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 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 April 9th through April 15th

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Vinny

The Netflix Tech Blog: HTML5 Video at Netflix – Today, we’re excited to talk about proposed extensions to HTML5 video that enable playback of premium video content on the web.
Scaling Pinterest – From 0 to 10s of Billions of Page Views a Month in Two Years – Architecture is doing the right thing when growth can be handled by adding more of the same stuff. You want to be able to scale by throwing money at a problem which means throwing more boxes at a problem as you need them. If you are architecture can do that, then you’re golden.
Mobile hybrid frameworks are not all alike There are actually two flavors of hybrid-ness — hybrid-web and hybrid-native. Comparing PhoneGap and Marmalade shows the difference. – PhoneGap and the rest of the hybrid-web frameworks are good at producing informational apps. These apps can look beautiful and certainly can have some compelling features like tight integration with social networks and geo-tracking, for example. But they’re inadequate for games and still lack a rich user experience when compared to more native apps like Flipboard or AngryBirds.
Apple’s Dominance, in One Chart – Corporate Intelligence – WSJ – On the left, share of global handset sales by unit. In the middle, revenues for the industry. On the right, profits. There is very little money to be made in being anything but Apple or Samsung right now.
Kaggle: Go from Big Data to Big Analytics – Go from Big Data to Big Analytics – 88,044 of the world's best data scientists working on your problem.
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design – As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)
How to work with software engineers – by Ken Norton #humor – today I will share with you my Ten-Step Plan for Working With Engineers. Or more to the point: how to make engineers do what you tell them to do.
High Frequency and Algorithmic trading, research and design – HFT is a small project with a big ambition. We aim to build the worlds best algorithmic trading platform using the best off-the-shelf open source technology stack to be found. And all of this on a tight budget.
Hypercritical: Code Hard or Go Home – Given these graphs, and knowing the history between Apple and Google over the past decade, one of two things seemed inevitable: either Google was going to become the new de facto “owner” of WebKit development, or it was going to create its own fork of WebK
Software Leadership #4: Slow Down to Speed Up – Building a quality-focused team isn't easy. But creating a culture that slows down to do the right thing, while simultaneously moving fast, provides an enormous competetive advantage. It's not as common as you might think.
Groovy & Grails for Java Developers – Peter Ledbrook shows how Groovy can be useful for writing scripts, unit tests or builds for Spring projects and how Grails simplifies web application development.
Re-imagining the Browser with AngularJS – Miško Hevery demoes using AngularJS to create dynamic web applications using reusable components.
Cisco taps Microsoft’s Cloud OS for new datacenter portfolio | ZDNet – Cisco and Microsoft have teamed up on a series of new datacenter ventures designed to simplify cloud deployments. Based on Microsoft's Cloud OS, the suite of solutions rely on the combination of Cisco's Unified Data Center architecture with Microsoft's Fa
15 Programming Skills Most Coveted By Employers – ReadWrite – So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for such data, but its very nature makes Indeed.com an ideal place to look. The job search site aggregates more than 16 million listings from a wide range of sources, so it's fairly comprehensive.
Tutorial: How to make an offline HTML5 web app, FT style | FT Labs – n this tutorial we will build two versions of an offline website in order to demonstrate how to add functionality to an existing offline website in such a way that existing users won’t get left behind using an old version.
Objective-C’s dip in popularity tied to decline in iPad and iPhone | Application Development – InfoWorld – Objective-C, best known as the programming language used for building applications to run on Apple's popular iPad and iPhone devices, is beginning to level off in popularity, one monthly assessment of languages reports
Appcache Facts – The application cache is a poorly understood part of the HTML5 specification with a lot of potential. Let's get rid of some of the confusion and make the web a faster place.
Introducing the OpenStack Activity Board » The OpenStack Blog – I am pleased to announce that a beta release of the OpenStack Activity Board (beta) is now live. The development Activity Board announced few months ago provides a visual overview of all the OpenStack public activity of community members across multiple dimensions: contributors and organizations, projects and tools
Key Insights from Cisco’s Latest Research on the “Network Software Evolution” – So to minimize confusion, for a new study conducted by Cisco we decided to come up with an all-encompassing term to summarize all of the above ? the Network Software Evolution (NSE).
Sencha Touch 2.2 RC Notes – I’ve spent the last couple of days porting apps over to 2.2 RC. This post is about the issues I’ve come across, and some general thoughts on the framework’s changes.
IntelliJ IDEA :: Out-of-the-box IDE for Spring Development – IntelliJ IDEA brings outstanding code assistance and productivity-boosting features for development Spring applications with Web Services, Data JPA, Security, Web Flow, MVC, AOP, Roo, Integration and Dynamic Modules.
Getting Started with Android Development – IntelliJ IDEA – Confluence – An Android application is a Java program written against the Java SDK and Android SDK. An integrated development environment (IDE) for any kind of Java applications, IntelliJ IDEA automates and streamlines all required steps that go from writing the source
We need a data democracy, not a data dictatorship – There are few companies that helped spur the democratization of data over the past few years more than Tableau. It has become the face of the next-generation business intelligence software thanks to its ease of use and focus on appealing visualization, and its free public software has found avid users even among relative data novices like myself.

Links for February 11th through February 15th

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Vinny

Boxen is your team’s IT robot. It’s a dangerously opinionated framework that automates every piece of your development environment. – Boxen is a framework for managing almost every aspect of your Mac. We built a massive standard library of Puppet modules optimized for Boxen to manage everything from running MySQL to installing Minecraft.
A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity | Javalobby – Personally, I think this library is a godsend, and I think there’ll be a LOT of teams picking it up over the next five years, just like the popularity of Spring has swept the globe due to all the efficiencies it bestows on developers. The library, by the w
Raible Designs | The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security at Denver JUG – The first talk, The Modern Java Web Developer, was inspired by the book titled The Well-Grounded Java Developer. Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg mention in the beginning of the book that they wrote it as a training guide to get new Java developers up to spee
The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story – This four-minute video gives you a quick overview of Sencha Fastbook, and shows you a side-by-side comparison of how well our HTML5 app performs against both the native iOS and the native Android Facebook apps (versions 5.2 and 1.9.12 respectively, the latest available when we made this video on December 10th).
Promoting iOS Apps with Smart App Banners – Safari has a new Smart App Banner feature in iOS 6 and later that provides a standardized method of promoting apps on the App Store from a website. <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID>
How Lockheed Martin’s ‘Kill Chain’ Stopped SecurID Attack – Dark Reading – A rare inside look at how the defense contractor repelled an attack using its homegrown 'Cyber Kill Chain' framework
Plivo Cloud – Cloud Platform to Build Voice & SMS Applications (Voice & SMS API Platform) – Build powerful Telephony Apps. Leave the Infrastructure plumbing to Us.
apiary.io — REST API documentation, Reimagined – It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.
Love the idea that my next car has a REST API! Go Tesla – An unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API
Cloud 66 | Code to Cloud in 5 minutes – Build your own Rails PaaS – The easiest way to get your code hosted on your servers. Provision, deploy and manage your Ruby on Rails apps on your cloud or your own servers.
Gartner Positions Tableau as a Leader in 2013 Magic Quadrant – Tableau is a "Leader" for first time in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.
VMware Marching Towards Software Defined Datacenter with Software Defined Storage Acquisition of Virsto | SiliconANGLE – As part of its strategy to deliver the software-defined datacenter, VMware continues to invest and innovate to extend the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the datacenter — compute, network, storage and the associated security and availability
Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit – Feb 11 2013 – Bill Gates did a AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit and here is the transcript.
The Porsche 911: An ode to iteration (via @daringfireball) – 50 years of iterative refinement.
Developing Java Apps for iOS–Codenameone, An Interview – Develop in Java, deploy on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. What is codenameone? An interview with Chen Fishbein.
Building Twitter Bootstrap · An A List Apart Article – Thanks to the foresight and focus of a small group of designers and developers, we were able to evolve our development process, build an extensive front-end toolkit, and help thousands of others bootstrap the projects they love
Infotron Spreadsheet Analyzer – Breviz, the Spreadsheet Visualization Tool reveals the hidden logic of a spreadsheet, to help you spot errors and make your spreadsheets less risky and more efficient.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Wins Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013! | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We are excited to announce that a few days ago IntelliJ IDEA 12 was named the winner of the Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013, an annual award run by Dr. Dobbs to showcase the best IDEs and coding tools of the year.
Apple iTunes becomes much more than a "break-even" business. – iTunes now is a blend of many business models. Some, like music, use a wholesale revenue recognition method and have very low to zero margins, others, like eBooks and Apps, are sold using an “agency” revenue model with potentially higher margins and some, like Software, are recognized at full value with very high margins.

Links for January 4th through January 10th

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Vinny

WordPress has left the building – WordPress is the best blogging platform I, or indeed we, have ever used… but as a CMS is falling far behind the alternatives.
Enterprise Will Spend $19 Billion on Apple Hardware in 2012 – John Paczkowski – Enterprise – AllThingsD – Apple is expected to sell $10 billion worth of iPads and $9 billion of Macs to business customers in 2012, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook. Those are 68 percent and 45 percent increases, respectively, over 2011.
MongoSV Live-Blog: Schema Design by Example – Kyle’s strategy is to start with a normalized representation and then embed for simplicity and optimization. This reminds me of our data-modeling post.
InfoQ: Running Spring Java and Scala Apps on Heroku – James Ward demoes building a Spring Roo application and a Grails one, deploying them on Heroku.
10 BI Trends for 2012 According to Tableau Software • myNoSQL – 10 BI Trends for 2012 According to Tableau Software
From the Mule’s Mouth » Enterprise IT predictions for 2012 – 2012 is here. And while we’ve seen a number of exciting developments in enterprise IT in 2011, it was just the beginning. There’s a lot in store next year, here are 6 key developments to look out for in 2012
Recap: Improving Hadoop Performance by (up to) 1000x | LinkedIn Engineering – Daniel Abadi recently visited LinkedIn and talked about "Improving Hadoop Performance by (up to) 1000x."

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Tag Archives: tableau

Links for November 17th through November 22nd

Links for July 11th through July 26th

Links for April 9th through April 15th