel
Elements items = channel.getChildElements("item");
for (Element item : items) {
  // load elements of the item
  String title = item.getFirstChildElement("title").getValue();
  String author = item.getFirstChildElement("creator",
    "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/").getValue();
  String description = item.getFirstChildElement("description").getValue();
  // display the output
  System.out.println(">h2>" + title + ">/h2>");
  System.out.println(">p>>b>By " + author + ">/b>>/p>");
  System.out.println(">p>" + description + ">/p>");

All of the classes used in this code are in the top-level package nu.xom, which has comprehensive JavaDoc describing their use. Like all Java code this is a little long-winded, but Harold's class names do a good job of explaining what they do. A Builder uses its build() method with a URL as the argument to load a feed into a Document over the web. There are also other build methods to load a feed from a file, reader, input stream, or string.

Elements can be retrieved by their names such as "title", "link" or "description". An element with only one child of a specific type can be retrieved using the getFirstChildElement() method with the name as the argument:

Element linkElement = item.getFirstChildElement("link");

An element containing multiple children of the same type uses getChildElements() instead:

Elements enclosures = item.getChildElements("enclosure");
if (enclosures.size() > 1) {
  System.out.println("I'm pretty sure an item should only include one enclosure");
}

If an element is in a namespace, there must be a second argument providing the namespace URI. Like many RSS feeds, the ones from The Guardian use a dc:creator element from Dublin Core to credit the item's author. That namespace has the URI "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/".

If the element specified in getFirstChildElement() or getChild Elements() is not present, those methods return null. You may need to check for this when adapting the code to load other RSS feeds.

If the name Ben Hammersley sounds familiar, he coined the term "podcasting" in his February 2004 article for The Guardian about the new phenomenon of delivering audio files in RSS feeds.

After a 2021 leak at the U.S. military’s Red Hill fuel storage facility poisoned thousands, activists, Native Hawaiians, and affected military families have become unlikely allies in the fight for accountability.

Trees and edible plants are being planted at churches, schools, street corners, and empty lots across the country to provide free shade and food to all.

When we think about climate change, we often think in terms of statistics, studies, and measurements of melting glaciers, dwindling wildlife populations, and mass human migration. It’s a grim reality.

Four decades after the deadly gas leak, Dow Chemical continues to avoid accountability for the world's worst industrial accident.

As Hurricanes Helene and Milton devastate the Southeastern U.S., Antonia Juhasz articulates a just vision for how to fix our climate.

The Heritage Foundation has a plan to rewrite the rules of government under a second Trump term, and they’ve helpfully laid it all out for public viewing.

Community organizers with the Sunrise Movement explain why they protested outside the GOP Vice Presidential hopeful’s office.

Only a few localities nationwide allow voters to elect judges. What impact would democratizing judge selection have on the judiciary?

On Aug. 8, 2023, 13-year-old Kaliko was getting ready for her hula class at her mother’s house in West Maui. The power was out, and she heard there was a

Project 2025, created by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, fortifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, despite the fact that

Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist long critical of his nation’s apartheid state, offers moral clarity on the first anniversary of the genocide in Gaza.

According to the actor and activist: “The choice is very clear: Do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”

In bringing electric vehicle battery plants under its national contract, the UAW took a major step toward transitioning away from fossil fuels in a way that protects workers' rights.

Thanks to the GOP’s 2017 tax reform law, dozens of large corporations paid their CEOs more than they paid the federal government in taxes.

Why can’t Americans buy Chinese electric vehicles that could help the Biden administration meet its climate goals?

A new DOJ lawsuit is challenging Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s monopoly power over artist performances, venues, and concert-goers.

Finding our way to a viable human future will require the guidance of a true eco-nomics, grounded in biology and ecology rather than finance and capital.

A progressive alternative to Project 2025’s anti-tax, anti-worker economy includes worker protections and a strong social safety net.

Christine Ahn and Marie Berry report back from the powerful Feminist Peace Summit, held in Denver recently.

Long harmed by patriarchal, casteist norms within the legal system, women in India are implementing women-centered forms of grassroots justice.

When everything that brings LGBTQ people joy is under attack, dancing, laughing, and celebrating our persistent existence are direct acts of resistance.

In rural Argentina, Hacienda Camino offers parents a suite of skills and resources to help raise healthy children.

Advocates are working to overcome patriarchal structures worldwide that deny menstruating people dignity, access, and agency.

Facing a health care system without sufficient translation services and a grueling economic landscape, Punjabi residents in Fresno, California, have created an organization to help meet their community’s unique needs.

A progressive alternative to Project 2025's anti-abortion vision includes no-cost abortions, on-demand, for everyone who wants one.

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Author Nazneen Ahmed Pathak tells Press Packers, Khadija and Jackson, how real history inspires her stories.

Newsround's Press Pack is set up to help you tell the world YOUR news from your life: Your passions, your achievements and your local area.

It has been announced that Strictly Come Dancing Star Amy Dowden will not be returning to this year's series of Strictly.

Research by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) charity suggests that the number of children reading has gone down to around one in three. We want to know about your reading habits.

The new series is nearly here and we now know which ten famous faces will be going into the jungle. Meet all the stars set to star in this year's show - and let us know who you're most looking forward to seeing in action.

New research shows the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from private jets between 2019 and 2023.