Daily del.icio.us for December 27th through December 30th

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Vinny

La terraza de Aravaca: Lessons learned using GWT, Axis and JPA simultaneously – Here you have some lessons learned that should be taken into account when working with the Google Web Toolkit, Axis and any of the JPA implementations out there
PDF embed code generator – This code generator can generate two kinds of PDF embedding code: pure standards-compliant HTML markup, or JavaScript-based PDFObject code. The generator also makes it easy to customize your embed code using Adobe's optional PDF Open parameters.
JSP – Create Custom Tags for Beginners | Techie Zone – JSP Tags acts as a plugin to your JSP pages. These are basically Java Classes that get executed when jsp page get rendered by server and browser. JSP comes with in build Tags like jsp:include, jsp:forward, but they are not sufficient to cater to the Web World. To overcome this problem you can design tags based on your business requirement. This article will guide you how we can create an custom tags for JSP.
Design Pattern Interview Questions Part (3) – C#, ASP.Net, VB.Net – To give you a practical understanding i have put all these design patterns in a video format and uploaded on http://www.questpond.com/FreeDesign1.htm . You can visit http://www.questpond.com/ and download the complete architecture interview questions PDF which covers SOA , UML , Design patterns , Togaf , OOPs etc.
Memoization in Java Using Dynamic Proxy Classes | O’Reilly Media – Memoizing a function adds a transparent caching wrapper to the function, so that function values that have already been calculated are returned from a cache rather than being recomputed each time. Memoization can provide significant performance gains for computing-intensive calls. It is also a reusable solution to adding caching to arbitrary routines.
YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: "Ajax Performance" » Yahoo! User Interface Blog – Douglas Crockford returns to YUI Theater with another chapter in his evolving lecture series. This session, “Ajax Performance,” debunks common misconceptions about the relationship between JavaScript and performance and gives engineers a core focus for improving the performance of web apps
giver – Google Code – Giver is a simple file sharing desktop application. Other people running Giver on your network are automatically discovered and you can send files to them by simply dragging the files to their photo or icon shown in Giver. There is no knowledge or set up needed beyond what the person looks like or their name to use Giver.
Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power of the Real Time Enterprise – O’Reilly Radar – What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative change in their entire business
Fast and ‘free’ beats steady and paid on MySQL • The Register – It appears that since being acquired by Sun Microsystems, MySQL's process has been slowed by a 30,000-person bureaucracy, and the open source community has the patience of a six year old.
InfoQ: Architecting for Green Computing – In an article entitled “Green Maturity Model for Virtualization”, Kevin Francis and Peter Richardson explain how to use virtualization to reduce energy consumption. They see 4 types of computing: Local, Logical, Data Center and Cloud Computing, the last offering the most advanced form of virtualization and therefore representing the greenest computing

Daily del.icio.us for December 23rd through December 26th

Posted on December 27, 2008 by Vinny

30+ Great Adobe AIR Apps for Designers and Developers – Here are over 30 great Adobe AIR apps for designers and developers that can help you do everything from tracking your time to measuring pixels, and more
First Steps in Flex: A Quick, Small Intro for Programmers – Need to learn Flex, but find all those thick books intimidating? First Steps in Flex was designed to be small (only 140 pages!). Each chapter is only a few pages long, and contains just enough to get you comfortable with the topic. We don't want to bury you in details, but we provide plenty of resources when you need them
Wal-Mart to start selling iPhones on Sunday | Technology | Reuters – Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Friday it will start selling Apple Inc's iPhone on Sunday, but the popular cell phones that can surf the web will not be priced as low as some anticipated.
Alan Cox leaves Red Hat, suggesting company’s future direction | Business Tech – CNET News – From the JBoss acquisition to Red Hat Exchange, Red Hat has slowly but surely been moving ever closer to applications. This makes sense for Red Hat as it seeks to increase its relevance (and deal size) to the enterprise, selling solutions rather than just cheap bits
Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 – The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well. When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.
Truck and SUV sales rising as gas prices drop – WTF!!!!!! – After nearly a year of flagging sales, low gas prices and fat incentives are reigniting America's taste for big vehicles. Trucks and SUVs will outsell cars in December, according to researchers at the automotive Website Edmunds.com, something that hasn't happened since February.
Solar eclipse, Aug. 11, 1999, seen from the Mir space station | Futility Closet – An eclipse appears total only while you're directly in the moon's shadow. Normally the darkness lasts only a few minutes … but in 1973 a Concorde supersonic jet managed to stay in the shade for 74 minutes.
Op-Ed Columnist – Time to Reboot America – NYTimes.com – My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
Fly Me to the moon – And let me play among the stars..

Daily del.icio.us for December 17th through December 22nd

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Vinny

The busy Java developer’s guide to Scala: Scala and servlets – In this article in the The busy Java developer's guide to Scala series, Ted Neward begins a tour of Scala in the real world by examining how Scala can interact with the core Servlet API and perhaps even improve it a little.
FrontPage – Dropbox Wiki – The Dropbox Wiki is your designated resource for the more advanced features (and creative uses) that Dropbox has to offer. Like all wikis, this will be constantly changing, and we welcome any contributions you make.
Red Hat 3Q up 20 pct, but revenue below estimate – BusinessWeek – Red Hat Inc. on Monday reported a 20 percent increase in profit for the third quarter as budget-conscious companies opted for the software provider's open-source Linux operating system over more expensive proprietary systems.
Asia’s wounded giants | Suddenly vulnerable | The Economist – Asia’s two big beasts are shivering. India’s economy is weaker, but China’s leaders have more to fear
Management guru: Warren Buffett | Warren Buffett | The Economist – Buffett is known as “the Sage of Omaha”, after the town where he was born and where he has spent most of his life, and much is made of his small-town homespun values. He likes to play the ukulele and he plays bridge (with Bill Gates, among others) in his modest home in Omaha
JavaLobby’s Top 10 Articles of 2008 | Javalobby – As a way of looking back at how the year has been on JavaLobby, we've collected the top 10 most read articles. It paints a clear picture about what is important to you, and gives us some hints as to what we should be covering in 2009
Dustin’s Software Development Cogitations and Speculations: 2008: Year of the Java Persistence API – It appears that one of the most popular themes in Java development in 2008 has been the Java Persistence API (JPA). I base this statement on the recent announcements that JPA-focused articles appeared in the Top Ten lists of articles for both Oracle Technology Network (OTN) and JavaLobby.
Data Platform Insider : Ultimate guide for upgrading to SQL Server 2008 – Last week, our SQL Server engineering team in association with Solid Quality Mentors released an unprecedented 490-page free whitepaper called SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide that provides in-depth information on how to upgrade to SQL Server 2008
Scrum in under 10 minutes video | Agile Software Development – Hamid Shojaee from Axosoft published an excellent and funny video on the basics of Scrum. In under 8 minutes of animation Hamid describes most of the basic concepts. I don’t agree with everything (in particular I I would like to see the release burndown chart described), but you can only explain so much in under 10 minutes and every Scrum installation is different anyway. Have a look and enjoy!
Stax Networks Launches: Google App Engine For Java – Stax is built on top of Amazon EC2 and allows developers to create, text and deploy Java applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure.
Database Normalisation :: BlackWasp Software Development – The sixteenth part of the SQL Server Programming Fundamentals tutorial discusses the concept of database normalisation. Normalisation is a database design technique that minimises duplication of information, reducing the risk of introducing data errors.
10 Steps to Learn a New Coding Language Fast – NETTUTS – Learning a new language can seem like a daunting task. However, as it is with all types of learning, there are certain techniques and practices that will help you learn the language faster and more efficiently. Here are 10 of the best practices that aspiring programmers can use to quickly start programming in a new language
Kill Your Database – Rather, save your database with Terracotta. Relational database are valuable for many things, but serving as the cost-effective scalability backbone of high-load web applications isn't one of them. Is your database suffering under the weight of your application?
YouTube – Top Gear Tesla review – Top Gear reviews Tesla, smokes Lotus Elise

Daily del.icio.us for December 17th

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Vinny

Stax Networks Launches: Google App Engine For Java – Stax is built on top of Amazon EC2 and allows developers to create, text and deploy Java applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure.
Database Normalisation :: BlackWasp Software Development – The sixteenth part of the SQL Server Programming Fundamentals tutorial discusses the concept of database normalisation. Normalisation is a database design technique that minimises duplication of information, reducing the risk of introducing data errors.
10 Steps to Learn a New Coding Language Fast – NETTUTS – Learning a new language can seem like a daunting task. However, as it is with all types of learning, there are certain techniques and practices that will help you learn the language faster and more efficiently. Here are 10 of the best practices that aspiring programmers can use to quickly start programming in a new language
Kill Your Database – Rather, save your database with Terracotta. Relational database are valuable for many things, but serving as the cost-effective scalability backbone of high-load web applications isn't one of them. Is your database suffering under the weight of your application?
YouTube – Top Gear Tesla review – Top Gear reviews Tesla, smokes Lotus Elise

Merry Marquette Christmas

Posted on December 18, 2008 by Vinny

The faculty, staff and students of Marquette University wish you and your loved ones a peaceful and blessed Christmas.

Marquette Christmas

Daily del.icio.us for December 11th through December 16th

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Vinny

Google: A little more like Microsoft every day | The Open Road – CNET News – I liked to think that third parties like Mozilla helped to ensure that Google would "not be evil." Time will tell if Google has the will power to keep itself honest.
Adobe AIR powered cyn.in desktop fuses instant messengers and web based collaboration – AIR – The cyn.in desktop client is a beautiful new Adobe AIR application designed to improve collaboration between teams. The application, created by Cynapse, includes a variety of powerful features designed to make communication and collaboration easy between teams
InfoQ: Beyond Consolidation: Building a Better Development Environment with VMware – In this article Mak King describes advanced application of virtualization that goes far beyond server consolidation. Learn about the techniques and benefits behind putting your developers on virtual servers, all proving that virtualization is far from limited to commonplace consolidation. Additionally, and completely without a desire to be bandwagoners, the approach described in Mak's article is clearly "green computing."
Google’s Mayer: Staying Innovative In a Downturn – BusinessWeek – The mantra that's been flooding the Googleplex this year? 'Scarcity brings clarity,' explains Marissa Mayer, Google Vice-President
How to choose a netbook | Small is beautiful | The Economist – The upshot is that netbooks are great as cheap, simple and small computers for performing basic tasks—especially if the pre-installed software does what you want it to.
Code Snippets – Snipplr Social Snippet Repository – Snipplr is a public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day. Best of all, it lets you share your code snippets with other coders and designers. Did we mention it works with TextMate, too? It's code 2.0.
Microsoft Web Platform – The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework.
Reading between the lines of Red Hat’s Google Web Toolkit play | The Open Road – CNET News – In other words, Red Hat's work with GWT is a chance for Red Hat to cater to developers already-expressed desires for a Red Hat RIA story, but within the context of the enterprise
joose-js – Google Code – Joose is a self-hosting meta object system for JavaScript with support for classes, inheritance, mixins, traits, method modifiers and more. Joose makes object-oriented programming with JavaScript easy, declarative and very productive. The Joose meta-object system is multi-paradigm.
Key data center architect leaves Microsoft, headed for Amazon – TechFlash: Seattle’s Technology News Source – James Hamilton, one of the big brains behind Microsoft's data center strategy, has left the company, according to a note on his Microsoft home page. And we just confirmed that he's headed across town to Amazon.com, one of Microsoft's key rivals in the market for Web services and cloud computing.
Top Java Developers Offer Advice to Students – Since 1999, java.sun.com writers have interviewed Java developers from diverse backgrounds and solicited their advice for students. In this article, 11 top Java developers share the fruits of long experience
JetBrains Delivers Meta Programming System Beta – JetBrains, maker of the popular IntelliJ IDEA Java tool set, announces the beta version of its Meta Programming System for application development. JetBrains' MPS encourages the use of DSLs and code generation. MPS also implements the Language-Oriented Programming paradigm for building enterprise applications

Daily del.icio.us for December 6th through December 9th

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Vinny

Microsoft takes dead aim at WordPress… | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise | – This new release from Microsoft sounds promising. Based on the description and feature list, it’s a direct competitor for WordPress:
YUI Doc: A New Tool for Generating JavaScript API Documentation » Yahoo! User Interface Blog – We’re pleased today to release the first public version of YUI Doc, a python-based documentation tool that generates API documentation for JavaScript code. YUI Doc was developed by Adam Moore, one of the principal engineers on the YUI project since its inception, to support YUI’s API-level documentation.
Adobe Collaborates with SpringSource for Enhanced Flex / Spring Integration : Christophe Coenraets – Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that it is working with SpringSource to simplify the development and deployment of rich enterprise Java(TM) applications through a collaboration that will provide integration between the Adobe(R) Flash(R) and SpringSource platforms
Appcelerator Titanium puts more Web apps on your desktop | Webware – CNET – The line between Web and desktop apps is getting fuzzier Tuesday, with the preview release of Appcelerator Titanium, platform designed to turn Web app developers into desktop and mobile phone developers.
Appcelerator, which makes an open source Web app framework, is targeting Titanium at Web developers who want to bite off a chunk of the desktop market while still using their HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills
Developing iPhone Applications using Java | Java™ Software Development Videos and Tutorials Directory – In this presentation we introduce an Open Source Java-to-Objective-C cross-compiler as well as a Java-based implementation of the Cocoa library. With the help of these tools, iPhone applications can be written in pure Java.
Haus News – XStream 1.3.1 released – The XStream development team would like to announce the new XStream maintenance version 1.3.1. XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.
The release contains some bug fixes, some minor enhancements and support of new JDKs
Let’s talk about Python 3.0 – Python 3.0 is and was developed to be a practical language. The changes which break compatibility with Python 2.x are in many ways small and may seem insignificant at first glance, but small changes have big effects, and a cleaned-up, less-soul-tarnishing Python is, in my opinion, a goal which justifies a few breaks between major versions.
Marketplace Whiteboard – explaining the financial crisis » Lab49 Blog – Series of videos that explain various financial concepts (such as asset-backed securities, margin calls, CDO’s, etc) as well as aspects of the financial crisis (such as “fallout”, CDS problems, and the credit crisis) in simple terms
Using the SQLite Database Access API in AIR… Part 3: Annotation-Based ORM Framework : Christophe Coenraets – In this third version, we use a mini Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework that leverages the Flex support for class annotations to entirely eliminate manually-written SQL statements
Devices for Developers – Android – The Android Dev Phone 1 is a SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked device that is designed for advanced developers. The device ships with a system image that is fully compatible with Android 1.0, so you can rely on it when developing your applications. You can use any SIM in the device and can flash custom Android builds that will work with the unlocked bootloader

Windows Vista SP2 Beta – Initial impressions

Posted on December 7, 2008 by Vinny

So I just installed SP2 of Windows Vista which is out in beta on my computer yesterday – so it’s been about 24 hours and my computer is stable and all of the applications I’ve used so far have worked just fine. The only bizarre issue that I’ve noticed so far is the uninstall of .NET framework 3.5 SP1. I can’t really explain it and I’m not even sure if this was the SP2 beta install but Paint.NET stopped working with an error message that it needed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Paint.NET was working before the SP2 beta install and so I just reinstalled .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and everything worked. Not sure what happened there and as I said, could be completely unrelated but that’s the only strange thing that’s happened so far.

There is a list of new features and fixes at Microsoft and Mary-Jo’s blog. So far, the beta feels fairly solid and I hope this is a watershed release like Windows XP SP2 was for XP but I guess time will tell or Windows7 will be out and we won’t care about Vista. (Or we’ll be running Ubuntu or OS X and we won’t care about Windows 🙂 – Hope spring eternal!)

Here are some screen shots of Windows update on my machine doing the update for SP2.

If you want to try the beta yourself, Microsoft has a page on how to enable the download via Windows Update.

Daily del.icio.us for December 2nd through December 6th

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Vinny

Enterprise Java Community: Pondering About JSR-135, the New Servlet 3.0 Specification – Now there is a new specification coming, Servlet 3.0 (JSR-315). The Early Draft of this specification features some new really neat features, and in my opinion some mistakes. In this article I'm going to show the new additions to the EOD (ease of development), comment on them, and try to improve them
InfoQ: Manager’s Introduction to Test-Driven Development – Dave Nicolette and Karl Scotland try to introduce non-technical managers to one of the most popular Agile development techniques: Test-Driven Development (TDD). The presentation intends to be a primer for managers who want to understand the value of TDD, and of Agile in general, in software development.
Jean-Francois Arcand’s Blog: Writing a Twitter like application using Grizzly Comet part 1: The Servlet – Jean-Francois Arcand illustrates how to use the Grizzly Comet implementation and create a similar twitter like application in 150 lines of Java code.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wireless turns iPod into a phone – A freeware application for the iPod Touch can turn the music player into a virtual mobile phone. Truphone uses wi-fi technology in an iPod Touch to allow users to make calls to other iPod Touch owners and Google Talk's messaging service users
Did Coldplay rip off Joe Satriani? | PopWatch Blog | EW.com – Coldplay have been called many things, but Joe Satriani wannabes? That's a new one, and it's apparently what the chrome-domed axe man himself is claiming in a new lawsuit. Satriani accuses Coldplay of ganking the riff from his 2004 instrumental "If I Could Fly" for their hit single "Viva La Vida.
Project Deploy* | Choose, Bookmark, Deploy – Deploy* is a free, open source, web application which allows user to quickly deploy a web project framework with valid XHTML and CSS in only a matter of seconds.
InfoQ: IronRuby moves to Github – Microsoft recently announced they had moved their IronRuby project to GitHub. The announcement, like many projects these days, shows the project moving from its current Subversion repository to a Git repository located on Github
Around the World in 116 Beers | Sloshspot Blog – Beer is by far the most popular beverage in the universe. Well, at least in the world. Have you ever wondered what countries produced beer, and what the most popular domestically produced beers were in these countries?
JDbMonitor – Monitor JDBC Performance For Slow SQL Queries – JDbMonitor is a tool to monitor & analyse database performance for any Java application.
Easily determine your application's database performance and analyse problems down to specific SQL statement.
Flex Developer’s Toolbox : Free Components, Themes and Tutorials | Noupe – In today’s post we provide you with some essential Flex resources – Flex components, Flex Skins & Themes, Online Flex Apps, Flex Frameworks and Flex Tutorials.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Monthly Archives: December 2008