Links for December 27th through December 30th

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Vinny

Top 10 Unix Command Line Utilities 2012 | conflating – As last year I’m going to list 10 unix commands out of a larger collection of little examples I jotted down. The list has no particular order, just the way they came in handy for me.
The Mobile Web Developer’s Tool Belt – Pete LePage lists a number of mobile development tools, frameworks and libraries, and introduces a testing and iteration process meant to ensure an application works on as many devices as possible.
RubyFlux: a Ruby to Java compiler – RubyFlux is a compiler that turns a Ruby codebase into a closed set of .java source files suitable for running on any JVM with no additional runtime requirement.
Explanation for how to use Guava caches, Google Core Libraries for Java – Explanation for how to use Guava caches. – Guava: Google Core Libraries for Java 1.6+ – Google Project Hosting
NoSQL LinkedIn Skills Index shows MongoDB growth – MongoDB’s growth means that it has cemented its place as the most popular NoSQL database, according to LinkedIn profile mentions. As the chart below illustrates, it now accounts for 45% of all mentions of NoSQL technologies in LinkedIn profiles
Exitwp – Migrate from WordPress to Jekyll. – Exitwp is tool primarily aimed for making migration from one or more wordpress blogs to the jekyll blog engine as easy as possible.
How to build a router based on Linux – Turn your trusty Linux box into the world's most flexible router
Developing Backbone.js Applications eBook – Developers commonly use libraries like Backbone.js to create single-page applications or SPAs. To put it simply, these apps enable the browser to react to changes in data on the client-side without the need to completely load up all your markup from the server, meaning no complete page-refreshes are necessary.
Peer relationships: How to stop being competitive with your peers and be a better leader — kate{mats} – One project doesn’t matter; being seen as a visionary, an influencer, and a strong collaborator does. When you do your job, think about yourself in terms of your role, not yourself. How would a good manager handle this? What response is most helpful for my team, not me? How can I create an environment in which those around me thrive?
The five programming books that meant most to me by David of 37signals – Reading these five to seven books will give your programming chops more vitamins and nutritional value than a couple of year’s worth of blog posts and tutorial
MongoSpy let’s you keep an eye on MongoDB activity from your browser’s console. – MongoSpy let's you keep an eye on MongoDB activity from your browser's console. It runs as a lightweight node.js socket.io-powered application which monitors the system.profile collection of your database. When developing, simply start up the server, include a javascript file in your layout, and watch it go
MongoDB Fossils – This is a directory of old posts, organized by topic. It is manually curated, so it may not always be complete or up-to-date.

Daily del.icio.us for October 5th through October 8th

Posted on October 8, 2008 by Vinny

Business Technology : Oracle Springs on Primavera – Oracle continued its buying binge Wednesday, buying Primavera Systems, which makes project-management software. In this case Oracle isn’t buying customers or its way into a new market. It’s buying technology
20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know – NETTUTS – There are a few special techniques or effects that can spice up just about any web page. These are the top 20 Ajax effects that every web developer should know.
Microsoft planning add-on to SQL Server | Latest Microsoft News – CNET News – CNET News – Microsoft, which is making the Kilimanjaro upgrade at a business intelligence conference in Redmond, Wash., also plans to show its efforts at integrating its Datallegro acquisition with Windows Server and SQL Server.
Distorted-Loop.com » iPhone doubles Pandora usage – The iPhone has been a Pandora growth story, he confirmed – iPhone accounts for almost half of Pandora’s 17 million members – and has doubled growth rate from 20 to 40+ new users each day
Official Google Blog: New Technology Roundtable series – We've just posted the first three videos in the Google Technology Roundtable Series. Each one is a discussion with senior Google researchers and technologists about one of our most significant achievements. We use a talk show format, where I lead a discussion on the technology.
Keating Economics: the Making of a Financial Crisis – "Keating Economics: the Making of a Financial Crisis" is a documentary that shows why John McCain's failed philosophy and poor judgment are a recipe for deepening the economic crisis.
YouTube – Wall Street’s Shadow Market – Steve Kroft looks at some of the arcane Wall Street financial instruments that have magnified the economic crisis.
InfoQ: Introducing Spring Batch – In this presentation from QCon London 2008, Dave Syer discusses Spring Batch. Areas covered include batch processing patterns, typical use cases for batch processing, Spring Batch concepts and capabilities, case studies of Spring Batch implementations, Spring Batch domain details and code samples, the SpringSource/Accenture partnership and the Spring Batch roadmap
Introducing nWP, the Java Counterpart of WordPress | Javalobby – We liked the functionality of WordPress, but not its PHPness. So we automatically migrated it and obtained a pure Java open-source blogging engine.
YouTube – David Letterman-Paul Newman-Tribute-Sept-29-2008 – Beautiful and moving tribute to Paul Newman by David Letterman (via John Gruber)

Daily del.icio.us for October 2nd through October 4th

Posted on October 4, 2008 by Vinny

Examining America’s presidential candidates | Examining the candidates | The Economist – A survey of academic economists by The Economist finds the majority—at times by overwhelming margins—believe Mr Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics and will appoint better economic advisers.
Java Programmer: Quick review of Collections in Java – For a quick go round, I would like to share some of the important features In Java Collections I came to know from this book
Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Of Techmeme – The masses might have Digg, but perhaps the influencers have Techmeme. Certainly plenty of large, influential bloggers I know keep an eye on what it is covering. But I recommend it for anyone, not just influencers, for the easy way it organizes what’s happening with technology stories.
Captured at Red Rocks: Photos from U2’s Legendary Concert | JamsBio Magazine – On a cold, wet June night in 1983 at Colorado’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre, U2 proved why they were the greatest band on the planet
How Google developed the Chrome Web browser – Google's Darin Fisher, a software engineer on the Chrome project, talks about how the Web browser was developed and tested. As you might suspect, agility, speed, and testing were all critical
Netflix API : Introducing the Netflix API – On behalf of the Netflix API team, I’m very excited to announce the release of the Netflix API and to launch this site for our developer community. We have been impressed with the applications developers have managed to build using our RSS feeds or by screen-scraping the web site, so we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with a supported API!
The Netflix API includes a JavaScript API, REST API and ATOM feeds. Use of the API is free and we even allow commercial use.
SVNKit 1.2.0, Pure Java Subversion Library | Javalobby – SVNKit is a pure Java Subversion library that provides APIs to access and manipulate Subversion repositories and working copies. SVNKit does not require any native binaries to be installed in order to work with Subversion.
SpringSource Announces General Availability of SpringSource dm Server | SpringSource – dm Server redefines the Java server market – OSGi-based server provides a fast, flexible and modular infrastructure across deployment environments
YUI 2.6.0 Released » Yahoo! User Interface Blog – The YUI development community is pleased to announce the release of version 2.6.0 of the YUI Library. You can download YUI 2.6.0 from SourceForge or configure your implementation using the updated YUI Configurator.
Google Blog Search – Blog Search uses a set of algorithms to try to determine the most popular stories in the blogosphere. We consider factors such as a blog's title and content, as well as its popularity throughout the rest of the blogging community

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

Posted on June 27, 2008 by Vinny

vmcNetFlix – Official Site – vmcNetflix is an add-in for Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center which allows you to manage your NetFlix subscription, stream NetFlix "WatchNow" movies directly to the Media Center player, or download the movies for playback later from a "WatchLater" ga
The LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac – The post is titled LinkedIn Is Written in 99% Java, so to complete the picture I responded to the community with a message about how LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac.
Mercedes to Cut Petroleum Out of Lineup by 2015 | EcoGeek – In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency.
Jericho HTML Parser – Jericho HTML Parser is a powerful java library allowing analysis and manipulation of parts of an HTML document, including server-side tags, while reproducing verbatim any unrecognised or invalid HTML. It also provides high-level HTML form manipulation fun
Software Sensation Inc. – jWebApp Web Application Framework, Install&Update, MemSL – Memory Structures Library – jPersist is an extremely powerful object-relational persistence API that is based on the Active-Record and Data-Mapper patterns. jPersist wraps JDBC functionality and can work with any relational database, and any type of connection resource
Java Entrepreneur: We screwed up on open source, says Sun Chief Open Source Officer – Open source developers have been much more skeptical of Sun; a lot of open source developers don't remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source start-up in 1982. All they can remember is what happened in 2001/2002 when, to be quite fra
InfoQ: Liferay Portal 5.0 Released, Sun Joins the Team – Last month at JavaOne, Liferay, Inc. announced the release of the 5.0 version of their Liferay Portal product. The Liferay press release highlights a handful of the key tools and uses in the portal product:
How Hard Could it Be?: Glory Days – Bill Gates – working for Microsoft – Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out.
Unit testing with JUnit and EasyMock – Michael Minella – I hope this gives you a more in depth view into JUnit and EasyMock. Unit testing is something that once you get used to it, makes you code better, provides you with a safety net for future refactoring and protects you from being burned by API changes
Unit Testing With TestNG and JMockit | Javalobby – TestNG is a testing framework for unit test development. JMockit is a framework for mock objects that provides mock object functionality using the java.lang.instrument package of jdk 1.5. Together, these frameworks can provide the tools to create very rob

Daily del.icio.us for June 6th through June 10th

Posted on June 10, 2008 by Vinny

Databinder – Toolkit overview – Databinder is a Java programming toolkit for data–driven Web applications. It’s based upon the Wicket Web component framework and Hibernate object-relational mapping service.
The Future of BPM at BEA/Oracle | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog – It is possible that Oracle could adopt an IBM-like strategy and keep both threads alive until things sort out, using ALBPM on top of Fusion as the straight BPMS offering, and the current ARIS+SOA Suite to support the apps business. In some ways that's the
Microsoft Silverlight to back Ruby, Python in browser | InfoWorld | News | 2008-06-06 | By Paul Krill – Microsoft plans to enable the Python and Ruby languages to be used for client-side development of RIAs that leverages Silverlight browser plug-in. The intent is to let developers continue using these languages on the client side without having to also in
Sun bolsters SOA software with data management | InfoWorld | News | 2008-06-08 | By Paul Krill – Sun Microsystems is updating its SOA and business integration software Monday, adding a data management option and leveraging enterprise service bus capabilities based around the JBI (Java Business Integration) specification.
Free Personal Finance Software, Money Management, Budget Planner and Tools, Online Financial Planning – Mint.com – Free Personal Finance Software, Money Management, Budget Planner and Tools, Online Financial Planning – Mint.com
Json-lib 2.2.2 released – JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java.
Google’s GWT continues to amaze and delight – If you have checked out GWT then I urge you to give it a whirl, you will never look at another framework in the same way again.
eXo Platform (Enterprise WebOS) » Blog Archive » eXo Platform: The Open Source alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint – With the launch of eXo WebOS flagship product as the new type of Enterprise Portals and all its incoming optional modules such as eXo Enterprise Content Managment (eXo ECM) and eXo Collaboration Suite (eXo CS), we have been able to build the only true alt
The 3G iPhone: First Impressions | Walt Mossberg | Mossblog | AllThingsD – Less than one year after it was introduced at a hefty $599 price, the 8 GB model of the iPhone will now be two-thirds cheaper, at just $199.
Atlassian Developer Blog – Story Cards – Here at Atlassian, we like our agile methodologies. We like our pair programming. And we definitely like our story cards. Some people think story cards are old school, and that all this "agile" stuff is slight-of-hand. This video proves them … right.
LinkedIn – A Professional Network built with Java Technologies and Agile Practices – Learn how Java™ and agile practices are employed in building large-scale consumer internet sites like LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network.
Blogging Roller: LinkedIn: 99% Pure Java – Nick Lothian tweeted about this JavaOne presentation on LinkedIn. What's particularly interesting to me are the diagrams that explain how the LinkedIn architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users

Daily del.icio.us for January 18th

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Vinny

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.1 RC 1 – JRuby – Codehaus – JRuby 1.1RC1 is the first release candidate of JRuby 1.1. JRuby 1.1 represents a concerted focus on speed and refinement. Ruby code can completely compile in an Ahead Of Time (AOT) or Just In Time (JIT) mode; yielding a faster Ruby
Raible Designs | FreeMarker vs. JSP 2 – I’ve been doing quite a bit of prototyping with Spring MVC and Struts 2 with both JSP and FreeMarker in the last few months.
Mastering Grails: Build your first Grails application – Grails gives you the development experience of Rails while being firmly grounded in proven Java technologies. But Grails isn’t just a simple “me too” port of Rails to the Java. Grails takes the lessons learned from Rails and mixes them with Java.
Software Secret Weapons: Lessons learned while moving from JSPWiki to WordPress – Last weekend I decided to move Software Secret Weapons web site from Java onto LAMP! It was a complete success that I want to share with you
Dave Woods – HTML, CSS, Web Design » IE6 – CSS Bugs and Fixes Explained – In this article, I?ll hopefully cover the main problems that developers experience with Internet Explorer 6 and explain the solutions for these bugs.
Firefox DataAnalytics Help center – DataAnalytics is a Firefox extension that enables importation, manipulation, analysis and graphing of data. Often websites lock their information in static tables. Have you ever wanted to sort or manipulate a product list sorted by name by price?
Anyterm – SSH via web – Have you ever wanted SSH or telnet access to your system from an internet desert – from behind a strict firewall, from an internet cafe, or even from a mobile phone? Anyterm is a combination of a web page and a web server module that provides this access
Understanding the Java Persistence API, Part 1 – Java World – In this article, you will see how elegantly data persistence can be handled in an object-oriented manner just with the help of JPA annotations.
Sun To Acquire MySQL – Anyone who follows this blog or has heard my talks will have seen me say “Data is the Intel Inside” of the next generation of internet applications, the very heart of Web 2.0
Sun buys MySQL for $1 billion to take centerstage in the web economy | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – An acquisition by Sun means that MySQL gets to continue being a pureplay open-source company and won’t need to sacrifice the ideals or the benefits of open source to suit a halfway (and half-baked) stance on open source.
Open Source Unleashed: Book Review: JasperReports for Java Developers – “JasperReports for Java Developers” proved to be a well put together title that provided sufficient support for a JasperReports newbie, like me, while also making good as a source of reference content that might be useful for non-beginners
GWT vs. FLEX – This article would compare Google GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and Adobe Flex 2 and would describe the advantages and disadvantages of each of these technologies.
The Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms, Q3 2007 by John R. Rymer – Forrester Research – Sun Microsystems revealed itself to be a Strong Performer, approaching the status of established player BEA Systems in that regard

Daily del.icio.us for January 7th

Posted on January 7, 2008 by Vinny

alphaWorks Services | IBM Web Highlights | Overview – IBM Web Highlights is a social Web 2.0 application that allows quick creation, sharing, and discussion of Web snippets and Web pages. The snippets are in the form of highlights that can be independently created and then discussed between member.
Top 3 SSIS Dataflow Mistakes – Brian Knight – There’s an old saying that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the SSIS data flow is your hammer, too many people thing treat the components in the data flow like nails and don’t follow best traditional ETL practices
[Component] CForm v1.0 « Flexed – CForm is all about creating data entry screens. This component allows developers to create standardized forms/CRUD screens in their applications. The CForm component is a Data Entry component that can be very useful
Thin – A fast and simple web server « Marc-André Cournoyer?s blog – Thin is a web server that glues together 3 of the best Ruby libraries in web history: the Mongrel parser, Event Machine: a network I/O library with extremely high scalability, performance and stability and Rack
http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=205100034 – The list of financial firms deploying Web 2.0 applications, both within the enterprise and externally, is growing. TD Ameritrade, Bear Stearns and Wells Fargo all have announced new 2.0 applications in the last few months.
Amazon?s EC2 Open Source Firefox Plugin – Developers using Amazon?s EC2 API might find this interesting: Amazon has created an open source project on SourceForge for ElasticFox, their Firefox extension that lets you create and manage EC2 instances from a GUI in the browser.
PragDave: Two New Groovy Titles – Just to prove we’re not totally Ruby-centric, we just took two books on Groovy into beta. Venkat has written Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer, a wonderful introduction to the language. And Scott Davis complements it with Gr
Bruce Eckel: Java, Evolutionary Dead End – Bruce Eckel says that Java should not change much any more, that maybe “the right thing to do is just not add the feature at all (what fun is that?). That if you can’t do it right then maybe the language should stop growing and become stable.
The Myth of Stored Procedures Preference – Developer Pills – So with no pre-compilation and caching for both SPs and SQL statments there is no advantage for SPs here, in some other databases the SPs compiled into C or C++ but this isn’t the case in SQL Server 7.0/2000.
GWT Site » Getting started with GWT and Google Gears – Google Gears is a library that enables your web applications to work offline. Currently it consists of three modules: LocalServer for caching and serving up your web app resources (ie. html, javascript, images), a SQLite Database for storing offline data

Daily del.icio.us for December 31st through January 1st

Posted on January 1, 2008 by Vinny

Daily del.icio.us for December 31st through January 1st:

ZSFA — Rails Is A Ghetto – Stay tuned for more about Ruby conferences and why they suck, and why the Pickaxe book is what killed Ruby
InformIT: Using XQuery to Manage XML with SQL Server 2005 > XQuery Advantages – Jesse Smith gives you a crash course on XQuery methods and how you can use them in certain situations to retrieve and update XML data stored in your SQL Server 2005 database
Open source and the corporate elephant | InfoWorld | News | 2007-12-12 | By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service – More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.
base2 – Google Code – base2 is a lightweight library that irons out all the annoying differences in JavaScript implementations. It provides the additional functionality from JavaScript 1.6+ that only Mozilla browsers implement. It also adds some features from ES4
How to create a theme for Roller 4.0 – In part one I explained how to create a theme directory and add the required template and resource files. Now I’ll wrap things up by explaining what goes into a theme.xml theme definition file and how to deploy your new theme.
Law Blog – WSJ.com : The Law Blog 2007 Year-End Quiz! – We thought we?d say goodbye to 2007 with a little year-end quiz touching on some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the year in law.
Automatic blog posts from your Google Reader Shared items « Tzetze Fly – by Dan Woolley – Below is a Ruby script I wrote that does just that. It consumes an Atom feed of your Google Reader Shared Items, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface
Alfresco Press Releases – Quark And Alfresco Announce New Partnership – This new partnership will enable Quark and Alfresco to provide cost-effective end-to-end content management and publishing solutions based on open standards ? enabling seamless integration with an organization?s existing business system.

Daily del.icio.us for Apr 26, 2007 through Apr 27, 2007

Posted on April 27, 2007 by Vinny

The Dojo Offline Toolkit | The Dojo Toolkit – Dojo Offline is a free, open source toolkit that makes it easy for web applications to work offline. It consists of a JavaScript library bundled with your web page and cross-browser download that helps to cache your web application’s UI for use offline.
AllThingsD – AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It’s a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats & different sources.
mir.aculo.us – Prototype 1.5.1: Release candidate 3 – Prototype 1.5.1 is making steady progress and this should be the last release candidate before the final version?and we?ve already lots of stuff up our sleeves for 1.6.0
JD on EP: Open Flex links, 2 – There are many more posts and opinion now. I’ll be linking here to ones where I learn a little something different. Links will be updated over the next few hours and presented in chronological order, oldest findings first.
Adobe opensources Flex (Exclusive Videos with Adobe) « Scobleizer – Adobe is firing its guns in the Microsoft Silverlight vs. Flash war. Developers win.
Adobe to Open Source Flex – Adobe announced plans to release source code for Adobe Flex as open source. The open source Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL)

Sad State of Affair in Java & .NET blog server software

Posted on July 20, 2005 by Vinny

It really is a sad state of affair when it comes to blog server software for Java and .NET. For the last few weeks, I’ve been working to introduce blogs and the concept of blogging internally at work and trying to pilot the use of blogs instead of the standard project portal. To that end, I figured I should really get the latest offerings from all of the blogging server software out there and put them through the paces to see which one works better than the other.

I’ve personally only used Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress in the past 5 years. The primary blog ran on Blogger for many years before I finally moved everything to WordPress. To make sure we’re eating our own dog food, I decided to download Roller and Community Server (formerly. Text) and give them a whirl.

Being a Java guy, I was excited to download and install Roller, as it’s one of the most popular Java blogging software out there. Boy, was I disappointed. I know this is free and open-source but installing and getting Roller running was a royal pain in the neck. The installation is documented fairly well for Tomcat but I have tons of servers running WebLogic and so I tried to deploy Roller under WebLogic. So I configure the appropriate datasources and authentication realms and try to deploy the application. I killed the server before I got a seizure from the fast scrolling stack-trace. Without boring you with all the details, it took me almost 8 hours to get Roller to work correctly under WebLogic. Having worked with J2EE containers for over 6 years, I know the reality of deploy-anywhere but this is ridiculous. How easy is it to create a web application that works on a bunch of different containers? I could not believe the effort it took to get this simple web application deployed. Take a look at Confluence – Java web application that configures itself and runs on every container out there. And other major issue I have with Roller is the lack of support for any other database platforms besides MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB. I love MySQL but I have Oracle running internally on big boxes that are backed up several times a day and actively monitored. But I can’t use Oracle with Roller as it only supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB out of the box. With technologies like Hibernate, why do we still have applications written in Java that are so database platform bound? My next mission is to get Roller working with Oracle and then document (and blog) the hacks necessary to get Roller working under WebLogic and Oracle.

Another problem with Roller is the lack of community support and plug-ins. Coming from the WordPress side of the house, there is a plug-in for everything including the kitchen sink. Before you can think it, someone has already written a plug-in for it. (I should really look at Pebble and Blojsom)

Moving to the .NET side of house is not a pretty picture either. The blog engine that used to be named .Text is now rebranded as Community Server. The installation is pretty easy and product looks fairly robust. Telligent Systems is the company that’s taken over development of .Text and the new product includes a discussion system, blogging system, and photo gallery system. The same lack of plugins or add-ons exists here and the 3 listed add-ons require a commercial license. Beyond the base blog functionality, there is nothing available.

Roller and Community Server work well once you get them installed. But anything beyond the basic requires custom development and I just feel that is not a good use of my time. To me, blog server software is a commodity and so I want to find something that’s easy to use and has the most features. I know I am developer and I can sit down and write anything I need but my company pays me to add value in a different capacity.

WordPress on the other hand is unbelievable. It’s written in PHP, which I can hack (if I had to) but all the plugins I’ve downloaded simply work. Download a plugin and just drop it in the plugins directory and you’re off and running. The big deficiency for WordPress in my opinion is that it only supports MySQL as a database platform but the value proposition provided by all the functionality is just incredible. I just hope Roller can catch-up as competition is great and really helps drive innovation.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: blogs