Links for October 27th through October 29th

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Vinny

The King of Cloud: Q&A with Marc Benioff – Technology Review – The CEO of Salesforce.com explains why traditional software is dead and how giants like Oracle are twisting the meaning of cloud computing.
Dropbox Announces ‘Team’ Service and Mobile Deal – Technology Review – The new service, Dropbox for Teams, which has been in beta for the past year, is aimed at companies. It will provide a terabyte of storage for five users, along with administration tools and support, for $795 per year
Security Researchers Rain on Amazon’s Cloud – Technology Review – A new paper has revealed what its authors call "alarming" vulnerabilities in controls over Amazon's cloud service, but the problems were fixed before anyone could exploit them in real life.
LiveMinutes Launches Simple, Free Document-Based Web Conferencing Service | TechCrunch – LiveMinutes free web-conferencing service sits between file sharing and web conferencing. You can upload documents (i.e. PowerPoint presentations etc.), and LiveMinutes will give you a link to share with other participants
SQL Server Developer Tools – Codename Juneau vs. Red-Gate SQL Source Control – So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control? Read on to find out.
New eBook – Building a Sencha Touch Application – I just published the Building a Sencha Touch Application eBook. Based on the Sencha Touch tutorials I have written for this blog, the book will teach you how to create a Sencha Touch 1.1.1 application that allows its users to take notes and store them on the device running the app.
GitPad.exe – Use Notepad as your Git commit editor – GitPad.exe – Use Notepad as your Git commit editor. This single executable allows you to use Notepad as your editor any time Git requires one (commits, interactive rebase, etc).
Enterprise Java Applications on VMware – Best Practices Guide – This paper discusses best practices for running Enterprise Java Applications on VMware vSphere virtual machines. The guidelines will help you to get the best from your Java applications and application servers when you run them on VMware vSphere.
Intel lost the tablet war — is the desktop next? – Intel is losing the multi-billion-dollar tablet war. Tied to Microsoft and its second-rate mobile architecture (currently Windows Phone "Mango"), it's way behind the transformation sweeping the computing world. I'd never count Intel out, but the ARM architecture and its related ecosystem are ideally positioned to win a major share of the desktop of tomorrow.

Daily del.icio.us for July 30th through August 6th

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Vinny

YouTube – Google I/O 2010 – Architecting GWT apps – This session walks you through how teams at Google architect production-grade apps, from design to deployment, using GWT.
that’s great… » Google IO – Architecting GWT Apps talk – Building on his talk from the previous year, he of course mentions the MVP (Model-View-Presenter) pattern. However, this time around, Spring’s Roo is used to build the apps,
gwt-distcc – Project Hosting on Google Code – If your GWT compiles are getting really slow and your computer doesn't have as many CPUs as you have permutations, a distributed compiler can share the load with other computers.
G.W.T. Sushi: The increasing importance of GWT – As we move towards the cloud, frameworks such as GWT, will increase in importance as the de-facto choice for cloud based web application programming.
ongwt.com – HTML5 : the future of Microsoft ? – Is IE better than Firefox, Chrome or Safari ? I don’t care. What is important for me is that Microsoft is now in the battle, and this is very good for GWT
Why people still use BlackBerrys – CNN.com – It's the smartphone everyone owns — and no one seems to like.
Microsoft’s LightSwitch: Building business apps for Web, PCs and cloud | ZDNet – Microsoft is positioning LightSwitch as a way to build business applications for the desktop, the Web and the cloud
FT.com / Technology – Motorola and Verizon team up for TV tablet – The tablet market is seen as the next battle ground in the mobile devices war that has pit myriad device makers and Microsoft, Google and Research in Motion against Apple.
Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1%. « Greg DeKoenigsberg Speaks – Which probably explains why Red Hat has a billion dollars of cash in the bank, while Canonical is still continually reinventing itself to make any profits at all.
Information technology in transition: The end of Wintel | The Economist – As the Wintel pair splits, computing will start to look different. Instead of being dominated by two monopolists, the market will be fought over by eight or nine more or less vertically integrated giants

Daily del.icio.us for June 8th through June 14th

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Vinny

15 Awesome Dropbox Tips and Tricks with $100 Credit Giveaway | Web.AppStorm – There are a multitude of ways to use Dropbox and a plethora of tricks to make your daily computing easier.
DropboxAddons/Dropboxen – Dropbox Wiki – Dropboxen enables you to run multiple Dropbox clients concurrently by automatically launching multiple instances of Dropbox.exe as different Windows users so Dropbox will store the shared files in each unique Windows user directory.
SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry | VentureBeat – SeaMicro is dispelling the Silicon Valley myth that you can’t innovate in hardware anymore. The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.
The Four Meta Secrets of Scaling at Facebook – You can get the code right, you can get the products right, but you need to get the culture right first. If you don't get the culture right then your company won't scale.
Writing iPad/iPhone/iPod applications with Java and SWT? « EclipseSource Blog – Over the last couple of days, Jordi and I played a little with the Eclipse RAP protocol. We decided to develop a Cocoa Touch client for RAP using the iAd JavaScript library
Red Hat’s CEO: Clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins | Cloud Computing – InfoWorld – Red Hat announced Cloud Access, which will let enterprises use their subscriptions to support either traditional on-premise servers or servers hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.
InfoQ: The Need For Enterprise Agility – Vision and Case Study – Alan Shalloway discusses the need for lean enterprises to harmonize business with management and the technical team, offering advice for each component of the enterprise. Eileen Shuter presents Vanguard’s journey adopting Agile then gradually moving to Kanban, explaining why Kanban makes more sense to them, what it offers over Agile and what are the benefits.
dzone.com – Why Application Architecture Should Matter to Spring Developers – The Java language and the Spring framework combination have excellent support for application layering, where each layer is represented by a Spring or Java stereotype: @Controller, @Service, @Entity and @Repository.
iPhone now as fragmented as Android | VentureBeat – A lot of people thought that the Nexus One was Google’s entry into the handset market. This was actually far from the truth. The Nexus One is the equivalent of the Java Reference Implementation or UNIX POSIX and X/Open: a baseline of what handset manufacturers would have to support in order to create a real Android handset
Geotagging games: Location, location, location | The Economist – Gowalla and Foursquare are all about the location; because they do just that one thing, they do it well
Dilbert’s Scott Adams on Betting on the Bad Guys in Investing – WSJ.com – I have a theory that you should invest in the companies that you hate the most. The usual reason for hating a company is that the company is so powerful it can make you balance your wallet on your nose while you beg for their product.

The insides of my new computer

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Vinny

I am amazed at the size of the heatsink and the fan strapped on top of the Intel Core i7 processor.

My New Birthday Present

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Vinny

My brother is awesome and not only because he buys me the best geeky birthday present. For my birthday this year, he bought me a new DELL XPS desktop with the latest Intel Core i7 processor. The Core i7 is a quad-core processor with hyper-threading that appear as 8 separate processors to the operating system, giving the machine some serious processing horsepower.

My configuration is the Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz), 6GB of RAM (DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz), ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB video card and Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives for a total of 1.2 TB onboard. The machine also came with combo Blu-Ray/DVD/CD reader and burner along with 64-bit Vista. Here are the complete tech specs for the geeks out there.

Qty	Item Number	Description
1	224-3607	Studio XPS 435MT
1	311-9770	Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz)
1	311-9800	6GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz
1	310-9731	Keyboard included in Dell Bluetooth Package
1	320-7771	ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB
1	341-8397	Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives
1	421-0084	Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium 64-Bit
1	310-1966	Mouse included with Keyboard purchase
1	430-3347	Integrated 10/1000 Ethernet
1	313-7184	Blu-Ray, DVD+R/RW, CD-RW Drive
1	313-7186	Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
1	310-5408	Free Recycling Kit
1	310-9562	Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
1	341-8296	Dell 19 in 1 Media Reader withBluetooth 2.0

Here are some screenshots from the computer with more geeky goodness 🙂

Daily del.icio.us for January 28th through February 3rd

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Vinny

What Sun Should Do « Ian Skerrett – Sun’s problem is not that they don’t have good products, it is they have too many products for them to sustain. As Tim mentioned they need to focus on their strengths and that would Glassfish and MySql.
Terrence Barr’s Blog: Thoughts on "What Sun Should Do" – quot;Every complex problem can be boiled down to a solution that#039;s simple, attractive, and easy to understand – and wrong.quot; It#039;s a tendency we fall into easily – and what I have been missing in the discussion so far is the focus on client-side technologies and products and the role they play in technology-based business models.
InfoQ: Sun’s Future and Cloud Computing – Sun#039;s recent layoffs (which are said to be affecting people working on OpenJDK, the JCP, J2SE, and desktop Java), and also Sun#039;s recent acquisition of cloud infrastructure vendor Q-Layer, keeps alive the question of how Sun will redefine its strategic direction and choose which of its many technology possibilities it will focus upon.
InfoQ: Struts 2.1 Released – The latest version of the Struts2 framework, version 2.1, has just been released. This release marks a significant upgrade, with changes being focused on refactoring more code into the plug-in framework, reducing XML configuration by adding a conventions plug-in, and improving REST support.
FRONTLINE: my father, my brother, and me | PBS – quot;Parkinson#039;s arrives without fanfare,quot; journalist Dave Iverson says at the start of this week#039;s FRONTLINE broadcast. quot;You#039;re jogging at the gym one day and you happen to notice that one arm isn#039;t swinging the same as the other. In time, other signs accumulate: a leg starts to tingle, a finger begins to tremble…quot;
New Symbol of Elite Access – E-Mail to the Chief – NYTimes.com – Mr. Obama joked about the exclusive nature of his e-mail list at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington on Saturday night. “How exclusive?” the president asked. “Everyone look at the person sitting on your left. Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my e-mail address.”
InfoQ: Presentation: REST: A Pragmatic Introduction to the Web’s Architecture – In this presentation recorded during QCon London 2008, Stefan Tilkov introduces the audience to REST seen as an architectural style. He thinks that REST is not an alternative to SOA but it can serve SOA to reach its goals. Stefan also covers other related topics: HTTP, WS-*, SOAP, CORBA, RPC, enterprise, in an attempt to make the listeners understand what REST is and what is not and how it helps.
Eliminate Waste – The Toyota Way – Surya Suravarapu’s Blog – The first question in TPS always is what does the customer want from this process? (Both the internal customer at the next steps in the production line and the final, external customer).
Marek Blotny: C#, ASP.NET, Silverlight …: Are you Agile? – To answer question quot;Are you Agile?quot; you have to first define the minimum criteria for being Agile, here is a list of potential candidates: self-organizing teams, incremental development in short iterations, high responsiveness to changing requirements, continuous adjustments, everyday contact with stakeholders, pair programing, TDD, (automated) testing and so on
24/7 Wall St.: SP Endorses Linux, Raising Red Hat (RHT) – But Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) was just raised by Standard amp; Poor#039;s ratings today. You might even wonder if Samp;P is almost endorsing Linux after all these years after you look through the notes
Developing and Deploying Java applications – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud « HostedFTP.com – Developing and Deploying Java applications on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Headius: My Favorite Hotspot JVM Flags – Here#039;s a short list of my favorite JVM switches (note these are Hotspot/OpenJDK/SunJDK switches, and may or may not work on yours
Intel releases Linux-based Moblin 2 Alpha for Netbooks – Ars Technica – The first alpha release of Intel#039;s Linux-based Moblin 2 platform is now available for download. It#039;s designed to work on Atom-based netbook devices and it offers fast boot times and a unique Internet connection manager.

Daily del.icio.us for November 5th through November 6th

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Vinny

History of McCain for President – Post-Election John McCain Biography – Esquire – As Barack Obama takes the presidency, the reporter with intimate access to John McCain for two years takes a somber look back at where man gives way to politician.
Digg – 700 Covers For Obama From Around The World – 700 newspaper front pages from all over the world, the day after Barack Obama was elected 44th president of the United States.
AMD, Red Hat demo VM migration between AMD, Intel servers | InfoWorld | News | 2008-11-06 | – In Thursday's demonstration, AMD moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to one based on AMD's forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core Opteron processor, using Red Hat open-source virtualization software
Sun shines dimly in Big Blue’s shadow |Fatal Exception | Neil McAllister | InfoWorld – As Rich Green says, the key will be not just delivering products and professional services, but doing so with better ROI than anyone else. Sun needs to convince its customers not merely that it offers an impressive product and service portfolio, but that it can be as valuable a partner as IBM. Until it can do that, Sun is going to have a hard time crawling out from under Big Blue's shadow.
Change.gov – "Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today." – President-Elect Barack Obama
Op-Ed Columnist – Bring on the Puppy and the Rookie – NYTimes.com – Promising to also be president for those who opposed him, Obama quoted Lincoln, his political idol and the man who ended slavery: “We are not enemies, but friends — though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Wicket: A simplified framework for building and testing dynamic Web pages – Wicket provides an object-oriented approach toward developing dynamic Web-based UI applications. Because Wicket is pure Java™ and HTML code, you can leverage your knowledge about Java to write applications based on Wicket, dramatically reducing your development time. This article gives you an overview of Wicket and describes how you can use Wicket to rapidly build Web-based applications in a non-intrusive and simplified way
Reassessing the Dangers of BPA in Plastics – TIME – There's no denying that bisphenol A (BPA), the latest headline-making toxin, is ubiquitous — it's in hard plastic water bottles, the lining of food and beverage cans and, most disturbingly, the plastic baby bottles that most parents commonly use. What's less clear, however, is exactly what effect BPA has on human health
My Top List of Java Tools | Javalobby – Lack of imagination is one of our worst sins as software developers. We do the same things over and over again, but we rarely modify our ways: me at least. After some years, these are the tools that made it into my tricks box for everyday tasks. Tiresome operations are not my thing
BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | Hamilton targets title hat-trick – New world champion Lewis Hamilton has told BBC Sport he wants to claim the Formula One title three times.
The 23-year-old British driver said he has no intention of chasing Michael Schumacher's record seven F1 triumphs
JUnit and EasyMock | Refcardz – JUnit and EasyMock are the predominant choices for testing tools in the Java space. This reference card will guide you through the creation of unit tests with JUnit and EasyMock. It contains detailed definitions for unit testing and mock objects as well as a description of the lifecycle of each. The APIs for both JUnit and EasyMock are covered thoroughly so you can utilize these tools to their fullest extent.
Joe on Computing : A maze of twisty little Java web service standards, all alike – It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the fractal-like Java standards related to web services. As fast as each can be learned, Sun invents another, and a dozen open source implementations appear. For my own sanity I tried to create a rough map of some of them. I tried to avoid making recommendations; my main objective was to sketch out how they fit together. I also focused on the open source options; there are many good commercial implementations of all of these too.
The Atlassian Blog – Come with me a on Magic Quadrant Ride – Gartner's popular Magic Quadrant for Social Software 2008 is out and Atlassian scored huge on the survey. Atlassian was recognized at the top as a leading company in the market for social software and team collaboration, based on our vision and execution

Daily del.icio.us for September 22nd through September 24th

Posted on September 24, 2008 by Vinny

Sun jilted in Oracle big-systems love • The Register – That was a triple whammy directed at Sun. Not only was Oracle endorsing low-cost Intel boxes over Sun's mighty Sparc to power the server farms that run cloud data centers – an area where Sun has been heavily pushing Sparc – but she was also hitting Sun's Sparc Niagara processor family in an area where Sun has been making a lot of noise: power consumption.
Red Hat sets new performance record at a 20 percent cost savings – Today Red Hat announced that it has broken server performance records with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 on an IBM System x 3950 M2 running Intel X7460 Xeon processors. Apparently you can have your cake and eat it, too
Without further ado: Reverie « Vincent Laforet’s Blog – I’m proud to finally share this short film with everyone – no time for words – let’s let the moving images do the talking… Here is the raw footage (downsized to 1/4 resolution) from the prototype EOS 5D MKII that Canon allowed me to borrow over a 72 hour period.
Rands In Repose: Impossible – What’s important when the CEO asks for the impossible is that he’s pushing the definition of possibility for what the team can accomplish. Maybe your CEO only has an idea, and can only feel the possibility in what he’s asking, but it’s not his job to make it all happen. That’s where you come in. You’re the person responsible for transforming the feel, the intuition, the glimpse of a plan, and the confidence into knowing and doing.
Sam Harris on Sarah Palin and Elitism | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com – What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance
Amazon adds Oracle support to EC2 | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – The move will give Amazon’s cloud services some serious enterprise heft. In a blog post, Amazon said it will offer EC2 services preloaded with Oracle’s software–Enterprise Linux, Database 11g, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and developer tools–as well as support options.
T-Mobile’s Google phone may offer free e-mail – Techland – The new Android-powered phone will have Google’s (GOOG) Gmail service built in, and T-Mobile executives are considering offering access to Gmail free, without the need for a data plan
Direct Reports : Everybody (Why Leave IIS?) – If you have gotten a chance to try an early build of SQL Server Reporting 2008 Reporting Services, you know that one of the changes in the product is the removal of the Internet Information Services (IIS) dependency.
Google Visualization API – Google Code – The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.
Official Google Blog: The democratization of data – Google will be a part of this global economy, helping both large and small companies to grow their markets and manage their information. Exciting times are ahead!

MACS and Java

Posted on June 19, 2003 by Vinny

Over the past 2 years, I have noticed an interesting trend among the Java developer community. The trend is to move to Apple PowerBook as the laptop of choice away from any Wintel or Lintel alternatives. Are the Mac’s better laptops or is this just a ‘follow the crowd’ mentality driving people to buy Mac’s? Is the move to Mac’s influenced by the UNIX OS under the covers or is this just a pure ‘I hate Microsoft’ sentiment?

I’ve been an proud iPod user for about 2 months now and so I am drinking a little of that Apple Kool-Aid, but I’m not sure I’m ready to give up totally on XP. I am a Linux user and run it on my other box that acts as my WebLogic, JBoss, mySQL and CVS server but I still running IDEA on XP over Linux. Maybe I just need to try out the new 17 inch PowerBook to see if I give into the allure of OS X and Apple.

The new PowerBooks are impressive. Why can’t DELL, Toshiba and Compaq take a page from Apple’s book and create some sleek looking, ergonomically usable laptops instead of the standard clunky old boxes? Oh well, I guess I’ll need to head down to the Apple store to see if I’m just missing something or this is the latest fad.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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