Links for April 9th through April 15th

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Vinny

The Netflix Tech Blog: HTML5 Video at Netflix – Today, we’re excited to talk about proposed extensions to HTML5 video that enable playback of premium video content on the web.
Scaling Pinterest – From 0 to 10s of Billions of Page Views a Month in Two Years – Architecture is doing the right thing when growth can be handled by adding more of the same stuff. You want to be able to scale by throwing money at a problem which means throwing more boxes at a problem as you need them. If you are architecture can do that, then you’re golden.
Mobile hybrid frameworks are not all alike There are actually two flavors of hybrid-ness — hybrid-web and hybrid-native. Comparing PhoneGap and Marmalade shows the difference. – PhoneGap and the rest of the hybrid-web frameworks are good at producing informational apps. These apps can look beautiful and certainly can have some compelling features like tight integration with social networks and geo-tracking, for example. But they’re inadequate for games and still lack a rich user experience when compared to more native apps like Flipboard or AngryBirds.
Apple’s Dominance, in One Chart – Corporate Intelligence – WSJ – On the left, share of global handset sales by unit. In the middle, revenues for the industry. On the right, profits. There is very little money to be made in being anything but Apple or Samsung right now.
Kaggle: Go from Big Data to Big Analytics – Go from Big Data to Big Analytics – 88,044 of the world's best data scientists working on your problem.
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design – As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)
How to work with software engineers – by Ken Norton #humor – today I will share with you my Ten-Step Plan for Working With Engineers. Or more to the point: how to make engineers do what you tell them to do.
High Frequency and Algorithmic trading, research and design – HFT is a small project with a big ambition. We aim to build the worlds best algorithmic trading platform using the best off-the-shelf open source technology stack to be found. And all of this on a tight budget.
Hypercritical: Code Hard or Go Home – Given these graphs, and knowing the history between Apple and Google over the past decade, one of two things seemed inevitable: either Google was going to become the new de facto “owner” of WebKit development, or it was going to create its own fork of WebK
Software Leadership #4: Slow Down to Speed Up – Building a quality-focused team isn't easy. But creating a culture that slows down to do the right thing, while simultaneously moving fast, provides an enormous competetive advantage. It's not as common as you might think.
Groovy & Grails for Java Developers – Peter Ledbrook shows how Groovy can be useful for writing scripts, unit tests or builds for Spring projects and how Grails simplifies web application development.
Re-imagining the Browser with AngularJS – Miško Hevery demoes using AngularJS to create dynamic web applications using reusable components.
Cisco taps Microsoft’s Cloud OS for new datacenter portfolio | ZDNet – Cisco and Microsoft have teamed up on a series of new datacenter ventures designed to simplify cloud deployments. Based on Microsoft's Cloud OS, the suite of solutions rely on the combination of Cisco's Unified Data Center architecture with Microsoft's Fa
15 Programming Skills Most Coveted By Employers – ReadWrite – So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for such data, but its very nature makes Indeed.com an ideal place to look. The job search site aggregates more than 16 million listings from a wide range of sources, so it's fairly comprehensive.
Tutorial: How to make an offline HTML5 web app, FT style | FT Labs – n this tutorial we will build two versions of an offline website in order to demonstrate how to add functionality to an existing offline website in such a way that existing users won’t get left behind using an old version.
Objective-C’s dip in popularity tied to decline in iPad and iPhone | Application Development – InfoWorld – Objective-C, best known as the programming language used for building applications to run on Apple's popular iPad and iPhone devices, is beginning to level off in popularity, one monthly assessment of languages reports
Appcache Facts – The application cache is a poorly understood part of the HTML5 specification with a lot of potential. Let's get rid of some of the confusion and make the web a faster place.
Introducing the OpenStack Activity Board » The OpenStack Blog – I am pleased to announce that a beta release of the OpenStack Activity Board (beta) is now live. The development Activity Board announced few months ago provides a visual overview of all the OpenStack public activity of community members across multiple dimensions: contributors and organizations, projects and tools
Key Insights from Cisco’s Latest Research on the “Network Software Evolution” – So to minimize confusion, for a new study conducted by Cisco we decided to come up with an all-encompassing term to summarize all of the above ? the Network Software Evolution (NSE).
Sencha Touch 2.2 RC Notes – I’ve spent the last couple of days porting apps over to 2.2 RC. This post is about the issues I’ve come across, and some general thoughts on the framework’s changes.
IntelliJ IDEA :: Out-of-the-box IDE for Spring Development – IntelliJ IDEA brings outstanding code assistance and productivity-boosting features for development Spring applications with Web Services, Data JPA, Security, Web Flow, MVC, AOP, Roo, Integration and Dynamic Modules.
Getting Started with Android Development – IntelliJ IDEA – Confluence – An Android application is a Java program written against the Java SDK and Android SDK. An integrated development environment (IDE) for any kind of Java applications, IntelliJ IDEA automates and streamlines all required steps that go from writing the source
We need a data democracy, not a data dictatorship – There are few companies that helped spur the democratization of data over the past few years more than Tableau. It has become the face of the next-generation business intelligence software thanks to its ease of use and focus on appealing visualization, and its free public software has found avid users even among relative data novices like myself.

Daily del.icio.us for September 27th through October 1st

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Vinny

Amazon Web Services – The new site offers better navigation and easier access to the content related to each service. All of the relevant options and links are available in a series of convenient pull-down menus. It is now much easier to find AWS news, events, and media coverage. Dedicated sections on the right side provide convenient access to information of interest to developers (including the once elusive AMI directory) and to business managers
Amazon launches pre-emptive strike against Microsoft’s planned cloud platform | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com – Amazon announced that it plans to offer developers this fall the ability to run Windows Server or SQL Server via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to the Amazon Web Services site, “the ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability.”
Start-Ups Mine Database Field — Nimble Software Helps Make Sense Of Information Tide Business Innovation – Most databases are based on technology that originated 30 years ago. But change is in the air.
A mob of start-ups have been developing variants of the software, which provides the equivalent of filing cabinets for corporate information. Customers say the offerings are generating faster answers to questions that require sifting through huge volumes of business information.
Greenplum’s petabyte-scale database supports data warehouses, bi databases, and the data warehouse appliance with MapReduce – Greenplum is redefining the database for Petabyte-scale analytics at breakthrough speeds with MapReduce. Gain competitive advantage and extreme scalability at a lower cost, by managing all of your data on commodity hardware running the Greenplum database
The Singapore Grand Prix – The Big Picture – Boston.com – Formula One Racing held its 800th race on Sunday in Singapore,with the Singapore Grand Prix – also the first Formula One race held at night. Organizers built, then lined a 5 kilometer track with over 1,600 lamps, said to be four times brighter than those used at football stadiums.
Favre’s 6 TDs lead Jets past Cardinals 56-35 – NFL – Yahoo! Sports – Brett Favre set a career high and tied Joe Namath’s Jets mark with six touchdown passes, including three to Laveranues Coles, and New York took advantage of a series of mistakes by Arizona in a big second quarter before holding on to beat the Cardinals 56-35 on Sunday
Barack at the Debate in Oxford, MS 9-26-2008 – a set on Flickr – Candid behind-the-scenes photos from Obama campaign photographer David Katz (via John Gruber and the Daring Fireball)
Hole in Adobe software allows free movie downloads – Yahoo! News – A security hole in Adobe Systems Inc software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com Inc's video streaming service
Mini-Microsoft: Compensatory Arrangements of Certain (Microsoft) Officers – First SPSA. Now this. Microsoft is dying from the inside, and the folks sucking it dry have zero motivation to change things. It's working out pretty damn well for them.
Obsessable: Your personal technology guide. – Obsessable covers the latest in the world of technology, including cell phones, cameras, and HDTVs — obsessively, of course.

Daily del.icio.us for May 4th through May 7th

Posted on May 7, 2008 by Vinny

People Over Process » A Roadmap for JavaFX – Adobe’s Beat Them By a Week, But So What? – JavaOne 2008 – The fact that Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, and others are all racing towards the same end should be encouraging, not frustrating. Getting preempted by a week with, basically, the same sort of announcement is meaningless in the grand scheme of things
JavaFX’s day in the Sun | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com – JavaFX has a LONG way to go especially when you look at Adobe’s RIA strengths and Microsoft’s very enthusiastic entry into the space. But I think JavaFX will be a breath of fresh air for people and will help in expanding the RIA footprint further
Java platform to get modularity, OSGi support | InfoWorld | News | 2008-05-07 | By Paul Krill – Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
Dell Expands Virtualization Offerings – Dell is adding to its virtualization portfolio by embedding Citrix XenServer into its hardware and expanding its services for customers investing in the technology.
Andy Kessler: WSJ: The War for the Web – The continuing battle between Microsoft and Google will mean fierce competition – adding features, building data centers, cutting deals and spending money on speed and customer convenience
Archiva – The Build Artifact Repository Manager – Apache Archiva is an extensible repository management software that helps taking care of your own personal or enterprise-wide build artifact repository. It is the perfect companion for build tools such as Maven, Continuum, and ANT.
JavaOne 2008: Day One (So Far) – JavaOne 2008 Day One has started, of course, and it's an interesting show, with a lot of undercurrents about JavaFX (as expected) and multimedia – and mobile applications. There's a lot more, of course, and this thread is meant for people to add comments
The day the music died [dive into mark] – This is a letter I sent to my father to explain what it means that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music. Tech issues like this often bubble up into the media that he reads, but they are rarely explained well. My father assumes I have an opinion on s
Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 – GigaOM – Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now. Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.
Julien Lecomte’s Blog » JavaScript: The Good Parts – In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas extensively describes that good subset of the JavaScript language, occasionally warning to avoid the bad. I consider Douglas’ book a must-buy for anybody who’s serious about developing professional apps for the w

iTunes & Ehcache – You figure it out

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Vinny

Thanks to Greg Luck, I discovered something new in iTunes called My iTunes that lets you export your purchases out as RSS or as a widget to display on your website. Check out a sample of my purchases below – With DRM free music from Amazon, I’m not buying anything from iTunes that’s available on Amazon. By the way, Greg Luck is one of the lead developers of Ehcache, which IMHO is the best and most widely used Java distributed caching framework.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/wa/widget?type=1&sf=143441

Daily del.icio.us for Nov 02 through Nov 23, 2007

Posted on November 24, 2007 by Vinny

InfoQ: Prototype and Script.aculo.us: spending weekends at home again – Script.aculo.us creator Thomas Fuchs gives an overview about the concepts and functionality of both Prototype and the script.aculo.us libraries, provides advice on what and what not to expect and gives pointers and hints on how to get started.
Enterprise Java Community: Spring Loaded Observer Pattern – This article describes an easy process of implementing the observer pattern in the Spring framework
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark] – An analysis of the Amazon Kindle only as Mark Pilgrim or maybe John Gruber can do:) Must read – very thought provoking
InfoQ: Article: What’s New in Spring 2.5: Part 1: Annotation-Based Configuration – The newly released Spring 2.5 features annotation-driven dependency injection, auto-detection of Spring components on the classpath using annotations rather than XML for metadata, annotation support for lifecycle methods, a new web controller model for ma
InfoQ: DDD: putting the model to work – This talk will outline some of the foundations of domain-driven design:How models are chosen and evaluated;How multiple models coexist;How the patterns help avoid the common pitfalls, such as overly interconnected models;How developers and domain experts
JavaRanch Journal – November 2007 Volume 6 Issue 2 – Spring offers a few helper classes to do some scheduling in your app. In Spring 2.0, both the JDK’s Timer objects and the OpenSymphony Quartz Scheduler are supported. Quartz is an open source job scheduling system that can be easily used with Spring.
What is the Google Collections Library? – Kevin Bourrillion & Jared Levy are the two primary creators of the Google Collections Library, which aims to provide an extension to the Java Collections Framework. They discuss what the library is all about, its genesis, and how it will be useful to you.
InfoQ: Scrum and XP from the Trenches – The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP
InfoQ: Starting Struts 2 – Struts2 is the latest manifestation of the popular Struts Java web application framework. Like its predecessor, its goals are to make web application development faster, easier and more productive than ever before.
InfoQ: Homer’s Odyssey or My Life as an Agile Consultant – In this offbeat presentation from Agile2006, Jean Tabaka compares impediments and obstacles encountered by an Agile mentor with those detailed in Homer’s classic.
TSS Video: Christian Bauer on JBoss Seam – In this presentation, Christian Bauer discusses how JBoss Seam simplifies the handling of stateful conversations, multi-window operations and concurrent, fine-grained Ajax requests & integrates Facelets, Hibernate, jBPM, Drools, Groovy, iText and Lucene.
Seam 2.0 has been released – Seam 2.0 was released this week. JBoss Seam is a powerful new application framework for building next generation Web 2.0 applications by ntegrating Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), EJB3, Java Portlets and BPM.
Asual | SWFAddress – Deep linking for Flash and Ajax – SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state.
Adobe – Developer Center : Designing for Flex ? Part 5: Designing content displays – Content displays are the key element of Flex application design. Application chrome exists only to support these displays, if indeed it must exist at all.
Henrik Stahl’s Blog: BEA videos on YouTube – There are some short clips covering BEA technologies on YouTube. My favorite is the Predictable Java video. I wish my coffee machine was that well-behaved!
Hybridizing HTML – How to create Flex forms within HTML pages to easily achieve cross-browser and cross-platform functionality.
alphaWorks : IBM Personal Presenter : Overview – A simple, serverless means of producing and distributing rich media content consisting of video, audio, and slides from the originator’s computer to multiple clients.
Interface21 Team Blog » The Spring Web Flow 2.0 Vision – The goal of 2.0 is to evolve Spring Web Flow into a complete controller engine capable of handling all types of user interactions, stateless and stateful alike, with support for multiple view technologies and asynchronous event handling (Ajax) natively
gwt-ext – Google Code – GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more
xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project – An XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 Renderer – The Flying Saucer team announces Release 8pre1 of the Flying Saucer 100% Java XHTML+CSS renderer, including support for table pagination, margin boxes, running elements, named pages, and more:
It’s Only Software » 5 Minute Guide to Spring and JMX – I recently augmented a Spring-based project to expose some of the Spring-managed beans via JMX. Spring makes this very easy, and even if you?ve never used JMX before, this quick tutorial will let you set up your Spring beans to be viewed (and edited!) t
Android’s SDK Now Available – Android, Google’s mobile platform, is finally open to the developers. Now you can download the SDK and start to develop great applications in Java. Google launched a competition that offers $10 million awards for the most interesting apps
Microsoft Sync Framework != Google Gears (even if the press wants to make it look that way) on Dion Almaer’s Blog – saw Microsoft?s Answer to Google Gears popup in my news feed, along with Mary Jo?s piece itself: Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform.
Upgrading to Prototype 1.6: real world examples – Recently I have undertaken upgrading to Prototype 1.6.0. I will now show you some examples of what I?ve done, how I did it and why; you might find this writeup useful when doing the same in your application.

Daily del.icio.us for Apr 03, 2007

Posted on April 3, 2007 by Vinny

From Java EE security to Acegi – The right way to protect your Web applications – This article is an in-depth introduction and comparison of Java EE security and Acegi. They both offer a variety of security services to make application security programming easier. The declarative and annotation-based programming methodologies let devel
Microsoft Watch – Games & Consumer – What Apple DRM-Free Means to Microsoft – Apple will offer EMI music free of DRM for 30 cents more a track; album prices will remain the same. Apple makes the EMI catalog more attractive than other iTunes music in two ways: No DRM and higher encoding
BEA cites Java, availability in app server upgrade | InfoWorld | News | 2007-03-30 | By Paul Krill – WebLogic Server builds on Spring internally, said Rod Johnson, founder of Spring and CEO of Interface21. "The architecture that they’ve adopted, building on Spring, enables them to move to a situation where Spring components can be deployed natively to We
The Aquarium: GlassFish Components in BEA’s WebLogic Server 10.0 – BEA has released WebLogic Server 10.0, as a Technology Preview for their Java EE 5 support. BEA is using the GlassFish implementations for JAX-WS 2.0, and JAXB 2.0, which were part of GlassFish v1 UR1
The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Media Viewer – Tim Berners-Lee explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data.
JScrape – Simple Java & Xquery based HTML Scraping API – JScrape is a simple yet powerful java api for scraping (aka screen scraping) data from a web page using XQuery. This API makes it simple to pull data from other sources and maintain them in a simple way
Dev2Dev Editor’s Blog: WebLogic Server 10! WebLogic Portal 10 and Workshop for WebLogic 10 too! – BEA WebLogic Server 10, BEA WebLogic Portal 10 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 10 are all available now
Performance Research, Part 3: When the Cookie Crumbles – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This article, co-written by Patty Chi, is the third in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance
Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed! – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests – Yahoo! User Interface Blog – This is the first in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance.
Blogbody: IDEA Really is That Good – I consistently find myself trying to explain why IDEA is so good. This is my attempt to explain my favorite "features". I say "features" because many of these aren’t the type of bullet-point features you might see in a direct comparison (ie: "EJB3 Support

Amazon Unbox Video – More of the same

Posted on September 10, 2006 by Vinny

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.

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…..

No Vongo for me

Posted on January 5, 2006 by Vinny

Vongo is basically a video download service that provides movies on demand to personal computers and portable media devices. Vongo Membership allows members access to their movie library but any of the recent movies are considered pay-per-view and not accessible under your membership. So I sign up for the standard $9.99 plan that’s supposed to allow me to view, download any movie and 3 of the movies I searched for at random were pay-per-view – i.e. no free viewing. To view those movies, you pay $3.95. The free movies that you can download ‘expire’ after a finite (3-months?) amount of time and so you can’t keep them forever – You are licensing the movie not really purchasing them and that’s fine

So I download Vongo to see what it’s all about – Sign up, log in and start downloading movies. Every time I try to download a movie, it schedules the download for another time instead of downloading right away. After I got past that, I decided to try out the live Starz stream while I wait for the movie to download and I get the following lovely error message:

Vongo Error

That was it for me – I uninstalled the application and canceled my membership. I hate companies that make you call and talk to someone about canceling your membership. The web is good enough when you want to take my money but not good enough when I want a refund. The person on the phone was very polite and pleasant and I got my refund right away. And the final straw was the uninstaller – I try to uninstall the application and it dies as some file is locked because the player is still running in my task tray. Why is the uninstaller not smart enough to detect any running instances that would have to be killed before it can proceed? I guess I’ll wait for the Google Video announcement tomorrow at CES to see if their application is any better. As much as iTunes sucks, it still is a pretty decent platform for music and video.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: drm