Links for December 29th through January 8th

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Vinny

Nuance DragonDrive – Voice Recognition Optimized for Automobiles – Dragon Drive offers drivers personalized access to content and services in the car through deep voice integration, while ensuring seamless connectivity and end-to-end delivery of all services.
Leverage the Sencha Touch Class System and more in your Node.js app – For those of you who love Sencha Touch as much as we do, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Touch Node – a Node.js module that will enable you to leverage your knowledge on the back-end as well as the client.
BOWER: A package manager for the web – yum/apt-get for the web – Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.
The Little Book Of Modern Front-end Tooling #nodejs – A free open-source book introducing you to the world of tooling for modern web applications.
cue.language – Java library that provides the basic natural-language processing capabilities – A small Java library for simple text analysis – counting strings, identifying languages, and removing stop words.
Open Source REST API for Mobile Enterprise Application Development – Backend as a service (BaaS) – Our REST API with JSON objects provides the perfect backend for mobile applications written in either HTML5 or native client technologies like iOS, Windows 8, and Android. More backend-as-a-service
15 hot programming trends — and 15 going cold – What follows is a list of what's hot — and what's not — among today's programmers. Not everyone will agree with what's A-listed, what's D-listed, and what's been left out. But that's what makes programming an endlessly fascinating profession: rapid change, passionate debate, sudden comebacks.
Red Hat and the CentOS Project Join Forces to Speed Open Source Innovation – Red Hat, Inc, (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and the CentOS Project today announced they are joining forces to build a new CentOS, capable of driving forward development and adoption of next-generation open source techn
The Four Stages of Disruption – While I was speaking with some entrepreneurs recently on the topic, the question kept coming up: “If we’re so aware of disruption, then why do successful products (or companies) keep getting disrupted?”
Using WebStorm to maintain a Jekyll site – I've only covered a few features of WebStorm, the ones that I've found I'm using mostly on a daily basis to work with Jekyll / GitHub pages, but obviously as Web IDE it supports a ton of other things such as JavaScript, LESS, CSS, et al.
The Science of Choosing EC2 Reserved Instances – In this talk, Cloudability VP of Product Development Toban Zolman walks you through the most common scenarios for RIs, shows you how to make the best possible decisions for RI purchases, and how to significantly reduce the time needed to make those decisio
7 Ways to be a Better Programmer in 2014 – Programming – Coders make resolutions, no? If your to-do-better list is still empty, consider these ideas from other programmers to put to use in the New Year. Even the smartest folks have room to grow. The following excerpts are contained in the book 97 Things Every Pro
How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood – To understand how people look for movies, the video service created 76,897 micro-genres. We took the genre descriptions, broke them down to their key words, … and built our own new-genre generator.
GWT.create Conference – Presentation Slides – Presentation Slides from the largest event about GWT in 2013 with 2 days and more than 60 presentations.
Why I’m interested in Bitcoin – Chris Dixon – I believe the only way the technology industry can offer meaningfully improved financial services is by building new services that don’t depend on incumbent companies. Bitcoin is a serious proposal for dramatically improving the payments industry. There a
Koa – next generation web framework for node.js – Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, which aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs.
Jackson – Unmarshall to Collection/Array – Mapping json arrays to java collections is one of the more common tasks that Jackson is used for, and these solutions are vital to get to a correct, type-safe mapping.
Enterprise In 2013: Enterprise Ascends Into The Cloud – Enterprises ascend, spies abound and drones descend. A look back at the the enterprise in 2013.
Why OpenStack Needs Red Hat – ReadWrite – OpenStack has a lot going for it, but not leadership. Red Hat may change this.
The Decline of IE and Firefox – Windows and IE are dying under the assault of iPads and other tablets from the left, and Chromebooks from the right. This is not surprising, or even news to people who spend a lot of time in the tech world. What surprised me recently was how precipitous th
Ketosis – advantaged or misunderstood state? – In part I of this post I will see to it (assuming you read it) that you’ll know more about ketosis than just about anyone, including your doctor or the majority of “experts” out there writing about this topic.

Links for December 9th through December 11th

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Vinny

Docker for the Fedora Project: an interview with Alexander Larsson | opensource.com – Recently, Red Hat and Docker announced they'd be working together on several projects. One of them is packaging Docker for the Fedora Project: a Red Hat sponsored, volunteer-driven, rock-solid Linux operating system
Docker will change everything #iagreecompletely – Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere
IntelliJ IDEA 13 Brings a Full Bag of Goodies to Android Developers – At JetBrains we’re always listening to developers, and Android developers are no exception. Based on this tight feedback loop, we’ve made a long list of changes to our award-winning IDE which will hopefully make development of Android apps an even bigger p
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
Mobile dev chops? Cloud infrastructure skills? You’re hired! – Hiring more contractors than full-time staff, placing data center and cloud expertise over more conventional IT skills, emphasizing mobile rather than desktop development, and more fine-grained ways to find the right people for the right jobs — these are
Cause for hope: Windows 8 gets the heave-ho in the next wave of updates – Windows might actually become relevant again if rumors about the next version(s) of Windows are to be believed
The same app 4 times: PHP vs Python vs Ruby vs Clojure – Here's a toy program I wrote implemented in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure. I hope it's helpful for someone who knows at least one of those and wants to learn another.
Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees – Evernote’s CTO gave an exclusive talk at the recent First Round CTO Summit about security and the right way for growing startups to stay safe without needlessly expending valuable resources.
HotSpot JVM garbage collection options cheat sheet (v3) – HotSpot JVM options cheatsheet
websocketd – Turn any application that uses STDIO/STDOUT into a WebSocket server – websocketd is a small command line tool that will wrap an existing command line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket. It provides a quick mechanism for allowing web-applications to interact with existing command line tools.
Fast-growing IT automation startup Opscode raises $32M, changes name to Chef – In fact, a large percentage of companies utilizing Amazon Web Services also are turning to Chef as an "onramp" to the cloud. Essentially, it allows those organizations to ramp up more quickly with cloud services. “Chef is actually extremely simpatico with
Announcing Suro: Backbone of Netflix’s Data Pipeline – Suro, which we are proud to announce as our latest offering as part of the NetflixOSS family, serves as the backbone of our data pipeline. It consists of a producer client, a collector server, and plugin framework that allows events to be dynamically filte
Google Ups The Ante Against Amazon’s Cloud, And That’s A Good Thing For Business – Google wants to leapfrog Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing by making it available to everyone.
Meet The JavaScript Framework That Might Save HTML5 From Itself – Famo.us wants to make HTML5 apps sing using JavaScript. The goal: Flash-like performance, but with no plugins.
Java 8 first steps with Lambdas and Streams – Java 8 will bring the largest changes on the platform since the introduction of Generics in version 1.5. It’s on the time to look at some of the most important innovations.
Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die – FT.com – Technology has already transformed many industries. Next in line is banking. In two or three years, only 5 per cent of consumer interaction will be through branches. The rules have changed and a new league of competitors is emerging.
VoltDB to Provide Database to Eagle for Big Data – WatersTechnology – Eagle Investment Systems has agreed to distribute the in-memory relational database from Billerica, Massachusetts-based VoltDB for delivering real-time analytics and decisioning capabilities to clients.

Links for September 6th through September 14th

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Vinny

PostgreSQL Hits 9.3, New Levels Of Popularity With The Cool Kids – PostgreSQL has long been a great database, yet strangely ignored. Now it's rising in popularity. Why?
Amazon Continues Its March Into Enterprise Clouds And Wallets – Amazon, long the belle of the SMB cloud dance, is getting serious about the enterprise and has the tools to win.
Analysts: Amazon About To Get Serious Competition In The Cloud – Though AWS rules cloud compute workloads today, Google and Microsoft look set to give it serious competition, according to Forrester and Gartner.
Coder for Raspberry Pi – A simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi. – Coder is a free, open source project that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple platform that educators and parents can use to teach the basics of building for the web. New coders can craft small projects in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, right from the web browser.
Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ – As a background – all of us in Plumbr have all been using Eclipse for as long as we can possibly remember. But when I just looked around in the office I saw our whole team being converted to IntelliJ IDEA users. So what made us to jump the old free-to-ride warhorse and go with something we need to pay up to $600 per seat? If you bear with me I give you several reasons why you could also consider the move. – See more at: http://plumbr.eu/blog/why-we-dropped-eclipse-in-favour-of-intellij#sthash.S4Wa110I.dpuf
What’s Coming in Sencha Touch 2.3 – Sencha Touch 2.3 supports Apache Cordova APIs for Accelerometer, Camera, Capture, Compass, Connection, Contacts, Device, Events, File, Geolocation, Globalization, InAppBrowser, Media, Notification, Splashscreen, and Storage
MVC is dead, it’s time to MOVE on. – To re-iterate: MVC is awesome, but it's designed with decades old technologies. MOVE is just a update to make better use of the new tools we have.
Real Terminal, All Chrome — No Nonsense – Koding Blog – The app includes a Koding VM, SSH and all of the standard tools such as Vim, Emacs, and Midnight Commander. It also comes with runtimes/compilers for Python, Ruby, Go, Node, Gcc, and many more. The VMs even run an Apache server, accessible from a web address unique to the user’s session. All of this is completely free, no registration needed, and available whenever you need it.
Sencha and Backend REST Services: How Modus Create Connects an App to DreamFactory | Blog | Sencha – In this post, I'm going to introduce you to how Modus Create connects their corporate address book app, built using Sencha Touch 2 and Ext JS 4, to the DreamFactory open source backend services platform. We call each instance of the DreamFactory platform a
FastClick – JavaScript library to remove click delays on browsers with touch UIs – FastClick is a simple, easy-to-use library for eliminating the 300ms delay between a physical tap and the firing of a click event on mobile browsers. The aim is to make your application feel less laggy and more responsive while avoiding any interference wi

Links for August 3rd through August 10th

Posted on August 10, 2013 by Vinny

Google, Microsoft play catch up to Amazon, add load balancing, auto-scaling to their clouds – JavaWorld – Google rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service today, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand.
Firefox, Chrome strengthen in-browser debugging – JavaWorld – Google has been paying attention to Web developers as well, updating its Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools), a set of Web authoring and debugging tools built into the Google Chrome browser. Perhaps the most notable update is the introduction of Workspaces, a built-in source code editor that could eliminate the small but still frequent process of flipping between an external code editor and a browser to check a newly edited Web page
Holacracy | Social Technology for Purposeful Organization – The Holacracy governance process is not governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – it is governance of the organization, through the people, for the purpose. It liberates an organization to find and express its deepest creative capaci
The management framework that propelled LinkedIn to a $20 billion company – Weiner believes getting your “boat” to the best possible destination requires a clearly-articulated vision and mission. These statements ultimately inform and invigorate a company’s strategy and objectives. Perhaps most importantly, leaders need to talk the talk and walk the walk on their professed values to keep the entire company unified and moving in the right direction.
Twitter’s Killer New Two-Factor Solution Kicks SMS to the Curb – When you enroll, your phone generates an asymmetric 2048-bit RSA keypair, which stores the private key locally on the device and sends the public key, which Twitter stores as part of your user object in our backend store, to the server.
SQLFiddle – A tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions. – SQLFiddle – A tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions.
LightAdmin – Pluggable CRUD Administration Java Framework. Best alternative to scaffolding. – Pluggable data management solution for Java web applications developed in a “Rapid” manner! The primary goal of the project is to speed up application development by bringing pluggable fully operational data management back-end for JPA based applications and to relieve your codebase for more important stuff.
Metrics, a Java library gives you unparalleled insight into what your code does in production – Metrics is a Java library which gives you unparalleled insight into what your code does in production. Metrics provides a powerful toolkit of ways to measure the behavior of critical components in your production environment
ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story – previously wrote about ORMs vs SQL and received a lot of reaction to it–most of it positive. Some of it was predictable ("you don't know what you're talking about (because you don't agree with me)") but one reaction from a couple of people surprised me: they took my post to mean that I was against persistence abstractions. I will now expand on those points with a specific example: the Java Persistence API ("JPA").
Web Tracing Framework – Rich tools for instrumenting, analyzing, and visualizing web apps. – Web Tracing Framework – Rich tools for instrumenting, analyzing, and visualizing web apps. Make your app jank-free at 60fps!
Why does Angular.js rock? – Angular Tips – Angular.js is a MV* (Model – View – Whatever) Javascript framework which is maintained by Google which excels in the creation of single-page-applications or even for adding some “magic” to our classic web applications.

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 March 26th through March 28th

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Vinny

How much does your framework choice affect performance? The answer may surprise you. – How much does your framework choice affect performance? The answer may surprise you.
GWT implementation of Appfuse with MVP, Activities, Places & EventBus – the design of the application follows many of gwt latest best practices: MVP pattern, Activities and Places, EventBus, Gin and Guice..
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-best-practices-soup/
Integrating GWT into AppFuse – I've been interested in integrating GWT into AppFuse ever since I blogged about it 4 years ago. After Evite, I had a gig near Boston where I developed with GXT for the remainder of the year. When all was said and done, I ended up spending a year with GWT and really enjoyed my experience.
Sencha.io Support in Sencha Cmd – In this article, we will highlight the Sencha.io functionality available in Sencha Cmd by walking through the process of creating an application, deploying it to the cloud, and managing its settings.
‎Apache Tajo – a Relational and Distributed Data Warehouse for Hadoop – Tajo is a relational and distributed data warehouse system for Hadoop. Tajo is designed for low-latency and scalable ad-hoc queries, online aggregation and ETL on large-data sets by leveraging advanced database techniques. It supports SQL standards.
Springing Forward with Roo Add-ons – Ken Rimple shows how to write Spring Roo commands and features using the OSGi-based add-on API and how to extend the Roo shell using various Roo objects such as the FileManager and the ProjectManager.
inessential.com: Why Developers Shouldn’t Use iCloud Syncing, Even If It Worked – Half the mobile revolution is about designing and building apps for smartphones and tablets. The other half is about writing the web services that power those apps. How comfortable are you with outsourcing half your app to another company? The answer should be: not at all comfortable.
Everything about Java 8 – The following post is a comprehensive summary of the developer-facing changes coming in Java 8. This next iteration of the JDK is currently scheduled for general availability in September 2013.
Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack – Forbes – Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultancy as well as OpenStack Foundation board member recently told Business Insider that PayPal is in the midst of replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this sum
New Amazon CloudHSM service vows enterprise-grade security – CloudHSM could make regulation-constrained companies and agencies more comfortable entrusting workloads to the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Dashing – The exceptionally handsome dashboard framework. – Dashing is a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards.
Bringing new life to Spring Travel with Thymeleaf – By using Thymeleaf we are pushing the view layer back to the HTML side where it belongs, allowing us to use our templates more actively for customer validation and allowing our designers to easily update them without ever losing the information needed to process them dynamically at runtime.

Links for January 4th through January 8th

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Vinny

howdoi – a code search tool – Are you a hack programmer? Do you find yourself constantly Googling for how to do basic programming tasks?
Clipped | Summarize Anything – Clipped’s patent pending algorithm turns articles and documents into bullet point summaries. – Clipped's patent pending algorithm turns articles and documents into bullet point summaries.
accept4j – Business-friendly acceptance testing – accept4j bridges the gap between automated tests and business requirements in Java applications, by providing an automatically-generated, easy-to-read report identifying which requirements are tested, and which are not.
Extending Spring MVC with Spring Mobile and JavaScript – Craig Walls and Roy Clarkson explain how to extend Spring MVC to mobile devices with Spring Mobile and popular JavaScript frameworks.
Escape From Amazon: Tips/Techniques for Reducing AWS Dependencies – Soam Acharya presents a case study of a business which relied heavily on AWS and had to reduce its dependencies on it, including tips for avoiding cloud lock-in.
Christophe Coenraets | Tutorial: Developing a PhoneGap Application – In this tutorial, you create a fully functional employee directory application with PhoneGap. You will learn
PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build in 5 Minutes | Christophe Coenraets – During the last couple of months, I have been on the road presenting our new HTML tools as part of the Create the Web tour with many other members of the team.
My favorite technology bits of 2012 — Tech Talk — Medium – As I’ve grown older I’ve realized the only thing that excites me about technology these days are things that save me lots of frustration and time, and improve my life in some measurable way.
Books to become a better Rubyist, including OOP and FP titles. Compiled by a Rubyist of 7 years. – Books to become a better Rubyist, including OOP and FP titles. Compiled by a Rubyist of 7 years.
5 Reasons to be excited about Java in 2013 – With 2012 done and dusted, it’s time to look forward to the coming 12 months for the development world. Over the past few days, we’ve asked some respected developers for their predictions – now it’s time for our own
Junior – A front-end framework for building HTML5 mobile apps with a native look and feel. – A front-end framework for building HTML5 mobile apps with a native look and feel.
Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with PhoneGap – Christophe Coenraets compares hybrid mobile apps with native ones and demonstrates building HTML5 applications with PhoneGap.

Links for December 1st through December 4th

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Vinny

VMware Spins Out SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and GemFire – Following months of speculation, VMware has officially announced plans to transfer many of its tier 2 technologies, including the Spring framework, distributed in-memory data cache GemFire, the Cloud Foundry PaaS, and Hadoop analytics tool Cetas, to parent company EMC as part of a newly formed initiative called Pivotal.
Netflix Log4J Optimizations Yield Logging at Massive Scale – Blitz4k, Netflix’ internally optimized version of log4j, has been released to Github. Blitz4j efficiently generates logs within a massively concurrent and heavy traffic environment while consuming fewer resources than other, more traditional logging technologies. It achieves this by overriding sections of log4j’s code where synchronization and deadlocks may occur.
Evernote For Business: End Of Butt-Ugly Software? – Evernote Business lets an organization deploy and manage the Evernote application on behalf of employees, extending information discoverability and sharing company-wide.
Top 35 Startups In Tech that TechCrunch missed out on | StartupPlays – There’s no feeling that’s quite as electrifying as launching a product and watching people genuinely enjoy using it and wanting it to get better. Here are the Top 35 Startups In Tech that TechCrunch missed out on – November 201
How People Change – NYTimes.com – It’s a lousy leadership model. Don’t try to bludgeon bad behavior. Change the underlying context. Change the behavior triggers. Displace bad behavior with different good behavior. Be oblique. Redirect.
Hadapt – The greatest thing to happen to Hadoop since Hadoop – Hadapt’s flagship product is the Adaptive Analytical Platform, which brings a native implementation of SQL to the Apache Hadoop open-source project.
How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers – “It will be interesting to see, over the next 10 years or so, how successful the traditional server vendors will be competing against that kind of server capacity,” Pinkham says. “Once developers realize they can use this much cheaper, homogenous infrastructure, the power may shift toward the folks who build the cheapest, simplest hardware.”
Apple, Google, Microsoft Avoid Taxes By Keeping Billions In Profits Offshore: Senate Report – Companies such as Microsoft and Apple quietly dodge billions of dollars in taxes each year with potentially illegal schemes to move their profits offshore, according to a Senate subcommittee report released on Thursday
Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace – NYTimes.com – The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.
Paul Maritz To Lead New Group At EMC That Merges Greenplum With VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, And Gemstome | TechCrunch – EMC Chief Strategist Paul Maritz will lead a new platform group that will combine VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, and Gemstone with EMC’s big data platform – Greenplum
Technology giants at war: Another game of thrones | The Economist – Another game of thrones – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other's throats in all sorts of ways
Supporting Mobile Devices in a Web Application – The purpose of this paper was to prepare the reader for possible issues when preparing a web application for mobile deployment. The paper is an exercise to help the reader gain some experience prior to having to do the same.

Links for August 1st through August 5th

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Vinny

ProGuard – A free Java class file shrinker, optimizer, obfuscator, and preverifier – ProGuard is a free Java class file shrinker, optimizer, obfuscator, and preverifier. It detects and removes unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It optimizes bytecode and removes unused instructions. It renames the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. Finally, it preverifies the processed code for Java 6 or for Java Micro Edition.
Nevado JMS 1.0 GA for Amazon Web Services Released – We’ve released the final 1.0 version for our JMS driver for Amazon Web Services’ queue and notification services (SQS/SNS).
typica – A Java client library for a variety of Amazon Web Services – This is a simple API to access Amazon's SQS, EC2, CloudWatch, AutoScaling, ELB, SimpleDB, SNS, FPS and DevPay LS web services. It uses the QUERY APIs. This code is thread-safe and works very reliably to the best of my knowledge
GWT 2.5 SuperDevMode and Google App Engine – Now an Amazing Combination – With the advent of GWT's new SuperDevMode (SDM), you can easily modify your Java client code and see it quickly reflected in GAE's development environment without any restart necessary. This is an addition to the other native Java debugging features introduced as a result of SDM. Below is a quick screencast of this capability:
SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications. – SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications.
Piecon / Pie charts in your favicon! – A tiny javascript library for dynamically generating pie charts in your favicons.
Securing OAuth2-Enabled, Multi-Tenant Applications with Spring Security – Robert Winch explains how to secure a multi-tenant application with Spring Security and how to enable OAuth 2.
MongoDB SQL Server Importer – If you want a quick (but kinda dirty) way to import your SQL Server database to MongoDB, this is your tool. MongoDB SQL Server Importer (Sql2Mongo) is for those who wants to leverage their existing database to learn MongoDB.
Which freaking database should I use? | Data Management – InfoWorld – In the era of big data, good old RDBMS is no longer the right tool for many database jobs. Here's a quick guide to choosing among NoSQL alternatives
Extreme Performance with Java – Charlie Hunt explains what can be done to lower the latency introduced by the Java GC and JIT, including coding tips, and introducing tools for tuning the performance of Java applications.
Journey Through The JavaScript MVC Jungle | Smashing Coding – There are modern JavaScript frameworks that can assist with bringing structure and organization to our projects, improving how easily maintainable they are in the long-run.
Protean Echo | Fuse all your cards into one – Echo is the last payment card you'll ever carry. It's your debit, credit, loyalty, and prepaid cards – even your student ID – all combined into a single, elegantly crafted card.
No Excuse List – The best place on the web to learn anything, free. – The best place on the web to learn anything, free.
Legit – Git Workflow for Humans – Legit is a complementary command-line interface for Git, optimized for workflow simplicity. It is heavily inspired by GitHub for Mac.
Automating Unit Tests | Blog | Sencha – Unit tests are an important part of the software development process. By clearly defining what we expect from our code, unit tests allow us to develop a high degree of confidence that our applications will function as intended. Automating our unit tests reduces the number of bugs and decreases the amount of time we need to spend manually testing our code.
Cloud News: Rackspace Deploys OpenStack, AppFog Delivers a PaaS | Cloud Zone – Rackspace’s deployment marks the first time that any company has deployed a large-scale OpenStack powered service offering and starts to deliver upon the broader OpenStack vision of open and hence federable clouds.
Jeff’s SOA Ruminations: Setting-up GWT 2.5’s SuperDevMode – One of the most exciting features of GWT 2.5 is what is called SuperDevMode. As a replacement for the previous DevMode, it allows you to debug your Java code (and Javascript) directly through Chrome's Browser's Developer Tools
Sun Veterans Create SDK for Native Java on the iPhone — Application Development Trends – Codename One, an Israel-based startup founded by two former Sun Microsystems engineers, is developing a new software development kit (SDK) designed to allow Java developers to create native applications for multiple mobile/tablet platforms.
Integrating Java Spring Apps on Heroku with Force.com REST APIs – Recently I co-presented a webinar about how to integrate Java Spring Apps on Heroku with the Force.com / Salesforce.com REST APIs. Check out the recording:
Rich JavaScript Applications – the Seven Frameworks (Throne of JS, 2012) – Despite the differences, I’d argue there is one killer feature all the above technologies share: the idea of Model/View separation. This is a classic design pattern that predates the web itself by about 20 years. If you’re building even the most basic kind of web application UI, you’ll almost certainly benefit from applying this on the client.

Links for July 23rd through July 27th

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Vinny

OAuth 2.0 leader resigns, says standard is ‘bad’ | Internet & Media – CNET News – The standard grew too far away from its roots as a simple Web authentication technology, author Eran Hammer-Lahav says, and now is insecure and overly broad.
Keynote: MythBusters 2.0 – Mission Critical Cloud Computing @ NASA – Khawaja Shams presents how NASA’s JPL uses cloud computing, and evaluates some of the existing cloud computing myths in the MythBusters style.
easyCriteria | A JPA Criteria Helper – Easy criteria is a tool that will help any developer to create a JPA Criteria without the verbose JPA Criteria default code!
ocpsoft/rewrite – Rewrite GWT Integration – This enables the HTML5 History.pushState(…) support in your application, which will now use pretty/URLs whenever possible instead of the '#' anchor tag with 'name=value' pairs. Note that you must modify your place tokenization to process the new information.
7 Quality Principles we can learn from the big Tech Companies | The Codovation Blog – Out of these findings we collected from several blogs, articles and interviews with (former) employees of these companies we extracted 7 principles all of these companies seem to follow.
Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Released at 2nd Annual PhoneGap Day – Popular Open Source Mobile Development Framework Gets Upgrades Including Improved Plugin Support, Embeddable Webviews, Command Line Tooling and more
Java EE vs Spring Framework – This session compares the Spring and Java EE stacks in terms of Web frameworks. It re-examines the motivations behind the Spring framework and explores the emergence of the Java EE programming model to meet the challenges posed. The presentation provides insight into when Spring and/or Java EE is appropriate for a building Web applications and if they can coexist.
NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream | Linux Magazine – The 2.6.30 kernel is chock full of next-gen file systems. One such example is NILFS, a new log-structured file system that dramatically improves write performance.
Expanding The Cloud – High Performance I/O Instances for Amazon EC2 – All Things Distributed – The hi1.4xlarge has 8 cores and 60.5GB of memory. Most importantly it has 2 SSDs of 1 TB each and a 10 Gb/s Ethernet NIC that using placement groups can be directly connected to other High I/O instances.
Java Sequential IO Performance | Architects Zone – For most IO I've found the use of ByteBuffers and Channels to be the best optimised parts of the IO libraries. If buffered streams are your IO libraries of choice, then it is worth branching out and and getting familiar with the sub-classes of Channel and Buffer.
Effective Mockito Part 3 « EclipseSource Blog – In this post I want to show you how to use Mockito’s spy mechanism to eliminate testing troubles with third party libraries.
SubGit – Safe Svn to Git Migration – SubGit is a smooth Svn to Git migration. Install once on the server side and use both Subversion and Git as long as you like.
11 OPEN NoSQL Document-Oriented Databases | Architects Zone – A document-oriented database is a designed for storing, retrieving, and managing document-oriented, or semi structured data. Document-oriented databases are one of the main categories of NoSQL databases. The central concept of a document-oriented database is the notion of a Document.
SQLDirector is a MS SQL as a Service (SaaS) solution for the private cloud. @jeff_stanlick – SQLDirector provides a full-featured MS SQL Database as a service experience in your on-premise or remote data center. SQLDirector is available as a virtual or physical appliance.
CloudStack Now Offers MongoDB as a Service | Cloud Zone – ScaleGrid, Inc (http://www.scalegrid.net), a Seattle-based startup, is announcing this week the public availability of MongoDirector, an end-to-end lifecycle management solution for MongoDB. MongoDirector provides a "single pane of glass" to manage MongoDB deployments allowing for simplified and automated MongoDB lifecycle management on both VMware vCenter and CloudStack.
How AppFog Built a PaaS around CloudFoundry – Jeremy Voorhis introduces PaaS and CloudFoundry, then explains how AppFog built their own PaaS on top of CloudFoundry.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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