Links for December 9th through December 11th

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Vinny

Docker for the Fedora Project: an interview with Alexander Larsson | opensource.com – Recently, Red Hat and Docker announced they'd be working together on several projects. One of them is packaging Docker for the Fedora Project: a Red Hat sponsored, volunteer-driven, rock-solid Linux operating system
Docker will change everything #iagreecompletely – Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere
IntelliJ IDEA 13 Brings a Full Bag of Goodies to Android Developers – At JetBrains we’re always listening to developers, and Android developers are no exception. Based on this tight feedback loop, we’ve made a long list of changes to our award-winning IDE which will hopefully make development of Android apps an even bigger p
Leveraging PhoneGap within Sencha Touch – With the release of Sencha Touch 2.3 and Sencha Cmd 4, creating your cross platform hybrid applications has never been easier. PhoneGap is now a key feature in the Sencha Touch mobile workflow integrating seamlessly into the newly released, NodeJS based, P
Mobile dev chops? Cloud infrastructure skills? You’re hired! – Hiring more contractors than full-time staff, placing data center and cloud expertise over more conventional IT skills, emphasizing mobile rather than desktop development, and more fine-grained ways to find the right people for the right jobs — these are
Cause for hope: Windows 8 gets the heave-ho in the next wave of updates – Windows might actually become relevant again if rumors about the next version(s) of Windows are to be believed
The same app 4 times: PHP vs Python vs Ruby vs Clojure – Here's a toy program I wrote implemented in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure. I hope it's helpful for someone who knows at least one of those and wants to learn another.
Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees – Evernote’s CTO gave an exclusive talk at the recent First Round CTO Summit about security and the right way for growing startups to stay safe without needlessly expending valuable resources.
HotSpot JVM garbage collection options cheat sheet (v3) – HotSpot JVM options cheatsheet
websocketd – Turn any application that uses STDIO/STDOUT into a WebSocket server – websocketd is a small command line tool that will wrap an existing command line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket. It provides a quick mechanism for allowing web-applications to interact with existing command line tools.
Fast-growing IT automation startup Opscode raises $32M, changes name to Chef – In fact, a large percentage of companies utilizing Amazon Web Services also are turning to Chef as an "onramp" to the cloud. Essentially, it allows those organizations to ramp up more quickly with cloud services. “Chef is actually extremely simpatico with
Announcing Suro: Backbone of Netflix’s Data Pipeline – Suro, which we are proud to announce as our latest offering as part of the NetflixOSS family, serves as the backbone of our data pipeline. It consists of a producer client, a collector server, and plugin framework that allows events to be dynamically filte
Google Ups The Ante Against Amazon’s Cloud, And That’s A Good Thing For Business – Google wants to leapfrog Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing by making it available to everyone.
Meet The JavaScript Framework That Might Save HTML5 From Itself – Famo.us wants to make HTML5 apps sing using JavaScript. The goal: Flash-like performance, but with no plugins.
Java 8 first steps with Lambdas and Streams – Java 8 will bring the largest changes on the platform since the introduction of Generics in version 1.5. It’s on the time to look at some of the most important innovations.
Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die – FT.com – Technology has already transformed many industries. Next in line is banking. In two or three years, only 5 per cent of consumer interaction will be through branches. The rules have changed and a new league of competitors is emerging.
VoltDB to Provide Database to Eagle for Big Data – WatersTechnology – Eagle Investment Systems has agreed to distribute the in-memory relational database from Billerica, Massachusetts-based VoltDB for delivering real-time analytics and decisioning capabilities to clients.

Links for October 21st through October 25th

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Vinny

WhiteDB is a lightweight NoSQL database library written in C, operating fully in main memory. – WhiteDB is a lightweight NoSQL database library written in C, operating fully in main memory. There is no server process. Data is read and written directly from/to shared memory, no sockets are used between WhiteDB and the application program.
Google: Our Robot Cars Are Better Drivers Than Puny Humans | MIT Technology Review – Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.
Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet, TCP/IP, Protocol Buffers, and key-value objects – Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet, TCP/IP, Protocol Buffers, and key-value objects
Microsoft Surface Pro 2 review from gdgt – With the Surface Pro 2, Microsoft hasn't changed much — it kept the study build and sharp display, adding a new kickstand and improved battery life. But, despite all it has going for it, the Surface Pro 2 is still a hybrid device that isn't going to suit everyone.
Offline.js – Handle your users losing their internet connection like a pro – Offline.js is a library to automatically alert your users when they've lost internet connectivity, like Gmail. It captures AJAX requests which were made while the connection was down, and remakes them when it's back up, so your app reacts perfectly.
Technology Change: The journey from .NET to Scala – There are now several dev teams at Empathica working on Scala projects. Tool chains are being developed. Coding standards are being established and enforced. Libraries are being standardized across our projects. It’s starting to return to a comfortable
LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS | LinkedIn Engineering – Similarly, Intro’s approach of proxying IMAP is a novel way of delivering software to users. It operates at the limit of what is technically possible, but it has a big advantage: we can enhance the apps you already use. Of course the idea isn’t limited to
Webinar replay: Spring Boot – Simplifying Spring for Everyone – n this webinar Phil Webb will demonstrate how Spring Boot can take you from zero to Spring with minimal fuss. We will look at how you can rapidly prototype Spring applications using Groovy, and how Spring Configuration in Java applications can be radically
Debian/Ubuntu extend the dominance in the Linux web server market at the expense of Red Hat/CentOS – Debian has been the most popular Linux distribution on web servers for almost two years when it took over rank #1 from CentOS. Now CentOS lost another rank to Ubuntu, giving Debian-based distributions a solid lead over the Red Hat camp.
Linux is king *nix of the data center—but Unix may live on forever – Unix servers hit lowest market share ever, but they still have a long future.
How a flawed deployment process led Knight to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes – The tale has all the hallmarks of technical debt in a huge, unmaintained, bitrotten codebase (the bug itself due to code that hadn’t been used for 8 years), and a really poor, undisciplined devops story.
How to balance maintenance and IT innovation via @robcrussell – Many IT leaders admit their spending is too heavily weighted toward keep-the-lights-on projects. Here's how to tip the balance.
Microsoft, the sleeping giant of the cloud – With its vast portfolio of software and billions of dollars in data center infrastructure investment, Microsoft stands poised to rule the cloud
Learn Haskell Fast and Hard – A very short and dense tutorial for learning Haskell. – A very short and dense tutorial for learning Haskell.

Links for September 15th through September 23rd

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Vinny

For 2nd Generation of Surface, Tweaks From Microsoft – On Monday, Microsoft introduced a second generation of Surface tablets with only subtle adjustments from the originals, a sign that the company still believes in its vision of devices that blend the benefits of tablets and laptop computers. The most meaningful changes are under the hood, providing faster performance, better battery life and sharper screens.
Cutting Through the Cloud – NYTimes.com – Cutting Through the Cloud – NYTimes.com
What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong in his Theory of Low-End Disruption – Apple is – and, for at least the last 15 years, has been – focused exactly on the blind spot in the theory of low-end disruption. Differentiation based on design which, while it can’t be measured, can certainly be felt by consumers who are both buyers and
Doing well by doing good: A leader’s guide | McKinsey & Company – Addressing community problems increasingly requires cooperation among the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Here, three executives explain how a civic alliance in America’s Minneapolis–Saint Paul region may point toward an operating model.
Introduction to Java multitenancy – The IBM Multitenant JVM recently became available as part of the IBM Java™ 8 beta. By running multiple applications within a single multitenant JVM, a cloud system can speed applications' start times and reduce their memory footprint. This article introduc
iOS 7 Safari & New Web Platform Features – Today, iOS 7 ships with a new version of Mobile Safari which brings with it a whole slew of features that our team worked on! Here are some of the big ones we worked on and what they can help you with.
Deploymate helps you identify unavailable, deprecated and obsolete API usage in your Xcode projects – We've all been there. Your app is targeting an older OS version and you have used an API introduced later than your target OS. Xcode didn't warn you about it, did it? Now your app crashes
The Architecture of Open Source Applications – In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answeri
Spotify changes tune on Hadoop with switch to Hortonworks | ZDNet – Spotify's Hadoop infrastructure, which stood at about 30 nodes five years ago, is now described as Europe's largest commercial cluster, consisting of 690-nodes storing data from more than 24 million active users and six million subscribers.
RESTX, the lightweight Java REST framework – Introducing RESTX – the lightweight, modular, feature rich, blazing fast, open source Java REST framework
Move over WordPress? Microsoft throws its weight behind Ghost – Ghost, the node.js-based blogging platform that took Kickstarter by storm a few months ago, is set to release its first beta to the public in just a few weeks. Given the overwhelming dominance of WordPress in the blogging space, some may be surprised to see such a clamor around a new platform

Links for June 22nd through July 8th

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Vinny

The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users, 300K QPS, a 22 MB/S Firehose, and Send Tweets in Under 5 Seconds – VP of Engineering at Twitter, describes in his superb and very detailed presentation on Timelines at Scale. If you want to know how Twitter works – then start here
How to design a multi-user ajax web application to be concurrently safe – Stack Overflow – How to design a multi-user ajax web application to be concurrently safe – Stack Overflow
UnQLite – An Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine – UnQLite is a in-process software library which implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL database engine. UnQLite is a document store database similar to MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB etc. as well a standard Key/Value store similar to BerkeleyDB, LevelDB, etc.
Nginx just became the most used web server among the top 1000 websites – 34.9% of the top 1000 web sites rely on Nginx. That makes it the most trusted web server on high traffic sites, just ahead of Apache.
Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE” – It looks like Internet Explorer 11 could be the best Internet Explorer yet by a long shot. By finally removing the evidence of past mistakes, Microsoft is ready to take a place amongst the standards-based browsers of today
The world’s easiest CMS for designers | Cloud Cannon – Cloud Cannon turns your static website into a CMS your clients will love
Automating Development Environments with Vagrant and Puppet | Kloudless Blog – Hopefully I have given you a good taste of how easy it is to put these two tools together to make your development and deployment a lot easier! Puppet is a really great tool and I highly recommend learning more so you can take full advantage of this work flow
My Fitbit Flex Hasn’t Changed My Life, But It’s Telling Me What’s Wrong – ReadWrite – Part two of a first-person experiment: Two weeks with the Fitbit Flex exposes the power, and the limits, of wearable fitness tracking devices.
Why Mobile Developers Are Really Starting To Embrace The Enterprise – ReadWrite – Big businesses have gotten a taste of mobile's productivity bump. Now they're craving more.
Red Hat Looks Beyond Linux For Its Next Decade Of Growth – ReadWrite – Red Hat's last 10 years were all about enterprise Linux. The next 10 will be about enterprise clouds.
Our web development workflow is completely broken. – Visual debugging could get a whole new meaning, and we could finally show the right information in the right context.
Create a simple blog system and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails – In this project you’ll create a simple blog system and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails
Update for Rails 4.0 – Learn Web Development with the Ruby on Rails Tutorial – Ruby on Rails Tutorial – Learn Web Development with Rails 4.0
Facebook TAO: The power of the graph – A massive amount of effort has gone into making TAO the easy to use and powerful distributed data store that it is today. TAO has become one of the most important data stores at Facebook — the power of graph helps us tame the demanding and dynamic social
Salt Stack – Systems and configuration management for any enterprise cloud or DevOps organization – SaltStack is a total package – cloud deployment, configuration management, remote execution and monitoring in a clean, well-designed package
Oracle and Salesforce: a Data-Sharing Deal – NYTimes.com – Some of the best trash-talking in tech may be over. The Oracle Corporation and Salesforce.com, two of the more contentious competitors in software, are about to announce a close alliance involving software delivered via cloud computing.

Links for April 27th through May 3rd

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Vinny

Eliminating my trivial inconveniences building Discourse – There is also a more insidious form of waiting. The zero value work you tend to do repetitively, also known as trivial inconveniences. These issues don’t stop you from working, they just make your job slightly more annoying.
Microsoft readies ‘Mohoro’ Windows desktop as a service | ZDNet – Microsoft is believed to be building a Windows Azure-hosted desktop virtualization service that could be available on a pay-per-use basis
Standard Java API for JSON – JSR-353, the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), has reached final approval ballot this month. JSON-P (similar to JAXP) consists of a Streaming API (similar to StAX) and an Object Model API (similar to DOM).
Solarized – Precision colors for machines and people – Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined se
Novell offers mobile file sharing for the enterprise | PCWorld – In an effort to help enterprises get a handle on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, Novell has released enterprise file sharing software that it claims is as easy to use as commercial cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Microsoft Skydrive, and Goo
Unraveling HTML5 vs. Native – When going for multiplatform solutions bear in mind that while the idea of a common codebase is desirable the “write-once-run-anywhere” paradigm is ultimately an illusion, as your app will still need platform-dependent tweaks, and a broad QA effort.
Amazon doesn’t reveal what it makes on cloud computing, but here’s the number, anyway – Quartz – Amazon is famously reticent about sales figures, dribbling out clues without revealing actual numbers. But it appears the company has left enough hints to, finally, discern how much revenue it makes on its cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Serv
Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant – The firm is doubling down on search that is conversational, contextual, and personal.
iio Engine · an Interactive App Framework for HTML5 built with Canvas & JavaScript – The iio Engine (pronounced 'ee-oh') is an extensive application framework that helps with the creation and deployment of HTML5 applications. The framework provides a feature rich SDK, an advanced debugging system, and a cross-platform deployment engine
Hello Maps: A Five Minute iOS App with the Google Maps SDK – In this short and sweet tutorial, Google's Mano Marks shows you how to build a simple "Hello Maps!" starter app for iOS, using the Google Maps SDK.
Apple Backtracks on Planned Changes to VPN On Demand Behavior on iOS Devices – Mac Rumors – Apple no longer plans to change the behavior of the VPN On Demand feature of iOS 6.1 for devices that have already been shipped. The "Always" option will continue to work as it currently does on these devices.
SV Angel Says Health Informatics Is One Of Its New “Megatrends” | TechCrunch – SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms has always had a list of six to eight "megatrends" that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce, online-to-offline commerce, education tech, the sharing economy and the "Internet of things." Now they’re adding "health informatics" to that list

Links for March 21st through March 23rd

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Vinny

Facebook Turns Off Website Internally To Force Mobile Development – Just how important is mobile to Facebook? According to Facebook product manager Josh Williams, the former CEO of Gowalla, the social network's push toward mobility is crucial enough to its strategy to turn off Facebook's website internally.
Learn the ropes of Mobile Services with Brent Simmons – Mobile Services makes it easy to store data for your iOS app in the cloud, authenticate users, and send push notifications via APNS. Join Brent in a walkthrough of the basics.
Microsoft backs away from Flash ban in IE10 | Internet & Media – CNET News – Arguing that support for Adobe's browser plug-in is an advantage, Microsoft now permits Flash by default on Windows 8 and Windows RT. Tablets that can't run Flash are merely "a companion to a PC."
Stanford Offers Free Introductory Course on iOS Programming – Stanford University is offering a free introductionary course "Coding Together: Developing Apps for iPhone and iPad (Winter 2013)" on iTunes U. All lectures can be downloaded as video podcasts along with slides in PDF format. The material is suitable for O
Designing A RESTful API That Doesn’t Suck | devo.ps – As we’re getting closer to shipping the first version of devo.ps and we are joined by a few new team members, the team took the time to review the few principles we followed when designing our RESTful JSON API.
Coding Horror: Why Ruby? – However, I'd also be lying if I didn't mention that I truly believe the sort of project we are building in Discourse does represent most future software. If you squint your eyes a little, I think you can see a future not too far in the distance where .NET
NoSQL showdown: MongoDB vs. Couchbase | Data Management – InfoWorld – MongoDB edges Couchbase Server with richer querying and indexing options, as well as superior ease of use
Here’s How Marquette Erased A Six-Point Davidson Lead In The Final Minute And Avoided An Upset – Vander Blue took over in the final moments to lead Marquette past an upset-minded Davidson team today in Lexington, though a brutal blunder on the Wildcats' part sealed their fate as much as the Golden Eagles' suddenly hot shooting.
Cappuccino Web Framework – Build Desktop Class Applications in Objective-J and JavaScript – Cappuccino is an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser.
I’m done with the web – Don’t be afraid to invest a week learning something new. Cappuccino, GWT, and Sproutcore were born out of necessity; don’t stop breaking boundaries because it’s now easy to add rounded corners now.

Links for March 16th through March 20th

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Vinny

Google Keep—Save what’s on your mind – With Google Keep, you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have
Sencha.io Support in Sencha Cmd – Sencha Cmd allows you to perform a wide variety of tasks, including managing how an application is configured and hosted in Sencha.io. As the Sencha.io platform grows and more services and configuration options are added to it, we will continue to add equivalent features to Sencha Cmd, so developers can automate their workflows and test effectively.
Superhero.js – List of articles, tutorials, videos on how to create, test and manage large JS apps – Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic.
Backbone 1.0 is released – The essential premise at the heart of Backbone has always been to try and discover the minimal set of data-structuring (Models and Collections) and user interface (Views and URLs) primitives that are useful when building web applications with JavaScript
What 420,000 insecure devices reveal about Web security – Using a simple technique, a researcher creates a benign botnet to survey the breadth of the Internet, and finds a back door flung wide open and beckoning the bad guys.
It’s Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win – NYTimes.com – According to the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at the nonpartisan Resources for the Future, a tax of $25 per ton of carbon-dioxide emitted would raise approximately $125 billion annually
You are watching your DNS logs, right? – Watching the DNS requests being made by your systems allows you to identify network level indicators of compromise.
Dave Grohl’s SXSW 2013 Keynote Speech : NPR – Dave Grohl has become the unofficial Mayor of Rock 'n' Roll: a gregarious ambassador who wins armloads of Grammys and even directs a music documentary. Watch Grohl's keynote address at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas.
Splunk as a Big Data Platform for Developers – YouTube – Splunk is a Big Data platform that transforms the massive amount of heterogeneous and often totally unstructured machine data being generated across the enterprise into valuable insights and realtime operational intelligence.
Does the World Need Another Hadoop Distro? Greenplum Says Yes | SiliconANGLE – Greenplum is challenging Cloudera and MapR with a new Hadoop solution that delivers faster response times and better integration than the competition. Dubbed Dubbed Pivotal HD
EMC Greenplum Tackles Big Data With Hadoop Distribution – CIO.com – EMC Greenplum debuts its own Hadoop distribution, Pivotal HD, which marries Greenplum's massively parallel processing database technology with the Apache Hadoop framework to create a technology called HAWQ.
Finally! A Hadoop Hello World That Isn’t A Lame Word Count! – So I got bored of the old WordCount Hello World, and being a fairly mathy person, I decided to make my own Hello World in which I coaxed Hadoop into transposing a matrix!
By the numbers: How Google Compute Engine stacks up to Amazon EC2 — Tech News and Analysis – with Google Compute Engine, AWS has a formidable new competitor in the public cloud space, and we’ll likely be moving some of Scalr’s production workloads from our hybrid aws-rackspace-softlayer setup to it when it leaves beta. There’s a strong technical case for migrating heavy workloads to GCE, and I’ll be grabbing popcorn to eagerly watch as the battle unfolds between the giants.

Links for February 16th through February 21st

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Vinny

The Play Framework at LinkedIn | LinkedIn Engineering – We’ve been running Play 2.0 in production for several months and are now gradually rolling it out to more teams at LinkedIn. In this blog post, I'll talk about the benefits we've seen from Play, show a brief walk-through of the developer experience, and ta
How Microsoft will change forever and thrive again | Microsoft Windows – InfoWorld – As PC prospects decline, the tech giant moves toward a hybrid, cross-platform future with opportunities in the server closet and the cloud
Why is it that everyone wants to copy Apple’s products but nobody wants to copy being Apple? – This idea that the basis of competition is set by Apple and then the race is on to climb the trajectory of improvement is so well understood that it’s axiomatic: “It’s just the way things are.” Apple releases a product that defines a category or disrupts an industry and it becomes obvious what needs to be built.
Netflix – From SimpleDB to Cassandra: Data Migration for a High Volume Web Application at Netflix – From SimpleDB to Cassandra: Data Migration for a High Volume Web Application at Netflix
Smart Path Variables for Spring MVC in IntelliJ IDEA 12 – The latest release of IntelliJ IDEA brings many exciting features for Spring MVC support. In this post we would like to highlight some of them, which add even more intelligence for @RequestMapping and @PathVariable usages in your project.
Efficient JavaScript unit testing – Without unit testing the JavaScript code, organization will pay much money for testing, re-testing, and re-testing web applications for just deciding upgrading or supporting new browsers. This presentation shows the solution of this problem.
Eligible API – Build the future of health information. – The US health information systems pass records in disparate data formats. We've created simple REST APIs that normalize them for you.
Papertrail – Hosted log management for servers, apps, and cloud services. – Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.
Graylog2 – Free open source self-hosted log management and exception tracking – Graylog2 is an open source log management solution that stores your logs in ElasticSearch. It consists of a server written in Java that accepts your syslog messages via TCP, UDP or AMQP and stores it in the database.
Profile of the Former Apple Engineers Who Designed the Nest Smart Thermostat | MIT Technology Review – Two men who created the iPod and iPhone founded Nest and injected new technology into the humble thermostat. Now they have their sights on the rest of your house.

Links for February 11th through February 15th

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Vinny

Boxen is your team’s IT robot. It’s a dangerously opinionated framework that automates every piece of your development environment. – Boxen is a framework for managing almost every aspect of your Mac. We built a massive standard library of Puppet modules optimized for Boxen to manage everything from running MySQL to installing Minecraft.
A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity | Javalobby – Personally, I think this library is a godsend, and I think there’ll be a LOT of teams picking it up over the next five years, just like the popularity of Spring has swept the globe due to all the efficiencies it bestows on developers. The library, by the w
Raible Designs | The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security at Denver JUG – The first talk, The Modern Java Web Developer, was inspired by the book titled The Well-Grounded Java Developer. Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg mention in the beginning of the book that they wrote it as a training guide to get new Java developers up to spee
The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story – This four-minute video gives you a quick overview of Sencha Fastbook, and shows you a side-by-side comparison of how well our HTML5 app performs against both the native iOS and the native Android Facebook apps (versions 5.2 and 1.9.12 respectively, the latest available when we made this video on December 10th).
Promoting iOS Apps with Smart App Banners – Safari has a new Smart App Banner feature in iOS 6 and later that provides a standardized method of promoting apps on the App Store from a website. <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID>
How Lockheed Martin’s ‘Kill Chain’ Stopped SecurID Attack – Dark Reading – A rare inside look at how the defense contractor repelled an attack using its homegrown 'Cyber Kill Chain' framework
Plivo Cloud – Cloud Platform to Build Voice & SMS Applications (Voice & SMS API Platform) – Build powerful Telephony Apps. Leave the Infrastructure plumbing to Us.
apiary.io — REST API documentation, Reimagined – It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.
Love the idea that my next car has a REST API! Go Tesla – An unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API
Cloud 66 | Code to Cloud in 5 minutes – Build your own Rails PaaS – The easiest way to get your code hosted on your servers. Provision, deploy and manage your Ruby on Rails apps on your cloud or your own servers.
Gartner Positions Tableau as a Leader in 2013 Magic Quadrant – Tableau is a "Leader" for first time in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.
VMware Marching Towards Software Defined Datacenter with Software Defined Storage Acquisition of Virsto | SiliconANGLE – As part of its strategy to deliver the software-defined datacenter, VMware continues to invest and innovate to extend the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the datacenter — compute, network, storage and the associated security and availability
Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit – Feb 11 2013 – Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit and here is the transcript.
The Porsche 911: An ode to iteration (via @daringfireball) – 50 years of iterative refinement.
Developing Java Apps for iOS–Codenameone, An Interview – Develop in Java, deploy on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. What is codenameone? An interview with Chen Fishbein.
Building Twitter Bootstrap · An A List Apart Article – Thanks to the foresight and focus of a small group of designers and developers, we were able to evolve our development process, build an extensive front-end toolkit, and help thousands of others bootstrap the projects they love
Infotron Spreadsheet Analyzer – Breviz, the Spreadsheet Visualization Tool reveals the hidden logic of a spreadsheet, to help you spot errors and make your spreadsheets less risky and more efficient.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Wins Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013! | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We are excited to announce that a few days ago IntelliJ IDEA 12 was named the winner of the Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013, an annual award run by Dr. Dobbs to showcase the best IDEs and coding tools of the year.
Apple iTunes becomes much more than a "break-even" business. – iTunes now is a blend of many business models. Some, like music, use a wholesale revenue recognition method and have very low to zero margins, others, like eBooks and Apps, are sold using an “agency” revenue model with potentially higher margins and some, like Software, are recognized at full value with very high margins.

Links for December 1st through December 4th

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Vinny

VMware Spins Out SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and GemFire – Following months of speculation, VMware has officially announced plans to transfer many of its tier 2 technologies, including the Spring framework, distributed in-memory data cache GemFire, the Cloud Foundry PaaS, and Hadoop analytics tool Cetas, to parent company EMC as part of a newly formed initiative called Pivotal.
Netflix Log4J Optimizations Yield Logging at Massive Scale – Blitz4k, Netflix’ internally optimized version of log4j, has been released to Github. Blitz4j efficiently generates logs within a massively concurrent and heavy traffic environment while consuming fewer resources than other, more traditional logging technologies. It achieves this by overriding sections of log4j’s code where synchronization and deadlocks may occur.
Evernote For Business: End Of Butt-Ugly Software? – Evernote Business lets an organization deploy and manage the Evernote application on behalf of employees, extending information discoverability and sharing company-wide.
Top 35 Startups In Tech that TechCrunch missed out on | StartupPlays – There’s no feeling that’s quite as electrifying as launching a product and watching people genuinely enjoy using it and wanting it to get better. Here are the Top 35 Startups In Tech that TechCrunch missed out on – November 201
How People Change – NYTimes.com – It’s a lousy leadership model. Don’t try to bludgeon bad behavior. Change the underlying context. Change the behavior triggers. Displace bad behavior with different good behavior. Be oblique. Redirect.
Hadapt – The greatest thing to happen to Hadoop since Hadoop – Hadapt’s flagship product is the Adaptive Analytical Platform, which brings a native implementation of SQL to the Apache Hadoop open-source project.
How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers – “It will be interesting to see, over the next 10 years or so, how successful the traditional server vendors will be competing against that kind of server capacity,” Pinkham says. “Once developers realize they can use this much cheaper, homogenous infrastructure, the power may shift toward the folks who build the cheapest, simplest hardware.”
Apple, Google, Microsoft Avoid Taxes By Keeping Billions In Profits Offshore: Senate Report – Companies such as Microsoft and Apple quietly dodge billions of dollars in taxes each year with potentially illegal schemes to move their profits offshore, according to a Senate subcommittee report released on Thursday
Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace – NYTimes.com – The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.
Paul Maritz To Lead New Group At EMC That Merges Greenplum With VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, And Gemstome | TechCrunch – EMC Chief Strategist Paul Maritz will lead a new platform group that will combine VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, and Gemstone with EMC’s big data platform – Greenplum
Technology giants at war: Another game of thrones | The Economist – Another game of thrones – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other's throats in all sorts of ways
Supporting Mobile Devices in a Web Application – The purpose of this paper was to prepare the reader for possible issues when preparing a web application for mobile deployment. The paper is an exercise to help the reader gain some experience prior to having to do the same.