Monthly Archives: September 2008

Daily del.icio.us for September 24th through September 27th

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  • Completely Test Your BlackBerry Phone for any Problems with this Secret Shortcut – If you own a BlackBerry mobile phone (or plan to buy one), here’s a very useful shortcut (or can we say Easter Egg) that enables you to perform a complete health checkup of your BlackBerry hardware.
  • Using Java Persistence in a J2EE 1.4 Web Application – This document takes you through the basics of how to add Java™ Persistence functionality to a J2EE 1.4 web application. Though the Java Persistence API was introduced as part of the Java EE 5 platform, it is possible to use Java Persistence in a J2EE 1.4 application
  • FactCheck.org: FactChecking Debate No. 1 – McCain and Obama contradicted each other repeatedly during their first debate, and each volunteered some factual misstatements as well. Here’s how we sort them out:
  • Davenport WebDAV-SMB Gateway – Davenport is a servlet which provides a WebDAV gateway to SMB shared resources. Typical usage would be to provide web-based read and write access to Windows shared drives. WebDAV clients, such as Windows' "Web Folders" can copy files to and from the shares over HTTP. Non-WebDAV-capable web browsers can also access the network, downloading files from shared folders in a seamless fashion.
  • Bailout Could Deepen Crisis, CBO Chief Says – washingtonpost.com – The director of the Congressional Budget Office said yesterday that the proposed Wall Street bailout could actually worsen the current financial crisis
  • Oracle enters hardware market; Launches storage server to ride shotgun with database | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled its first ever hardware product–a storage server with embedded software designed to work with the company’s databases and be used in a grid. The Exadata programmable storage server aims to put database intelligence next to each drive. Oracle and HP also launched a “database machine.”
  • The Geek Stuff » Turbocharge PuTTY with 12 Powerful Add-Ons – Software for Geeks #3 – PuTTY is hands-down the best, free, and lightweight SSH client for Windows. I have provided list of 12 powerful PuTTY add-ons with screenshots, that will solve few shortcomings of the original PuTTY
  • InfoQ: Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design – I distilled the essence of the talk down to a modest collection of pithy maxims, in the spirit of Jon Bentley's classic Bumper-Sticker Computer Science, Item 6 in his excellent book, More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder (Addison-Wesley, 1988).
  • Bliki in a Jar 3.0.9 released – Bliki in a Jar is a small Wiki written in Java with focus on supporting the Wikipedia syntax. It is intended to run on an USB stick as a replacement for a paper notebook as a Personal Information Manager
  • Ext JS – Improving Application Usability with Ext JS Keyboard Handling – As you can see, adding custom key handling within an Ext JS application is quite easy. For any custom keys, including function keys, alpha keys with or without modifiers (alt/shift/ctrl) there is Ext.KeyMap. For navigation, arrows, paging, home/end there is Ext.KeyNav.
  • Hey Rod, You Are Killing Your Company – Weiqi Gao’s Observations – After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. Subsequent maintenance releases will be available to SpringSource Enterprise customers. Bug fixes will be folded into the open source development trunk and will be made available in the next major community release of the software.
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Daily del.icio.us for September 22nd through September 24th

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  • Sun jilted in Oracle big-systems love • The Register – That was a triple whammy directed at Sun. Not only was Oracle endorsing low-cost Intel boxes over Sun's mighty Sparc to power the server farms that run cloud data centers – an area where Sun has been heavily pushing Sparc – but she was also hitting Sun's Sparc Niagara processor family in an area where Sun has been making a lot of noise: power consumption.
  • Red Hat sets new performance record at a 20 percent cost savings – Today Red Hat announced that it has broken server performance records with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on an IBM System x 3950 M2 running Intel X7460 Xeon processors. Apparently you can have your cake and eat it, too
  • Without further ado: Reverie « Vincent Laforet’s Blog – I’m proud to finally share this short film with everyone – no time for words – let’s let the moving images do the talking… Here is the raw footage (downsized to 1/4 resolution) from the prototype EOS 5D MKII that Canon allowed me to borrow over a 72 hour period.
  • Rands In Repose: Impossible – What’s important when the CEO asks for the impossible is that he’s pushing the definition of possibility for what the team can accomplish. Maybe your CEO only has an idea, and can only feel the possibility in what he’s asking, but it’s not his job to make it all happen. That’s where you come in. You’re the person responsible for transforming the feel, the intuition, the glimpse of a plan, and the confidence into knowing and doing.
  • Sam Harris on Sarah Palin and Elitism | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com – What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance
  • Amazon adds Oracle support to EC2 | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – The move will give Amazon’s cloud services some serious enterprise heft. In a blog post, Amazon said it will offer EC2 services preloaded with Oracle’s software–Enterprise Linux, Database 11g, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and developer tools–as well as support options.
  • T-Mobile’s Google phone may offer free e-mail – Techland – The new Android-powered phone will have Google’s (GOOG) Gmail service built in, and T-Mobile executives are considering offering access to Gmail free, without the need for a data plan
  • Direct Reports : Everybody (Why Leave IIS?) – If you have gotten a chance to try an early build of SQL Server Reporting 2008 Reporting Services, you know that one of the changes in the product is the removal of the Internet Information Services (IIS) dependency.
  • Google Visualization API – Google Code – The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.
  • Official Google Blog: The democratization of data – Google will be a part of this global economy, helping both large and small companies to grow their markets and manage their information. Exciting times are ahead!

Daily del.icio.us for September 19th through September 21st

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  • Gbridge Does Simple but Secure File Sharing, Syncing, and VNC – Gbridge is a free software that lets you sync folders, share files, chat and VNC securely and easily. It extends Google's gtalk service to a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that connects your computers and your close friends' computers directly and securely. Gbridge has many unique features.
  • Space4J – Java Persistence – Space4J is a simple database system that will let you work with Java Collections in memory. Instead of having to perform a SQL SELECT to fetch a User from a database table, you can just access the users map (java.util.Map) and call users.get(id). With Space4J, all your data is kept in memory inside the JVM. There is no need for an extra database application
  • VMware Sees the Open Source Threat | OStatic – With Microsoft and Sun (along with Linux players) bundling virtualization with their server software, and ongoing improvements in open source virtualization offerings such as Xen, I've predicted before and I now predict more than ever that VMware has to radically change its business model.
  • Spring Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach | Javalobby – This wonderful book, Spring Recipes, covers in a very decent way Spring 2.5 from basic to advanced and in many cases some compatible configurations for 1.x, scalable. It is a way to learn each chapter throught the book, 19 well-organized chapters that cover the most important topics in the J2EE world with Spring, and of course, Spring core itself
  • DimeCasts.Net Details for # 46 – Setting up Continuous Integration for your Application with Team City – In this episode we will walk you though how setup and manage a Continuous Integration system using Team City for your application.

    You will get a guided tour on the various steps needed to get your CI enviornment up and running in no time flat.

  • InfoQ: Mockito 1.5 spies on plain objects – Mockito is a mocking framework for Java. It's very similar to EasyMock and jMock, but eliminates the need for expectations by verifying what has been called after execution. Other mocking libraries require you to record expectations before execution, which tends to result in ugly setup code
  • McCain’s Scapegoat – WSJ.com – In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution. He'll never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore, circa 2000
  • Java Parallel Processing Framework Home Page – JPPF is an open source Grid Computing platform written in Java that makes it easy to run applications in parallel, and speed up their execution by orders of magnitude. Write once, deploy once, execute everywhere!
  • JPPF, grid computing platform for Java, releases version 1.5 – JPPF is an open source Grid Computing platform written in Java that makes it easy to run applications in parallel, and speed up their execution by orders of magnitude. Write once, deploy once, execute everywhere!
  • Cisco buys into corporate IM | Business Tech – CNET News – On Friday, the networking giant Cisco announced it will purchase Jabber, which uses an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo

Daily del.icio.us for September 15th through September 19th

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  • Google Co-Founder Has Genetic Code Linked to Parkinson’s – NYTimes.com – Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said Thursday that he has a gene mutation that increases his likelihood of contracting Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that can impair speech, movement and other functions
  • Ext JS – Ext GWT 1.1 Released – We are pleased to announce the release of Ext GWT 1.1. This release is packed full of new features and components. Ext GWT 1.1 is a recommended upgrade for all Ext GWT 1.0 users. Although a minor release, Ext GWT introduces many exciting new features to help build your rich internet application. With this release, Ext GWT shortens the feature set gap between Ext JS.
  • Was ‘Adult Supervision’ Needed On Wall Street? : NPR – The bankruptcy of financial services giant Lehman Brothers and the 500-point drop in the stock market on Sept. 15 have sent shock waves through the financial community. Michael Greenberger, a former director at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, tells Terry Gross that the government's decision to bail out AIG is a sign that the economy is "teetering on the brink."
  • Obama airs unusual economy ad – Mike Allen – Politico.com – Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is airing an unusual two-minute TV ad about the economy, calling for “shared responsibility” and “real regulation” to rein in an “anything-goes culture on Wall Street.”

    The ad is part of the campaign’s effort to respond confidently and convincingly to this weekend’s financial meltdown

  • Why Obama’s Health Plan Is Better – WSJ.com – Everyone agrees our health-care financing system must change. But only one candidate, Barack Obama, has real change we can believe in.
  • Sun Launches Open Suite for SWIFT for Financial Institutions and Corporate Treasuries – Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the launch of the Sun Open Suite for SWIFT, a complete end-to-end software and hardware infrastructure solution to help corporate treasuries and financial institutions kick-start fast and secure SWIFTNet integration
  • Ext JS – Ext JS at The Ajax Experience – Come join Jack Slocum and I for two developer focused sessions, "Hands On Ext" and “Advanced CSS and Theming of Ext JS” at The Ajax Experience at the end of this month. Feel free to follow along with your laptop or watch as we build an application and demonstrate how to create a custom theme in each hour long session.
  • Windows Games Run Faster on Linux than on Windows Vista / From Out There / rca / Fellows / The Fellowship – Fellowship of FSFE – These benchmarks say that GNU/Linux with Cedega or WINE runs the tested games 33 – 40% faster than Windows Vista. 40%! That's not just the fraction of fps that the hardcore crowd lusts for, that's a significant number.

    So the best modern platform to play Windows games on is not Windows but GNU/Linux

  • Stack Overflow – Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language. Jump in and share your software engineering expertise!
  • The short – but eventful – life of Ike – The Big Picture – Boston.com – In its brief lifespan of only 13 days, Hurricane Ike wreaked great deal of havoc. Affecting several countries including Cuba, Haiti, and the United States, Ike is blamed for approximately 114 deaths (74 in Haiti alone), and damages that are still being tallied, with estimates topping $10 billion. Many shoreline communities of Galveston, Texas were wiped from the map by the winds, storm surge and the walls of debris pushed along by Ike – though Galveston was spared the level of disaster it suffered in 1900.

Daily del.icio.us for September 10th through September 13th

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Daily del.icio.us for September 9th

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  • BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » We hate success – The Justice Department has hired a litigator to look at going after Google and its growing dominance in advertising. This isn’t surprising, of course. It’s the yin-yang of American business: we love success stories but we hate too much success.
  • Michael Medavoy: When Did Education and Intellect Become Political Negatives? – Unfortunately, we are now living in a different world. No longer does the public want a leader with an education or experience. The public wants the beer-drinking buddy from Texas or the beauty queen from Alaska. Cover photos on US Weekly and People Magazine are now the new authoritative credentials — so much so that they carry more clout than Harvard Law degrees and Constitutional Law professorships.
  • Mendel Rosenblum, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at VMware, resigns | virtualization.info – This departure comes at the worst moment: yesterday Microsoft officially presented its competing product, Hyper-V, and while the hypervisor is still years behind the VMware technology, the entire industry announced support for it. VMware will need a solid strategy to counter that: cutting-edge technologies rarely wins against Microsoft marketing war-machines and ubiquitous alliances.
  • Beet.TV: Google’s Marissa Mayer on Chrome, New Web Browser – Yesterday in San Francisco, Kelsey Blodget, associate producer at Beet.TV sat down for an extensive interview with Google Vice President Marissa Mayer. In this segment, Marissa talks about the development and functionality of Chrome, the new Web browser from Google
  • Fitbit – Automatically Track Your Fitness and Sleep – Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good quality sleep? How many steps and miles did I walk today? The Fitbit Tracker helps you answer these questions.
  • TC50: iCharts Wants To Be The YouTube For Charts – The self-proclaimed “YouTube for interactive charts,” iChart provides a way for users to take data they created with other services like Excel or Google Spreadsheets, and upload that data directly to iCharts. Once collected, users need only to drag and drop the data to the chart to create a fully-modifiable and interactive chart.
  • InfoQ: AJAX Animator Demonstrates AJAX in RIA World – This open-source project uses AJAX technologies to provide a fully standards-based, online, collaborative, Web-based animation suite. The 0.2 release shows good potential for AJAX plays in the RIA world. The creator of AJAX Animator, who uses the alias Antimatter15, recently shared his insights with InfoQ.
  • InfoQ: Martin Fowler on Avoiding Common Scrum Pitfalls – Jacky Li of InfoQ China spoke with Martin Fowler during ThoughtWorks' AgileChina conference. In this print interview, Martin Fowler talked about Scrum certification and the future of Agile.
  • InfoQ: Pratik Patel on Enterprise JPA, Fetch Groups and Spring 2.5 – Pratik demonstrated JPA API usage and performance tuning using @FetchGroup and @FetchPlan annotations provided by Apache OpenJPA framework. He also talked about unit and integration testing of fetching logic and recommended to test the fetch groups code to prevent any last minute surprises when the application code is promoted to production environment.
  • InfoQ: Neal Ford On Programming Languages and Platforms – Neal Ford talks about the tendency of having multiple languages running on one of the two major platforms existing today: Java and .NET. He also presents the advantages offered by Ruby compared to static languages like Java or C#
  • InfoQ: Typemock: Past, Present and Future – The story of Typemock™ began in 2004, when now-CEO Eli Lopian found that developers didn't practice TDD (Test Driven Development) because writing unit tests was too hard, and he wanted to create a tool which will help developers become agile

Daily del.icio.us for September 5th through September 9th

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  • Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows: Page 1 – In the wake of Google's release of the new WebKit-based Chrome browser, some technology enthusiasts are beginning to wonder if the days are numbered for Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine
  • The U.S. Closes the Mobile Innovation Gap – After lagging in wireless for years, the U.S. has caught up with Western Europe and is now trying to take the innovation lead
  • The Art and Craft of Great Software Architecture and Development: Book Review: The Definitive Guide to Terracotta – This is a rock-solid book with a solid introduction. I wouldn't agree that it's a "Definitive Guide" – I'd like to have seem more help up front in getting your environment set-up for the examples, some case-studies of how Terracotta has been used, more benchmarks, perhaps even benchmark code. But given the fact that it's the ONLY book I can find on Terracotta it's fortunately pretty good and gets you "in the game".
  • InfoQ: Google Chrome: Perspectives and Analysis – On September 1st, 2008, Google announced its new open source browser, Google Chrome. The introduction of a new web browser by Google, a major player in the web by anyone's standards, has predictably resulted in a flurry of attention, analysis and soothsaying. InfoQ has taken some time to compile some of the perspectives and analysis from the community, news media and blogosphere in order to assemble comprehensive coverage of the Google Chrome launch and its impact.
  • Metallica: Master of YouTube? | Listening Post from Wired.com – Metallica, whose leaked album Death Magnetic is slated for a September 12 release, launched a promotion on YouTube today featuring the band's favorite Metallica cover songs on the site. Drummer Lars Ulrich introduces their selections in the video to the right.
  • Microsoft Missing the Boat on Mobile? – O’Reilly Radar – What's so ironic is that if Microsoft started thinking about the user again, instead of thinking about protecting their business, they could do great things. There are many problems yet to be solved in online software, but they won't be solved without bold leaps into the future.
  • Ext JS – Ext GWT: Now with Portal and Web Desktop – Ext GWT 1.1 is right around the corner and incorporates the popular Portal and Web Desktop interface.
  • Google at Age 10 – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Here’s a quick snapshot of Google by the numbers along with some comparisons to Microsoft. The sources of the data are the companies, Yahoo Finance and comScore.
  • InfoQ: Deploying a 1 Terabyte Cache using EhCache Server – The largest ehcache single instances run at around 20GB in memory. The largest disk stores run at 100Gb each. Add nodes together, with cache data partitioned across them, to get larger sizes. 50 nodes at 20GB gets you to 1 Terabyte
  • Bash scripting Tutorial – Linuxconfig.org – This bash tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of bash scripting.As you will soon discover in this quick comprehensive bash scripting guide, learning the bash shell scripting is very easy task. Lets begin this bash scripting tutorial with a simple "Hello World" script.
  • InfoQ: Jeff Barr Discusses Amazon Web Services – In this interview from QCon London 2008, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Evangelist Jeff Barr discusses SimpleDB, S3, EC2, SQS, cloud computing, how the different Amazon services interact within an application, the origins of AWS, SimpleDB and Microsoft SQL Server Data Services, globalization of the AWS cloud, the March AWS outage, SimpleDB Stored Procedures and converting between AMIs and VMWare.

Daily del.icio.us for August 28th through September 1st

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  • Generation 5 » Stop Catching Exceptions! – A strategy that (i) uses finally as the first resort for containing corrupting and maintaining invariants, (ii) uses catch locally when the exceptions thrown in an area are completely understood, and (iii) surrounds independent units of work with try-catch blocks is an effective basis for using exceptions
  • Reverse-engineer Source Code into UML Diagrams | Javalobby – Now that we have UML diagram integrated within our build file, and also our CI job, we can ensure that our code base and the UML diagrams are always in sync. We saw how to include these ant targets in our commit builds or nightly builds of our CI jobs, and also published these artifacts as part of our post build process.
  • The Way I Think | Good Bye FireBug. Hello Developer Tools. – If you’re a web developer and you've ever worked on the client side then you've almost certainly used the incredible Firebug. If you work regularly in IE you may have also used the fantastic IE web tool bar. However, IE8 is the first browser to actually build one of these clever little add-ons right into the browser.
  • InfoQ: Fowler: Agile Vs. Lean Misses the Point – Many of the people who developed the current crop of agile methodologies were strongly influenced by lean manufacturing and the ideas behind it. This can be seen in the many commonalities between lean and agile, including: People centric approach, Empowered teams, Adaptive planning, Continuous improvement
  • Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT 1.5 Now Available – We're happy to announce that GWT 1.5 is now officially released and available for download. GWT 1.5 delivers what we think are an impressive number of improvements, about four hundred issues if you're counting. We're also happy that one of those is issue 168, our most-requested feature, "Support for Java 5".
  • The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion’s Blog » Blog Archive » Recommended Books: Clean Code – This week i read Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code book. With so many great books already available about writing good code, the first question i asked myself was: do we really need another one? The answer turns out to be YES!
  • Java Reflection – Dynamic Proxies – Using Java Reflection you create dynamic implementations of interfaces at runtime. You do so using the class java.lang.reflect.Proxy. Dynamic proxies can be used for many different purposes, e.g. database connection and transaction management, dynamic mock objects for unit testing, and other AOP-like method intercepting purposes
  • Direct access 300 times faster in Java? at Stephans Blog – So for the last years people use more often composition not inheritance with Composite Oriented Programming being the extreme
  • Reading the Web – Ideas Blog – NYTimes.com – “Ideas” is a daily blog by Tom Kuntz and other editors of the Week in Review featuring brief posts on interesting articles and other stuff we've come across lately on the Web, in print and elsewhere. We’re generalists, so think of this as a grazing buffet for omnivores. Equally important, “Ideas” is a conversation, so please post your comments and e-mail us your suggestions.
  • Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project – Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of Google Browser, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.
  • Linux jumps to 13.4 percent of the stalling server market | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News – According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent.
  • A U.S.B. Cable for Splitting Screens and Sharing Files Between Two Computers – NYTimes.com – That’s why Iogear’s new U.S.B. Laptop K.V.M. Switch ($130) is so interesting. One double-ended cable connects two Windows PCs or laptops together (a Mac version should be available soon). Then, you can use one PC to control the other and even drag files and folders between the machines.
  • Real Time Economics : Will India Be Tortoise to China’s Hare? – The startling growth in China and India has been the global economic story of the last decade. So far, the Chinese gains have been stronger, but new research argues that India may come out on top in the long run
  • 1,000 Essential Recordings You Must Hear : NPR Music – 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die: A Listener's Life List covers all genres of music in its more than 900 pages. It's driven by the notion that "the more you love music, the more music you love."