Links for September 21st through September 30th

  • Debugger: working with sub-ranges for arrays and lists – I love you IntelliJ IDEA – During debugging IntelliJ IDEA shows only the first 100 elements of arrays and collections. It’s enough in most cases. However, it’s sometimes convenient to use a custom range. Exactly for this the ‘Adjust Range’ action has been available for arrays for quite a long time.
  • PhoneGap Build – Write once, compile in the cloud & run anywhere – Say goodbye to SDKs, compilers and hardware. Simply write your app using HTML, CSS or JavaScript, upload it to the PhoneGap Build service and get back app-store ready apps for Apple iOS, Google Android, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry and more.
  • Oracle to Launch NoSQL Database at OpenWorld | SiliconANGLE – Oracle plans to launch and demo a NoSQL database at Oracle OpenWorld next week along with a Hadoop data builder and in-memory data store.
  • After all, it sure looks like the Kindle Fire is about to become the Android tablet. – After all, it sure looks like the Kindle Fire is about to become the Android tablet.
  • Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet – Bloomberg – Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer, unveiled its Kindle Fire tablet computer, taking aim at Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s bestselling iPad with a device that’s smaller and less than half the price
  • Enhancing iOS Sencha Touch apps with NimbleKit | Learn | Sencha – In this article we discuss a less well-known option called NimbleKit, which, as well as packaging and device API access, also offers a few interesting opportunities to enhance a web application's user interface with native controls
  • How Bad Boards Kill Companies: HP | Monday Note – In the end, as some see it, this could be a none-too-subtle power grab by Ray Lane: note the joint signature at the bottom of the memo to the troops: Meg and Ray. As the newly appointed Executive Chairman, he gets to "assist" Meg. Why appoint a CEO who needs such assistance in the first place? And wouldn’t any normal, non-executive Chairman, or any director provide assistance anyway?
  • Strata Web Framework – Strata is a fast, streaming web framework for node.js that is patterned after time-honored and battle tested web application design principles pioneered in the Python and Ruby communities (see WSGI and Rack). Using Strata, developers can build highly performant web servers in a powerful, modular style that is easy to maintain and takes full advantage of the streaming capabilities and excellent I/O handling of node.js.
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Links for September 17th through September 20th

Daily del.icio.us for April 17th through April 19th

Daily del.icio.us for June 3rd through June 4th

Daily del.icio.us for December 31st through January 4th

  • Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle – Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle
  • I’m using Git because it makes me feel cool | unethical blogger – As 2007 became 2008 the writing was on the wall, Git was our new bicycle. It had been blessed by Saint Torvalds and clearly we needed to get in on the ground floor of the new cool before it became mainstream.

    We needed to switch to Git immediately. Who cares if Git is extremely fast, it's not like time is money or something ridiculous like that

  • Why Git is Better Than X – This site is here because I seem to be spending a lot of time lately defending Gitsters against charges of fanboyism, bandwagonism and koolaid-thirst. So, here is why people are switching to Git from X, and why you should too. Just click on a reason to view it.
  • Microsoft Readies Cost-Cuts; Though Massive Layoff Unlikely – NBCBAYAREA- msnbc.com – Microsoft will embark on a significant cost-cutting initiative in 2009, which might begin as early as this month, to offset a global slowdown in sales. However, sources tell Jim Goldman of CNBC, the cuts will largely be handled through attrition and the non-renewal of contract employees, rather than through a rumored, sweeping layoff.
  • Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source – The popular search engine Google announced plans Friday to launch a new site, TheGoogle.com, to appeal to older adults not able to navigate the original website's single text field and two clearly marked buttons.
  • Javascript Best Practices – This document is a list of best practices and preferred ways of developing javascript code, based on opinions and experience from many developers in the javascript community. Since this is a list of recommendations rather than a list of absolute rules, experienced developers may have slightly differing opinions from those expressed below.
  • ie7-js – A JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser. – IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.
  • Main – browsersec – Google Code – Browser Security Handbook landing page – This document is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.
  • With 2008, Let’s Say Good-bye to Mediocrity – It is our acquiescence that has led to the spread of this culture of mediocrity. We accept dropped phone calls on our wireless networks, computers that constantly crash, broadband networks that are best effort.
  • HtmlUnit 2.4 Released – A new release of the pure GUI-Less browser is available, which allows high-level manipulation of web pages, such as filling forms, clicking links, accessing attributes and values of specific elements within the pages, you do not have to create lower-level requests of TCP/IP or HTTP, but just getPage(url), find a hyperlink, click() and you have all the HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax are automatically processed.
  • Audiolizer Puts Your iTunes Library In The Cloud, But Lala Does It Better – Audiolizer is a new music streaming service that lets you put your iTunes library in the cloud. After uploading your iTunes Library database file, the site will automatically compile a list of links to every song, allowing you to access your favorite music when you’re away from your home computer. Users can also manually search for individual songs.

Daily del.icio.us for July 1st through July 4th

Netflix Player by Roku – Internet TV done right

I just want to say that if the future of Internet TV is anything like the Netflix Player by Roku, we are going to be just fine. I was one of the lucky ones who ordered the Netflix Player by Roku right away and have had the opportunity to play with it for the last few weeks. I absolutely love my Netflix player box – unequivocally 🙂 If you haven’t heard anything about the Netflix player, it is a little hardware device (box) that allows instant streaming direct to your TV over the Internet.

The box, made by Roku is a $99.99 one-time purchase which connects to your existing broadband (wired or wireless) connection and allows you to instantly watch content from Netflix web site. This box plugs into the same infrastructure over at Netflix that lets you watch streaming movies and TV shows on your PC. The nice thing is that this is part of your standard Netflix membership and there are no extra monthly charges. The same flat fee DVDs you receive are not impacted by your instant streaming. The Netflix/Roku box connects to any TV using HDMI, component, s-video, composite or good old RCA and you get full DVD video quality if your bandwidth permits.

I’ve had the pleasure of using this box and I have been completely and totally impressed with the design of box, the software and the actual quality of the content being streamed. Setup/installation was incredibly easy and I was able to get the box to connect to my WPA secured wireless network in seconds. The first thing the box did was download an update from Netflix and automatically update itself – nice feature. Once the box was up and running, I was able to link the Netflix box to my online Netflix account and anything in my ‘Watch Instantly’ queue was available for viewing on my TV. So I start watching Blade Runner and it’s almost an hour before I realize that I’m not watching a DVD on my TV and it’s actually being streamed live over the Internet. The picture and sound quality is unbelievable and rewind/fast-forward is decent with the little time-series snapshot of scenes to help gauge how far or back you’re going. The box supports HD but Netflix doesn’t support that at the moment but I fully anticipate Netflix enabling that feature as they build up a bigger library of on-demand material that is of HD quality.

I only have two complaints with the box and I think one of them will probably be handled in a software update. The first one is the lack of a power button – Once the box is plugged in and turned on, you cannot turn it off. There is no OFF button on the box or the remote and that’s just annoying. There is a little light that’s always on and it’s not blindingly bright or anything but I would like to be able to turn it off. The second missing feature is the lack of Closed Captioning – I think this is a big miss and a must for me as I’m often watching movies late at night while my wife and daughter are sleeping. I can live without the power button but I really want Closed Captioning enabled in the next software release – please!!

In closing, I cannot stress how good the quality of the picture is and I haven’t had a single issue with video glitches or slowness or pauses while it’s buffering or anything like that. I’ve seen several long movies along with the most of the first season of Heroes and I haven’t had a single issue. I do have a nice broadband connection with 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbp up but that’s fairly standard these days and Netflix recommends about 3-4 Mbps for the service. The other nice thing about this box and the use of the Flash memory is that it doesn’t have a fan and so its whisper quiet. I am also excited about the future as this box runs on a embedded Linux OS and Roku has released a lot (if not all) of the code under GPL. I can’t wait for all the mods/patched kernels and apps that are going to surface in the coming weeks and months.

Daily del.icio.us for June 24th through June 27th

Daily del.icio.us for May 18th through May 20th

Daily del.icio.us for Dec 04, 2007 through Dec 06, 2007

  • Roller: free and open source Java blog software – Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download. This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and other small fixes.
  • infinitest – Google Code – Infinitest is a continuous JUnit test runner designed to facilitate Test Driven Development. Infinitest helps you learn TDD by providing feedback as you work, and helps you master TDD by reducing your feedback cycle from minutes to mere seconds
  • dev2dev: Using Asynchronous Servlets to Deal with Hung Threads – BEA WebLogic Server 9.2 and later versions expose an Abstract Asynchronous Servlet class, which allows you to decouple receiving a servlet request from sending its response. The class also provides a Future Response Servlet, which lets the server handle s
  • Yahoo! Flash(R) Blog » Blog Archive » YUI Got a Little More Flashy Today! – Yahoo! releases version 2.4.0 of the YUI Library and they have been working with the Flash team to help them introduce a new component that leverages the power of Flash Player. The experimental YUI Charts widget brings the Yahoo! Astra Flash Charts
  • Yahoo! Developer Network – Flash Developer Center – ASTRA Flash Components – Charts – Charts is a set of visualization components that represent two-dimensional data structures (tables, arrays of values, etc.) in a variety of ways (bars, graphs, pie charts, etc.)
  • Yahoo! UI Library: Charts – The YUI Charts Control visualizes tabular data on a web page in several possible formats including vertical columns, horizontal bars, lines, and pies. Features include support for the DataSource Utility, customizable serie, axes, mouse-over datatip
  • Ext JS LiveGrid Component – The Ext JS LiveGrid Component is a user extension that’s build upon the wonderful Ext JS Framework. The component allows to read chunks of data from an underlying storage (common use case: a database) without the need of paging. Means: You can virtually d
  • Ext JS Blog – » Ext 2.0 Final Released – The Ext team is proud to announce that the official release of Ext v2.0 is available for download. Ext 2.0 is a dramatic step forward from all previous versions of Ext, providing increased performance, ease of configurations, flexibility and UI capabiliti
  • Adobe Debuts Flash Media Server 3 – Slashes Price – The Flash Media Interactive Server includes the debut of streaming HD video. FMS3 will offer H.264 video streaming, as well as support for High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio that can be streamed to Flash player, AIR applications, or Adobe’s Media Player a
  • NetBeans Magazine – To coincide with the launch of 6.0, this latest issue of NetBeans Magazine features 62 pages of in-depth articles. NetBeans IDE 6.0 features Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails support, enhancements for improved Swing development, a new Visual Game Designer, updated