Programming

• Most Topular Stories

• Microsoft TechDays 2011 in Vancouver

  Software Development in the Real World

  miguelcarrasco

  11 Nov 2011 | 3:43 pm

  I’m excited to be presenting at Microsoft TechDays 2011 in Vancouver on November 15th and 16th 2011. If you are a software developer that loves staying up to speed on the latest trends, tools, and strategies for developing software effectively, you need to attend TechDasy 2011.  I’ve been doing the Microsoft TechDays tour since they started a few years ago, and every year they continue to get better and better. This year in Vancouver will be no exception with the likes of Scott Hanselman, Mary-Jo Foley and others presenting live. My sessions are focused around my passions. User…

• Next XBOX 360 is Under Development

  Software Development in the Real World

  miguelcarrasco

  12 Oct 2011 | 5:32 am

  When a new XBOX 360 arrives before Christmas 2012, it will usher in a new era of software development opportunities for many of you. The ability to write applications for XBOX 360 and place them in the Microsoft Marketplace is going to be an awesome opportunity. Game development studios are already underway in their development efforts to bring the next generation video games to your television sets near you. Rare, the famous video game studio that brought you games like Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country are already working on some new and exciting games. People within Microsoft have…

• Say Goodbye to the Menu Button

  Android Developers Blog

  Tim Bray

  26 Jan 2012 | 2:10 pm

  [This post is by Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com. — Tim Bray]Before Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), all Android-powered devices included a dedicated Menu button. As a developer, you could use the Menu button to display whatever options were relevant to the user, often using the activity’s built-in options menu. Honeycomb removed the reliance on physical buttons, and introduced the ActionBar class as the standard solution to make actions from the user options immediately visible and quick to invoke. In order to provide the most intuitive and consistent…

• Fridaygram: faster web, stronger machines, prettier planet

  Google Code Blog

  Scott Knaster

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:55 pm

  By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor Everybody likes a faster web, and that theme has been evident this week here on Google Code Blog. On Monday, Yuchung Cheng wrote about Google’s research into making TCP faster through various proposals and experiments. Yesterday, Roberto Peon and Will Chan blogged about SPDY (pronounced speedy), Google’s protocol for speeding up the web’s application layer historically handled by HTTP. In related news this week, the chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group announced support for SPDY in a public post. At Google, these projects are part of our Make…

• Windows 8 and Software Developers

  Software Development in the Real World

  miguelcarrasco

  21 Sep 2011 | 3:01 am

  As a Software Developer, I was stunned at what I saw at Microsoft Build last week. And it was a stunned look of excitement. Last week Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, a revolutionary new touch centric operating system that will change the way you work forever. I was lucky enough to take part in Microsoft Build, and was able to record a full demo of Windows 8 Slate Device, be interviewed by Telerik TV on my thoughts of Microsoft Build and Windows 8 and what it means to software developers, and also record a podcast with Windows Observer! Here are the links to those videos and podcasts, because…

• 

  Google Code Blog

• Fridaygram: faster web, stronger machines, prettier planet

  Scott Knaster

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:55 pm

  By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor Everybody likes a faster web, and that theme has been evident this week here on Google Code Blog. On Monday, Yuchung Cheng wrote about Google’s research into making TCP faster through various proposals and experiments. Yesterday, Roberto Peon and Will Chan blogged about SPDY (pronounced speedy), Google’s protocol for speeding up the web’s application layer historically handled by HTTP. In related news this week, the chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group announced support for SPDY in a public post. At Google, these projects are part of our Make…

• Making the web speedier and safer with SPDY

  Scott Knaster

  26 Jan 2012 | 1:31 pm

  Will Roberto By Roberto Peon and Will Chan, Software Engineers Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog In the two years since we announced SPDY, we’ve been working with the web community on evolving the spec and getting SPDY deployed on the Web. Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the…

• Let's make TCP faster

  Scott Knaster

  23 Jan 2012 | 12:00 pm

  By Yuchung Cheng, Make The Web Faster Team Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the workhorse of the Internet, is designed to deliver all the Web’s content and operate over a huge range of network types. To deliver content effectively, Web browsers typically open several dozen parallel TCP connections ahead of making actual requests. This strategy overcomes inherent TCP limitations but results in high latency in many situations and is not scalable. Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We’re experimenting with several improvements to TCP. Here’s a…

• Fridaygram: don’t censor the web, rediscovering Darwin, beautiful nebula

  Scott Knaster

  20 Jan 2012 | 3:26 pm

  By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor Last Wednesday, the web looked very different than it usually does. Dozens of popular sites went dark or were modified in some way. We censored the logo on our homepage. As you probably know by now, all this was done to call attention to prospective legislation being debated by the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These bills would censor the web, eliminate due process, and despite their titles, would not stop piracy. We asked you to take action by signing a petition to Congress, and you responded. More…

• Google Apps EMEA Developer Tour (continued)

  Scott Knaster

  19 Jan 2012 | 2:00 am

  By Nicolas Garnier, Developer Relations Team Cross-posted from the Google Apps Developer Blog Two months ago we announced that a few of us from the Google Apps Developer Relations team would be going around EMEA to meet with developers and talk about Google Apps technologies. We have met great developers from Germany, France, Russia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Switzerland, Israel, and Spain during Google Developer Days, hackathons, developer conferences and GTUG meetings. This year we are continuing the tour with a series of Google Apps Script hackathons taking place in Vienna, Milan, Madrid,…

• 

  Apple Developer News

• Manage Default Language Settings in iTunes Connect

  26 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  You can now edit the default language for app metadata any time. If you have multiple apps, you have the added flexibility of managing metadata localizations for each individual app. Any localizations you add will be displayed automatically based on customers’ OS or iOS language settings. Otherwise, the default language you select will be displayed to all customers. Learn more in the latest iTunes Connect Developer Guide.

• iTunes Connect Holiday Shutdown Details

  20 Dec 2011 | 3:40 pm

  iTunes Connect will be temporarily shut down December 22-29 for the winter holidays. During this time, access to iTunes Connect and the delivery of apps and updates will be unavailable. You should not schedule pricing changes that would take effect during the shutdown, as these changes will not be reflected in the App Store and the app will become unavailable for purchase. In addition, releases scheduled between these dates will not go live until after the shutdown.

• iOS 5.0.1 Now Available to Customers

  10 Nov 2011 | 3:20 pm

  iOS 5.0.1 is now available to iOS users worldwide. Be sure to read the iOS Data Storage Guidelines to understand the latest on managing data with iCloud storage.

• iAd Producer 2.0 adds new tools and animation effects

  8 Nov 2011 | 2:00 pm

  New tools and animation effects in iAd Producer 2.0 make it even easier to build great iAds. Create sophisticated animations with precise control over object properties like position, opacity, size, color and shadow. Get instant, one-click access to any object or element on a page with the new object list. Make your iAds better and faster with new validation tools that identify optimization opportunities and common errors. Learn more.

• New File Attribute for Managing Data Backups

  3 Nov 2011 | 5:30 pm

  iOS 5.0.1 beta is now available on the iOS Dev Center. It introduces a new way for developers to specify files that should remain on device, even in low storage situations. Learn more.

• 

  dzone.com: latest front page

• @@TRANCOUNT is always get incremented in a trigger

  jincyv

  28 Jan 2012 | 4:07 am

  The system variable @@TRANCOUNT is used to get the number of transactions that are active. Consider the following code begin transaction select 3 select @@TRANCOUNT commit transaction The result of @@TRANCOUNT is 1. Consider the following code. begin...

• The State Of HTML5 Video

  egenesky

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:12 pm

  The folks over at LongTail Video share some of the current trends in HTML5 video for various browsers, with special emphasis on the following: Market Share of Browsers and Devices, Media Formats, Tag Attributes, Fullscreen Playback, Adaptive Streaming, and Accessibility.

• The Fixie Bike Index and hipsters

  cjsmith

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:28 pm

  Priceonomics takes the association of fixie bikes to hipsters, and creates the Fixie Bike Index. After starting with New York, they branch out to national numbers.

• What Are the Odds That Stats Would Be This Popular?

  cjsmith

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:28 pm

  “Most of my life I went to parties and heard a little groan when people heard what I did,” says Robert Tibshirani, a statistics professor at Stanford University. “Now they’re all excited to meet me.”

• More people want to learn statistics

  cjsmith

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:28 pm

  At North Carolina State, an advanced analytics program lasting 10 months has, since its founding in 2006, placed over 90 percent of its students annually. The average graduate’s starting salary for an entry-level job is $73,000. Its current class of 40 students had 185 applicants, and next year’s applications are already twice that.

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  Ajaxian » Front Page

• Shim uses node.js to test sites on multiple browsers

  jvaughan

  14 Jan 2012 | 10:01 pm

  Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited. The shim, once loaded in a device’s browser, opens and maintains a socket connection to the server, according to to Shim’s developers. Shim was written in 2011 by Chris Marstall, Creative Technologist at the Boston Globe. The software has been open sourced. Write…

• HipHop Virtual Machine for PHP

  jvaughan

  10 Dec 2011 | 8:15 pm

  Facebook Software Engineer and HipHop for PHP team member Jason Evans provides details on Facebook’s move to a new high-performance PHP virtual machine. Described by Evans is ”a new PHP execution engine based on the HipHop language runtime that we call the HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm).” He sees it as replacement for the HipHop PHP interpreter (hphpi). He continues: We have long been keenly aware of the limitations to static analysis imposed by such a dynamic language as PHP, not to mention the risks inherent in developing software with hphpi and deploying with hphpc. Our…

• Adobe to forgo Flash plug-in for mobile devices

  jvaughan

  12 Nov 2011 | 6:04 pm

  Earlier this week, Adobe VP and General Manager Danny Winokur disclosed that the company has concluded that HTML5 is ”the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” The company said it would stop building Flash to run on mobile browsers. In a blog post on the new focus of Flash strategy, Winokur wrote: Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.  We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work…

• Intel’s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript

  jvaughan

  8 Oct 2011 | 12:38 pm

  Intel’s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript, code named River Trail, hooks into on-chip vector extensions to improve performance of Web applications. Details of Intel’s attempt to get on the JavaScript juggernaut emerged last month at its developer event. The prototype JavaScript extension offered by Intel is intended to allow JavaScript apps to take advantage of modern parallel chip capabilities. Sequential gives way to parallel, at least in theory. In-browser games and image editing are pitched as examples of application elements that would take advantage of new eight-core…

• Adobe buys Nitobi

  jvaughan

  4 Oct 2011 | 8:52 pm

  As it kicked off its yearly developer event, Adobe announced that it had acquired Nitobi Software, maker of PhoneGap open source software for cross-platform mobile application building with HTML5 and JavaScript. In a blog, Nitobi CEO Andre Charland pledged to pursue donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation ”to ensure open stewardship of the project over the long term.” In a statement, he said Nitobi and Adobe shared the same philosophy about enabling mobile and Web applications. Dave Johnson, Nitobi CTO said: Adobe was fully supportive of the decision to…

• 

  PHP.net news & announcements

• PHP 5.4.0 RC6 released

  Webmaster

  24 Jan 2012 | 6:05 am

  The PHP development team announces the 6th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the 6th release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0. The 6th release candidate focused on improving traits. Please test them carefully and help us to identify bugs…

• ConFoo 2012

  Webmaster

  19 Jan 2012 | 11:20 pm

  ConFoo 2012 in Montreal, Canada on Feb 29 - Mar 02 ConFoo is the unique web conference in Canada gathering different tech communities in one place. find working solutions for your day to day challenges; discover new tools that increase your productivity; network with people from some of the world’s biggest companies; 160 presentations focusing on core competencies improvement; Don't miss this great opportunity and register today! Also check out our two training days around PHP, HTML5, Symfony2 and security topics right before the conference.

• PHP 5.3.9 Released!

  Webmaster

  10 Jan 2012 | 3:29 pm

  The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.9: Added max_input_vars directive to prevent attacks based on hash collisions. (CVE-2011-4885) Fixed bug #60150 (Integer overflow during the parsing of invalid exif header). (CVE-2011-4566) Key enhancements in PHP 5.3.9 include: Fixed bug #55475 (is_a() triggers autoloader, new optional 3rd argument to is_a and is_subclass_of). Fixed…

• PHP 5.4.0 RC5 released

  Webmaster

  7 Jan 2012 | 8:44 am

  The PHP development team announces the 5th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the 5th release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0. We got a lot of feedback that helped us to improve the upcoming PHP version. Please continue to help us to…

• PHPBenelux 2012

  Webmaster

  7 Jan 2012 | 7:47 am

  The PHPBenelux Conference is ready for its third edition and takes place January 27th & 28th in Antwerp (Belgium). We're very proud to have a great lineup this year and some awesome social events. All information about the conference can be found on our conference website http://conference.phpbenelux.eu/2012. There are some tickets still available, get them at http://shop.phpbenelux.eu.

• 

  SOTC Recent Posts

• Introduction to the Pulse Engine

  The Hairiest

  27 Jan 2012 | 9:25 am

  One interesting corner of HTML5 development is web-based games. With a few well placed canvases and a healthy does of Javascript, you can create just about any game you can dream. However, the complex nature of Javascript has created the need for a few companies to release game engines built entirely in Javascript and HTML5. This is where Pulse comes in. Pulse is a game engine built in Javascript. It utilizes HTML5 canvases to display and animate various elements and offers features like event handling, audio, and sprite sheet animations. With the recent release of the developer preview, I…

• Switch On The Code - Year End Review

  The Reddest

  20 Jan 2012 | 9:10 am

  Another year has come and gone, which means it's time for us to look back at 2011 and see what happened. This year marks the fifth anniversary of Switch On The Code and so far every year has been better than the last. In February we saw our first ever month of 500k pageviews, and for the most part traffic has held steady ever since. We ended the year with an amazing 5.6 million pageviews - a 10% increase over the previous year. Somehow we managed to publish 42 articles, which is pretty darn close to our goal of one article a week. If we look at every article, not just the ones created in…

• Regular Expressions - Grouping

  The Hairiest

  18 Jan 2012 | 9:23 am

  As we learned in our Regular Expressions Primer, regular expressions can be simple or extremely complex. However, there are a few concepts that were left out. Today we are going to cover one of those concepts... grouping. In regular expressions, grouping allows you to "chunk" parts of your expression and tell the regular expression engine to treat each "chunk" as a separate match. This allows you to, say, find the type of domain (com, eu, biz) of an email address, or possibly whether or not the uri is using encrytion (https). There are a whole lot of reasons you want to use grouping, but…

• Regular Expression Primer

  The Hairiest

  13 Jan 2012 | 9:32 am

  Pattern recognition is a very hard thing to get right, and as a developer it can be as easy as a few lines of code or more than you can count with fingers and toes. Today we are going to go over a very common tool used for text pattern recognition: regular expression. So let's get started and dive right in. Regular expressions provide a standard framework for pattern recognition in strings. It allows you to define and find specific pieces of text, which can be slightly more complicated that it sounds. In fact, regular expressions are really a language unto themselves, albeit a small language.

• Introducing the Pulse Developer Preview

  The Hairiest

  13 Dec 2011 | 10:20 am

  HTML5 is pretty much the web 3.0 standard these days, and there are plenty of neat neat HTML5 tutorials out there to prove it. In fact, there are even a few game engines out there that are built for HTML5. A recent development in this area was the release of the Pulse developer preview. Here is a short demo of what is possible with pulse: Pulse is a game engine built in Javascript and utilizes HTML5 canvases to render content. It offers a lot of neat features, including: Sprites Sprite sheet animations Bitmap & native fonts Keyboard and mouse events Drag & drop Layers Scenes The Pulse…

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  Signal vs. Noise

• Basecamp Next's caching hardware

  David

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:45 am

  From the very start, we wanted Basecamp Next to be fast. Really, really fast. To do so we built a russian-doll architecture of nested caching that I’ll write up in detail soon. But for now I just wanted to share where all this caching is going to live as we just installed it at the hosting center. It kinda reminds me of what pictures of a drug raid look like when they lay out all the coke and cash on the table, but this is what 864GB of RAM looks like: Cost of the loot was $12,000.

• Three years later, Mr. Moore is still letting us punt on database sharding

  David

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:23 am

  Three years ago, I wrote about how improvements in technology keep allowing us to punt on sharding the Basecamp database. This is still true, only more so now. We’ve grown enormously over the last three years but RAM keeps getting cheaper and FusionIO SSD’s keep getting faster. If anything, it seems like recent advances in SSD technology are accelerating and it’s ever more unlikely that we’ll need to shard Basecamp. Basecamp remains a perfect candidate for sharding. Isolated accounts, no sharing between them. Yet the cost in increased complexity is constant while the…

• REWORK passes 200,000 copies sold!

  David

  26 Jan 2012 | 12:43 pm

  We just got our royalty statement from Crown and are pretty excited about the fact that we’ve sold over 200,000 copies of REWORK now. About three quarters of the sales have been hardcover books with audio and ebook splitting the remainder. Thanks to everyone who helped us get here by buying and recommending the book. We are very grateful for your support in getting the word out.

• Basecamp Next: A peek at early iterations of the Projects screen

  Jason F.

  26 Jan 2012 | 12:06 pm

  We’ve been working on Basecamp Next since March 2011 and we’re getting close to the public release. The private beta is now in full swing. Early iterations on the Projects screen We thought it might be fun to share some of the early design explorations for one particular screen, the Projects screen. Basically, the projects screen is a list of your projects. You can create new projects there as well. We explored hundreds iterations of the screen – from small tweaks to fundamental shifts in the feature itself. Only a fraction of the explorations are shown in the video below.

• Give me spark

  David

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:14 am

  Some of the best decisions and designs at 37signals have emerged from intensely contested debates. Not just between Jason and me, but from anyone in the company. When sparks fly, some truly great ideas come to light. The catch is that the heat must arise around the decision itself. Debates go off track when personal biases or old grudges come into play. So long as each party sticks to the merits, adding some fire will only unearth new angles and concerns. This energy is so important to how 37signals operates that I consider it every time we make a hire. Is this person willing to fight for…

• 

  A List Apart

• Building Twitter Bootstrap

  17 Jan 2012 | 3:00 am

  Bootstrap is an open-source front-end toolkit created to help designers and developers quickly and efficiently build great stuff online. Its goal is to provide a refined, well-documented, and extensive library of flexible design components created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for others to build and innovate on. Today, it has grown to include dozens of components and has become the most popular project on GitHub, with more than 13,000 watchers and 2,000 forks. Mark Otto, the co-creator of Bootstrap, sheds light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it…

• An Important Time for Design

  17 Jan 2012 | 3:00 am

  Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups such as Kickstarter and Airbnb are taking center stage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that design has a massive role to play in the evolution of the web and the next generation of web products. The result, says Cameron Koczon, is that designers have now been given a blank check—one that lets web designers band together as a community to change the way design is…

• A Pixel Identity Crisis

  17 Jan 2012 | 3:00 am

  The pixel has long been the atomic particle of screen based design: a knowable, concrete unit of measurement. But layouts based on the hardware pixel are fast becoming an endangered species. Even the introduction of a new, W3C standard reference pixel, although it promises stability in the long-term, can't help us navigate the current chaos. Consider the two "standard" pixel definitions and 500 "standard" viewports your user's Android device may support. To create designs that transcend platform differences—the promise of the web and standards—you must normalize pixels across devices.

• What I Learned About the Web in 2011

  13 Dec 2011 | 1:00 am

  As the year draws to a close, we asked some A List Apart readers to tell us what they learned about the web in 2011. Together their responses summarize the joys and challenges of this magical place we call the internet. We need to continue to iterate, to embrace change, and challenge complexity to keep shipping. Above all, we must continue to reach out to one another, to teach, to support, to help, and to build the community that sustains us.

• Say No to SOPA

  29 Nov 2011 | 2:00 am

  A List Apart strongly opposes United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it. SOPA approaches the problem of content piracy with a broad brush, lights that brush on fire, and soaks the whole web in gasoline. If passed, SOPA will allow corporations to block the domains of websites that are “capable of” or “seem to encourage” copyright infringement. Once a domain is blocked,…

• 

  Scott Hanselman

• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs of Software Development

  Scott Hanselman

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:27 pm

  I've been experimenting with my diet a little and considering a Paleo diet. What an amazing and selfish thing, though, for me to even consider or be able to change my diet in a fundamental way. Only someone who isn't worried about their next meal could explore that aspect of their lives without fear or concern. One doesn't get to have certain luxuries until other more basic needs are met. Here's an interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs:   I was talking to a customer a while back and one gentleman was deeply concerned about coding style, curly brace location, best practices in…

• Get involved in Open Source today - How to contribute a patch to a GitHub hosted Open Source project like Code 52

  Scott Hanselman

  24 Jan 2012 | 8:12 pm

  It's been over 5  years since my post how to contribute a patch to an Open Source Project. That post is focused primarily on Subversion as the source control system. If you are using CodePlex and Subversion for example, those instructions work great. Here's the same idea for GitHub projects. Folks email me all the time asking questions like "how can I be a better programmer?" "how do I get more experience?" or even the very specific "how can I make my resume more attractive?" My answer is almost always get involved in open source. Work with an open source…

• Skip Intro - CSS3 is the new Flash

  Scott Hanselman

  23 Jan 2012 | 2:10 pm

  I remember spring of 1996 when FutureSplash Animator came out. That was 16 years ago, youngsters. Our minds were blown. No one had seen a cell-based animation editor before that was so easy. This was the beginning of Flash. Macromedia bought them, and then Adobe bought them. Now, almost fifteen years of amazing animations, full screen fun, loading screens, auto-play music and skip intro links, Flash (and browser plugins for general use) seem to be on the way out. Proprietary binary formats are being replaced by angle brackets and curly braces. Just when we think we've seen the limits of…

• Abusing the Microsoft Research's Touch Mouse Sensor API SDK with a Console-based Heat-map

  Scott Hanselman

  19 Jan 2012 | 2:14 pm

  In August I purchased and reviewed the Microsoft Touch Mouse. I still use my Microsoft Arc Mouse more than the touch, initially due to what I felt was dodgy scrolling performance on the Touch Mouse, as I mentioned in my review. Still, I've kept it in my backpack and I use the Touch Mouse perhaps a few times a month and have kept the software up to date in case there's some software changes made to improve performance. I can happily say that they've changed something and the scrolling performance is WAY better. I can finally get 1 to 2 pixel precision with it while scrolling in my browsers.

• An analysis of SOPA and PIPA Protest "Blackout" HTML and CSS techniques

  Scott Hanselman

  18 Jan 2012 | 4:04 pm

  Many popular sites are blacked out today in protest of two acts before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. Long story short, the legislators barely know how to email, much less understand what a DNS takedown is. As I've been surfing around today bumping into SOAP sites, I noticed that every site is doing the blackout technique differently. This is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, things on the web aren't setup for an event like this. To shutdown your website for a day is one thing but to do it in such a way…

• 

  The Register

• Ten... smart TVs

  28 Jan 2012 | 2:00 am

  Product round-up Net set and catch up

• Blog blast births boffin boycott of publisher Elsevier

  27 Jan 2012 | 7:44 pm

  Rage over high fees and SOPA support The ongoing world protests against SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA have helped inspire a revolt among scientists over the role of academic publisher Elsevier and its business practices.…

• webOS daddy Jon Rubinstein exits HP

  27 Jan 2012 | 6:51 pm

  Enough is enough: 'I'm gonna go for a swim, have a little lunch..." Jon Rubinstein, late of NeXT, FirePower, Apple, and Palm, has resigned from his position at HP, where he endured the mismanagement and eventual overboarding of Palm's webOS mobile operating system.…

• Students busted for hacking computers, changing grades

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:36 pm

  'Very bright kids' too bright for their own good Three high school juniors have been arrested after they devised a sophisticated hacking scheme to up their grades and make money selling quiz answers to their classmates.…

• First US CTO Aneesh Chopra resigns from post

  27 Jan 2012 | 1:14 pm

  Logs out for possible political career The first US government chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra has announced he’s leaving the job.…

• 

  Joel on Software

• New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

  13 Jan 2012 | 1:56 pm

  This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money. I’m on the board of advisors of the new school, which plans to accept ninth graders for fall of 2012. Here’s why I’m excited about this new…

• How Trello is different

  6 Jan 2012 | 1:14 pm

  Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.0 state. Trello is new kind of development project for Fog Creek. It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an “installed software” version of Trello. That allowed us to modernize many aspects of our development process; I am happy to announce that there is absolutely no Visual Basic code involved in any part of Trello. What’s next, flying cars? The biggest difference you’ll notice (compared…

• Should you launch at a conference?

  15 Sep 2011 | 10:28 pm

  Should you launch at Launch? (Or TechCrunch Disrupt? Or Demo? They’re all pretty similar). This year I launched two major new products at conferences: Careers 2.0 and Trello, and both times, it was totally worth it. First, a little background. There are three popular conferences where you can launch new products: Launch, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Demo. They all work the same way: You apply. If you have a half-decent product that is genuinely new, you’re likely to get a spot. That said, hundreds of companies apply for these conferences with unbearably awful products, so there’s always…

• Announcing Trello

  13 Sep 2011 | 12:44 pm

  Around the time of Fog Creek Software's ten year anniversary, I started thinking that if we want to keep our employees excited and motivated for another ten years, we were going to need some new things to work on. It occurred to me that we could easily afford to make four little two-person teams to launch four new products. That would give our developers more chances to move around from product to product when they got bored, which would make Fog Creek Software an even better place to work. Each team, we decided, would be guided by the spirit of lean startups. They would ship early and often.

• Stack Overflow DevDays is Back!

  27 Jun 2011 | 2:51 pm

  [UPDATE - September 6th - Regrettably, DevDays had to be cancelled. See the announcement on the Stack Exchange Blog for details.] Stack Overflow DevDays, the universe's best conference series for coders, is back, and it's bigger than ever! Here's the idea behind DevDays. You're a developer. You'd love to learn all the latest hot new technologies. Things like DVCS, HTML 5, Node.js, CSS3, Hadoop, etc. The stuff the cool kids are all talking about on the playground while you're stuck in the basement somewhere grinding away on Java Enterprise Visual Basic. The idea behind DevDays is a fast,…

• 

  Rajesh Setty » Blog

• The Relentless Manifesto

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  21 Jan 2012 | 11:04 pm

  To be relentless is to keep going. The dictionary definition for relentless is “unyieldingly severe.” When you are relentless, you know that stop signs are temporary. The Relentless Manifesto is an invitation to get something done this year. Here is the manifesto for your consideration: The Relentless Manifesto 1. Pick themes that you will be passionate about even after ten years If your themes belong to the “fashion-de-jour” category, there is a good possibility that you may not be able to sustain your interest when the marketplace perceptions for those themes change…

• Seeing is Believing (Most of the Time)

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  18 Jan 2012 | 12:27 pm

  Seeing is believing. Yes, but NOT always. Here is an example. Take a look at this static image. Does not look static, does it? How about this one? And, what about this one? My analysis of the last image is that it was deliberately created to mislead you. How? By simply making the guy sitting on the couch to wear a girl’s pants. Now, let me get to the point. We can convert this disadvantage into an advantage The limits that you think you have are generally illusions. They are that way because you just see and acknowledge them. What if you stop seeing those limits? What would life look…

• Dave Gardner on Using Social Media to Connect With Big Companies

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  18 Jan 2012 | 12:57 am

  Recently, my friend Dave Gardner (president of Gardner & Associates Consulting) shared his story of how he used social media to reach (and start a working relationship with) a big company (Dell.) The story was fascinating and it was very different from the stories that are common out there. The common stories have a general theme of increasing your presence and getting more followers. I am confident that you will enjoy reading what Dave has to say. So, here we go: Rajesh Setty: I understand that you are a member of Dell’s Customer Advisory Panel. How did this come to be? Dave Gardner:…

• The 30% Factor

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  15 Jan 2012 | 9:17 pm

  Every worthwhile project comes with varying levels of resistance throughout the lifecycle of that project. If you are one of those that can overcome this resistance, not just once, but throughout the lifecycle of the project, you will see the project through completion. On the other hand, if you are one of those people that can’t seem to overcome the resistance at a particular point in the project lifecycle, you will abandon the project. If you are very smart, you will not only abandon the project, you will also come up with one or more brilliant excuses that will absolve your hand in…

• How much higher education do you need?

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  13 Jan 2012 | 11:34 pm

  This is a dilemma for many professionals and entrepreneurs – a feeling that a bit of higher education may just give them that “edge.” So, here is the question again – “How much higher education do you need?” Short answer: Whatever you need to start making a meaningful contribution to the world. Not less. Not more. Just right. Let us focus on one of the most common higher education options – an MBA. Over these years, I have met thousands of professionals who dream of getting an MBA sooner than later. Upon talking to them a bit more, I realize that for a large majority…

• 

  Jon Udell

• Another way to think about geeks and repetitive tasks

  Jon Udell

  9 Jan 2012 | 10:08 am

  The other day Tim Bray tweeted a Google+ item entitled Geeks and repetitive tasks along with the comment: “Geeks win, eventually.” Here’s the chart posted on Google+ by Bruno Oliveira: A couple of things bothered me about this. First, there’s the adversarial tone. The subtext is a favorite geek quotation: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. That gem is often attributed to Gandhi. Wikiquote disputes that and finds a close variant in Nicholas Klein’s 1918 speech to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Either way…

• When 2.0: Scheduling the Internet of things

  Jon Udell

  4 Jan 2012 | 8:23 am

  Before my podcast went AWOL I had been meaning to interview Toby Considine about his efforts to mesh schedules for things with schedules for people, and to define Internet calendaring extensions for that purpose. So when Phil Windley wrote to ask me how I thought calendaring might relate to the personal event networks he wants to bootstrap, I suggested that we ask Toby on an episode of Phil’s Technometria podcast. Phil, I suspect, is actually one of five identical quintuplets. One teaches at BYU. Another runs a startup called Kynetx. A couple of others take care of family, church, and…

• Teaching is about conveying a way of thinking

  Jon Udell

  2 Jan 2012 | 9:01 am

  As I build out the elmcity network, launching calendar hubs in towns and cities around the country, I’ve been gathering examples of excellent web thinking. In Ann Arbor’s public schools are thinking like the web I noted that the schools in that town — and most particularly the Slauson Middle School — are Doing It Right with respect to online calendars. How, I wondered, does that happen? How does a middle school figure out a solution that eludes most universities, theaters, city governments, nightclubs, museums, and other organizations with calendars of interest to the…

• Forgotten knowledge

  Jon Udell

  15 Dec 2011 | 7:12 am

  John Ochsendorf, who teaches civil and environmental engineering and architecture at MIT, cares about ancient construction methods and the forgotten knowledge they embodied: rammed-earth walls, braided-fiber suspension bridges, Gothic cathedrals. In an enlightening lunchtime talk a couple of years ago he reviewed what these ancient builders knew and could still teach us if we were willing to learn. Dave Winer’s Why apps are not the future reminded me of that. The ancient construction method we are forgetting, in this case, is linking. We had already started to forget back in 2004. Then,…

• Harry Tuttle’s busy month

  Jon Udell

  8 Dec 2011 | 3:51 pm

  It’s been a busy month for rogue plumber Harry Tuttle. When last heard from, he was deploying a filter to fix broken iCalendar feeds served up by the University of Michigan. His next assignment was at Rice University, where the downloadable sports schedules are available only in CSV (comma-separated values) format. Here are the instructions for how to get one of those CSV files into Outloook: Select the File / Import and Export… Menu option. Select “Import from another program or file” and click Next. Select “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” and click…

• 

  Rands In Repose

• A Design Primer for Engineers

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  15 Jan 2012 | 10:08 pm

  For a word that can so vastly change the fortunes of a company, it's worth noting that no generally accepted definition of the word design exists. This means when your boss stands up in front of the team at that all-hands and says, "We'll have a design-centered culture," there's a good chance he's saying nothing at all. But you keep hearing this word. More importantly, you hear the urgency behind the word. You hear that choosing to design a thing is an important thing to do and the person saying it is also important, so you nod vigorously while silently thinking, "I have no fucking idea what…

• 2011 in Review

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  22 Dec 2011 | 3:43 pm

  Over a half a million unique visitors stumbled on Rands this year and as the year winds down, I wanted to take a look back at the year in articles. These are articles that turned out to be popular or just pieces I loved to write: Bored People Quit. From a traffic perspective, the clear winner for 2011. This is article is a good example of a piece where I've no idea how it will resonate until I hit the publish button. There are articles I feel have a good chance before they are published: they target a specific group and cover a topic I think will appeal to that demographic. This was not one…

• A Bag of Holding

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  4 Dec 2011 | 4:21 pm

  The fundamental goal I have for a wallet via its design is that it prevents me from randomly collecting crap. Years of folding leather wallets with myriad pockets and flaps all yielded precisely the same result: a Costanza-sized monstrosity that contained random crap that at one time I thought I needed, but eventually became useless clutter. This collection sat in my back pocket as a constant reminder of a tidying task I never did. Meanwhile, the massive collection of clutter ultimately destroys the wallet because no wallet is designed to perpetually hold everything. The current wallet is…

• How Can I Help You?

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  13 Nov 2011 | 3:48 pm

  Being computer literate means getting asked to help. I'm happy to help. I believe the less you fear your computer, phone, or tablet, the more you'll get out of it, so, absolutely, How I can help you? However, this free tech support does come at a cost. I have a system for evaluating a problem which is accompanied by colorful inner monologue. The following flowchart explains both the details of how I triage a problem, how I might fix it, and how and why I'm likely to swear while I'm helping. Download the larger version.

• Why?

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  6 Nov 2011 | 3:33 pm

  Early in the design discussion for the logo for the latest Rands in Repose charity t-shirt, Robert Padbury responded to my early design feedback: "You know, I realized something when I was thinking about this the other day - People don't really have more than the following three responses to a design: It's awesome. It sucks. Apathy." This short list of responses captured me with their lack of subtlety. Three bullets effectively describe the majority of opinions people have about topics that often deserve more consideration. While Robert's eventual point was different, his observation serves…

• 

  Software Development in the Real World

• Marketing and Technology Take Center Stage

  miguelcarrasco

  23 Jan 2012 | 9:27 pm

  One interesting thing I’ve seen take place over the last few years is the importance of marketing in technology. It used to be acceptable to write software that compiled, worked, and was bug free. With the consumerization of IT, and the rise of user centered design, it has become critical to not only build software that works, but also software the looks amazing and engages the end user. A few months ago I started focusing heavily on writing on topics like digital marketing, social media, and the importance of innovation in technology. I wanted to point out to software developers, that…

• Microsoft TechDays 2011 in Vancouver

  miguelcarrasco

  11 Nov 2011 | 3:43 pm

  I’m excited to be presenting at Microsoft TechDays 2011 in Vancouver on November 15th and 16th 2011. If you are a software developer that loves staying up to speed on the latest trends, tools, and strategies for developing software effectively, you need to attend TechDasy 2011.  I’ve been doing the Microsoft TechDays tour since they started a few years ago, and every year they continue to get better and better. This year in Vancouver will be no exception with the likes of Scott Hanselman, Mary-Jo Foley and others presenting live. My sessions are focused around my passions. User…

• Next XBOX 360 is Under Development

  miguelcarrasco

  12 Oct 2011 | 5:32 am

  When a new XBOX 360 arrives before Christmas 2012, it will usher in a new era of software development opportunities for many of you. The ability to write applications for XBOX 360 and place them in the Microsoft Marketplace is going to be an awesome opportunity. Game development studios are already underway in their development efforts to bring the next generation video games to your television sets near you. Rare, the famous video game studio that brought you games like Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country are already working on some new and exciting games. People within Microsoft have…

• Microsoft Releases Official Windows Phone 7.5 Development Tools

  miguelcarrasco

  1 Oct 2011 | 12:24 am

  Windows Phone 7.5 is now being released across the globe, and it is a smoking new operating system that brings the feature set of Windows Phone up to the iOS/Android level.  With that, Microsoft has released Windows Phone 7.1 SDK which allows developers to code for the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango without the need of using beta tools. The Windows Phone 7.1 SDK provides software developers all the tools they need to build amazing Windows Phone 7.5 Mango applications, as well as games. The list of new features in Windows Phone 7.5 is incredibly impressive, so why not sit back and watch a quick…

• Windows 8 and Software Developers

  miguelcarrasco

  21 Sep 2011 | 3:01 am

  As a Software Developer, I was stunned at what I saw at Microsoft Build last week. And it was a stunned look of excitement. Last week Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, a revolutionary new touch centric operating system that will change the way you work forever. I was lucky enough to take part in Microsoft Build, and was able to record a full demo of Windows 8 Slate Device, be interviewed by Telerik TV on my thoughts of Microsoft Build and Windows 8 and what it means to software developers, and also record a podcast with Windows Observer! Here are the links to those videos and podcasts, because…

• 

  Think Vitamin

• Free Video: iOS Tab bar (UITabBarController)

  Amit Bijlani

  26 Jan 2012 | 2:55 pm

  In this 7 minute video, you will learn the basics of the UITabBarController and how to create one using the Xcode project template. This video is from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos on topics like … Accessibility CSS3 Aesthetic Foundations Django HTML CSS HTML5 iOS Development JavaScript jQuery NoSQL PHP Responsive Web Design Ruby Ruby on Rails UX Version Control WordPress Theme Design New videos are added regularly, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

• Twitter Bootstrap 2.0

  Jason Seifer

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 will be coming out January 31st. In the mean time, there is a pre-release you can check out and report on any bugs that you find. Twitter Bootstrap is a great HTML and CSS framework that has been gaining a lot of popularity recently. You can check out sites built with bootstrap on the unofficial Built With Bootstrap tumblr. You can also follow @twbootstrap on Twitter. Here’s some of what’s new in this release: Responsive layout (!) with media queries. New 12 column grid (the old one was 16 columns). Stacked forms are the default. Split button dropdowns. New…

• A New Year, A New Responsive Dribbble Portfolio – Part 1 of 2

  Mat Helme

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  What better way to start off the new year than a fresh new Dribbble portfolio?  If you are a designer with minimal coding experience and want to display your Dribbble work in all browser sizes, you have come to the right place.  We will be creating a HTML5 one page portfolio which pulls your Dribbble information and is responsive in all browsers.  This little project will be presented in two parts. Part 1 (this post): HTML/CSS/jQuery set up. Part 2 (coming soon): Convert HTML to PHP and use the Dribbble API to pull your data. Plus IE fixes. The File Structure Let’s dig right in and start…

• Scrolling Made Fun

  Mat Helme

  25 Jan 2012 | 2:00 pm

  Just when you thought scrolling your web page was getting boring. Scrollorama has stepped the scroll game up with this remarkable jQuery Plugin. Scrollorama allows you to manipulate text when you scroll the page. You can do everything from Transitions to Zoom to Parallax. Check out the Scrollorama site to view some great examples and the plugin’s documentation. This Plugin is great for landing pages and highly interactive web applications. Like CSS3 transitions, use your animations sparingly.

• Our new Treehouse Student Plan is live!

  Ryan Carson

  25 Jan 2012 | 3:58 am

  We’ve just released our new Treehouse Student plan and it’s only $9 per month! It’s the equivalent to our Gold plan, which is $49 per month, so you’re saving a massive 82%. Anyone who attends a school, college or university is eligible. After you sign up, we’ll ask you to provide proof of your student program. Benefits include: Unlimited access to our Video Course Library. 450+ videos, more added each week on topics like CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, iOS, Photoshop and more. All videos downloadable for offline viewing. Unlock Badges to prove your knowledge. Complete…

• 

  ScottGu's Blog

• Getting Started with Windows Azure

  ScottGu

  19 Jan 2012 | 8:24 pm

  This is the second in a series of posts I’m doing on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform. In today’s post I’m going to cover how to sign-up and get started with Windows Azure using a no-obligation 3 month free trial offer.  This free trial costs nothing and doesn’t obligate you to buy anything at the end of it.  It provides an easy way to try out and get started with Windows Azure. Windows Azure Website The http://www.windowsazure.com web-site provides everything you need to get started with Windows Azure – including overview content,…

• Windows Azure

  ScottGu

  16 Jan 2012 | 12:35 am

  As some of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the last 6 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to run the teams that build ASP.NET, core pieces of .NET and VS, and a bunch of other products too). I’m pretty excited about where we are going with Windows Azure – it is going to enable a number of great new scenarios for developers.  Over the next few months I’m going to be blogging a lot more about it – and I’ll cover both what it provides as well as how you can easily take advantage of it as developers.

• “Unplugged” LIDNUG online talk with me on Monday (Jan 16th)

  ScottGu

  11 Jan 2012 | 11:08 pm

  Jan 16th Update: An audio recording of my talk can be listened to here. This coming Monday (Jan 16th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session.  The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic is fair game: technical, strategy, community, college basketball, etc. You can learn more and…

• ASP.NET Security Update Shipping Thursday, Dec 29th

  ScottGu

  28 Dec 2011 | 10:59 pm

  A few minutes ago Microsoft released an advance notification security bulletin announcing that we are releasing an out-of-band security update to address an ASP.NET Security Vulnerability. Dec 29th Update: the security update (MS11-100) has now shipped and is available to install via Windows Update, the Windows Server Update Service and as a download from the Microsoft Download Center. The security update we are releasing resolves a publicly disclosed Denial of Service issue present in all versions of ASP.NET.  We’re currently unaware of any attacks on ASP.NET customers using this…

• Learn Windows Azure Next Tuesday (Dec 13th)

  ScottGu

  7 Dec 2011 | 4:29 pm

  As some of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the last 6 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to work on ASP.NET, .NET, VS and a bunch of other products). Next Tuesday, Dec 13th we’ll be holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers.  It will provide a great way to learn Windows Azure and what it provides.  You can attend the event either by watching it streamed LIVE online, or by attending in person (on the Microsoft Redmond Campus).  Both options are completely free. Learn Window…

• 

  Perlbuzz

• Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-01-23

  Andy Lester

  23 Jan 2012 | 11:25 am

  These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Perl QA Hackathon last call for participation (nntp.perl.org) RJBS gives the history of Dist::Zilla (perlmonks.org) What to avoid in BEGIN blocks (blogs.perl.org) Visualizing the improved Perl 5 release cycles (dagolden.com) Perl tools for working with PostgreSQL logs (depesz.com)

• Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-01-16

  Andy Lester

  16 Jan 2012 | 4:38 pm

  These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Modern Perl 2011-2012 edition released (modernperlbooks.com) Developing parsers incrementally w/Marpa (blogs.perl.org) Parrot tickets migrated to @GitHub. (perlbuzz.com) Thank you, CPAN Testers (blogs.perl.org) The case of the overloaded curlies (blogs.perl.org) Perl more viable for webdev than ever (blogs.perl.org)

• Parrot tickets now converted to GitHub

  Andy Lester

  16 Jan 2012 | 2:03 pm

  The Parrot project is now using GitHub's issue tracking system. Parrot has used GitHub's source code control for months now, but we had hundreds of tickets in the Trac system.  Now, over the past few weeks, I've been working with Rick from GitHub to migrate the tickets out of Trac into GitHub's issue system. Like most data conversion projects, the challenges were less about the coding and more about making the decisions about how to massage the data between two similar systems.  For example, Trac has fields for Severity and Priority of tickets, but GitHub only has free-form tagging, so I…

• Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-01-09

  Andy Lester

  9 Jan 2012 | 9:41 am

  These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Perl interface to the nginx web server (blogs.perl.org) The 2011 Perl 6 coding contest: Write Perl 6 code, win $100 of prizes (strangelyconsistent.org) Perl documentation is awesome (blogs.perl.org) YAPC::NA 2012 is now accepting talk proposals (blogs.perl.org) A look back at Perl 2011 (onionstand.blogspot.com) Installing Citrus Perl on OS X (blogs.perl.org) How do I debug memory usage? (blogs.perl.org) Perl::Critic finds annoying little bugs in your code…

• Perl::Critic finds annoying little bugs in your code.

  Andy Lester

  4 Jan 2012 | 9:21 am

  My work colleague Mike O'Regan created a policy for the latest version of Perl::Critic. Now if you have a line of code like this: my $n += somefunc(); # Should be my $n = somefunc(); Perl::Critic will tell you Augmented assignment operator '+=' used in declaration at line X, column Y. Use simple assignment when initializing variables. If you haven't let Perl::Critic loose on your code yet, now's a great time to try. To the loyal Perl::Critic users, what's the nastiest bug Perl::Critic found for you? Let me know in the comments.

• 

  Knowing .NET

• Review of American Gods

  larry

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:33 pm

  American Gods by Neil Gaiman My rating: 3 of 5 stars A good page-turner, but ironically for a book that is about the fate of gods, the stakes felt extremely low. Gaiman very quickly establishes a porous boundary between life and death for mortals and then, later, establishes the same things with gods. So it’s never at all clear if anyone is actually facing extinction. View all my reviews

• Comment Spam: The Voice Of Experience

  larry

  21 Dec 2011 | 5:34 pm

  Author : Effortless Products For nail fungus treatment – Some Practical Guidance (IP: 118.96.251.234 , 118.96.251.234) E-mail : bhthhyh@jflui.com URL    : Whois  : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/118.96.251.234 Comment: When you are starting up a new organization you certainly want to come up with a catchy business title that will be special from other folks out there. An beautiful organization identify will do far more than just make your business stand out from other people. Thanks for the advice “Effortless Products for nail fungus treatment”!

• “Moneycode” not “Developernomics”: My Hunch as to the Distribution of Software Excellence

  larry

  13 Dec 2011 | 11:00 pm

  Part 1: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” Part 2: Why 10x Ticks Me Off If this subject’s of interest to you, you might enjoy (or despise) the column on the subject I’ve been writing for SD Times for the past decade. In order to understand my position on why I don’t believe in 10x Superprogrammers, it may help to show my hunch as to how productivity is distributed in the software development world. I think that it is sadly the case that there are bad programmers ranging from utterly incompetent to simply inept and that they form a long tail of widely variant…

• The Passing of Pioneers

  larry

  12 Dec 2011 | 12:12 pm

  The passing of pioneers – SD Times: Software Development News. SD Times has published some brief memories of some of those the industry lost this year.

• Why 10x Ticks Me Off

  larry

  11 Dec 2011 | 7:28 pm

  This is a follow-up to my Friday rant Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” First: If the subject’s of interest to you, you might enjoy (or despise) the column on the subject I’ve been writing for SD Times for the past decade. (I can’t help but wonder if I wrote in my normal, less-heated mode if I’d have had any chance of getting picked up by hackernews.) Luckily, though, this is a subject that really sets me off, so I don’t have to manufacture passion. I get angry because the Myth of the Superprogrammer has lots of important consequences: IF…

• 

  Channel 9

• TWC9: SQL Server 2012, Windows Phone, Async, Azure, HTML5 and more

  Clint Rutkas, Dan Fernandez, Greg Duncan

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:59 pm

  This week on Channel 9, Dan and Clint discuss the week's top developer news, including:[0:30] SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event, March 7th [1:17] Free Windows Phone Training (Peter Kuhn [aka Mister Goodcat]), http://www.goodcat-trainings.net [2:05] 8 Must-Have Tools for Windows Phone 7 Development (Doug Rathbone) [3:05] MetroSky - A Complete SkyDrive Sample for Windows Phone (Ilija Injac) [3:49] Hanselminutes on 9 - The Eddie Robotics Platform with Kinect (Scott Hanselman) [4:38] Advanced APM Consumption in Async Methods (Stephen Toub) [6:42] Getting…

• Episode 68 - Throttling in SQL Azure with Scott Klein

  Steve Marx, Wade Wegner

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:20 pm

  Join Wade and Steve each week as they cover the Windows Azure platform. You can follow and interact with the show at @CloudCoverShow.In this episode, Wade and Steve are joined by Scott Klein, Technical Evangelist for SQL Azure, who explains how to understand, diagnose, and handle throttling in SQL Azure. He also demonstrates how to use the Transient Fault Handling Application Block.In the news:New Service Bus demo SendGrid and Windows Azure Windows Azure and Cloud9 IDE at Node Summit Import/export service for SQL Azure generally available Tip of the week: Dealing with "cannot create…

• GoingNative 2012 Full Schedule (Sold Out, But Will Stream Live!)

  Charles

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:22 am

  We are sold out! But have no fear: The entire event will stream live and be available on demand shortly after the show ends.Here's the complete GoingNative 2012 Agenda: Concepts, variadic templates, STL11, static if, memory model, VC++11 and beyond, Clang, incredible keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter, user-driven panels. It's a C++11 party at Microsoft headquarters. Day 1 – C++11 TodayRegistration Opens/Continental Breakfast 8:00-9:30AM[Keynote ] 9:30-11:00AM PST (1730 - 1900 UTC) -- Bjarne StroustrupC++11 Style11:15-12:15PM PST (1915 - 2015…

• WHOIS: Danah Boyd, MSR Social Scientist

  Larry Larsen

  26 Jan 2012 | 3:19 pm

  Today we'll chat with Danah Boyd. Danah is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass., exploring social media. You can read more about Danah in this NY Times article posted this week.  How did you get into technology?As a child, I remember playing a few computer games and I had fun writing complex programs using LOGO, but it was my brother who was in love with computers.  I had limited interest in them.  Then, frustrated that my brother's computer was taking up the phone line by making weird sounds, I marched into his room and demanded to know what he…

• Hot Apps: Z0MB1ES, ARMED!, Groupon, NewEgg, Lumia Music

  Laura Foy

  25 Jan 2012 | 4:42 pm

  Hot Apps will feature 5 of the hottest apps each week for the Windows Phone 7. In this episode Laura takes a look at:Z0MB1ES (on teh phone) ARMED! Groupon NewEgg Lumia Music Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

• 

  java.net

• Janice J. Heiss: Java Champion Dick Wall on Genetics, the Java Posse, and Alternative Languages (Part One)

  editor

  26 Jan 2012 | 11:28 pm

  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/dickwall1-1498851.html Janice J. Heiss interviews Java Champion Dick Wall on Genetics, the Java Posse, and Alternative Languages (Part One): This series of interviews spotlights Java Champions, individuals who have received special recognition from Java developers across industry, academia, Java User Groups, and the larger community. (This is part one of a two-part interview with Dick Wall... 40x40 Thumb javaCup.jpg Community:  General

• Blaise Doughan: JAXB and Inhertiance - Using XmlAdapter

  editor

  26 Jan 2012 | 11:21 pm

  http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/01/jaxb-and-inhertiance-using-xmladapter.html Blaise Doughan demonstrates JAXB and Inhertiance - Using XmlAdapter: In previous posts I have covered how to map inheritance relationships in JAXB. This can be done by element name (via @XmlElementRef), by the xsi:type attribute, or in EclipseLink MOXy using another XML attribute... Community:  Java Web Services and XML

• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine: JCP.next with merged Executive Committee - JSR 355

  editor

  26 Jan 2012 | 11:14 pm

  http://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/entry/jcp_next_with_merged_executive1 Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine announces JCP.next with merged Executive Committee - JSR 355: The latest JSR filed is #355 and it's not a technical one - "JCP Executive Committee Merge". As the name implies this is about merging the current ME and SE/EE executive committees into a unified one... Community:  JCP

• Heather Van Cura: Another JCP.Next JSR submitted

  editor

  26 Jan 2012 | 12:49 am

  http://blogs.oracle.com/jcp/entry/another_jcp_next_jsr_submitted Heather Van Cura announces Another JCP.Next JSR submitted: JSR 355, JCP Executive Committee Merge, has been posted this week for JSR Review, with the JSR Review Ballot scheduled for 7-20 February. From Section 2.1 of the JSR proposal, this JSR proposes to make changes to the JCP's Process Document and the Executive Committee's Standing Rules with the goal of... Community:  JCP

• Michael Kopp: About the Performance of Map Reduce Jobs

  editor

  26 Jan 2012 | 12:42 am

  http://blog.dynatrace.com/2012/01/25/about-the-performance-of-map-reduce-jobs/ Michael Kopp writes About the Performance of Map Reduce Jobs: One of the big topics in the BigData community is Map/Reduce. There are a lot of good blogs that explain what Map/Reduce does and how it works logically, so I won’t repeat it...Very few of them however explain the technical flow of things, which I at least need, to understand the performance implications... 40x40 Thumb javaCup.jpg Community:  General

• 

  The Daily WTF

• Error'd: 19999 Below

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  "Mac OS X has an odd definition of gigabyte," writes Kevin Kelly.   "I saw this when on holiday to Barcelona," writes Greig Hamilton, "it was a huge screen on La Rambla, the busiest street in Barcelona"   Drake wonders, "just what would I be saying 'Yes' or 'No' to?"   "Well, apparently it actually is possible to get colder than 0 Kelvin," Dorian H, "and of course I'm right there."   "In the end," Mark wrote, "I just ended up spelling out 'thirteen'."   Bryan Scott writes "at least it…

• Sketchy Skechers.com

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  Imagine yourself as an eager, young developer. After many long months of self-study, you’ve carefully honed your craft and have skillfully mastered virtually all development technologies from enterprisey to hipster. Your twelve-page résumé could land you a job anywhere, and as it would happen, the job you decided to take was at a highfalutin consultancy filled with like-minded developers who were almost as skilled as you. You and you cohorts could build anything. Literally, anything: a software cure for cancer; a software cure engine that could dynamically load cure…

• Tales from the Interview: The Storage Warehouse, The Most Ethical, and The Customizer

  24 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  The Storage Warehouse (from Grig) The first recession I remember was in the early 1990’s, and I remember it so well because I was looking for a job. The want ads listed an opening for a UNIX admin – something which was right up my alley – so I gave the company a ring. “Ye-LLO!” was the greeting after a couple of rings. In the background, it sounded like John Philip Sousa March music was playing on a 1960s AM transistor radio. “Um… I am calling about the want ad in the paper for a UNIX admin?” “Yeah yeah, sure sure,” he responded…

• CodeSOD: Globally Coupled

  23 Jan 2012 | 10:15 am

  "I work on a team maintaining a large and enterprisey PHP system," writes Amber, "and as such, my job mostly involves doing enhancements and fixing bugs." "It sounds normal enough, if not for the fact that almost all variables are globals and each of them might or might not be initialized in the same way, or the same place, as seen in this screenshot." "That's tolerable, but the real problem arises when I need to reuse a function in a different location. I've added line breaks and formatting to make some sense of things..." global $dbCon;…

• Error'd: Sponsor Appreciation, SQL Scourge, and More Error'd

  20 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  We've got some great companies that sponsor The Daily WTF. And all they ask in return... just take a moment or two to check out what they do. It's some pretty cool stuff. TDWTF Sponsors   SingleHop Cloud Instances 98% off - Design, deploy and manage your cloud instance on the public cloud for only $1 for your 1st month (normally $50/month!) Use your Cloud Instnace to test new code, experiment with new software or gain extra development time...it's your choice! Try it today with coupon code "CLOUD1".   New Relic is basically a magical, real-time performance and user…

• 

  The Old New Thing

• Does mapping the same shared memory two times in a process lead to double the address space usage?

  Raymond Chen - MSFT

  27 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  A customer designed a system which uses shared memory. Specifically, for each database file, they create a corresponding shared memory block of, say, 200MB. Multiple clients which connect to the same database file use the same shared memory block. Naturally, if two processes each access the same database file, each process will map the shared memory block into their respective address space. The question arose regarding what happens if one process connects to the same database file twice. Will the two calls to Map­View­Of­File share the same address space, or will each one…

• The 2012/2013 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

  Raymond Chen - MSFT

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but either way, you're going to have to suffer through it. Here's the at-a-glance season guide for the 2012/2013 season. (Full brochure. Seattle Times coverage.) Week Program Comments 21 13 7A7B 7C7D 7E7F 7G 4A BS SU WG 09/202012 Berlioz: Roman Carnival Overture Martinů: Symphony #6 Fantaises symphoniques Debussy: Nocturnes: Nuages and Fêtes Respighi: Pines of…

• Why doesn't the Windows 7 Start menu have a pushpin for pinning items?

  Raymond Chen - MSFT

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  You may have noticed a minor inconsistency between pinning a program to the Start menu and pinning a destination to a program's Jump List. Although pinned items appear at the top of the respective lists, and both the Start menu and Jump List let you right-click an item and select Pin/Unpin, the Jump List also lets you pin and unpin an item by clicking on the pushpin. Why doesn't the Start menu have a pushpin in addition to the right-click menu? For a time, items on the Start menu did have a pushpin, just like items on Jump Lists. The design had a few problems, however. Start menu items can…

• How do I disable the fault-tolerant heap?

  Raymond Chen - MSFT

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  A while back, I linked to a talk by Silviu Calinoiu on the fault-tolerant heap. But what if you don't want the fault-tolerant heap? For example, during program development, you probably want to disable the fault-tolerant heap for your program: If the program is crashing, then it should crash so you can debug it! Method 1 is to disable the fault-tolerant heap globally. While this prevents the fault-tolerant heap from auto-activating in the future, it does not go back and undo activations that were enabled in the past. In other words, you have to remember to do this before your application…

• A single-handed effort to keep the memory of $2 bills alive

  Raymond Chen - MSFT

  24 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  As I noted when I told the story of the computer programmer who dabbled in making change that my colleague had a lot of money-related quirks. For some reason my colleague felt the $2 bill deserved more attention. Every so often, he would go to the bank and buy $100 in $2 bills, then reintroduce the bills into circulation and enjoy people's reactions to them. (Most cashiers looked at it and recognized that it was legal tender, but couldn't find a good place to put it in the till. It usually got tossed under the drawer with all the checks.) It was a regular occurrence that the bank didn't have…

• 

  Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

• Beyond pure Prolog: Power and danger

  23 Jan 2012 | 4:54 am

  One of the sections of Oleg Kiselyov's Prolog and Logic Programming page, on Beyond pure Prolog: power and danger, points out (i) term introspection (in the guise of the var/1 predicate) can be derived from three of Prolog's imperative features, two of which are quite mild-looking, and (ii) this introspection potentially makes Prolog code hard to understand. Oleg pointed this note in response to my defence of cut; it is short, sweet, and well-argued.

• Deca, an LtU-friendly bare metal systems programming language

  1 Jan 2012 | 8:40 pm

  The Deca programming language is "a language designed to provide the advanced features of sophisticated, high-level programming languages while still programming as close as possible to the bare metal. It brings in the functional, object-oriented, and generic programming paradigms without requiring a garbage collector or a threading system, so programmers really only pay in performance for the features they use." The latter link provides a list of features that Deca does, will, and won't provide. Features provided include type inference, universally- and existentially- quantified types, and…

• Seven Myths of Formal Methods Revisited

  27 Dec 2011 | 10:19 am

  Software Engineering with Formal Methods: The Development of a Storm Surge Barrier Control System - Seven Myths of Formal Methods Revisited (2001), by Jan Tretmans, Klaas Wijbrans, Michel Chaudron: Bos is the software system which controls and operates the storm surge barrier in the Nieuwe Waterweg near Rotterdam. It is a complex, safety-critical system of average size, which was developed by CMG Den Haag B.V., commissioned by Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) – the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management. It was completed in October 1998 on time and within budget. CMG used…

• Dependently Typed Programming based on Automated Theorem Proving

  22 Dec 2011 | 8:18 am

  Dependently Typed Programming based on Automated Theorem Proving, by Alasdair Armstrong, Simon Foster, and Georg Struth. [Link to preprint on ArXiv, a.k.a. this has not yet been refereed, use at your own risk]. Mella is a minimalistic dependently typed programming language and interactive theorem prover implemented in Haskell. Its main purpose is to investigate the effective integration of automated theorem provers in a pure and simple setting. Such integrations are essential for supporting program development in dependently typed languages. We integrate the equational theorem prover…

• Cambridge Course on "Usability of Programming Languages"

  19 Dec 2011 | 11:42 am

  From the syllabus of the Cambridge course on Usability of Programming Languages Compiler construction is one of the basic skills of all computer scientists, and thousands of new programming, scripting and customisation languages are created every year. Yet very few of these succeed in the market, or are well regarded by their users. This course addresses the research questions underlying the success of new programmable tools. A programming language is essentially a means of communicating between humans and computers. Traditional computer science research has studied the machine end of the…

• 

  cssplay.co.uk

• CSSplay Dropline/Dropdown Menu

  Stu Nicholls

  18 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Using css3 transitons to animate a dropline/dropdown menu with 'current' page options.

• The Right Move - Puzzle

  Stu Nicholls

  11 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  A puzzle using :target.

• Image Magnifier with Bounce

  Stu Nicholls

  21 Dec 2011 | 6:00 pm

  A simple image magnifier with a bounce animation.

• CSSplay Slide/Fly menu with Image 'Bounce'

  Stu Nicholls

  20 Dec 2011 | 6:00 pm

  Using css3 transitions to animate a slide/fly menu with image 'bounce'.

• CSSplay No Left Turn Maze Puzzle

  Stu Nicholls

  5 Dec 2011 | 6:00 pm

  Using :target to produce a click maze puzzle. Get to the end without turnng left.

• 

  Coding Horror

• Defeating SOPA and PIPA Isn't Enough

  18 Jan 2012 | 5:00 pm

  SOPA and PIPA are two pieces of proposed legislation designed to "stop" Internet piracy… in the most hamfisted way imaginable. As Mitchell Baker explains: Assume there's a corner store in your neighborhood that rents movies. But the movie industry believes that some or even all of the videos in that store are unauthorized copies, so that they're not being paid when people watch their movies. What should be done? SOPA/PIPA do not aim at the people trying to get to the store, or even the store itself. The solution under the proposed bills is to make it as difficult as possible to find or…

• Building Social Software for the Anti-Social

  19 Dec 2011 | 5:31 am

  In November, I delivered the keynote presentation at Øredev 2011. It was the second and probably final presentation in the series I call Building Social Software for the Anti-Social. I've spent almost four years thinking about the Q&A format, and these two presentations are the culmination of that line of thought. In them I present ten "scary ideas", ideas which are counterintuitive for most folks. These are the building blocks we used to construct Stack Overflow, and by extension, Server Fault, Super User, and the rest of the Stack Exchange network. Radically lower the bar for…

• Gifts for Geeks, 2011 Edition

  13 Dec 2011 | 2:12 am

  Between founding Stack Overflow (and later, running Stack Exchange) and having a child, I haven't had much time to blog about the holidays for a few years now. The last Gifts for Geeks I did was in 2008. Those recommendations are still as valid as ever, but I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to do it every year. I've also come to realize, especially after having a child, that the goal in life is not to own a lot of "stuff", but rather, to free yourself from everything except that which is essential, and that which you love. I'm still working on this, and I probably will be until I die.

• Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)

  7 Dec 2011 | 7:12 pm

  Anti-aliasing has an intimidating name, but what it does for our computer displays is rather fundamental. Think of it this way -- a line has infinite resolution, but our digital displays do not. So when we "snap" a line to the pixel grid on our display, we can compensate by imagineering partial pixels along the line, pretending we have a much higher resolution display than we actually do. Like so: As you can see on these little squiggly black lines I drew, anti-aliasing produces a superior image by using grey pixels to simulate partial pixels along the edges of the line. It is a hack, but as…

• Bias Lighting

  7 Nov 2011 | 5:22 am

  I've talked about computer workstation ergonomics before, but one topic I didn't address is lighting. We computer geeks like it dark. Really dark. Ideally, we'd be in a cave. A cave … with an internet connection. The one thing that we can't abide is direct overhead lighting. Every time the overhead light gets turned on in this room, I feel like a Gremlin shrieking Bright light! Bright light! Oh, how it burns! But there is a rational basis for preferring a darkened room. The light setup in a lot of common computing environments causes glare on the screen: If your room's lit, as most…

• 

  ASP.NET News

• New Tutorial Series: Working with the DropDownList Box and jQuery

  22 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Learn the basics of working with the DropDownList helper and the ListBox helper in an ASP.NET MVC Web application with this new 3-part series!

• Walkthrough: Hosting an ASP.NET Application on Windows Azure

  2 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Learn everything you need to know to host your ASP.NET MVC or Web Forms application on Windows Azure with this new set of walkthroughs!

• Announcing the Release of Silverlight 5

  8 Dec 2011 | 6:00 pm

  Today is the official release of Silverlight 5! Find out more on what's included and how to get the bits from Pete Brown's blog post.

• New ASP.NET Website Launched

  1 Dec 2011 | 6:00 pm

  A new ASP.NET website has launched, with easier-to-find information and new content to get you started. Get the all the details from Scott Hanselman!

• New Deploying With Visual Studio 2010 Tutorial Series!

  16 Nov 2011 | 6:00 pm

  Learn how to make an ASP.NET web application available over the internet by deploying it to a third-party hosting provider via Visual Studio's one-click publish.

• 

  Martin Fowler

• Rebecca and I will be Keynoting at QCon London

  Martin Fowler

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:24 am

  QCon invited Rebecca and I to do a keynote at QCon London (March 7). Over the last year or so we’ve been seeing more and more of a change in how organizations think about data, so that seems a natural choice to talk about. Our clients are seeing larger volumes of data, that they need to analyze more quickly and more cleverly. We’re seeing different technologies for data storage that have loosened the vice-like grip of relational databases. And we find our profession needs to start thinking about what our responsibilities are in managing all of this information.

• Rebecca and I talk about DSLs on Software Engineering Radio

  Martin Fowler

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:36 am

  I’ve long been a fan of the podcast series Software Engineering Radio. The team there have built an excellent series of podcasts on various aspects of software development and I often listen to them while taking my afternoon walk. So I’m glad to get a spot on there myself. In this episode I’m on the program with Rebecca Parsons, my colleague and co-author of my DSL book to talk about DSLs. We talk about what DSLs are, the differences between internal and external DSLs, and when you should (and shouldn’t use DSLs). The episode is hosted by Markus Völter, who, of…

• Bliki: CharityCodeJam

  Martin Fowler

  25 Jan 2012 | 8:39 am

  Over the last couple of years several of my colleagues have been organizing code jam[1] events where developers get together to write software for charitable causes. A good example is a regular code-jam in New York that works on RapidFTR. Chris George, a ThoughtWorker based in New York, helped organize a one-off event in New York in August 2010. The group didn't get as much done on the day as they had hoped, but in a bar afterwards decided to try to get together more regularly. Since then they've been meeting every week. It's a small group, still mostly ThoughtWorkers and friends, with a core…

• photostream 19

  Martin Fowler

  22 Jan 2012 | 6:49 pm

  Boston, MA

• Bliki: AggregateOrientedDatabase

  Martin Fowler

  19 Jan 2012 | 8:11 am

  One of the first topics to spring to mind as we worked on NosqlDistilled was that NoSQL databases use different data models than the relational model. Most sources I've looked at mention at least four groups of data model: key-value, document, column-family, and graph. Looking at this list, there's a big similarity between the first three - all have a fundamental unit of storage which is a rich structure of closely related data: for key-value stores it's the value, for document stores it's the document, and for column-family stores it's the column family. In DDD terms, this group of data is…

• 

  Yahoo! User Interface Blog

• YUI Theater — Ryan Cannon: “There is no off-season: NFL.com’s move to YUI” (42 min.)

  Ryan Grove

  17 Jan 2012 | 12:57 pm

  NFL.com’s Ryan Cannon (@rcanine) joined us at YUIConf 2011 to share the story of why NFL.com chose YUI over jQuery, how they migrated a large codebase from Prototype to YUI 3 on a tight schedule, and how they use YUI to create websites and mobile apps for one of the world’s most popular sports leagues. Links View in HD on YouTube Slides Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

• YUI: Open Hours Thurs Jan 19th

  Luke Smith

  17 Jan 2012 | 11:57 am

  3.5.0 DataTable update A lot of progress has been made for 3.5.0 DataTable, and we want to show and tell the latest status of the code and API. There’s plenty left to do, but we’re excited for the new state of the art and want to make sure what’s coming will meet your needs and expectations. With a couple weeks left before 3.5.0 PR2 (scheduled for Jan 30th), there’s still time to add features and polish, and the whole of PR3 to stress test and optimize, so things are looking good. We’ll cover what’s there today, what will be there for PR2 and PR3, and what…

• YUI Theater — Paul Donnelly: “Using Yahoo! Pipes and the YQL Module” (39 min.)

  Ryan Grove

  11 Jan 2012 | 8:02 pm

  In this talk from YUIConf 2011, YQL engineer Paul Donnelly demonstrates the features of the Yahoo! Pipes editor and explains how you can use Pipes and YQL to power your web apps, create mashups, and more. Links View in HD on YouTube Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

• YUI: Open Hours Thurs Jan 12th

  Luke Smith

  9 Jan 2012 | 3:21 pm

  YUI 3.5.0 Button (and more?) update Welcome to 2012! We’re starting this year off easy, talking about buttons. Y.Buttons to be exact. Derek Gathright will be joining us to give the latest details on the classes and modules for creating YUI style buttons, what’s available today and where, what’s coming up, and reviewing some of the unique challenges of creating something as simple as a button. If we have time in the hour, we might talk about DataTable’s development status as well, since that’s consuming most of my time and attention these days. Time & Details…

• YUI Theater — Jeff Burtoft: “Scaling Mobile with YUI” (49 min.)

  Ryan Grove

  3 Jan 2012 | 12:40 pm

  In this talk from YUIConf 2011, Jeff Burtoft (@boyofgreen), Lead Frontend Engineer at USAA, shares what he’s learned about building performant and scalable cross-platform mobile web apps using YUI. In the course of the talk, Jeff reveals some of the pitfalls of dealing with device limitations — particularly when building native-wrapped web apps that run in web views — and explains how he and his team worked around them using YUI. Links View in HD on YouTube Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

• 

  Ruby Inside

• This Week in Ruby: Rails 3.2, Rails Tutorial, and Why You Should Learn Smalltalk

  Peter Cooper

  27 Jan 2012 | 7:35 pm

  It's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-) Headlines Rails 3.2 Released DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of…

• This Week in Ruby: Nominate Your Ruby Heroes, Include/Extend, Ruby on Netbeans, Jekyll-Bootstrap, and more

  Peter Cooper

  20 Jan 2012 | 10:32 am

  Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, my Ruby e-mail newsletter. Headlines Vote for your 'Ruby Hero' in the Ruby Hero Awards The Ruby Heroes awards run each year and present 6 community nominated 'heroes' with an award at RailsConf. Nominations are now open so go and drop your nomination for the Rubyist whose code has brightened up your life the most in the past year. Heroku Receives InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award Sorry it's just a press release but it's great to see a company that came up from the Ruby world continue to do well. Congrats to the Heroku team.

• The Last Week in Ruby: RSpec 2.8, Redcar 0.12, Torquebox 2.0 beta, articles and more

  Peter Cooper

  16 Jan 2012 | 5:36 am

  Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter. While I have you, be sure to follow @RubyInside on Twitter as I'm going to be posting news more frequently there than on the Web site in future. Follow @RubyInside Also, if you're interested in getting one interesting programming related quote or link each day on Twitter, check out @codewisdom. Follow @CodeWisdom Headlines RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic RSpec 2.8 and rspec-rails 2.8.1 have been released and some users have been reporting significant performance improvements. Other…

• RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic

  Peter Cooper

  7 Jan 2012 | 7:53 am

  RSpec 2.8 has been released, along with rspec-rails 2.8.1 for the full Rails 3.x integration experience. RSpec is a BDD-focused testing tool that's particularly popular in the Rails world where everyone except DHH is using it (if you believe the hoopla). RSpec has faced accusations of being less than speedy in the past, but it seems 2.8 has had a performance firework shoved up its tailpipe: David Chelimsky, the creator of RSpec, also notes that in RSpec 2.8: the documentation has been significantly improved there's improved support for tags and filtering random example running order support…

• The Past 2 Weeks in the World of Ruby: 40 Links to Bring You Up to Speed (January 2012)

  Peter Cooper

  6 Jan 2012 | 9:03 am

  Ruby Weekly has just tipped over 10,000 subscribers but I know not everyone is into getting their news via e-mail, so here's the latest frequent roundup of the latest Ruby and Rails news for you, all on the Web :-) Key News, Releases, and Headlines Hungry Academy Application Process Closes This Weekend LivingSocial's 'Hungry Academy' will provide a paid, on-site 5 month Ruby and Rails learning experience and mentorship program to a small group of lucky applicants. Interested? You've only got a few days left to apply. DOS Attack Vulnerability Found in Ruby 1.8's Hash Algorithm Ruby 1.8.7-p352…

• 

  Channel 9

• TWC9: SQL Server 2012, Windows Phone, Async, Azure, HTML5 and more

  Clint Rutkas, Dan Fernandez, Greg Duncan

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:59 pm

  This week on Channel 9, Dan and Clint discuss the week's top developer news, including:[0:30] SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event, March 7th [1:17] Free Windows Phone Training (Peter Kuhn [aka Mister Goodcat]), http://www.goodcat-trainings.net [2:05] 8 Must-Have Tools for Windows Phone 7 Development (Doug Rathbone) [3:05] MetroSky - A Complete SkyDrive Sample for Windows Phone (Ilija Injac) [3:49] Hanselminutes on 9 - The Eddie Robotics Platform with Kinect (Scott Hanselman) [4:38] Advanced APM Consumption in Async Methods (Stephen Toub) [6:42] Getting…

• Episode 68 - Throttling in SQL Azure with Scott Klein

  Steve Marx, Wade Wegner

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:20 pm

  Join Wade and Steve each week as they cover the Windows Azure platform. You can follow and interact with the show at @CloudCoverShow.In this episode, Wade and Steve are joined by Scott Klein, Technical Evangelist for SQL Azure, who explains how to understand, diagnose, and handle throttling in SQL Azure. He also demonstrates how to use the Transient Fault Handling Application Block.In the news:New Service Bus demo SendGrid and Windows Azure Windows Azure and Cloud9 IDE at Node Summit Import/export service for SQL Azure generally available Tip of the week: Dealing with "cannot create…

• GoingNative 2012 Full Schedule (Sold Out, But Will Stream Live!)

  Charles

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:22 am

  We are sold out! But have no fear: The entire event will stream live and be available on demand shortly after the show ends.Here's the complete GoingNative 2012 Agenda: Concepts, variadic templates, STL11, static if, memory model, VC++11 and beyond, Clang, incredible keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter, user-driven panels. It's a C++11 party at Microsoft headquarters. Day 1 – C++11 TodayRegistration Opens/Continental Breakfast 8:00-9:30AM[Keynote ] 9:30-11:00AM PST (1730 - 1900 UTC) -- Bjarne StroustrupC++11 Style11:15-12:15PM PST (1915 - 2015…

• WHOIS: Danah Boyd, MSR Social Scientist

  Larry Larsen

  26 Jan 2012 | 3:19 pm

  Today we'll chat with Danah Boyd. Danah is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass., exploring social media. You can read more about Danah in this NY Times article posted this week.  How did you get into technology?As a child, I remember playing a few computer games and I had fun writing complex programs using LOGO, but it was my brother who was in love with computers.  I had limited interest in them.  Then, frustrated that my brother's computer was taking up the phone line by making weird sounds, I marched into his room and demanded to know what he…

• Hot Apps: Z0MB1ES, ARMED!, Groupon, NewEgg, Lumia Music

  Laura Foy

  25 Jan 2012 | 4:42 pm

  Hot Apps will feature 5 of the hottest apps each week for the Windows Phone 7. In this episode Laura takes a look at:Z0MB1ES (on teh phone) ARMED! Groupon NewEgg Lumia Music Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

• 

  CodePlex

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 27, 2012

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:52 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 27, 2012Popular ReleasesMagelia WebStore Open-source e-commerce software: Magelia WebStore 1.0.1.2: V1 of Magelia WebStore is the result of two years of work to create an advanced e-commerce software for the .NET environment. This first version includes : a new File management and media library feature Order and customer management Order history and statistics Improved Setup using WebPI Basic ETL Engine Bugfix see http://www.magelia.org/page/documentation/installation-guide/introduction for installation guideSimple…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 26, 2012

  26 Jan 2012 | 3:45 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 26, 2012Popular ReleasesCommunity TFS Build Extensions: January 2012 (v1.3.0.0): This is a minor update to support the ALM Rangers BRDLite team. This is our forth Stable release providing in excess of 100 Activities / Actions for Team Foundation Build 2010 and Team Foundation Build 11 as well as a new deliverable, the Community TFS Build Manager. The Community TFS Build Manager is now available on the Visual Studio Extensions Gallery A blog post by Jakob Ehn describing the features of the Community TFS Build Manager can be found…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, January 25, 2012

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:06 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, January 25, 2012Popular ReleasesWindows Forms Toolkit: WindowsForms Toolkit 0.3: This version add MVVM Pattern, CommandManager...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha: This is a preview version of the upcoming Circuit Diagram 2.0: Completely redesigned component system XML-based components Select and move multiple components Keyboard short-cuts for placing components Customise the toolbox Better connections detection and rendering51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.0.6.2: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 24, 2012

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:36 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 24, 2012Popular ReleasesLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.23: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, and Windows Phone 7.1. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 7: Change - Moved Culture property from JsonTextReader to JsonReader Fix - Fixed circular reference error when serializing nullable struct properties Fix - Fixed JsonReader.ReadAsXXX methods not converting string valuesVirtual Keyboard on windows phone: 多媒体遥控器: Copyright ©…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 23, 2012

  23 Jan 2012 | 5:54 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 23, 2012Popular ReleasesPDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.6.1: Changes from the previous version * Fixed bug #17280 * Includes Brazilian and Japanese localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructions 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.6.1-setup.exe" NotesPDFRider is written in C# on Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5…

• 

  Planet MySQL

• M3 code refactor & DBI support

  Hovhannes Avoyan

  27 Jan 2012 | 4:35 pm

  Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one! After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level. Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article. After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins. The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain…

• Tungsten at MySQL Users Conference

  Petri Virsunen

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:40 pm

  Don't miss these talks at MySQL Users Conference:Tuesday, April 10MySQL Replication 101, 9:30 am -12:30 pm in Room 3Wednesday, April 11What's new in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 Replication, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm in Room 7Be a Data Management Hero with Good Backups!, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm in Room 6One to Many: The Story of Sharding at Box, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm in Room 3Build simple and complex replicationPlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

• More Oracle ACEs for MySQL

  Giuseppe Maxia

  27 Jan 2012 | 1:32 pm

  As Keith announced today, there are two more Oracle ACE Directors for MySQL expertise. In case you are wondering how an ACE Director compares to a regular ACE, here is an overview and some FAQ.PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

• Statistics counters for Multi Range Read

  Sergey Petrunia

  27 Jan 2012 | 1:06 pm

  MariaDB 5.3 has now three statistics counters for Multi Range Read optimization: MariaDB [test]> show status like 'Handler_mrr%'; +-------------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-------------------------------+-------+ | Handler_mrr_extra_key_sorts | 0 | | Handler_mrr_extra_rowid_sorts | 0 | | Handler_mrr_init | 0 | +-------------------------------+-------+ 3 rows in set (0.08 sec) I’ve just added the first two. The reason for having them is as follows: the point of MRR is to provide speedup over regular execution by doing reads in disk order. In order to make reads…

• Oracle MySQL Developer Days - Germany & France

  Keith Larson

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:50 am

  MySQL is coming to Frankfurt am Main in Germany for a MySQL Developer Day, Febuary 9th.This developer day has a wide range of sessions and two great resources:  Johannes Schlüter, MySQL Software Developer (great PHP resource as well) and Giuseppe Maxia, Oracle ACE Director for MySQL.Take advantage of this chance to learn more about MySQL !  More information on the event in Germany can be found here.Paris France will also host a Developer day in March 21st. More information on this will becoming soon.PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

• 

  mySQL DBA

• mySQL Column Types and Why it Matters.

  Dathan Pattishall

  17 Jan 2012 | 12:49 pm

  MySQL is awesome at converting stringsto integers when comparing column lvalues with converted rvalues. So much sothat many of us take this fact for granted. When does this assumption breakdown? When does passing in the wrong value cause problems in mySQL?Let's take a table EmailLookup forexample. CREATE TABLE `EmailLookup` (  `userId` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,  `email` varchar(128) NOT NULL,  `emailCrc32` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,  `createDate` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,  PRIMARY KEY (`emailCrc32`,`userId`),  KEY `createDate`…

• The Effect of using Cloudfront and why it matters

  Dathan Pattishall

  20 Dec 2011 | 1:29 pm

  For years (12+) I have been building systems on every tier of the web. Everything from low-level OS optimizations, mySQL internals, interpreted language performance tricks to static content optimization.Building CDN's are easy, but what makes Akami or Cloudfront attractive-presences known as edge nodes-they have around the world to syndicate your content closest to the requester. Their smart DNS servers send people to the closest edge node to serve content. This is great for serving Javascript, Images CSS (Video) because its static. Here is a good example. Your system…

• Using live code interrupts to produce stats which in turn improves code

  Dathan Pattishall

  22 Nov 2011 | 2:55 pm

  How do you know that your code is fast? Is it fast for your test cases or is it fast for every case? When changes are made how does that affect your customers? How do you know over a period of time if the system is faster or slower.The same stat system which is used to track new installs, viral clicks, impressions, rates,  funnels, page flows, gauges, counters, etc is also used to let me know how fast code blocks are performing. How is this done?Since a Front Controller Design Pattern is used for my AJAX calls, I am able to wrap all calls in time deltas to produce a centralized stat on…

• Handling the Hockey Stick Growth

  Dathan Pattishall

  25 Oct 2011 | 2:38 pm

  The term hockey stick is used to describe the effect of an app that suddenly goes viral. Take a look at the graph to the left. There is modest growth and suddenly, the app goes viral and takes off. It looks like a hockey stick, ala the term.This article is briefly going to touch on the points of how to handle the sudden growth at the lowest cost possible with a site that I helped build: schoolFeed.com-a social network that reconnects classmates for Free.The main features of schoolfeed.com is reconnecting classmates, ensuring that each classmate is well connected, a feed to keep classmates in…

• Facebook should launch FBCloud and compete directly with Amazon, Google and others

  Dathan Pattishall

  20 Oct 2011 | 8:17 pm

  AnotherFacebook should do post by someone outside of Facebook; but it’s a moneymakerthat Facebook has not tried and probably has the best chance of succeeding at(not like deals har har - jab, jab). Some of the best DEV Ops work at Facebook.Facebook knows scale. Facebook knows system management. Facebook built the mostadvance data-center on the planet. This stuff is great it shows that they can doit, but what’s the motivation for the app developer to deploy in a FacebookCloud? Simply put Latency. This is the real issue, for me, really a selfish desire tohave my app move as fast…

• 

  MySQL Performance Blog

• MySQL Configuration Wizard Updated

  Baron Schwartz

  26 Jan 2012 | 1:52 pm

  We’ve released an updated version of the MySQL Configuration Wizard we announced at the end of last year. If you don’t remember that announcement, here’s the short version: this is a tool to help you generate my.cnf files based on your server’s hardware and other characteristics. We’ve gotten really good feedback on this tool, including this nice mention on Stack Exchange: Percona just built a tool to do just that called the Configuration Wizard. I tested it out once just to see what it would return and the results were pretty darn close to what we were using on…

• How to recover a single InnoDB table from a Full Backup

  Miguel Angel Nieto

  25 Jan 2012 | 8:50 pm

  Sometimes we need to restore only some tables from a full backup maybe because your data loss affect a small number of your tables. In this particular scenario is faster to recover single tables than a full backup. This is easy with MyISAM but if your tables are InnoDB the process is a little bit different story. With Oracle’s stock MySQL you cannot move your ibd files freely from one server to another or from one database to another. The reason is that the table definition is stored in the InnoDB shared tablespace (ibdata) and the transaction IDs and log sequence numbers that are…

• Schedule for MySQL Conference 2012 is Published

  Peter Zaitsev

  25 Jan 2012 | 8:17 am

  I am pleased to announce the schedule for Percona Live: MySQL Conference And Expo 2012 is now published. This is truly great selection of talks with something for MySQL Developers, DBAs, Managers, people just starting to use MySQL as well as looking for advanced topics. We have talks about running MySQL on extremely large scale in a Web as well as running MySQL In the Enterprise Environments. Some speakers have spent over decade pushing MySQL to its limits, others have in depth experience working on MySQL Code. We have many talks which are covering Oracle MySQL, and forks such as MariaDB,…

• linux.conf.au 2012 roundup

  Stewart Smith

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:31 pm

  I spent last week at linux.conf.au in Ballarat, Victoria (that’s the Victoria in Australia, not wherever else there may be one) which is only a pleasant two hour drive from my home town of Melbourne (Australia, not Florida). I sent an email internally to our experts detailing bits of the conference that may interest them – and I thought that it may also interest our wider readers who are interested in all levels of the software stack. For those that don’t know: linux.conf.au is one of (if not the) most awesome technical conference in the free software space. It…

• Preventing MySQL Emergencies Webinar

  Espen Braekken

  24 Jan 2012 | 2:20 pm

  On the 25th of January at 10 am PST, I will present a webinar on preventing MySQL emergencies titled “Preventing Downtime in Production MySQL Servers”. The material I will present is based on in-depth research done by Percona across many production servers.  We analyzed more than 150 emergency cases and categorized our findings to help you learn ways to avoid production downtimes. Join us to learn more about why emergencies happen (it may be different than what you think) and what you can do to avoid them. Sign up for the webinar now by visiting our webinar page…

• 

  Polymath Programmer

• Congratulations on becoming rich!

  Vincent

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:16 am

  In which I teach you 3 Chinese New Year greetings. Also, this was unscripted (mostly). I also can’t do one-take videos…

• Belief is everything

  Vincent

  20 Jan 2012 | 6:57 am

  You might be surprised that I’ve learnt many life lessons from books. Specifically, fantasy fiction. Today, I’m going to tell you one of them. Warning: There will be spoilers, even though I’ve summarised a fair chunk of the book. The following comes from the book Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. If you don’t want spoilers, you should stop reading… now. Gifted wrongly I will be summarising extensively. There was this great druid. There was also this great evil (isn’t there always…). With some thought, the druid figured out how to defeat the great…

• Quadratic Bezier curve control point calculation demo

  Vincent

  16 Jan 2012 | 5:07 am

  MacGile made a video to demonstrate the calculation of control points of a quadratic Bezier curve. The algorithm is based on what I wrote here. That looks awesome! Thanks MacGile!

• Launching SpreadsheetLight

  Vincent

  9 Jan 2012 | 10:15 pm

  I am excited to tell you that my spreadsheet software library is available! For the initial launch version (I decided to go for version 1. Why do people launch with versions 0.8? I don’t know…), you get comprehensive support for styles, rich text formatting, 47 named cell styles, themes (either one of the 20 built-in themes or create-your-own). Well, like I said, comprehensive styling support. There’s also the (hum-drum) support for merging cells and freezing panes. I actually explored how to split panes. I certainly wrote about it in my Open XML guide, but it turns out that…

• Named cell styles are still explicitly declared

  Vincent

  4 Jan 2012 | 11:12 pm

  Styling cells in Microsoft Excel has its difficulties (as I’ve written before). The biggest one is keeping track of all the indices. In Open XML SDK, you have the ability to have a named cell style. At first glance, you might think that’s awesome. You just use a named cell style, and all the related styles are applied. It’s like there’s a red car that uses hybrid fuels. “Yes, I would like to have a red car that uses hybrid fuels.” Not quite. You see, the named cell style is dependent on the implementing spreadsheet software. For example, Microsoft Excel has…

• 

  Pushing Pixels

• Retro:Active #567

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  25 Jan 2012 | 11:40 pm

  Game cartography by Mike Schley.

• Retro:Active #566

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  25 Jan 2012 | 11:29 pm

  Settlements and City Strategies by Olalekan Jeyifous. Some prints available for sale.

• Retro:Active #565

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  25 Jan 2012 | 11:16 pm

  Haack House by 4D-Arquitetura.

• Retro:Active #564

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  25 Jan 2012 | 4:24 pm

  Illustrations by Justin Mezzell.

• The iconic look of times long gone

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  24 Jan 2012 | 10:45 pm

  I must have died and went to heaven… Related posts: The iconic images of “Key Largo” The iconic images of “To Catch A Thief”  ... The iconic images of “North By Northwest”, part 1

• 

  No Fluff Just Stuff

• The apparent results of meeting room boredom [Flickr]

  Aaron Gustafson

  27 Jan 2012 | 4:00 pm

  Aaron Gustafson posted a photo:

• LinkedIn Etiquette

  Howard Lewis Ship

  27 Jan 2012 | 1:00 pm

  I've used LinkedIn for many years now, long before I joined Facebook ... I liked the concept of never losing contact information with business contacts and technologist. It just seemed like a good idea (though I do sometimes wonder if LinkedIn has any particular purpose). I tend to only connect with people I've met in person, or at least talked to on the phone. One thing that drives me crazy about LinkedIn is that you aren't forced to customize the message. As far as I'm concerned, the default message is like no message at all, and its a sign that you are just trolling for contacts. Just like…

• Batch Update All Your Vendor Repositories

  Mike Girouard

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:00 am

  I’ve got just shy of 100 vendor repositories that I pull from for my side projects and client work. Updating them all has become quite a bother so I wrote this little guy to save me some time. It’s certainly not perfect, and sometimes falls over, but this does the trick. This handles both Git and SVN repositories, but I’m sure with a few extra lines you can make it work for whatever SCM you prefer to use. https://gist.github.com/1674246

• Tiggzi – The Cloud-based HTML5 and Hybrid Mobile App Builder, Now Free!

  Max Katz

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  Last week we have we have renamed our cloud-based mobile app builder to Tiggzi (from Tiggr). Tiggzi is the most powerful and easy to use cloud-based mobile app builder. Free Plan! But, even more interesting news (for you) is that now we have a Free plan. No credit card nothing, just sign up and start building your mobile app. All the gotiggr.com links work and will continue working and we will be updating all the social media links. For now, use the links below to get help. Email Forum Docs and Getting Started Blog Twitter Facebook

• Tapestry Advantages

  Howard Lewis Ship

  26 Jan 2012 | 4:00 pm

  A summary of a discussion about the advantages of Tapestry over Struts: Exceptional exception reporting Significantly less code Live class reloading Sensible defaults, especially for SEO-friendly URLs Great community Flexibility and customizability Interestingly, the quality of Tapestry's documentation was mentioned ... favorably! Between the revised home page, and Tapestry JumpStart (and Igor's coming book), I think we're headed in the right direction in terms of documentation going from a liability to an asset.

• 

  www.thoughtworks.com aggregator

• Alister Scott: Reading CSS properties using Watir-WebDriver

  28 Jan 2012 | 6:06 am

  There was recently a question on Stack Overflow about how you read a CSS property of an element that is defined in a stylesheet using Watir-WebDriver. It’s really quite simple: require 'watir-webdriver' b = Watir::Browser.start 'minesweeper.github.com' puts b.div(:id => 'g1minesRemaining100s').style 'background-image'

• Hu Kai: 信息轰炸与自律

  28 Jan 2012 | 2:21 am

  Information Overloaded 商业读书会: Recovering from information overload 在ThoughtWorks的前4年我一天的生活常常是这样的: 取下一张故事卡，和业务分析人员聊清楚客户为什么要作这个功能？ 需求是什么样？ 和测试人员一起谈清楚验收条件是什么？ 怎么才算把这个功能做完了？…

• Patrick Kua : OOP Conference 2012

  27 Jan 2012 | 11:33 am

  OOP Conference is the longest running conferences I’ve ever presented at. This year was it’s 21st year of running, and although coming from Object-Oriented programming roots, the contents of OOPConference have evolved with the times to represent so much more – just like JAOO has over the years. This is the second conference I’ve presented at where the talks were in a mix of languages – obviously German, since the conference is based in Munich, and the other language being English. As a result, the number of sessions I attended was much lower than I normally would…

• Jaco Pretorius: Book Review: Programming Ruby

  27 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  TLDR Version: This book is incredibly well researched and covers pretty much everything in the Ruby world. While it does have a very good introductory section I think the main benefit to this book is as a reference guide. Programming Ruby is probably the most well-known book in the Ruby world. I guess I’m a little unsure as to the target audience for this book, but based on the amount of recognition it has received it seems to be aimed at pretty much anyone who codes in Ruby. There are several points in the book where the author gives you the option of skipping past a particularly…

• Sahana Chattopadhyay: A Surprise!

  27 Jan 2012 | 7:02 am

  Today I received a pleasant surprise! And one that also humbled me. One of my Twitter friends notified me about this post: Asia Pacific's List of elearning Movers and Shakers -- http://www.prlog.org/11780265-asia-pacifics-list-of-learning-movers-and-shakers.html I appear in this curated list of the top 10 movers and shakers, and I was delighted. Then as the euphoria settled, I was beset with questions. Do I really deserve to be on this list? How can I contribute more to the industry of elearning? How can I make my learning more transparent? Even as the Questions buzzed around inside my head,…

• 

  Android Developers Blog

• Say Goodbye to the Menu Button

  Tim Bray

  26 Jan 2012 | 2:10 pm

  [This post is by Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com. — Tim Bray]Before Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), all Android-powered devices included a dedicated Menu button. As a developer, you could use the Menu button to display whatever options were relevant to the user, often using the activity’s built-in options menu. Honeycomb removed the reliance on physical buttons, and introduced the ActionBar class as the standard solution to make actions from the user options immediately visible and quick to invoke. In order to provide the most intuitive and consistent…

• Southern-hemisphere Developer Labs

  Tim Bray

  16 Jan 2012 | 5:37 pm

  We’ve just scheduled Android Developer Labs for Melbourne (January 31), Sydney (February 3), and Auckland (February 8). The material is not introductory; it’s aimed at people with existing apps who want to make them better in the era of Ice Cream Sandwich and tablets. You’ll want to show up with the SDK installed, and a couple of devices.If this describes you, drop by the ADL page and sign up. You should hurry, because these are not large-scale events and there are more qualified people than there are seats.

• Introducing the Android Design site

  Tim Bray

  12 Jan 2012 | 3:00 pm

  [This post is by Christian Robertson, who leads the Android visual design group. He is also the designer of the Roboto font family. —Tim Bray]Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is our biggest redesign yet — both for users and developers. We’ve enhanced the UI framework with new interactions and styles that will let you create Android apps that are simpler and more beautiful than ever before.To help you in that mission, we’re introducing Android Design: the place to learn about principles, building blocks, and patterns for creating world-class Android user interfaces.

• Levels in Renderscript

  Tim Bray

  10 Jan 2012 | 3:43 pm

  [This post is by R. Jason Sams, an Android Framework engineer who specializes in graphics, performance tuning, and software architecture. —Tim Bray]For ICS, Renderscript (RS) has been updated with several new features to simplify adding compute acceleration to your application. RS is interesting for compute acceleration when you have large buffers of data on which you need to do significant processing. In this example we will look at applying a levels/saturation operation on a bitmap.In this case, saturation is implemented by multiplying every pixel by a color matrix Levels are…

• Holo Everywhere

  Tim Bray

  3 Jan 2012 | 3:35 pm

  [This post is by Adam Powell, an Android Framework engineer who cares about style. —Tim Bray]Android 4.0 showcases the Holo theme family, further refined since its debut in Android 3.0. But as most developers know, a new system theme for some Android devices isn’t a new or uncommon event. For developers new system themes mean more design targets for their apps. Using system themes means developers can take advantage of a user’s existing expectations and it can save a lot of production time, but only if an app designer can reliably predict the results. Before Android 4.0 the variance in…

• 

  Amazon Web Services Blog

• New Tagging for Auto Scaling Groups

  AWS Evangelist

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:29 pm

  You can now add up to 10 tags to any of your Auto Scaling Groups. You can also, if you'd like, propagate the tags to the EC2 instances launched from your groups. Adding tags to your Auto Scaling groups will make it easier for you to identify and distinguish them. Each tag has a name, a value, and an optional propagation flag. If the flag is set, then the corresponding tag will be applied to EC2 instances launched from the group. You can use this feature to label or distinguish instances created by distinct Auto Scaling groups. You might be using multiple groups to support multiple scalable…

• AWS HowTo: Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce with DynamoDB (Guest Post)

  AWS Evangelist

  25 Jan 2012 | 7:42 pm

  Today's guest blogger is Adam Gray. Adam is a Product Manager on the Elastic MapReduce Team. -- Jeff; Apache Hadoop and NoSQL databases are complementary technologies that together provide a powerful toolbox for managing, analyzing, and monetizing Big Data. That’s why we were so excited to provide out-of-the-box Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) integration with Amazon DynamoDB, providing customers an integrated solution that eliminates the often prohibitive costs of administration, maintenance, and upfront hardware. Customers can now move vast amounts of data into and out of…

• The AWS Storage Gateway - Integrate Your Existing On-Premises Applications with AWS Cloud Storage

  AWS Evangelist

  25 Jan 2012 | 2:56 am

  Warning: If you don't have a data center, or if all of your IT infrastructure is already in the cloud, you may not need to read this post! But feel free to pass it along to your friends and colleagues. The Storage GatewayOur new AWS Storage Gateway service connects an on-premise software appliance with cloud-based storage to integrate your existing on-premises applications with the AWS storage infrastructure in a seamless, secure, and transparent fashion. Watch this video for an introduction: Data stored in your current data center can be backed up to Amazon S3, where it is stored as…

• Launch Relational Database Service Instances in the Virtual Private Cloud

  AWS Evangelist

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:34 pm

  You can now launch Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) DB instances inside of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Some BackgroundThe Relational Database Service takes care of all of the messiness associated with running a relational database. You don't have to worry about finding and configuring hardware, installing an operating system or a database engine, setting up backups, arranging for fault detection and failover, or scaling compute or storage as your needs change. The Virtual Private Cloud lets you create a private, isolated section of the AWS Cloud. You have complete control over IP…

• AWS Toolkits for Eclipse and Visual Studio Now Support DynamoDB

  AWS Evangelist

  20 Jan 2012 | 2:12 pm

  The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse and and the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio now support Amazon DynamoDB.You can create tables, insert and edit data, initiate table scans, and more. Here are some screen shots from the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. Create a table: Edit a multi-valued attribute: Set up a table scan: The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio also contains the latest and greatest version of the AWS SDK for .NET. This version of the SDK includes support for Amazon DynamoDB, in the form of the Amazon.DynamoDB.DocumentModel and Amazon.DynamoDB.TableModel classes and namespaces. More information…

• 

  Pure Danger Tech

• St. Louis Startup Scene

  Alex

  24 Jan 2012 | 9:45 am

  Lots of new resources coming in to promote a St. Louis startup scene. Tying together some threads: Arch Grants is a new program to give $50k grants to create startups in St. Louis! Cool program. Here’s a story about it. Startup Weekend is coming to St. Louis this weekend (Jan 27-29th) – it’s a great opportunity to find others interested in creating companies. And finally, the new Startup Missouri program is launching on Jan 31st.

• Strange Loop: The Plan

  Alex

  1 Jan 2012 | 1:31 am

  Some musings on previous Strange Loop years and the plan for 2012. Strange Loop 2009 I started Strange Loop in 2009 with the thought that I could put together a local conference and surely I could find (heck probably knew myself) a couple hundred people in St. Louis that would go to a one day developer conference. I planned it in one of my favorite movie theaters in one of my favorite areas of St. Louis – the Loop. We ended up expanding by a half day and selling out with 300 attendees. The whole experience was terrifying from beginning to end. The event itself was an a/v nightmare…

• Language criticism

  Alex

  29 Nov 2011 | 9:49 pm

  I read @codahale’s “leaked” assessment of Yammer moving some code from Scala back to Java with great interest today. I post about it somewhat hesitantly because it is a private thing that became public but I have lots of thoughts and I need to dump them somewhere. I am going to write this quickly and it will likely be twice as long as it should be. Sorry. First, I think there is a great temptation to point at this particular note and use it as evidence that “Scala is bad” or whatever. While I know and respect Stephen Colebourne a tremendous amount, I have not…

• Clojure and Processing

  Alex

  17 Nov 2011 | 4:14 pm

  I had a great time at Devoxx this week – many thanks to Stephan and crew and whoever is making all this delicious beer here in Belgium. During the end of my Cracking Clojure talk I showed a screencast I did where I progressively build up a solution to Conway’s Life in Clojure. The end solution is completely stolen from Christophe Grand‘s elegant solution – I just filled in the work leading up to it (and refactored slightly). My end result from the ‘cast: (defn neighbors [[x y]] (for [dx [-1 0 1] dy (if (zero? dx) [-1 1] [-1 0 1])] [(+ dx x) (+ dy y)])) (defn live…

• Improving Clojure’s docs

  Alex

  10 Nov 2011 | 2:10 pm

  There was an interesting conversation today on #clojure about various aspects of Clojure documentation. This is not a new topic I thought I’d goose it a little more publicly. There are docs in several places (this is incomplete, but most easily found): clojure.org – “official”, first-stop, very small editor set dev.clojure Confluence – wiki, editable by many but less formal. Important parts include the Getting Started pages in particular. Clojure Docs – a place to stash per-function examples in core and libraries Learn-Clojure – a gathering of…

• 

  Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist

• Change is hard

  udidahan

  8 Jan 2012 | 6:45 am

  Organizational change is hard – like the way a diamond is hard. So, don’t try to change the organization. It’s too big anyway. Instead, focus on changing one person at a time – that’s hard enough. Don’t necessarily take the “one person as a time” too literally, though. You don’t need to completely and utterly have one person won over before starting on the next. Understand that for someone to change, that may require them admitting (either implicitly or explicitly) that the way they were doing things before was wrong. In some…

• Talks, NServiceBus Beta, and Course Registration

  udidahan

  4 Jan 2012 | 4:33 am

  Some links to things that don’t fit anywhere else: Andreas Ohlund’s talk on New and Shiny things in NServiceBus 3.0 is available here. By the way, we’ve now got a beta out of NServiceBus 3.0 – get it here. Yves Goeleven will be giving a talk on simplifying distributed application development with NServiceBus and the Windows Azure Platform on Jan 31 – details here. Carl and Richard over at Dot Net Rocks interviewed me at the Oredev conference in Sweden about Domain Driven Design and one of my pet peeves – the use of Customer in example applications. Get it…

• The Myth Of “Infinite Scalability”

  udidahan

  29 Dec 2011 | 3:58 am

  Scalability is a topic near and dear to my heart. Many a client seeks me out for the first time for help in this area. Usually the request is for an amount substantially smaller than infinity. It’s usually on the discussion groups and in conference presentations that infinity is brought into it. The basics The first issue with scalability is the use of the word as an adjective: scalable. “Is the system scalable?” Or the similar verb use: “Does it scale?” The problem here is the implication that there is a yes/no answer to the question. Scalability is not boolean.

• MSMQ Info

  udidahan

  26 Dec 2011 | 6:18 am

  In my courses and conference presentations in which I mentioned the use of MSMQ, I usually state that it comes installed on all versions of Windows going back to Win 2000 (unlike other queuing systems requiring an explicit install). Although installed, the MSMQ service does need to be turned on. Anyway, it turns out that in the Server Core installations of Windows Server 2008 R2, MSMQ does NOT come pre-installed, and for a while it wasn’t even possible to add it (as John Breakwell described here). Luckily, Microsoft has put MSMQ in the Developer Preview of Server 8 (as Brian…

• Recording of joint interview with Eric Evans

  udidahan

  30 Nov 2011 | 10:59 pm

  Last month both myself and Eric Evans spoke at a conference run by the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) in Madrid. Eric talked about DDD and I talked about CQRS. While the talks were recorded, I don’t think they’ve come online yet. At the end of the conference, we were interviewed by the local .NET magazine dNM and that video is now available here. We covered the background on things like DDD, CQRS, and the Cloud. I don’t think that either of us said anything earth-shattering but if you have half an hour, take a look:

• 

  Agile Software Development

• Daily wallpaper 1.1 for Nokia N9. Knows how to cut and rotate

  Artem

  18 Jan 2012 | 3:23 am

  Direct Nokia Store link - http://store.ovi.com/content/214273 I've released the free Daily Wallpaper for Nokia N9 a couple of months ago. Since that time it enjoyed nearly nine thousands of downloads (quite a number for this platform) and was keeping me personally entertained. Once an hour (or once a day or once a month) it is downloading the fresh cool wallpaper from flickr and every time I unlock the phone I can enjoy a new interesting photo. Since the moment of release, the most popular request (sometimes even causing the low rating in the Nokia Store) was not to rotate the too wide…

• Winter holidays: 50% discount on Easy Discount Calculator for Nokia N9 and Symbian phones

  Artem

  28 Dec 2011 | 6:47 am

  For those too busy to read the whole post: from now and until the end of winter you can get Easy Discount Calculator for Symbian and Nokia N9 for 50% cheaper (1 euro in most of the countries) from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742 I am a big fan of small utilities tuned for the very concrete purpose. And I don't enjoy messing with the lots of discount calculations. You know, when one headset for my phone was 49 euro and now it it is 33% cheaper, but then there is the other one that used to be 69 euro and now it is 40% cheaper. How much do they actually cost? Simple, elegant,…

• Daily Wallpaper - a top photo & video download for Nokia N9. Free until Christmas 2011

  Artem

  18 Dec 2011 | 1:48 pm

• How to make your QML applications scale to and look nice on Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and android

  Artem

  9 Oct 2011 | 7:35 am

  Yesterday I was talking at the 2nd Tampere barcamp about how you can make your application automatically scale to different devices, yet allow for pixel perfect fine-tuning when needed. We used this approach for Easy Discount Calculator that is to my understanding the first real app available simultaneously for Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and Android (on some Android devices it runs smoothly, on som it has problems due to bugs in not yet mature the porting technology). Unfortunately the presentation may not make much sense to you if you haven’t been to the barcamp as well, but you may like to…

• Tampere Goes Agile 2011 - conference photos

  Artem

  19 Sep 2011 | 5:58 am

  A couple of days earlier, on Saturday, Sep 17 in a city of Tampere I was co-organizing the conference called Tampere Goes Agile. Conference was a big success, preparations were challenging and interesting and I should really write about it. For now, here is the slideshow for the conference photos. If you want your photos to appear here, tag them on flickr with tamperegoesagile. There are no comments allowed on this blog (until I find time to solve the overspamming problem), but feel free to copy-paste the slideshow code to wherever you like. The best way for providing feedback is a tweet…

• 

  All About Agile | Agile Development Made Easy!

• Rotating the ScrumMaster Role

  Mike Cohn

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:18 pm

  Some teams that struggle with choosing the best ScrumMaster decide that an appropriate strategy is to rotate the role among all team members. I don’t advocate this, as I don’t think it demonstrates an appropriate respect for the challenges and significance of the role. In my family, we rotate who... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Three Keys to Successful Product Ownership

  Arlen Bankston

  25 Jan 2012 | 2:50 pm

  The Product Owner is both one of the most important roles in Scrum and often the most difficult to fill. In this post, I will explore a few aspects of successful product ownership that are often done poorly or not at all. Manage Both the Big Vision and... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Committing for the Sprint

  Joe Little

  23 Jan 2012 | 5:02 pm

  This is, to me, still a New Year.  And a friend suggested I talk about New Years' resolutions.  Or something like them, Sprint commitments. Henry Ford said: Whether you think you can or you can't, you are usually right. So, let us work bac... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Are managers evil?

  Joe Little

  22 Jan 2012 | 7:56 pm

  First, many have said that there are a lot of bad managers in the US, and in the world. Peter Drucker worked on this. W. Edwards Deming had his ideas, and worked on this. And many many business gurus have had their say, trying to improve the manager... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• Modifying Scrum – You THINK you know better…

  Mike Vizdos

  18 Jan 2012 | 2:38 pm

  Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...

• 

  Agile Development Blog: Scaling Software Agility

• Tractors and Agile Development?

  Ryan Martens

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  Whenever I use John Deere as an example of a fantastic Agile adoption, I always get looks of surprise. That’s quickly followed by an ‘a-ha’ moment when I share that today’s From my visit to the test farm in Des Moines - note all of the hardware on top of the tractors tractors are run by more lines of code than the early space shuttles. Yesterday, ComputerWorld published a great article about John Deere’s Agile adoption, characterized as a ‘big bang’ across their 800-person development organization within a year. It’s definitely worth the 5…

• What the World Needs Now… Citizen Engineers

  Ryan Martens

  4 Jan 2012 | 1:23 pm

  Are you an engineer? If so, our society needs you to apply yourself to the global warming and other global social problems for the remainder of your life. Just before the Holidays, an article I wrote ran in Fast Company on the call-to-action I believe all engineers need to embrace. Read the article, “Engineers: Why Aren’t You Doing Work For Good?“ Is this a calling that resonates with you? Do you think it’s feasible? If so, how can we get there? I would love to hear from you. Ryan Martens is CTO and founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at…

• Strategy Meets Execution: The Industry’s First Agile Portfolio Management Solution

  Ryan Martens

  7 Dec 2011 | 3:06 pm

  Yesterday, we kicked off Rally’s Roadshow announcing the industry’s first Agile Portfolio Management solution. What an incredible opportunity to tell the Rally story, hear an inspiring presentation from Geoffrey Moore on how to escape the pull of the past, listen to the real-life story of aligning strategy and execution from Nina Schoen at Getty Images, and moderate a panel so lively that the panelists starting asking each other the questions. Catch the Next Agile Portfolio Management Roadshow Panelists Geoffrey Moore, Nina Schoen, Todd Olson, Dave West, Ronica Roth The best way…

• We Are ‘Go for Launch’

  Catherine Connor

  29 Nov 2011 | 7:02 am

  40 preview customers, 34 builds, 3 launch events, 1 product. That’s what it took to launch our Agile Portfolio Management solution. Following Rally’s latest customer development project (see Ryan’s Lean Startup post), here’s how it all happened and Rally’s gift to you for the holiday season… 40 Preview Customers A year ago, we put a call out to the Agile community. We knew to get it right, we had to first learn how customers currently managed their strategic plans, and the challenges they were encountering. So we scheduled many, many interviews talking to development…

• Geoffrey Moore Q&A on the Future of Portfolio Management

  Ryan Martens

  28 Nov 2011 | 12:57 pm

  Geoffrey Moore, a leading high-tech strategist and author of the bestselling Silicon Valley bible Crossing the Chasm, is speaking at Rally’s December 6th launch event. His new book, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, offers a pragmatic plan for established enterprises to move beyond past successes and drive next-generation growth from new lines of business. We chatted with Geoffrey last week about the focus of Escape Velocity, his thoughts on how companies can capitalize on their portfolio of opportunities, and why he’s excited to speak at Rally’s…

• 

  Successful Software

• Pivot Tables demystified

  Andy Brice

  5 Jan 2012 | 11:05 am

  Online businesses generate a lot of data. Sales data, marketing data, traffic data etc. Pivot tables can be a useful tool for analysing and extracting useful information from this sea of data. A lot of people seem to have heard of Pivot Tables without understanding what they are or how to use them. Despite the slightly cryptic name they are really just a way of summarizing tables of data. Nothing to be intimidated by. I’m going to try to demystify them here with a simple example. Let’s imagine you have got an Excel spreadsheet with a month of (fictitious) sales transaction. It looks like…

• Promoting your software

  Andy Brice

  2 Dec 2011 | 11:09 am

  This is a video of a “Promoting your software” talk I did at ESWC 2011. In it I discuss my experiences attempting to try every form of promotion known to man including: SEO, Google Adwords, magazine ads, affiliates, Facebook ads and hanging out in wedding forums using a female pseudonym. With real data! You can’t read the slide text in the video, but I have included the slides below. A couple of people asked me afterwards whether anything I tried had worked. Yes! I wouldn’t have survived long as a microISV otherwise. But I didn’t really want to dwell on what had…

• Cppcheck – A free static analyser for C and C++

  Andy Brice

  28 Nov 2011 | 6:46 pm

  I got a tip from Anna-Jayne Metcalfe of C++ and QA specialists Riverblade to check out Cppcheck, a free static analyser for C and C++. I ran >100 kLOC of PerfectTablePlan C++ through it and it picked up a few issues, including: variables uninitialised in constructors classes passed by value, rather than as a const reference variables whose scopes could be reduced methods that could be made const It only took me a few minutes from downloading to getting results. And the results are a lot less noisy than lint. I’m impressed. PerfectTablePlan is heavily tested and I don’t think…

• ESWC 2011

  Andy Brice

  13 Nov 2011 | 10:13 am

  No proper post this week. I’m too busy finishing off my talk ‘Promoting your software’ for ESWC 2011 in London next weekend (19-20 Nov). I am going to talk about my experiences attempting to try every form of promotion known to man including: SEO, Google Adwords, magazine ads, affiliates, Facebook ads and hanging out in wedding forums using a female pseudonym. With audience participation! Plus real data! There are also some other interesting looking talks. Chatting to other people in the business over coffee or beer is also invaluable. If you haven’t booked a ticket,…

• Losing weight with a minimum of willpower

  Andy Brice

  30 Oct 2011 | 2:31 pm

  If you are happy with your weight you can skip this post. Normal programming will be resumed soon. We all know how to lose weight: eat less and move more. So why do so few people succeed? You only have to spend a few minutes walking around any wealthy western country to see that obesity is a huge problem. The human body is truly an incredible thing, evolved over millions of years. It is so much more than just a mere transport and fuelling system for the brain. We only get one body, it is a tragedy to neglect it. The past is always with us Our evolutionary past is working against us.

• 

  Encosia

• The ASUS Zenbook UX31: Initial impressions

  Dave Ward

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  For over a year now, I’ve been using a 13” MacBook Air as my only laptop. Though it’s a bit underpowered and I prefer Windows to OS X, I was ultimately unable to resist Apple’s build quality compared to the Dell I had used previously. However, I never fully resigned myself to accepting a dichotomy between quality construction and operating system. Thankfully, the recent proliferation of Windows-based Ultrabook™ machines seems to be rapidly bridging that divide. Given my already-growing desire to find an alternative, when I was contacted about reviewing the ASUS’ Zenbook UX31…

• Adding your own callbacks to existing JavaScript functions

  Dave Ward

  11 Jan 2012 | 2:08 pm

  Hey Dave, is there a way to create an event handler so when .tmpl() is done it will fire a function? I’m trying to make it global, so I was hoping I could say, when ANY template gets done, do this… The question of how to retroactively add hooks before and/or after a pre-existing JavaScript function executes is one that comes up from time to time. Whether it’s a simple method like tmpl(), a server-generated script artifact, or a function in a third-party script, sometimes it’s desirable to alter a JavaScript function without access to change the original declaration of…

• Five years of Encosia

  Dave Ward

  22 Dec 2011 | 4:50 pm

  As I ponder the title of this post, I’m conflicted. I clearly remember writing last year’s post and thinking that it didn’t seem like four years could have possibly passed since I started publishing here. As I write this one, I find myself feeling like it’s surely been much longer than five years. I guess you could say 2011 has been a long year? Relativity aside, this week saw the fifth anniversary of the night that I hastily threw this site together and published my first post. So, I guess it’s that time again. Site stats Page views are far from a perfect metric for…

• Using CORS to access ASP.NET services across domains

  Dave Ward

  19 Dec 2011 | 12:25 am

  Work on client-side applications long enough and it’s just about inevitable that you’ll eventually want to make an AJAX request that breaches the browser’s XMLHttpRequest security restrictions. Limitations on cross-domain requests are great when they’re preventing malicious sites from malfeasing, but are a thorn in the side when they complicate your legitimate applications. Traditionally, direct communication across the same-origin boundary required using a rickety (though clever) workaround called JSONP. JSONP is a reasonable compromise if all you need to do is make…

• Help me organize my posts about using jQuery with ASP.NET

  Dave Ward

  29 Nov 2011 | 1:12 pm

  One of the longest running themes here has been the compelling intersection between ASP.NET and jQuery. Beginning with my post about using jQuery to circumvent ASP.NET AJAX’s client-side apparatus for calling ASMX services, I’ve been writing about using ASP.NET and jQuery since the Spring of 2008. As these related posts have accumulated over the years, I’ve made an effort to weave a thread of cross-links between them posts where appropriate. However, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate every possible entry point and subsequent path that someone might find themselves…

• 

  The Endeavour

• Twenty weeks down to twenty minutes

  John

  26 Jan 2012 | 6:39 pm

  I had a simulation this week that I estimated would take 20 weeks to run. This estimate was based on too small a run. A more reliable estimate based on a longer run was 300 CPU hours, about two weeks running on a single processor. Before I split the problem up to run in parallel, I wanted to see if I could make each thread run faster. The most expensive part of the simulation is a function that takes in four integer parameters and does a numerical integration. Each parameter could be any value from 0 to 120. So in principle there are 121^4 = 214,358,881 possible parameter combinations. I knew…

• The most brutal man page

  John

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:14 pm

  In The Linux Command Line, the author describes the bash man page* as “the most brutal man page of them all.” Many man pages are hard to read, but I think that the grand prize for difficulty has to go to the man page for bash. As I was doing my research for this book, I gave it a careful review to ensure that I was covering most of its topics. When printed, it’s over 80 pages long and extremely dense, and its structure makes absolutely no sense to a new user. On the other hand, it is very accurate and concise, as well as being extremely complete. So check it out if you dare, and…

• Review: The Linux Command Line

  John

  25 Jan 2012 | 7:00 am

  No Starch Press recently released The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction by William E. Shotts, Jr. True to its name, the book is about using Linux from command line. It’s not an encyclopedia of Linux. It doesn’t explain how to install Linux, doesn’t go into system APIs, and says little about how to administer Linux. At the same time, the book is broader than just a book on bash. It’s about how to “live” at the command line. The introduction explains the intended audience. This book is for Linux users who have migrated from other platforms. Most…

• Color-coded surgery

  John

  24 Jan 2012 | 10:08 pm

  This is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in cancer research in some time: a way to make tumors fluoresce. This allows surgeons to see tumor boundaries. From TED

• Boundary conditions are the hard part

  John

  24 Jan 2012 | 9:29 am

  What we call “differential equations” are usually not just differential equations. They also have associated initial conditions or boundary conditions. With ordinary differential equations (ODEs), the initial conditions are often an afterthought. First you find a full set of solutions, then you plug in initial conditions to get a specific solution. Partial differential equations (PDEs) have boundary conditions (and maybe initial conditions too). Since people typically learn ODEs first, they come to PDEs expecting boundary values to play a role analogous to ODEs. In a very limited…

• 

  ProgrammableWeb

• Developers Make a Difference at CleanWeb Hackathon

  Kin Lane

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:00 pm

  The CleanWeb Hackathon wrapped up this weekend in New York City, with the goal of building apps that explore sustainable business models leveraging the mobile and social web, challenging developers on what they can do in 24 hours with utility, transport and smart grid datasets, and APIs. Two energy related APIs were on hand to help developers build applications on their platforms: Genability, provides tools to gain insight into electricity usage, with detailed, accurate and up-to-date tariff and energy pricing data, that is searchable by zipcode and other criteria. Tendril Connect, enables…

• Best New Mashups: Book Mashups using Freebase, Google Maps and Amazon

  Wendell Santos

  27 Jan 2012 | 12:29 pm

  Recently we have seen some imaginative mashups centered on books. From mapping story locations, building communities around book genres and even discovering the most obscure connections between details in your favorite stories, these mashups are nothing short of creative. In addition we’ve rounded up a couple of standard book search and recommendation applications. Some of the popular APIs used include Google Maps and Amazon. Small Demons – Suppose someone took every meaningful detail from all the books you love. Every song mentioned, every person, every food or place or movie…

• AllTrails Drops Google Maps in Favor of NatGeo’s TOPO

  Romin Irani

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:00 am

  Google Maps API has become so entrenched in developer minds, that if you are looking for a mapping feature in your application, you did not look beyond them. But ever since Google announced its pricing last year, websites that have a large number of visitors have been disappointed with the potential fees that they will have to shell out for the services. These websites have responded in typical fashion and they are looking for alternate solutions. This definitely means good news to developers since having competitive choices is a positive thing. Earlier this year, we covered how Google’s…

• APIs Enables Alaska Airlines to Fly Higher and Grow Faster

  Kin Lane

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:00 am

  Even though Alaska Airlines was one of the first airlines to offer an iPhone application, allowing travelers to check-in and use their phone as mobile boarding pass, early efforts were essentially just “screen-scraped” from the companies website, providing a very poor user experience, not really delivering on the process of the mobile web. Since you’re a ProgrammableWeb reader, you can probably guess what the company needed. After all, mobile has fueled API growth. In order to stimulate the creation of next generation mobile applications, Alaska Airlines needed to expose…

• Today in APIs: Facebook Subscribers, Google SOAP and 6 New APIs

  Adam DuVander

  26 Jan 2012 | 2:00 pm

  This new daily ProgrammableWeb feature brings you the latest from the world of APIs, both on PW and from around the web. Let us know in the comments what works for you and where we can improve. Facebook added subscriber data to its Facebook Graph APIand the Google AdWords API updated its SOAP validation. Wait, people still use SOAP? Plus, two sides to API frustration, a mobile app contest, HTTP API evolvability and six new APIs. Facebook Adds Subscribers to the Graph Last year Facebook introduced a new concept to its social network. Users can now subscribe to someone’s public messages…

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  LogicalVue

• Changes at LogicalVue for 2012

  Paul Lefebvre

  17 Jan 2012 | 10:17 am

  LogicalVue Software, Inc. was first formed in 2003 and primarily sold software products built using RealBasic. In 2007, I started doing consulting (also using RealBasic). During this time I had a separate full-time job, but in 2008, I had so much RealBasic consulting work that I had to leave my full-time job (as a .NET developer) to devote myself to it. I’ve been doing full-time RealBasic (now Real Studio) consulting since then. But after four years, it’s time for another change. Starting on February 1, 2012, I will be joining Real Software, the makers of Real Studio, as their…

• Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

  Paul Lefebvre

  6 Oct 2011 | 12:51 pm

  I am saddened by the loss of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs only got 56 years on this earth, but boy did he make use of his time. Anyone would be lucky to have just one of his successes. Every computer in use today is based on the original vision of the Macintosh. Every Mac in use today uses the operating system created by Steve Jobs’ team at Next. The music industry was changed, for the better, by Steve’s vision of the iPod and iTunes. Every phone is now based on the original iPhone concept. Every tablet is based on the iPad. And I haven’t even mentioned the joy that Pixar brought…

• Changing Columns in SQLite Tables

  Paul Lefebvre

  31 May 2011 | 10:52 am

  A recent purchaser of SQLVue, our SQLite IDE for database developers, requested for a new feature: the ability to modify existing columns on a table. Currently SQLVue does not support this and until it does, I thought I would explain how you can do this manually. But first, why does SQLVue not support this obviously useful feature? Well, the reason SQLVue does not support this yet is because SQLite itself does not support it. Unlike most databases, the ALTER TABLE command in SQLite is a bit restrictive. It only allows you to add new columns and to rename a table. You cannot use ALTER TABLE to…

• SQLVue 4.1 Now Available

  Paul Lefebvre

  31 May 2011 | 10:35 am

  SQLVue 4.1 is now available in the Mac App Store and is on sale for $14.99 through June 14th: App Store Link New features include: New features for SQLVue 4.1 include: * All-new table designer: create and alter tables without using SQL * Easily create Views from SQL statements * Export database table structure as SQL commands to include in your apps * Ensure the quality of your SQLite databases with the Database Integrity Check and Index Analyzer * Create sample databases using the Chinook database, populated with significant sample data * And much more!

• Mac Development Setup

  Paul Lefebvre

  4 May 2011 | 2:53 pm

  Marco Arment just wrote a blog post about iMacs, Mac Pros, and laptops. Considering I just recently upgraded all my computing hardware here, I thought I would comment on what worked for me. Earlier this year, I replaced my 3-year old MacBook Pro with a Mac Pro and a MacBook Air. I seriously considered getting a 27″ iMac i7 and did not seriously consider getting another MacBook Pro. I’ll try to explain why. More for Less First, I want to stress that getting refurbished equipment is the way to go. With Apple refurbished hardware, you can save hundreds of dollars on equipment that is…

• 

  The Programmer's Paradox

• The First Principle of Software

  Paul W. Homer

  27 Jan 2012 | 5:03 pm

  The very worst thing that any computer can do is lie to you. You have to be able to trust it when it says it will accomplish some work on your behalf. If it tells you one thing, then goes off and does something completely different -- causing a huge mess -- you have the right to be mad. If it shows you deliberately incorrect or misnamed data then you should be pissed. Except during hardware

• An Informal Ramble

  Paul W. Homer

  22 Dec 2011 | 3:41 pm

  [ Author’s Note: I really don’t know what to say. It was just one of those days. If you don’t feel like reading a broad rambling on loosely connected ideas, please don’t read this! ]A good place to start -- as always -- is with a few definitions. For this particular discussion it works better if I create them loosely and use somewhat non-conventional meanings. I’ll try to explain why that

• The Engineering of Software

  Paul W. Homer

  19 Dec 2011 | 4:50 pm

  The last thing I ever wanted to be -- twenty-six years ago -- was an engineer. When I started university I had heard that 70% of all engineers hate their jobs and that they were often bored at work. Boredom sounded horrible. What I wanted, was to master the black art of coding. To follow in the foot steps of those early magicians I had seen in the computer magazines. The ones that crafted

• Getting to the Truth

  Paul W. Homer

  10 Dec 2011 | 7:02 pm

  One of the most enjoyable things about building software is that it requires the developers to dig around in other domains. If you’re writing financial software, you need to know how the industry works, understand the terminology, and all of the complex details underneath. If you build something for the printing industry, you need to grok their equipment and business models. Everything you

• Problems and Solutions

  Paul W. Homer

  30 Nov 2011 | 12:51 pm

  The world is littered with a growing number of problems. Some of these problems are solvable by using a computer, some not. To solve a problem with a computer all it takes is to design and construct a software solution, then get people to use it. Easy?Solving a problem with software is not nearly as simple as it looks. Many more solutions fail then succeed. The stats are ugly: 66% of all

• 

  Embedded Computing Design » News

• Consecutive Years of Significant Growth at DiSTI Continue

  DiSTI

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:59 am

  Orlando, FL (January 27, 2012) – The DiSTI Corporation, a software development and simulation training company based in Orlando, FL, announces another year of growth and expansion for the company. In 2011, DiSTI increased its employee base by 24% compared to 2010 staffing levels, and an astounding 97% when compared to 2009 levels. Accompanying the growth in staff, DiSTI’s worldwide software product sales grew 11% and engineering services grew 10%. To accommodate this growth, DiSTI has relocated to a new 10,500 square foot facility on Corporate Boulevard near the University of…

• Following State of the Union, TIA Pushes for Wireless Spectrum and Public Safety Network Legislation

  TIA

  26 Jan 2012 | 5:57 pm

  WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) President Grant Seiffert issued the following statement: “We deeply appreciate President Obama’s commitment to extend broadband access to all Americans. We also thank him for his strong support for innovation and research and development and we’re pleased that he noted the importance of the tech industry’s contributions to economic growth and creation of jobs in the United States.” “We ask again that the…

• Clearwire’s mixed results highlight big job ahead

  Clearwire

  26 Jan 2012 | 5:53 pm

  For a company that seemed like it was on the ropes just a little over a month ago, Clearwire seems like it is doing everything it can to fight back, whether that involves seeking more financing at a time when the perceived value of its spectrum holdings has soared, or releasing quarterly results early to highlight growing revenue. Clearwire did both of those things this week, as it sought to raise about $300 million through a new debt issue, money that presumably will be used for its LTE upgrade, though Clearwire did not outline specific plans for the money. The company also reported that its…

• Wi-Fi Alliance hosts Wi-Fi/ZigBee interop demo

  Wi-Fi Alliance

  26 Jan 2012 | 5:50 pm

  Wi-Fi appears ready to edge further into the home automation market, as the Wi-Fi Alliance this week hosted a public demonstration of interoperability between Wi-Fi devices and ZigBee-enabled smart energy meters. The demonstration, which took place at the DistribuTECH 2012 event in San Antonio, is the latest step in promoting Smart Energy Profile (SEP) 2.0. The multi-vendor demonstration established Wi-Fi device connectivity to both Wi-Fi and ZigBee meters, reportedly the first time that a mixed technology set-up has been publicly demonstrated. The interoperability event included eight…

• RFMD powers new smartphones with industry-leading 3G/4G products

  RFMD

  26 Jan 2012 | 5:49 pm

  RF Micro Devices, Inc. today announced it has commenced volume production of multiple 3G/4G power amplifiers (PAs), in support of two leading smartphone families. The two most recent smartphones supported by RFMD® feature RFMD’s PowerSmart™ power platform and RFMD’s RF724x family of ultra-high efficiency power amplifiers. The first smartphone, featuring RFMD’s PowerSmart, is a stylish, all-touch handset featuring a brilliant 3.2” high resolution display, a 5MP camera with flash and video recording, and preinstalled social networking apps for a smoothly…

• 

  Ruminations of a Programmer

• List Algebras and the fixpoint combinator Mu

  Debasish Ghosh

  24 Jan 2012 | 12:27 am

  In my last post on recursive types and fixed point combinator, we saw how the type equations of the form a = F(a), where F is the type constructor have solutions of the form Mu a . F where Mu is the fixed point combinator. Substituting the solution in the original equation, we get ..Mu a . F = F {Mu a . F / a}where the rhs indicates substitution of all free a's in F by Mu a . F.Using this we also got the type equation for ListInt as ..ListInt = Mu a . Unit + Int x aIn this post we view the same problem from a category theory point of view. This post assumes understanding of quite a bit of…

• Event Sourcing, Akka FSMs and functional domain models

  Debasish Ghosh

  15 Jan 2012 | 8:54 am

  I blogged on Event Sourcing and functional domain models earlier. In this post I would like to share more of my thoughts on the same subject and how with a higher level of abstraction you can make your domain aggregate boundary more resilient and decoupled from external references.When we talk about a domain model, the Aggregate takes the centerstage. An aggregate is a core abstraction that represents the time invariant part of the domain. It's an embodiment of all states that the aggregate can be in throughout its lifecycle in the system. So, it's extremely important that we take every pain…

• Learning the type level fixpoint combinator Mu

  Debasish Ghosh

  7 Jan 2012 | 2:13 pm

  I blogged on Mu, type level fixpoint combinator some time back. I discussed how Mu can be implemented in Scala and how you can use it to derive a generic model for catamorphism and some cool type level data structures. Recently I have been reading TAPL by Benjamin Pierce that gives a very thorough treatment of the theories and implementation semantics of types in a programming language. And Mu we meet again. Pierce does a very nice job of explaining how Mu does for types what Y does for values. In this post, I will discuss my understanding of Mu from a type theory point of view much of what…

• 

  9lessons Programming Blog

• CSS3 Logo Design

  22 Jan 2012 | 11:59 pm

  Back then we used graphic design softwares like photoshop to design logos and icons. But now we can design almost anything using the power of CSS3. Designing logos and icons using Cascading Style Sheets will make your site load faster than using images. Today i am going discuss how to design CSS3 logo using basic properties. Read more »

• Jquery AnchorCloud Expanding Link Plugin.

  9 Jan 2012 | 1:28 am

  Introducing a new jQuery AnchorCloud Link Identifier plugin, This helps make better and enrich link expanding system for your web content pages. This plugin developed using yahoo query language(YQL) for extracting website content like page title and description. First version supports we included Youtube and Vimeo, next release we are planning to include some more popular video and photo services. Read more »

• Jquery Notification Plugin.

  7 Jan 2012 | 11:56 pm

  Introducing a new jQuery notification plugin, it helps better and enrich message notification system for your web application. This plugin contains four types of notification systems such as Success, Error, Warning and Information with rich user interface. Very easy to implement just follow the steps. Read more »

• Amazon EC2 Multi Domain Setup and Technology Behind 9lessons

  26 Dec 2011 | 1:26 am

  Recent days I received lots for requests from my readers that asked to me few questions about 9lessons.info hosting and CMS technology. This post explains you how do I setup my domains + sub domains with Blogger and Amazon EC2 hosting. How to setup multi domains setup in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud using htaccess file. Read more »

• jQuery Mobile Framework Tutorial.

  18 Dec 2011 | 11:57 pm

  Jquery mobile framework helps you to develop rich web based mobile applications. In this tutorial, we explained basic things such as theme selection, library usage, design pages, page links and Transition animations. Its very lightweight code, simple and flexible, it supports all popular smartphone and table platforms. Use it and enrich your mobile web applications. Read more »

• 

  Tamir Khason - Just code

• Self installable and runnable service or how to make generic service and console hybrid

  Tamir

  24 Jan 2012 | 5:08 am

  Frankly, I thought that one of basic things in windows development, such as “debagability” and “installability” of services,  were changed for the last 10 years in development environments. However I was disappointed to discover, that nothing actually changed. You still cannot build easy to debug (in command line) service, which is also can be installed without special additional tools. Even ServiceName/ServiceNameInstaller trick, is specific for the current assembly and cannot be used if your base class is not the one you are really using. This is not the only approach. Also,…

• Video encoder and metadata reading by using Windows Media Foundation

  Tamir

  10 Aug 2011 | 4:42 pm

  At 1996-1997, together with Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft released API to work with media content (for example movies). They used to call it Quartz. This was very convenience set of interfaces and thus was widely used by industry. Now we call it DirectShow. Years passed, but DirectShow remains the same. It worked and worked very good. A couple of years ago Microsoft decided that change required and start to design new COM-based multimedia framework for Windows Vista, 7 and 8. They called it Media Foundation. This framework is much more generic and extensible, but also much more intricate.

• RSA private key import from PEM format in C#

  Tamir

  13 Jun 2011 | 4:14 pm

  First of all, I want to apologies for not writing. From one hand, this is not a good think for me to disappeared from development community horizons, from other hand, I am investing all my time into our better feature, which is good thing. There are too much things were done during last two years. And the good news are that we already delivered whatever was promised to deliver and know for sure that we are able to deliver even more in the future. But let’s come into business. First of all I have huge pipeline of interesting articles to share with you, second, some people from my team are…

• Visual Studio Face-to-Face battle

  Tamir

  13 Apr 2010 | 7:05 am

  Yesterday Visual Studio 2010 was released. This is very exciting, however from the moment I played with very first preview versions I had concerns regarding the performance of it code editor. So today I had some time to perform small face-to-face battle between different versions of Visual Studio – 2005, 2008 and 2010 (Sorry, I did not found VS2002 to test). Environment I used very slow machine with 256Mb of RAM running Windows XP as a reference for comparison. First of all I installed each one of those programs. I used customized installation to install only C# programming modules. Then I…

• Quick IT tip: How to build bootable USB stick

  Tamir

  7 Oct 2009 | 6:55 am

  Because of my main job and lack of human resources there, I invest less and less in community. Thus I lost my MVP title. Sorry, guys. Also a ton of management tasks in big company prevents me from actual coding. However I am still able to find some time for doing “real” things such as Windows Embedded Standard 2011 image building. Thus today I will explain how to build bootable flash USB disk with a couple of simple commands and without using special utilities.   Why to use bootable USB instead of regular CD or DVD ROM? Well, it is more convenience, takes less storage, faster and…

• 

  Web business. Web startups. - Karol Zielinski Blog » Web business. Web startups. – Karol Zielinski Blog

• What a small company can do in one year?

  Karol Zielinski

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:38 am

  Our company – PayLane, after first year of hard working. Have a look at this anniversary infographic. Hope you like it. Full infographic could be found here: What a small company can do in one year? (anniversay infographic)

• Zappos and managing data breach [good article]

  Karol Zielinski

  24 Jan 2012 | 4:07 am

  Several days ago Zappos (well-known online shoe retailer with brilliant reputation) announced the data breach in their systems/databases. How did they do it? In an email from founder and CEO Tony Hsieh. Let’s have a look at the great example of managing data breach. Really good article: Zappos is giving us a lesson on managing a data breach

• Top ten reasons why large companies fail to keep their best talent [good article]

  Karol Zielinski

  4 Jan 2012 | 2:07 pm

  Large companies always had a problem with keeping their best employees with them. There are lots of reasons why. Here you can find some of them. Honestly I need to agree with most of them. Really good article: Top 10 reasons why large companies fail to keep their best talent

• Credit cards in numbers

  Karol Zielinski

  20 Dec 2011 | 7:35 am

  Great infographic about payment industry (specifically about credit cards). I really love it. Brought to you by Across the Board & PayLane

• Design blogs that I’d love to subscribe, but I won’t

  Karol Zielinski

  21 Nov 2011 | 4:26 pm

  There are so many great design blogs around the web. I used to subscribe some of them for a long time. However I had to quit. Not because I don’t like them anymore. It’s because I don’t have a time to look at all these great design projects. Let me recommend some of these sites. behance.net Behance Network, the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work youthedesigner.com You The Designer is a graphic design blog that strives to be on the cutting edge of design news, tips, trends, tutorials, resources, and much more! 990px.pl In Polish, but so what. It’s about…

• 

  Jolicloud Blog

• 2012, The Year of the Cloud

  Tariq Krim

  19 Jan 2012 | 9:10 am

  TweetHappy New Year and welcome to the new Jolicloud! I am very excited to introduce the new Jolicloud which has been in development since last summer. With the new Jolicloud we are still pursuing the same idea: to combine the infinite power of the cloud with the most simple and elegant user interface. With Joli OS, we’ve already made 750 000 low cost computers look cooler and better connected to the cloud. With Jolicloud we introduced the first consumer platform designed for the cloud, with a portable desktop and more than 1500 free webapps. But with the success of mobile devices and the…

• Update on our beta

  Jolicloud Team

  15 Dec 2011 | 9:53 am

  TweetUpdate: Thanks everyone for your huge interest! We are closing this post but don’t worry, we continue to roll out the beta and stay tuned on Twitter for another chance to get an instant invite! After announcing the new Jolicloud, we started sending out invites some weeks ago. We are still rolling out to the thousands of you who signed up but if you can’t wait any longer leave us your Jolicloud username in the comments section of this blog post. Don’t forget you need to have signed up on beta.jolicloud.com first. Thank you for your patience! Tweet

• Get Us Nominated for the Best Design 2011 Crunchie!

  Jolicloud Team

  2 Dec 2011 | 11:58 am

  TweetMy name is Martin Karasek and I am the lead designer here at Jolicloud. At Jolicloud we have a great passion for design. We love simplicity and elegant interfaces. Through our design we strive to make complex stuff simple and beautiful. From the beginning of our project we have worked with world class designers like Jon Hicks, Benjamin de Cock, Cat Oshiro, Ian Hart, Simon Rohrbach, Michael Villar and William Wilkinson in order to bring the best design to our products. Here is a sample of some of our favorite works. If you like what we do please nominate Jolicloud for the Best Design…

• Announcing the new Jolicloud. Your cloud, beautifully organized.

  Jolicloud Team

  27 Oct 2011 | 10:19 am

  TweetDear Joliclouders, This summer we announced that we were working on a new product and more than 35 000 people registered for the beta without knowing the details. We’ve been amazed and humbled by such a response. Today we want to offer more details about what we have been working on over the last months: the new Jolicloud platform. With the first Jolicloud platform, we wanted to give anyone access to the cloud. We created a very simple OS and the first Web app store with access to the coolest applications online. 600 000 users and more than 15 million apps installed later, we decided…

• Some news about Joli OS

  Jolicloud Team

  19 Jul 2011 | 1:56 pm

  TweetIt’s been a while since you’ve had an update from us but we’ve been working hard on something big. We will tell you a bit about that very soon! In the meantime, we have some updates for you on Joli OS. Joli OS Updates We’re happy to announce that Firefox is back in the App Center and it’s Firefox 5! Remember like all the apps in the Jolicloud App Center, it will be automatically synchronized on all your devices. Some other native apps have also been upgraded including: Adobe AIR 2.6.0 Banshee 2.0.1 Dropbox Client 0.6.8 Gimp 2.6.8 Hulu Desktop 0.9.8 Skype 2.2.0.35 Thunderbird…

• 

  Goyelloblog

• Happy birthday Commodore 64

  Marcin Dembowski

  26 Jan 2012 | 5:35 am

  “Holly Crap, how old am I? I just became 30 this year! I have no wife, no money, but still many fans and people who love me, even if there are other good-looking and rich guys around”. Commodore 64 could probably say this if he was a human being. How did a home PC look 30 years ago and how does the same computer look today? I would like to invite you to my time-machine, where I will present you some of my experience with the Commodore 64 – The first and last successful home computer in the universe! The first Commodore 64 was introduced in January 1982. On YouTube you can…

• The 7 ground rules of communication to became a good Manager

  Maciej Greń

  26 Jan 2012 | 3:57 am

  http://www.sxc.hu As a Manager you have to cope with people. This is your daily bread. The way you communicate with others can be a key to either your success or failure. People tend to block themselves, refuse to cooperate when their Manager talks to them in a wrong way. A good Manager has to understand a few ground rules that always have to be applied while communicating with other people, and here they are! Respect the person you talk to It is a very simple fact. If you want a person to do something for you, you have to respect him because this is up to his good will to listen to you or…

• Quick start with method caching using Spring 3.1 and Ehcache

  Rafał Borowiec

  20 Jan 2012 | 6:17 am

  A while ago I wrote about method caching in Java using Ehcache Annotations for Spring. However, Spring 3.1 release, among many enhancements, brings native support for method caching with so-called cache abstraction. The main usage scenario of cache abstraction is to reduce the number of expensive executions and/or slow methods returning the same result for given parameters. The usage of Spring cache abstraction consists of two aspects: cache declaration and configuration. Spring provides many ways for declaring and configuring caching in an application: annotation-based, XML-based or mixed.

• How Personas can help you clear the fog

  Peter Horsten

  19 Jan 2012 | 9:01 am

  Just imagine yourself taking part in a lively discussion at some birthday party. Everybody is telling great stories about recent holidays. We ask some polite questions and at least pretend to share the same excitement. What’s wrong with it? Honestly, may not be much as long as everybody likes it. But this shouldn’t happen when the business owner explains the development team what he wants to achieve, what he needs. Unfortunately, too often the opposite is the reality. A thick fog remains, causing the business owner to feel understood (while that’s not necessarily the truth)…

• How to NOT store user credentials in a database

  Marcin Dembowski

  10 Jan 2012 | 2:54 pm

  Sometimes you need to create an application with your own role and user management module. In most cases you are creating it in a simple and understandable way. That way the user information with a password is stored in the database in the same table named User. In this post I will show you why this solution is not safe, why you should omit such structures and how to fix them. I will not discuss which authentication and/or authorization services and/or existing libraries you should use in your application. I will only focus on the reason why the described solution is not safe and how to make…

• 

  Learnivore!

• RailsCasts #150 Rails Metal (revised) (Railscasts - paid)

  26 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Rails metal may have been removed in Rails 3, but it is possible to bypass the entire Rails stack through middleware as shown in this episode. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews!

• RailsCasts #319 Rails Middleware Walkthrough (Railscasts - paid)

  22 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Here I describe each Rack middleware that is included in a Rails app which will give you a better understanding of what a request goes through behind the scenes before it hits your application. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews!

• RailsCasts #318 Upgrading to Rails 3.2 (Railscasts - free)

  22 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Rails 3.2 sports many new features including automatic explain queries, tagged logging, key-value store in Active Record, improve migration generator and more. Learn all about these new features in this episode. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews!

• RailsCasts #72 Adding an Environment (revised) (Railscasts - paid)

  18 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Rails comes with three environments: development, test, and production, but it is easy to add your own. Here I show how to add a separate staging environment and how to start up Rails under this. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews!

• Episode 4: Context In JavaScript (Watch Me Code - paid)

  16 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pm

  When was the last time JavaScript's "this" worked the way you thought it did? You have an object with a function, and you call "this" to get some data from the it only to find that the data isn't there because "this" isn't the object you thought it was! In this episode, we'll look at all function invocations and how they manipulate "this". We'll also see some common scenarios that trip people up, like passing an object's method as a callback. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews!

• 

  Tales from the bits

• 10 Online Marketing Mistakes

  gb

  18 Jan 2012 | 11:13 am

  Online retail sales are booming.The annual global e-commerce sales for 2012 is estimated to be $820 billion.  In the first half of 2011, online advertise revenues rose 23.2 percent—to a record $14.9 billion, according to figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.  Companies need to retain and expand their online customers. Many companies fail to do that because they do not understand e-commerce sales. The 10 common mistakes that companies do in their online marketing strategy are:  1. Unclear e-strategy. Some companies think that their e-strategy is to have a web site and…

• Software Project Management Basics – Part 2

  gb

  14 Jan 2012 | 11:15 am

  Roles in Project Management Before we go any further we will define the different roles in project management. The Project Manager The project manager has responsibility for a specific project(s). The Project Manager’s purpose is to achieve the project goals within the predefined constraints of time, money and quality. The project manager is the main communicator between the various project stakeholders and the project team. Within the role of Project Manager is also to manage expectations. Every group of stakeholders may have different expectations from the project (system). Failing…

• Best Office Suite for iPad 2

  gb

  14 Jan 2012 | 4:50 am

  When you are on the move you need to make the most of your time. I prefer to carry around my iPad 2 and not my notebook. Making that decision I needed to select an Office suite to be able to edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Of course I have to option to create a VPN and work directly with my desktop computer but there is a risk that the connection may not be available all the time. To mitigate this risk I decided to install an office suite in my iPad.  I reviewed several applications before I choose the application I am currently using. Numbers is an innovative…

• iPad 2 3G Europe Travel

  gb

  18 Dec 2011 | 2:47 pm

  We just returned from a trip to London. Both myself and my wife, Alina, have an iPad 2 3G 64GB each. Remember to take with you the proper power adapter changer. iPad 2 is a must have travelling assistant. As soon as we arrived to London, we purchased a 3G SIM for iPad 2. Just choose any provider that has pay as you go option for iPad 2 data.A small investment of around US $30. I had 3GB of data available. It is a good thing that iPad 2 is not locked to any provider, so changing the SIM is very easy. Alternatively you may use WiFi but I didn’t want to take the risk of being in an area…

• Software Project Management Basics – Part 1

  gb

  1 Dec 2011 | 7:49 am

  This article aims to provide a very brief introduction to Software Project Management. It is the first of  a series of articles about project management. The articles include tools and templates to help you manage a software project. Software Project Management (SPM) is the planning and leading of a temporary endeavor undertaken to produce a software product. Software Project Plan is a part of Systems (or Software) Development Life Cycle (SDLC). In a nutshell, SDLC is the process and the model used to create or evolve a software product. The SDLC starts with an idea. If the idea is…

• 

  C Languages

• Weekend Stuff: Start The Android For .Net Developers Series

  13 Jan 2012 | 3:09 am

  Hallelujah! Just stumbled upon this beautiful 8 part series on Android development for .Net developers

• CNN: Learn To Code, Get A Job

  12 Jan 2012 | 5:53 pm

  I never knew that programming was considered this much of a niche profession

• Visual Studio Magazine 2012 Survey Results: Good Year For Skilled .Net Developers

  7 Jan 2012 | 12:46 pm

  The writers at Visual Studio Magazine agree with me on one of my previous posts that .Net developers are living in the good times inspite of the bad economy.

• SOPA: Stifling Innovation And Pursuit Of Sharing Information On The Internet

  31 Dec 2011 | 1:02 pm

  This will take us 10 steps backward in this day and age when we badly need innovation and the freedom to pursue creativity and sharing of information.

• Free eBook Download: OWASP Top Ten For .Net Developers

  31 Dec 2011 | 4:23 am

  This is a must read for .Net developers that contains an indepth study on Injection attacks, XSS, Broken Authentiion and Session Management, Insecure Direct Object References, CSRF, Security Misconfiguration, Insecure Cryptographic Storage, Failure to restrict URL access, Insufficient , Transport Layer Protection, Unvalidated redirects and Forwards

• 

  RBDevZone

• Real Software Developer Evangelist

  paul

  17 Jan 2012 | 10:20 am

  I am excited to announce that starting February 1, 2012, I will be joining Real Software as their Developer Evangelist. For more information, view the blog post at LogicalVue.com: http://www.logicalvue.com/2012/01/changes-at-logicalvue-for-2012/

• UltraUpdater 1.4.0 Now Available

  paul

  17 Nov 2011 | 8:11 am

  It hadn’t been updated in a while, but UltraUpdater 1.4.0 is now available.  This all-RealBasic library adds auto-update capability to your Real Studio applications.  It can check an XML file on your server to see if a new version is available, show the changes and let the user download and run the installer. It’s available here at RBDevZone: UltraUpdater The demo app shows you how it works.  Full source code is included with purchase.  Previous purchases can get this update for free.  Eventually, I’ll have a Real Studio Web Edition app to handle this, but for now if…

• CodeVue Now Available

  paul

  1 Nov 2011 | 2:58 pm

  CodeVue 1.0, a code snippet manager for Real Studio, is now available in the Mac App Store .  It’s on sale now for the next two weeks for only $4.99! CodeVue features: Full syntax highlighting Manage any number of code snippets Searching Copy/Paste Create new snippet from clipboard New features planned for CodeVue include: Sharing code between computers using Dropbox Font selection Sharing code online with other users Support for syntax highlighting of other languages View CodeVue in the Mac App Store.

• Storm is now available

  paul

  31 Aug 2011 | 8:04 pm

  Storm is an object-relational mapping framework for your Real Studio projects that use SQLite (REALSQLDatabase). Using an ORM such as Storm allows you to simplify your database applications. Benefits include: Access your database without using SQL Map classes to your database tables without writing any code Simple syntax Transaction management Serialization and deserialization to XML Optional SQL logging Automatic processing of database schema updates Visit the Storm web site for more information: http://storm.logicalvue.com

• SQLVue Lite now available in the Mac App Store

  paul

  5 May 2011 | 10:55 am

  SQLVue Lite is now available in the Mac App Store at the low price of free. The Lite version of SQLVue works exactly the same as SQLVue with one limitation: it cannot modify the database With SQLVue Lite, you can view all your tables, views, data and even write SQL SELECT statements. It’s a great way to work with SQLite and REALSQLDatabase. And if you find you need to also modify your databases, you can purchase the full version for only $20. SQLVue Lite (free) SQLVue ($20)

• 

  Rss | PHP on Google App Engine

• 28 Jan 2012 | 4:47 am

  28 Jan 2012 | 4:47 am

  ...

• 

  Free IT - Software & Development Magazines and Downloads from alltop.tradepub.com

• HTML5: Background Processes with Web Workers

  23 Jan 2012 | 1:50 pm

  The course demonstrates practical examples for detecting web workers support, setting up workers, implementing shared workers, and handling errors. Exercise files are included with the course.Topic focus:Understanding API differences in shared workersAlong with the free video training tutorials you will also receive monthly offers, tips, and insider information you won't hear elsewhere--including special discounts extended to newsletter subscribers.After taking advantage of the free video training, you can access all of the video tutorials by becoming a member of the Online Training…

• Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta Preview

  23 Jan 2012 | 1:50 pm

  The course covers the new Book module and integration with Blurb, an online book printing service; the video playback and editing options, including the ability to color, tone, export, and publish movies; and the image editing enhancements in Lightroom 4, including the Image Adjustment Brush for correcting color and noise.Topics include:Why use Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta?Video playback and trimmingEditing the color and tone of a video fileOrganizing video files in a Lightroom databaseCapturing a still image from a video fileExporting or publishing a video to your hard driveAlong with the free…

• Drupal 7: Creating and Editing Custom Themes

  23 Jan 2012 | 1:50 pm

  The course explores how Drupal default themes are configured and structured and how to install and edit a theme. The course also explores the tools a designer needs to create a Drupal 7 theme, using HTML, CSS, PHP, and Drupal templates, or migrate an existing Drupal 6 theme to Drupal 7. Exercise files are included with this course.Topics include:Using the Devel and Theme Developer modulesExploring the Appearance interfaceUsing the Backup Migrate module to create content for a web siteEnabling cachingAlong with the free video training tutorials you will also receive monthly offers, tips, and…

• Joomla! 1.6: Creating and Editing Custom Templates

  23 Jan 2012 | 2:00 am

  The course also covers advanced styling techniques, such as creating multiple layouts within the same Joomla! template, configuring menus and submenus, and implementing template overrides and template styles. Exercise files accompany the course.Topics include:Understanding Joomla!Template filesGetting the HTML comp ready for conversionConverting from index.html to index.phpInstalling the package fileAlong with the free video training tutorials you will also receive monthly offers, tips, and insider information you won't hear elsewhere--including special discounts extended to newsletter…

• The Business Value of Next-Generation ERP: Perspectives for IT Management in Manufacturing

  17 Jan 2012 | 11:20 am

  Written by Martin Butler Research, analysts in business technology and IT systems, and Epicor Software, a worldwide leader in enterprise solutions, this report will help your organization understand in simple business language how you can profit from the latest, agile ERP technologies.Business Value of Next-Generation ERP - Perspectives for IT Managers shows IT professionals in Manufacturing how ERP can help:support unique business processes with flexible service-oriented-architecture (SOA) technologycontrol enterprise-wide security and audit trailsimprove end user efficiency with ease of use…

• 

  Latest from developerFusion

• Article: The HTML5 History API and ASP.NET MVC

  Dan Maharry

  27 Jan 2012 | 2:19 am

  The HTML 5 History API is one of the newer kids on the HTML 5 block. This article based on chapter 4 of HTML5 for .NET Developers shows you one way of getting history integrated with your .NET server-side web applications.

• Article: An Introduction To Practical AOP Using PostSharp

  Brady Gaster

  23 Jan 2012 | 8:03 am

  In this article, Brady Gaster introduces the concept of Aspect Oriented Programming and how it can reduce code smells in your work. He uses PostSharp to refactor out logging, timing, transaction and GUI update code into separate and automatically executing Aspects

• Book: Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation

  Dorothy Graham, Mark Fewster

  21 Jan 2012 | 10:44 am

  Software test automation has moved beyond a luxury to become a necessity. Applications and systems have grown ever larger and more complex, and manual testing simply cannot keep up. As technology changes, and more organizations move into agile development, testing must adapt—and quickly. Test automation is essential, but poor automation is wasteful—how do you know where your efforts will take you?

• Article: Making Tables More Accessible With HTML5

  Dan Maharry

  20 Jan 2012 | 2:36 am

  For those who are visually challenged and depend on technology such as screen readers to translate the Web from a visual to an aural experience, tables represent a significant challenge. This extract from HTML5 24 Hour Trainer looks at a number of additional tags and attributes that can make tables and their content more accessible to all.

• Article: Testing In An Agile World: The Heart Of A Developer

  Malcolm Anderson

  16 Jan 2012 | 6:55 am

  In this article, Malcolm Anderson looks at the roles of developer and tester in a classic team scenario and how a tester’s role and mindset, as well as a developer’s and manager’s to the tester, must evolve to fit effectively within an agile development team.

• 

  Software Developers India

• The Best ROMs in Droid Application Development, Handpicked!

  admin

  1 Jan 2012 | 11:16 pm

  For many of us, half the fun of owning an Android phone lies in the freedom to mould its OS the way we want. Then again, whole of this customization would be rendered impossible, if not for a ROM that supports modifications to the OS. So here’s a roundup on some of the best Droid ROMs out there (for the Droid X and Droid 2) with the merits and demerits of each laid open. Apex is by far the best when it comes to battery life and functionality. This ROM is lightening fast and exceptionally stable, and has a whole range of themes to its credit. With an amazing mix of speed and customization,…

• Custom Website Design: It can’t get any better!

  admin

  9 Nov 2011 | 12:08 am

  Ages ago, business was limited to marketplace activities. Then came the internet and wowed everyone with possibilities unheard of before. Today, businesses can’t do without: 1. A strong internet mapping and 2. Custom Website Designing Custom Website Design When it comes to revenue generation, custom website designing is right at the top. Every aspect of a custom designed website—from custom codes to website layout—is built around crucial business factors like target audience, buyer groups, market trends and so on. This makes your business appeal right away to the most productive…

• iPhone Application Development: Picking out the right iPhone Developer

  admin

  31 Aug 2011 | 11:26 pm

  Ever since the launch of the iPhone, the world’s never been the same. On its way up, the Apple iPhone went from being the talk of the town to world’s most preferred gadget. It sent the world in frenzy, got everyone talking, and had iPhone Developers queued up in numbers. Today selecting an iPhone developer isn’t easy with thousands of iPhone Development Companies occupying the markets. Each of them claims to have built the best iPhone apps in the business. But the point is: how to choose a developer for your iPhone Application Development? To begin with, understand your iPhone…

• Why Your Business Needs Social Media Attention

  admin

  5 Aug 2011 | 1:17 am

  Social media is no longer limited to increasing business web presence. Rather, it’s a full-blown marketing and advertizing medium. That’s why from small businesses to big enterprises, everyone looks up to Social Media Optimization, or in other words, generating traffic through social media sites. Key Social Media Advantages: Client Engagement Social media strategies have a great trait—they’re engaging. Users can be involved on multiple levels, such as making new services/product announcements, running social media campaigns, product promotions, enhancements, etc. Worldwide Reach…

• Advantages of Development in PHP

  admin

  21 Jul 2011 | 1:13 am

  PHP is the most-loved web development platform today, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s an open source language, is quick, stable, secure, and easy to program. PHP enables complex web application development for Web 2.0 websites and enterprise level ecommerce web solutions. PHP executes code from HTML scripts and runs them on server. This ensures a high degree of security.PHP applications utilize very little system resources and are quick to upload and execute. On the compatibility front, few languages can be a match for PHP. PHP programming offers amazing connectivity to multiple…

• 

  Systems We Make

• Spark: Cluster Computing with Working Sets

  Hari

  6 Jan 2012 | 2:19 pm

  One of the aspects you can’t miss even as you just begin reading this paper is the strong scent of functional programming that the design of Spark bears. The use of FP idioms is quite widespread across the architecture of Spark such as the abilityContinue reading

• Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing

  Hari

  20 Dec 2011 | 12:27 pm

  Kafka, a system developed at LinkedIn, is essentially a messaging system that is designed to support aggregation of high throughput log messages arriving from different applications. Why would a traditional messaging system not be a good fit for log processing? Typical enterprise messaging systems tendContinue reading

• Windows Azure Storage : A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency

  Hari

  24 Nov 2011 | 2:32 pm

  Windows Azure Storage is a key component of the Windows Azure Cloud platform that offers an infinite disk in the cloud. It’s been in production since November 2008 and is used heavily within Microsoft in addition to being available as a public cloud service. ItContinue reading

• Thialfi: A Client Notification Service for Internet-Scale Applications

  Hari

  29 Oct 2011 | 3:51 pm

  The Scandinavian mythology regards Thialfi, a swift runner, as the attendent of Thor, the god of war. Motivated by the swiftness that qualifies Thialfi, was perhaps why the folks at Google named their message delivery system (it delivers notifications at sub-second intervals!) after him. TheContinue reading

• Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming

  Hari

  8 Oct 2011 | 12:26 pm

  This paper from folks at Spotify primarily focuses on how they use P2P techniques in their platform. The service is not web-based, but instead uses a proprietary client and protocol. At the heart of the system is this custom music streaming protocol that is optimizedContinue reading

• 

  Raw Syntax

• Learn Emacs: Swap Windows

  Eric Himmelreich

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:33 am

  When I use Emacs in GUI mode, I set it up to have two 80 column windows side by side. It’s extremely convention when you need to look at one section of the code while writing another. For instance, you can have the spec file side by side with the code when doing TDD. Sometimes I want to swap the windows. This kind of functionality does not come built in with emacs. I found the swap-windows function that I use in Steve Yegge’s .emacs file. (defun swap-windows () "If you have 2 windows, it swaps them." (interactive) (cond ((not (= (count-windows) 2)) (message "You…

• Troubleshooting your Emacs Config

  Eric Himmelreich

  22 Jan 2012 | 9:26 pm

  Up to this point my Learn Emacs series has been all about how to do cool stuff in emacs. One of my personal favorites is align-regexp. A while back that stopped working for me. Now I get an error: Wrong type argument: markerp, 0. Emacs doesn’t always do what I mean. First Remove your Config Whether you use a single .emacs file or a ~/.emacs.d/ directory it is time to remove it. Personally I keep ~/.emacs.d/ symlinked to my emacs.d github repo so it iss quite easy to remove the symlink. Alternatively you can start emacs with the --no-init-file option, to skip loading your files. The…

• Stop Programming

  Eric Himmelreich

  4 Jan 2012 | 2:25 pm

  I’ve got some ideas on how you can improve your programming by not programming. Try something new this year. Simplifying Too Much About 4 years ago, I fell in love with minimalism and tried to get rid of most of my possessions. I went as far as selling my saxophone, (3) bass guitars, and bass rig. This meant not playing music any more. At the time I decided that playing music was nonessential since it did not relate to programming and didn’t make any money. I also sold my bicycle (which meant no more cycling). Pretty soon after that I was just a guy who programmed at work and…

• Building a Gaming PC

  Eric Himmelreich

  21 Dec 2011 | 9:34 am

  I recently built a gaming pc from parts, as my laptop was struggling to run the latest games even on very low settings. I did some googling and came to the obvious conclusion that building a desktop for gaming is way cheaper than trying to buy a new laptop, and the desktop gets way better performance. In fact, this makes it so that I can stretch my laptop for a few more years, as it’s only used for web programming at the moment (and it’s plenty fast due to its SSD). At the end of this article I’ll be listing all the parts I used for my build. Before Building a PC You will…

• Sometimes Side Projects Fail

  Eric Himmelreich

  9 Dec 2011 | 10:44 am

  I’ve worked on a few side projects over the years. Sometimes they’ve turned out well, and other times I stopped working on them. How do you know when it’s time to throw in the towel and when it’s time to push through? Roughly a year ago a friend and I were working on a bill splitting system. It was supposed to solve the problem of splitting bills between friends. More specifically, splitting regularly occuring or one time expenses between roommates. Rather than worrying about having cash, or writing a check and waiting for it to cash, we built a system which…

• 

  Systems We Make

• Spark: Cluster Computing with Working Sets

  Hari

  6 Jan 2012 | 2:19 pm

  One of the aspects you can’t miss even as you just begin reading this paper is the strong scent of functional programming that the design of Spark bears. The use of FP idioms is quite widespread across the architecture of Spark such as the abilityContinue reading

• Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing

  Hari

  20 Dec 2011 | 12:27 pm

  Kafka, a system developed at LinkedIn, is essentially a messaging system that is designed to support aggregation of high throughput log messages arriving from different applications. Why would a traditional messaging system not be a good fit for log processing? Typical enterprise messaging systems tendContinue reading

• Windows Azure Storage : A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency

  Hari

  24 Nov 2011 | 2:32 pm

  Windows Azure Storage is a key component of the Windows Azure Cloud platform that offers an infinite disk in the cloud. It’s been in production since November 2008 and is used heavily within Microsoft in addition to being available as a public cloud service. ItContinue reading

• Thialfi: A Client Notification Service for Internet-Scale Applications

  Hari

  29 Oct 2011 | 3:51 pm

  The Scandinavian mythology regards Thialfi, a swift runner, as the attendent of Thor, the god of war. Motivated by the swiftness that qualifies Thialfi, was perhaps why the folks at Google named their message delivery system (it delivers notifications at sub-second intervals!) after him. TheContinue reading

• Spotify: Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming

  Hari

  8 Oct 2011 | 12:26 pm

  This paper from folks at Spotify primarily focuses on how they use P2P techniques in their platform. The service is not web-based, but instead uses a proprietary client and protocol. At the heart of the system is this custom music streaming protocol that is optimizedContinue reading

• 

  Software Product Development | Software Testing Tutorial | Software Process

• What are different characteristics of Certified Manager of Software Testing (CMST)?

  Sunflower

  28 Jan 2012 | 2:15 am

  CMST or certified manager of software testing as it is known in expanded form, sets up a standard for the certified professionals and individuals which are working or will be working in the field of software testing.CHARACTERISTICS OF CMSQ- These standards are worldwide and are meant to be followed everywhere irrespective of the place where the certified individuals and professionals are working.

• What are different concepts of Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)?

  Sunflower

  27 Jan 2012 | 12:36 am

  Certified software quality analyst or CSQA as it is known in short form, is the certification that checks the software quality analysing capabilities and skills of an individual who applies for it. Certified software quality analyst certification is gaining fast popularity in the field of software testing these days. Number of CSQA aspirants is growing day by day. More and more skilled

• What are different characteristics of Certified Manager of Software Quality (CMSQ)?

  Sunflower

  26 Jan 2012 | 1:36 am

  The Certified Manager of Software Quality or CMSQ as it is abbreviated to, has worked out a great deal in establishing a standard for the assessment or determination of the capabilities of the individuals who are concerned with the development of software quality. CHARACTERISTICS OF CERTIFIED MANAGER OF SOFTWARE QUALITY (CMSQ)1. The certified manager of software quality certification provides a

• What are different characteristics of Certified Association in Software Quality (CASQ)?

  Sunflower

  25 Jan 2012 | 1:53 am

  CASQ is the abbreviated form of Certified Association in Software Quality. Day by day the competition is increasing in the market. Therefore it becomes necessary to incorporate ability in the management by virtue of which it can easily distinguish the skilled individuals and professionals. CASQ certification lays down a basic foundation for understanding of principles of quality assurance as well

• What are different characteristics of Capability Maturity Model (CMM)?

  Sunflower

  24 Jan 2012 | 1:04 am

  Capability maturity model or CMM as it is often abbreviated. It is a development model developed after a prolonged study of the data collected from various organizations from all over the world. Characteristics of Capability Maturity Model1.The development of this model was funded by the USDD (United States department of defence). 2.The capability maturity model became the foundation for the

• 

  Use The Index, Luke! blogs

• Partial Results

  Markus Winand

  12 Jan 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Todays installment opens the Chapter about efficiently fetching partial results—that is, whenever you don’t need all the rows, but just a few from the beginning. These kind of queries are every often used to show lists in a page wise manner. The installment consists of two parts: the chapter intro and the first section about the Top-N queries. Continue Reading

• Indexing Group By

  Markus Winand

  11 Dec 2011 | 5:00 pm

  Todays update delivers the last part of the Chapter on sorting and grouping. It is a short demonstration how to use indexing for a pipelined group by. Pipelined order by and group by are the prerequisite for the optimization methods described in the next chapter on partial results. Besides that, you should definitely have a look a my new website. My New Website Read Group By Article

• Indexing ASC/DESC and NULLS FIRST/LAST

  Markus Winand

  2 Dec 2011 | 5:00 pm

  Todays update explains how to control the index order so that queries using ASC/DESC or NULLS FIRST/LAST specifications can also be executed as piplined order by. Continue Reading

• Pipelined ORDER BY: The Third Power

  Markus Winand

  25 Nov 2011 | 12:17 pm

  Todays installment is about the third power of indexing: satisfying order by clauses by an index—thus, preventing the need to sort the data. The installment consists of two parts: the chapter intro and the first section about the interactions between the order by and the where clause. Continue Reading

• Clustered Indexes and Index-Organized Tables

  Markus Winand

  7 Nov 2011 | 5:00 pm

  The previous installment explained the index-only scan to prevent the table access after an index lookup. Todays update extends the idea and elaborates on the question if the separate table structure is required at all, if the index covers all table columns. Continue Reading

• 

  Codes & More

• Purchase a Comfortable Sofa in UK

  Paula

  27 Jan 2012 | 4:02 am

  A sofa is a convenient piece of furniture and is almost imperative for every home. Whether you wish to relax while watching television or reading a book, you can do so in a comfortable sofa. Purchasing a sofa in UK is not difficult since there are several offline stores that stock large varieties of sofas in different fabrics, styles and utilities. You simply need to visit any such store and pick the sofa that most suits your requirement. Nowadays sofa beds have become a great utility for homes as homeowners can use the spare bed when there are guests. Moreover sofa beds are also great for…

• Spa Breaks: A Temporary Getaway

  Paula

  27 Jan 2012 | 12:49 am

  You have many choices when it comes to spa breaks when you need to get away from it all. It may not be as much time as a full spa holiday, but you can still find just the right temporary getaway that will get you back on track. Not only can you find special pricing on some last minute deals and other promotions, but you can also find the kind of services that you really want in a spa according to season and other details. For instance, if you and some friends need a brief getaway, you can find specials like a Girls Night In for the winter. With a break such as this, you and your girlfriends…

• Going about Pest Control Home

  Paula

  23 Jan 2012 | 11:21 pm

  When you own your home, it is your safe haven provided you practice pest control home. Granted, there are large numbers of responsibilities that come with it. These could range from ensuring the plumbing is working correctly, the electric wiring is fixed properly, and so on. Thus, you would not want to include pests to the list of things that you are already taking care of when it comes to your home. Once you have a pest infestation, you will find that not only could it affect your health but it could also prove harmful to other aspects of your home. That is why it is always important to…

• Campervans Perform Better and Last Longer with Preventative Maintenance

  Paula

  18 Jan 2012 | 11:45 pm

  Campervans offer a fun and convenient way to travel to distant places and see all New Zealand has to offer. Your time is your own and you travel the road with all the conveniences of home. You can travel wherever you want to go and never worry about finding an affordable hotel. Before you purchase your own campervan, you must be willing to make a commitment to keep up with preventative maintenance if you want to get the most out of your vehicle. Campervan New Zealand dealers have a variety of models on sale. Regardless of which one you choose, the salesperson is likely to give you speech…

• The Classic T Shirt

  Paula

  12 Jan 2012 | 8:40 am

  The t shirt is a classic piece of apparel that will never go out of style. There are many options when it comes to this simple yet fashionable piece of clothing. It is important to know exactly how to take full advantage of the classic t-shirt. For casual events, simply wearing a t shirt and jeans is still a very acceptable outfit. Most people prefer a printed shirt, as opposed to just one solid color. Shirts that are printed can have a variety of designs, images, or phrases. Pick one that you can relate to, or that expresses yourself or interests. These are inexpensive and can be found…

• 

  ViralPatel.net

• Convert Arrays to Set in Java

  Viral Patel

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:45 am

  Java Collection API is one of the most useful APIs used in any Java application. In my day to day Java coding routine, I have to deal with these APIs quite often.However sometime while working with Collection API, lot of developers end up writing unnecessary and mostly inefficient code. For example, to convert an Java Array to ArrayList, I have seen people writing loops instead of simple Arrays.asList().Here is a simple writeup on Converting Java Arrays to ArrayList that I wrote a while ago.One of such simple requirement is to convert Java Arrays to Set. While working with Hibernate, I once…

• STOP SOPA JQuery Plugin

  Viral Patel

  18 Jan 2012 | 5:48 am

  Right now, Internet is experiencing the biggest protest since its inception. We have seen people protesting against Companies, Government, Dictators etc. Also Internet has become their voices in form of Twitter & Facebook.But today we saw something completely new. Major websites such as Wikipedia and Google are openly demonstrating their protest against new legislation bills SOPA and PIPA which is right now being voted in U.S. Congress. The Senate will begin voting on January 24th.Well, if you do support the STOPSOPA cause here is a coolest thing to do. Add a black colored STOPSOPA…

• How To Create QR Codes in Java & Servlet

  Viral Patel

  16 Jan 2012 | 11:04 am

  Nowadays, Quick Response (QR) Codes are becoming more and more useful as they have gone mainstream, thanks to the smart phones. Right from the bus shelter, product packaging, home improvement store, automobile, a lot of internet websites are integrating QR Codes on their pages to let people quickly reach them. With increase in number of users of smart phones day by day, the QR codes usage is going up exponentially.Let us see a quick overview of Quick Response (QR) codes and also how to generate these codes in Java.Introduction to QR CodesA QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a…

• Facebook Style Scroll Fixed Header in JQuery

  Viral Patel

  11 Jan 2012 | 6:22 am

  While doing some UI changes of a website, we had to implement a FIX header which remains fix on top of screen while scrolling. Facebook has a similar header which remains on top of content.Now for this, there are number of jQuery plugins available out there! But in our case we weren’t allowed to add any new plugins to the technology stack of application (I know it sucks ). So here is a small JQuery based solution to make a DIV of header fixed on top of the screen while scrolling.Related: Mouse Scroll Events in JQueryThe HTMLBelow is the HTML code. It contain a simple div #header which…

• Create ZIP Files in JavaScript

  Viral Patel

  10 Jan 2012 | 2:44 am

  Zip is a very useful file type if I must say most used. It is the most used file format for data compression and archiving. There are number utilities available to create/generate Zip file. Also most of the programming languages comes up with API supporting to generate Zip files. I have written a couple of articles for zipping/unzipping files in Java and PHP.While browsing internet, I came up to a very interesting website http://jszip.stuartk.co.uk/. This is JavaScript based API to generate Zip files on the fly! It’s very simple to use. All you need to do is to include the jszip…

• 

  Coderholic

• Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Jekyll!

  Ben Dowling

  20 Jan 2012 | 2:00 am

  I've finally given up on Wordpress, and moved this blog over to Jekyll, the "blog aware static site generator". My blog is now 100% static HTML. No database, no dynamic code, and hopefully no downtime the next time one of my posts makes it to the front page of Hacker News! My primary motivation for the move was the fact that wordpress would die every time my blog got a decent amount of traffic, even with WP-SuperCache enabled. That's far from the only benefit though. I don't have to worry about keeping wordpress updated anymore, or it getting hacked (which has happened a few times). Tom…

• My OSX Setup

  Ben Dowling

  9 Oct 2011 | 2:00 am

  After over 10 years of Linux I recently switched to OSX on a MacBook Air. I can't say enough good things about the Air hardware, but it's taken me  a few months to get completely confortable with the operating system. Here are the apps I've settled on, which I think make for a fairly awesome OSX setup: Alfred  Alfred is a powerful launcher, which allows you to start any application simply by pressing Alt-Space and then typing the application name. Alfred also has an inbuilt calculator, which is really handy, and can be used to quickly search google too. Chrome I did try Safari for a while…

• How I got the Turntable.fm Gorilla in less than 48 hours

  Ben Dowling

  13 Sep 2011 | 2:00 am

  Turntable.fm has taken off in a big way. Launching in May, over 140,000 users signed up in the first month. Celebrities regularly hang out there, and Lady GaGa and Kanye West are even investing in the site. For those that haven't tried it out yet (or perhaps can't, more on that shortly) turntable is somewhere that you can listen to great music and discover new artists and songs that you might otherwise not have otherwise come across. The site features a number of rooms, each with a different theme (eg. chillout, dubstep, indie) and in each room there are up to 5 DJs. Every one in a room can…

• Invaluable command line tools for web developers

  Ben Dowling

  13 Aug 2011 | 2:00 am

  Life as a web developer can be hard when things start going wrong. The problem could be in any number of places. Is there a problem with the request your sending, is the problem with the response, is there a problem with a request in a third party library you're using, is an external API failing? There are lots of different tools that can make our life a little bit easier. Here are some command line tools that I've found to be invaluable. Curl Curl is a network transfer tool that's very similar to wget, the main difference being that by default wget saves to file, and curl outputs to the…

• Hacker News London Meetup: A Year On

  Ben Dowling

  29 May 2011 | 2:00 am

  Almost exactly a year ago I posted a comment to Hacker News about organizing a London meetup. Soon after that I met up with Dimitri, and over a beer we came up with a plan for the Hacker News London meetup. The first event was a lot of fun, with around 40 London based hackers turning up to a pub to drink beer and chat about what they were all hacking on. We've had 7 more meetups since then, and in that time we've grown from 40 hackers to almost 200! We've changed the format slightly, starting the evening with 8 short 5 minute talks, and we've managed to bag a few sponsors who make sure…

• 

  Hot Koehl

• What comes after the yottabyte?

  Frank

  16 Jan 2012 | 4:52 pm

  I was reviewing the data storage requirements for a project recently which had me talking in terabytes, and thinking long-term in petabytes. For those of you who don’t know, tera- and peta- are the binary prefixes for measuring units of digital information that come after giga- (as in “gigabyte”). The list of prefixes, which most people started using with the term “kilobyte,” are collectively called the SI Prefixes. SI prefixes are defined under the International System of Units (“SI” for short), which is maintained by the International Bureau of…

• Write code like they do in Hollywood

  Frank

  13 Dec 2011 | 5:07 pm

  Want to look like a badass hacker in front of your friends? Head over hackertyper.com and just start pushing buttons. As long as you avoid mashing your palms against the keyboard, your non-techie friends will look at you like this.

• Brian Rolle machine gun celebration

  Frank

  21 Nov 2011 | 12:53 pm

  I’m not much of a sports guy, but this sack celebration by Eagles’ Linebacker Brian Rolle in last night’s game against the Giants has to be one of the best defensive celebrations I’ve ever seen. Equal parts hilarious and badass! (Apologies for the gif format, the NFL gestapo makes it hard to find real video clips.)

• Fix WordPress “Fatal error: Allowed memory size” messages

  Frank

  26 Oct 2011 | 11:38 pm

  You may (or may not) have noticed this site was down for the past few days, displaying a blank page no matter what URL was entered. After recalling that I had turned off PHP error onscreen outputting, I was presented with this lovely message: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate XX bytes) in /some/file on line XX This is a general PHP error, but the exact amount (33554432 bytes) occurs very frequently on WordPress sites. Here’s what’s happening, and how to fix it. Every installation of PHP has an ini value called memory_limit, which…

• Recover hijacked default keyword search engine in Firefox

  Frank

  9 Sep 2011 | 1:47 pm

  Earlier today I installed what I thought was an update to the Xvid codec in order to watch a video. I should have been more careful with the source, as their installer proceeded to modify my Firefox installation, adding some junk toolbar called “Start Now” and changing my default search engine to Bing. (Sidebar: they can plead ignorance all they want, I’m certain the MS overlords are using every back-alley approach they can find to break the Google stranglehold.) The toolbar was easy enough to remove, find it in the addons and push the “Remove” button. Changing…

• 

  Shergill Games

• WiFiKill Android App For Cutting Off WiFi Access

  Shergill Games

  28 Jan 2012 | 12:00 am

  Here's an interesting little app that's useful for annoying your friends. WiFiKill is an Android application that lets you DoS the whole WiFi network your phone is connected to, or kick specific devices off the network. Obviously this is something you don't want to do in any place where Internet connectivity is important, like your workplace. Read more »

• Overclock Android Phones With SetCPU

  Shergill Games

  21 Jan 2012 | 12:00 am

  I overclocked my HTC Inspire Android phone using the SetCPU app some months ago and wanted to make sure it worked well before I wrote about it, and it has. SetCPU doesn't just let you give your smartphone a boost in clock rate and performance, you can also use it to save some power by decreasing the clock speed when the phone is idle. If you're already messing around with rooting and custom roms, this is the sort of thing you'll want to check out. Read more »

• Add SATA Ports To Your Desktop With A PCI-E Card

  Shergill Games

  14 Jan 2012 | 12:00 am

  Recently I had a bit of a panic when both of the SATA drives in my desktop computer failed to be detected by the BIOS on boot. I couldn't boot either of the two operating systems installed and none of my files were accessible. Since the BIOS didn't detect the drives I couldn't even use a live CD to access my files. I knew that it was unlikely for two hard drives to fail simultaneously without some sort of system-wide catastrophe like a power surge so I suspected that the SATA controller might have failed. This view was reinforced when people on Twitter said that that in their…

• Stream Media From An Android Phone To An Xbox 360 or PS3

  Shergill Games

  7 Jan 2012 | 12:00 am

  Game consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3 use UPnP/DLNA to access media from other devices like computers that are on the same network. You can share media from your Android device to XBMC or any computer that can connect to Windows file shares with a Samba server app like the one I've been using, but to share videos, music and photos with an Xbox 360 or PS3 you'll need a UPnP/DLNA server app like iMediaShare. It's a free download on the Android Market. Read more »

• Acer Aspire One AO722-0473 Netbook Review

  Shergill Games

  28 Dec 2011 | 12:00 am

  There are a lot of very low end netbooks on the market but there are a few decent models too. I purchased this cheap Acer Aspire One for a relative because it's a good compromise between size, performance and cost. It's certainly not something to do development work or serious gaming on, but for general desktop use it's more than fast enough, and certainly better than some single core Atom netbook. Read more »

• 

  Coding Mix

• Private chat room script

  4 Jan 2012 | 2:47 am

  Finally my private chat room is ready! I`we used jQuery, PHP and 2 MySQL tables to write this script. This is the first version, this is some kind of beta version, because I hadn`t test it yet, because it needs at least 2 users to work... Here is a live demo, have fun with it and please tell me about the errors: NOTES: Everything is refreshed each 15 seconds. An user is logged out after 10 minutes of inactivity.Each message is kept for 30 minutes.An users name is highlighted with orange if the user sent you a message.The selected username is highlighted with red.As I said, we will need two…

• Cross-browser Chat script using PHP, MySQL and Javascript

  1 Feb 2011 | 1:41 am

  I write this tutorial because the first version of my Chat script had some problems in IE (Internet Explorer): After the message was submitted the page was not refreshed. Now I`we found the problem and a solution and here is the new, cross-browser chat script:The chat is refreshed automatically each 30 seconds.This script works the same way as the old one.Let`s start: First we need to create a MySQL table with 4 fields: time - the time when the message was posted (UNIX)name - the name of the author of the messageip - the ip of the author of the messagemessage - the message textTo create the…

• Upload an image and downsize it (in KB`s) using php and GD

  15 Jan 2011 | 5:41 am

  If you have a website where you let your users to upload images, you know that even the small images (around 100x100) can reach 50 - 100KB. This is way too much, when you could simply downsize the image to around 1 - 5KB, this is only the 1 - 5% of the size of the original image. Just imagine the benefits of downsizing 100.000 images...Bellow is an image before and after resizing: Before24.80KBAfter3.52KBSo let`s begin downsizing those images...The upload formupload-form.php:<form action="upload.php" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data"><input…

• Create SEO friendly URL`s using mod rewrite in PHP (.htaccess)

  19 Dec 2010 | 9:12 am

  In this tutorial I will show you how to transform this: http://www.mywebsite.com/tutorials.php?id=123&title=mod_rewrite&category=php into this http://www.mywebsite.com/tutorials/php/mod_rewrite-123Why to rewrite your URL`s ?The main reason is because static URL`s (the second URL is static) are indexed more faster than dynamic URL`s (like the first one), because from a static URL is easier to understand what the page is about both for search engines and your visitors. When using dynamic URL`s there is an another problem: search engines are reading only the beginning of the long URL`s, so if…

• My first AdSense payment arrived today!

  10 Dec 2010 | 2:55 pm

  I`m very happy, today my first AdSense payment has arrived. When I`we opened this website I wasn`t even sure if AdSense will send me the money if I reach the threshold. In the first 1 - 2 months it seems that I will never reach the 70€, but since that time my incomings are slowly increasing. I`we worked hard for this money but it worth it!I`we made an image about the check, bellow the check is my adsense pin:I know that 70€ is a small amount but I`m sure that I will get more checks like this or even with higher amount of money.Most of my traffic comes from tutorial sites and only a small…

• 

  Mr.Bool - Recent posts!

• OutputCache - Course ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 - Part 66 (Ayad Boudiab)

  26 Jan 2012 | 9:00 pm

  If you need programmatic control of the attributes within the OutputCache directive, you can use Response.Cache.HttpCachePolicy.(Author: Ayad Boudiab)

• Calendar: Localization - Course ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 - Part 68 (Ayad Boudiab)

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:27 pm

  This video is a continuation of our localization discussion. One more item what I would like to add to the previous video is that calendars are affected by the culture you choose. (Author: Ayad Boudiab)

• Localization - Course ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 - Part 67 (Ayad Boudiab)

  26 Jan 2012 | 8:25 pm

  In the video, we talk about localization. When creating a web site, you might have users from all over the world. (Author: Ayad Boudiab)

• Using Start and Return - Course Introduction to Reactive Extensions - Part 3 (Ayad Boudiab)

  23 Jan 2012 | 8:56 pm

  We will create a console application to experiment with using Start and Return. (Author: Ayad Boudiab)

• Using different Thread - Course Introduction to Reactive Extensions - Part 2 (Ayad Boudiab)

  23 Jan 2012 | 8:55 pm

  In the previous video, we looked at what is needed to install and start experimenting with Reactive Extensions(Author: Ayad Boudiab)

• 

  With VB.NET

• Writing To Text Files

  Admin

  22 Jan 2012 | 8:59 pm

  VB.NET provides multiple ways to save program data out to a file. This VB Tutorial will walk you through several different ways to easily save your data to a simple text file. This is by far the most straight forward way to serialize data so that your VB program can later read it back in. Below you will learn how to write to files using both a fixed format or a delaminated format. If you don’t know what this means or why you would choose one over the other please read on and it will make sense.read more

• Reading Text Files

  Admin

  29 Aug 2011 | 7:59 pm

  So you have a file full of text how can you parse and read it. This File Reading VB.NET tutorial explains exactly how. It goes over examples of fixed width files, tab and comma delimited files, and even how to use the .NET TextFieldParser class. After going through these examples you will be handling text files with the best of them. read more

• Simple Windows API Example

  Admin

  28 Aug 2011 | 12:10 pm

  The Windows API allows any program to have full access to all the inner workings of Windows. This is means as a developer we should be learning what all the Win32 API offers so that we aren't limited by the language or libraries we are using. This tutorial walks through a simple example of how to interact with Microsoft's Windows API. read more

• Simple and advanced Conditional Experssions

  Admin

  7 Aug 2011 | 4:37 pm

  Comparisons in programming allow us to do the most simple and powerful thing - make a choice. By using comparisons we can do things like branch in different directions if something is true, or loop over a bunch of things until a comparison is false, etc. This tutorial explains all the operations VB.NET supports when doing comparisons. This will provide a solid foundation for some of the more advanced features of Visual Basic .NET. read more

• VB.NET Strings

  Admin

  6 Aug 2011 | 11:46 am

  VB.NET has amazing support for handling strings. This includes both the native .NET methods as well as the ones in Microsoft provided Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace (which makes migrating from VB6 over to VB.NET much easier). This tutorial goes through most of the string handling functions in in both these areas and compares them to each other. read more

• 

  TIBCO RV FIX PROTOCOL JAVA TUTORIAL

• Sudden Drop in Traffic? Could be Google page layout algorithm update and Above the folds ads.

  Javin Paul

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:23 am

  Google page layout algorithm update and Above the folds ads.Recently Google made new update called page layout algorithm improvement update which targets website, blogs having excessive ads on Above the fold page area. if you are experiencing sudden traffic drop from last Friday 20th January 2012 , you are most likelyaffected by Google page layout algorithm update. This Recent Google search update is causing severe drop more than half of normal trafficto various sites and blogs which has two or three ads around header and above the fold area.here are important points I have read and collected…

• How to get and set default Character encoding or Charset in Java

  Javin Paul

  26 Jan 2012 | 4:52 am

  Default Character encoding or Charset in JavaDefault Character encoding in Javaor charset is the character encoding used by JVM to convert bytes into Strings or characters when youdon't define java system property "file.encoding". Java gets character encoding by calling System.getProperty("file.encoding","UTF-8") at the time of JVM start-up. So if Java doesn't get any file.encoding attribute it uses "UTF-8" character encoding for all practical purpose e.g. on String.getBytes() or Charset.defaultCharSet() Most important pointto remember is that…

• How to define Error page in Java Web Application - Servlet JSP

  Javin Paul

  26 Jan 2012 | 12:16 am

  Error page in Java Web Application JSP ServletThere are two ways to define Error page in Java web application written using Servlet and JSP. First way is page wise error page which is defined on each jsp page and if there is any unhanded exception thrown from that page, corresponding error page will be displayed. Second approach is an application wide general or default error page which is shown if any Exception is thrown from any Servlet or JSP and there is no page specific error page defined. In this java tutorial we will see both approach to declare error page in JSP and when should we use…

• How to fix java.sql.SQLException: Invalid column index

  Javin Paul

  25 Jan 2012 | 10:42 pm

  java.sql.SQLException: Invalid column index"java.sql.SQLException: Invalid column index" is a frequent error while working in Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). As thename suggests "Invalid column index" its related to accessing or setting column in your SQL Query using prepared statement in Java. I have seen "java.sql.SQLException: Invalid column index" coming mostly due to two reason: 1) Setting column data using setXXXX(int coloumIndex) e.g. setInt(0) setString(0)2) Getting column data using getXXX(int columnIndex) e.g. getInt(0) getString(0) Most common cause…

• Difference between Thread vs Runnable interface in Java

  Javin Paul

  25 Jan 2012 | 8:27 am

  Difference between Thread and Runnable interface in JavaThread vs Runnable in Java is always been a confusing decision for beginners in java. Thread in Java seems easy in comparison of Runnable because you just deal with one class java.lang.Thread while in case of using Runnable to implement Thread you need to deal with both Thread and Runnable two classes. though decision of using Runnable or Thread should be taken considering differences between Runnable and Thread and pros and cons of both approaches. This is also a very popular thread interview questions and most of interviewer are…

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  NeverFriday

• Apple's Impressive Profits are Stolen from Employees

  rolah

  24 Jan 2012 | 10:23 pm

  The entrepreneurs over at Hacker News who like to pretend they're rich and can turn their little startup into Apple are praising the impressive profits that Apple has reported. What's more impressive is that they fail to make the connection between gigantic profits and the very low amount of wages and salary paid to workers and employees. Apple apparently makes $409,000 in net income per employee. One commenter congratulates the managers for doing an "epic job". The only epic job they've done is in tricking employees to give up the value that they generate over to the company. The maximum…

• SOPA, PIPA, and the endless stream of laws designed to erode our freedoms

  rolah

  21 Jan 2012 | 11:20 am

  (Note: I'm not American, but U.S. laws are usually taken as a model for laws in other countries or are forced upon them which is why discussing U.S. laws is important even if you live in another country) Dan479 has asked on Reddit, "why do they wish to take away our freedom away so badly?" in response to the new bills that have spawned after the fight against SOPA. The reason we get so tired in these fights against people who wish to take away our freedom is because they have infrastructure to support them while we do not. Government bureaucrats and elected officials have a whole system of…

• Trust and "poisonous people" in project communities

  rolah

  17 Jan 2012 | 7:00 am

  I just found out from ReadWriteWeb that someone was messing up data on OpenStreetMaps. This is similar to the vandalism that occurs on Wikipedia. Mentioned in this article was an article from 2010 about poisonous people in open project communities by a member of the OpenStreetMaps community. This is a separate issue from vandalism but it still hinders a project from accomplishing anything. Basically, there are people in communities who will nitpick on minor details and slow down the process so that nothing gets down, or they will do something else that deters others from making a…

• Kobo store ebook restrictions and DRM

  rolah

  15 Jan 2012 | 12:56 pm

  I was looking to buy a few ebooks since I've been using my Android phone for reading moreso than for other applications and I thought the Canadian company Kobo would have a fantastic store. Unfortunately that turned out not to be the case. Their website is confusing and it lists download options. Notice how this is plural rather than singular? Yeah, I noticed that and following that text it said "ADOBE DRM EPUB". That's three separate words and so I thought these were different options. Adobe means PDF, DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) means whatever crap Kobo wanted to use (kinda like…

• The Licenses of the Top 12 Javascript MVC Frameworks Reviewed

  rolah

  14 Jan 2012 | 4:30 pm

  Gordon Hempton has posted a review of 12 Javascript MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks on his blog, CodeBrief. It includes a table of features but it doesn't include something that more programmers and software developers should be interested in; the license of the framework. Encouraging free software to spread is important especially since copyright law and its enforcement is becoming a bigger problem (think SOPA, DMCA, etc.), Here's a table of the licenses the frameworks use: Framework License Backbone.js MIT License SproutCore 1.x MIT License Sammy.js MIT License Spine.js MIT License…

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  Faye Williams | C & C++ Programming Blog

• Offline

  Faye

  6 Jan 2012 | 6:08 am

  I’m taking a break in 2012 for a few months (maybe less, maybe more!). Two boys aged 2 and 4 months fill my days to capacity at the moment. Keep on coding!

• Simple Programming | Unions in C

  Faye

  14 Dec 2011 | 5:22 am

  Unions – ew. As primarily a C++ programmer, I used to shy away from code that contained this kind of black magic. However, unions are actually very cool things and are really not that scary or weird. A union is basically a variable. But instead of being an int, or a float, or a double, a union can actually be any one of these things at a given point in time. What? That doesn’t make any sense! Wait – let me illustrate with an example. The code below contains a union declaration at the top. Unions are declared just like structs, but instead of containing ALL the variables…

• Simple Programming | Boost Compiled Libraries in 3 Minutes

  Faye

  7 Dec 2011 | 4:26 am

  Boost is mostly made of just header files, as we saw last week, which means you include them in your source, add the correct namespace and you’re good to go. However, there are a handful of compiled libraries too, so let’s take a very quick look at how we can use these. If you haven’t installed Boost, take a look at Boost in 3 Minutes to get you up and running.   1) Include the header of the library you are interested in using I’m going to use the filesystem library: #include <boost/filesystem.hpp> Time taken: 30 seconds   2) Write some code using this…

• Simple Programming | Get Started With Boost in 3 Minutes

  Faye

  30 Nov 2011 | 5:28 am

  Boost is simply a collection of C++ libraries that provide lots of fun things to do in C++ without you having to write the code yourself. For example, Boost contains libraries to help you with mathematical calculations, regular expressions, smart pointers and even python integration. Parts of Boost have already been integrated into C++11, but if you (or your organisation) is not quite ready for C++11 yet, or you want to play with the other Boost libraries, you can get to grips with it really easily in just 3 minutes. This guide covers the header only libraries (i.e. most of them). I’ll…

• Simple Programming | Find Files Installed by Yum

  Faye

  23 Nov 2011 | 5:43 am

  Yum is great isn’t it? All you do is tell it the name of the program or library and off it goes, installing files all over your computer, ready for you to use at the drop of a hat. However, sometimes it’s nice to know a little bit more about what yum is up to. Have you ever found yourself hunting all over your hard drive, trying to find exactly where yum has installed something? Me too. Well, if you do ever need to quiz yum, the following commands will allow you to gather all the knowledge you need on what your latest install has done. As with pretty much everything on Linux, yum…