Links for January 14th through January 16th

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Vinny

Sign documents online, directly in GMail – Fill out and sign documents without ever leaving Gmail. Never print, sign, and scan ever again.
Ember.js – A framework for creating ambitious web applications – Ember.js – A framework for creating ambitious web applications
iOS Development Tips I Would Want If I Was Starting Out Today – If I was starting out with iOS development today these are the things I would hope somebody would tell me
The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Sass – Treehouse Blog – Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets Sass, and was created by Hampton Catlin. It’s a way to simplify your CSS workflow, making development and maintenance tasks easier.
Squash: The open-source bug-smashing tool – Squash is a collection of tools that help engineers find and kill bugs in their code
Find the Perfect Sleep Position – WSJ.com – Stomach, Back or Side? How You Slumber Can Aggravate Pain, Prevent the Body From Bouncing Back
"Hello, World!" The Hard Way with Sencha Touch – But a closer look would reveal a lot more goodies beyond those handy components in Sencha Touch. It offers a class system, a MVC pattern, tools that handles code dependency, compression and native packaging, etc. Albeit daunting, learning and embracing all of those offerings makes a quite enjoyable coding experience and rewards me with development efficiency overall.
Lessons from Functional Programming in Five Languages – Robert Rees shares lessons learned while using Clojure and applied them to other languages, Scala, JavaScript and Java.
Architecture of a Modern Web App – Scott Andrews demoes using two JavaScript frameworks – Meteor and Derby – to create complex web applications.
What is the future for GWT? – The newly formed Google Web Toolkit (GWT) steering committee recently published "The Future of GWT Report", which captures the opinions, usage patterns and hopes of over 1300 Google Web Toolkit users worldwide.

Links for January 9th through January 14th

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Vinny

RubySource | A Look at Ruby 2.0 – With Ruby 2.0 set to be released on February 24th, exactly on the 20th anniversary of Ruby’s first debut, I decided to write this article to give you a quick rundown of some of the most interesting changes.
A Carefully Selected List of Recommended Tools on Datavisualization.ch – That’s why we have put together a selection of tools that we use the most and that we enjoy working with. We called it selection.datavisualization.ch. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you’re not into programming, you’ll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code.
How Japanese Kids Learn To Multiply – Amazing, No Need to Learn Japanese – Through a Japanese friend on twitter I came across this method and it shows how Japanese pupils learn to multiply in lessons. You do not need to learn Japanese to master this method.
An Advanced Guide to HTML & CSS – An Advanced Guide to HTML & CSS takes a deeper look at front-end design and development, expanding on what is covered in the beginner’s guide. Studying modern front-end development, this guide teaches the latest for any designer looking to round out their front-end skills.
Be Careful With Cache Managers | Javalobby – If you are using spring and JPA, it is very likely that you utilize ehcache (or another cache provider). And you do that in two separate scenarios: JPA 2nd level cache and spring method caching.
CodeOutlaw: iOS Development on Windows w/ PhoneGap Build – Using PhoneGap Build, I am able to build an app in HTML5, package it up, and send it to their servers to have it compiled and ready to install onto my iOS device.
Packaging a Sencha Touch App for iOS using Windows 7 – Packaging a Sencha Touch App for iOS using Windows 7.
Microsoft Surface Pro Hands-On: This Is What It Should Have Been All Along – Surface RT was an enormous letdown—not because it was bad, but because it could have been so, so good. But Microsoft brought the Pro version to Vegas and let us play—and I couldn't be happier.
UI Testing a Sencha App – I wanted to address this topic by adding UI Tests to my demo Ext JS application and discussing strategies for enterprise application testing.
The Atlantic Wire: Building for iPad on HTML5 and Sencha Touch – The Atlantic Wire and projects such as Fastbook showcase what is truly possible with HTML5 and the many benefits of building universal applications with open standards. Publishers like The Atlantic benefit from using HTML5 to build applications that are free of app store constraints, allowing them to innovate on their business model and the technical delivery. With HTML5, companies have the ability to build universal applications without limitations.
APIs | Codecademy – Build real-life apps with APIs – Want to write apps and build websites that can text your phone, pull in YouTube videos, or connect to Facebook and Twitter? Start doing all this and more with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Links for December 30th through January 4th

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Vinny

Why Your Next Cloud App Will Probably Suck Without….Unit Testing – Put simply, developers use unit tests as an internal control on the functionality and compatibility of their applications when changes to features, code or the environment happen.
Hacking Knowledge: How to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better in the 21st Century | OEDb – We've collected some amazing tips and tricks (an update of our earlier article, almost seven years old now) you can use to help you get the most out of the time you spend learning. From study suggestions to brain hacks, these tips are sure to help you learn faster, deeper, and better, no matter the subject.
America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead – Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.
Advanced NFL Stats: Play-by-Play Data – I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready.
Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j | Architects Zone – Here's a 1-hour practical guide to getting started with Spring Data on Neo4j. This will cover Spring Data Neo4j's features/benefits, use cases, and a step by step demo.
The future according to Google’s Larry Page – Fortune Tech – Google CEO Larry Page envisions a future in which computers plan your vacations, drive your cars, and anticipate your whims. Audacious? Maybe. But Page's dreams have a way of coming true.
Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Objective-C – We're all guilty of some Objective-C sins, I'm sure, but the important thing is to improve. We're at the dawn of a new year. Why not take this opportunity to reflect on why you've been so sinful and find ways to code more virtuously in the new year?
Introducing Spring Scala – The goal of the Spring Scala project is simply to make it easier to use the Spring framework in Scala. We believe that there are many Spring users out there who want to try Scala out, but do not want to leave their experience with Spring behind. This project is meant for those people.
Sublime Package Control – a Sublime Text 2 Package Manager by wbond – A full-featured package manager that helps discovering, installing, updating and removing packages for Sublime Text 2. It features an automatic upgrader and supports GitHub, BitBucket and a full channel/repository system.
Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform that uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC) – Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform. The project aims to develop an open protocol for communication between software agents. Eve is designed as a decentral, scalable system for autonomously acting agents. Eve uses the existing world wide web as platform, and uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC).
twig-persist – Object Datastore for Google App Engine – Twig is an object persistence interface built on Google App Engine's low-level datastore which overcomes many of JDO-GAEs limitations including improved support for inheritance, polymorphism and generic types. You can easily configure, modify or extend Twigs behaviour by implementing your own strategies or overriding extension points in pure Java code.
OWNER – Java properties files made super simple! – The goal of OWNER API is to minimize the code required to handle application configuration through Java properties files. The inspiring idea for this API comes from GWT i18n
Java.next() -> Scala or Groovy? – Generally the understanding is that scala has the ability to disrupt the status quo rather than incrementally improving it like Groovy. Scala has done and doing good job of reducing the cost of abstraction transliterate Java into Scala and end up with bytecode that is almost exactly the same. Scala has some original good ideas and well thought out type system.
Windows 8 proving less popular than Vista | KitGuru – Data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is less popular than Windows Vista, the operating system that proved unpopular with the enthusiast audience.
Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively – NYTimes.com – Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.
HtmlUnit vs JSoup: html parsing in Java – In this blog I will compare JSoup with other similar framework, HtmlUnit. Apparently both of them are good Html parsing frameworks and both can be used for web application unit testing and web scraping. In this blog, I will explain how HtmlUnit is better suited for web application unit testing automation and JSoup is better suited for Web Scraping.
Progress of Happiness – The first is that sucking at something is the first step of getting better at it. And that trying really hard isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, getting better at anything isn’t supposed to be easy. You are bound to get fail, get hurt, fail again before you succeed.
Microsoft WebMatrix – Open Source Web Applications Made Easier – Open source web apps make it easy to get started developing websites, but they can sometimes be time-consuming to get configured on your computer. WebMatrix makes it simple and straightforward.
Safeguard Your Phone from Malware – WSJ.com – According to a report by research group Juniper Networks, JNPR -2.07% hackers are increasingly targeting smartphones and other mobile devices with malicious software (also known as malware) to gain access to personal information. The threat is still small in comparison to computers, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions to protect your smartphone.

Links for December 16th through December 19th

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Vinny

Properly testing Spring MVC controllers – Spring Test MVC is indispensable if you want to test your Spring MVC controllers. Simply testing the controller methods without including the Spring MVC framework itself, is useless. Spring Test MVC will be included in the Spring 3.2 release (so I'm told) but for now it can be found on Github:
Manage Your Database Schema in IntelliJ IDEA 12 – A while ago we shared this video with a quick overview of how to set up a connection to a database, use smart completion (even for SQL queries within Java), on-the-fly code analysis, navigation (between queries and database), search (for tables and fields), and more cool features.
Now, please enjoy a new video with even more exciting features available in IntelliJ IDEA 12 for working with databases:
Sublime Text 2 screencast that explores the basics and expanded features of ST2 – Sublime Text is taking the programming community by storm, and rapidly unseating incumbents like TextMate and Vim for many programmers. This screencast series teaches you Sublime Text’s layout, navigation, and flow. You will also learn how to use more advanced features, such as tweaking the program’s interface or installing custom plugins. You’ll even incorporate the vast library of TextMate themes and plugins into the Sublime Text environment. This screencast teaches both the basics and expanded features of ST2, and accelerates you along the learning curve needed to become rapidly productive with this powerful editor.
JUnit Strikes Back | Tomek’s blog – There are also some new project emerging around JUnit, like the new initiative of providing Data Driven Testing to JUnit ( see EasyTest) or another attempt at parameterized tests (see Zohhak).
A programmer’s guide to big data: 12 tools to know — Data | GigaOM – But whatever the case, if your job revolves around writing code rather than data flows, you might need a little help. Here are 12 tools (listed alphabetically) that aim to help
Billions Of Reasons To Get Ready For Big Data – Forbes – Whether you know it or not, you've probably already experienced one of the next big things in IT.
New Features and Enhancements in Spring Framework 3.2 – This section covers what's new in Spring Framework 3.2.
Spring Framework 3.2 goes GA – Exactly one year after the Spring Framework 3.1 release, SpringSource is pleased to announce that Spring Framework 3.2 is generally available now!
Rod Johnson Talks Scala in TechCast #75 – The Typesafe Blog – Typesafe is very proud to have Rod Johnson on our board of directors but what really gets us excited is when he talks about his use of Scala. In this podcast he talks about why he likes Scala and when Java developers should consider using Scala.
The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story | Blog | Sencha – When a team has problems with HTML5, it usually stems from the fact that they take a “website” development approach to building an app, and often don't use the right tools and architectures for application development. This is what we suspected about the Facebook HTML5 app. The way that app performed — slow loading, choppy user experience in the News Feed, low framerate — exhibited the usual symptoms.
Forecast 2013: The Appification Of Everything Will Turn The Web Into An App-o-verse – Forbes – hat we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, “The Appification of Everything.” This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents—a Wikipedia of Wikipedias—we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces.
Does it pay to know your type? – The Washington Post – In the graphic below, we walk through the 16 types to give a sense of how these bigger-than-life personalities fit in the Myers-Briggs philosophy. The official test is based on Carl Jung’s work in psychological typology. Ryan Smith and Eva Gregersen, creators of celebritytypes.com, helped us take the extra step of historical-figure associations.
Mountain Lion Server tutorials – When setting up a server, getting it right early can save a lot of headache later. We've put together these tutorials to get you started in setting up a server.

Links for December 12th through December 15th

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Vinny

Deploy Web Apps to CloudBees from IntelliJ IDEA 12 | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – In case you didn’t know, the new release of IntelliJ IDEA comes with deployment tools for CloudBees, a rapidly growing cloud platform for Java applications. At the moment IntelliJ IDEA allows you to connect to your CloudBees account and view/manage deployed applications.
Tuts+ Premium Course: Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2 – I’m a confessed code editor addict, and have tried them all! I was an early adopter of Coda, a TextMate advocate, even a Vim convert. But all of that changed when I discovered Sublime Text 2, the best code editor available today. Don’t believe me? Let me convince you in this course.
Working as a Software Developer – I recently gave a presentation on what it is like to work as a software developer to first-year engineering students at KTH taking an introductory programming course. I wanted to give my view on the main differences between professional software development and programming for a university course.
HTML, Javascript and the app-ification of the Web – The post described in a nutshell what might be one of the most powerful trends in Web app design — the move from multipage Web applications to single page applications driven by javascript and access to a powerful API.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers – The first step in becoming an effective programmer is to ensure that you are spending your time wisely. And there is no greater waste of time than in working on something that is not useful or never shipped.
Scaling GitHub – I’ll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing. It also presents some interesting business challenges, too. How you grow your company from three employees, how you work in teams, and how you split your app up into services all help ensure that you’ll be able to react to your product’s growth.
Innovating for Growth | Innovation 2.0: a spiral approach to business model innovation – The Economist and Ernst and Young collaborate on a discussion forum to talk about innovation.
Goldman Sachs: Microsoft has gone from 97 percent share of compute market to 20 percent | Microsoft Pri0 | The Seattle Times – According to the report, Microsoft's operating systems have gone from 97 percent of all computing devices in 2000 — back when desktop and laptop PCs were dominant — to 20 percent expected in 2012 — when PCs, tablets and smartphones are all part of the computing-device picture.
Creating Native Applications with Sencha Desktop Packager – Sencha Desktop Packager is a new product, included with the Sencha Complete: Team bundle, which enables you to take your existing Ext JS web application and package it as a native desktop application. From here, you may deliver your application to your customers who are running Windows and Mac OS X.
EMC follows VMware, rest of world into OpenStack – With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon
Query Mongo: MySQL to Mongo Query Translator – Query Translator – Convert MySQL Queries to MongoDB Syntax
WebLogic Examples: Wiki: Home – The purpose of this project is to share Java EE examples for WebLogic with the Java EE and WebLogic user communities. This project was started by Oracle Product management, but we encourage you to submit your own examples.

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.

Links for November 22nd through November 30th

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Vinny

Turbo-Charging Agile Software Development with Lean Methods – Satish Thatte introduces Scrum, Agile and Lean, then explains how Lean can be used to enhance Agile practices.
tabIndent – Javascript object that allows you to enhance a plain old textbox with "tab" behaviour. – tabIndent.js does two things to enhance the traditional text-box:
– Disables the default browser behaviour (moving to the next input box)
– Enhances the existing textbox to capture the "tab" key and replicate behaviour similar to that found in editors. (Inserting a tab character, intentation
The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like – The most recent findings that support coffee as a panacea will make their premiere this December in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Coffee, researchers found, appears to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.
New Kendo UI Framework for Java Developers — Application Development Trends – Developer tools and solutions provider Telerik has released a new version of its framework for building applications and Web sites with HTML5 and JavaScript that supports Java.
5 APIs that will transform the Web in 2013 | Alex MacCaw – The reason why the future is so bright is evergreen browsers, or browsers that automatically update in the background. It takes about 18 weeks for a new feature in Chrome’s Canary to be rolled out to its ~350 million users. That’s an incredibly fast adoption rate, and innovation is happening quicker than ever before
Chatting with Obama For America’s Director of Frontend Development: Daniel Ryan | Nettuts+ – Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Daniel Ryan – the Director of Frontend Development for “Obama for America” – about the strategies, technologies, and experiences that were a part of the race to November 6.
The Release Windows Archaism | Monday Note – Even taking in account the unavoidable piracy (which also acts as a powerful promotional channel), with two billion people connected to the internet outside the US, the math heavily favors the end of the counter-productive and honest-viewer-hostile Release Windows archaism.
Redline Smalltalk – because nothing is as productive as Smalltalk, and the App has to run on the Java Virtual Machine. – a couple of major barriers keep Smalltalk out of reach for many developers. I want to bring Smalltalk to everyone, so I created Redline, a thoroughly modern version of Smalltalk that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
The Legacy of Linus Torvalds: Linux, Git, and One Giant Flamethrower | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com – Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all Torvalds has given the internet.
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: September 2012 – tecosystems – while there may be a few surprises on this list – the continued traction of Java, as an example, is unexpected for some – by and large this list seems like nothing more or less than a reasonable representation of programming languages in use today
Keynote: The New Application Architectures – Adrian Colyer discusses the application architecture emerging these days defined by a departure from server-side apps to a model characterized by smart clients and services.
Keynote: Spring 2012 and Beyond – Adrian Colyer, Juergen Hoeller, Mark Pollack and Graeme Rocher present SpringSource’s Unifying Component Model, current developments regarding Big Data, and betting on Grails.
Changing times for web developers – 6 Tips You Should Read to survive – Think about crafting your web applications properly. Use commonsense to mix and match based on scenarios. Here we go with 6 Tips to be a responsible web developer, and to stay on top of what you do.
18 Useful Twitter Boostrap Goodies You Should Know | Queness – In this post, I have found many useful tools, plugins and themes created specifically for Twitter Bootstrap. If you love using Twitter Bootstrap, I'm sure you will love all these resources.
50 Tricks for Faster Web Applications – Jatinder Mann, an Internet Explorer PM at Microsoft, held the session 50 performance tricks to make your HTML5 apps and sites faster at BUILD 2012, providing many tips for creating faster web applications. The advice provided by Mann was organized around six principles outlined below.
Apple and Twitter – Almost anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess – My friend and co-worker Tom has a thesis about Apple’s biggest problem: Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.

Links for November 16th through November 21st

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Vinny

The Web engineer’s online toolbox – I wanted to compile a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation
Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) – Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
Continuuity’s SDK makes building Big Data apps blazing fast – Continuuity’s SDK makes building Big Data apps blazing fast. You build apps in your IDE, then run, test and debug them locally on a fully featured single-node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
Therapist-free therapy – Cognitive-bias modification may put the psychiatrist’s couch out of business | The Economist – A new kind of treatment may, though, mean he does not have to. Cognitive-bias modification (CBM) appears to be effective after only a few 15-minute sessions, and involves neither drugs nor the discussion of feelings. It does not even need a therapist. All it requires is sitting in front of a computer and using a program that subtly alters harmful thought patterns.
US patent chief to software patent critics: “Give it a rest already” | Ars Technica – David Kappos, the head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, offered a strong defense of software patents in a Tuesday address at the Center for American Progress. Kappos touted several provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA), which he argued would allow the patent office to weed out low-quality software and business method patents.
Brian LeRoux on Mobile Web vs. Native, PhoneGap Build, Firefox OS – Brian LeRoux talks about the PhoneGap Build service, mobile web apps vs native, Facebook's switch to a native iOS app, PhoneGap adoption in emerging markets, Firefox OS, Adobe's web tools and more.
ModelMapper – Simple, Intelligent, Object Mapping. – ModelMapper is an intelligent object mapping library that automatically maps objects to each other. It uses a convention based approach while providing a simple refactoring safe API for handling specific use cases.
Keynote: SOA, Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web at NASA – Hook Hua discusses how semantic Web technologies are being leveraged by cloud-based SOA to improve interoperability within NASA enterprise boundaries and between NASA and external organizations.
Infrastructure as Code – Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation – helpful for automating every infrastructure operations. – Gareth Rushgrove offers advice, code samples, and introduces tools – Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation – helpful for automating every infrastructure operations.

Links for November 12th through November 15th

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Vinny

U.S. consumers hesitant to make switch to Windows 8 – Most Windows users in the U.S. know about Windows 8 but few have immediate plans to upgrade to Microsoft's newest operating system.
JUnit 4.11 final version is available both on GitHub and Maven Central – JUnit now uses the latest version of Hamcrest. Thus, you can use all the available matchers and benefit from an improved assertThat which will now print the mismatch description from the matcher when an assertion fails.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013 – Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013.
Review: 6 slick open source routers – DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT, M0n0wall, PfSense, and Vyatta suit a wide range of devices and networking needs
Surveillance and Security Lessons From the Petraeus Scandal – More broadly, this scandal centers around email, and it’s a reminder that the legal protections for email fall far short of what they should be. We need to modernize our privacy laws—for example by passing the proposal that is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and we need protections that cover metadata of the kind that was apparently so central in this scandal.
Bloomberg: There’s An App For That – Wall Street & Technology – The Bloomberg App Portal allows third-party developers to distribute apps for use along with the Bloomberg Professional Service.
Meet Big Switch, a Company That Wants to Help You Rebuild Your Network – Arik Hesseldahl – News – AllThingsD – There’s now a new player to keep track of, and its name is Big Switch Networks. It come out of stealth mode today, and it is also launching a general-release product with an army of partners and $37 million in combined funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs.
Internet Explorer 10 Guide for Developers (Windows) – The Internet Explorer 10 Guide for Developers provides a look at the developer features included in Internet Explorer 10, as well as the latest HTML5, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets, Level 3 (CSS3) features available to developers of Windows Store apps using JavaScript for Windows 8.
A billion dollar software tech company is founded every 3 months *in U.S. – A billion dollar software tech company is founded every 3 months *in U.S.
Coding Horror: A SSD in Your Pocket – Now I feel like a total dork for continuing to carry around a 2010 era flash drive that I thought had decent performance at 20 MB/sec. Forget that noise. Now we can darn near carry pocket solid state hard drives on our keychains! Nobody told me, man!
Web Views & RubyMotion – Marcgg#Blog – Here we go, another article on RubyMotion! For those of you that don’t know what’s that’s all about, it’s a toolchain created by Laurent Sansonetti (of MacRuby fame) allowing you to create native iOS application using Ruby.
Spring Framework 3.2 RC1: Spring MVC Test Framework – Today I will continue this subject and describe another exciting spring-test addition. In 3.2 RC1 we've added first class support for testing Spring MVC applications both client-side and server-side.

Links for October 31st through November 7th

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Vinny

Obama Wins: How Chicago’s Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed | TIME.com – That data-driven decisionmaking played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. It’s another sign that the role of the campaign pros in Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data sets for insight. As one official put it, the time of “guys sitting in a back room smoking cigars, saying ‘We always buy 60 Minutes’” is over. In politics, the era of big data has arrived.
Microsoft Surface: Why is the new tablet so much worse than the iPad? – Slate Magazine – Microsoft has been working on its tablet for years. It should be a whole lot better.
Ratchet – Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components. – Ratchet – Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components.
MongoDB Gotchas & How To Avoid Them – Everyone should be able to benefit from MongoDB’s power and simplicity, and so as a follow up to David’s article I have outlined some common and not-so-common things that hackers should know about MongoDB.
Fight. Live your dreams and aspirations now.| Dustin Curtis – Fight. Live your dreams and aspirations now.
Microsoft Surface with Windows RT review – CONCLUSION: WAIT TO BUY – Microsoft Surface with Windows RT review – CONCLUSION: WAIT TO BUY
Speed and Innovation through Architecture – Jan Bosch discusses the importance of speed and innovation in software development, covering Innovation Experiment Systems, a 3 layer product model, and the role of architecture and scalability.
Why I love everything you hate about Java « Magic Scaling Sprinkles – If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories.
Not One Microsoft Product on Kaspersky’s Top 10 Vulnerabilities List – Security firm Kaspersky has released its latest IT Threat Evolution report. There were some interesting findings in the report, as always, but the most interesting thing that stuck out was all the way at the bottom:
Powerful Command Line Tools For Developers | Smashing Coding – Here we cover six particularly powerful and versatile tools which can help make your life a little bit easier.
SOA Still Not Dead: Ratification of Governance Standard Highlights SOA’s Continued Relevance – The SOA Governance Framework is designed to be a vendor-neutral, technology-neutral reference model that organizations use as a foundation for implementing an SOA. The Framework, originally published in 2009, has a few key components as described in the Open Group blog post.
Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop – Global-cio – Executive – Sears pushes the cutting edge with some big data techniques, while trying to sell its big data services. Can emerging tech drive change in old-school companies?

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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