Links for December 19th through December 21st

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Vinny

Logstash helps you take logs and other event data from your systems and store them in a central place. – elasticsearch works seamlessly with logstash to collect, parse, index, and search logs
SecTools.Org Top Network Security Tools – SecTools.Org: Top 125 Network Security Tools
Become a Better Architect – The most successful IT professionals I know, regardless of title or role, are the ones that are business focused. From an enterprise architecture perspective, the technology is, at best, half of the overall architecture equation
iPad, Surface, Kindle owners reveal their top gripes – A new report from tech Q&A site FixYa cites the biggest complaints with the latest tablets from Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
"Backbreaking" OpenStack migrations hinder enterprise upgrades – OpenStack’s promise of an open-source cloud infrastructure free of vendor lock-in is big. But difficulties upgrading from one release to the next are a major kink that needs to be worked out before widespread adoption can begin.
Scott Hanselman’s 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Hacker News discussion – Scott Hanselman's 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Hacker News discussion
Scott Hanselman’s 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Scott Hanselman's 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
oterm is a web browser unix terminal – oterm is a web browser unix terminal. It serves a console so you can access your server from anywhere in the world where you have an Internet connection. It effectively is an xterm in a browser.
JavaScript spin-off asm.js brings web even closer to native performance | ZDNet – Firefox creator Mozilla release benchmarks showing that asm.js, its performance-optimised subset of JavaScript, can deliver performance only 1.5x slower than code compiled to run natively.
Enterprise App Developer Atlas – An interactive map of the developer journey, helping developers make the right tool choices to reduce costs, increase revenue and capture new markets.

Links for August 11th through August 16th

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Vinny

An inside (and detailed) look at re-architecting Twitter. Plus, a new Tweets-per-second peak: 143,199 Tweets. – An inside (and detailed) look at re-architecting Twitter. Plus, a new Tweets-per-second peak: 143,199 Tweets.
RethinkDB – An open-source distributed database with intuitive query language, automatically parallelized queries – RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.
PentesterLab.com – Learn Web Penetration Testing: The Right Way – PentesterLab is an easy and great way to learn penetration testing.
PentesterLab provides vulnerable systems that can be used to test and understand vulnerabilities
How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut – Forbes – Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called “forward-deployed engineers” a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer’s data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.
Encryption is less secure than we thought – For 65 years, most information-theoretic analyses of cryptographic systems have made a mathematical assumption that turns out to be wrong.
Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software. Here’s how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware. – While most companies fight copycats, Red Hat embraces its top clone, CentOS. Here's how that helps it fight real enemies like VMware.
I’ve Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here’s Why It’s Actually Amazing – For years, I kept hearing how awesome Evernote was: how it could store everything you possibly needed, make it available everywhere, and how scores of people couldn't live without it. I tried it multiple times, and never saw the appeal until now. Here's what I was missing.
TinyPNG – Compress PNG images while preserving transparency – Advanced lossy compression for PNG images that preserves full alpha transparency.
Why JavaScript Will Become The Dominant Programming Language Of The Enterprise – ReadWrite – A simple learning curve and flexible skill set have JavaScript on the verge of taking over the enterprise.

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 May 7th through May 13th

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Vinny

Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite – Businessweek – On a normal weeknight, Netflix (NFLX) accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com (AMZN), HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around
Mobile DevCon New York – How We Built Facebook for iOS – Hear the story of how we rebuilt the Facebook app – moving to native code instead of WebViews – from one of Facebook's very own iOS engineers.
With Windows Blue, Microsoft may (finally) do the right thing | ZDNet – Call it capitulation. Call it listening to customers. But whatever you call it, making Windows 8 more usable with expected coming Blue tweaks is a positive, not a negative.
Declarative Data Visualization – Intellectual Wanderlust – The purpose of this post is to provide a live example of DViz, a declarative data visualization library written in Javascript.
Learn Web Penetration Testing: The Right Way – PentesterLab is an easy and great way to learn penetration testing.
PentesterLab provides vulnerable systems that can be used to test and understand vulnerabilities.
Fries lets you prototype Android apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. – Fries is an awesome mobile prototyping framework for Android apps inspired by Ratchet. We all know that you can find loads of iOS prototyping tools out there, so this time let's give some love to Android.
Guitar Handbook Download with Berklee Online | Berkleemusic.com – Get a taste of Berklee's legendary guitar instruction in our free downloadable Guitar Handbook. This extensive PDF contains lessons taken from Berklee's 12-week online guitar courses, and covers introductory topics such as scales, triads, strumming techniq
Microsoft Windows 8 criticism response: not like New Coke | BGR – Microsoft executive Frank Shaw is not happy with everyone who compared Windows 8 to New Coke this week. Shaw, who serves as Microsoft’s vice president of corporate communications, has written a blog post swiping back at media outlets who bashed the company
Google builds push notifications into Chrome, Chrome OS | Internet & Media – CNET News – In a step to help browser-based apps catch up with the abilities of other software, Google has made it possible for programmers to push notifications to Web apps running in Chrome.
Disruptive technologies articles and insights discussion with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt – In the first of a series of video interviews with high-tech experts, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explores the technologies likely to have the greatest disruptive impact on economies, business models, and people.
Discover Meteor – Learn how to build real-time JavaScript web apps – Learn Meteor and build faster, simpler web apps as we teach you how to build a real-time Meteor app from scratch.
NASA to migrate ISS computers from Windows to Linux | The Rocketry Blog – Citing stability issues NASA has announced they will be migrating the ISS laptops and PCs from Windows to Linux
Why Enterprise Software Sucks: 6 Years Later | The Future Of Work – I thought it would be interesting to revisit the topic and see what progress has been made (or not made) since then.

Links for January 26th through January 31st

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Vinny

20 tips for building modern sites while supporting old versions of IE – 20 tips for building modern sites while supporting old versions of IE
modern.IE: Testing made easier in Internet Explorer | modern.IE | Microsoft – Microsoft Launches Modern.IE To Help Developers Test Their Web Apps For Legacy And Modern Versions Of IE
How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server – Tutorials Blog – So I found yet another cool use for a Raspberry Pi. You can actually use it as a file server, or more accurately a controller for a file server. All you need is your Pi and a nice external drive and you can serve files to anyone on your network. It’s prett
Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers – NYTimes.com – For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.
Functional thinking: Why functional programming is on the rise – Java developers should learn functional paradigms now, even if they have no immediate plans to move to a functional language such as Scala or Clojure. Over time, all mainstream languages will become more functional; Neal Ford explores the reasons why in this installment.
Our First Node.js App: Backbone on the Client and Server – Airbnb Engineering – Here at Airbnb, we've been looking curiously at Node.js for a long time now. We've used it for odds and ends, such as the build process for some of our libraries, but we hadn't built anything production-scale. Until now.
Hortonworks Joins OpenStack Foundation | Hortonworks – Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop, today announced it has joined the OpenStack Foundation, which promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system. By contributing to the OpenStack ecosystem
64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free – Marco.org – This is deceptive enough advertising that the FTC should consider taking action. As tablets become more computer-like and mobile OSes get larger, this is only going to get worse.
Sequel Pro – MySQL Database Management for Mac OS X – Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases.
Cross-domain Ajax with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing – Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a W3C Working Draft that defines how the browser and server must communicate when accessing sources across origins. The basic idea behind CORS is to use custom HTTP headers to allow both the browser and the server to know enough about each other to determine if the request or response should succeed or fail.
Considering MySQL? Use something else. Already on MySQL? Migrate. – Inevitably, someone's going to come along and tell me how wrong I am and how MySQL is just fine as a database system. These people are everywhere, and they mean well too, and they are almost all wrong.
Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution | The Verge – We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn't exist. Instead, thanks to a vision laid out by a small team of Google designers, each product team is finding its way to a consistent and forward-looking design language thanks to a surprising process.

Daily del.icio.us for May 16th through May 19th

Posted on May 19, 2010 by Vinny

Introducing App Engine for Business – Google App Engine – Google Code – App Engine for Business enables you to build your enterprise applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications. App Engine for Business provides all the ease of use and flexibility of App Engine with more power to manage enterprise use cases, more capable APIs, straightforward pricing and the SLAs and support you need for business-critical applications.
Google Storage for Developers – Google Code – Google Storage for Developers is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilitie
Google Code Blog: Enabling Cloud Portability with Google App Engine for Business and VMware – New data presentation widgets in Google Web Toolkit speed development of traditional enterprise applications, increase performance and interactivity for enterprise users, and make it much easier to create engaging mobile apps with a fraction of the investment previously required.
Official Google Blog: Google I/O 2010 Day 1: A more powerful web in more places – This week we’ll celebrate this ongoing evolution of the web and share some of our latest work in moving the web forward and keeping it open.
Expanding the Cloud – Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage – All Things Distributed – Today a new storage option for Amazon S3 has been launched: Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). This new storage option enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy
Five JavaScript Frameworks Comparison | TechnoForum – Ext JS is emerging as an “industry-strength” framework and is being increasingly used in the enterprise. Ext JS also supports a robust client-side data model and support for component model and design patterns.
Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing | ZDNet – Given Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 and its existing Google Voice service, the search giant appears to be collecting enough assets to give Skype and others competition on the consumer and business fronts. GIPS’s software can also be layered into Google Apps in multiple areas as a business collaboration tool.
Marco.org – The iPad doesn’t need to do everything – Find the balance: use the iPad for what it does well, accept that it won’t be everything, and use other tools for the rest.
Amazon Stealing the Cloud « SmoothSpan Blog – It’s still relatively early days, but Amazon’s competitors need to rev up pretty soon. Amazon is stealing the Cloud at an ever-increasing rate.
Foursquare Growing Like Crazy: Up To 600,000 Check-Ins Per Day – Foursquare, the hot mobile "check-in" app, has basically doubled in usage over the last two months
Querydsl – Querydsl – Mysema Source – Querydsl is a framework which enables the construction of type-safe SQL-like queries. Instead of writing queries as inline strings or externalizing them into XML files they aren be constructed via a fluent API like Querydsl.
The Atlantic :: Magazine :: The Enemy Within – THE CYBER-SECURITY ELITES OF THE WORLD HAVE JOINED FORCES IN A HIGH-TECH GAME OF COPS AND ROBBERS, TRYING TO FIND CONFICKER’S CREATORS AND DEFEAT THEM. THE COPS ARE FAILING. AND NOW THE WORM LIES THERE, WAITING …
Bill Maher Thinks The Government Would Work Better If It Was Run By Apple – “If we wanted a president that didn’t understand gizmos and doohickeys,” Maher reminded the President, America would have elected McCain and Palin. “McCain thinks an iPad is something women wear on their Xboxes once a month.”

Daily del.icio.us for April 26th through April 27th

Posted on April 27, 2008 by Vinny

What Programming Languages Should You Know? – David Chisnall suggests that the more programming languages you know, the better. The point is not to stuff your head with language rules. Rather, he explains how being able to read multiple languages, even if you never code in them, can help you to selec
MetaWidget: the ‘sweet spot’ of automatic UI development – Metawidget takes your domain objects and automatically creates User Interface components for them, saving you handcoding your UIs and leaving you to concentrate on stitching together your application.
Ext JS: A reminder that you are not alone on Dion Almaer’s Blog – Every now and then, normally when talking to a libertarian, I think about how we are actually all connected to each other. It is impossible to sandbox yourself from society which leads me to conclude that I need to embrace it and do what I can to work out
InformIT: Interview with Donald Knuth > Interview with Donald Knuth – Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming co
Graeme Rocher’s Blog: Choosing an OSS License and the Ext-JS saga – The news that Ext-JS has, from one release to the next, changed from a modified LGPL to a GPL based license nearly made me fall off my chair. There have been many poor judged, and ill advised decisions made by software companies over the last few years, b
The Future of Enterprise Software: I Am So Scared, I Am So Excited « 7thursdays – More so than ever, the time is coming for companies that build it right and do it right to prosper while the ones that exclusively focus on just selling it right and who-cares-what-happens-after-the-deal-closes to stare at a lacklustre or flat revenue cur
@Gridify: Java Executor Service Rocket Scientists and Generics Brain Surgeons – We at GridGain recently were faced with the following problem. It turns out (may be old news to some), that java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService in JDK 1.6 is not backward compatible with JDK 1.5
Take a screenshot in Flex and send it to ASP.NET | YTechie.com – In Adobe Flex 3, you can get a bitmap image of any control by using this code (you’ll need to import "mx.graphics.ImageSnapshot"):
Simple CSS: Creating More Readable Text | Web Page Design for Designers © – CSS provides three very useful properties to enhance the readability of your site: font, line-height, and letter-spacing
Jack Slocum’s Blog – » Ext JS License change and personal attacks – It’s not right the amount of personal attacks I have been receiving lately. I have people questioning my ethics, business practices and saying we changed Ext JS to GPL v3 because my (and I quote) “greed for money came before your moral ethics”.
Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked – Security Fix – The attackers appear to be breaking into the sites with the help of a security vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers. In an alert issued last week, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of an unpatched flaw in
0x000000 # Massive SQL Injection Attack 600.000++ – I just read that F-secure found out that already 510.000 600.000++ new websites are hacked and more are being hacked while we speak. Among them the British government, United Nations and many more high target

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Tag Archives: hacking