2015 - Reddheads newsletter 14: Dev in the details View this email in your browser Dev in the details

Hello Reddheads, This month readers of the newsletter can learn about some development that @gnasher has been carrying out in November. One of the things that strikes me about working with people such as @gnasher and @henry is the genuine interest they have for the technology behind Reddcoin and cryptocurrency in general. Communication is regularly sparked by development going on in other projects as well as by Reddcoin-specific matters; it pays to be attentive to what is going on with other projects, as you will read below. Since the team evolved over the summer, the priority has been to make a firm foundation on which to build. Hence the creation of supplementary seed nodes (which you can read about in the previous newsletter) to support the network. Today you will learn about another way in which the foundation for Reddcoin development is being strengthened... through the creation of a multi-dev environment that increases the trustworthiness of binary releases. Some of you may know that @gnasher originally became actively involved with Reddcoin when he developed the tipping plugin for Reddcointalk, which runs on the excellent "next generation forum software" Node BB. What you probably don't know is that while he was working on the plugin @gnasher managed to hunt down at least one bug in the forum software itself, which he communicated back to the Node BB team. Below you get an update on @gnasher's work to implement Node BB upgrades into Reddcointalk. Lastly, the best thing about the main content of the newsletter is that... it was written by @gnasher himself. Thanks for your input John ‒ much appreciated! ;) Reddibrek Chief editor



John Nash ‒ @gnasher as he posts on Reddcointalk ‒ is working with other members of the Reddcoin dev team...



Reddcointalk profile



Reddit profile John Nash ‒ @gnasher as he posts on Reddcointalk ‒ is working with other members of the Reddcoin dev team... Multi-tasking

Reddibrek and myself were discussing what might be useful for the newsletter and one thing that continues to pop up is getting information from the devs across to the users. The last four weeks have been quite busy with a number of tasks on my plate. Blockchain exploit identified

About three weeks ago it was pointed out on reddit that the Peercoin blockchain forked due to a bug exploit. This was also confirmed by rnicoll from Dogecoin. In essence, the exploit was caused by a bug in OpenSSL where you cannot store 5 bytes in a long int on a 32bit system (64bit systems were not affected by this). This bug was initially identified by Bitcoin dev Pieter Wuille; this is where BIP66 was created. This is an issue that will exist for most coins that have not already implemented BIP66 (not specific to POS coins). Thankfully due to the good work of the devs at Peercoin, an emergency fix was created which I have already pulled and merged into my repo. This will require an upgrade to the Reddcoin wallet and additionally bumping the version of OpenSSL used, and binaries will be released soon. I will provide a write-up of the history. Gitian Builds

After identifying the issue above and getting the new code in, I busied myself with building out RC binaries. The way this works is using a neat system developed initially for Bitcoin, to make deterministic builds. That is, several people will compile the source code and end up with the finished binaries. These are signed, and the signatures compared. If they all match, we have a winner and the binaries can be released. So, never having undertaken this before, I set about creating a setup to perform the task. Suffice to say, this has been an interesting learning experience. It took about 1 week of testing and retesting and creating various build environments. I am now satisfied that we have a workable system that, if needs be, could be shared with others interested in being a part of the code signing process. I will share more about this over on Reddcointalk. Reddcointalk Forum updates

Although time spent on the above did put working on the forum on hold, I have managed to get very close to the finish with this particular task. I have run through the upgrade process once already. It was relatively successful and I caught a couple of deviations of the process. I need to go through it again at least one more time before we have a go signal. One thing: the update did break the tipping plugin, which I was able to resolve, and this will be deployed in the same package. Coming Up

We are now heading into the Christmas/holiday month. Following on from the work in November, some of my goals for December before we hit the holidays are to: Deploy the Reddcoin binaries

Deploy forum updates



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