Monthly Archives: August 2013

Links for August 19th through August 29th

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Vinny

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• Why Microsoft .Net failed – Microsoft tried, but it couldn't win the hearts and minds of developers who weren't already indoctrinated — and it alienated others along the way
• CSS Sprites vs. Data URIs: Which is Faster on Mobile? | Mobify – Based on this research, I recommend limiting the use of data URIs to very small resources and to not use too many of them in your CSS or inline HTML. 15-20kB for max data URI size, and no more than 3 – 5 instances seems like a good rule of thumb for mobile!
• Parallels Access – use your favorite Mac or Windows applications on your iPad as if they were native iPad apps – Parallels Access lets you use your favorite Mac or Windows applications on your iPad as if they were native iPad apps, easy to use and automatically sized to take up the full display of your iPad.
• Plain Text Doesn’t Exist… Unicode and encodings demystified | 10K-LOC – Always, I mean always, indicate the encoding of your document either by using Content-Type or meta charset tag. By doing this, your are preventing web browsers from guessing the encoding and telling exactly which encoding they should use to render the page.
• High Scalability – High Scalability – Reddit: Lessons Learned from Mistakes Made Scaling to 1 Billion Pageviews a Month – Jeremy Edberg, the first paid employee at reddit, teaches us a lot about how to create a successful social site in a really good talk he gave at the RAMP conference. Watch it here at Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion–Pitfalls and Lessons.
• Enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of application development | McKinsey & Company – Software has become critical for most large enterprises. They should adopt a reliable output metric that is integrated with the process for gathering application requirements.
• Extensionizr – Start a chrome extension in 15 seconds! – Extensionizr is a simple way to jump start your chrome extension development. Just select the type of extension you want, choose permissions and you're off.
• How To Create Your Own Chrome Extensions – This is going to be a quick crash course to give you a general idea of what all you can easily do with Chrome extensions.
• Celluloid: Actor-based Concurrent Objects for Ruby – Celluloid is a concurrent object oriented programming framework for Ruby which lets you build multithreaded programs out of concurrent objects just as easily as you build sequential programs out of regular objects
• Java 7 Sockets Direct Protocol – Write Once, Run Everywhere …. and Run (Some Places) Blazingly – This article will survey the new Java Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) technology, a very exciting breakthrough that was recently introduced in the Java 7 SDK. SDP empowers the Ultra High Performance Computing (UHPC) community to use Java’s ubiquitously common features and merits for a very uncommon use case: native access to the InfiniBand Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capability
• How An Arcane Coding Method From 1970s Banking Software Could Save The Sanity Of Web Developers Everywhere – Forty years ago, a Canadian bank pioneered a brand new computer system that allowed non-programmers to help write code. The paradigm was so disruptive that it was suppressed by computer scientists for decades. But as web apps get increasingly complex, and w
• Gartner: AWS Now Five Times The Size Of Other Cloud Vendors Combined – Amazon spends less than its rivals on cloud infrastructure yet seriously dominates them in adoption. Why?
• Steroids.js Bridges The Performance Gap Between PhoneGap And Native Apps – Steroids then lets developers easily add these to PhoneGap HTML5 apps to allow them to build “HTML5 hybrid apps with animation and other performance results that are indistinguishable from those of native apps.”
• iOS App Store Approval Tips and Tricks – In this post I hope to provide some guidance on what to avoid when developing and publishing any iOS app (be it native or hybrid).
• The Critical Path #93: The Innovator’s Curse – Markets are expected to do one thing and one thing only: determine price. What happens when they fail? The tragedy and comedy of corporate raiders.
• A Bright Future Full of Promise: Asynchronous Pipelines in Scala and Java – A Bright Future Full of Promise: Asynchronous Pipelines in Scala and Java

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Links for August 11th through August 16th

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Vinny

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• An inside (and detailed) look at re-architecting Twitter. Plus, a new Tweets-per-second peak: 143,199 Tweets. – An inside (and detailed) look at re-architecting Twitter. Plus, a new Tweets-per-second peak: 143,199 Tweets.
• RethinkDB – An open-source distributed database with intuitive query language, automatically parallelized queries – RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.
• PentesterLab.com – Learn Web Penetration Testing: The Right Way – PentesterLab is an easy and great way to learn penetration testing.
  PentesterLab provides vulnerable systems that can be used to test and understand vulnerabilities
• How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut – Forbes – Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called “forward-deployed engineers” a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer’s data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.
• Encryption is less secure than we thought – For 65 years, most information-theoretic analyses of cryptographic systems have made a mathematical assumption that turns out to be wrong.
• Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software. Here’s how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware. – While most companies fight copycats, Red Hat embraces its top clone, CentOS. Here's how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware.
• I’ve Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here’s Why It’s Actually Amazing – For years, I kept hearing how awesome Evernote was: how it could store everything you possibly needed, make it available everywhere, and how scores of people couldn't live without it. I tried it multiple times, and never saw the appeal until now. Here's what I was missing.
• TinyPNG – Compress PNG images while preserving transparency – Advanced lossy compression for PNG images that preserves full alpha transparency.
• Why JavaScript Will Become The Dominant Programming Language Of The Enterprise – ReadWrite – A simple learning curve and flexible skill set have JavaScript on the verge of taking over the enterprise.

Links for August 3rd through August 10th

Posted on August 10, 2013 by Vinny

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• Google, Microsoft play catch up to Amazon, add load balancing, auto-scaling to their clouds – JavaWorld – Google rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service today, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand.
• Firefox, Chrome strengthen in-browser debugging – JavaWorld – Google has been paying attention to Web developers as well, updating its Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools), a set of Web authoring and debugging tools built into the Google Chrome browser. Perhaps the most notable update is the introduction of Workspaces, a built-in source code editor that could eliminate the small but still frequent process of flipping between an external code editor and a browser to check a newly edited Web page
• Holacracy | Social Technology for Purposeful Organization – The Holacracy governance process is not governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – it is governance of the organization, through the people, for the purpose.  It liberates an organization to find and express its deepest creative capaci
• The management framework that propelled LinkedIn to a $20 billion company – Weiner believes getting your “boat” to the best possible destination requires a clearly-articulated vision and mission. These statements ultimately inform and invigorate a company’s strategy and objectives. Perhaps most importantly, leaders need to talk the talk and walk the walk on their professed values to keep the entire company unified and moving in the right direction.
• Twitter’s Killer New Two-Factor Solution Kicks SMS to the Curb – When you enroll, your phone generates an asymmetric 2048-bit RSA keypair, which stores the private key locally on the device and sends the public key, which Twitter stores as part of your user object in our backend store, to the server.
• SQLFiddle – A tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions. – SQLFiddle – A tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions.
• LightAdmin – Pluggable CRUD Administration Java Framework. Best alternative to scaffolding. – Pluggable data management solution for Java web applications developed in a “Rapid” manner! The primary goal of the project is to speed up application development by bringing pluggable fully operational data management back-end for JPA based applications and to relieve your codebase for more important stuff.
• Metrics, a Java library gives you unparalleled insight into what your code does in production – Metrics is a Java library which gives you unparalleled insight into what your code does in production. Metrics provides a powerful toolkit of ways to measure the behavior of critical components in your production environment
• ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story – previously wrote about ORMs vs SQL and received a lot of reaction to it–most of it positive. Some of it was predictable ("you don't know what you're talking about (because you don't agree with me)") but one reaction from a couple of people surprised me: they took my post to mean that I was against persistence abstractions. I will now expand on those points with a specific example: the Java Persistence API ("JPA").
• Web Tracing Framework – Rich tools for instrumenting, analyzing, and visualizing web apps. – Web Tracing Framework – Rich tools for instrumenting, analyzing, and visualizing web apps. Make your app jank-free at 60fps!
• Why does Angular.js rock? – Angular Tips – Angular.js is a MV* (Model – View – Whatever) Javascript framework which is maintained by Google which excels in the creation of single-page-applications or even for adding some “magic” to our classic web applications.

Links for July 28th through August 1st

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Vinny

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• The Inside Story of the Moto X: The Reason Google Bought Motorola – The $12 billion experiment begins today with the Moto X, available later this month for the standard price of $200 with a two-year carrier contract. Woodside would prefer that people not call it the Google Phone: “People don’t associate Google with phones,” he says. “Motorola’s the brand that resonates to consumers.”
• Apportable – Objective-C for Android – Apportable lets you cross-compile your iOS app and 
  reuse the same code across platform
• Pure – A set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project. – Pure builds on Normalize.css and provides layout and styling for native HTML elements, plus the most common UI components. It's what you need, without the cruft.
• How to turn everyone in your newsroom into a graphics editor » Nieman Journalism Lab – A newly open-sourced tool from Quartz makes it easy for newsrooms to build quick, attractive charts from datasets on deadline.
• The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2013 – Java still top but chasing pack closing – Java advocates are likely to look at the above list and declare victory, but Java is technically tied with JavaScript rather than ahead of it. Still, this is undoubtedly validation for defenders of a language frequently dismissed as dead or dying.
• Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask) – It remains number one on the OWASP Top 10 for a very good reason – it’s common, it’s very easy to exploit and the impact of doing so is severe. One little injection risk in one little feature is often all it takes to disclose every piece of data in the who
• A Little Rebellion is a Good Thing: The Rise of Shadow IT | Innovation Insights | Wired.com – This trend of developer-focused open source projects and services supplanting traditional vendors has exploded in the last ten years. More and more tools are accessible via open source, as freemium services or free download. As a result, developers can find, test and deploy the tools they want.
• Key Behavioral Traps and How to Avoid Them – Morningstar readers weigh in on which behavioral mistakes have hobbled their results and how they've fought back.
• The Hardware Revolution is Upon Us and Why it Matters | True Ventures – This is a tectonic shift that is going to drive the next wave of industrialization — one that is more nimble, adaptable and rapidly evolving. One that is as much based in software as it is in assembly lines.  The past 150 years were about the economics of
• Knockout – Simplify dynamic JavaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern – Simplify dynamic JavaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern
• Video of Using KnockoutJS in an HTML5 Application – In this video tutorial series, we look at how to build a client-side HTML5 application with jQuery and KnockoutJS. We'll look at binding DOM elements to a data model, defining event handlers, and pulling data from JSON and REST services.
• How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business: Scientific American – Schools and universities are embracing technology that tailors content to students' abilities and takes teachers out of the lecturing business. But is it an improvement?
• Bootstrap 3 – Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile-first front-end framework for faster and easier web development. – Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile-first front-end framework for faster and easier web development.
• Simple API with Nginx and PostgreSQL – Sometimes it’s overkill to use a web framework if you only need to develop a very simple REST API. It turns out that Nginx can be used to develop a full fledged REST API and PostgreSQL can easily be used for persistence.
• Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web | meanpath – Love it or hate it but Twitter Bootstrap is quickly taking over the web. The team at meanpath recently pulled a random selection of 100 million websites from our source code search engine and found clear Twitter Bootstrap signatures on 981,608 of them.