Last Lecture – Randy Pausch passes away

Posted on July 27, 2008 by Vinny

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university on Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed auditorium and that video become a huge viral hit with over 10 million viewing on YouTube. He passed away on Friday in Virginia of pancreatic cancer – I knew nothing about Professor Pausch till someone sent me a link to the video (below) which was his last lecture at CMU. He was truly a remarkable, positive, charismatic and inspirational person who will be missed. If you haven’t seen his last lecture, it’s definitely worth watching. Our thoughts and prayers are with your family and friends.

Daily del.icio.us for July 20th through July 25th

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Vinny

Microsoft pledges love and money to open source | The Register – Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership. The move follows work between the two to support the Office Open XML file formats in Apache's POI project.
Why India Will Beat China – An entrenched and vibrant democracy will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically
Rush Plays Rock Band Backstage at Colbert | Comedy Central Insider – The Comedy Blog for Comedy Fans – So, when Rush was backstage at The Colbert Report last week, they played "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band and now there's video of it
gxp -Google XML Pages – GXP is a templating system used to generate XML/SGML markup (most often HTML). Support for multiple languages – currently Java
Ext JS – Ext GWT Grid, Grid Plugins, and EditableGrid – Ext GWT 1.1 development is moving along nicely and includes a new Grid component. Grid is based on the Ext JS Grid and will support the same features including grid plugins, grouping, totaling, and inline editing
If your SSD sucks, blame Vista, says SSD vendor | Register Hardware – It's Windows Vista's fault that solid-state storage isn't performing as well as its proponents predicted. So said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, but at least he didn't go as far as saying it's Microsoft's problem to fix.
VMware to offer low-footprint ESX hypervisor free | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-22 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service – VMware said Tuesday it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware's lead in the virtualization market.
InfoQ: Christophe Coenraets Discusses Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS – In this interview from QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, the move towards open source at Adobe, how to integrate Flex with existing applications, and the challenges of integrating Rich Internet Applicatio
Copy your files faster with TeraCopy – TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
Java Performance Tuning: A Conversation With Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine – A Java Champion since September 2005, Kirk Pepperdine is a primary contributor to javaperformancetuning.com, which is widely regarded as the premier site for Java performance tuning information, and is the coauthor of Ant Developer's Handbook.

Holy Bandwidth – Take 3

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Vinny

I just upgraded my existing Road Runner turbo connection to their Business Class service and I now have 15Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream along with QOS to give my packets priority over the rest of the regular Roadrunner customers.

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Prior to this upgrade, I was getting 15Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and so the extra Mbps of upstream is nice but I can really tell the difference in the QOS. I did a speed test to a server in Chicago and then to another server in San Francisco and didn’t notice any drop in speed or overall bandwidth. Prior to business class Road Runner, there was significant drop-off in speed as you traveled further away from my location. Next step – static IP and then I can put the Linux boxes at home to good use 🙂

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

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Vinny

Clemens Vasters, Bldg 42 : Announcing the Microsoft Code-Name “BizTalk Services” R12 Release – BizTalk Services is the code-name for a platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. Currently in development, BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Workflow, and Identity functionality to enable disparate applications to connect quickly and easily.
Success Soul » Warren Buffett’s 7 Secrets for Living a Happy and Simple Life – I’m an avid admirer of simplicity, but I’m an even bigger fan of the man who has mastered the greatness by living and breathing simplicity amid an ocean of wealth.
AppleInsider | iPhone 3G’s final build price: just $174.33 – With roughly $50 in licenses for patents and other intellectual property factored into the price and an assumed unsubsidized cost of $499 for an 8GB model of the celllphone, Apple is thought to be getting as much as $300 in subsidies from AT&T for each cu
InfoQ: An Introduction to Lean Thinking – Lean software development, which we hear a lot about these days, may be still a bit of a mystery for people who come to Agile via Scrum or XP. Earlier this year, at an Open Party, Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China offered an introduction
Ext Javascript Library for beginners, ext-perience Ext » Blog Archive » In Place / Inline Editing with Ext, ExtJS Inline editor – I found an inline editing tutorial using prototype which after reading seemed very easy and very simple to replicate using Ext. I have Googled this topic in the past but found nothing… so I decided to follow this tutorial and port it to ExtJs.
iBATIS, Hibernate, and JPA: Which is right for you? – Java World – In this article we introduce and compare two of the most popular open source persistence frameworks, iBATIS and Hibernate. We also discuss the Java Persistence API (JPA)
Continuous Integration: Was Fowler Wrong? – While rereading Martin Fowler's paper, Continuous Integration, it struck me that its approach to Continuous Integration (CI) is fundamentally flawed. Fowler, like most of the CI community, seems to argue that CI is about building rather than testing
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6 – I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS
Flex 4 (Gumbo) Available for Download – InsideRIA – The Flex 4 SDK, code named Gumbo, is up for download now. This is an exciting time for Flex, it's now 2 full versions beyond Flex 2 which was really the first version of Flex that gained mainstream adoption
Salesforce.com pulls plug on Sun’s flagship Unix servers | The Register – Salesforce.com is chucking out the last of it Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire servers this week, ending one of Sun's most bragged about relationships.

Daily del.icio.us for July 12th through July 14th

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Vinny

visualvm: Home – VisualVM is a visual tool integrating several commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling capabilities. Designed for both production and development time use, it further enhances the capability of monitoring and performance analysis for the Java SE pl
Comparison of 2 Java Excel Apis on Large Workbooks/Worksheets – Ramblings of a Java Developer – Essentially what I did was to compare the Apache POI HSSF Api and the JExcelApi.
iPhone: The New Personal Computer – ReadWriteWeb – Increasingly, desktops and laptops will be for professional computing. iPhone and its descendants will be our new personal computer. This is an exciting page in the history of our technology. It's the start of an era: ubiquitous, portable, personal comput
Our Electric Future — The American, A Magazine of Ideas – A policy that favors sticky energy with multiple sources and that aggressively moves vehicles first toward dual-fuel mode and ultimately to running on just electricity provides the answer
stevenf.com – Don’t use FTP – FTP has served us well, but it's time to move on. You wouldn't use a 23 year old computer to do your work, so don't use a protocol from the same vintage. Demand modern transfer protocols from your host.
How to Install Media Codecs for Flash, DVD, QuickTime (MOV), MP3, WMV, WMA, and ACC (MP4, M4A) Playback in Linux [Ubuntu Guide] : Zaphu – Due to copyrights, Ubuntu (currently Hardy Heron 8.04) is distributed without codecs to play many of the most prevalent media formats. This guide shows you how.
Slipstream – On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff – NYTimes.com – Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays, which routinely have 20-inch or larger screens.
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide – This book is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. Use Ruby, and you'll write better code, be more productive, and enjoy programming more.
Political Irony › If today’s Congress presided during Watergate – If today’s Congress presided during Watergate
TV Review – ‘Generation Kill’ – In ‘Generation Kill’ Comrades in Chaos Invade Iraq – Review – NYTimes.com – “Generation Kill,” an HBO seven-part mini-series about the invasion of Iraq that begins on Sunday, is bold, uncompromising and oddly diffident.
Java Sorting: Comparator vs Comparable Tutorial – Computerized World – This article will discuss the java.lang.Comparator and java.lang.Comparable in details with a set of sample codes for further clarifications.
theJavaJar.com – Groovy, Grails and JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA – he JetGroovy plugin does a great job of exposing a new Groovy developer to an environment that most seasoned Java developers are already accustomed to.

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

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Vinny

Open Source LDAP Server in Java Released : Ludo’s sketches – The OpenDS development team is very please to announce the release of OpenDS 1.0.0. OpenDS 1.0.0 delivers a fully compliant LDAPv3 server (*) that passes all of the compliance, interoperability and security tests suites
SQLite Example for Adobe AIR–Working with local SQL databases(with source code) – Ntt.cc – Adobe AIR includes the capability of creating and working with local SQL databases. Many stand SQL features are supported in the runtime, open source SQLite system can be used for storing local, persistent data.
The flollowing is a simplistic example tha
Sun lays off approximately 1,000 employees | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-11 | By Paul Krill – Following through on a restructuring plan announced in May, Sun on Thursday laid off approximately 1,000 employees in the United States and Canada.
Oracle faces skeptical BEA customer base – In fact, it looks as if Oracle acquiring BEA could be a major disruption event in application development, either by establishing Oracle with a brand new customer base or by releasing a slew of user free agents
Ext JS – Ext GWT v1.0 Released – The Ext team is proud to announce that the official release of Ext GWT v1.0 is available for download. This is the first release of Ext GWT which is the culmination of many weeks of development from the Ext development team
Object-oriented Programming in Java – I am using the text Object-oriented Programming in Java in my beginning computer programming course. It is aimed at students with little or no programming experience, and it uses DrJava as a vehicle for student experimentation OO programming concepts.
The Development of the C Language – This paper is about the development of the C programming language, the influences on it, and the conditions under which it was created
eXtplorer – A PHP- and JavaScript- based File Manager – eXtplorer is a web-based File Manager. You can use it to browse directories & files on the server and edit, copy, move, delete files, search, upload and download files, create and extract archives, create new files and directories and much more
Jeff Beehler’s Blog : Tools for Agility – A white paper by Kent Beck – A transparent team can more cheaply and effectively coordinate their efforts towards shared goals. Acting transparently sends a signal to others that they can trust you. Trust, when realized, reduces the friction of development as people focus….
globeandmail.com: Start your day with a square of chocolate – According to researchers, a big breakfast packed with protein, carbs – and even something sweet – can lead to weight loss
Talking Business – On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble – NYTimes.com – Instead, Google has shown that it thinks about day care the same way every other company does — as a luxury, not a benefit. Judging by what’s transpired, that’s what Google is fast becoming: just another company

Daily del.icio.us for July 1st through July 4th

Posted on July 4, 2008 by Vinny

java.net: The Open Road: java.nio.file – Add on top of that sexier new I/O features, such as watch lists, true asynchronous I/O, and virtual file systems, and Java 7 may finally have a modern foundation for input and output on which the next generation of clients, servers, and desktop apps can b
InfoQ: Agile Project Management: Lessons Learned at Google – A retrospective on Google's first Scrum implementation. Jeff Sutherland visited Google to do an analysis of the first Google implementation of Scrum on one of their largest distributed projects. Their strategy for inserting Scrum step by step into the Goo
Coding Horror: Why Can’t Microsoft Ship Open Source Software? – It's a shame, because the best way to "beat" open source is to join 'em — to integrate with and ship open source components as a part of your product. Unfortunately, that's the one route that Microsoft seems hell bent on never following.
Allway Sync: Free File Synchronization, Backup, Data Replication, PC Sync Software, Freeware, File Sync, Data Synchronization Software – Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more. Allway Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface.
InfoQ: Enterprise Batch Processing with Spring – In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Wayne Lund discusses batch processing, Spring Batch objectives and features, scenarios for using Spring Batch, Spring Batch infrastructure and architecture, scaling Spring Batch, example Spring Batch code
InfoQ: Google Releases Open Source Web Application Security Assessment Tool – Google has announced the open source release of one of their internal security tools "ratproxy". The proxy analyzes problems such as cross-site script inclusion threats, insufficient cross-site request forgery defenses, caching issues, cross-site scriptin
Netflix Player source code released – Hack a Day – The Netflix Player continues to gain in popularity. Roku has finally released the GPL code for their Netflix Player. Just today Forbes published that Roku would roll out a software update allowing it to stream from other online services
Build Ajax applications with Ext JS – Ext JS is a powerful JavaScript library that simplifies Async JavaScript + XML (Ajax) development through the use of reusable objects and widgets. This article introduces Ext JS, providing an overview of the object-oriented design concepts behind it
Seymour Hersh On Covert Operations In Iran : NPR – Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh believes that the United States may be closer to armed conflict with Iran than previously imagined. He writes about Congress' funding of covert military operations in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker.
Oracle reveals BEA roadmap | InfoWorld | News | 2008-07-01 | By Paul Krill – The BEA Weblogic Server Java application server "becomes Oracle's strategic J2EE container," Kurian said. It has been integrated with Oracle technologies like Oracle TopLink for Java persistence and Oracle Coherence grid capabilities.
InfoQ: Building Large AJAX Applications with GWT 1.4 and Google Gears – In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Rajeev Dayal discusses building applications with GWT and Google Gears. Topics discussed include an overview of GWT, integrating GWT with other frameworks, GWT 1.4 features, developing large GWT applicati
Ext JS – Integrating Google Maps API With ExtJS – Theres no doubt that Google has some interesting and very useful JavaScript API’s – most of which I end up using over and over again. So why not package them up into an Ext component?

Daily del.icio.us for June 29th

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Vinny

Sun Bundles MySQL Database, GlassFish App Server — Sun Microsystems — InformationWeek – In one of the first results of its $1 billion purchase of MySQL, Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) has packaged the popular open source database with its GlassFish application server and is offering the two as a $65,000-per-year bundle.
InfoQ: Mark Little on Transactions, Web Services and REST – In this interview, recorded at QCon London 2008, Red Hat Director of Standards and Technical Development Manager for the SOA platform Mark Little talks about extended transaction models, the history of transaction standardization, their role for web servi
ScreenSteps: Rapid Documentation Tool – ScreenSteps takes the drudgery out of creating visual, step-by-step software tutorials/guides. With ScreenSteps you can communicate software instructions clearly and quickly.
Vespa: A better MVC » Semicolon – Vespa is a refinement of the old MVC (Model View Controller) architectural pattern that better reflects how Web applications actually work. I have refined the basic MVC pattern in light of typical usage patterns I’ve encountered
Featured Windows Download: iSpring Converts PowerPoint Presentations to Flash Video – Freeware PowerPoint plug-in iSpring converts your PowerPoint presentation to an interactive Flash video with the click of a button. The exported movie even preserves all of your slide transitions, animations, and hyperlinks
Google Code Blog: OAuth Available for Google Data APIs – We love open standards, and we've just added support for a new one: OAuth is now supported on all of the APIs. OAuth is an open standard for authentication that allows applications to authenticate users without ever directly handling usernames/passwords
InfoQ: Kilim – actors and message passing in Java – Kilim is a message-passing framework for Java that claims provides ultra-lightweight threads and facilities for fast, safe, zero-copy messaging between these threads.
Andrew Peters’ Blog » Blog Archive » My Language of the Year – Erlang is important because it combines both functional and concurrency-oriented programming models in a very powerful way. Specifically, it turns out that the Erlang approach is ideal for harnessing the power of multi-core CPUs.
dragtable – Drag and drop HTML table headers to reorder columns using a simple interface similar to sorttable. – Once you include this script, you can give an HTML table drag-and-drop reorderable columns by setting "class=draggable". dragtable can be combined with sorttable by setting 'class="draggable sortable"', thus producing highly interactive HTML tables

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Monthly Archives: July 2008