Vinny Carpenter's blog

Links for May 14th through May 21st

The Tumblr Architecture Yahoo Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars – The theme at Tumblr is transition at massive scale. Transition from a LAMP stack to a somewhat bleeding edge stack. Transition from a small startup team to a fully armed and ready development team churning out new features and infrastructure.
Apache Thrift – Scalable Cross-language Services Implementation – The Apache Thrift software framework, for scalable cross-language services development, combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haske
You are your data: The scary future of the quantified self movement | PandoDaily – As we document and share more of where we go, what we do, who we spend time with, what we eat, what we buy, how hard we exert ourselves, and so on, we create more data that companies can and will use to evaluate our worthiness – or lack thereof – for their
Dell dumps its public cloud offerings | ITworld – Dell has become one of the first high profile companies to dump its public cloud ambitions, announcing today that it will no longer invest in its OpenStack and VMware-based cloud services
Automated Insights – High Quality Automated Content Services – Our sophisticated artificial intelligence platform sifts through large data sets to spot interesting patterns, trends and insights, and then describes those findings in plain English with the tone, personality and variability of a human writer.
Everything Apple Needs to Introduce at WWDC to Appease the Internet — carpeaqua by Justin Williams – With WWDC just a few weeks away, I thought it’d be beneficial to the Internet at large to compile a working list of everything that is expected of Apple during their Keynote and subsequent “State of the Union” addresses in order to appease the Internet.
Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup | Holovaty.com – On Friday, we migrated Soundslice from Heroku to direct use of Amazon Web Services (AWS). I'm very, very happy with this change and want to spread the word about how we did it and why you should consider it if you're in a similar position.
Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start eating healthfully. Sincerely, the Food Industry | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network – Dear Consumers: A disturbing trend has come to our attention. You, the people, are thinking more about health, and you’re starting to do something about it. This cannot continue.
Meteor – A better way to build apps. – Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started.
How We Built eBay’s First Node.js Application — eBay Tech Blog – For the most part, eBay runs on a Java-based tech stack. Our entire workflow centers around Java and the JVM. But we have always been open to new technologies, and Node.js has been topping the list of candidates for quite some time. This post highlights a few aspects of how we developed eBay’s first Node.js application.
How forward-thinking developers are beating the old-guard in emerging application markets – The increasing speed of development (and developer feedback) means new technologies — witness HTML5 — are getting field-tested and absorbed into the mix more quickly, hastening the pace of relevancy.
As always, though, application development isn't abou
Android tooling? Yes. New Android OS? No | Development tools – InfoWorld – While the Google I/O conference didn't bring Android 5.0 'Key Lime Pie,' the company did bolster app dev for Android
Google Launches Android Studio And New Features For Developer Console based on IntelliJ IDEA – Today, during Google’s I/O developer conference, the company announced a group of tools for app developers, including a new developer suite called Android Studio. It’s an IDE based on IntelliJ.
Apple’s new Objective-C to Javascript Bridge – A few month back, Apple quietly slipped a very nice Objective-C to Javascript bridge into WebKit. Since the first commit while we were busy celebrating New Year’s Eve, it has been fairly actively developed and improved. This new API supports straightforwar
Salesforce’s enterprise social network adds file sharing capabilities to its mobile iOS offering – The Next Web – Salesforce.com has unveiled a new feature for its Chatter Mobile product. Called Files for Chatter Mobile, users can share files with other people right on the go using their iOS device.
Microsoft announces Windows 8.1, a free update to Windows 8. – "Windows Blue" will be called Windows 8.1 and will be a free update to Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store.
Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is – Big data! If you don’t have it, you better get yourself some. Your competition has it, after all. Bottom line: If your data is little, your rivals are going to kick sand in your face and steal your girlfriend.

Links for May 14th through May 21st

Links for May 7th through May 13th

Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite – Businessweek – On a normal weeknight, Netflix (NFLX) accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com (AMZN), HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around
Mobile DevCon New York – How We Built Facebook for iOS – Hear the story of how we rebuilt the Facebook app – moving to native code instead of WebViews – from one of Facebook's very own iOS engineers.
With Windows Blue, Microsoft may (finally) do the right thing | ZDNet – Call it capitulation. Call it listening to customers. But whatever you call it, making Windows 8 more usable with expected coming Blue tweaks is a positive, not a negative.
Declarative Data Visualization – Intellectual Wanderlust – The purpose of this post is to provide a live example of DViz, a declarative data visualization library written in Javascript.
Learn Web Penetration Testing: The Right Way – PentesterLab is an easy and great way to learn penetration testing.
PentesterLab provides vulnerable systems that can be used to test and understand vulnerabilities.
Fries lets you prototype Android apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. – Fries is an awesome mobile prototyping framework for Android apps inspired by Ratchet. We all know that you can find loads of iOS prototyping tools out there, so this time let's give some love to Android.
Guitar Handbook Download with Berklee Online | Berkleemusic.com – Get a taste of Berklee's legendary guitar instruction in our free downloadable Guitar Handbook. This extensive PDF contains lessons taken from Berklee's 12-week online guitar courses, and covers introductory topics such as scales, triads, strumming techniq
Microsoft Windows 8 criticism response: not like New Coke | BGR – Microsoft executive Frank Shaw is not happy with everyone who compared Windows 8 to New Coke this week. Shaw, who serves as Microsoft’s vice president of corporate communications, has written a blog post swiping back at media outlets who bashed the company
Google builds push notifications into Chrome, Chrome OS | Internet & Media – CNET News – In a step to help browser-based apps catch up with the abilities of other software, Google has made it possible for programmers to push notifications to Web apps running in Chrome.
Disruptive technologies articles and insights discussion with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt – In the first of a series of video interviews with high-tech experts, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explores the technologies likely to have the greatest disruptive impact on economies, business models, and people.
Discover Meteor – Learn how to build real-time JavaScript web apps – Learn Meteor and build faster, simpler web apps as we teach you how to build a real-time Meteor app from scratch.
NASA to migrate ISS computers from Windows to Linux | The Rocketry Blog – Citing stability issues NASA has announced they will be migrating the ISS laptops and PCs from Windows to Linux
Why Enterprise Software Sucks: 6 Years Later | The Future Of Work – I thought it would be interesting to revisit the topic and see what progress has been made (or not made) since then.

Links for May 7th through May 13th

Links for April 27th through May 3rd

Eliminating my trivial inconveniences building Discourse – There is also a more insidious form of waiting. The zero value work you tend to do repetitively, also known as trivial inconveniences. These issues don’t stop you from working, they just make your job slightly more annoying.
Microsoft readies ‘Mohoro’ Windows desktop as a service | ZDNet – Microsoft is believed to be building a Windows Azure-hosted desktop virtualization service that could be available on a pay-per-use basis
Standard Java API for JSON – JSR-353, the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), has reached final approval ballot this month. JSON-P (similar to JAXP) consists of a Streaming API (similar to StAX) and an Object Model API (similar to DOM).
Solarized – Precision colors for machines and people – Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined se
Novell offers mobile file sharing for the enterprise | PCWorld – In an effort to help enterprises get a handle on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, Novell has released enterprise file sharing software that it claims is as easy to use as commercial cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Microsoft Skydrive, and Goo
Unraveling HTML5 vs. Native – When going for multiplatform solutions bear in mind that while the idea of a common codebase is desirable the “write-once-run-anywhere” paradigm is ultimately an illusion, as your app will still need platform-dependent tweaks, and a broad QA effort.
Amazon doesn’t reveal what it makes on cloud computing, but here’s the number, anyway – Quartz – Amazon is famously reticent about sales figures, dribbling out clues without revealing actual numbers. But it appears the company has left enough hints to, finally, discern how much revenue it makes on its cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Serv
Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant – The firm is doubling down on search that is conversational, contextual, and personal.
iio Engine · an Interactive App Framework for HTML5 built with Canvas & JavaScript – The iio Engine (pronounced 'ee-oh') is an extensive application framework that helps with the creation and deployment of HTML5 applications. The framework provides a feature rich SDK, an advanced debugging system, and a cross-platform deployment engine
Hello Maps: A Five Minute iOS App with the Google Maps SDK – In this short and sweet tutorial, Google's Mano Marks shows you how to build a simple "Hello Maps!" starter app for iOS, using the Google Maps SDK.
Apple Backtracks on Planned Changes to VPN On Demand Behavior on iOS Devices – Mac Rumors – Apple no longer plans to change the behavior of the VPN On Demand feature of iOS 6.1 for devices that have already been shipped. The "Always" option will continue to work as it currently does on these devices.
SV Angel Says Health Informatics Is One Of Its New “Megatrends” | TechCrunch – SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms has always had a list of six to eight "megatrends" that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce, online-to-offline commerce, education tech, the sharing economy and the "Internet of things." Now they’re adding "health informatics" to that list

Links for April 27th through May 3rd

Links for April 19th through April 26th

Heavy use of herbicide Roundup linked to health dangers-U.S. study | Reuters – Heavy use of the world's most popular herbicide, Roundup, could be linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson's, infertility and cancers, according to a new study.
Quantitative Finance Reading List – QuantStart – I've tried to list as many great quantitative finance books as I can. The lists cover general quant finance, careers guides, interview prep, quant trading, mathematics, numerical methods and programming in C++, Python, Excel, MatLab and R.
GE to pour $105M into EMC and VMware’s Pivotal Initiative — Tech News and Analysis – The Pivotal Initiative, the big cloud and big data startup backed by parents EMC and VMware, now has another big, scary backer: General Electric is ponying up $105 million for a 10 percent stake in the company.
The economics behind Amazon’s possible set-top box gambit | Internet & Media – CNET News – A Wedbush Securities analyst believes the opportunity could be huge if the retail giant gives away its Amazon Instant Video service for a year to consumers who buy a set-top box.
Galaxy S4 Crams in More Software, Some of It Good – NYTimes.com – For everyone else, the S4 may be buggy in spots and laden with not-quite-there features. But the basics are excellent; this phone is still a fast, bright, handsome pocket rocket. It easily earns its place as a successor to the Galaxy S3 and a rival to the
Gigabit Wi-Fi: Difference Engine: Unplugging the cables | The Economist – The promise is that, once the wrinkles have been ironed out, 60 gigahertz Wi-Fi could be an even bigger driver of innovation in the years ahead than the original 2.4-gigahertz Wi-Fi was in its day
Atlassian – Git Flow Comes to Java – Git Flow is a branching and merging model introduced by Vincent Driessen that provides a little bit of structure to your development workflow.
Create ipa in Sencha Touch 2 – A guide to Sencha Touch native packaging iOS – Using sencha touch 2 you can create web applications that look like native. You can host application in your server and run in webkit enabled browser, either in smartPhone or PC. Native packaging lets you export web app as ipa for iOS or apk for android (lets you Create ipa in Sencha Touch). You can then use these packages to submit in app store or play store.
Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything – Harvard Business Review – In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. Most important, I’ll explain how, in combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new entrepreneurial economy.
IBM buys UrbanCode for its devops chops — Tech News and Analysis – If there was any doubt that devops — the practice of getting development and operations teams to work together to design and deploy software fast, here’s more evidence: IBM is buying UrbanCode.
Make Your UI More Responsive with HTML5 Web Workers – Web workers can be a very useful and empowering feature but they do have some limitations. All communication into and out of your web workers is done by passing in and out data in the form of messages. All data is passed by value meaning that any object r
Diving into AngularJS | Float Left – These are just my initial thoughts after playing with the framework for a day and maybe I’ll change my mind after I’ve used it more extensively but right now I’m loving Angular and can’t see myself choosing Backbone the next time I start a big front end JS
A multi-part series on how to test Sencha Touch apps using Jasmine and Siesta – A multi-part series of articles on how to test Sencha Touch applications. It uses Jasmine for unit testing and Siesta for integration testing.
Tabris 1.0: Cross-platform Mobile Development in Java – After three years in development, EclipseSource has released Tabris 1.0, a cross-platform Java mobile development framework for iOS and Android. Tabris is targeted at enterprises, and unlike other mobile solutions out there it uses a different approach:

Links for April 19th through April 26th

Links for April 15th through April 18th

Spring MVC – Easy REST-Based JSON Services with @ResponseBody – Spring 3 makes JSON REST services really easy. This tutorial will show you how in just a few steps. You can grab the code on GitHub.
A Scala Tutorial for Java Programmers – Scala Documentation – This document gives a quick introduction to the Scala language and compiler. It is intended for people who already have some programming experience and want an overview of what they can do with Scala. A basic knowledge of object-oriented programming, especially in Java, is assumed.
Google Trends: Javascript Frameworks – Google Trends: Javascript Frameworks
Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 & went native for its mobile apps | VentureBeat – LinkedIn has just launched the latest versions of its mobile apps, and in a stunning reversal, it’s gone from mobile web-based apps back to fully native.
Who’s Winning, iOS or Android? All the Numbers, All in One Place | TIME.com – Android if you’re talking about market share; iOS if you mean financial success. So far, this is a strikingly different market than the PC business back in the 1990s, when market share translated directly into financial success.
Non-blocking IO in Servlet 3.1 By Example | Java.net – Servlet 3.1 (JSR 340) is almost ready for the release. One of the new features is the support for non-blocking IO. ReadListener and WriteListener are introduced to allow non-blocking processing in Servlet.
Red Hat pushes open source cloud with OpenStack distro | ZDNet – Linux software giant Red Hat has launched a community-led distribution of the OpenStack open source cloud platform. RDO — announced at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, USA, on Monday — is a free community-supported distro of OpenStack that will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora and their derivatives.
A comparison of Angular, Backbone, CanJS and Ember – Sebastian’s Blog – I have had the opportunity to use four of these frameworks: Angular, Backbone, CanJS and Ember. So I decided to create a comparison to help you decide which one to use. I will go through several factors that you might want to consider when choosing one.
Your First iOS App: 100% Programmatically – This is Part 1 of a tutorial that follows Apple’s “Your First iOS App”, but implements all of the user interface elements programmatically
A Little Graph Theory for the Busy Developer – Jim Webber explores graph data analytic techniques using social graph properties inspired by anthropology and sociology, extracting online business intelligence from graph matching.

Links for April 15th through April 18th

Links for April 9th through April 15th

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 April 9th through April 15th

Links for April 3rd through April 8th

Top 10 Reasons I like Postgres Over SQL Server – DataChomp – Below is my quick little list of reasons I gave him as to why I’m favoring Postgres over SQL Server from a technical/business aspect.
Pixate Bootstrap – Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier mobile app development. – Pixate Bootstrap is based on the popular Twitter Bootstrap framework and has been made to work on the Pixate Engine for iOS. Because web and native mobile apps are different, not everything in Bootstrap can be mapped 1:1 to a native iOS application, but ev
JavaScript MVC frameworks: A Comparison of Marionette and Chaplin « IO 9elements – JavaScript application development is a hot topic and people are wondering which framework they should pick. In this post I’m going to compare two of them.
The Economic Story of the Year: The Stock Market vs. the Labor Market – No matter how you want to break down the schism — 99% vs. 1%; wages vs. wealth; labor vs. capital; local vs. global — this is big economic story, now
Gartner’s Technology Trends for Information Infrastructure: Big Data, NoSQL and In-Memory Computing – Big Data, NoSQL databases and In-Memory computing are some of the technologies that will play key role in modernizing information management in 2013 and beyond, according to Gartner. A recent report released by Gartner team identifies the top technology trends that will have impact on the information infrastructure and governance.
25 iOS App Performance Tips & Tricks – Ray Wenderlich – This article gathers together 25 tips and tricks that you can use to improve the performance of your apps, in the form of a handy checklist.
SAP: Is HANA growth overstated? | ZDNet – SAP has shown strong growth with its HANA in-memory analytics systems, but at least one analyst is questioning the growth and adding that the company may be allocating other products to the category.
3 Things You Need to Turn Your Enterprise Into A Platform – Laura Merling shares advice in building a software platform for the enterprise based on 3 ideas: Product to Sell, Self-Service with Full Service, Things in Common.
Web Application Development Frameworks performance benchmark – Round 2 – Last week, we posted the results of benchmarking several web application development and frameworks. The response was tremendous. We received comments, recommendations, advice, criticism, questions, and most importantly pull requests from dozens of readers
TheBigDB :: The open facts database – TheBigDB is a very loosely structured database of facts,
free and open to everybody.
Microsoft to Make Leaps in the Mobile Enterprise – CIO.com – Apple, Google, Microsoft and BlackBerry bear down for the great mobile enterprise race in 2013. Here are the results from an exclusive survey on mobile app deployment plans for all mobile platforms. The winners and losers may surprise you.

Links for April 3rd through April 8th

Links for March 29th through April 2nd

SEC Says Companies Can Use Social Media to Alert Investors – WSJ.com <AMEN!!!> – The Securities and Exchange Commission gave explicit permission for companies to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook FB -0.43% to announce key information, so long as investors have been alerted about which sites will be used to disseminate such it.
Why China Is Reading Your Email – WSJ.com – Beijing's cyber attacks are rooted in military strategy, says one of America's foremost experts. The best way to combat them is for the U.S. to go on the cyber offensive too.
Database test data generator – Fill your database with random test data! – Generate test data for your database – Quick recipes to test real applications with random data
Performance Testing Java Applications – This talk explores when to start performance testing, how to avoid the common pitfalls, how to profile when the results cause your team to pull a funny face, and what you can do about that funny face. Specific issues to Java and managed runtimes in general
MongoDB Gets Better Security, Text Search, Performance Improvements – What’s Next? – MongoDB 2.4 was recently released with new features such as Text Search, hash-based sharding, better geo-spatial capabilities with GeoJSON support and several performance and tooling improvements. We also discussed with 10gen about what’s next on the roadm
High Performance Messaging for Web-Based Trading Systems – This presentation will investigate WebSocket and how trading systems can be designed to leverage this new web protocol for reliability, security and performance for desktop, mobile, datacenter and cloud environments.
Pragmatic DevOps: Reproducing Yourself with Vagrant and Chef | zeroturnaround.com – This post provides an introductory look at why should you care about DevOps, what can we use to make it easy to get started and covered by hands-on guides. First we need to look at Virtualization and Provisioning.
Big Data Deep Dive Conclusion: The Future of Analytics – Furrier wraps up the Big Data Deep Dive by highlighting that everything generates data, and everybody will be affected by it thanks to the technology that is being developed by the data science community.
Why Use Twitter Bootstrap? Because I Said So – For me Twitter Bootstrap is a wonderful design tool because as a designer I don't have to focus so much on the UI components and focus more on the overall design of the app and its users. For web based applications and large data driven and heavy interactive websites it's a fantastic design tool
How to teach a Java EE app new NoSQL tricks – Sun dumped JavaEE Pet Store, but a bright developer modernized it, and we ported it to NoSQL with Couchbase
GWT Activity & Places: Order matters | techscouting through the java news – The GWT Activity and Places framework is a useful and common mechanism to use the browser history within your application allowing users to bookmark URLs and use the back button as a feature. To do so, it automatically updates the URL token when navigating

Links for March 29th through April 2nd

Links for March 26th through March 28th

How much does your framework choice affect performance? The answer may surprise you. – How much does your framework choice affect performance? The answer may surprise you.
GWT implementation of Appfuse with MVP, Activities, Places & EventBus – the design of the application follows many of gwt latest best practices: MVP pattern, Activities and Places, EventBus, Gin and Guice..
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-best-practices-soup/
Integrating GWT into AppFuse – I've been interested in integrating GWT into AppFuse ever since I blogged about it 4 years ago. After Evite, I had a gig near Boston where I developed with GXT for the remainder of the year. When all was said and done, I ended up spending a year with GWT and really enjoyed my experience.
Sencha.io Support in Sencha Cmd – In this article, we will highlight the Sencha.io functionality available in Sencha Cmd by walking through the process of creating an application, deploying it to the cloud, and managing its settings.
‎Apache Tajo – a Relational and Distributed Data Warehouse for Hadoop – Tajo is a relational and distributed data warehouse system for Hadoop. Tajo is designed for low-latency and scalable ad-hoc queries, online aggregation and ETL on large-data sets by leveraging advanced database techniques. It supports SQL standards.
Springing Forward with Roo Add-ons – Ken Rimple shows how to write Spring Roo commands and features using the OSGi-based add-on API and how to extend the Roo shell using various Roo objects such as the FileManager and the ProjectManager.
inessential.com: Why Developers Shouldn’t Use iCloud Syncing, Even If It Worked – Half the mobile revolution is about designing and building apps for smartphones and tablets. The other half is about writing the web services that power those apps. How comfortable are you with outsourcing half your app to another company? The answer should be: not at all comfortable.
Everything about Java 8 – The following post is a comprehensive summary of the developer-facing changes coming in Java 8. This next iteration of the JDK is currently scheduled for general availability in September 2013.
Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack – Forbes – Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultancy as well as OpenStack Foundation board member recently told Business Insider that PayPal is in the midst of replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this sum
New Amazon CloudHSM service vows enterprise-grade security – CloudHSM could make regulation-constrained companies and agencies more comfortable entrusting workloads to the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Dashing – The exceptionally handsome dashboard framework. – Dashing is a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards.
Bringing new life to Spring Travel with Thymeleaf – By using Thymeleaf we are pushing the view layer back to the HTML side where it belongs, allowing us to use our templates more actively for customer validation and allowing our designers to easily update them without ever losing the information needed to process them dynamically at runtime.

Links for March 26th through March 28th

Links for March 21st through March 23rd

Facebook Turns Off Website Internally To Force Mobile Development – Just how important is mobile to Facebook? According to Facebook product manager Josh Williams, the former CEO of Gowalla, the social network's push toward mobility is crucial enough to its strategy to turn off Facebook's website internally.
Learn the ropes of Mobile Services with Brent Simmons – Mobile Services makes it easy to store data for your iOS app in the cloud, authenticate users, and send push notifications via APNS. Join Brent in a walkthrough of the basics.
Microsoft backs away from Flash ban in IE10 | Internet & Media – CNET News – Arguing that support for Adobe's browser plug-in is an advantage, Microsoft now permits Flash by default on Windows 8 and Windows RT. Tablets that can't run Flash are merely "a companion to a PC."
Stanford Offers Free Introductory Course on iOS Programming – Stanford University is offering a free introductionary course "Coding Together: Developing Apps for iPhone and iPad (Winter 2013)" on iTunes U. All lectures can be downloaded as video podcasts along with slides in PDF format. The material is suitable for O
Designing A RESTful API That Doesn’t Suck | devo.ps – As we’re getting closer to shipping the first version of devo.ps and we are joined by a few new team members, the team took the time to review the few principles we followed when designing our RESTful JSON API.
Coding Horror: Why Ruby? – However, I'd also be lying if I didn't mention that I truly believe the sort of project we are building in Discourse does represent most future software. If you squint your eyes a little, I think you can see a future not too far in the distance where .NET
NoSQL showdown: MongoDB vs. Couchbase | Data Management – InfoWorld – MongoDB edges Couchbase Server with richer querying and indexing options, as well as superior ease of use
Here’s How Marquette Erased A Six-Point Davidson Lead In The Final Minute And Avoided An Upset – Vander Blue took over in the final moments to lead Marquette past an upset-minded Davidson team today in Lexington, though a brutal blunder on the Wildcats' part sealed their fate as much as the Golden Eagles' suddenly hot shooting.
Cappuccino Web Framework – Build Desktop Class Applications in Objective-J and JavaScript – Cappuccino is an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser.
I’m done with the web – Don’t be afraid to invest a week learning something new. Cappuccino, GWT, and Sproutcore were born out of necessity; don’t stop breaking boundaries because it’s now easy to add rounded corners now.

Links for March 21st through March 23rd

Links for March 16th through March 20th

Google Keep—Save what’s on your mind – With Google Keep, you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have
Sencha.io Support in Sencha Cmd – Sencha Cmd allows you to perform a wide variety of tasks, including managing how an application is configured and hosted in Sencha.io. As the Sencha.io platform grows and more services and configuration options are added to it, we will continue to add equivalent features to Sencha Cmd, so developers can automate their workflows and test effectively.
Superhero.js – List of articles, tutorials, videos on how to create, test and manage large JS apps – Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic.
Backbone 1.0 is released – The essential premise at the heart of Backbone has always been to try and discover the minimal set of data-structuring (Models and Collections) and user interface (Views and URLs) primitives that are useful when building web applications with JavaScript
What 420,000 insecure devices reveal about Web security – Using a simple technique, a researcher creates a benign botnet to survey the breadth of the Internet, and finds a back door flung wide open and beckoning the bad guys.
It’s Lose-Lose vs. Win-Win-Win-Win-Win – NYTimes.com – According to the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at the nonpartisan Resources for the Future, a tax of $25 per ton of carbon-dioxide emitted would raise approximately $125 billion annually
You are watching your DNS logs, right? – Watching the DNS requests being made by your systems allows you to identify network level indicators of compromise.
Dave Grohl’s SXSW 2013 Keynote Speech : NPR – Dave Grohl has become the unofficial Mayor of Rock 'n' Roll: a gregarious ambassador who wins armloads of Grammys and even directs a music documentary. Watch Grohl's keynote address at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas.
Splunk as a Big Data Platform for Developers – YouTube – Splunk is a Big Data platform that transforms the massive amount of heterogeneous and often totally unstructured machine data being generated across the enterprise into valuable insights and realtime operational intelligence.
Does the World Need Another Hadoop Distro? Greenplum Says Yes | SiliconANGLE – Greenplum is challenging Cloudera and MapR with a new Hadoop solution that delivers faster response times and better integration than the competition. Dubbed Dubbed Pivotal HD
EMC Greenplum Tackles Big Data With Hadoop Distribution – CIO.com – EMC Greenplum debuts its own Hadoop distribution, Pivotal HD, which marries Greenplum's massively parallel processing database technology with the Apache Hadoop framework to create a technology called HAWQ.
Finally! A Hadoop Hello World That Isn’t A Lame Word Count! – So I got bored of the old WordCount Hello World, and being a fairly mathy person, I decided to make my own Hello World in which I coaxed Hadoop into transposing a matrix!
By the numbers: How Google Compute Engine stacks up to Amazon EC2 — Tech News and Analysis – with Google Compute Engine, AWS has a formidable new competitor in the public cloud space, and we’ll likely be moving some of Scalr’s production workloads from our hybrid aws-rackspace-softlayer setup to it when it leaves beta. There’s a strong technical case for migrating heavy workloads to GCE, and I’ll be grabbing popcorn to eagerly watch as the battle unfolds between the giants.

Links for March 16th through March 20th

Links for March 7th through March 15th

A collection of best front-end frameworks with comparison | By usabli.ca – A collection of best front-end frameworks for faster and easier web development.
Hortonworks Sandbox – Go from zero to Big Data in 15 minutes – The Hortonworks Sandbox is designed to provide you with a personal Hadoop solution and learning platform in one convenient package. The Sandbox comes with step-by-step hands-on tutorials, demos, videos that allow you to go from Zero to Big Data in 15 Minutes
First 5 Minutes Troubleshooting A Server | devo.ps – Back when our team was dealing with operations, optimization and scalability at our previous company, we had our fair share of troubleshooting poorly performing applications and infrastructures of various sizes, often large (think CNN or the World Bank). Tight deadlines, “exotic” technical stacks and lack of information usually made for memorable experiences
Fliptop – Social Intelligence – At the end of the day, the scarcest resource in a startup is time. More code = more engineering time = more cost = higher burn rate. The features of Lift I’ve talked about (and others I haven’t yet, like Comet) help me to do the most amount of work with
Android Accounted For 79% Of All Mobile Malware In 2012, 96% In Q4 Alone, Says F-Secure | TechCrunch – Android Accounted For 79% Of All Mobile Malware In 2012, 96% In Q4 Alone, Says F-Secure | TechCrunch
The ‘Big Data’ Revolution: How Number Crunchers Can Predict Our Lives – That kind of decision-making is an example of Big Data: the decade-long explosion of digital information, much of it personal, that has become available to companies and governments. This trend in predictions and decisions is the topic of a new book, Big D
Introduction to Spring Integration and Spring Batch – Gunnar Hillert and Gary Russell introduce Spring Integration and Spring Batch, how they differ, their commonalities, and how you can use them together.

Links for March 7th through March 15th

Links for March 4th through March 6th

Gosling: New Java proposal could ease ports to iOS – Java founder sees promise in JNI, which modifies standard Java to package runtime, as well as native and Java application code
Introducing Sodium, a new Cryptographic Library – Today, I’m announcing Sodium, a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable, API-compatible version of NaCl.
Epic codefest: 7 programming languages in 7 days – We challenged our developers to learn Clojure, Scala, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, and Go in a day. Here's how easy it is to make the switch
ChildBrowser – The child browser allows you to display external webpages within your PhoneGap application – The child browser allows you to display external webpages within your PhoneGap application
Why I switched from iPhone to Android | TechHive – And so, by the end of the year, the idea of continuing to use an iPhone exclusively, or even as my primary phone, was no longer appealing. That's why I willingly parted with my unlimited data plan.
JUnit Testing of Spring MVC application: Testing Frontend Using Selenium | Javalobby – In continuation of my earlier blogs on Introduction to Spring MVC and Testing Controller in Spring MVC, in this blog I will demonstrate how to test Web layer in Spring MVC. We can also incorporate Authentication and Authorization, learn more about it in th
Server Shield is a lightweight method of protecting and hardening your Linux server – Server Shield is a lightweight method of protecting and hardening your Linux server. It is easy to install, hard to mess up, and makes your server instantly and effortlessly resistant to many basic and advanced attacks.
OpenDolphin – Enterprise Java meets Desktop Java – Dolphin is a free open-source library that protects your business applications against the uncertainties of changing visualization technologies.
Martin Fowler on Schemalessness, NoSQL, and Software Design – Here's a 75-minute presentation from ThoughtWorks by Martin Fowler on software design in the 21st century.

Links for March 4th through March 6th

Links for February 26th through March 3rd

My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers – Server security doesn’t need to be complicated. My security philosophy is simple: adopt principles that will protect you from the most frequent attack vectors, while keeping administration efficient enough that you won’t develop “security cruft”. If you us
Rise of the Web App – Kevin Dangoor reviews the latest developments in the web platform – media queries, app cache, IndexedDB, WebGL, Mozilla’s WebAPI – and takes a look at its future.
Microsoft, EMC, NetApp join Oracle’s legal fight against Google on Java | Intellectual property – InfoWorld – Microsoft, EMC, and NetApp have joined an appeal by Oracle against an earlier decision in a copyright and patent infringement lawsuit against Google over Android.
WebKit for Developers – Paul Irish – For many of us developers, WebKit is a black box. We throw HTML, CSS, JS and a bunch of assets at it, and WebKit, somehow.. magically, gives us a webpage that looks and works well. But WebKit isn’t a black box. It’s a white box. And not just that, but an open, white box.
Why MongoDB? – Rackspace announces the acquisition of ObjectRocket. – ObjectRocket is a MongoDB database as a service that is highly available, automatically sharded and lightning fast – 10 times faster than its leading competitors, according to our internal benchmarking tests.
The Adventurous Developer’s Guide to JVM Languages – In "The Adventurous Developer’s Guide to JVM Languages", we don our explorers’ hats as we test out eight languages with an HTTP server example that you can find on Github. We also pinged the experts for this report and included commentary from 5 of the actual creators or project leads of the languages we look at. James Gosling & Rich Hickey, we’re looking at you for the next report
Video – Threats to Samsung Android Market Share? – WSJ.com – Samsung Electronics Co. and Google Inc. together have stemmed Apple Inc.'s dominance in smartphones, but there is new tension in their partnership.
Event Programming with Google Guava EventBus – This post is about taking a different approach to handling Java events using Guava’s EventBus. The EventBus allows for objects to subscribe for or publish events, without having explicit knowledge of each other. The EventBus is not meant to be a general pu
Event Programming Example: Google Guava EventBus & Java 7 WatchService – The Guava EventBus is a great way to add publish/subscribe communication to an application. The WatchService, new in the Java 7 java.nio.file package, is used to monitor a directory for changes.
Only Apple and Google are skating to where the puck is going – Who would've bet that Google would be the first company to release a competitor to Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina display?

Links for February 26th through March 3rd

Links for February 21st through February 26th

IE10 for Windows 7 Globally Available for Consumers and Businesses (msdn.com) – IE10 for Windows 7 Globally Available for Consumers and Businesses (msdn.com)
Webinar recording: Theming your app for iOS, Android, WP8 and BB10 on Vimeo – Theming Sencha Touch applications is one the major steps in getting an application built and deployed. Teams looking to build custom themes need to consider various theming best practices in addition to thinking about what platforms their application needs
Servant for IIS – transforms IIS Manager into to a beautiful, fast and web-based management tool. – Servant is a piece of software that transforms your regular Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager to a beautiful, fast and web-based management tool.
Brian McCallion on Enterprise Considerations for Cloud, Hybrid Strategies, and Amazon RedShift – Enterprise cloud specialist Brian McCallion talks about what's really holding back enterprises from adopting the cloud, how they should address their legacy applications, ways to avoid introducing complexity in distributed environments, the value of Amazon
Hortonworks delivers beta of Hadoop big-data platform for Windows | ZDNet – HDP was built with "joint investment and contributions" from Microsoft, according to officials from both companies. The new Windows platform is 100 percent open source and provides the same Hadoop experience as is available from Hortonworks on Linux
The Nine Circles of Hell: Front-End Development for Sharepoint – This publication is intended as a useful quick-start guide for front-end developers delving into the realm of Sharepoint development.
How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing – Developing in the newsroom is fast-paced and comes with a different set of priorities than when you’re coding for a technology product team. There are three salient Boyerisms I’ve picked up in my month as an NP-Rapper that sum up these differences:
Bootstrapping a Software Product // Speaker Deck – A presentation about the lessons learned through both the good and bad decisions that we feel we've made while bootstrapping Sifter. Evolving this into a book that should be out mid-March 2013. http://startingandsustaining.com
Ruby 2.0 is released – Ruby 2.0.0 is the first stable release of the Ruby 2.0 series, with many new features and improvements in response to the increasingly diverse and expanding demands for Ruby.
SproutCore vs Cappucino vs Ember vs Extjs – Stack Overflow – Great comments from the core-team members of some of the best JavaScript frameworks out there. SproutCore vs Cappucino vs Ember vs Extjs
Common JavaScript "Gotchas" – JavaScript has a lot of weird behaviours that trip up noobs to the language – especially those acquainted with more traditional OOP languages. Hopefully this guide will provide a quickly scannable, easily understood list to save a lot of pain to those getting acquainted with the language.
Rails, You Have Turned into Java. Congratulations! | Discursive – I’ve railed against the JCP for years, but I do think that Rails is a picture of what happens to “frameworks” in the absence of standards. Call me old for saying it, but I did. So there
An Overview of Guava: Google Core Libraries for Java – Kevin Bourrillion introduces Guava, a set of open source core libraries used internally by Google.
Android SQLite Database – Android platform includes the SQLite embedded database and provides out of the box support to use it via Android APIs. In this tutorial we shall see how to get started with SQLite database in Android. SQLite is nothing but a relational database and our sql
Google I/O registration begins March 13th at 7am PST, requires Google+ and Google Wallet accounts – The Next Web – Google has announced the registration dates for this year’s I/O conference, which will be held on May 15-17, 2013 at Moscone Center West in San Francisco. Registration for the conference will open on March 13th at 7AM PST
Getting started with Spring Data and Distributed Database Grids – Mark Johnson and David Turanski introduce Spring Data for GemFire demoing using Spring Data for persistency across multiple distributed database grids.
Google ports Chrome OS app launcher to the Chrome browser Dev channel on Windows; Mac and Linux coming soon – The Next Web – Google on Wednesday announced a significant bridging of the gap between Chrome and Chrome OS: the app launcher, a little window that features all your apps in one place. The company has ported the dedicated “home for your apps” from Chrome OS to its Chrome browser
The Saddest Map In America « I think it’s funny – Yep, there it is: the result of a scholarly study by Dorothy Gambrell of the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. This is where you thought you saw your future spouse or date or hook-up, state by state.

Links for February 21st through February 26th

Links for February 16th through February 21st

The Play Framework at LinkedIn | LinkedIn Engineering – We’ve been running Play 2.0 in production for several months and are now gradually rolling it out to more teams at LinkedIn. In this blog post, I'll talk about the benefits we've seen from Play, show a brief walk-through of the developer experience, and ta
How Microsoft will change forever and thrive again | Microsoft Windows – InfoWorld – As PC prospects decline, the tech giant moves toward a hybrid, cross-platform future with opportunities in the server closet and the cloud
Why is it that everyone wants to copy Apple’s products but nobody wants to copy being Apple? – This idea that the basis of competition is set by Apple and then the race is on to climb the trajectory of improvement is so well understood that it’s axiomatic: “It’s just the way things are.” Apple releases a product that defines a category or disrupts an industry and it becomes obvious what needs to be built.
Netflix – From SimpleDB to Cassandra: Data Migration for a High Volume Web Application at Netflix – From SimpleDB to Cassandra: Data Migration for a High Volume Web Application at Netflix
Smart Path Variables for Spring MVC in IntelliJ IDEA 12 – The latest release of IntelliJ IDEA brings many exciting features for Spring MVC support. In this post we would like to highlight some of them, which add even more intelligence for @RequestMapping and @PathVariable usages in your project.
Efficient JavaScript unit testing – Without unit testing the JavaScript code, organization will pay much money for testing, re-testing, and re-testing web applications for just deciding upgrading or supporting new browsers. This presentation shows the solution of this problem.
Eligible API – Build the future of health information. – The US health information systems pass records in disparate data formats. We've created simple REST APIs that normalize them for you.
Papertrail – Hosted log management for servers, apps, and cloud services. – Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.
Graylog2 – Free open source self-hosted log management and exception tracking – Graylog2 is an open source log management solution that stores your logs in ElasticSearch. It consists of a server written in Java that accepts your syslog messages via TCP, UDP or AMQP and stores it in the database.
Profile of the Former Apple Engineers Who Designed the Nest Smart Thermostat | MIT Technology Review – Two men who created the iPod and iPhone founded Nest and injected new technology into the humble thermostat. Now they have their sights on the rest of your house.

Links for February 16th through February 21st

Links for February 11th through February 15th

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 February 11th through February 15th

Links for February 5th through February 10th

Why Discourse uses Ember.js – Evil Trout’s Blog – One question people keep asking me is “Why did you choose Ember.js?”. It’s a good one, and one that I think can be considered in two ways: “Why use a a client side MVC Framework?” and “Why Ember out of all the frameworks?” Here’s my answer to both of those questions.
iOS 6.1 banned from corporate servers due to Exchange snafu | ZDNet – iPads and iPhones running the newest version of iOS are being blocked in some enterprises because bugs are overloading corporate Exchange servers.
Technical Debt Will Kill You Dead (If You Let It) – Most of all, though, listen to your developers. If you’ve hired the right people, then they want clean, extensible, scalable code as much as you do.
A Look at Oracle’s NoSQL Database – Oracle NoSQL Database offers deep integration with Oracle Database. Via Oracle’s External Tables feature, SQL queries can be written against the NoSQL Database and even joined with relational tables.Support for Hadoop, the Apache’s map-reduce technology, i
Google’s Introduction to Datastore | Architects Zone – This Google Developers tutorial explores App Engine's Datastore service, driven by Google Bigtable:
Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list — Tech News and Analysis – Verizon is now reviewing iPhone and Android apps, but not based on how fun or useful they are. It’s concerned about the resources they consume, which means Facebook and many popular games get docked.
Revolution of Java – Project Lambda – Slide & Sample Codes | Javalobby – The slide contains general Project Lambda innovations and sample project includes java.util.function interfaces, Lambda expressions, Method references, Type inferences, Defender methods, Body types and new Collection features.
Sencha release Sencha Touch 2.1.1 to include BlackBerry 10 support – Sencha release Sencha Touch 2.1.1 to include BlackBerry 10 support along with a lot of bug fixes, performance enhancements,
LeanSentry: IIS Application Monitoring + Diagnostics – Built by ex-Microsoft engineers to help you understand, troubleshoot, and improve your IIS and ASP.NET applications.
Introducing the Dropbox Sync API for mobile developers – Get ready to add some Dropbox magic to your apps with the Sync API for iOS and Android, a powerful new library that makes it easier than ever to sync with Dropbox. The API takes care of all the complexity around caching, syncing, and working offline so tha
Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind. – Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind.
Chime aggregates your notifications from across the web in the browser – Chime aggregates your notifications from across the web from Gmail, G+, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and many more.
Scivantage Rolls Out Mobile Trading Apps Built with HTML5 – American Banker Article – Scivantage announced Wednesday the launch of its new HTML5-based mobile brokerage platform, Investor Mobile, and the immediate availability of investment apps for iOS and Android devices.
Review of Microsoft’s Surface Pro: Hefty Tablet Is a Laptop Lightweight – WSJ.com – However, I am less enamored with the Surface Pro. It's too hefty and costly and power-hungry to best the leading tablet, Apple's full-size iPad. It is also too difficult to use in your lap. It's something of a tweener—a compromised tablet and a compromised

Links for February 5th through February 10th

Links for February 1st through February 5th

Service Oriented Architecture at Square | Architects Zone – SOA is hard. Learn how Square is approaching this problem today with JRuby and where we hope to be in the future. We'll go from git init to cap deploy, covering Square's approach to testing and service isolation, dependency management, API documentation, code quality metrics, data seeding, schema versioning, logging, exception handling, security and password management, deployment and more.
Announcing MoSQL – a MongoDB → PostgreSQL streaming replication – Today, we are releasing MoSQL, a tool Stripe developed for live-replicating data from a MongoDB database into a PostgreSQL database. With MoSQL, you can run applications against a MongoDB database, but also maintain a live-updated mirror of your data in Po
Free Sencha Touch and Ext JS 4 Training Tutorials – Teach Yourself Sencha Complete with Sencha Architect is a self-study course designed to introduce you to the basic concepts of building cross-browser compatible mobile and desktop apps using technologies from Sencha, Inc.
Why Amazon Is Special and Apple Is Not—in 1 Paragraph – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic – A week ago, Apple announced the most profitable quarter in the history of the company and the stock plunged 12 percent. A few days later, Amazon announced a 45 percent annual fall in profits, and its stock went up. What the what?
Java language designer Daniel Smith describes the forthcoming enhancements in Java 8 as "dramatic and necessary" – In this article we discuss the new language features coming in Java 8, as well as the most important enhancements to the standard libraries, specifically the new Stream interface.
One-third of Europe’s software industry is SAP | ZDNet – Germany accounts for over 48 percent of Europe's software revenue, according to the Truffle list, bringing in €18.1bn of the continent's €37.2bn software revenues last year. However, SAP remains Europe's 100lb gorilla, accounting for €14bn of software reve
A crazier prediction: iPhone Plus is real, and huge – Marco.org – The recently rumored, larger-screened “iPhone Math”, or more likely “iPhone Plus”, is plausible as an additional model (not a replacement) alongside the 4” iPhone. And there’s a good chance that it would have a 4.94”, 16:9 screen.
Egghead IO: 26 AngularJS Tutorial Videos – Egghead Videos aims to provide the best experience for teaching with video tutorials on the web. For starters, there are 26 videos on AngularJS.
Going Async – Practical Patterns for Push-enabled Applications – Jeremy Grelle demoes patterns for building desktop or mobile applications leveraging WebSockets and Push-to-Device services with SockJS, RabbitMQ and Spring.
Building Google Cloud Storage – Nathan Herring presents the available storage options at Google, the ideal characteristics of a storage service, and the actual implementation of Google Cloud Storage.
Flight by Twitter – A lightweight, component-based JavaScript framework from Twitter – Flight is a lightweight, component-based JavaScript framework that maps behavior to DOM nodes. Twitter uses it for their web applications. By way of example, we've including a simple email client demo (browse the source code) built over the Flight framewor

Links for February 1st through February 5th

Links for January 26th through January 31st

20 tips for building modern sites while supporting old versions of IE – 20 tips for building modern sites while supporting old versions of IE
modern.IE: Testing made easier in Internet Explorer | modern.IE | Microsoft – Microsoft Launches Modern.IE To Help Developers Test Their Web Apps For Legacy And Modern Versions Of IE
How to Build a Raspberry Pi File Server – Tutorials Blog – So I found yet another cool use for a Raspberry Pi. You can actually use it as a file server, or more accurately a controller for a file server. All you need is your Pi and a nice external drive and you can serve files to anyone on your network. It’s prett
Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers – NYTimes.com – For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.
Functional thinking: Why functional programming is on the rise – Java developers should learn functional paradigms now, even if they have no immediate plans to move to a functional language such as Scala or Clojure. Over time, all mainstream languages will become more functional; Neal Ford explores the reasons why in this installment.
Our First Node.js App: Backbone on the Client and Server – Airbnb Engineering – Here at Airbnb, we've been looking curiously at Node.js for a long time now. We've used it for odds and ends, such as the build process for some of our libraries, but we hadn't built anything production-scale. Until now.
Hortonworks Joins OpenStack Foundation | Hortonworks – Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop, today announced it has joined the OpenStack Foundation, which promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system. By contributing to the OpenStack ecosystem
64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free – Marco.org – This is deceptive enough advertising that the FTC should consider taking action. As tablets become more computer-like and mobile OSes get larger, this is only going to get worse.
Sequel Pro – MySQL Database Management for Mac OS X – Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases.
Cross-domain Ajax with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing – Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a W3C Working Draft that defines how the browser and server must communicate when accessing sources across origins. The basic idea behind CORS is to use custom HTTP headers to allow both the browser and the server to know enough about each other to determine if the request or response should succeed or fail.
Considering MySQL? Use something else. Already on MySQL? Migrate. – Inevitably, someone's going to come along and tell me how wrong I am and how MySQL is just fine as a database system. These people are everywhere, and they mean well too, and they are almost all wrong.
Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution | The Verge – We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn't exist. Instead, thanks to a vision laid out by a small team of Google designers, each product team is finding its way to a consistent and forward-looking design language thanks to a surprising process.

Links for January 26th through January 31st