Links for April 19th through April 26th

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Vinny

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

Links for March 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 February 26th through March 3rd

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Vinny

My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers – Server security doesn’t need to be complicated. My security philosophy is simple: adopt principles that will protect you from the most frequent attack vectors, while keeping administration efficient enough that you won’t develop “security cruft”. If you us
Rise of the Web App – Kevin Dangoor reviews the latest developments in the web platform – media queries, app cache, IndexedDB, WebGL, Mozilla’s WebAPI – and takes a look at its future.
Microsoft, EMC, NetApp join Oracle’s legal fight against Google on Java | Intellectual property – InfoWorld – Microsoft, EMC, and NetApp have joined an appeal by Oracle against an earlier decision in a copyright and patent infringement lawsuit against Google over Android.
WebKit for Developers – Paul Irish – For many of us developers, WebKit is a black box. We throw HTML, CSS, JS and a bunch of assets at it, and WebKit, somehow.. magically, gives us a webpage that looks and works well. But WebKit isn’t a black box. It’s a white box. And not just that, but an open, white box.
Why MongoDB? – Rackspace announces the acquisition of ObjectRocket. – ObjectRocket is a MongoDB database as a service that is highly available, automatically sharded and lightning fast – 10 times faster than its leading competitors, according to our internal benchmarking tests.
The Adventurous Developer’s Guide to JVM Languages – In "The Adventurous Developer’s Guide to JVM Languages", we don our explorers’ hats as we test out eight languages with an HTTP server example that you can find on Github. We also pinged the experts for this report and included commentary from 5 of the actual creators or project leads of the languages we look at. James Gosling & Rich Hickey, we’re looking at you for the next report 😉
Video – Threats to Samsung Android Market Share? – WSJ.com – Samsung Electronics Co. and Google Inc. together have stemmed Apple Inc.'s dominance in smartphones, but there is new tension in their partnership.
Event Programming with Google Guava EventBus – This post is about taking a different approach to handling Java events using Guava’s EventBus. The EventBus allows for objects to subscribe for or publish events, without having explicit knowledge of each other. The EventBus is not meant to be a general pu
Event Programming Example: Google Guava EventBus & Java 7 WatchService – The Guava EventBus is a great way to add publish/subscribe communication to an application. The WatchService, new in the Java 7 java.nio.file package, is used to monitor a directory for changes.
Only Apple and Google are skating to where the puck is going – Who would've bet that Google would be the first company to release a competitor to Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina display?

Links for December 12th through December 15th

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Vinny

Deploy Web Apps to CloudBees from IntelliJ IDEA 12 | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – In case you didn’t know, the new release of IntelliJ IDEA comes with deployment tools for CloudBees, a rapidly growing cloud platform for Java applications. At the moment IntelliJ IDEA allows you to connect to your CloudBees account and view/manage deployed applications.
Tuts+ Premium Course: Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2 – I’m a confessed code editor addict, and have tried them all! I was an early adopter of Coda, a TextMate advocate, even a Vim convert. But all of that changed when I discovered Sublime Text 2, the best code editor available today. Don’t believe me? Let me convince you in this course.
Working as a Software Developer – I recently gave a presentation on what it is like to work as a software developer to first-year engineering students at KTH taking an introductory programming course. I wanted to give my view on the main differences between professional software development and programming for a university course.
HTML, Javascript and the app-ification of the Web – The post described in a nutshell what might be one of the most powerful trends in Web app design — the move from multipage Web applications to single page applications driven by javascript and access to a powerful API.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers – The first step in becoming an effective programmer is to ensure that you are spending your time wisely. And there is no greater waste of time than in working on something that is not useful or never shipped.
Scaling GitHub – I’ll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing. It also presents some interesting business challenges, too. How you grow your company from three employees, how you work in teams, and how you split your app up into services all help ensure that you’ll be able to react to your product’s growth.
Innovating for Growth | Innovation 2.0: a spiral approach to business model innovation – The Economist and Ernst and Young collaborate on a discussion forum to talk about innovation.
Goldman Sachs: Microsoft has gone from 97 percent share of compute market to 20 percent | Microsoft Pri0 | The Seattle Times – According to the report, Microsoft's operating systems have gone from 97 percent of all computing devices in 2000 — back when desktop and laptop PCs were dominant — to 20 percent expected in 2012 — when PCs, tablets and smartphones are all part of the computing-device picture.
Creating Native Applications with Sencha Desktop Packager – Sencha Desktop Packager is a new product, included with the Sencha Complete: Team bundle, which enables you to take your existing Ext JS web application and package it as a native desktop application. From here, you may deliver your application to your customers who are running Windows and Mac OS X.
EMC follows VMware, rest of world into OpenStack – With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon
Query Mongo: MySQL to Mongo Query Translator – Query Translator – Convert MySQL Queries to MongoDB Syntax
WebLogic Examples: Wiki: Home – The purpose of this project is to share Java EE examples for WebLogic with the Java EE and WebLogic user communities. This project was started by Oracle Product management, but we encourage you to submit your own examples.

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 June 19th through June 23rd

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Vinny

Welcome to OpenStack – An Introduction – OpenStack is an open source platform for building massively scalable cloud operating systems and can be used to power both public and private clouds. Diablo is the latest stable release of OpenStack.
Puppet Labs and EMC open source next-generation provisioning tool: Razor – Puppet Labs and EMC announced last month the availability of Razor, an open source cloud-provisioning tool that allows automated provisioning and inventory of bare metal machines as well as virtual machines based on user-defined tagging rules. The tool currently deploys as a Puppet module and is licensed under Apache 2.0.
Jetty on OpenShift – Lightweight Java Web Serving for the Cloud | OpenShift by Red Hat – This tutorial provides guidelines describing one way how to deploy Jetty on OpenShift. Anyone interested in more complex deployments (or production ones) I call to action.
Spring Framework 3.2 M1 Released – Java Code Geeks – SpringSource just announced the first milestone release toward Spring 3.2. The new release is now available from the SpringSource repository at http://repo.springsource.org/
Long live SOA in the cloud era – You might not hear much about SOA anymore, but its imperative to make 'everything a service' is more relevant than ever
Simple Made Easy – how to achieve it in design and how to recognize its absence in the tools, language constructs and libraries – Rich Hickey discusses simplicity, why it is important, how to achieve it in design and how to recognize its absence in the tools, language constructs and libraries.
No Price, No Date, No Apps, No Problem. No Wait — Problem. by MG Siegler – But hey, at least Surface for Windows 8 Pro comes with a pen. To quote a guy I once met, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”

Links for June 10th through June 11th

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Vinny

Writing a Sencha Touch Application, Part 1 – In this series we will create a Sencha Touch application that allows its users to take notes and store them on the device running the app
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs – O’Reilly Broadcast – We've seen a lot of the good, the bad, and the ugly in API design. This article sums up my thinking on the subject.
Zero-downtime Deployment (and Rollback) in Tomcat; a walkthrough and a checklist – Java Code Geeks – If you thought Tomcat could not get any better, you thought wrong. Tomcat 7 introduces what is called Parallel Deployment. This was contributed by SpringSource/VMWare. Simply put, parallel deployment is the ability to deploy more than one version of your web application in parallel, making all versions available under the exact same URL.
mokk.me – Mobile web app mocks – mokk.me is a web app with no back-end, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and CouchDB only
Using CouchDB in an iOS Application :: myNoSQL – A guide of using mobile Couchbase Xcode project templates by Marty Schoch. It takes only 5 minutes to get started.
Why won’t Microsoft say anything about Silverlight? | Mobile development – InfoWorld – Once touted as the ultimate replacement for Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight's future seems cloudier than ever
YUI Theater — Jenny Donnelly: “Introduction to Git” (53 min.) » Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog) – YUI engineering manager Jenny Donnelly (@jennyd) gives an introduction to Git and how to use it in the real world, including branching and committing, a typical git workflow, merge vs rebase, and tips and tricks that will make your life easier.
Safer Software through Secure Frameworks – What we need is implementation-level security issues taken care of at the language and framework level. So that developers can focus on their real jobs: solving design problems and writing code that works.
Seven Security (Mis)Configurations in Java web.xml Files – There are a lot of articles about configuring authentication and authorization in Java web.xml files. Instead of rehashing how to configure roles, protect web resources, and set up different types of authentication let's look at some of the most common security misconfigurations in Java web.xml files.
Java Web Application Security – Part IV: Programmatic Login APIs | Javalobby – This article has shown you how you can programmatically login using Java EE 6, Spring Security and Apache Shiro. Before Java EE 6 (and Servlet 3), there was no API to programmatically login, so this is a welcome addition
EMC BigData Acquisition Budget: $3 Billion :: myNoSQL – EMC Corp. may spend about $3 billion on acquisitions this year, keeping pace with last year’s tally, to add businesses that can help corporate customers analyze reams of data
Java Persistence Performance: How to improve JPA performance by 1,825% – JPA provides several optimization features and techniques, and some pitfalls waiting to snag the unwary developer. Most JPA providers also provide a plethora of additional optimization features and options. In this blog entry I will explore the various optimization options and techniques, and a few of the common pitfalls.
How to Design Multi-Client Databases | Brent Ozar PLF | Brent Ozar PLF – When you’re building an application for lots of clients, there’s two common ways to design the database(s): Option A: Put all clients in the same database Option 2: Build one database per client
New Features and Enhancements in Spring 3.1 – Building on the support introduced in Spring 3.0, Spring 3.1 is currently under development, and at the time of this writing Spring 3.1 M2 has just been released. This is a list of new features for Spring 3.1
Mea Vita (My Life): Tricks I Learned At Apple: Steve Jobs Load Testing @mvorpagel – While it's hard to predict exactly how the entire system would behave in the real world, we had a good idea, before we flipped the switch, thanks to our thorough testing strategies.
For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It’s A Humiliation (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG) – The problem for Microsoft is that they had almost a decade to come up with something like iCloud to realize that vision, and they didn't.

Goodbye Carbonite – Hello Mozy

Posted on October 7, 2007 by Vinny

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I have or should say had been a Carbonite user for almost an year but issues after issues finally got to me and the lack of new features that were long promised but never delivered forced me to start looking at the automated online backup again and I am so glad I did, as I’ve found Mozy. I’ve had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it’s better to lose $80.00 than all your data.

Mozy is similar to Carbonite in some regards but has a much richer feature set that makes it a better offering. Like Carbonite, Mozy installs a small client on your Windows XP/Vista or OS X desktop that runs in the background and backs up files over the Internet using your broadband connection. But that’s where the similarities end. Carbonite is a fairly bare-bones offering which may be ok for most novice users but Mozy offers several configuration options like creation of backup sets, file versions, access to your files via the web and many other features.

One of the best and most important feature that set Mozy and Carbonite apart is the fact that you can actually get your backed files back. Wow! What a concept – I know I know. When I first installed Carbonite, I did several test restores and they worked fine but when I had been backing up for several months and really need to restore something, Carbonite let me down. Mozy on the other hand has never done that. Another awesome feature of Mozy is that fact they don’t really throttle your bandwidth after you’ve uploaded 50 GB. Carbonite seems to limit upload bandwidth to about 2 GB a day and then throttle it down after you reach 50 GB. Mozy doesn’t seem to play any of those games and allows uploads that are supported by your bandwidth. On an average day, I think I was uploading about 5+ GB.

Another recent event that makes Mozy even more attractive to me is the purchase of Berkeley Data Systems, providers of Mozy online backup by EMC Corporation. As you probably know, EMC is the leader is the storage market and owns Documentum, VMWare, and RSA among other technology companies.

So if you are looking for a great, reliable and affordable backup solution for your home computer, you should check out Mozy.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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