Daily del.icio.us for May 29th through May 31st

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Vinny

A Look Inside JBoss Rules | Javalobby – JBoss Rules is the production release of the Drools project, an expert system for declarative programming based around the Rete algorithm. During this talk, Mark Proctor, the lead on JBoss Rules covered the Drools basics, as well as the new features in 4.
The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time : Rolling Stone – This is what makes a great rock & roll guitar sound: an irresistible riff; a solo or jam that takes you higher every time you hear it; the final power chord that pins you to the wall and makes you hit "play" again and again.
The Business Of IT: Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies – The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years
David Card – No Way to Build an Operating System – MSFT has worked on WinFS for more than a decade without success in making it fast, reliable, and easy-to-use enough for release. The Longhorn "reset" in 2004 was in large part the realization that WinFS was still not ready for primetime.
My DebugBar | IETester / HomePage – IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.
Oracle and BEA – Welcome, Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch Members – The Oracle Technology Network is happy to welcome members of the BEA Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch communities. The OTN team, which now includes some of the very same people behind those BEA communities, is hard at work merging the best of Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch
Ozzie: Open source is greatest threat to Microsoft | Tech news blog – CNET News.com – Ozzie, speaking at Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday, said that while Google is a "tremendously strong competitor…open source was much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business model.
Ben Northrop – Does Programming to Interfaces Buy Us Anything? – In the end, I'm not saying that programming to interfaces and not implementations isn't a good thing, just that it's a good thing less often than we think – in other words, it can't just be dogmatically applied.
O’Reilly Media | Harnessing Hibernate – More than a reference, Harnessing Hibernate starts with basic configuration before moving on to demonstrate how to use Hibernate to accomplish practical goals. "If you follow along with the examples–which is easy–you'll have a working Hibernate-based pr
InfoQ: Top 5 Ways to Reduce Flex Application Startup Time – Jun Heider has an excellent piece on O’Reilly’s InsideRIA site discussing a number of the options for minimizing the startup time of Flex applications, in hopes of helping developers reduce the amount of time that users see the ugly "Loading" dialog.
Akamai Releases State of the Internet Report | CenterNetworks – Akamai is out today with their first "State of the Internet" report. The report is well worth a read as it covers a variety of topics including: security, connection speeds, geography, network access, and Internet penetration.

Daily del.icio.us for May 25th through May 28th

Posted on May 28, 2008 by Vinny

Nick Bradbury: Hospitals Are No Place for Sick People – My father is a wealthy, well-connected, fully-insured, brilliant man, and this all took place at what is supposed to be one of the best hospitals in the country. If the healthcare system failed him, it will fail the rest of us, too.
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Erlang By Example – Learn how to write Erlang programs by sitting next to an experienced Erlang programmer as he builds an application from the ground up. In these screencasts, Kevin Smith incrementally builds a distributed chat system using Erlang
Ext JS – Use Namespaces to organize your JavaScript code – Using namespaces will ensure your JavaScript code is safe from other code overwriting it in the global namespace.
YUI 2.5.2 Released: Bug Fixes and Support for Upcoming Firefox and Opera Releases » Yahoo! User Interface Blog – The YUI development team released version 2.5.2 today; you can download the new release from SourceForge or configure your implementation using the YUI Configurator. This is a focused release that addresses several key bugs while providing support for Fir
Ten Books on Investing Recommended by Warren Buffett | Business Pundit – Over the years, Warren Buffett has recommended many books in a variety of venues about a variety of subjects. Continuing our ongoing series of books recommended by Buffett, here we highlight ten books that Buffett has recommended on investing.
.htaccess Tutorials, htaccess Examples, Sample .htaccess Files – This is the index of my favorite apache HTTP (htaccess, mod_rewrite, httpd.conf) examples, solutions, ideas, htaccess tips, apache tricks and .htaccess sample files
AJAX Libraries API – Google Code – The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libs. By using the Google AJAX API, your application has high speed, globaly available access to JavaScript open source libraries
Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers | Tech news blog – CNET News.com – Lighting a fire under Web 2.0 – App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.
Ext JS Ext.ux.Wiz (Wizardcomponent) – Ext.ux.Wiz is a user extension that helps you setting up wizards for your Ext JS project easily.
Guide your users through a set of cards, collecting needed informations, an only let them pass through if each and every submitted value validates against the
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : CSS Menu Writer debuts – Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.

Daily del.icio.us for May 20th through May 24th

Posted on May 24, 2008 by Vinny

Computing | Down on the server farm | Economist.com – One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atm
InfoQ: Integrate Flex with Spring Framework – A key to project success is creating an architecture that new developers can rapidly integrate themselves into and begin to be productive on day 1. Flex with Spring, iBATIS, & Cairngorm help me to quickly produce a patterned- based, repeatable architectur
New Adventures in Software » Visual SourceSafe: A Public Service Announcement – “Visual SourceSafe? It would be safer to print out all your code, run it through a shredder, and set it on fire.” – (Attributed to an unidentified Microsoft employee).
SSIS Junkie : SSIS: Suggested Best Practices and naming conventions – I thought it would be worth publishing a list of guidelines that I see as SSIS development best practices. These are my own opinions and are based upon my experience of using SSIS over the past 18 months. I am not saying you should take them as gospel but
IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Neal Ford Advises on Boosting Developer’s Productivity – Neal tells you how you can become more accustomed with the shortcuts, get used to using them in the daily routine, and demonstrates the magic of different key combinations while coding with IntelliJ IDEA.
Twitter Technology Blog: Twittering About Architecture – Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system
Enterprise Java Community: Extending Spring LDAP with an iBATIS-style XML Data Mapper – This article explains how to extend Spring-LDAP with an iBATIS-style XML Data Mapper to access LDAP data through intuitive JavaBean operations.
About – XML Hammer – The XML Hammer application is a free and open-source tool that simplifies elementary XML actions like checking for well-formedness, validation, transformation and xpath searches using any JAXP implementation.
Novell, Red Hat upgrade Linux offerings – LinuxWorld – Novell released SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2), while Red Hat shipped Version 5.2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both vendors added improvements on the desktop and the server. There were many areas of overlap, especially with virtualization.
JasperReports: 3.0.0 released – JasperReports, the market leading open source business intelligence and reporting engine. This project is being moved to http://www.jasperforge.org/. This project is the home for all things Jasper, Reports, Analysis, Server, and Intelligence.

Pink Princess

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Vinny

To help celebrate my first Father’s Day, my wife got me one of the most special present I’ve ever gotten! She got me a Pink Princess Flowering Crab Apple tree to celebrate my first year as a father to our beautiful daughter Katie. The Pink Princess is a Malus or a miniature Crab Apple and it bears the most beautiful flowers. The tree is in full bloom and so I took some pictures a few days ago that I finally got around to uploading. Here is my beautiful Pink Princess tree.

Daily del.icio.us for May 18th through May 20th

Posted on May 20, 2008 by Vinny

Why the Roku Netflix Player is the First Shot of the Revolution – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog – In the small, generic plastic box that is the new Netflix Player made by Roku, I think you can see the future of video.
Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World – It was June 2007 in sleepy Surrey County, and Coughlan, a statuesque blonde, sauntered through the door of the shop holding a sheaf of 780 pages. Scan them onto two CDs, she told the clerk, a forgettable middle-aged guy in a forgettable office park in the
Should we discard Interfaces? | Learning by Experience – Is a class that only has interfaces as dependencies easier to test then classes that have implementations as dependencies? Most of us are eager to say yes, but in fact, frameworks like EasyMock enable us to mock (non final) classes.
Graeme Rocher’s Blog: Grails.org now powered by Grails – We've just launched a re-write of the Grails.org site in Grails. Previously the site was powered by Confluence (the Atlassian wiki), now in the spirit of eating ones own dog food it is a fully Grails powered site.
IntelliJ Tips & Tricks – Listen to Neal Ford, the software architect at ThoughtWorks and a fabulous speaker, giving you some hints on improving productivity through the intensive use of keyboard shortcuts for carrying out various tasks while coding with IntelliJ IDEA.
WEB4J – Minimalist Java Web Application Framework -> Criticisms of Spring, PHP, and Rails – The Spring Framework is popular. It has also met with a disturbing lack of criticism. The following remarks are based on Spring 2.0.
US billionaire Buffett backs Obama for president – Yahoo! News – Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, is backing Barak Obama for US president and thinks current US economic policy will push the dollar lower against other global currencies
Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource – The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editi
A conversation Clinton was having…: RE: Java haters, gtfo – Well everyone's favorite potty mouthed blogger is back, slinging poo and doing nothing much to help anything. That said, I've met Hani, and he's actually a pretty cool and down to earth guy.
Firefox 3 RC 1 full review – Mozilla Links – A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with a very long list of new features and improvements.

Daily del.icio.us for May 16th through May 18th

Posted on May 18, 2008 by Vinny

Google Doctype – Documenting the Open Web – Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library
Testability Explorer – TestabilityExplorer.org records the testability scores for many open source and commercial Java libraries. The compiled bytecode for the library is analyzed and metrics are calculated for the testability of individual classes. Those classes fall into one
Brandon Werner » Blog Archive » ACM Article: How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design? – There is an incredible article that was published in the Communications of the ACM entitled “How Intuitive is Object Oriented Design?” by Irit Hadar from the University of Haifa, Israel and Uri Leron from the Israeli Institute of Technology. It goes t
cloudtools – Google Code – Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).
Wind power, alternative energy | Salon News – A stunning new report just issued by the Bush administration finds that for under 2 cents a day per household, Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030 which would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.
InfoQ: Getting Started with Grails – In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Jason Rudolph gives an overview and demonstration of Grails. Topics covered include Java/Grails integration, Grails plugins, creating a complete Grails sample application from scratch, the structure of a
Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – 11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation – 11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation
peterpascale.com » TeamCity Lessons Learned (Build Trophy For Sale) – In honor of four months of successful TeamCity usage – I offer this set of TeamCity lessons learned:
SpringSource Team Blog » Why should I care about OSGi anyway? – Michael Burke asked a great question on that thread which can be paraphrased as "forgetting the hype surrounding OSGi, what benefits can I expect to see if I port an application currently packaged as an EAR to OSGi bundles?
Linux On A Stick: Fedora 9 Puts Your Desktop on a USB Drive – This week's release of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don't need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched,

Daily del.icio.us for May 12th through May 16th

Posted on May 16, 2008 by Vinny

James Clark’s Random Thoughts: XML and JSON – I would like to offer a few thoughts about XML and JSON. My previous post came off much too dismissive of JSON. I actually think that JSON does have real value
13 reasons for UML’s descent into darkness | Little Tutorials – UML lost the programmers. There is no doubt about it… in my mind. This happened because UML was pushed in a direction that most code writers don’t like: it started to look a lot like bureaucratic paper work
Guitar Tutorials Rocket Up iTunes Podcast Charts | Listening Post from Wired.com – Modern guitarists have a new option when it comes to learning their instrument. Chord books and music lessons still sell, but for visual learners, the best option is probably the video tutorial. There are several online options, but we really like iVideos
Sun is bleeding; More engineers leave as JavaFX is pimped on Dion Almaer’s Blog – Well, more heavy hitting engineers are leaving. When the CTO of the client division moves on (to Adobe again, no less), we yet again have a reason to wonder what is happening at Sun.
davber does IT » Groovy: Java++ by being Java– – Groovy is actually not a brand new language, but rather an extension of Java. The difference between this extension and that of, say C++ over C is that Groovy extends Java by simplifying constructs, ridding the developer of much of the repetitive rituals
12 Signs That The Recession Has Hit The Internet | command line idiot – The United States economy is in a funk. Food prices are up, oil is through the roof, real estate has collapsed, and credit is becoming scarce. Here are 12 signs to look for when the recession hits the Internet:
Clearskys.net Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing StayPress – StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system
Ext JS – Using the standard Panel title config to organize Ext JS form fields – Yesterday while working on our internal support system I had a desire to organize the fields on a form a little better. I didn’t want to use a FieldSet and add full wrapping or another layer of indention in my form code so I decided to give the standard
Real World Haskell – Haskell is most likely quite different from any language you've ever used before. Compared to the usual set of concepts in a programmer's mental toolbox, functional programming offers us a profoundly different way to think about software
ExtJS 2.1 and Java Demo – ExtJS Ajax Communication Best Practices – Ext JS Forums – I've been evaluating ExtJS 2.1 as the user interface for my client's next application. During my evaluation I've developed a demo (3 actually) that displays the powerful API of ExtJS

Daily del.icio.us for May 8th through May 12th

Posted on May 12, 2008 by Vinny

Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate (oh, and did I forget to mention “war hero”?) John McCain – Am I being “age-ist”? Probably. But the world is a pretty complicated place right now and I’m thinking that it’s not such a great time to elect our oldest President ever. So sue me.
If we hired like we vote – If we hired like we vote
Hillary Clinton’s suicidal gamble with race poison | Andrew Sullivan – Times Online – But in that venture the Clintons are destroying themselves and their legacy and their capacity to bridge the very gaps they now must widen to stay in the race. It is a Clinton tragedy – and one that most Americans seem slowly, cautiously but palpably de
InfoQ: Mocking Web Services – A new tutorial by Upul Godage describes how to use Apache Synapse to mock web services for development and testing. Apache Synapse is a simple, lightweight, high-performance enterprise service bus (ESB). Apache Synapse can be used to filter, transform, ro
Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight…: Death by Scheduling – The moral of the story is that if perception is reality, then the best way to manage perception is to make up stuff that you can honestly remember.
InfoQ: The State of Enterprise Architecture – As organizations continue to grow their IT investments (bought, borrowed, or built) and concepts like Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) become more common, the role of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become more co
Web 2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet – GigaOM – So all you agile programmers working on Ruby-on-Rails, Python and AJAX, pay attention: If you want more people to think your application loads faster than Google, learn about your host. It’s called the Internet
John Ferguson Smart’s Blog: JavaOne 2008 – FindBugs is a great little tool, and it just keeps getting better! – FingBugs uses more sophisticated analysis techniques than tools like PMD and Checkstyle, working at the bytecode level rather than with the source code, and is more focused on finding the most high priority and potentially dangerous issues.
Pictures from JavaOne 2008 – Arun Gupta’s Weblog – Take 11 – Pictures from JavaOne 2008. Continuing from Take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and more pictures from JavaOne 2008.
Google Web Security for Enterprise – Google Web Security for Enterprise service, powered by Postini, stops web-borne spyware and viruses before they infiltrate your network and compromise or disable your computers. All web requests are scanned in real-time, rather than solely relying on stat

Daily del.icio.us for May 4th through May 7th

Posted on May 7, 2008 by Vinny

People Over Process » A Roadmap for JavaFX – Adobe’s Beat Them By a Week, But So What? – JavaOne 2008 – The fact that Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, and others are all racing towards the same end should be encouraging, not frustrating. Getting preempted by a week with, basically, the same sort of announcement is meaningless in the grand scheme of things
JavaFX’s day in the Sun | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com – JavaFX has a LONG way to go especially when you look at Adobe’s RIA strengths and Microsoft’s very enthusiastic entry into the space. But I think JavaFX will be a breath of fresh air for people and will help in expanding the RIA footprint further
Java platform to get modularity, OSGi support | InfoWorld | News | 2008-05-07 | By Paul Krill – Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
Dell Expands Virtualization Offerings – Dell is adding to its virtualization portfolio by embedding Citrix XenServer into its hardware and expanding its services for customers investing in the technology.
Andy Kessler: WSJ: The War for the Web – The continuing battle between Microsoft and Google will mean fierce competition – adding features, building data centers, cutting deals and spending money on speed and customer convenience
Archiva – The Build Artifact Repository Manager – Apache Archiva is an extensible repository management software that helps taking care of your own personal or enterprise-wide build artifact repository. It is the perfect companion for build tools such as Maven, Continuum, and ANT.
JavaOne 2008: Day One (So Far) – JavaOne 2008 Day One has started, of course, and it's an interesting show, with a lot of undercurrents about JavaFX (as expected) and multimedia – and mobile applications. There's a lot more, of course, and this thread is meant for people to add comments
The day the music died [dive into mark] – This is a letter I sent to my father to explain what it means that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music. Tech issues like this often bubble up into the media that he reads, but they are rarely explained well. My father assumes I have an opinion on s
Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 – GigaOM – Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now. Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.
Julien Lecomte’s Blog » JavaScript: The Good Parts – In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas extensively describes that good subset of the JavaScript language, occasionally warning to avoid the bad. I consider Douglas’ book a must-buy for anybody who’s serious about developing professional apps for the w

Daily del.icio.us for May 2nd through May 4th

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Vinny

Pearware Blog : Improving Java web site performance with asset caching – In this post, I’ll be talking about a solution I developed at my day job to improve the performance of our web site by allowing the browser to cache JavaScript, CSS, and image files
Who Will Tell the People? – New York Times – We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV
The All-White Elephant in the Room – New York Times – Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.
Headius: The Power of the JVM – The future is definitely looking awesome for dynamic languages on the JVM. And languages like Groovy and JRuby are proving it.
How Has Functional Programming Influenced Your Coding Style? – Functional programming languages are enjoying a renaissance. Even if not intending to use a functional language for daily work, learning such a language can improve one's programming style
Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor – (37signals) – Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-m
Java Persistence 2.0 Early Draft Available – Linda DeMichiel’s Blog – We've just released the Early Draft of the Java Persistence 2.0 specification, so I thought it would be a good time to report on some of the work we've been doing in the JSR 317 Expert Group.
InfoQ: Flex, AIR and AS3 Flex Gain Code Coverage Utilities – Last month Joe Berkovitz announced the initial experimental release of Flexcover, an open-source code coverage tool suite for Flex, AIR and AS3
For all you know, it’s just another Java library – David Pollak’s Blog – Bottom line… to anyone other than the folks with hands in the code and the folks who have to recruit and manage them, "For all you know, it's just another Java library."
Common Solutions for T-SQL Problems – Home – Some of the Moderators, Answerers, and MVPs have gotten together to create a new resource to supplement the Forums; it's called SQLExamples. We just started it a few weeks ago so it's still very much in its infancy

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Monthly Archives: May 2008