Links for November 22nd through November 30th

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Vinny

Announcing Scala.js v0.1 – a compiler from Scala to JavaScript – Scala.js is a compiler from Scala to JavaScript. It allows you to write your entire web application in Scala and simply compile to JavaScript!
Build a RESTful API with Martini – I’ve been looking for an excuse to try Martini ever since it was announced on the golang-nuts mailing list. Martini is a Go package for web server development that skyrocketed to close to 2000 stars on GitHub in just a few weeks
HTML5 javascript database library for web app – HTML5 javascript database library for web app that supports all desktop, mobile and web client browsers utilizing IndexedDB, WebSQL and localStorage. No dependency.
Docker unleashed: App portability gets a boost – Popular application-virtualization system for Linux no longer needs custom kernel, adds portability and connectivity features
Atlassian: A Leader in Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle Management – Gartner's 2013 Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle Management names Atlassian as a Leader. We believe this is based on our investment in agile software development practices and support of team collaboration.
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
Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science – R remains popular with the PhDs of data science, but as data moves mainstream, Python is taking over.
cmder | Portable console emulator for Windows – Cmder is a software package created out of pure frustration over absence of nice console emulator on Windows. It is based on amazing software, spiced up with Monokai color scheme and custom prompt layout. Looking sexy from the start.
An opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby – Grape is a REST-like API micro-framework for Ruby. It's designed to run on Rack or complement existing web application frameworks such as Rails and Sinatra by providing a simple DSL to easily develop RESTful APIs. It has built-in support for common convent
How Authy Built A Fault-Tolerant Two-Factor Authentication Service – On the heels of their newest product release, we sat down with Daniel Palacio, Founder of Authy, to talk about how they built their service.
On launching AngularJS 1.2: what we learned, what we’re changing – We learned a lot from launching 1.2. Here are our own notes on the 1.2 launch process, and what we'll be improving, in case you're curious too.
It can’t just be Big Data, it has to be Fast Data: Reactor 1.0 goes GA – I'm happy to announce that Reactor, a powerful foundational library for building reactive, fast data applications on the JVM has reached GA!
Arm yourself: The API wars are coming – The arms merchants of the cloud and a new wave of developers armed with APIs are going to cause massive technology disruption.
Eric Schmidt’s guide for converting to Android from iPhone – Eric Schmidt's guide for converting to Android from iPhone
Salesforce Making Business Software More Social – NYTimes.com – According to a senior engineer overseeing the project, however, applications running on Salesforce can now be quickly remodeled for any screen, adding and taking away features that might prove more or less useful on a mobile device.
Hands On With Google Glass 2: What’s New? – The second Explorer Edition of Google Glass is out—and we get our paws all over it.
How Node.js Got Big – How the wunderkind framework grew up, from the perspective of one of its earliest contributors.
What it takes to run Stack Overflow – Here’s what runs the Stack Exchange network in that data center
FastR: an implementation of the R language – FastR: an implementation of the R language

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 July 11th through July 26th

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Vinny

What’s New in Eucalyptus 3.3: AWS-compatible Private Clouds for Dev & QA – Review the latest AWS-compatible features in Eucalyptus 3.3, including Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch, and more.
Learn why Eucalyptus is the ideal solution for developing and testing your apps built for AWS and how hybrid usage between Eucalyptus and AWS will make Dev and QA more agile and productive
Services, Not Devices is the best way forward for Microsoft – The solution to the secular collapse of the PC market is not to seek to prop up Windows and force an integrated solution that no one is asking for; rather, the goal should be the exact opposite. Maximum effort should be focused on making Office, Server, and all the other products less subservient to Windows and more in line with consumer needs and the reality of computing in 2013.
OpenStack’s Future Depends on Embracing Amazon. Now – The time has come for the OpenStack community to choose a public cloud compatibility strategy that will position the project for dominance in the private and hybrid cloud markets.
Udacity Blog: New Course: The Design of Everyday Things – Design 101: The Design of Everyday Things is based upon the new edition of The Design of Everyday Things (revised and expanded: to be published in Fall 2013).
More Git and GitHub Secrets – This is the brand-new, action-packed sequel to the original Git and GitHub Secrets talk I did in 2012. For one, it has more emoji.
ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services (August Lilleaas’ blog) – This article describes how to use ZeroMQ for RPC calls to internal services. HTTP is the canonical choice for public facing services. But for RPC to internal services in systems composed of many small parts, you're probably better off using ZeroMQ instead
This Explains Everything: 192 Thinkers Each Select the Most Elegant Explanation of How the World Works | Brain Pickings – In 2012, the question Brockman posed, proposed by none other than Steven Pinker, was “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” The answers, representing an eclectic mix of 192 (alas, overwhelmingly male) minds spanning psychology, qu
Google and Microsoft spent a combined $3.4B on infrastructure last quarter — Tech News and Analysis – Microsoft invested $1.79 billion in “property and equipment” during its fiscal fourth quarter, while Google’s second quarter saw it invest $1.61 billion
Divshot 1.0: Visual Front-End Development for Bootstrap and Beyond – Today we are proud to take the wraps off of Divshot 1.0. This next stage of our visual HTML builder for Bootstrap (and Foundation, and Ratchet) is simple like a mockup tool, powerful like a text editor, and packs more new features than you can fit in a <marquee> tag.
Tableau takes its data-analysis software to the cloud – Tableau has gotten into the SaaS game with a cloud-based version of its popular analytics software. Called Tableau Online, it’s essentially the company’s server-based version delivered as a service.
Puppet Labs acquires Cloudsmith to ease devops’ automation burden – Puppet Labs is acquiring Cloudworks to make it easier for devops people to roll out software updates on servers configured exactly the way they should be, on premise or in the cloud.
Review: Puppet Enterprise 3.0 pulls more strings – Version 3.0 of Puppet Labs' configuration automation tool shines with speed boosts, orchestration improvements, and deeper support for Windows servers
The future of Linux: Evolving everywhere | Open Source Software – InfoWorld – Cemented as a cornerstone of IT, the open source OS presses on in the face of challenges to its ethos and technical prowess
Why Microsoft’s reorganization is a bad idea – In my (very-biased) opinion, I believe collaboration is fundamentally broken at Microsoft. It is all about politics, not great outcomes, and that is absolute death in a functional organization, which has nothing but collaboration to hold together cross-fun
The Great Gatsby Curve: Inequality and the End of Upward Mobility – Is the American economic system fundamentally unequal, perpetuating income inequality and stymieing upward economic mobility? Or do families — by virtue of their differing genes and values — reproduce income inequality?
Using Information About Our Network to Remove Monitoring Noise – In cases like this we need to make our monitoring system more aware of the dependencies exist between these checks so that we can eliminate the noise. To do so we use a number of open source technologies:
Do Things that Don’t Scale – Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got elec
Why mobile web apps are slow | Sealed Abstract – this is the most complete and comprehensive treatment of the idea that many iOS developers have–that mobile web apps are slow and will continue to be slow for the forseeable future.
One big threat to cybersecurity: IT geeks can’t talk to management – Quartz – A new report on the state of risk-based cybersecurity management helps explain why IT employees and their corporate bosses don’t see eye to eye about hacking and other computer-based threats.
The report, titled “Are Security Metrics Too Complicated for Management?” is the latest installment of an ongoing series by Tripwire and the Ponemon Institute.
Minified.js – A Truly Lightweight JavaScript Library – Minified.js is a client-side JavaScript library, comparable to jQuery and MooTools in scope. Its features include DOM manipulation, animation, events, cookies and HTTP requests.
Hibernate adds OSGi Support – Hibernate, the popular Java ORM implementation, has recently added OSGi support, enabling Hibernate to be used both as a standalone Jar and also in an OSGi runtime
Why is nobody using SSL client certificates? – In the current state, this excellent idea is rendered completely useless by the awful usability and the completely detached nature: This is a browser feature. It's browser dependent without a way for the sites to control it – to guide users through steps.
Do the right thing, Wait to get fired – But greatness rarely happens by following rules, process and structure. That is why companies also want to find employees ready to take risks, make decisions, try new things, move fast and even break things.
Three big takeaways from the Microsoft reorg | CITEworld – Our new strategy will put us right at the intersection of the consumerization of IT and the evolving needs of the enterprise customer, delivering the devices that employees want and the productivity, security and control that IT managers need.
Top 10 Ext JS Development Practices to Avoid | Blog | Sencha – Based on a review of our work over the last few years, we came up with this list of the top 10 development practices we recommend you avoid in your Ext JS apps.

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 19th through April 26th

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Vinny

Heavy use of herbicide Roundup linked to health dangers-U.S. study | Reuters – Heavy use of the world's most popular herbicide, Roundup, could be linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson's, infertility and cancers, according to a new study.
Quantitative Finance Reading List – QuantStart – I've tried to list as many great quantitative finance books as I can. The lists cover general quant finance, careers guides, interview prep, quant trading, mathematics, numerical methods and programming in C++, Python, Excel, MatLab and R.
GE to pour $105M into EMC and VMware’s Pivotal Initiative — Tech News and Analysis – The Pivotal Initiative, the big cloud and big data startup backed by parents EMC and VMware, now has another big, scary backer: General Electric is ponying up $105 million for a 10 percent stake in the company.
The economics behind Amazon’s possible set-top box gambit | Internet & Media – CNET News – A Wedbush Securities analyst believes the opportunity could be huge if the retail giant gives away its Amazon Instant Video service for a year to consumers who buy a set-top box.
Galaxy S4 Crams in More Software, Some of It Good – NYTimes.com – For everyone else, the S4 may be buggy in spots and laden with not-quite-there features. But the basics are excellent; this phone is still a fast, bright, handsome pocket rocket. It easily earns its place as a successor to the Galaxy S3 and a rival to the
Gigabit Wi-Fi: Difference Engine: Unplugging the cables | The Economist – The promise is that, once the wrinkles have been ironed out, 60 gigahertz Wi-Fi could be an even bigger driver of innovation in the years ahead than the original 2.4-gigahertz Wi-Fi was in its day
Atlassian – Git Flow Comes to Java – Git Flow is a branching and merging model introduced by Vincent Driessen that provides a little bit of structure to your development workflow.
Create ipa in Sencha Touch 2 – A guide to Sencha Touch native packaging iOS – Using sencha touch 2 you can create web applications that look like native. You can host application in your server and run in webkit enabled browser, either in smartPhone or PC. Native packaging lets you export web app as ipa for iOS or apk for android (lets you Create ipa in Sencha Touch). You can then use these packages to submit in app store or play store.
Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything – Harvard Business Review – In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. Most important, I’ll explain how, in combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new entrepreneurial economy.
IBM buys UrbanCode for its devops chops — Tech News and Analysis – If there was any doubt that devops — the practice of getting development and operations teams to work together to design and deploy software fast, here’s more evidence: IBM is buying UrbanCode.
Make Your UI More Responsive with HTML5 Web Workers – Web workers can be a very useful and empowering feature but they do have some limitations. All communication into and out of your web workers is done by passing in and out data in the form of messages. All data is passed by value meaning that any object r
Diving into AngularJS | Float Left – These are just my initial thoughts after playing with the framework for a day and maybe I’ll change my mind after I’ve used it more extensively but right now I’m loving Angular and can’t see myself choosing Backbone the next time I start a big front end JS
A multi-part series on how to test Sencha Touch apps using Jasmine and Siesta – A multi-part series of articles on how to test Sencha Touch applications. It uses Jasmine for unit testing and Siesta for integration testing.
Tabris 1.0: Cross-platform Mobile Development in Java – After three years in development, EclipseSource has released Tabris 1.0, a cross-platform Java mobile development framework for iOS and Android. Tabris is targeted at enterprises, and unlike other mobile solutions out there it uses a different approach:

Links for March 29th through April 2nd

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Vinny

SEC Says Companies Can Use Social Media to Alert Investors – WSJ.com <AMEN!!!> – The Securities and Exchange Commission gave explicit permission for companies to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook FB -0.43% to announce key information, so long as investors have been alerted about which sites will be used to disseminate such it.
Why China Is Reading Your Email – WSJ.com – Beijing's cyber attacks are rooted in military strategy, says one of America's foremost experts. The best way to combat them is for the U.S. to go on the cyber offensive too.
Database test data generator – Fill your database with random test data! – Generate test data for your database – Quick recipes to test real applications with random data
Performance Testing Java Applications – This talk explores when to start performance testing, how to avoid the common pitfalls, how to profile when the results cause your team to pull a funny face, and what you can do about that funny face. Specific issues to Java and managed runtimes in general
MongoDB Gets Better Security, Text Search, Performance Improvements – What’s Next? – MongoDB 2.4 was recently released with new features such as Text Search, hash-based sharding, better geo-spatial capabilities with GeoJSON support and several performance and tooling improvements. We also discussed with 10gen about what’s next on the roadm
High Performance Messaging for Web-Based Trading Systems – This presentation will investigate WebSocket and how trading systems can be designed to leverage this new web protocol for reliability, security and performance for desktop, mobile, datacenter and cloud environments.
Pragmatic DevOps: Reproducing Yourself with Vagrant and Chef | zeroturnaround.com – This post provides an introductory look at why should you care about DevOps, what can we use to make it easy to get started and covered by hands-on guides. First we need to look at Virtualization and Provisioning.
Big Data Deep Dive Conclusion: The Future of Analytics – Furrier wraps up the Big Data Deep Dive by highlighting that everything generates data, and everybody will be affected by it thanks to the technology that is being developed by the data science community.
Why Use Twitter Bootstrap? Because I Said So – For me Twitter Bootstrap is a wonderful design tool because as a designer I don't have to focus so much on the UI components and focus more on the overall design of the app and its users. For web based applications and large data driven and heavy interactive websites it's a fantastic design tool
How to teach a Java EE app new NoSQL tricks – Sun dumped JavaEE Pet Store, but a bright developer modernized it, and we ported it to NoSQL with Couchbase
GWT Activity & Places: Order matters | techscouting through the java news – The GWT Activity and Places framework is a useful and common mechanism to use the browser history within your application allowing users to bookmark URLs and use the back button as a feature. To do so, it automatically updates the URL token when navigating

Links for June 15th through June 18th

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Vinny

Jekyll Github Blog Feeds Template – RSS 2.0 & Atom 1.0 Feed Templates For Jekyll-Based Blogs – Jekyll Github Blog Feeds Template – RSS 2.0 & Atom 1.0 Feed Templates For Jekyll-Based Blogs
Pondasee – Front-end Starter Kit combined with the power of SCSS & Compass – Pondasee is NOT a css framework, it is only our front-end starter kit combined with the power of SCSS & Compass to build a theme. If you want to use this project as your starting point, you need to know
Lessons from Amazon RDS on Bringing Existing Apps to the Cloud | GigaSpaces on Application Scalability | Open Source PaaS and More – I believe that the lessons from Amazon RDS could serve as a good reference on what that process could be. If you are considering moving more than one application into the cloud, you should consider the use of DevOps & PaaS as the means to deliver those steps
InfoQ: Visual Studio LightSwitch Adds HTML5/JavaScript Support – At this week's TechEd conference, Microsoft announced that they are adding HTML5 support to Visual Studio LightSwitch, the tool intended to simplify the development of custom database-driven business applications.
Mobello | HTML5 framework for building mobile web app – Mobello is high performance JavaScript framework for HTML5 mobile apps. You can build native-like HTML5 apps for smartphones and tablets with Mobello. Mobello is scalable and robust framework suited for fast and rich user interface.
JMeter Cloud Testing – BlazeMeter is a 100% JMeter-compatible, self-service web load testing cloud. Instantly generate massive stress tests with comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.
The Two Horsemen of the Enterprise Software Apocalypse – Businessweek – One of the first things Duffield and his Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri will tell you is that their company is not a revenge plot against Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Oracle
The Great Replacement: Microsoft, Yammer, and a New World in Enterprise Computing | PandoDaily – Hot companies such as Dropbox, Asana, and Atlassian will ascend to the throne, while the corpses of the old rulers – Microsoft, Oracle, SAP – will lie rotting in the gutter. The Great Replacement is beginning
OWASP Top 10 for JavaScript – A3: Broken Authentication and Session Management – In this post I'll describe how OWASP Top 10: A3 – Broken Authentication and Session Management applies to javascript based applications. Problems around broken authentication and session management can happen for a number of reasons. The end result is the same
Titan – A Highly Scalable, Distributed Graph Database – Titan is a distributed graph database optimized for storing and processing large-scale graphs within a multi-machine cluster.
PhoneGap apps powered by Database.com | Adobe Developer Connection – In this article we will explore the creation of mobile applications built using PhoneGap, with all data served and persisted using Database.com. Before we dive deeper into the technical details, let's review the terminology.
AngularJS — Superheroic JavaScript MVC Framework – AngularJS lets you write web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you extend HTML's syntax to express your application's components clearly and succinctly and lets use standard HTML as your template language. And it automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: devops

Links for November 22nd through November 30th

Links for July 11th through July 26th

Links for April 19th through April 26th

Links for March 29th through April 2nd