Links for February 16th through February 21st

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Vinny

The Play Framework at LinkedIn | LinkedIn Engineering – We’ve been running Play 2.0 in production for several months and are now gradually rolling it out to more teams at LinkedIn. In this blog post, I'll talk about the benefits we've seen from Play, show a brief walk-through of the developer experience, and ta
How Microsoft will change forever and thrive again | Microsoft Windows – InfoWorld – As PC prospects decline, the tech giant moves toward a hybrid, cross-platform future with opportunities in the server closet and the cloud
Why is it that everyone wants to copy Apple’s products but nobody wants to copy being Apple? – This idea that the basis of competition is set by Apple and then the race is on to climb the trajectory of improvement is so well understood that it’s axiomatic: “It’s just the way things are.” Apple releases a product that defines a category or disrupts an industry and it becomes obvious what needs to be built.
Netflix – From SimpleDB to Cassandra: Data Migration for a High Volume Web Application at Netflix – From SimpleDB to Cassandra: Data Migration for a High Volume Web Application at Netflix
Smart Path Variables for Spring MVC in IntelliJ IDEA 12 – The latest release of IntelliJ IDEA brings many exciting features for Spring MVC support. In this post we would like to highlight some of them, which add even more intelligence for @RequestMapping and @PathVariable usages in your project.
Efficient JavaScript unit testing – Without unit testing the JavaScript code, organization will pay much money for testing, re-testing, and re-testing web applications for just deciding upgrading or supporting new browsers. This presentation shows the solution of this problem.
Eligible API – Build the future of health information. – The US health information systems pass records in disparate data formats. We've created simple REST APIs that normalize them for you.
Papertrail – Hosted log management for servers, apps, and cloud services. – Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.
Graylog2 – Free open source self-hosted log management and exception tracking – Graylog2 is an open source log management solution that stores your logs in ElasticSearch. It consists of a server written in Java that accepts your syslog messages via TCP, UDP or AMQP and stores it in the database.
Profile of the Former Apple Engineers Who Designed the Nest Smart Thermostat | MIT Technology Review – Two men who created the iPod and iPhone founded Nest and injected new technology into the humble thermostat. Now they have their sights on the rest of your house.

Daily del.icio.us for April 8th through April 13th

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Vinny

Google exec worries over ‘rudderless’ Java – open source, licensing, Java, Google, apache – PC World – The Java platform has "appeared rudderless for the last few years," said Google's chief Java architect, Josh Bloch, speaking Wednesday at the Red Hat Middleware 2020 virtual conference. "A malaise [has fallen] over the community and the end is not in sight."
Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video – While an open-source VP8 could end concerns about H.264’s licensing issues and Theora’s quality, questions still remain about whether Google can provide a video standard on which everyone can agree
Surprise, Surprise: Opera Mini iPhone App Gets Apple’s Stamp Of Approval – Good news for Opera (and its legions of fans around the world): the company has just announced that its mobile browser Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store.
PBS | About PBS | NEW RESEARCH CONFIRMS PBS THE MOST TRUSTED AND UNBIASED SOURCE FOR NEWS – The American people have named PBS the most trusted and unbiased institution among nationally known organizations, the most trusted source of news and public affairs1 among broadcast and cable sources,1 and the most educational media brand for children ages 2-82 according to new national polls.
Please do not change your password – The Boston Globe – “Most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit trade-off to users,” wrote its author, Cormac Herley, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research.
Java 1.7 – What’s new? Release date, code examples and performance – I have been reading quite a lot about Java 1.7. I have decided to regroup all I have discovered in this article so that I and maybe you, won't have to spend hours surfing the web to find all this information
The Busy Java Developer’s Guide to Functional Java – Functional programming is definitely a different mindset. It seems to solve a good number of problems that we attempt to address using tactics like the Strategy pattern in normal OO Java
.NET Java Interop Solutions; Grasshopper – The Visual Studio 2008, 2005 Plugin – At Mainsoft, we believe the fastest route for Visual Studio® developers to deploy applications on open systems is to extend existing .NET development skills to the Java™ EE platform
Ajaxian » So all this is done in HTML5 by the way – The Web is so special as it isn’t owned by a single vendor. This means that this kind of crap can’t happen. One company can’t change the rules in one fell swoop. There isn’t that one company that can become misaligned with the interests of certain developers and Do Bad Things.
gxtforms – Library for automating GXT forms generation – GXT Forms provides utility code to autogenerate GWT/GXT forms based on annotated Java Beans. This library is intended to complement the GXT library, making form generation and data binding just a bit easier.

Daily del.icio.us for January 27th through February 1st

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Vinny

Alex Payne On the iPad – We have the technology and the incentive to build the future of computing in an open way. The only reason not to is greed, laziness, and hubris.
Flash, iPad, Standards Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report – Developers who supplement Flash with HTML5 may soon tire of Flash—but Adobe has a brief but golden opportunity to create the tools with which rich HTML5 content is created. Let’s see if they figure that out.
InfoQ: Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both – Scrum and Kanban are two flavours of Agile software development – two deceptively simple but surprisingly powerful approaches to software development. So how do they relate to each other?
Integrating Spring Security with ExtJS Login Page | Loiane Groner – This tutorial will walk through how to configure ExtJS Login form (Ajax login form) instead of default Spring Security login.jsp.
New Logitech Touch Mouse Turns Your iPhone or iPod Touch into a Wireless Trackpad and Keyboard | BLogitech – The Touch Mouse app turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wireless trackpad and keyboard for your computer, so you can point, click, scroll and type from afar, in any application, on a Mac or PC
InfoQ: SOA Practioners Should Define Standards First – Choosing the right standards at the start of the SOA lifecycle is an important first step and one that is still overlooked by many practitioners today, with resultant problems.
Sun.com is dead now – Just found that sun.com is now redirecting to oracle.com. Some days back I visited Sun’s original website. But it didn’t took long by Oracle to make it red
Hyrum Wright: Why use Subversion? – Hyrum Wright, the President of the Subversion Corporation and our Director of Open Source Software, has taken some time to put together a brief presentation on "Why Subversion" where he talks about the benefits of using Subversion, some of the features it offers and the improvements over the last couple of versions what's next on the radar in Subversion 1.7.
Citrix will have an iPad app to run Windows 7 sessions | Mobilize – InfoWorld – Want to run Windows 7 on the new Apple iPad? Citrix says it will soon be possible — at least virtually — using a new version of its Citrix Receiver software
Apple confirms 3G VoIP apps on iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch – Apple Inc. confirmed last night that it is now allowing iPhone, iPad and iPod touch developers to build apps that can make Internet calls over a 3G cellular network
With iPad Tablet PC, Apple Blurs the Lines Between Devices – NYTimes.com – After months of feverish speculation, Steven P. Jobs introduced Wednesday what Apple hopes will be the coolest device on the planet: a slender tablet computer called the iPad.

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

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Vinny

U.S. Soldiers’ New Weapon: an iPod | Newsweek International Edition | Newsweek.com – Making sense of the reams of data from satellites, drones and ground sensors cries out for a handheld device that is both versatile and easy to use. With their intuitive interfaces, Apple devices—the iPod Touch and, to a lesser extent, the iPhone—are becoming the handhelds of choice.
10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About | MakeUseOf.com – Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:
Java 7 Will Evolve to Fine-grained Parallelism | Intel Go Parallel – DK 7 (Java Development Kit 7) will offer the fork-join framework in order to help Java developers to tackle the multicore revolution using this popular programming language.
Aneesh Chopra: America’s Chief Technology Officer – ReadWriteWeb – During his weekly address this morning, President Obama named Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. Chopra, who has effectively been doing much the same job at a state level in his role as Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, will work closely with Vivek Kundra, the recently named Federal CIO, and Jeffrey Zients, the man Obama today named the first ever Chief Performance Officer.
Skyway Team Blog » Blog Archive » Five part Spring MVC tutorial is live – In conjunction with the release of Skyway Builder 6.2, we’ve published an updated series of videos for generating a Spring MVC application using Skyway Builder. All Skyway Builder videos can be found here, and here’s a list of the Spring MVC tutorial:
AaronZ Sakai: Java Collection Performance – This is just a helpful reference when trying to decide which collections to use in Java. I use this for my personal reference but it may help others as well. The links go to the Sun Javadocs. The collections of each type are ordered based on performance (i.e. the highest performance (highest speed) ones are listed first and will be the fastest for most operations)
GridGain – Open Cloud Platform : Weblog – It is actually not quite obvious question as GAE with Java support remains relatively new technology comparing to EC2. Here's a good pros/cons checklist that you can run to see what infrastructure fits the bill for your needs.
Project Fondue | CSS Sprite Generator – This tool allows you to automate the process of generating CSS sprites. Simply give it a ZIP file containing 2 or more images (GIF, PNG or JPG) and it will generate a sprite image and the corresponding CSS rules to target and display each component image.
C# From a Java Developer’s Perspective – What follows is an overview of similarities and differences between the language features and libraries of the C# and Java programming languages based on my experience using both languages.
The Online Collaboration Tools Guide – ReadWriteWeb – The following review of major products in this space will help you choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The big company and the cloud – Don't expect to see the biggest companies closing down their data centers in the next few years. Besides, the cloud in the end will be more interesting for the new models of computing it opens up rather than for its ability to accommodate the old ones

Daily del.icio.us for January 15th through January 19th

Posted on January 19, 2009 by Vinny

Lincoln’s second inaugural address – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation#039;s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Cairngorm – Cairngorm – Confluence – Cairngorm is the lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications built in Flex or AIR. A collaboration of recognized design patterns, Cairngorm exemplifies and encourages best-practices for RIA development
Selecting the Right Flex Application Framework | Summa Blog – The Flex community is divided between Adobe’s Cairngorm and Cliff Hall’s PureMVC, with strong arguments from both sides. However, your answer may just lie in the “it depends” space.
This post aims to help you make that decision. It includes analysis of Cairngorm, PureMVC, and the new kid on the block, asfusion’s Mate.
InfoQ: Pair Programming vs. Code Review – Pair programming and code review are each practices that improve the quality of software, as well as promote knowledge sharing. When the Agile vs. Lean, XP vs. Scrum, and vi vs. Emacs debates get slow, developers have been known to debate the merits of pair programming vs. code review. Theodore Nguyen-Cao described code reviewers as chickens, and paired programmers as pigs.
InfoQ: Presentation: Kent Beck: Trends in Agile Development – In this presentation, Kent Beck, the father of eXtreme Programming, shows the synergies between business and Agile development. The reason Agile is becoming more popular every day is because it responds to the business needs as they evolve.
terraza de aravaca: JPA implementations comparison: Hibernate, Toplink Essentials, Openjpa, Eclipselink – This article is a response to the lack of information on the net about the performance differences among the 4 most well known Java Persistence API (JPA) implementations: Toplink Essentials, EclipseLink, Hibernate and OpenJPA
An Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows – This document is designed to show that using git on Windows is not a difficult process. In this guide, I will create a repository, make several commits, create a branch, merge a branch, search the commit history, push to a remote server, and pull from a remote server. The majority of this will be done using GUI tools.
Farata Systems » Enterprise Development with Flex – first rough cuts – This groundbreaking book shows Flex developers exactly what’s required to build production-quality Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the enterprise. Part of the popular Adobe Developer Library co-published by O’Reilly and Adobe, Enterprise Development with Flex goes well beyond Flex tutorials and product documentation to suggest best practices, compare frameworks and tools, and offer efficient techniques for developing enterprise RIAs
Choices Narrowed for First U.S. CTO – BusinessWeek – President-elect Obama has two executives in mind for the top technology job, one from Cisco and one from Washington, D.C. Both were born in India
Welcome to WordPress.tv « Blog « WordPress.tv – To make it easy for you to find up-to-date, WordPress-themed video content within a couple of clicks. Without having to wade through spammy promotional videos, out-of-date content, and missing chunks of presentations
John Goerzen on Why You Should Learn Haskell – O’Reilly Broadcast – John Goerzen is a co-author of Real World Haskell. In a recent interview with O#039;Reilly, he explained how the book came to be, the special magic which makes Haskell worth learning, and how to change your mindset to make learning possible.
iFlyz grips your gadgets while uFlyz | Crave – CNET – To use the iFlyz, you attach your phone or media player to the suction cup, clamp it to a seat tray in either the stowed and locked position or unlocked and down position, and adjust the flexible gooseneck to the ideal viewing angle. It works with gadgets including the iPhone, Zune, and iPod.
Xpress Suite Adds Automatic Java to iPhone Conversion | JAVA Developer’s Journal – Javaground announced a new component of its Xpress Suite allowing developers to automatically generate a native iPhone program from a Java source code.
Felipe Gaucho’s Blog: Servlet 3.0 Unleashed – The specification of Servlet 3.0 was approved by the Public Review Ballot and it was also endorsed by the Java EE Executive Committee (EC).

Daily del.icio.us for January 11th through January 13th

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Vinny

What I Saw at C.E.S. This Year, Part II – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com – As promised: here are a few goodies I saw at C.E.S. that are worth looking forward to
Java EE and Flex: A compelling combination, Part 1 – JavaWorld – Adobe Flex is becoming a popular choice for generating the client side of enterprise Java applications. In this first of two articles, Dustin Marx demonstrates how Flex can help you deliver highly interactive user interfaces that access your Java EE application#039;s enterprise logic.
Tim Sneath : The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets – If you’ve downloaded and installed Windows 7 Beta recently, I think you’ll enjoy this list of my thirty favorite secrets. Have fun!
Adobe LiveCycle takes to the cloud | InfoWorld | News | 2009-01-11 | By Paul Krill – LiveCycle ES is a server-based offering combining data capture, document output, process management, and content services. It draws on PDF, Adobe Reader, and Flash in the creation and distribution of documents. Applications can run in a disconnected mode via the reader.
Compass – Java Search Engine Framework – Compass is an open source project built on top of Lucene aiming at simplifying the integration of search into any Java application
JimNeath’s bort at master — GitHub – A base rails app featuring: RESTful Authentication, Will Paginate, Rspec amp;amp; Rspec-rails, Exception Notifier, Asset Packager, Cap Recipe (multi-stage). Put together by Fudge to remove the need for boring project setup.
Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles – O’Reilly Radar – That#039;s why a time like this, when the bubble is bursting, is a great time to see how important it is to think about the big picture, and what matters not just to us, but to building a sustainable economy in a sustainable world
ivan krsti? · code culture » How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing – A “short squeeze” sounds inconspicuous enough; you wouldn’t tell it by Bloomberg’s language, but Merckle’s Volkswagen bet lost out to one of the most masterful hacks of the financial system in history.
pastebud: copy and paste for the iPhone – pastebud enables round-trip copy and paste on your iPhone or iPod Touch, between the two applications that matter the most: Mail and Safari.
To ban or not to ban: Bisphenol-A in food is OK with FDA but not with some scientists – Columbia Missourian – Professor of biological sciences Frederick vom Saal uses this laboratory in LeFevre Hall on the MU campus to study BPA. For more than a decade, vom Saal has denounced BPA as a toxin and threat to public health.

Daily del.icio.us for November 18th through November 22nd

Posted on November 22, 2008 by Vinny

InfoQ: Pressure and Performance – The CTO’s Dilemma – In this interview made by Deborah Hartmann during Agile 2008, Diana Larsen and Jim Shore talk about patterns observed in CTOs' activity. CTOs emerge as real people caring for other people in their organization, and are put under a lot of pressure and constraints.
Apple – iPhone – iPhone Your Life – Once you own an iPhone, you discover that it’s more than a phone. It’s a way of life. Take a look at some ideas to help you get the most out of your iPhone, wherever you go.
JavaScript Table Sorter – Web Development Blog – This JavaScript table sorting script is easy to use, fast and lightweight at only 1.7KB. It includes alternate row formatting, header class toggling, auto data type recognition and selective column sorting. It will currently sort strings, numbers and currency
JavaScript Table Sorter | Ajaxonomy – This JavaScript table sorting script is easy to use, fast and lightweight at only 1.7KB. It includes alternate row formatting, header class toggling, auto data type recognition and selective column sorting. It will currently sort strings, numbers and currency.
Tour de Flex | Flex.org – Rich Internet Application Development – Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more
Explore over 200 Flex and AIR samples with the new Tour de Flex application – AIR – James Ward announced a new desktop application powered by Adobe AIR called Tour de Flex exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more. James has been working on this project along with fellow Adobe employees Christophe Coenraets, Greg Wilson and others.
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google – Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google
Ext JS – Ext CDN – Custom Builds, Compression, and Fast Performance – We are pleased to announce that Ext has partnered with CacheFly, a global content network, to provide free CDN hosting for the Ext JS framework. Cachefly’s globally distributed network and aggressive caching accelerate the delivery of web content like JavaScript and CSS, making for an even faster Ext experience.
WTFramework bookmarklet – Oskar Krawczyk – blog.olicio.us – Ever wondered which JavaScript framework was used on a specific website but was too lazy to check the source code for the answer? Fear no more WTFramework is here.
JCS – Java Caching System – JCS is a distributed caching system written in java. It is intended to speed up applications by providing a means to manage cached data of various dynamic natures. Like any caching system, JCS is most useful for high read, low put applications. Latency times drop sharply and bottlenecks move away from the database in an effectively cached system

Amazon Unbox Video – More of the same

Posted on September 10, 2006 by Vinny

Amazon launched their latest offering entitled Unbox Video which is essentially a video (TV shows, movies, etc) download to buy or rent service. Rumor is that Amazon rushed this out on Friday, September 8th to beat some super secret announcement coming from Apple later next week.

The Unbox video service doesn’t offer anything new and is in fact more of the same. I can buy a movie but I can't burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV. Media center PC's are exceptions if you have a Media Center PC hooked up to your TV or are using something like Media Center Extender to broadcast the output to a TV. The videos that you download from Amazon are DRM'd Windows Media (WMV) files and so you cannot put in on your video iPod. Apple essentially works the same way with their DRM but you since they control the mobile music and video player market; it's less of an issue. I'm guessing you've probably already got the sense that Unbox video is only for Windows and you would be right. No MAC or Linux support at this time.

There are 2 new concepts introduced that set Amazon Unbox video apart from iTunes and other similar services. To my knowledge, Amazon is the only one that will let you rent a movie by downloading it to your computer. You have 30 days to watch it and 24 hrs to complete watching it before the video is automatically deleted. I know Netflix is working on a download-n-rent but I don't believe that's available at this moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Another concept that I consider a move in the right direction is the concept of the Media Library. Everything you buy or rent is in your Media Library on Amazon and so you can buy an item on 1 machine and download to watch it on another registered machine. Both machines must have the Unbox video player and be registered on Amazon as your machines. As an experiment, I bought a TV show on my laptop and downloaded it. I then copied the video over to my desktop and dropped it the directory where Amazon would expect its videos to reside. The Unbox player didn't see and I wasn't able to play it directly without downloading it from my Media Library to the desktop. The video player was smart enough to realize that the file was already there and started playing in seconds after it marked the video as downloaded on the desktop. The subtle point here is that if your computer crashes and you lose your purchased content, you will be able to download it from your Amazon Media Library. It would be interesting for Amazon to make this a paid-service and use their S3 service to automatically back-up your purchased content for you.

The video quality of the TV shows that I purchased was good and the sound was fine as well. I guess a true test would be to buy a widescreen movie and see if the Dolby 5.1 surround-sound works as advertised. All in all, the video service is nice but nothing earth shattering and left me wanting more. Another major issue with this offering is the licensing agreement that you agree to as part of the software installation and it requires you to apply all patches from Amazon whether you want them or not and Amazon can delete your movies if you uninstall their video player. Yikes! Doesn't like a lot like that Amazon we know and love, does it? More information at the uninnovate blog and CNet.

Why is it so hard to come up with a video service where I can buy a movie and burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV? I hate DRM but I understand the need to protect copyrights but there has to be a way to protect content and allow me as the purchaser fair-use of that purchased piece of content. I guess the key here is purchase – I am paying for something. Don't put limitations on my personal usage of that. Anyone that can produce a service that allows that will eat everyone's lunch. I hope Apple or Netflix or YouTube or dozen of the other YouTube clones/wannabe's out there come up with a way to legally distribute video content but allow the purchaser some flexibility on where they can view that piece of content. It would also be great if they could include some future-proofing on your purchase and so if you bought 2nd season of The Office with some proprietary DRM, you could exchange or upgrade it for any future format that's different without having to repurchase the movie all over again. Ah to dream…..

iPod Mini – Daddy like! :)

Posted on March 1, 2004 by Vinny

I want one, now! My friends Chris and Douglas went out this past weekend and each picked up new iPod Minis. I got a chance to play with Douglas’s mini today and I just feel in love. I already own a 30GB iPod and I want one of these Mini’s now. I fell in love, there’s no other way to describe the feeling of holding this sleek and cute little device in your hands. Apple just has an amazing eye for style in everything they do and they make just amazing looking, functional products. My iPod was the first Apple product I purchased and I was so impressed with the box the iPod came in, let alone the device. Chris always rails on the PC manufactures for the lack of imagination and I have to totally agree. Sony and Toshiba have some neat PC/laptops, but the rest of the herd seems to make the most generic, boxy unattractive machines. Now I just have to figure out how to buy a mini without my wife yelling at me.

Update: Just saw this on MacMinute via. Erik’s blog. Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich said that revenue from iPods should be around US$1 billion this year. That number is estimated to double to $2 billon by 2006

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” }

Tag Archives: ipod