Daily del.icio.us for April 26th through April 27th

Posted on April 27, 2008 by Vinny

What Programming Languages Should You Know? – David Chisnall suggests that the more programming languages you know, the better. The point is not to stuff your head with language rules. Rather, he explains how being able to read multiple languages, even if you never code in them, can help you to selec
MetaWidget: the ‘sweet spot’ of automatic UI development – Metawidget takes your domain objects and automatically creates User Interface components for them, saving you handcoding your UIs and leaving you to concentrate on stitching together your application.
Ext JS: A reminder that you are not alone on Dion Almaer’s Blog – Every now and then, normally when talking to a libertarian, I think about how we are actually all connected to each other. It is impossible to sandbox yourself from society which leads me to conclude that I need to embrace it and do what I can to work out
InformIT: Interview with Donald Knuth > Interview with Donald Knuth – Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming co
Graeme Rocher’s Blog: Choosing an OSS License and the Ext-JS saga – The news that Ext-JS has, from one release to the next, changed from a modified LGPL to a GPL based license nearly made me fall off my chair. There have been many poor judged, and ill advised decisions made by software companies over the last few years, b
The Future of Enterprise Software: I Am So Scared, I Am So Excited « 7thursdays – More so than ever, the time is coming for companies that build it right and do it right to prosper while the ones that exclusively focus on just selling it right and who-cares-what-happens-after-the-deal-closes to stare at a lacklustre or flat revenue cur
@Gridify: Java Executor Service Rocket Scientists and Generics Brain Surgeons – We at GridGain recently were faced with the following problem. It turns out (may be old news to some), that java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService in JDK 1.6 is not backward compatible with JDK 1.5
Take a screenshot in Flex and send it to ASP.NET | YTechie.com – In Adobe Flex 3, you can get a bitmap image of any control by using this code (you’ll need to import "mx.graphics.ImageSnapshot"):
Simple CSS: Creating More Readable Text | Web Page Design for Designers © – CSS provides three very useful properties to enhance the readability of your site: font, line-height, and letter-spacing
Jack Slocum’s Blog – » Ext JS License change and personal attacks – It’s not right the amount of personal attacks I have been receiving lately. I have people questioning my ethics, business practices and saying we changed Ext JS to GPL v3 because my (and I quote) “greed for money came before your moral ethics”.
Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked – Security Fix – The attackers appear to be breaking into the sites with the help of a security vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers. In an alert issued last week, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of an unpatched flaw in
0x000000 # Massive SQL Injection Attack 600.000++ – I just read that F-secure found out that already 510.000 600.000++ new websites are hacked and more are being hacked while we speak. Among them the British government, United Nations and many more high target

Daily del.icio.us for April 22nd through April 25th

Posted on April 25, 2008 by Vinny

Bonus Quote of the Day — Political Wire – "The Clintons know that she can?t win this. But they?'re hell-bound to make it impossible for Obama to win."
Thank you, Javascript – The Daily WTF – Javascript supports octal numbers. Any number starting with a zero is octal, even if it can't be an actual octal number. In certain languages, like Perl, trying to use a non-octal number as an octal number results in an error. In other languages, like Jav
Screencast #1 – Amazon EC2 plugin for IntelliJ | Elastic Grid Blog – Here is a screencast demonstration the use of the Amazon EC2 plugin for IntelliJ IDEA
a little madness » Ext Discovers Step 2 of the Slashdot Business Model? – The saddest part about this is that the Ext team really have built a fantastic library, and a vibrant community around it. The library had all the hallmarks of an open source success story. Now, however, Ext have committed the cardinal sin of an open sour
Application Development Trends – SpringSource Enterprise Edition Now Live – The new SpringSource Enterprise Edition product is specifically designed to support large organizations, providing enterprise-class tools and features. The product aims to meet enterprise requirements by being "certified, warranted and indemnified,".
Sun looks to free up the rest of Java | The Industry Standard – By freeing these up, Java can be fully open-source and thus be packaged more easily with Linux distributions. In conjunction with this activity, Sun is talking with Linux distributors, including OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Fedora to have them offer an updated ve
Windows Server 2008 Now ‘PHP Ready’ – Microsoft and Zend have worked together on Zend Core, Zend's tested, certified and supported version of PHP. Zend Core and PHP are now certified for Windows Server 2008.
InfoQ: Comparing JEE Servers – When picking which JEE server to use for your application, you have a number of choices to select from. Knowing which application server is the best is key. Jonathan Campbell took a handful of JEE application servers, and came up with surprising results
Ext JS – Blog – Ext JS is pleased to announce the latest release of the Ext JS toolkit and the introduction of a new product, Ext GWT 1.0 (beta 1). The Ext JS version has been updated to 2.1 and includes new components, performance improvements, bug fixes and more.
Ajaxian » Ext JS 2.1 Released – Ext JS 2.1 has been released. In this point release the featured changes are: Full REST support, Added Ext.StatusBar Component and Samples, Ext.Slider Component and Samples, Example to demonstrate Remote Loading of Component Configs, Grid Filtering Sample

Daily del.icio.us for April 20th through April 22nd

Posted on April 22, 2008 by Vinny

InfoQ: Top 10 Mistakes when building Flex Applications – In this post, Adobe’s James Ward teams up with InfoQ.com to bring you another Flex Top 10 (our most recent Flex Top 10). Flex is an open source application development framework for building rich Internet applications that run in the web with Flash Play
InfoQ: IntelliJ IDEA Supports Flex Development – JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA is one of Java developers' the most favorite development IDEs. The recent IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.3 release includes some new features supports Flex application development. To understand how Flex RIA developers can utilize InitelliJ's
IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Type Renderers – I’d like to tell you about one of the IntelliJ IDEA features – type renderers. They provide you the ability to customize how objects are displayed in the debugger, offering “logic-oriented” presentation of data vs. structure-oriented as it is by def
Cloud Security: Where is Your Computer Today? – A new blog that launched last week–Cloud Security–is devoted to looking at the security issues of cloud computing, which encompasses grid computing, utility computing, software as a service, storage in the cloud, and virtualization
Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today. – Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center's worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents!
Why ‘no Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-04-21 | By Galen Gruman – According to NPD Research, Apple's share of the retail market has climbed to 14 percent as of February 2008. Gartner and IDC report that the Mac's share in the U.S. as of March 31 was 6.6 percent.
The Norway Vote – What really happened « Topic Maps and All That – The process which led to Norway’s Yes vote on OOXML was so surrealistic that it deserves to be recorded for posterity. Here’s my version of the story.
For AT&T, U-Verse Is Picking Up Steam – GigaOM – UBS’s John Hodulik, one of the best telecom analysts, has pegged AT&T as his top pick for this earnings seasons and is expecting some good tidings from Ma Bell. What caught my eye in his note was the progress made by AT&T’s IPTV effort, U-Verse.
Virtualization: VMware, Xen, or VirtualBox? (by Jeremy Zawodny) – I wish to virtualize my computer life. However, I face an abundance of choices from which you will help me select the right one. What are the pros and cons here? And are there other solutions worthy of consideration?
/var/log/mind » Blog Archive » Turbocharge your string keyed hashmaps – In most most situations the possible universe of keys in the hashmap are known upfront either when writing the code or when starting up the application. If instead of creating hard coded strings or by using various string key parameters from say an XML fi

Daily del.icio.us for April 17th through April 19th

Posted on April 19, 2008 by Vinny

Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient ‘Toxic’ – New York Times – The Canadian government is said to be ready to declare bisphenol-a, or B.P.A. as a toxic chemical. It is widely used in plastics for baby bottles, beverage and food containers as well as linings in food cans.
Jodd Library -Proxetta – Proxetta is all about dynamic proxies. Using just Java. In the same way you would code it by yourself. And the only dependency is Jodd & Asm library.
Census for open-source apps kicks off – CNET News.com – Open-source management company OpenLogic, IDC and Unisys launched the Open Source Census. The project is based around a tool, OSS Discovery, that scans systems for known open-source projects and anonymously submits the data to an OpenLogic database.
Process Monitor – Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon
MySQL adoption: Deep and wide | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – I love this anecdote from Jonathan Schwartz's blog. As is demonstrated again and again, enterprises have no idea just how awash in open-source software they are…until they ask.
Java Community News – Rod Johnson’s Predictions for Enterprise Java – In a series of predictions for the future of Java EE, Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring project, shares his opinions on de facto versus de jure standards, the role of the JCP, and on why Java EE 6 will usher in renewed app server competition.
Amazon Web Services gets serious about enterprise | Software as Services | ZDNet.com – It now seems that Amazon is moving aggressively to make its cloud computing services palatable for enterprise users — not surprising, given that enterprises including The New York Times and Nasdaq are now customers
Google delivers; Maybe paid clicks weren’t such a big deal | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Google on Thursday allayed concerns about its paid click growth rate with first quarter earnings that topped Wall Street’s expectations. Google reported first quarter net income of $1.31 billion, or $4.12 a share, on revenue of $5.19 billion.
Red Hat News | What’s Going On With Red Hat Desktop Systems? An Update – Red Hat team notes that they will not be working on a consumer version of their Linux product in the foreseeable future, instead focusing on enterprise software.
Hiring the Rowing-Forward 30% – His anecdotal "70% Rowing Backwards" sounds roughly right to me, and it bothers me a lot. Studies show that programmers derive their primary satisfaction by being productive, so such an environment sounds downright depressing. But managers obviously don't

Daily del.icio.us for April 14th through April 16th

Posted on April 17, 2008 by Vinny

Searchable javadocs – Javadocs are good but not great as they miss a key feature of being able to do a full text search. Enter Documancer – It allows you to point to the index.html Javadoc file of a given library and one can then run full text searches through the Javadocs
DataCleaner – eobjects – DataCleaner is an open source project concerned with creating a data quality solutions for business and organizations wishing to measure and increase the quality of their data. DataCleaner includes functionality to profile and compare data, to validate da
IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Announcing New Release of JetGroovy Plugin – We’re glad to announce the general availability of the new release of JetGroovy Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. Version 1.5 brings yet more of IntelliJ IDEA´s smart, advanced features to Groovy and Grails developers
HtmlUnit 2.1 Released « A Public Scratchpad – The HtmlUnit team is pleased to announce a new release of HtmlUnit. This latest version includes a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements, and sports excellent support for GWT, jQuery and Sarissa, decent support for Prototype and Dojo, and basic
Enterprise 2.0: A Computer Security Nightmare? – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog – One conclusion, the report notes, is that users are routinely, and fairly easily, circumventing corporate security controls. And that is because traditional firewall technology was not meant to grapple with the diversity of Internet applications of recent
Amazon’s cloud computing will surpass its retailing business | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Everyone else–Google and Microsoft–are working on their cloud computing services, but they are really in the first revision of their respective offerings. Amazon is ahead and tweaking
It’s Only Software » 5 Minute Guide to Spring and Simple[r!] JDBC – I recently worked on a personal project to learn how one can write dead-simple plain old JDBC applications using only Spring Framework 2.5 without an ORM layer. Spring 2.5 has many features that provide some of the convenience of ORM libraries
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Road Runner vs. U-verse

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Vinny

I am one of those people who hate Time Warner (because of the crappy and recently unreliable service) that can’t wait for Verizon FOIS or AT&T U-verse or anything faster to show up in my neighborhood. My dream Internet provider for home would be what people in Europe have – 50Mbps connections but I’ll settle for Verizon’s Faster Plus services that claims to provide 15 Mbps download and 15 Mbps upload. But Verizon is slowly rolling this out and I am not going to get this for a couple of years. AT&T U-verse is my only salvation as they are slowly offering service in my neighborhood and their Max plan would work for me. U-verse Max offers 10 Mbps download and 1.5 Mbps upload and that would just rock but Time Warner has been upping their game in terms of broadband speed (not service or reliability, mind you) and I am currently getting 15Mbsp download and 1Mbps upload.

Bandwidth Test

I just did a bandwidth test and discovered that I am truly getting close to 1 Mbps upstream and that’s pretty awesome as I use Mozy for my remote backup and I also use Rsync and Subversion to backup my code and other essentials files to my remote (Linux) server. My current thought is to get the AT&T U-verse service and run it side-by-side with my Road Runner connection for a while and see which one is consistently reliable and faster. I sure hope its AT&T as I would like nothing better than to dump Time Warner.

If you’re not using Mozy (or another online backup provider), you should consider getting one!

Daily del.icio.us for April 12th through April 13th

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Vinny

Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync – This document describes a method for generating automatic rotating "snapshot"-style backups on a Unix-based system, with specific examples drawn from the author's GNU/Linux experience. Snapshot backups are a feature of some high-end industrial file server
Flex, Spring and BlazeDS: the full stack! (Part 1) – In this article series, I’ll try to give you a step-by-step process to create an application with Flex/BlazeDS/Spring/Hibernate/MySQL architecture, all of that built with Maven.
Saki’s Blog » Blog Archive » Simplest 3 Columns Layout with CSS – After experimenting with Designing a 3 columns web page using TableLayout
I have came with the solution that is, IMO, simplest possible:
Saki’s Ext Examples Page – I have been actively helping on Ext Forums for some time and during this period I have found out that most effective help for members is to give them a well written running example that they can either modify for their purposes or it just gives them an an
Saki’s Blog » Blog Archive » Writing a Big Application in Ext – I have decided to write this article for those users of Ext 2.x that have already grown up from having one HTML page with embedded script that creates one simple window or form, for those who are already decided that Ext is the way and for those who are f
behind the times: 10 Best IDEA Inspections You’re Not Using – Let's clarify. By "Best" I mean the ones I like. By "You're Not Using" I mean they aren't enabled by default. By "Inspections" I mean those little code warnings that IDEA gives you which can be configured under Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S) Errors (6).
A List Apart: Articles: Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards – There are plenty of options out there for data visualization, too. Google’s recently-announced Charts API is a great example, but there are a number of tools and services for creating charts and graphs as images and for making interactive visualizations
Introducing Java 6 update 10 – Don't be fooled by its unassuming name: the upcoming Java 6 update 10 is a very different animal than the updates that preceded it. Java 6u10 pushes the envelope by adding more new features and functionality than in any previous Java programming language
InfoQ: Spring Web Services 1.5 Released – After 6 months of work, Spring Web Services 1.5.0 has been release. Based off contract-first development using SOAP service development, Spring-WS can be manipulated through XML to create document-driven Web services
Sun Claims Big Leap with MySQL Upgrade Next Week – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership – Among the advances in 5.1 are partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering. They are fairly standard features already offered by rivals IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, but they should help MySQL compete in environments where

Daily del.icio.us for April 6th through April 12th

Posted on April 12, 2008 by Vinny

louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog – As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held
Reports of Windows’ demise are greatly exaggerated | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com – It’s not news that Windows is huge and unwieldy. Many (probably most) of Microsoft’s own Windows developers would agree with that premise. But to suggest that Microsoft is burying its head in the sand and hoping its problems just go away is ridiculous
Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Instead of just offering applications over the Web in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Amazon and Google are offering an entire Platform-as-a-Service because they provide the foundation upon which to build highly scalable and robust Web apps
Hartija – Css Print Framework – To solve this problem I decided to make universal Cascading Style Sheets for web printing by uniting all best CSS printing practises into one.
dtsn : Highlighting Forms [tutorial] – This is quite a well known but under used technique for highlighting your form elements without any JavaScript. By using the CSS property focus you can apply style to a form element when it is clicked, also know as focus.
Cisco switch consolidates functions in the data center – Cisco Systems Inc. today announced the Nexus 5000 series of server access switches, which are designed to consolidate storage, networking and virtualization functions in data centers. The switch unifies Fibre Channel over Ethernet with data center Etherne
Alfresco’s sales up 320 percent, hits 30,000 active deployments | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – Yes, you can make lots of money with open-source software. Alfresco, a leading enterprise content management and collaboration vendor, just announced its 2007 financial results. The numbers speak for themselves:
Google App Engine – Google Code – Run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.
The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog: When Mashing Your Enterprise, It Pays To Have a Lot of Friends – There’s one thing we’ve always been certain about: no single vendor can address the entire enterprise mashup problem alone. It is critical to catalyze mashups in the enterprise with an ecosystem that surrounds those mashups, making them easier and mor
GWT-Ext 2.0.3 released with charting, maps, portal and other goodies – GWT-Ext 2.0.3 has been released. This version is compatible with Ext 2.0.2 and GWT 1.5. The new features in this release are charts and maps plus all of the goodies already built in.

Daily del.icio.us for April 4th through April 6th

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Vinny

Visual SourceSafe to Subversion Migration – This migration script will take all live files in a VSS project and migrate them to Subversion. Additionally, for those live files, all file history will be preserved. Without this, it wouldn't be a migration, merely an import.
VisualSVN Server – All-in-one installer for Subversion and Apache – VisualSVN Server is a package that contains everything you need to install, configure and manage Subversion server for your team on Windows platform. It includes Subversion, Apache and a management console.
Coding Horror: Setting up Subversion on Windows – When it comes to readily available, free source control, I don't think you can do better than Subversion at the moment. Allow me to illustrate how straightforward it is to get a small Subversion server and client going on Windows. It'll take all of 30 min
JRuby 1.1 is out! – The Empty Way – The long awaited JRuby 1.1 is finally out. Working on it was fun, much more fun than I expected — so much to do, so many interesting things, so little time! It is a perfect mixture of Java and Ruby
Executive Pay: The Bottom Line for Those at the Top – The New York Times – Compensation and accumulated wealth of 200 chief executives for large public companies that filed proxies for last year by March 28.
Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 – Or maybe that's just what I tell myself when I only have $1,000 bucks to spend. Either way, multi-core CPUs made powerful computers far more affordable. You can build a fine quad-core, 8-gig server within that budget
My Essential Twitter Tools – If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.
Here are the tools that I’m using to improve my Twitter experience
Windows Vista source code – Windows Vista source code 🙂
Forbes.com – Dial D for Disruption – With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.
dangertree techblog » Blog Archive » Groovy vs. Google Collections: Round #1 – In my last post, Dan Lewis responded with some counter-code from Google’s collections package. Instead of attempting to snap back with some witty technical retort, I challenged Dan to a code-off. Groovy collections vs. Google collections (in Java)
Adam Bien’s Weblog : Huge discussion about JavaDoc …and no one cares about Fat Clients 🙂 – I really wondered about the discussion about JavaDoc – but actually no one complained about this statement "Therefore, a fat client with a local embedded database, such as Java DB, is the simplest possible solution — everything else is a workaround.".
IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Migrating to EJB 3 with IntelliJ IDEA is Easy – IntelliJ IDEA has the full-blown support for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Supporting EJB specs from 1.x to 3.0 and leveraging it through all of its productivity-boosting features, from coding assistance to refactoring, IntelliJ IDEA stands for the weapon
Gartner: Open source will quietly take over – ZDNet.co.uk – "By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form:
Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly – Ext JS Forums – I'm happy to announce the first release of my (first) Ext JS extension – Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly which allows you to easily build printer friendly layouts and grids for your Ext JS pages.

iTunes & Ehcache – You figure it out

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Vinny

Thanks to Greg Luck, I discovered something new in iTunes called My iTunes that lets you export your purchases out as RSS or as a widget to display on your website. Check out a sample of my purchases below – With DRM free music from Amazon, I’m not buying anything from iTunes that’s available on Amazon. By the way, Greg Luck is one of the lead developers of Ehcache, which IMHO is the best and most widely used Java distributed caching framework.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/wa/widget?type=1&sf=143441

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Monthly Archives: April 2008