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 December 27th through December 30th

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Vinny

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

Daily del.icio.us for April 2nd through April 3rd

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Vinny

As Big Data Takes Off, the Hadoop Wars Begin: Cloud Computing News « – It turns out "big data" isn’t just a buzzword, but a legitimate concern for companies across the board. The action is centered around Hadoop, the flagship technology for storing and processing large amounts of unstructured data.
SharePoint: Is It Worth Using as a Collaboration Tool? – In this post, I want to step back a bit and ask a more existential question: should you even be using SharePoint 2010 for your collaboration platform in the first place?
The RSA Hack: How They Did It – NYTimes.com – How did a hacker manage to infiltrate one of the world’s top computer-security companies? And could the data that was stolen be used to impair its SecurID products, which are used by 40 million businesses that are trying to keep their own networks safe from intruders?
Google mobile search gets redesigned results for stocks – When you search for your favorite stock ticker symbol on your smartphone, you'll be presented with a result page that can be seen to the left in the image above. It displays an interactive graph on a 'card', and you can switch the amount of time that the graph covers by simply tapping on the buttons below it.
Clever Title: "Intro to Scala for Java Programmers": slides, code, and links – Last week, I presented a talk titled "An Introduction to Scala for Java Programmers". I had a lot of fun making it, and I learned a ton. I thought it was interesting that the more I learned, the more I liked Scala.
JDK 7: The New Objects Class – The java.util.Objects class is new to JDK 7 and its Javadoc states that the class is "since 1.7" and describes the class as: "This class consists of static utility methods for operating on objects. These utilities include null-safe or null-tolerant methods for computing the hash code of an object, returning a string for an object, and comparing two objects."
What really happens when you navigate to a URL – In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL
The Freight Train That Is Android « abovethecrowd.com – This is the part that amazes me the most. I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to “win” in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics
kundera – JPA 1.0 Annotation based ORM library for the Cassandra database – The idea behind Kundera is to make working with Cassandra drop-dead simple and fun. Kundera does not reinvent the wheel by making another client library; rather it leverages the existing libraries and builds – on top of them – a wrap-around API to help developers do away with unnecessary boiler plate codes, and program a neater-and-cleaner code that reduces code-complexity and improves quality. And above all, improves productivity.
The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have. – The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have.
Cassandra gets ready for world domination and can MongoDB scale up like Cassandra? – After using Cassandra during development for the past 8 months my team and I made the decision to switch from Cassandra to MongoDB this morning. I thought I'd share some thoughts on why we did this and where Cassandra might benefit from improvement.

Daily del.icio.us for March 30th through April 2nd

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Vinny

Google mobile search gets redesigned results for stocks – When you search for your favorite stock ticker symbol on your smartphone, you'll be presented with a result page that can be seen to the left in the image above. It displays an interactive graph on a 'card', and you can switch the amount of time that the graph covers by simply tapping on the buttons below it.
Clever Title: "Intro to Scala for Java Programmers": slides, code, and links – Last week, I presented a talk titled "An Introduction to Scala for Java Programmers". I had a lot of fun making it, and I learned a ton. I thought it was interesting that the more I learned, the more I liked Scala.
JDK 7: The New Objects Class – The java.util.Objects class is new to JDK 7 and its Javadoc states that the class is "since 1.7" and describes the class as: "This class consists of static utility methods for operating on objects. These utilities include null-safe or null-tolerant methods for computing the hash code of an object, returning a string for an object, and comparing two objects."
What really happens when you navigate to a URL – In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL
The Freight Train That Is Android « abovethecrowd.com – This is the part that amazes me the most. I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to “win” in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics
kundera – JPA 1.0 Annotation based ORM library for the Cassandra database – The idea behind Kundera is to make working with Cassandra drop-dead simple and fun. Kundera does not reinvent the wheel by making another client library; rather it leverages the existing libraries and builds – on top of them – a wrap-around API to help developers do away with unnecessary boiler plate codes, and program a neater-and-cleaner code that reduces code-complexity and improves quality. And above all, improves productivity.
The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have. – The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have.
Cassandra gets ready for world domination and can MongoDB scale up like Cassandra? – After using Cassandra during development for the past 8 months my team and I made the decision to switch from Cassandra to MongoDB this morning. I thought I'd share some thoughts on why we did this and where Cassandra might benefit from improvement.
Google Web Toolkit Blog: Top Ten Reasons to use Google Plugin for Eclipse – So in no particular order, here are 10 reasons you should use Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE).
Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year – It's pretty amazing what can happen when a group of talented people who trust each other get together and decide to make something awesome.

Daily del.icio.us for March 17th through March 19th

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Vinny

PyCon 2011: How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped – PyCon US Videos – 2009, 2010, 2011 – blip.tv – This talk will give an overview of the first two years of Dropbox, the team formation, our early guiding principles and philosophies, what worked for us and what we learned while building the company and engineering infrastructure. It will also cover why Python was essential to the success of the project and the rough edges we had to overcome to make it our long term programming environment and runtime
High Scalability – High Scalability – 6 Lessons from Dropbox – One Million Files Saved Every 15 minutes – Dropbox saves one million files every 15 minutes, more tweets than even Twitterers tweet
Microsoft SQL Azure vs. Amazon RDS – DevelopMentor – There are two major differences between the Microsoft SQL Azure and Amazon RDS platforms: pricing and capabilities. If price is no object and the user wants full features and high performance, then RDS is the obvious choice
InfoQ: Adopting Apache Cassandra – Eben Hewitt introduces the Apache Cassandra project to those interested in getting a quick clear picture of what Cassandra is, what are its main features, what is the the data model used and the API.
codeartisan: RSA Public Key Cryptography in Java – Public key cryptography is a well-known concept, but for some reason the JCE (Java Cryptography Extensions) documentation doesn't at all make it clear how to interoperate with common public key formats such as those produced by openssl
Google Web Toolkit Blog: Update on GWT support for IE9 – In keeping with the GWT philosophy of making it possible to write no-compromise AJAX in any modern browser, GWT 2.3 (in progress) will support IE9
kryo.se: iodine (IP-over-DNS, IPv4 over DNS tunnel) – iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.
Shearing FireSheep with the Cloud | Stratum Security Blog – Quite simply, the solution I came up with was to create an EC2 instance with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server and setup OpenVPN and SideStep. This allows me to route all of my traffic over an SSL or SSH VPN to my EC2 instance and then out to the Internet.
Learn Scala the Fun Way: With Processing – Processing is a simple programming language for creating visualizations. It's meant to be easy for non-programmers to learn. Artists can use Processing to create generative at programs known as sketches
iPhone vs. Android – 45,000 Tests Prove Whose Browser is Faster | Blaze.io – Android’s browser is faster. MUCH faster. On average, Android 2.3 was a 52% faster than iPhone 4.3, with a median load time of 2.144 seconds vs. iPhone’s median load time of 3.254 seconds

Daily del.icio.us for July 13th through July 15th

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Vinny

Check Your JMeter – Now Version 2.4 | Javalobby – Today the Apache Jakarta subproject JMeter is releasing the next version of its pure Java desktop app, JMeter, which is designed to load test functional behavior and gauge performance. Features of the newly released JMeter 2.4 include JUnit 4 annotation support, JSR-223 test elements, and HTTPS session recording.
Scala 2.8.0 final | The Scala Programming Language – It is finally here!! After many, many months of hard work, the Scala team is truly happy to announce the new, much-awaited stable release of Scala! The all-new Scala 2.8.0 final distribution is ready
Scripting News: Apple’s brewing shitstorm – Apple is a company that desperately needs to grow up and wipe the smile off its face, and roll its sleeves up and start to appreciate that they're no longer the upstart, the underdog
DNS gains added measure of security starting today ( – Security ) – The 13 globally distributed server clusters — known within Internet engineering circles as the Root Zone – will begin cryptographically signing DNS look-ups today.
With Google as Partner, Verizon May Not Need iPhone – NYTimes.com – Verizon could decide that it does not actually need the iPhone, thanks to its deepening ties with Google.
Sencha Docs gives JavaDoc a Facelift – Sencha – Blog – Sencha Docs offers a fresh take on API documentation for Java. Rather than modifying or restyling JavaDoc, we decided to start from scratch and build a new user interface experience using the JavaDoc parser and Ext GWT. Since Ext GWT is designed to build rich internet applications, it was a great framework with which to build a modern user experience.
Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Increased 21 Percent in Second Quarter of 2010 – Worldwide PC shipments reached 82.9 million units in the second quarter of 2010, a 20.7 percent increase from the second quarter of 200
AppleInsider | Report: Apple’s iPad to copy iPhone in eating up lion’s share of profits – Despite selling a small 3% minority of the world's mobile phones, Apple has surpassed the earnings of RIM, Motorola, Nokia, HTC and Sony Ericsson combined, and is estimated to widen its lead in the future, according to Goldman Sachs research cited by the Financial Times
Survey: Oracle Not So Bad for Java and MySQL — Application Development Trends – The results of a survey, published this week by open-source business intelligence (B.I.) vendor Jaspersoft, seem to indicate that early concerns about the fate of Java and MySQL in the hands of Oracle have abated, at least for the present.
eTown Radio Show 1008 – Natalie Merchant / The Horse Flies – eTown celebrates the return one of the world’s most respected recording artists, Natalie Merchant. Backed by her band, Natalie shares both brand new tunes and beloved favorites
Java and security skills offer IT job security | Job search – InfoWorld – A recent survey by job-hunting site Dice.com found that the people who are hiring IT pros put Java/J2EE at the very top of their hiring criteria.

Daily del.icio.us for May 2nd through May 5th

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Vinny

Solving the Persistence Problem with Google AppEngine with SimpleDS – TheServerSide.com – SimpleDS provides a simple persistence framework for Google AppEngine that gets as little in the way as possible. It is barely a wrapper around Datastore APIs, providing mapping between Entity and Java classes
Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″ (Exclusive Screenshots) – We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.
The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash – Charlie’s Diary – I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new mark
InfoQ: Using DNS for REST Web Service Discovery – Service Discovery can be easily introduced to systems of RESTful Web services by leveraging standard DNS mechanisms as specified by DNS-SD. DNS based service discovery is readily available to anyone in any system environment given the ubiquitous availability of DNS nameserver and resolver implementations.
Lift – The Simply Functional Web Framework – Home – Lift is the only new framework in the last four years to offer fresh and innovative approaches to web development. It's not just some incremental improvements over the status quo, it redefines the state of the art
Interview With Lift Creator – On Foursquare, Scala, and Lift 2.0 | Javalobby – With the impending release of Lift 2.0, DZone contacted David Pollak, the creator of Lift, to talk about Scala, web development, Foursquare, and what to expect in Lift 2.0
Apple Sells One Million iPads – Apple® today announced that it sold its one millionth iPad™ on Friday, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. iPad users have already downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store and over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.
Chrome again beats Firefox in browser gain race – Computerworld – Chrome was the only browser to gain significant usage share last month, and it again trounced Firefox.
Novell and Red Hat prevail in user-interface patent case | Open Source – InfoWorld – Two open-source-software companies successfully thwart a patent infringement case
YouTube – President Obama and Jay Leno at White House Correspondents Dinner – President Obama and Jay Leno trade jokes at the 2010 White House Correspondents Association Dinner in Washington, D.C.

Daily del.icio.us for December 2nd through December 7th

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Vinny

Google Goggles ‘visual search’ arrives for Android | News | TechRadar UK – Google has announced a visual search application for Android phones called Google Goggles, allowing users to point their phone at anything, from buildings and landmarks to business cards and papers and search for it.
SpringSource, Oracle To Back Modular Eclipse Project for Java — Application Development Trends – The module-based design principles defined by the OSGi have emerged as the de facto means of componentizing enterprise Java, said Michael Coté, industry analyst at RedMonk
Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Public DNS – Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.
SpringFuse – Getting Started Tutorial – In this tutorial you are going to learn how to generate your first Java/Spring/Hibernate based project using Springfuse. All in all, you should not type more than 3 commands from your console to have your first project running.
InfoQ: Service Orientation Requires Data Orientation – In his follow-up post, Ash discuses practical approaches to data-orienting a service-oriented infrastructure. He outlines several prescriptive recommendations providing a holistic solution to a data integration problem for an enterprise:
InfoQ: Beginning an SOA Initiative – Ian Robinson on what organizational and social issues should be addressed when starting a new SOA project by identifying business capabilities using user stories, describing services and their contracts, and how to set up teams for delivery.
InfoQ: "SOA Governance" Revitalized – Miko Matsumura discusses why people are pursuing SOA, whether SOA is dead, what SOA Governance is, the relationship to SOA itself, how it differs from management, and how SOA differs from integration.
George Dawoud’s Blog: Java + Spring + MediaWiki = JAMWiki – JAMWiki is a Wiki engine implemented using Java/JSP that attempts to provide much of the functionality of MediaWiki. It can be run with or without a database and is designed to be fast and easy to set up.
Java Code generation for Spring, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Web Flow, JPA &Hibernate – Springfuse generates in a few seconds, Java Web applications that leverage Open Source technologies and standards. Springfuse uses the structure of your database as an entry point. The generation process is done in 3 easy steps.
The Disco Blog » Blog Archive » To EasyMock or to Mockito? – While I’m only scratching the surface of features available in both libraries, Mockito’s API is more in tuned with my way of thinking

OpenDNS Rocks

Posted on October 18, 2006 by Vinny

I first discovered OpenDNS on Chris Pirillio's blog – OpenDNS is a free service that is designed to make your Internet browsing faster, safer and smarter. And guess what - it does that. OpenDNS is essentially a set of massive distributed DNS caches that allow faster name resolution and yet obey the TTL rules for each domain. They have a very fast geographically distributed network of DNS caches that allow for blazingly fast lookup times which allows for faster connections to those sites. The traditional ISP DNS lookup connects to one of the root name servers which in turn send you to the name server for the top-level domain which will then probably get you to the name-server that is hosting the DNS entry for the site you are trying to connect to. OpenDNS skips all of that and return the IP address of the site you are attempting a connection two in a single request.

The safer surfing part comes into play with the phishing filter built into OpenDNS. OpenDNS intercepts connections against known phishing sites, based on network analysis and feeds from other network operators including their new venture PhishTank. PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others submissions.

The smarter bit comes in the typo-correction feature of OpenDNS. So if you're going to google.com and misspell Google, OpenDNS first attempts to correct the typo and get you to the right site instead of the squatter sites that are just waiting for that misspelling to land you on their site.

I have been using OpenDNS for months now since I first read Chris's blog entry about OpenDNS and have been extremely happy with the free service. Can't beat the price – I can't really tell if my surfing is any faster but cognitively I know it is and that makes me happy. 🙂

Another thing that really stands out about OpenDNS is the service - I've had two occasions where I've contacted support to check on some DNS changes I made to move my domains from one hosting vendor to another and I got an almost immediate response both times. John Roberts, who is the VP of Product Development responded back in minutes to my query on both occasions and helped me by force clearing the cached entries for my domain.

Anyone and everyone can start using OpenDNS to surf smarter, faster and safer. Check out their Getting Started page for more information on how to change your router or computer DNS settings to start using OpenDNS.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: dns