Links for July 28th through August 1st

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Vinny

The Inside Story of the Moto X: The Reason Google Bought Motorola – The $12 billion experiment begins today with the Moto X, available later this month for the standard price of $200 with a two-year carrier contract. Woodside would prefer that people not call it the Google Phone: “People don’t associate Google with phones,” he says. “Motorola’s the brand that resonates to consumers.”
Apportable – Objective-C for Android – Apportable lets you cross-compile your iOS app and
reuse the same code across platform
Pure – A set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project. – Pure builds on Normalize.css and provides layout and styling for native HTML elements, plus the most common UI components. It's what you need, without the cruft.
How to turn everyone in your newsroom into a graphics editor » Nieman Journalism Lab – A newly open-sourced tool from Quartz makes it easy for newsrooms to build quick, attractive charts from datasets on deadline.
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2013 – Java still top but chasing pack closing – Java advocates are likely to look at the above list and declare victory, but Java is technically tied with JavaScript rather than ahead of it. Still, this is undoubtedly validation for defenders of a language frequently dismissed as dead or dying.
Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask) – It remains number one on the OWASP Top 10 for a very good reason – it’s common, it’s very easy to exploit and the impact of doing so is severe. One little injection risk in one little feature is often all it takes to disclose every piece of data in the who
A Little Rebellion is a Good Thing: The Rise of Shadow IT | Innovation Insights | Wired.com – This trend of developer-focused open source projects and services supplanting traditional vendors has exploded in the last ten years. More and more tools are accessible via open source, as freemium services or free download. As a result, developers can find, test and deploy the tools they want.
Key Behavioral Traps and How to Avoid Them – Morningstar readers weigh in on which behavioral mistakes have hobbled their results and how they've fought back.
The Hardware Revolution is Upon Us and Why it Matters | True Ventures – This is a tectonic shift that is going to drive the next wave of industrialization — one that is more nimble, adaptable and rapidly evolving. One that is as much based in software as it is in assembly lines. The past 150 years were about the economics of
Knockout – Simplify dynamic JavaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern – Simplify dynamic JavaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern
Video of Using KnockoutJS in an HTML5 Application – In this video tutorial series, we look at how to build a client-side HTML5 application with jQuery and KnockoutJS. We'll look at binding DOM elements to a data model, defining event handlers, and pulling data from JSON and REST services.
How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business: Scientific American – Schools and universities are embracing technology that tailors content to students' abilities and takes teachers out of the lecturing business. But is it an improvement?
Bootstrap 3 – Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile-first front-end framework for faster and easier web development. – Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile-first front-end framework for faster and easier web development.
Simple API with Nginx and PostgreSQL – Sometimes it’s overkill to use a web framework if you only need to develop a very simple REST API. It turns out that Nginx can be used to develop a full fledged REST API and PostgreSQL can easily be used for persistence.
Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web | meanpath – Love it or hate it but Twitter Bootstrap is quickly taking over the web. The team at meanpath recently pulled a random selection of 100 million websites from our source code search engine and found clear Twitter Bootstrap signatures on 981,608 of them.

Links for January 14th through January 16th

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Vinny

Sign documents online, directly in GMail – Fill out and sign documents without ever leaving Gmail. Never print, sign, and scan ever again.
Ember.js – A framework for creating ambitious web applications – Ember.js – A framework for creating ambitious web applications
iOS Development Tips I Would Want If I Was Starting Out Today – If I was starting out with iOS development today these are the things I would hope somebody would tell me
The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Sass – Treehouse Blog – Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets Sass, and was created by Hampton Catlin. It’s a way to simplify your CSS workflow, making development and maintenance tasks easier.
Squash: The open-source bug-smashing tool – Squash is a collection of tools that help engineers find and kill bugs in their code
Find the Perfect Sleep Position – WSJ.com – Stomach, Back or Side? How You Slumber Can Aggravate Pain, Prevent the Body From Bouncing Back
"Hello, World!" The Hard Way with Sencha Touch – But a closer look would reveal a lot more goodies beyond those handy components in Sencha Touch. It offers a class system, a MVC pattern, tools that handles code dependency, compression and native packaging, etc. Albeit daunting, learning and embracing all of those offerings makes a quite enjoyable coding experience and rewards me with development efficiency overall.
Lessons from Functional Programming in Five Languages – Robert Rees shares lessons learned while using Clojure and applied them to other languages, Scala, JavaScript and Java.
Architecture of a Modern Web App – Scott Andrews demoes using two JavaScript frameworks – Meteor and Derby – to create complex web applications.
What is the future for GWT? – The newly formed Google Web Toolkit (GWT) steering committee recently published "The Future of GWT Report", which captures the opinions, usage patterns and hopes of over 1300 Google Web Toolkit users worldwide.

Links for January 9th through January 14th

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Vinny

RubySource | A Look at Ruby 2.0 – With Ruby 2.0 set to be released on February 24th, exactly on the 20th anniversary of Ruby’s first debut, I decided to write this article to give you a quick rundown of some of the most interesting changes.
A Carefully Selected List of Recommended Tools on Datavisualization.ch – That’s why we have put together a selection of tools that we use the most and that we enjoy working with. We called it selection.datavisualization.ch. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you’re not into programming, you’ll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code.
How Japanese Kids Learn To Multiply – Amazing, No Need to Learn Japanese – Through a Japanese friend on twitter I came across this method and it shows how Japanese pupils learn to multiply in lessons. You do not need to learn Japanese to master this method.
An Advanced Guide to HTML & CSS – An Advanced Guide to HTML & CSS takes a deeper look at front-end design and development, expanding on what is covered in the beginner’s guide. Studying modern front-end development, this guide teaches the latest for any designer looking to round out their front-end skills.
Be Careful With Cache Managers | Javalobby – If you are using spring and JPA, it is very likely that you utilize ehcache (or another cache provider). And you do that in two separate scenarios: JPA 2nd level cache and spring method caching.
CodeOutlaw: iOS Development on Windows w/ PhoneGap Build – Using PhoneGap Build, I am able to build an app in HTML5, package it up, and send it to their servers to have it compiled and ready to install onto my iOS device.
Packaging a Sencha Touch App for iOS using Windows 7 – Packaging a Sencha Touch App for iOS using Windows 7.
Microsoft Surface Pro Hands-On: This Is What It Should Have Been All Along – Surface RT was an enormous letdown—not because it was bad, but because it could have been so, so good. But Microsoft brought the Pro version to Vegas and let us play—and I couldn't be happier.
UI Testing a Sencha App – I wanted to address this topic by adding UI Tests to my demo Ext JS application and discussing strategies for enterprise application testing.
The Atlantic Wire: Building for iPad on HTML5 and Sencha Touch – The Atlantic Wire and projects such as Fastbook showcase what is truly possible with HTML5 and the many benefits of building universal applications with open standards. Publishers like The Atlantic benefit from using HTML5 to build applications that are free of app store constraints, allowing them to innovate on their business model and the technical delivery. With HTML5, companies have the ability to build universal applications without limitations.
APIs | Codecademy – Build real-life apps with APIs – Want to write apps and build websites that can text your phone, pull in YouTube videos, or connect to Facebook and Twitter? Start doing all this and more with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Links for November 16th through November 21st

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Vinny

The Web engineer’s online toolbox – I wanted to compile a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation
Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) – Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
Continuuity’s SDK makes building Big Data apps blazing fast – Continuuity’s SDK makes building Big Data apps blazing fast. You build apps in your IDE, then run, test and debug them locally on a fully featured single-node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
Therapist-free therapy – Cognitive-bias modification may put the psychiatrist’s couch out of business | The Economist – A new kind of treatment may, though, mean he does not have to. Cognitive-bias modification (CBM) appears to be effective after only a few 15-minute sessions, and involves neither drugs nor the discussion of feelings. It does not even need a therapist. All it requires is sitting in front of a computer and using a program that subtly alters harmful thought patterns.
US patent chief to software patent critics: “Give it a rest already” | Ars Technica – David Kappos, the head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, offered a strong defense of software patents in a Tuesday address at the Center for American Progress. Kappos touted several provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA), which he argued would allow the patent office to weed out low-quality software and business method patents.
Brian LeRoux on Mobile Web vs. Native, PhoneGap Build, Firefox OS – Brian LeRoux talks about the PhoneGap Build service, mobile web apps vs native, Facebook's switch to a native iOS app, PhoneGap adoption in emerging markets, Firefox OS, Adobe's web tools and more.
ModelMapper – Simple, Intelligent, Object Mapping. – ModelMapper is an intelligent object mapping library that automatically maps objects to each other. It uses a convention based approach while providing a simple refactoring safe API for handling specific use cases.
Keynote: SOA, Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web at NASA – Hook Hua discusses how semantic Web technologies are being leveraged by cloud-based SOA to improve interoperability within NASA enterprise boundaries and between NASA and external organizations.
Infrastructure as Code – Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation – helpful for automating every infrastructure operations. – Gareth Rushgrove offers advice, code samples, and introduces tools – Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation – helpful for automating every infrastructure operations.

Links for August 5th through August 9th

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Vinny

U.S. Should Adopt Higher Standards for Science Education: Scientific American – Teachers, scientists and policymakers have drafted ambitious new education standards. All 50 states should adopt them
Testing SQL Server Code with TST – Enter TST. TST is an Open source Unit Testing framework specifically meant for testing SQL Server Database Code.
Fr. Naus retires after 50 years at Marquette – Rev. John Naus, S.J., has retired after serving Marquette for nearly five decades. From his days as Tumbleweed the Clown, his famous Christmas cards and long tradition of celebrating 10 p.m. Mass at St. Joan of Arc Chapel, he has touched many lives.
Watch High-Speed Trading Bots Go Berserk – Technology Review – The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT [high-frequency trading] world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable.
Long live SOA in the cloud era – SOA’s dictum that ‘everything is a service’ is more relevant than ever – A few years back, SOA (service-oriented architecture) was all the rage. Vendors rushed to remarket everything as SOA, and SOA-washing was the new greenwashing. But in today'srush to the cloud, have we abandoned SOA? If so, we're in trouble.
A Brave New World of Testing? An Interview with Google’s James Whittaker – To get an answer, I turned to James Whittaker, an engineering director at Google, which has been at the forefront of leveraging the cloud. James is a noted expert and author on software testing, whose team has been managing Google’s cloud computing testing.
MongoMapper – A Mongo ORM for Ruby – Built from the ground up to be simple and extendable, MongoMapper is a lovely way to model your applications and persist your data in MongoDB. It has all the bells and whistles you need to get the job done and have fun along the way.
Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system – Kafka provides a publish-subscribe solution that can handle all activity stream data and processing on a consumer-scale web site. This kind of activity (page views, searches, and other user actions) are a key ingredient in many of the social feature on the modern web
Brian ONeill’s Blog: A Big Data Trifecta: Storm, Kafka and Cassandra – We're big fans of Cassandra. We also use Storm as our distributed processing engine. We've had a lot of success using our Cassandra Bolt to create a successful marriage between the two. To date, we've been using Storm to integrate with our legacy technologies via our JMS Spout. Now we're looking to expand its role beyond legacy system integration.
9 Reasons Why Your Company Needs A Mobile Strategist – Forbes – As their name implies, these mobile strategists play a critical role in gathering business requirements, building a ‘mobile center of excellence,’ creating a mobile strategy that aligns to the key business drivers, and selecting the right technology and platform to support both short- and long-term needs. At this point, a business without a mobile strategy is a business without a strategy at all.
Principles of User Interface Design – Principles of User Interface Design

Links for May 27th through May 29th

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Vinny

app-UI is a collection of user interface components that may be helpful to web and mobile developers for creating interactive applications using HTML and JavaScript – app-UI is a free & open source collection of reusable "application container" user interface components that may be helpful to web and mobile developers for creating interactive applications using HTML and JavaScript, especially those targeting mobile devices.
Eliminating Web Development Waste – Nefarious Designs – Understanding waste in your development process can help you improve the efficiency of your delivery. Being able to take the principles of lean development and integrate them into your agile teams are a clear way to improve your life
InfoQ: Introduction to MongoDB for Java, PHP and Python Developers – This article covered the basics of MongoDB architecture, caveats and how to program in MongoDB for Java, PHP, JavaScript and Python developers.
Java Annotation for (Design) patterns to communicate pattern usage · GitHub – JPatterns is a collection of annotations that should make it easier to communicate
the use of (Design)Patterns within your code to your fellow developers and
your future self.
We’re creating a culture of distraction – We are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we are increasingly disconnected from the people and events around us and increasingly unable to engage in long-form thinking. People now feel anxious when their brains are unstimulated
10 Years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – Red Hat has been around longer than ten years, and Linux much longer than that

Links for November 27th through November 30th

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Vinny

Upgrading to Sencha Touch 2 PR2 | Learn | Sencha – This has been a brief introduction to some of the updates you should be aware of when using Sencha Touch 2 PR2, and hopefully you enjoy working with it and benefiting from the major enhancements these small changes on your part can bring.
VMware’s Cloud Foundry Ranked Top Developer Platform – New VMware kid on the PaaS block takes "best overall" honors, while Google App Engine is best public and IBM SmartCloud best private cloud platform in Evans Data survey.
Following Digital Breadcrumbs To ‘Big Data’ Gold : NPR – What do Facebook, Groupon and biotech firm Human Genome Sciences have in common? They all rely on massive amounts of data to design their products. Terabytes and even zettabytes of information about consumers or about genetic sequences can be harnessed and crunched.
The Twelve-Factor App – In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that
Humane JS – A simple, modern, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system. – Humane JS – A simple, modern, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system.
Learn, build, and deploy Ruby web apps using Rails and Sinatra – We're going to teach you how to build your first Ruby web application in 3 minutes and deploy it live to the internet. Don't worry, you won't have to install or setup anything. We'll take care of all those pesky little details: Ruby, Rails, Git, Gems, configuring SSH keys, and deploying your application to a server
Don’t Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! – Anthony Tjan – Harvard Business Review – As digital communication accelerates the pace at which people form and broaden relationships, it is also decreasing the rate at which people are willing to resolve issues professionally and directly in-person
I Write Like – Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
Inside McKinsey – FT.com – The world’s most prestigious consultancy prides itself on its intellectual prowess and ethical standards. But this year, an insider trading scandal surrounding former McKinsey luminaries has left staff and alumni reeling
Freakonomics » The Way We Teach Math, Sciences, and Languages Is Wrong – Despite spending 5 percent of the hours that I spent in school, with the self-study method I became far more competent in the language.
Codes from the Underground – What if SMTP and Sinatra Had a Baby? – smtproutes is what you’d get if Sinatra and SMTP had a baby. It’s not an email server with a capital S. smtproutes is a lightweight framework for rapidly prototyping web-services on top of SMTP.

Links for August 24th through August 27th

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Vinny

Running MongoDB on the Cloud – In this video Jared Rosoff covers topics like scaling and performance characteristics of running MongoDB in the cloud and he also shares some best practices when using Amazon EC2.
Why it is important to choose a #1 language for an enterprise project : Adam Bien’s Weblog – Why it is important to choose a #1 language for an enterprise project?
Kendo UI – The Art of Web Development – Kendo UI is a framework for modern HTML UI. Engineered with the latest HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript standards, it delivers everything needed for client-side, jQuery-powered development in one integrated, compact package.
Java NIO: NIO vs. IO – In this text I will try to shed some light on the differences between Java NIO and IO, their use cases, and how they affect the design of your code.
totallylazy – Another functional library for Java – A functional library for Java that provides map, reduce, join operations.
Heroku | Heroku for Java – Heroku is driven by a simple first principle: do what's best for developers. Supporting Java is what's best for the large world of Java developers; it's what's best for developers who want to use other JVM languages; and it's even good for users of other languages, who will benefit indirectly from the learning their community may gain from contact with Java. We're pleased to welcome Java developers to Heroku.
Google Doubles Down On Android And Andy Rubin – Seeking Alpha – Page has opened the full faith-and-credit of Google to Rubin, meaning its best legal and lobbying minds are now at his disposal, and the network Google built for itself may now be slowly opening up to handle direct customer traffic
Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA – Forbes – The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do—improve profitability by focuson on those activities that are profitable and by getting out of activities that are less profitable.
Advantages Of Being A Polyglot Programmer – People who only work with one language/platform often have an emotional attachment to it. If you're emotionally attached, it's not always easy to remain rational during discussions or when the future of your language/platform is being threatened

Links for May 29th through June 2nd

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Vinny

schema.org – A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema – Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
Daring Fireball: Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad – The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. iOS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS. There’s a cost for this elimination of complexity and compatibility, of course, which is that the iPad is also less capable than a Mac
Cloud Foundry: Now Supporting Scala – Today, we are announcing Cloud Foundry support for Scala and a variety of associated frameworks. Most Scala applications written to Lift and Spring will deploy seamlessly without modification to Cloud Foundry
Daily Dose: Realtime Communications For All! Google Open Sources WebRTC | Agile Zone – Today, Google open sourced their WebRTC technology, a framework for the web that allows realtime communications in a browser. Web RTC was acquired by Google when they purchased Global IP Solutions for 68.2 million in 2010.
Apple’s Twitter – Anil Dash – Could a small team of developers and designers within Apple make a credible realtime messaging service with first-rate native clients on every important platform? Could they graft on a simple, REST-based web-style APIs to the complicated, old-fashioned API that enables push notifications right now?
[Update] Skype installs EasyBits Go CrapWare on your systems without users’ prior knowledge – It seems that Skype is automatically installing crapware called EasyBits Go without informing or asking users for installation permission.
How the Android Ecosystem Threatens the iPhone | Magazine – The company with the largest and most loyal user base is likely to win that fight, and that’s what both Apple and Google are currently trying to establish. But make no mistake: As is often the case in technology, only one platform will prevail.
70% of Science Award Finalists Are Children of Immigrants – Yahoo! News – Immigration is a boon to American science and math, a new report asserts, noting that 70 percent of the finalists in a recent prestigious science competition are the children of immigrants.
Code School – Learn Rails the Zombie Way – Learning Rails for the first time should be fun, and Rails for Zombies allows you to get your feet wet without having to worry about configuration. You'll watch five videos, each followed by exercises where you'll be programming Rails in your browser.
Waterfail – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Waterfail: The act of attempting to build software according to spec and releasing it 2 years later for nobody

Links for May 25th through May 26th

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Vinny

Enemies of Agility: The Dirty Dozen | Agile Zone – I present the "dirty dozen" impediments, or key enemies of successful agility that I've observed.
Head first into GWT game development. | skorulis.com – Here's a quick introduction into making a canvas based game using GWT and the problems that I ran into. If you’re even more hasty, here’s the source code so you can just get it building and running.
FunctionSource: SproutCore 2; Lean, Mean, and back to HTML – Today we got a sneak peak at the next version of SproutCore via a developer preview. One of the biggest differences that jumped out to me was the change from coding everything through JS APIs to being able to do much more via HTML, CSS, and templates
The 10 Commandments of Good Source Control Management – None of these things are hard. Honestly, they’re really very basic: commit early and often, know what you’re committing and that it should actually be in VCS, explain your commits and make sure you do it yourself, don’t forget the databases and don’t forget the dependencies. But please do forget VSS!
InfoQ: Making Apps That Don’t Suck – Mike Lee considers that a software engineer makes great applications not because he follows good rules but because he has a better way of looking at the world and he learns from experience.
Spiffy UI Framework – Beautiful fast flexible secure maintainable applications with GWT and REST – The Spiffy UI framework takes the power of GWT and adds patterns, widgets, and utilities to make beautiful, fast, secure, maintainable web applications.
JavaScript conquers the server | It’s BroadVision and Netscape LiveCycle all over again 🙂 – Node.js, Jaxer, EJScript, RingoJS, and AppengineJS combine the familiarity of JavaScript, low overhead, blazing speed, and unique twists
Codesta – Blog – Sencha Touch/PhoneGap Tips and Tricks – Sencha Touch/PhoneGap Tips and Tricks

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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