Daily del.icio.us for April 27th through April 28th

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Vinny

Easier testing with EasyMock – Join Elliotte Rusty Harold for a look at some hard unit tests made easy through mock objects — more specifically, the EasyMock framework. This open source library saves you time and helps make your mock-object code concise and legible.
InfoQ: 13 Reasons for Java Programmers to Learn Flex and BlazeDS – This article outlines the 13 reasons why Java programmers should learn Flex and BlazeDS. It talks about why Flex with BlazeDS is one of the best choices for developing rich Internet applications (RIAs)—from highly interactive websites to enterprise applications with Java back ends
RubyMine Features :: Ruby on Rails IDE. Code editing, code completion, refactoring, ruby debugger. Best HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing support – JetBrains RubyMine IDE provides a comprehensive Ruby code editor aware of dynamic language specifics and delivers smart coding assistance, intelligent code refactoring and code analysis capabilities. Easy project configuration, integrated Ruby Gems manager, Rake support — it's got everything a Ruby developer needs in a development environment
Google Launches Public Data Search & Charts During Wolfram Alpha Demo – Google promises to add public data for answers on prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires amongst others. Currently this data is coming from produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, but Google does hope to bring in more public data sources.
10 Essential Firefox Plugins for the Infosec Professional | dmiessler.com – Shown below are the information security related plugins I recommend any infosec professional (or enthusiast) install upon spinning up a new Firefox instance.
NPR: Power Hungry: Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid – The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation's electrical systems.
Op-Ed Columnist – To Tweet or Not to Tweet – NYTimes.com – I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.) I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.
The White House – Press Office – President Obama Announces Members of Science and Technology Advisory Council – PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.
Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy? – Companies are realizing that people are talking about them whether they like it or not. As a result, they’re deciding whether they should consider having a social media presence, and hence, a policy. A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.
Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-Book Application for the iPhone – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Seeking to strengthen its presence on the iPhone and iPod Touch, Amazon has acquired Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, a popular free e-book application for the iPhone, according to Lexcycle’s blog.
Raible Designs | Ajax Framework Analysis Results – Way back in January, I wrote about how my colleagues and I were evaluating Ajax frameworks to build a SOFEA-style architecture. To make our choice, we used the following process:

Daily del.icio.us for April 21st through April 22nd

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Vinny

Terracotta Bolsters Java In-Memory Caching Platform — Application Development Trends – Terracotta 3.0 improves throughput of Java-based applications three-fold while reducing database loads by 60 percent compared to the previous version. Terracotta 3.0 also offers new APIs for cloud and grid-based applications, and management and developer interfaces.
PBS Brings Bugs, Presidents and Soufflés to the Web – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – public TV stations are taking more risks, and on Wednesday they introduced a fancy new video portal at PBS.org/video. It replaces a hodgepodge of sites, with different features, run by the producers of each of the network’s programs and by its member stations.
Bluetooth 3.0 + HS gets official, adds speed with 802.11 – The new standard obviously catapults Bluetooth into a new dimension; rather than being good for nothing more than sending images from one phone to another or syncing a fitness module to a DAP, v3.0 is nimble enough to handle camcorder-to-HDTV, PC-to-PMP and UMPC-to-printer transfers. In fact, the inclusion of the 802.11 Protocol Adaptation Layer (PAL) provides increased throughput of data transfers "at the approximate rate of 24Mbps
Oracle expected to slash thousands of Sun Microsystems jobs – San Jose Mercury News – Coleman believes Oracle could shrink, sell or shut down Sun's high-end server products and storage business. "The servers are being dramatically squeezed by the next generation of servers and blades," a type of server, Coleman said. "Sun's storage business is not a leader and it's being squeezed by commodity storage" competitors.
The True Cost of Amazon’s New Kindle – BusinessWeek – A teardown analysis of the Kindle 2 by market research firm iSuppli estimates the cost to build the device at $185.49, or about 52% of its retail price of $359.
AppleInsider | End users, developers seen flocking to iPhone apps on wide scale – A mobile analytics firm has published new findings which show the iPhone taking the majority of the app market — especially when it comes to the sheer number of users. Examining 8 million users and 100 apps, researchers at Flurry hint that Apple's handset has a conspicuous market share lead among developers, the number of apps and the actual range of customers for those apps.
Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 17.5 seconds! – So how fast did Ubuntu 9.04 boot with a solid-state drive? Really freaking fast. Like, “I can’t believe it’s already done” fast. Well, here, watch for yourself:
The Community for Skyway Users, Developers, and Contributors – Featured Download – Similar to Grails, Skyway Builder allows developers to quickly scaffold a CRUD application, but unlike Grails, the generated code isn't Groovy – it's pure Java and Spring.
Evolutionary Goo » Blog Archive » Larry Ellison’s Cloud Computing Comments Revisited – The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements
byteonic.com » Comprehensive analysis on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems – Oracle announced today of acquiring Sun Microsystems for a total price of $7.4 billion. This transaction has long lasting and possibly game changing impact on the several market segments in the IT industry. My analysis is listed below under each of the market segments.

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

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Vinny

Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz Tries to Reassure His Troops in Email – Digits – WSJ – Though profit-minded Oracle is widely expected to cut Sun’s headcount sharply after the transaction, Schwartz insists in the message that Oracle realizes that Sun’s people are its greatest asset and will not harm it.
Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama – NYTimes.com – He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence. Designed to offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking, the letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand, in black ink on azure paper.
Adobe in Push to Spread Flash Video Format to TVs – NYTimes.com – Now Adobe Systems, which owns the technology and sells the tools to create and distribute it, will announce that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.
Williams and Stone: The Twitter Revolution – WSJ.com – But Twitter is much more than a novel way to share updates of one's daily life with friends. It's now evolved into a powerful new marketing and communications tool. Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster. NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail.
Apache Pivot – Home – The Pivot development team is happy to announce the release of Apache Pivot version 1.1! Pivot is an open-source platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform.
Atlassian Stimulus Package Announced – For the next 5 days, get Confluence or JIRA for $5 for 5 users. All goes to Room To Read – The Goal: To raise $25k to build 5 libraries for children in the developing world in 5 days… all whilst helping stimulate startups and small teams with kick-ass tools.
JSpring presentation: REST, the internet as a database? :: Andrej Koelewijn – I just uploaded the slides of our JSpring presentation to slideshare: “REST, het internet als database“.
Oracle Buys Sun – Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash
The Algebra of Data, and the Calculus of Mutation » Lab49 Blog – With the spreading popularity of languages like F# and Haskell, many people are encountering the concept of an algebraic data type for the first time. When that term is produced without explanation, it almost invariably becomes a source of confusion. In what sense are data types algebraic
SOASTA, Inc. – The Cloud Testing Authority – SOASTA has harnessed the immense power of Cloud Computing to become the leading provider of cloud testing, which businesses use to test the real-world performance of their web applications

Daily del.icio.us for April 16th through April 19th

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Vinny

U.S. Soldiers’ New Weapon: an iPod | Newsweek International Edition | Newsweek.com – Making sense of the reams of data from satellites, drones and ground sensors cries out for a handheld device that is both versatile and easy to use. With their intuitive interfaces, Apple devices—the iPod Touch and, to a lesser extent, the iPhone—are becoming the handhelds of choice.
10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About | MakeUseOf.com – Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:
Java 7 Will Evolve to Fine-grained Parallelism | Intel Go Parallel – DK 7 (Java Development Kit 7) will offer the fork-join framework in order to help Java developers to tackle the multicore revolution using this popular programming language.
Aneesh Chopra: America’s Chief Technology Officer – ReadWriteWeb – During his weekly address this morning, President Obama named Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. Chopra, who has effectively been doing much the same job at a state level in his role as Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, will work closely with Vivek Kundra, the recently named Federal CIO, and Jeffrey Zients, the man Obama today named the first ever Chief Performance Officer.
Skyway Team Blog » Blog Archive » Five part Spring MVC tutorial is live – In conjunction with the release of Skyway Builder 6.2, we’ve published an updated series of videos for generating a Spring MVC application using Skyway Builder. All Skyway Builder videos can be found here, and here’s a list of the Spring MVC tutorial:
AaronZ Sakai: Java Collection Performance – This is just a helpful reference when trying to decide which collections to use in Java. I use this for my personal reference but it may help others as well. The links go to the Sun Javadocs. The collections of each type are ordered based on performance (i.e. the highest performance (highest speed) ones are listed first and will be the fastest for most operations)
GridGain – Open Cloud Platform : Weblog – It is actually not quite obvious question as GAE with Java support remains relatively new technology comparing to EC2. Here's a good pros/cons checklist that you can run to see what infrastructure fits the bill for your needs.
Project Fondue | CSS Sprite Generator – This tool allows you to automate the process of generating CSS sprites. Simply give it a ZIP file containing 2 or more images (GIF, PNG or JPG) and it will generate a sprite image and the corresponding CSS rules to target and display each component image.
C# From a Java Developer’s Perspective – What follows is an overview of similarities and differences between the language features and libraries of the C# and Java programming languages based on my experience using both languages.
The Online Collaboration Tools Guide – ReadWriteWeb – The following review of major products in this space will help you choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The big company and the cloud – Don't expect to see the biggest companies closing down their data centers in the next few years. Besides, the cloud in the end will be more interesting for the new models of computing it opens up rather than for its ability to accommodate the old ones

Daily del.icio.us for April 13th through April 15th

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Vinny

Lean service architectures with Java EE 6 – JavaWorld – Although Java EE 6 is far less complex than previous platform versions, it can still be misused to create exaggerated and bloated architectures. In this article, Adam Bien delineates the essential ingredients of a lean service-oriented architecture (SOA), then explains how to implement it without sacrificing maintainability
Foreign Policy: Photo Essay: The World’s Biggest Election – What do you call 714 million eligible voters, 5,500 candidates, 1,055 political parties, and 830,000 polling stations? Call it the world's biggest election ever, to be held in India, the world's largest democracy, beginning April 16.
10 Cool Things We’ll Be Able To Do Once IE6 Is Dead – Anyway, by my estimation, the day is approximately 12 months away when we’ll be able to kiss a fond goodbye to IE6 support forever. And when that day comes, here are some useful things we’ll be able to do that we couldn’t really do on mainstream sites before
Cell Phone Makers Agree: One Thing to Charge Them All | GOOD – The world’s major cellphone manufacturers have announced plans to standardise chargers for all phones by 2012, reducing the need to bundle chargers with every phone and changing the fact you can rarely borrow a charger for your phone when you need to.
StockTwits.com – Real Investors. Real Ideas. Real Time. – StockTwits is an open, community-powered investment idea and information service. You can think of it as Bloomberg for the little guy and gal. Eavesdrop on what traders and investors are talking about RIGHT NOW or contribute to the conversation and build your reputation and following as a savvy market wizard.
Really? – The Claim – Nasal Irrigation Can Ease Allergy Symptoms – Question – NYTimes.com – In one independent study in 2008, researchers examined a group of children with severe allergies. They found that regular nasal irrigation with a mild saline solution significantly eased symptoms and helped reduce the need for steroid nasal sprays
Spring Finance > Part 5: Spring Web Flow Integration | StSMedia – In this fifth instalment of the Spring Finance Manager series I am integrating a form wizard into the application. So far, to properly use the Spring Finance Manager application, you had to know the sequence in which you needed to create resources which are exposed through Spring MVC
The Programmer Has No Clothes: Hibernate is crazy, iBATIS is awesome – Fortunately, while trying to understand Hibernate I came across iBATIS (http://ibatis.apache.org/). iBATIS definitely "has clothes". This is what an open source project should be:
Technology Review: Gmail Sidesteps the App Store – The technology behind the new Gmail could challenge Apple's control over third-party applications.
How Bo the puppy wound up with the Obamas – Washington Post- msnbc.com – It starts at a doggie love shack on the bank of a creek in far western Pennsylvania and ends at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
OpenSecrets lets users download data for free | Politics and Law – CNET News – The nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics is making 200 million data records from its archive free for anyone to download for noncommercial purposes on its site OpenSecrets.org.

Daily del.icio.us for April 7th through April 12th

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Vinny

How Google Stole Control Over Content Distribution By Stealing Links – Publishing 2.0 – There is so much misunderstanding flying around about the economics of content on the web and the role of Google in the web’s content economy that it’s making my head hurt. So let’s see if we can straighten things out.
Performance Anti-Patterns | Haytham El-Fadeel – Remember, the performance work done at the beginning of the project in terms of benchmark, algorithm, and data-structure selection will pay tremendous dividends later on—enough, perhaps, to allow you to avoid that traditional performance fire drill at the end.
The Atlassian Blog – Wiki Theater – Five Killer Use Cases for Wikis – Since the conference theme was Doing More with Less, attendees were rather receptive to the idea of getting more out of their wiki. Below is one of the presentations we delivered called Five Killer Use Cases for Wikis. We hope it gives you some ideas on how to get more out of your Confluence wiki.
YouTube – Google App Engine – Early Look at Java Language Support – This video introduces the latest features of App Engine, including an early look at Java language support. Andrew Bowers will walk through the development of a sample Java application, from creation to deployment.
Google AppEngine uses Jetty! : gregw – Hot on the heels of Google Widget Toolkit(GWT) switching to Jetty, the little server that can has received some more Google luv'n! Google's new App Engine Java service is powered by Jetty! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google's scalable infrastructure.
Sorting Algorithm Animations – These pages show 8 different sorting algorithms on 4 different initial conditions. These visualizations are intended to show how each algorithm operates, Show that there is no best sorting algorithm, Show the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm.
App Engine Java Overview – Google App Engine – Google Code – Welcome to Google App Engine for Java! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google's scalable infrastructure. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache
New BlazeDS Support Demo | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’ve created a new IntelliJ IDEA demo: BlazeDS Support. It shows you how to create, run and debug BlazeDS applications with IntelliJ IDEA, and covers a wide variety of features — project configuration, run and deployment configurations, debugger and the others.
Google improves Gmail for iPhone, Android | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews – Google has released a new Web-based version of Gmail that gives iPhone and Android phone users a more sophisticated version of the online e-mail service, including access to messages that's faster and that works even when offline.
Fly the friendly skies in Flight Control (review) | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews – At first blush, an air-traffic control simulator sounds about as much as fun as a podiatry theme park. But Flight Control is an absolute gem of a game, a perfect five-minute diversion that's perfectly priced at 99 cents

Daily del.icio.us for April 3rd through April 7th

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Vinny

Sun’s Six Biggest Mistakes – Forbes.com – In the interest of exploring Sun's value to history students, if not its shareholders, we asked analysts and industry watchers where Sun went wrong.
Protovis – A graphical toolkit for visualization – Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots.
SitePen Blog » Stocker: Advanced Dojo Made Easy – SitePen is excited to announce Stocker, which demonstrates some of the more advanced capabilities of Dojo, including the newly released DataChart, the DataGrid, Data Store, Comet, Persevere, and BorderContainer.
Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight | Digital Media – CNET News – The thwacking sounds of bats striking balls will once again fill stadiums, as Monday is opening day for Major League Baseball. This year, Microsoft will watch from the sidelines.
MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft's Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe's Flash player.
Internal cloud’s big test: Amazon vs. Cloudera | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News – The announcement on Thursday of Amazon's new Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce service, combined with the introduction of a commercial Hadoop distribution from start-up Cloudera, means that we finally have a reasonable means of watching which directions enterprise IT prefers.
I.B.M. Withdraws $7 Billion Offer for Sun Microsystems – NYTimes.com – After weeks of negotiations, I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks.
Digital Domain – Web-Based Competition for Microsoft Word – NYTimes.com – The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.
Outside the Box() » Ext Core vs. JQuery – Both Ext Core and JQuery are solid, complete base JavaScript libraries. JQuery leans towards simplicity while Ext Core offers enhanced configuration. The choice of which to use will come down to where you are now.
Ext JS – Ext Core 3.0 Beta Released – the Ext Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Ext Core 3.0 beta for download. Ext Core provides a cross-browser consistent API for performing the most common tasks in JavaScript development for web pages. Ext Core is released under a permissive MIT license – there is no cost to use Ext Core – it's free for everyone.
SaveIE6: Help us save the best browser around – These days we are inundated with bloated web browsers that overcomplicate our lives. However, there is one eminent exception: IE6. It has been around since 2001 and is still one of the most powerful and versatile browsers available.

Daily del.icio.us for March 29th through April 3rd

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Vinny

Switched – Google Chrome from IE8 – JavaScript is 56 times faster on Chrome The genius behind Google’s web browser (re-tweeted by Douglas Purdy from John Lam), V8 JavaScript Engine.
Good-bye Solaris? The fate of Sun’s top 5 technologies – Computerworld Blogs – By this time next week, IBM will have bought Sun at a cut-rate price. I'd long thought Sun was going to down for the count, so the news that IBM was moving in didn't surprise me. What happens next though? Specifically, what's going to happen to Sun's product lines? As a long-time watcher of both Sun and IBM, here are my best guesses.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce – Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News – Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference here about the increasingly prominent issue of data center efficiency.
Building Rich Enterprise Applications with Adobe AIR – Adobe AIR Team Blog – Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets recorded a very impressive demonstration (see below) of a sample application he built using Adobe AIR and Flex. The sample application, called Salesbuilder, demonstrates many powerful features including
Lean Software Is Agile, Fit-To-Purpose, And Efficient by John R. Rymer, Dave West, Mike Gilpin – Forrester Research – Lean software is emerging as the antidote to bloatware, enabling architects and developers to rapidly assemble business solutions that deliver "just in time" the software capabilities the business requires both today and tomorrow. The trend toward lean software has been building for years, but the worldwide recession is accelerating it. All application development professionals should know why and how to incorporate lean software into their software strategies for the future.
SpringSource Team Blog » Job Trends: Tomcat, Spring, Weblogic, JBoss, EJB – Forrester recently described a trend that they refer to as "lean software" in their paper entitled Lean Software Is Agile, Fit-To-Purpose, And Efficient. They state that "lean software is emerging as the antidote to bloatware" and that "the trend toward lean software has been building for years, but the worldwide recession is accelerating it".
Spring Finance > Part 3: DDD, JPA & Transaction Support | StSMedia – Before we start digging into DDD, JPA and transaction management – the main topics of this article, I should note that I am planning to release a new version of the Spring Finance Manager sample application with each article. However, this article is the exception to the rule :-). The code for this article was already realeased with the previous article on the Google code project website. This was needed to get get the sample application running to show the new Spring 3 REST features.
InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: Jaroslav Tulach’s Practical API Design – Jaroslav Tulach's latest book Practical API Design covers the topic of API design of software projects. Jaroslav discusses the importance of API design in the modern software applications, what are the different factors that make a good API, and how to go about implementing API frameworks
Attack From the Left: Paul Krugman’s Poison Pen | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com – Paul Krugman has emerged as Obama's toughest liberal critic. He's deeply skeptical of the bank bailout and pessimistic about the economy. Why the establishment worries he may be right.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Monthly Archives: April 2009

Daily del.icio.us for April 21st through April 22nd

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