Links for December 29th through January 8th

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Vinny

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

Links for December 9th through December 11th

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Vinny

Docker for the Fedora Project: an interview with Alexander Larsson | opensource.com – Recently, Red Hat and Docker announced they'd be working together on several projects. One of them is packaging Docker for the Fedora Project: a Red Hat sponsored, volunteer-driven, rock-solid Linux operating system
Docker will change everything #iagreecompletely – Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere
IntelliJ IDEA 13 Brings a Full Bag of Goodies to Android Developers – At JetBrains we’re always listening to developers, and Android developers are no exception. Based on this tight feedback loop, we’ve made a long list of changes to our award-winning IDE which will hopefully make development of Android apps an even bigger p
Leveraging PhoneGap within Sencha Touch – With the release of Sencha Touch 2.3 and Sencha Cmd 4, creating your cross platform hybrid applications has never been easier. PhoneGap is now a key feature in the Sencha Touch mobile workflow integrating seamlessly into the newly released, NodeJS based, P
Mobile dev chops? Cloud infrastructure skills? You’re hired! – Hiring more contractors than full-time staff, placing data center and cloud expertise over more conventional IT skills, emphasizing mobile rather than desktop development, and more fine-grained ways to find the right people for the right jobs — these are
Cause for hope: Windows 8 gets the heave-ho in the next wave of updates – Windows might actually become relevant again if rumors about the next version(s) of Windows are to be believed
The same app 4 times: PHP vs Python vs Ruby vs Clojure – Here's a toy program I wrote implemented in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure. I hope it's helpful for someone who knows at least one of those and wants to learn another.
Evernote’s CTO on Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees – Evernote’s CTO gave an exclusive talk at the recent First Round CTO Summit about security and the right way for growing startups to stay safe without needlessly expending valuable resources.
HotSpot JVM garbage collection options cheat sheet (v3) – HotSpot JVM options cheatsheet
websocketd – Turn any application that uses STDIO/STDOUT into a WebSocket server – websocketd is a small command line tool that will wrap an existing command line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket. It provides a quick mechanism for allowing web-applications to interact with existing command line tools.
Fast-growing IT automation startup Opscode raises $32M, changes name to Chef – In fact, a large percentage of companies utilizing Amazon Web Services also are turning to Chef as an "onramp" to the cloud. Essentially, it allows those organizations to ramp up more quickly with cloud services. “Chef is actually extremely simpatico with
Announcing Suro: Backbone of Netflix’s Data Pipeline – Suro, which we are proud to announce as our latest offering as part of the NetflixOSS family, serves as the backbone of our data pipeline. It consists of a producer client, a collector server, and plugin framework that allows events to be dynamically filte
Google Ups The Ante Against Amazon’s Cloud, And That’s A Good Thing For Business – Google wants to leapfrog Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing by making it available to everyone.
Meet The JavaScript Framework That Might Save HTML5 From Itself – Famo.us wants to make HTML5 apps sing using JavaScript. The goal: Flash-like performance, but with no plugins.
Java 8 first steps with Lambdas and Streams – Java 8 will bring the largest changes on the platform since the introduction of Generics in version 1.5. It’s on the time to look at some of the most important innovations.
Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die – FT.com – Technology has already transformed many industries. Next in line is banking. In two or three years, only 5 per cent of consumer interaction will be through branches. The rules have changed and a new league of competitors is emerging.
VoltDB to Provide Database to Eagle for Big Data – WatersTechnology – Eagle Investment Systems has agreed to distribute the in-memory relational database from Billerica, Massachusetts-based VoltDB for delivering real-time analytics and decisioning capabilities to clients.

Links for November 22nd through November 30th

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Vinny

Announcing Scala.js v0.1 – a compiler from Scala to JavaScript – Scala.js is a compiler from Scala to JavaScript. It allows you to write your entire web application in Scala and simply compile to JavaScript!
Build a RESTful API with Martini – I’ve been looking for an excuse to try Martini ever since it was announced on the golang-nuts mailing list. Martini is a Go package for web server development that skyrocketed to close to 2000 stars on GitHub in just a few weeks
HTML5 javascript database library for web app – HTML5 javascript database library for web app that supports all desktop, mobile and web client browsers utilizing IndexedDB, WebSQL and localStorage. No dependency.
Docker unleashed: App portability gets a boost – Popular application-virtualization system for Linux no longer needs custom kernel, adds portability and connectivity features
Atlassian: A Leader in Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle Management – Gartner's 2013 Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle Management names Atlassian as a Leader. We believe this is based on our investment in agile software development practices and support of team collaboration.
Leveraging PhoneGap within Sencha Touch – With the release of Sencha Touch 2.3 and Sencha Cmd 4, creating your cross platform hybrid applications has never been easier. PhoneGap is now a key feature in the Sencha Touch mobile workflow integrating seamlessly into the newly released, NodeJS based, P
Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science – R remains popular with the PhDs of data science, but as data moves mainstream, Python is taking over.
cmder | Portable console emulator for Windows – Cmder is a software package created out of pure frustration over absence of nice console emulator on Windows. It is based on amazing software, spiced up with Monokai color scheme and custom prompt layout. Looking sexy from the start.
An opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby – Grape is a REST-like API micro-framework for Ruby. It's designed to run on Rack or complement existing web application frameworks such as Rails and Sinatra by providing a simple DSL to easily develop RESTful APIs. It has built-in support for common convent
How Authy Built A Fault-Tolerant Two-Factor Authentication Service – On the heels of their newest product release, we sat down with Daniel Palacio, Founder of Authy, to talk about how they built their service.
On launching AngularJS 1.2: what we learned, what we’re changing – We learned a lot from launching 1.2. Here are our own notes on the 1.2 launch process, and what we'll be improving, in case you're curious too.
It can’t just be Big Data, it has to be Fast Data: Reactor 1.0 goes GA – I'm happy to announce that Reactor, a powerful foundational library for building reactive, fast data applications on the JVM has reached GA!
Arm yourself: The API wars are coming – The arms merchants of the cloud and a new wave of developers armed with APIs are going to cause massive technology disruption.
Eric Schmidt’s guide for converting to Android from iPhone – Eric Schmidt's guide for converting to Android from iPhone
Salesforce Making Business Software More Social – NYTimes.com – According to a senior engineer overseeing the project, however, applications running on Salesforce can now be quickly remodeled for any screen, adding and taking away features that might prove more or less useful on a mobile device.
Hands On With Google Glass 2: What’s New? – The second Explorer Edition of Google Glass is out—and we get our paws all over it.
How Node.js Got Big – How the wunderkind framework grew up, from the perspective of one of its earliest contributors.
What it takes to run Stack Overflow – Here’s what runs the Stack Exchange network in that data center
FastR: an implementation of the R language – FastR: an implementation of the R language

Links for November 17th through November 22nd

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Vinny

Introducing node.js Tools for Visual Studio – Scott Hanselman – Just when you thought it couldn't be crazier in Redmond, today they are introducing node.js Tools for Visual Studio!
Apple’s iOS7 Native JavaScript Bridge – The combination of JavaScript support in your native iOS client and the proliferation of JavaScript server technology Node.js makes for exciting opportunities in “asymmetric” JavaScript code re-use for your native iOS App, web client and of course backend
Ionic: The Most Advanced HTML5 Mobile App Framework – Ionic is a beautiful front-end framework for developing hybrid mobile apps in HTML5.
Tableau 8.1 is Available: You Asked, We Delivered – We're happy to announce that Tableau 8.1 is now available around the world. In this release we're delivering a host of features inspired by your ideas.
Tableau 8.1 covers a lot of ground: from enterprise features and enhanced mobile authoring, to sophisti
Google is building a Chrome app-based development environment called Spark – The Next Web – Google’s Chromium team never ceases to amaze. Its latest project is a Chrome app-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) codenamed Spark.
ReportServer – Professional Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting – ReportServer integrates many free and commercial reporting engines. This allows you to use existing reports directly and choose the engine that best fits the current need for new developments.
Using Sencha GXT To Build Interactive Web Apps That Manage Big Data – GWT is a great framework for developing small and large interactive web applications. Sencha GXT is a huge addition that gives developers all the tools they need to build great looking and easy-to-use user interfaces. If you are in the process of evaluating web application frameworks, the combination of GWT and Sencha GXT should be high on your list.
We Analyzed 30,000 GitHub Projects – Here Are The Top 100 Libraries in Java, JS and Ruby – We chose the 3 top languages on GitHub – Java, Ruby and JavaScript. For each one we analyzed 10,000 projects (i.e. GitHub repositories) leaning towards those that have been favorited the most by developers.
Why Office 365 is a better Office – Microsoft's flexible approach to Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office means each business can get the right mix of cloud and local for its needs
High performance libraries in Java – There is an increasing number of libraries which are described as high performance and have benchmarks to back that claim up.
Could Tizen be Android’s next nemesis? – Tizen is an up and coming open-source operating system based off of Linux. Like, Android, Tizen is extremely flexible in its uses. Tizen also allows a wide variety of app development as it supports apps running on HTML5 as well as other related web technologies to allow apps to run across multiple device categories. For example, an app on Tizen would be coded in HTML5 and it would be able to run on everything from smartphones to laptops and even to bigger devices such as TVs.
The rediscovery of India | McKinsey & Company – Is diversity an excuse for disunity? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says Indians must embrace their common ambitions if the nation is to fulfill its tremendous potential.
How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management – Harvard Business Review – That, in a nutshell, is the principle at the heart of Google’s approach: deploying disciplined data collection and rigorous analysis—the tools of science—to uncover deeper insights into the art and craft of management.
Windows and Line of Business Applications: No Good Options – So while it pains me to say it, companies that are looking to develop a new line of business applications should seriously consider abandoning that idea and build an internal website instead.
DevTools Snippets – A collection of helpful snippets to use inside of browser devtools – The snippets can be used in any browser console. Chrome provides a 'snippets' feature that can be used to manage the scripts, while Firefox has a 'scratchpad' feature that lets you run, edit, and save chunks of JavaScript.
Debugging JavaScript – Chrome DevTools – As the complexity of JavaScript applications increase, developers need powerful debugging tools to help quickly discover the cause of an issue and fix it efficiently. The Chrome DevTools include a number of useful tools to help make debugging JavaScript less painful.
5 Advanced Javascript and Web Debugging Techniques You Should Know About – In this article we will discuss 5 advanced techniques which web developers can use to reduce the time they spend debugging and squash challenging bugs by using new tools available to us and taking advantage of the new features offered by debuggers.
Dart SDK 1.0 is here, and it’s on a quest to slay JavaScript – Google’s intention to build a front-end development language for building web apps was first made public two years ago. Today, it was announced at Belgium based Devoxx that Dart SDK 1.0 had finally been upgraded from test version to production-ready option
Elasticsearch & Kibana – visualize logs and time-stamped data – visualize logs and time-stamped data – Elasticsearch works seamlessly with kibana to let you see and interact with your data
Another day, another Java menace: Ceylon has landed – This week’s Devoxx conference in Antwerp saw the launch of two box fresh languages: Google’s Dart SDK 1.0, and Red Hat’s Ceylon 1.0. Creator Gavin King has been adamant from the earliest development stages that the intention has always been to create something that can run alongside Java – but designed as a language and SDK for business computing that learns and builds on Java’s successes and failures

Links for November 6th through November 9th

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Vinny

Hadoop – 100x Faster. How we did it… – After two years of development, tens of thousands of lines of Java, Scala and C++ code, multiple design iterations, several releases and dozens of benchmarks later, we finally built a product that can deliver real-time performance to Hadoop customers with seamless integration and no tedious ETL
Seven Ways To Use GitHub That Aren’t Coding – Meet the projects that prove GitHub is a collaboration tool for all stripes. – Meet the projects that prove GitHub is a collaboration tool for all stripes. GitHub is so often touted as a tool for coding projects that it’s easy to forget just how useful a resource it is for everything else.
How to Organize the Big Data Behind the Apps: Video – Bloomberg – New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne discusses the company's app data collection product with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West.
Building the social enterprise | McKinsey & Company – By following a few simple principles, leaders can realize the vast potential of social technologies to engage employees and transform organizations.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. – There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
Frege is a non-strict, pure functional programming language in the spirit of Haskell that compiles to Java & runs in a JVM – Frege is a non-strict, pure functional programming language in the spirit of Haskell. It enjoys a strong static type system with type inference. Higher rank types are supported, though type annotations are required for that.
Frege programs are compiled to
Red Hat aims for enterprise OpenStack deployment dominance – Red Hat Enterprise Linux integration could ease OpenStack adoption, but complexity and cloud competition stand in the way
Presto: Interacting with petabytes of data at Facebook – Presto is a distributed SQL query engine optimized for ad-hoc analysis at interactive speed. It supports standard ANSI SQL, including complex queries, aggregations, joins, and window functions.
Review: Box beats Dropbox – and all the rest – for business – Box trumps Dropbox, Egnyte, Citrix ShareFile, EMC Syncplicity, and OwnCloud with rich mix of file sync, file sharing, user management, deep reporting, and enterprise integration

Links for October 21st through October 25th

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Vinny

WhiteDB is a lightweight NoSQL database library written in C, operating fully in main memory. – WhiteDB is a lightweight NoSQL database library written in C, operating fully in main memory. There is no server process. Data is read and written directly from/to shared memory, no sockets are used between WhiteDB and the application program.
Google: Our Robot Cars Are Better Drivers Than Puny Humans | MIT Technology Review – Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.
Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet, TCP/IP, Protocol Buffers, and key-value objects – Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet, TCP/IP, Protocol Buffers, and key-value objects
Microsoft Surface Pro 2 review from gdgt – With the Surface Pro 2, Microsoft hasn't changed much — it kept the study build and sharp display, adding a new kickstand and improved battery life. But, despite all it has going for it, the Surface Pro 2 is still a hybrid device that isn't going to suit everyone.
Offline.js – Handle your users losing their internet connection like a pro – Offline.js is a library to automatically alert your users when they've lost internet connectivity, like Gmail. It captures AJAX requests which were made while the connection was down, and remakes them when it's back up, so your app reacts perfectly.
Technology Change: The journey from .NET to Scala – There are now several dev teams at Empathica working on Scala projects. Tool chains are being developed. Coding standards are being established and enforced. Libraries are being standardized across our projects. It’s starting to return to a comfortable
LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS | LinkedIn Engineering – Similarly, Intro’s approach of proxying IMAP is a novel way of delivering software to users. It operates at the limit of what is technically possible, but it has a big advantage: we can enhance the apps you already use. Of course the idea isn’t limited to
Webinar replay: Spring Boot – Simplifying Spring for Everyone – n this webinar Phil Webb will demonstrate how Spring Boot can take you from zero to Spring with minimal fuss. We will look at how you can rapidly prototype Spring applications using Groovy, and how Spring Configuration in Java applications can be radically
Debian/Ubuntu extend the dominance in the Linux web server market at the expense of Red Hat/CentOS – Debian has been the most popular Linux distribution on web servers for almost two years when it took over rank #1 from CentOS. Now CentOS lost another rank to Ubuntu, giving Debian-based distributions a solid lead over the Red Hat camp.
Linux is king *nix of the data center—but Unix may live on forever – Unix servers hit lowest market share ever, but they still have a long future.
How a flawed deployment process led Knight to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes – The tale has all the hallmarks of technical debt in a huge, unmaintained, bitrotten codebase (the bug itself due to code that hadn’t been used for 8 years), and a really poor, undisciplined devops story.
How to balance maintenance and IT innovation via @robcrussell – Many IT leaders admit their spending is too heavily weighted toward keep-the-lights-on projects. Here's how to tip the balance.
Microsoft, the sleeping giant of the cloud – With its vast portfolio of software and billions of dollars in data center infrastructure investment, Microsoft stands poised to rule the cloud
Learn Haskell Fast and Hard – A very short and dense tutorial for learning Haskell. – A very short and dense tutorial for learning Haskell.

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 June 22nd through July 8th

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Vinny

The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users, 300K QPS, a 22 MB/S Firehose, and Send Tweets in Under 5 Seconds – VP of Engineering at Twitter, describes in his superb and very detailed presentation on Timelines at Scale. If you want to know how Twitter works – then start here
How to design a multi-user ajax web application to be concurrently safe – Stack Overflow – How to design a multi-user ajax web application to be concurrently safe – Stack Overflow
UnQLite – An Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine – UnQLite is a in-process software library which implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL database engine. UnQLite is a document store database similar to MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB etc. as well a standard Key/Value store similar to BerkeleyDB, LevelDB, etc.
Nginx just became the most used web server among the top 1000 websites – 34.9% of the top 1000 web sites rely on Nginx. That makes it the most trusted web server on high traffic sites, just ahead of Apache.
Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE” – It looks like Internet Explorer 11 could be the best Internet Explorer yet by a long shot. By finally removing the evidence of past mistakes, Microsoft is ready to take a place amongst the standards-based browsers of today
The world’s easiest CMS for designers | Cloud Cannon – Cloud Cannon turns your static website into a CMS your clients will love
Automating Development Environments with Vagrant and Puppet | Kloudless Blog – Hopefully I have given you a good taste of how easy it is to put these two tools together to make your development and deployment a lot easier! Puppet is a really great tool and I highly recommend learning more so you can take full advantage of this work flow
My Fitbit Flex Hasn’t Changed My Life, But It’s Telling Me What’s Wrong – ReadWrite – Part two of a first-person experiment: Two weeks with the Fitbit Flex exposes the power, and the limits, of wearable fitness tracking devices.
Why Mobile Developers Are Really Starting To Embrace The Enterprise – ReadWrite – Big businesses have gotten a taste of mobile's productivity bump. Now they're craving more.
Red Hat Looks Beyond Linux For Its Next Decade Of Growth – ReadWrite – Red Hat's last 10 years were all about enterprise Linux. The next 10 will be about enterprise clouds.
Our web development workflow is completely broken. – Visual debugging could get a whole new meaning, and we could finally show the right information in the right context.
Create a simple blog system and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails – In this project you’ll create a simple blog system and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails
Update for Rails 4.0 – Learn Web Development with the Ruby on Rails Tutorial – Ruby on Rails Tutorial – Learn Web Development with Rails 4.0
Facebook TAO: The power of the graph – A massive amount of effort has gone into making TAO the easy to use and powerful distributed data store that it is today. TAO has become one of the most important data stores at Facebook — the power of graph helps us tame the demanding and dynamic social
Salt Stack – Systems and configuration management for any enterprise cloud or DevOps organization – SaltStack is a total package – cloud deployment, configuration management, remote execution and monitoring in a clean, well-designed package
Oracle and Salesforce: a Data-Sharing Deal – NYTimes.com – Some of the best trash-talking in tech may be over. The Oracle Corporation and Salesforce.com, two of the more contentious competitors in software, are about to announce a close alliance involving software delivered via cloud computing.

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.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: Linux