Links for May 5th through May 10th

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Daily del.icio.us for January 13th through January 16th

  • VMware Go a Free Server Virtualization Option | Architects Zone – VMware just released VMware Go, a free service for managing the VMware ESXi embedded hypervisors (including ESX Server 3i, ESXi 3.5, and ESXi 4.0), which are also free.
  • Google upgrades to EXT4 FileSystem – Google’s decision to deploy Ext4 is a strong endorsement of the filesystem’s reliability and affirms its suitability for enterprise adoption, this could cause a revolution and accelerated adoption throughout the industry
  • Struts 2 Tutorial: Struts 2 Validation Framework Tutorial with Example | Javalobby – In this article we will learn how to leverage Struts2 Validation Framework in an application. For this we will use StrutsHelloWorld application which we created in previous article as base and starts adding validation logic to it.
  • Java 6 Update 18: Now With Windows 7 Support | Javalobby – Java 6 Update 18 is now available for download. One of the main features of this release is the inclusion of support for Windows 7. Along with an impressive list of bug fixes, the update includes performance improvements, an update to JavaDB and the inclusion of the latest version of the Java profiling tool, VisualV
  • InfoQ: Google Collections 1.0 Offers Enhanced Implementations of the Java Collections Framework – The Google Collections Library also offers new utility implementations and a focused set of libraries concerned with concurrency, including immutable collection implementations
  • OSCache – OSCache – CacheFilter – OSCache comes with a servlet filter that enables you to transparently cache entire pages of your website, and even binary files. Caching of binary files is extremely useful when they are generated dynamically, e.g. PDF files or images.
  • Eyal Lupu Java Blog >> Embedding and Initializing Databases in Spring 3.0 – I noticed a small, but useful, new feature in Spring 3.0: support for embedding and initializing databases using the application context. Using this support one can configure embedded database engine as part of the application context and use it just as another bean
  • InfoQ: Overview of the Spring 3.0 Web Stack – In this presentation from SpringOne 2009, Keith Donald discusses the Spring 3.0 web stack, key Spring Framework and Spring MVC features, demos of Spring MVC capabilities, REST support, validation support, automatic data conversion, data binding and validation, Joda Time support, Spring JavaScript, Dojo, Spring Web Flow, Spring Security, Spring BlazeDS, and the roadmap for the Spring web stack.
  • Grails – 1.2 Release Notes – Grails 1.2 has been released with new features like Dependency Resolution DSL, Named Query Support, Improved Performance & Memory Consumption, Named URL Mappings, Refactored Testing Infrastructure, Pluggable Web Containers
  • Why Did Google Build a Phone and a Browser? Design By Gravity – Google isn’t so much interested in selling the best phone, or providing the best browser. Google is intent in raising the average in areas it thinks are key to its future.

Daily del.icio.us for November 2nd through November 4th

  • PhoneGap | Bridging the iPhone GAP – PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that's the problem we're trying to solve.
  • Finextra: Bank of America offers m-banking apps for Google Android – Bank of America has become the first bank to offer a mobile phone application on Google's Android Market, which opened for business Wednesday with 50 apps available for download.
  • 2 MILLION MINUTES :: A DOCUMENTARY FILM ON GLOBAL EDUCATION – How do most American high school students spend this time? What about students in the rest of the world? How do family, friends and society influence a student's choices for time allocation? What implications do their choices have on their future and on a country's economic future?
  • 2008 Election Results Dashboard – Election Results 2008 – The New York Times – Monitor live election results on Tuesday night with The Times’s Election 2008 Dashboard.
  • WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 – The first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is here at last. Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1. As previously mentioned on this blog, 2.7 is bringing a new visual design
  • enunciate – Articulate your web api – Enunciate is an engine for creating, maintaining, and deploying your rich Web service API for the Java platform.
  • jersey: JSR-311: JAX-RS – Java API for RESTful Web Services. – Jersey is the open source (under dual CDDL+GPL license), production quality, JAX-RS (JSR 311) Reference Implementation for building RESTful Web services. But, it is also more than the Reference Implementation. Jersey provides an API so that developers may extend Jersey to suite their needs
  • Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Do we need WADL? – Everybody's atwitter about WADL, a description file for REST services, and since it's supposed to be RESTful I regularly get questioned about it. For this post I'm going to experiment and adopt Stephen O'Grady's Q&A style.
  • BrowserPlus – Break Out of Your Browser – BrowserPlus is a technology for web browsers that allows developers to create rich web applications with desktop capabilities
  • The Shallowest Generation – Seeking Alpha – The Baby Boom generation has one last chance to change the course of U.S. history, keep us from wrecking in a storm of debt on the approaching jagged reef and shed the title of “Shallowest Generation”.

Upgraded my computer – Love the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT card

I have a couple of computers at home but my primary machine is a DELL desktop running Vista. This is a dual-core machine with 4 GB of RAM but it ran sloooooooooooowwwwww. So I just upgraded the machine with a new 500w power supply and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT is an amazing video card that’s SLI ready with 112 stream processors and a 256-bit framebuffer interface running at 900MHz, DirectX 10, PCI Express 2.0 and the second generation NVIDIA PureVideo engine with full acceleration and post processing for HD DVD and Blu-ray movies.

Here are the screenshots of the Performance Information and Tools screen with the before and after Windows Experience Index number. Guess I need to upgrade the processor next.

The power supply I chose was the PC Power and Cooling PPCS500D Silencer.

Holy Bandwidth – Take 3

I just upgraded my existing Road Runner turbo connection to their Business Class service and I now have 15Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream along with QOS to give my packets priority over the rest of the regular Roadrunner customers.

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Prior to this upgrade, I was getting 15Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and so the extra Mbps of upstream is nice but I can really tell the difference in the QOS. I did a speed test to a server in Chicago and then to another server in San Francisco and didn’t notice any drop in speed or overall bandwidth. Prior to business class Road Runner, there was significant drop-off in speed as you traveled further away from my location.

Holy Bandwidth – Take 3

I just upgraded my existing Road Runner turbo connection to their Business Class service and I now have 15Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream along with QOS to give my packets priority over the rest of the regular Roadrunner customers.

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Road Runner Turbo - Business Class bandwidth test

Prior to this upgrade, I was getting 15Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and so the extra Mbps of upstream is nice but I can really tell the difference in the QOS. I did a speed test to a server in Chicago and then to another server in San Francisco and didn’t notice any drop in speed or overall bandwidth. Prior to business class Road Runner, there was significant drop-off in speed as you traveled further away from my location. Next step – static IP and then I can put the Linux boxes at home to good use 🙂

Simple Tags plugin & WordPress 2.5 RC2 breaks your blog

I just upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 RC2 and everything stopped working. Instead of getting my blog or the admin screen, I got the following error message:

Fatal error: Call to a member function add_query_var() in taxonomy.php

I discovered the root-cause of the problem and it is the wonderful Simple Tags plugin. Disabling the plugin restores WordPress back to it’s own awesome self. Simple Tags is an awesome plugin that allows you to manage tags within WordPress.

I’ve opened an issue with the Simple Tags issue tracker on Google Code.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

I know the latest release of WordPress, v2.5 is not officially out but I have been running WordPress 2.5 from their Subversion repository trunk for about the last week. My initial thoughts on the 2.5 release are very positive and all of my plugins and themes have worked without any major changes. Most plugin and theme authors are already busy upgrading their stuff to the latest code.

Some of the new features include a customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and major performance improvements. Apparently, the Automattic crew has been working with the folks at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — to redesign WordPress from the ground-up. The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone. It’s more than just a new CSS – it’s a very nice redesign of the user interface that may require a little time to get familiar with, but it’s worth the effort as the new interface is very user-friendly, slick, and powerful.

Do this at your own risk as this is still pre-release software, but if you want to run the latest development trunk of WordPress, use the checkout command (svn co) to get the latest code and then an update once you get the latest code to make sure you are getting the latest code (svn update).

[source:xml]
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .

svn update
[/source]

Daily del.icio.us for February 14th through February 16th

Daily del.icio.us for Nov 02 through Nov 23, 2007

  • InfoQ: Prototype and Script.aculo.us: spending weekends at home again – Script.aculo.us creator Thomas Fuchs gives an overview about the concepts and functionality of both Prototype and the script.aculo.us libraries, provides advice on what and what not to expect and gives pointers and hints on how to get started.
  • Enterprise Java Community: Spring Loaded Observer Pattern – This article describes an easy process of implementing the observer pattern in the Spring framework
  • The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark] – An analysis of the Amazon Kindle only as Mark Pilgrim or maybe John Gruber can do:) Must read – very thought provoking
  • InfoQ: Article: What’s New in Spring 2.5: Part 1: Annotation-Based Configuration – The newly released Spring 2.5 features annotation-driven dependency injection, auto-detection of Spring components on the classpath using annotations rather than XML for metadata, annotation support for lifecycle methods, a new web controller model for ma
  • InfoQ: DDD: putting the model to work – This talk will outline some of the foundations of domain-driven design:How models are chosen and evaluated;How multiple models coexist;How the patterns help avoid the common pitfalls, such as overly interconnected models;How developers and domain experts
  • JavaRanch Journal – November 2007 Volume 6 Issue 2 – Spring offers a few helper classes to do some scheduling in your app. In Spring 2.0, both the JDK’s Timer objects and the OpenSymphony Quartz Scheduler are supported. Quartz is an open source job scheduling system that can be easily used with Spring.
  • What is the Google Collections Library? – Kevin Bourrillion & Jared Levy are the two primary creators of the Google Collections Library, which aims to provide an extension to the Java Collections Framework. They discuss what the library is all about, its genesis, and how it will be useful to you.
  • InfoQ: Scrum and XP from the Trenches – The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP
  • InfoQ: Starting Struts 2 – Struts2 is the latest manifestation of the popular Struts Java web application framework. Like its predecessor, its goals are to make web application development faster, easier and more productive than ever before.
  • InfoQ: Homer’s Odyssey or My Life as an Agile Consultant – In this offbeat presentation from Agile2006, Jean Tabaka compares impediments and obstacles encountered by an Agile mentor with those detailed in Homer’s classic.
  • TSS Video: Christian Bauer on JBoss Seam – In this presentation, Christian Bauer discusses how JBoss Seam simplifies the handling of stateful conversations, multi-window operations and concurrent, fine-grained Ajax requests & integrates Facelets, Hibernate, jBPM, Drools, Groovy, iText and Lucene.
  • Seam 2.0 has been released – Seam 2.0 was released this week. JBoss Seam is a powerful new application framework for building next generation Web 2.0 applications by ntegrating Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), EJB3, Java Portlets and BPM.
  • Asual | SWFAddress – Deep linking for Flash and Ajax – SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state.
  • Adobe – Developer Center : Designing for Flex ? Part 5: Designing content displays – Content displays are the key element of Flex application design. Application chrome exists only to support these displays, if indeed it must exist at all.
  • Henrik Stahl’s Blog: BEA videos on YouTube – There are some short clips covering BEA technologies on YouTube. My favorite is the Predictable Java video. I wish my coffee machine was that well-behaved!
  • Hybridizing HTML – How to create Flex forms within HTML pages to easily achieve cross-browser and cross-platform functionality.
  • alphaWorks : IBM Personal Presenter : Overview – A simple, serverless means of producing and distributing rich media content consisting of video, audio, and slides from the originator’s computer to multiple clients.
  • Interface21 Team Blog » The Spring Web Flow 2.0 Vision – The goal of 2.0 is to evolve Spring Web Flow into a complete controller engine capable of handling all types of user interactions, stateless and stateful alike, with support for multiple view technologies and asynchronous event handling (Ajax) natively
  • gwt-ext – Google Code – GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more
  • xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project – An XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 Renderer – The Flying Saucer team announces Release 8pre1 of the Flying Saucer 100% Java XHTML+CSS renderer, including support for table pagination, margin boxes, running elements, named pages, and more:
  • It’s Only Software » 5 Minute Guide to Spring and JMX – I recently augmented a Spring-based project to expose some of the Spring-managed beans via JMX. Spring makes this very easy, and even if you?ve never used JMX before, this quick tutorial will let you set up your Spring beans to be viewed (and edited!) t
  • Android’s SDK Now Available – Android, Google’s mobile platform, is finally open to the developers. Now you can download the SDK and start to develop great applications in Java. Google launched a competition that offers $10 million awards for the most interesting apps
  • Microsoft Sync Framework != Google Gears (even if the press wants to make it look that way) on Dion Almaer’s Blog – saw Microsoft?s Answer to Google Gears popup in my news feed, along with Mary Jo?s piece itself: Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform.
  • Upgrading to Prototype 1.6: real world examples – Recently I have undertaken upgrading to Prototype 1.6.0. I will now show you some examples of what I?ve done, how I did it and why; you might find this writeup useful when doing the same in your application.