Links for May 5th through May 10th

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Daily del.icio.us for December 30th through January 5th

  • InfoQ: Deriving Agility from SOA and BPM – Ten Things that Separate the Winners from the Losers – In this presentation from SOA Symposium 2010, Manas Deb and Clemens Utschig-Utschig discuss how to derive business agility from SOA and BPM, motivations for agility, developing and nurturing agility, influencers and dependencies, how SOA and BPM enable agility, pitfalls and recommendations for organizational culture, and pitfalls and recommendations for business and technical architectures.
  • InfoQ: Introduction to Spring Roo – In this presentation from SpringOne/2GX 2010, Rod Johnson and Stefan Schmidt introduce Spring Roo, how to build a sample application with Spring Roo and SpringSource Tool Suite
  • InfoQ: Mobile HTML 5.0 – In this presentation from Strange Loop 2010, Michael Galpin discusses developing mobile web applications, HTML 5, WebKit, ACID 3, PhoneGap and Appcelerator, Viewports, geolocation, DOM storage, Web Workers, Web Sockets and server-side data pushing, Canvas, CSS 3.0, application cache, the Device API, touch events, video/audio, meta tags, and support for each of these on assorted mobile platforms.
  • Cisco’s Videoscape: Ready to Reinvent TV? : Online Video News « – What brings this strategy together is a new family of devices carrying the Videoscape brand that carry a common software architecture, which Cisco promises will deliver a consistent quality of experience across devices
  • Griffin Technology: Your Leader in Essentials for iPod, iPhone, and iPad – Crayola ColorStudio HD is an entirely new digital play experience, coupling a multi-activity drawing application for iPad (Crayola ColorStudio HD App) with a custom-built digital stylus, called Crayola iMarker
  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • aria2 – The next generation download utilty – aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source download utility operated in command-line. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 has built-in XML-RPC interface. You can manipulate aria2 via XML-RPC interface.
  • Our Top Ten HTML5 Wishes for 2011 – Sencha – Blog – 2010 has been a fantastic year for HTML5 – But there’s still a lot of work still to do. As the new year approaches, we’re taking a stab at a HTML5 wish list for 2011
  • The Best of JIRA 2010 – Similar to the GreenHopper and Confluence teams, 2010 was a very exciting year for the JIRA team. We doubled the size of the dev team – forcing us to move into a new building across the street – adding a new skillsets and evolving new roles
  • Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak vs HBase comparison :: KKovacs – In this light, here is a comparison of Cassandra, Mongodb, CouchDB, Redis, Riak and HBase:
  • Can Individuals hold values which are contrary to their employer’s view? – Leadership is a game of thinking where you are always looking for a better way to make your employees (followers) happy. If you are simply attempting to make them conform, you have lowered yourself to a manager
  • The busy manager’s view of Android mobile development – One of Android's greatest "pluses," from a Java team manager's view, is that 90% of the tooling, ecosystem, and experience is one that is familiar to the Java development team

Daily del.icio.us for February 8th through February 9th

Daily del.icio.us for February 8th through February 10th

Daily del.icio.us for Jun 06, 2007 through Jun 08, 2007

  • Maven – Security Annotation Framework – The Security Annotation Framework (SAF) is an instance-level access control framework driven by Java 5 annotations
  • Wbox HTTP testing tool – Wbox aims to help you having fun while testing HTTP related stuff. You can use it to perform many tasks, including Benchmarking, Web server and web application stressing, Testing virtual domains, compression, etc
  • filehippo.com Update Client – filehippo.com – The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to filehippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.
  • I’m moving to Finland 🙂 | Economist.com – But American workers have perhaps the most to feel aggrieved about: theirs is the only rich-world country that does not give any statutory paid holiday
  • Red Hat Magazine | Squid in 5 minutes – There are many great tools that Squid has to offer, but when I need to redirect http traffic to a caching server for performance increases or security, squid?s my pick. Squid has built in proxy and caching tools that are simple, yet effective.

Daily del.icio.us for Jun 02, 2007 through Jun 06, 2007

  • filehippo.com Update Client – filehippo.com – The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to filehippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.
  • I’m moving to Finland 🙂 | Economist.com – But American workers have perhaps the most to feel aggrieved about: theirs is the only rich-world country that does not give any statutory paid holiday
  • Red Hat Magazine | Squid in 5 minutes – There are many great tools that Squid has to offer, but when I need to redirect http traffic to a caching server for performance increases or security, squid?s my pick. Squid has built in proxy and caching tools that are simple, yet effective.
  • Coding Horror: The Best Code is No Code At All – The fundamental nature of coding is that our task, as programmers, is to recognize that every decision we make is a trade-off. To be a master programmer is to understand the nature of these trade-offs, and be conscious of them in everything we write
  • Google kicks offline Web apps into gear | CNET News.com – The goal of Google Gears is to create a single, standardized way to add offline capabilities to Web applications. The initial code is aimed at JavaScript Ajax-style Web applications. It runs on IE & Firefox on Windows, Mac OS and Linux
  • How to build the world’s best paper planes | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health – Get designs for the world’s best paper planes plus tips from aviation experts on how to make them fly faster and longer
  • Christophe Coenraets » Flex-based SQLAdmin for Google Gears – The demo is a Flex-based Sales Force Automation application that uses Gears to save data to a local SQLite database while offline, and automatically synchronizes back with the server when you reconnect to the network.

Amazon Unbox Video – More of the same

Amazon launched their latest offering entitled Unbox Video which is essentially a video (TV shows, movies, etc) download to buy or rent service. Rumor is that Amazon rushed this out on Friday, September 8th to beat some super secret announcement coming from Apple later next week.

Amazon Unbox Video

The Unbox video service doesn’t offer anything new and is in fact more of the same. I can buy a movie but I can't burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV. Media center PC's are exceptions if you have a Media Center PC hooked up to your TV or are using something like Media Center Extender to broadcast the output to a TV. The videos that you download from Amazon are DRM'd Windows Media (WMV) files and so you cannot put in on your video iPod. Apple essentially works the same way with their DRM but you since they control the mobile music and video player market; it's less of an issue. I'm guessing you've probably already got the sense that Unbox video is only for Windows and you would be right. No MAC or Linux support at this time.

There are 2 new concepts introduced that set Amazon Unbox video apart from iTunes and other similar services. To my knowledge, Amazon is the only one that will let you rent a movie by downloading it to your computer. You have 30 days to watch it and 24 hrs to complete watching it before the video is automatically deleted. I know Netflix is working on a download-n-rent but I don't believe that's available at this moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Another concept that I consider a move in the right direction is the concept of the Media Library. Everything you buy or rent is in your Media Library on Amazon and so you can buy an item on 1 machine and download to watch it on another registered machine. Both machines must have the Unbox video player and be registered on Amazon as your machines. As an experiment, I bought a TV show on my laptop and downloaded it. I then copied the video over to my desktop and dropped it the directory where Amazon would expect its videos to reside. The Unbox player didn't see and I wasn't able to play it directly without downloading it from my Media Library to the desktop. The video player was smart enough to realize that the file was already there and started playing in seconds after it marked the video as downloaded on the desktop. The subtle point here is that if your computer crashes and you lose your purchased content, you will be able to download it from your Amazon Media Library. It would be interesting for Amazon to make this a paid-service and use their S3 service to automatically back-up your purchased content for you.

The video quality of the TV shows that I purchased was good and the sound was fine as well. I guess a true test would be to buy a widescreen movie and see if the Dolby 5.1 surround-sound works as advertised. All in all, the video service is nice but nothing earth shattering and left me wanting more. Another major issue with this offering is the licensing agreement that you agree to as part of the software installation and it requires you to apply all patches from Amazon whether you want them or not and Amazon can delete your movies if you uninstall their video player. Yikes! Doesn't like a lot like that Amazon we know and love, does it? More information at the uninnovate blog and CNet.

Why is it so hard to come up with a video service where I can buy a movie and burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV? I hate DRM but I understand the need to protect copyrights but there has to be a way to protect content and allow me as the purchaser fair-use of that purchased piece of content. I guess the key here is purchase – I am paying for something. Don't put limitations on my personal usage of that. Anyone that can produce a service that allows that will eat everyone's lunch. I hope Apple or Netflix or YouTube or dozen of the other YouTube clones/wannabe's out there come up with a way to legally distribute video content but allow the purchaser some flexibility on where they can view that piece of content. It would also be great if they could include some future-proofing on your purchase and so if you bought 2nd season of The Office with some proprietary DRM, you could exchange or upgrade it for any future format that's different without having to repurchase the movie all over again. Ah to dream…..