Links for December 30th through January 4th

  • Why Your Next Cloud App Will Probably Suck Without….Unit Testing – Put simply, developers use unit tests as an internal control on the functionality and compatibility of their applications when changes to features, code or the environment happen.
  • Hacking Knowledge: How to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better in the 21st Century | OEDb – We've collected some amazing tips and tricks (an update of our earlier article, almost seven years old now) you can use to help you get the most out of the time you spend learning. From study suggestions to brain hacks, these tips are sure to help you learn faster, deeper, and better, no matter the subject.
  • America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead – Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.
  • Advanced NFL Stats: Play-by-Play Data – I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready.
  • Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j | Architects Zone – Here's a 1-hour practical guide to getting started with Spring Data on Neo4j. This will cover Spring Data Neo4j's features/benefits, use cases, and a step by step demo.
  • The future according to Google’s Larry Page – Fortune Tech – Google CEO Larry Page envisions a future in which computers plan your vacations, drive your cars, and anticipate your whims. Audacious? Maybe. But Page's dreams have a way of coming true.
  • Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Objective-C – We're all guilty of some Objective-C sins, I'm sure, but the important thing is to improve. We're at the dawn of a new year. Why not take this opportunity to reflect on why you've been so sinful and find ways to code more virtuously in the new year?
  • Introducing Spring Scala – The goal of the Spring Scala project is simply to make it easier to use the Spring framework in Scala. We believe that there are many Spring users out there who want to try Scala out, but do not want to leave their experience with Spring behind. This project is meant for those people.
  • Sublime Package Control – a Sublime Text 2 Package Manager by wbond – A full-featured package manager that helps discovering, installing, updating and removing packages for Sublime Text 2. It features an automatic upgrader and supports GitHub, BitBucket and a full channel/repository system.
  • Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform that uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC) – Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform. The project aims to develop an open protocol for communication between software agents. Eve is designed as a decentral, scalable system for autonomously acting agents. Eve uses the existing world wide web as platform, and uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC).
  • twig-persist – Object Datastore for Google App Engine – Twig is an object persistence interface built on Google App Engine's low-level datastore which overcomes many of JDO-GAEs limitations including improved support for inheritance, polymorphism and generic types. You can easily configure, modify or extend Twigs behaviour by implementing your own strategies or overriding extension points in pure Java code.
  • OWNER – Java properties files made super simple! – The goal of OWNER API is to minimize the code required to handle application configuration through Java properties files. The inspiring idea for this API comes from GWT i18n
  • Java.next() -> Scala or Groovy? – Generally the understanding is that scala has the ability to disrupt the status quo rather than incrementally improving it like Groovy. Scala has done and doing good job of reducing the cost of abstraction transliterate Java into Scala and end up with bytecode that is almost exactly the same. Scala has some original good ideas and well thought out type system.
  • Windows 8 proving less popular than Vista | KitGuru – Data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is less popular than Windows Vista, the operating system that proved unpopular with the enthusiast audience.
  • Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively – NYTimes.com – Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.
  • HtmlUnit vs JSoup: html parsing in Java – In this blog I will compare JSoup with other similar framework, HtmlUnit. Apparently both of them are good Html parsing frameworks and both can be used for web application unit testing and web scraping. In this blog, I will explain how HtmlUnit is better suited for web application unit testing automation and JSoup is better suited for Web Scraping.
  • Progress of Happiness – The first is that sucking at something is the first step of getting better at it. And that trying really hard isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, getting better at anything isn’t supposed to be easy. You are bound to get fail, get hurt, fail again before you succeed.
  • Microsoft WebMatrix – Open Source Web Applications Made Easier – Open source web apps make it easy to get started developing websites, but they can sometimes be time-consuming to get configured on your computer. WebMatrix makes it simple and straightforward.
  • Safeguard Your Phone from Malware – WSJ.com – According to a report by research group Juniper Networks, JNPR -2.07% hackers are increasingly targeting smartphones and other mobile devices with malicious software (also known as malware) to gain access to personal information. The threat is still small in comparison to computers, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions to protect your smartphone.
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Links for December 12th through December 15th

  • Deploy Web Apps to CloudBees from IntelliJ IDEA 12 | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – In case you didn’t know, the new release of IntelliJ IDEA comes with deployment tools for CloudBees, a rapidly growing cloud platform for Java applications. At the moment IntelliJ IDEA allows you to connect to your CloudBees account and view/manage deployed applications.
  • Tuts+ Premium Course: Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2 – I’m a confessed code editor addict, and have tried them all! I was an early adopter of Coda, a TextMate advocate, even a Vim convert. But all of that changed when I discovered Sublime Text 2, the best code editor available today. Don’t believe me? Let me convince you in this course.
  • Working as a Software Developer – I recently gave a presentation on what it is like to work as a software developer to first-year engineering students at KTH taking an introductory programming course. I wanted to give my view on the main differences between professional software development and programming for a university course.
  • HTML, Javascript and the app-ification of the Web – The post described in a nutshell what might be one of the most powerful trends in Web app design — the move from multipage Web applications to single page applications driven by javascript and access to a powerful API.
  • Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers – The first step in becoming an effective programmer is to ensure that you are spending your time wisely. And there is no greater waste of time than in working on something that is not useful or never shipped.
  • Scaling GitHub – I’ll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing. It also presents some interesting business challenges, too. How you grow your company from three employees, how you work in teams, and how you split your app up into services all help ensure that you’ll be able to react to your product’s growth.
  • Innovating for Growth | Innovation 2.0: a spiral approach to business model innovation – The Economist and Ernst and Young collaborate on a discussion forum to talk about innovation.
  • Goldman Sachs: Microsoft has gone from 97 percent share of compute market to 20 percent | Microsoft Pri0 | The Seattle Times – According to the report, Microsoft's operating systems have gone from 97 percent of all computing devices in 2000 — back when desktop and laptop PCs were dominant — to 20 percent expected in 2012 — when PCs, tablets and smartphones are all part of the computing-device picture.
  • Creating Native Applications with Sencha Desktop Packager – Sencha Desktop Packager is a new product, included with the Sencha Complete: Team bundle, which enables you to take your existing Ext JS web application and package it as a native desktop application. From here, you may deliver your application to your customers who are running Windows and Mac OS X.
  • EMC follows VMware, rest of world into OpenStack – With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon
  • Query Mongo: MySQL to Mongo Query Translator – Query Translator – Convert MySQL Queries to MongoDB Syntax
  • WebLogic Examples: Wiki: Home – The purpose of this project is to share Java EE examples for WebLogic with the Java EE and WebLogic user communities. This project was started by Oracle Product management, but we encourage you to submit your own examples.