- Google is oddly silent about Grand Central | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Google is being very quiet about Grand Central, the virtual phone service it acquired in July 2007 but hasn’t really done anything with since. In my opinion, Grand Central is already a good service. There are a few features I’d like to see added but, for the most part, it’s working for me – so much so that, in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, I called it my favorite telecommuting tool.
- How LinkedIn changed its security model in order to offer an API – This talk also covered how LinkedIn retrofitted the security model chosen for the API into the mainstream website, which helped tremendously in the scalability of the website by allowing stateless front-end / single sign-on (SSO), and improved security by removing sessions entirely.
- Building LinkedIn’s Next Generation Architecture with OSGi – Over the course of the last 5 years, LinkedIn has been built using relatively simple technologies: front end web applications (Tomcat/Servlet/JSP), back-end services (Jetty/Spring Remoting), databases, replication, and JMS. Although the web site was scaling adequately, we had some big challenges to overcome: In this session, I talked about why OSGi was chosen to help us solve those challenges, the implementation progress we've made, the pitfalls that we've encountered (so far) and what we have learned in the process.
- Atlassian Developer Blog – Performance testing with JMeter – This is the first in a series of blog posts aimed at documenting whats involved in setting up a performance test harness from scratch. In my next post, I will show how to deploy these performance tests using Maven 2 and how to automate the process using Bamboo
- Almost Human: a review of Google’s Android G1 phone: Page 1 – The T-Mobile G1 Google smartphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, remains firmly in the shadow of the iPhone—for now. The phone, which goes on sale next week in the US and next month in Britain, was released too early. The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects.
- Charlie Owen – Windows Media Center in the PDC Build of Windows 7 – If you are attending the 2008 Professional Developers Conference you received a pre-beta Windows 7 build today (6801) which contains many features the Windows Media Center team has been developing over the past year
- I would just like to say… – This post is for all of you out there who have developed or contributed to Linux/Ubuntu projects and all of the open source coders who read this
- Windows 7: Windows 7 Walkthrough, Boot Video and Impressions – On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively 7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loaded with pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked, underappreciated developers at Redmond, it's surprisingly stable, and its look and feel already puts Vista to shame.
- Microsoft Watch – Web Services & Browser – Office Goes to the Web – Microsoft made a stunning announcement during today's Professional Developers Conference: A lightweight Web-based version of Office. Office Web is a stunning concession to Google and other Web 2.0 platform developers offering Web-based productivity applications. Office Web will come with lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
- Microsoft Joins Working Group for Open Standards Messaging Software: Decision to join AMQP Working Group based on commitment to openness, interoperability and providing customer choice. – Microsoft Corp. today announced that it is joining the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, an organization focused on the development of the AMQP specification. Microsoft is joining the AMQP Working Group at the request of its members, including several of Microsoft’s customers in the financial services industry, in order to support the development of an open industry standard for ubiquitous messaging.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Daily del.icio.us for October 26th through October 27th
- Network Effects in Data – O’Reilly Radar – Nick Carr's difficulty in understanding my argument that cloud computing is likely to end up a low-margin business unless companies find some way to harness the network effects that are the heart of Web 2.0 made me realize that I use the term "network effects" somewhat differently, and not in the simplistic way many people understand it.
- Windows Live Dev : Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider – Beginning today, Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.
You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!
- Update: Microsoft launches Windows Azure for the cloud | InfoWorld | News | 2008-10-27 | By Paul Krill and Eric Knorr – At Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled the company's much-anticipated cloud computing platform, dubbed Windows Azure.
- Azure Services Platform – Build new applications in the cloud – or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.
- SitePen Blog » Debunking Dojo Toolkit Myths – The Dojo Toolkit has been around for over four years, and has undergone significant changes, both big and small, in becoming a great JavaScript toolkit. This article debunks myth and outdated assumptions (both fair and false) applied to Dojo over its four plus years of development.
- Open source: How e-voting should be done | InfoWorld | News | 2008-10-27 | By Paul Venezia – An open source approach to open voting systems is essential to the integrity of our electoral process. Here's a technical blueprint for securing the vote
- Obama Draws More Than 100,000 At Denver Rally (PHOTOS) – Barack Obama drew a crowd of over 100,000 at a rally in Denver on Sunday, the AP reports:
- Will Kindle sales spike because of ‘Oprah effect’? | News – Digital Media – CNET News – Oprah, who became a force in book publishing in the mid 1990s when she began recommending her favorite titles on her TV show, said during Friday's broadcast that the Kindle, Amazon.com's electronic book reader is her "new favorite gadget." She also called the device "life changing."
- CrunchGear » Archive » Sprint officially releasing HTC Touch Pro next week – Here comes the HTC Touch Pro. It’ll be available on the Sprint network with availability starting next week at “select national retailers” followed by availability in Sprint stores and on Sprint’s website starting November 2nd
- Times Online – WBLG: The McCain excuses begin – Joe Klein (Time Magazine) argues that Obama is winning rather than McCain losing: Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making.
…I came along, I wrote a song for you!
Coldplay was the musical guest on tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live and they were amazing as usual. They played 3 songs and it looked like they were going into a 4th song as the show ended and the credits started to roll. They performed Viva La Vida, Lost and Yellow on the show and I hope those live performances show up on YouTube or Hulu in the next few hours.
Coldplay – Viva La Vida
Coldplay – Lost
Coldplay – Yellow
Daily del.icio.us for October 23rd through October 25th
- Why Barack Obama Is Winning – TIME – He has done this by introducing a quality to American politics that we haven't seen in quite some time: maturity
- The Database Programmer: Minimize Code, Maximize Data – The rule "Minimize Code, Maximize Data" has positive impacts and the coding process, the debugging process, the maintenance process, and the user experience. Since that covers all parties concerned with software development, it is safe to conclude that this is a crucial design concept
- Advanced Data Visualization Tools using Javascript | 84 Bytes – I want to show you some amazing open source tools built with pure Javascript. With most of the browsers improving their Javascript engines, Javascript is really becoming quite powerful and people are doing a lot of cool stuffs with it and here are some of them:
- Amazon’s Kindle obsession: Bury the printed book | Outside the Lines – CNET News – Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos loves to talk about the Kindle e-book reader. He's even got media mogul Oprah Winfrey pitching the device: "I'm telling you, it is absolutely my new favorite thing in the world," she recently said.
- Barack Obama for President – Editorial Board Endorsement – NYTimes.com – After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.
- Better Design Through Code – I titled the 50-minute talk "Better Design Through Code" and walk through latent capabilities of servers and browsers ready and waiting to deliver personalized, adaptive content to unique Web visitors.
- Advanced Message Queuing Protocol – Advanced Message Queuing Protocol – AMQP is an open Internet Protocol for Business Messaging. In response to the needs of its members and market demand the AMQP Working Group are collaborating on specifications for messaging infrastructure that provides businesses with a simple and more powerful way of connecting messaging dependent applications both within and between firms. The resulting specifications are published here under royalty-free terms.
- 37signals’s wysihat at master — GitHub – WysiHat is a WYSIWYG JavaScript framework that provides an extensible foundation to design your own rich text editor. WysiHat stays out of your way and leaves the UI design to you.
- Security Flaw Is Revealed in T-Mobile’s Google Phone – NYTimes.com – Just days after the T-Mobile G1 smartphone went on the market, a group of security researchers have found what they call a serious flaw in the Android software from Google that runs it.
- 60+ Useful Adobe AIR Applications You Should Know | Tools – With Adobe AIR’s rich features, developers are able to build application using HTML, Ajax, JavaScript, Flex and Flash. Therefore, we strongly believe that Adobe Air has unleashed the power to extend user experiences beyond the browser. Here’s our collection of 60+ Adobe AIR Application you should know.
- Sun Loses Co-Founder to Start-Up – NYTimes.com – Mr. Bechtolsheim’s new company, Arista Networks, has built an ultra-fast network switch that costs one-tenth the price of similar products from Cisco
Daily del.icio.us for October 20th through October 21st
- REST for Java developers, Part 1: It’s about the information, stupid – JavaWorld – When you need to invoke behavior in standard, contract-bound ways between disparate partners, SOAP is a good approach. If, on the other hand, you are looking to share information in flexible, scalable, reusable ways, then REST is a great approach
- InfoQ: Business Processes for SOA Governance – Prabhakar Mynampati, an Advisory Architect at IBM, published last week an article detailing 6 SOA Governance business processes. The article includes a BPMN-like process definitions for: Service identification, Service creation, Service testing, Service versioning and change management, Service management, and Service security
- InfoQ: Implementing SOA Governance – Governance is the combination of people, policies, and processes that an organization leverages to achieve desired behaviors. SOA governance is about achieving the desired behavior associated with, or attributed to, SOA adoption
- InfoQ: HP Releases Systinet 3.0 – HP announced the release of HP SOA Systinet 3.00, a market-leading service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance software. HP acquired Systinet as part of its acquisition of Mercury Interactive in 2006.
- InfoQ: Fostering Software Craftsmanship in a Corporate Setting – In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Dillman talks about transforming developers into software craftsmen, people responsible for their work, continuously learning, taking pride in doing qualitative work, sharing knowledge and respecting professional standards.
- Introduction to WEB4J: Web development for minimalists – JavaWorld – As Java Web application frameworks have become more powerful and flexible, they've also become more complex. John O'Hanley's WEB4J framework in many ways flies in the face of this trend: it offers few customization options, but is easy to learn and work with
- Git Community Book – Welcome to the Git Community Book. This book has been built by dozens of people in the Git community, and is meant to help you learn how to use Git as quickly and easily as possible
- Android Developers Blog: Android is now Open Source – we're making what might just be the most exciting announcement of all: we and our Open Handset Alliance partners have now released the source code for Android. There's a huge amount of code and content there, so head over to http://source.android.com/ for all the details.
- InfoQ: Flex for XML and JSON – Beauty and brains. Flex and Java. Or is it the other way around? Who can say? What I know is that Flex and Java work really well together to create amazing Rich Internet applications (RIAs)
- How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub – In the end, just as Indiana Jones could never turn down the opportunity to search for the Holy Grail, I could no less turn down the chance to work for myself on something I truly love, no matter how safe the alternative might be
Daily del.icio.us for October 18th through October 20th
- The Short List for U.S. Chief Technology Officer – BusinessWeek – Barack Obama has pledged to name a cabinet-level CTO to oversee a job-creating national broadband buildout if he's elected. Big names abound
- Wikimedia Ubuntu migration FAQ – Meta – There's been some recent news coverage about Wikimedia's ongoing migration of servers to Ubuntu Linux. While much of the coverage is fairly straightforward and fact-based, there are some common questions and misconceptions I've seen in comments.
- Linux Ecosystem worth $25 billion – InternetNews:The Blog – Sean Michael Kerner – The Linux Foundation is set to release a report on Wednesday estimating that the Linux ecosystem is now worth $25 billion
- Open Web Podcast – Episode 5: Ryan Stewart of Adobe – Ryan Stewart of Adobe joined us for episode 5 of the Open Web Podcast. We really want to be pragmatic Open Web citizens, so thought it would be good to hear from Ryan and get his point of view on what Adobe, and he, are thinking with respect to the Web as a-whole
- Ajaxian » Dojo 1.2 Final Release – Pete Higgins released Dojo 1.2 the first version under his command. There are a ton of subtle improvements such as
- Ajaxian » The bane and choice of Rich Text Editors – Stuart Atkinson has kindly done a roundup of the state of rich text editors, and it covers
- High Performance Web Sites :: Runtime Page Optimizer – The Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO) is an exciting product from Aptimize. RPO runs on a web server applying performance optimizations to pages at runtime, just before the page is sent to the browser
- FancyUpload for Flash 10 » digitarald:Harald K – I developed and tested all day to release a FancyUpload version that works in Flash 9 and 10 (Kodus to Anders Rasmussen and his conversion to AS3). The code is now commited to github,
- Newer Technology Universal Drive Adapter -… (U2NV2SPATA) at OWC – The "Swiss Army Knife" of Disk Connectivity…Turns Any Bare Drive Into An External Storage Solution!!
- The Return of Terry Tate – Office Linebacker and his election specials – http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Cormen/dp/0262032937
- Ruminations of a Programmer: Memcached and Terracotta : Alternatives or Complementary ? – Can we conclude that for read-only (mostly) usecases, use memcached, while, for read-write usecases, use Terracotta to obtain transparent durability to the persistent store. Rather than alternatives, the two technologies are complementary.
- Colin Powell endorses Obama – CNN.com – Former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced Sunday that he will be voting for Sen. Barack Obama, citing the Democrat's "ability to inspire" and the "inclusive nature of his campaign."
- The Great GWT Roundup | Javalobby – Over the past two months or so we here at the web builder zone, thanks to Manning Publishing, have been publishing a comprehensive series on GWT. We recently published the last in the series and I thought that it would be a good idea to create a sort of index of all of these articles.
- Washington Wire – WSJ.com : Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri – Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event. The crowd assembled under the Gateway Arch on a sunny Saturday afternoon to hear Obama speak about taxes and slam the Republicans on economic issues.
Daily del.icio.us for October 16th through October 18th
- Microsoft makes gains in server virtualization | InfoWorld | News | 2008-10-17 | By Eric Lai, Computerworld – Bolstered by the June launch of its Hyper-V virtualization software , Microsoft grabbed nearly a quarter of the fast-growing x86 server virtualization market in the second quarter, IDC said Thursday.
- XSLT-based XHTML Markup Sanitizer – O’Reilly Broadcast – I've been meaning to write an XSLT-based XHTML markup sanitizer for a while now and tonight discovered I needed it sooner rather than later
- Obba: A Java Object Handler for Excel. – Obba provides a bridge from Excel sheets to Java classes. With Obba, you can easily build Excel GUIs to Java code. Its main features are:
* Loading of arbitrary jar or class files at runtime through an Excel worksheet function.
* Instantiation of Java objects, storing the object reference under a given object label.
* Invocation of methods on objects referenced by their object handle, storing the handle to the result under a given object label - SitePen Blog » Dojo Sensei Reader, a Training Application – Nothing beats having a full application in front of you—with code available to read and modify as you learn the ropes—so we built the Dojo Sensei Reader, a rich, powerful RSS reader realized as a single-page web application
- Taffy DB : A JavaScript database for your browser – Taffy DB is a free and opensource JavaScript library that acts as thin data layer inside Web 2.0 and Ajax applications.
- Gunnar Hillert’s Blog: Incorporating reCAPTCHA into your Struts 2 + Spring Application – In addition to that it is a slick CAPCHA implemention as well, that you can incorporate freely into your web applications. There are APIs available for various languages including Java, Ruby and Python
- REST for Java developers, Part 1: It’s about the information, stupid – JavaWorld – Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for creating, maintaining, retrieving, and deleting resources. REST's information-driven, resource-oriented approach to building Web services can both satisfy your software's users and make your life as a developer easier
- Microsoft starts distributing open-source Drupal | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News – The single biggest distributor of Drupal just might be Microsoft. As I discovered from Dries Buytaert's blog on Wednesday, Microsoft's Web Application Installer comes with out-of-the-box support for Drupal, OScommerce, and other popular open-source Web applications.
- Microsoft Web Application Installer – The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more
- Parleys: Writing JPA applications – A video recording of my presentation from SpringOne 2007 is now available online. The presentation covers JPA usage in an application, including API usage, transactional semantics, useful JPQL constructs, and common performance concerns.
Daily del.icio.us for October 13th through October 16th
- Java Entrepreneur: MySQL Co Founder plans to quit since current stay becomes unpleasant – I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organizations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to 'retire' from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.
- InfoQ: SOA Governance: An Enterprise View – This article observes SOA governance specifics from the enterprise perspective and illustrates them with several examples of SOA Governance policies.
- InfoQ: Martin Fowler: Can SOA Be Done With an Agile Approach? – In a recent article, Martin Fowler is trying to explore the applicability of evolutionary design – a practice commonly used in Extreme Programming (XP) – to SOA implementations.
- InfoQ: Kenai: Project Hosting Built on JRuby on Rails – Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye, according to Tim Bray) is a new project hosting platform from Sun. It integrates several source code management systems, forums, mailinglists, issue-tracking systems and wikis.
- InfoQ: Java In-Memory Persistence with Space4J – Space4J is a simple database system that will let you work with Java Collections in memory. Since memory is several orders of magnitude faster than disk for random access to data, Space4J provides better scalability for "real-time" web applications and systems that require performance.
- InfoQ: Erich Gamma Discusses Jazz, Eclipse, JUnit and Design Patterns – In this interview from QCon London 2008, Erich Gamma discusses the Jazz project, why Eclipse has been successful, the strict Eclipse release schedule, JUnit, Design Patterns, how to identify a design pattern, design patterns and the 'Don't Repeat Yourself' principle, the design pattern community, and whether dependency injection is a design pattern.
- The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (October 15, 2008) – Alaskans Get It – Two women in Anchorage talk sense about Palin
- InfoQ: Granite Data Service 1.1.0 Released with new Features and Tools – Granite Data Services (GDS) 1.1.0 GA is released this week. Granite Data Services (GDS) is a free, open source (LGPL'd), alternative to Adobe LiveCycle (Flex 2+) Data Services for J2EE application servers
- Announcing the New York Times Campaign Finance API – Open – Code – New York Times Blog – The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code.
- First New York Times API is Live – Here’s Why it Matters – ReadWriteWeb – The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live today, according to a post on the company's blog Open – All the code that's fit to printf(). First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API. Also available is a database management program initially developed for internal use at the NY Times.
- Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama – The Daily Beast – The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat. Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
- The Soyuz Spacecraft – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com – The basic design of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft has not changed in some 40 years, though it has had numerous upgrades. The current version, known as Soyuz TMA, is expected to be the only means of taking astronauts to the International Space Station from 2010 to 2015
- FCC Clears Free Wireless Web – WSJ.com – A proposal to create a free, national wireless Internet service got a boost as Federal Communications Commission engineers concluded that concerns are overblown about such service interfering with other carriers.
Daily del.icio.us for October 11th through October 13th
- Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Developer Tools and the Open Web – We’re also excited to announce that Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience, and long-time supporters of the open Web, have joined Moziila full-time to lead this newly formed Developer Tools Lab
- Ext JS – Ext Charting and Mapping with Google Visualizations – Using the GDataTableAdapter to adapt or convert an Ext.data.Store to a google.visualization.DataTable is a good way to allow Ext Developers to use Google Visualizations without worrying about any underlying differences
- Paul Krugman Wins the Nobel Economics Prize – WSJ.com – Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.
- Credit crunch glossary | Business | guardian.co.uk – A guide to terms and phrases used in the financial sector
- 13 Training Principles of CSS Everyone Should Know « HMV.co.in – Take a look at some of the following tips used by the CSS experts to ensure your CSS is being written both effectively and efficiently
- Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever – a knol by Jurgen Appelo – In this post I proudly present the Top 100 of Best Software Engineering Books, Ever. I have created this list using four different criteria: 1) number of Amazon reviews, 2) average Amazon rating, 3) number of Google hits and 4) Jolt awards.
- The Coffee Desk » » Microsoft’s new ‘M’ programming language – The new language is to be a part of Microsoft’s new Oslo development and service-oriented strategy, incorporating features from XAML while being textual and domain-specific. M is to be used directly with 2 other components to be released with M along with Visual Studio 2010: Quadrant, a tool for building models visually, and a repository for storing and viewing models in an SQL database
- codeslower.com: The Haskell Cheatsheet – As I learned Haskell I frequently wanted a quick reference for syntax, keywords and other language elements. The Haskell Report, while very thorough, wasn’t quite it. For that reason I’ve created this cheatsheet. It’s intended for beginning to intermediate Haskell programmers to use as a quick-reference guide for syntax, keywords or other language issues
- Antec Skeleton | Uncrate – This is hardcore. The Antec Skeleton ($TBA) is a futuristic, open-air PC enclosure that keeps your components cool — in more ways than one. Made of 0.8mm cold rolled steel, the Skeleton has a front 92mm fan, a top three speed 250mm fan with multicolor LED customization, layered component trays, rackmount quality side rails, 7 expansion slots, and room for 4 drive bays
- BBC NEWS | Business | Finance crisis: in graphics – It is shaping up to be one of the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets
Upgraded my computer – Love the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT card
I have a couple of computers at home but my primary machine is a DELL desktop running Vista. This is a dual-core machine with 4 GB of RAM but it ran sloooooooooooowwwwww. So I just upgraded the machine with a new 500w power supply and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT is an amazing video card that’s SLI ready with 112 stream processors and a 256-bit framebuffer interface running at 900MHz, DirectX 10, PCI Express 2.0 and the second generation NVIDIA PureVideo engine with full acceleration and post processing for HD DVD and Blu-ray movies.
Here are the screenshots of the Performance Information and Tools screen with the before and after Windows Experience Index number. Guess I need to upgrade the processor next.
The power supply I chose was the PC Power and Cooling PPCS500D Silencer.