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

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Vinny

JPivot – Home – JPivot is a JSP custom tag library that renders an OLAP table and let users perform typical OLAP navigations like slice and dice, drill down and roll up. It uses Mondrian as its OLAP Server. JPivot also supports XMLA datasource access.
olap4j: Open Java API for OLAP – olap4j is designed to be a common API for any OLAP server, so you can write an application on one OLAP server and easily switch it to another. And built on that API, there will be a growing collection of tools and components
Mistaeks I Hav Made: Mapping Inheritance Cleanly with XStream – This works with multiple subclasses and with SingleValueConverters. As long as you can determine the concrete type to be unmarshalled from the contents of the marshalled element, you can use this technique to elide the class attribute and get cleaner XML.
Amazon Web Services: No Open Cloud Manifesto for us | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Amazon will join Microsoft as two big cloud computing players not signing on to the Open Cloud Manifesto.
The manifesto, which has raised a ruckus following a Microsoft blog post, is set to be released Monday with IBM as the ringleader. Given the hubbub it was only natural to wonder where Amazon Web Services, one of the premier cloud computing players stood
MapReduce programming with Apache Hadoop – JavaWorld – Google and its MapReduce framework may rule the roost when it comes to massive-scale data processing, but there's still plenty of that goodness to go around. This article gets you started with Hadoop, the open source MapReduce implementation for processing large data sets
RSS to PDF Newspaper – This is a free software project to let people create printable PDFs from content found on the web. It is a free alternative to HP's Tabbloid service. It is being developed as part of the Five Filters project to promote alternative, non-corporate media.
Oracle: If RHEL were free, we wouldn’t compete | The Open Road – CNET News – Now we find out that it's not a question of support at all, but rather that Oracle simply wants Linux to be free. Why? Because that makes its overpriced software seem cheaper.
At least Oracle is being honest now. Coekaerts' argument is cheeky, but it makes strategic sense for Oracle. It just makes no financial sense for Red Hat.
Ubuntu promises DIY Amazon cloud • The Register – The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu, version 9.04, due in April, will let you take existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and run them on your own Ubuntu servers.
Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking & Learning – Andy Hunt, co-author of several titles in the Pragmatic Programmers series, has turned his pragmatic prism on our brains. His new book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactoring Your Wetware, is a delight to read, provided you understand the vocabulary of agile development. It could be a perfect gift for your favorite geek this holiday season.
jaxb: A JAXB Tutorial – Wolfgang Laun has created an outstanding tutorial. Wolfgang’s tutorial is possibly the most comprehensive (and most current) information on every aspect of JAXB. I highly recommend it both as a getting started guide and a reference.

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

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Vinny

NPR’s broadcast audience surges. Can it do the same online? | The Industry Standard – "At a time when newspapers, magazines and TV news continue to lose readers and viewers," writes Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, "the audience for NPR's daily news programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, reached a record last year
Van Couvering Is Not a Verb: Sun gets behind clouds, may be Eclipsed – thoughts from an ex-employee – Sun has had this amazing ability to thrash for a very long time on large and ultimately doomed projects (remember N1?), and they just haven't been able to turn the corner and really reinvent themselves
Google’s former CIO barely lasts a year at EMI | Digital Media – CNET News – Douglas Merrill, Google's former chief information officer who jumped to EMI Music not quite a year ago, has resigned as chief of the label's digital unit.
HowTo: EC2 for Poets – The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.
Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm » Blog Archive Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now « – Zuckerberg is a real leader because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s going to do what he thinks is best for his business. I wish Silicon Valley had more like him
Spring BlazeDS Integration Home – Spring BlazeDS Integration is a new addition to the Spring portfolio, and a component of the complete Spring Web stack. This project's purpose is to make it easier to build Spring-powered Rich Internet Applications using Adobe Flex as the front-end client.
Command-line Fu < The best UNIX commands on the web – Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.
Spring Finance Sample Application | StSMedia – Spring Finance is designed to be a simple finance tracker application for the Simpsons family. As some of you might know the Simpsons frequently have financial trouble of all sorts. They borrow money from their neighbour, the Ned Flanders, the local power plant owner, Mr Burns, and others.
The Atlassian Blog – Comparing SharePoint to Confluence? – Last week Martin Seibert at Seibert Media wrote an interesting blog post where he evaluated SharePoint as an enterprise wiki.
He posed the question, is SharePoint really a good alternative to a fully developed company wiki? He draws his conclusion early and then presents a list of compelling arguments as to why SharePoint is not a good wiki alternative
The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone – The global economic crisis isn't about money – it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

Daily del.icio.us for March 14th through March 19th

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Vinny

Writing good unit tests, Part 1: Follow your GUTs – JavaWorld – Just like production code, test code needs to be rigorously examined to ensure it's clean and bug free. In this first half of a two-part article, Klaus Berg makes the case for why good unit tests are as important as high-quality production code, then provides a comprehensive listing of agile tools and best practices used to improve the internal quality of test code
Flux: Java Job Scheduler. File Transfer. Workflow. – Flux – Flux is an embeddable, pure Java solution that increases productivity by meeting the challenges of Job Scheduling, File Transfer, and Workflow
Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? | High Scalability – We are on the edge of two potent technological changes: Clouds and Memory Based Architectures. This evolution will rip open a chasm where new players can enter and prosper. Google is the master of disk. You can't beat them at a game they perfected.
Hadoop, Analytical Software, Finds Uses Beyond Search – NYTimes.com – MapReduce represented a couple of breakthroughs. The technology has allowed Google’s search software to run faster on cheaper, less-reliable computers, which means lower capital costs. In addition, it makes manipulating the data Google collects so much easier that more engineers can hunt for secrets about how people use the company’s technology instead of worrying about keeping computers up and running.
Update: Cisco enters server market with Unified Computing System | InfoWorld | News | 2009-03-16 | By Marc Ferranti, Elizabeth Montalbano and Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service – Cisco's new data-center architecture comprises compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single rackable system designed to cut IT infrastructure costs and complexity, stretch existing IT investments and allow enterprise customers to build an agile data center that they can easily extend for future growth, according to the company.
America cheers as satirist, Jon Stewart, delivers knockout blow to TV finance gurus | World news | The Observer – For the past 10 days the US has been gripped. Even President Obama tuned in as the country's foremost TV comic, Jon Stewart, unleashed an extraordinary broadside against TV's top financial commentators for their part in the unfolding economic crisis.
Useful scripts to plot charts in web pages – In this post I want to suggest you a list of some interesting scripts you can use to plot easily charts (line, area, pie, bar…) in your web pages using jQuery, MooTools, Prototype and other JS frameworks
Better batteries are on their way | Batteries now included | The Economist – The result is a material that, when tested in experimental batteries, was able to charge and discharge in a few seconds. In the future, therefore, that weekend in the south of France need not be interrupted by running out of juice
The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java – In a recent discussion, there were assertions that C++ was a poorly-designed language. I was on the C++ Standards Committee for 8 years, and saw the decisions take place. I think it's helpful to understand the language choices for both C++ and Java in order to see the bigger perspective.
AWS "sucks the air out of the room." Cuts EC2 costs by 50% [Article] « elc technologies – Amazon's goal is to enter a market and "suck the air out of the room." Yes–that room is now your server room; the market is your internal IT infrastructure cost center. EC2 had an effective price cut today of 50% of its server usage fees

Dell Adamo looks beautiful

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Vinny

Looks like DELL is getting ready to launch a beautiful 13-inch laptop called Adamo. Adamo is a latin word that means “to fall in love with” or “find pleasure in” and I can certainly see that after seeing the pictures that were leaked at SXSW.

Picture by Brian Solis.

More pictures on Flickr.

Daily del.icio.us for March 11th through March 14th

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Vinny

State of the Art – Unify the Phone Numbers and All Else Follows – NYTimes.com – If Google search revolutionized the Web, and Gmail revolutionized free e-mail, then one thing’s for sure: Google Voice, unveiled Thursday, will revolutionize telephones.
Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email « I’m Not Actually a Geek – This use case is what promises to dramatically increase communications among employees. As we’re seeing with Twitter’s explosive growth, it takes time for people to grok why they should microblog. But once they “get it”, it takes off.
A special report on entrepreneurship: Time for entrepreneurship | An idea whose time has come | The Economist – The triumph of entrepreneurship is driven by profound technological change. A trio of inventions—the personal computer, the mobile phone and the internet—is democratising entrepreneurship at a cracking pace. Today even cash-strapped innovators can reach markets that were once the prerogative of giant organisations.
Amazon, Microsoft improve their cloud computing game | InfoWorld | News | 2009-03-13 | By Bernard Golden, CIO.com – Amazon has introduced EC2 Reserved Instances, which allow you to obtain a reduced hourly fee for an upfront payment that varies according to which level of EC2 server you use.
Cisco’s expected server splash raises data center ruckus | Business Tech – CNET News – Cisco Systems on Monday is widely expected to launch network servers in a move that will put it in the virtualization business and potentially at odds with players like Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
ACM Queue: A Conversation with Alan Kay | Lambda the Ultimate – I fear — as far as I can tell — that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
Your Guide to Most Useful Bookmarklets – Now that you know the benefits of using a bookmarklet and how easy it is to add one to your own browser bookmarks, let me share some of my favorite bookmarklets that are both useful and powerful:
Google Voice – Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.
InfoQ: Debate: Prototype vs. jQuery – With Ajax dominating the Web development scene on the client-side, the question “which JavaScript/Ajax framework is the best” has become a common one. Glenn Vanderburg’s article which compares Prototype to jQuery caused diverse responses from industry experts Douglas Crockford and Dion Almaer.
The Post Redirect Get Pattern – Andy Pemberton – There’s a long-standing, accepted pattern for handling form submissions in web applications; it’s usually called the post redirect get pattern. The goal of the pattern is to prevent the payload of a HTTP POST request from being stored in the browser history.

Daily del.icio.us for March 7th through March 11th

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Vinny

Coding Horror: Why Can’t Error Messages Be Fun? – Chrome is a joy to use, and in my opinion at least, it's the first true advance in web browser technology since the heady days of Internet Explorer 4.0. Chrome is filled with so many thoughtful details, so many reimaginings of web browser functionality as a true application platform, it's hard to even list them all.
Write your own Twitter application – JavaWorld – In this article you'll learn how to build your own Twitter service: an application that accesses tweets via the Twitter API and archives them in the form of a PDF file
Ooma rebounds after cutting price for service – After it stumbled out of the gate in July 2007, it's hard to imagine that Palo Alto's Ooma would look forward to an economic downturn. But the startup, which offers free home phone service with the purchase of an Ooma box, has found a new lease on life after cutting its price and expanding its distribution
JumpBox | Instant Infrastructure | JumpBox Inc. – We simplify server software deployment with pre-built, pre-configured software applications packaged for deployment on virtual computing platforms.
Top 50 New Software Development Books | Agile Zone – In this post I proudly present the Top 50 New Software Development Books, where new means "less than two years old". This list was created using a weighed mix of the following criteria:
X2O Blog // We Are Mammoth, Inc. – X2O is a web-based data modeling platform for Adobe® Flex® and Flash® apps.
MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms, Lectures 20 and 21: Parallel Algorithms – good coders code, great reuse – This is the thirteenth post in an article series about MIT’s lecture course “Introduction to Algorithms.” In this post I will review lectures twenty and twenty-one on parallel algorithms. These lectures cover the basics of multithreaded programming and multithreaded algorithms.
Why HTML – The short and sweet reason is simply this: XHTML offers no compelling advantage — to me — over HTML, but even if it did it would also offer increased complexity and uncertainty that make it unappealing to me.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The coming of the megacomputer – In a talk yesterday, reports the Financial Times' Richard Waters, the head of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid, said that about 20 percent of all the server computers being sold in the world "are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies," including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon
Coding Horror: HTML Validation: Does It Matter? – That said, validation does have its charms. There were a few things that the validation process exposed in our HTML markup that were clearly wrong — an orphaned tag here, and a few inconsistencies in the way we applied tags there. Mark Pilgrim makes the case for validation:

Daily del.icio.us for February 27th through March 5th

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Vinny

The White House – Press Office – President Obama Names Vivek Kundra Chief Information Officer – Today, President Barack Obama named Vivek Kundra the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House.
Java concurrency with thread gates – JavaWorld – The thread gate pattern is an effective tool for controlling thread concurrency, but many developers are unfamiliar with it. Just as a traffic light can regulate the behavior of automobiles at an intersection, thread gates can block or allow thread progress based on given factors
SitePoint » 10 Fixes That Solve IE6 Problems – We know IE is likely to be around for some time, but can we still support the browser and avoid hacks and conditional CSS? Here are 10 fixes to solve the majority of IE6 problems with valid HTML and CSS code…
Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog: Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4) – I thought I#039;d take the opportunity to deliver this overview and the upcoming focused discussions on what makes Sun tick in a video format.
Amazon Extends Book Sales Beyond Its Kindle to iPhone – WSJ.com – Amazon.com Inc. plans to release a program Wednesday for reading electronic books on Apple Inc.#039;s iPhone, extending Amazon#039;s sales of digital books to devices beyond its Kindle e-book reader.
Mark to market | Marketplace Whiteboard | Marketplace from American Public Media – There#039;s a debate in financial circles over whether banks are unfairly penalized by the requirement that they quot;mark to marketquot; their holdings. Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains what that term means.
Apache FtpServer – Index – The Apache FtpServer is a 100% pure Java FTP server. It#039;s designed to be a complete and portable FTP server engine solution based on currently available open protocols. FtpServer can be run standalone as a Windows service or Unix/Linux daemon, or embedded into a Java application. We also provide support for integration within Spring applications and provide our releases as OSGi bundles.
Books and Music That Make You Dumb – Digits – WSJ.com – With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.com and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.com, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence
A Brew That Prevents Parkinson’s? – RealAge Tip of the Day – A large study in Singapore showed that black tea might have the power to slash Parkinson’s disease risk by almost a third.
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data – Bret Taylor’s blog – After some deliberation, we decided to implement a quot;schema-lessquot; storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This post attempts to describe the high-level details of the system
Sun’s McNealy: Some federal officials see open source as ‘anti-capitalist’ – Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman Scott McNealy wants President Barack Obama#039;s administration do what the U.K., Denmark and other countries have done: encourage, as a matter of policy, open-source software adoption
Facebook’s "In-House Sociologist" Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior – While many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, quot;Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.quot;

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Monthly Archives: March 2009

Dell Adamo looks beautiful

Daily del.icio.us for March 11th through March 14th

Daily del.icio.us for February 27th through March 5th