Programming

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  Google Code Blog

• Join the Conversation Around Google Buzz

  DeWitt Clinton (Google)

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:03 am

  This morning we Google Buzz, a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. We'd like to take this opportunity to invite developers to join us as we prepare the Google Buzz API for public launch. Our goal is to help create a more social web for everyone, so our plan for the Buzz API is a bit unconventional: we'd like to finalize this work out in the open, and we ask for your participation. By building the Google Buzz API exclusively around freely available and open protocols rather than by inventing new proprietary…

• Update on Google I/O BootCamp

  Mike

  5 Feb 2010 | 5:00 pm

  Earlier this week, we announced the introduction of I/O BootCamp, a new event happening the day before Google I/O. We didn't anticipate the level of interest we've seen in just the last few days, and we're both excited and sorry to let you know that I/O BootCamp is now sold out.However, we are accepting waitlist sign-ups. So if you'd like to attend I/O BootCamp, submit your info on the BootCamp website, and we'll email you if a spot opens up.Please remember that I/O BootCamp is only available to those who've already registered for Google I/O. If you'd like learn more about and register for…

• Who's @ Google I/O: spotlight on Enterprise sessions

  Mike

  3 Feb 2010 | 11:20 am

  Each week in our "Who's @ Google I/O" blog series, we'll highlight the latest from a featured track at I/O. This week, the spotlight is on Enterprise -- a major theme of this year's event.In 2009, we saw an increasing number of large companies moving to the cloud (and "Going Google"), choosing the web as their platform of choice. At I/O, we'll share our enterprise and commercial developer offerings and focus on how to build business apps in the cloud. We'll be adding new Enterprise sessions over the next couple of months, but here's a preview of some of the sessions you'll see at…

• Enlist in BootCamp for Google I/O

  Mike

  2 Feb 2010 | 12:35 pm

  This year, we're introducing I/O BootCamp, a new event happening the day before Google I/O. BootCamp is an opportunity for attendees to get a crash course in our major development platforms and tools before they head into Google I/O. BootCamp will feature introductory "101" content, hands-on lab sessions, and community-led discussions.BootCamp is only available to those who are registered to attend Google I/O. Since space is limited, we ask that interested Google I/O attendees please register at our BootCamp site. To register for Google I/O, please visit code.google.com/io.By…

• Flashy New Authentication: AuthSub Adds Support for ActionScript

  Zach

  29 Jan 2010 | 3:38 pm

  Today, we are happy to announce the launch of AuthSub for ActionScript, a new component of the well-known AuthSub authentication interface for the Google Data Protocol. This new feature enables Flash and Silverlight applications to access data securely on behalf of a user, without the application ever seeing the user’s private login credentials.To use AuthSub for Actionscript (or as we’re calling it, AuthSubAS), first ensure that the API you are accessing offers cross-domain support. To do this, simply check for a crossdomain.xml file like those offered by the Picasa Web Albums Data API…

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  Dzone

• All The Young (Ex) Dudes

  Adam Leggett

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:48 am

  We are currently in the final phases of testing the version of our platform that will form the basis of our commercial offering. Our acceptance testing work flow involves consuming services provided by other organisations to best simulate a real-world usage scenario for our platform. The primary third party service we use is hosted version control. In fact, it is only reasonable to state that Mike has a strong dependency on the existence of such services. It is the first link in the chain of what we here at Mike HQ refer to as the ‘hosted ALM continuum’ – the suite of co-operating and…

• ExtJS: How to Export DataGrid to Excel

  Loiane

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:42 am

  This tutorial will walk through how to export data from ExtJS DataGrid directly to Excel.

• Corfield on ColdFusion

  lyndsey

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:21 am

  Sean Corfield talks about the the ColdFusion specification and explains the ways in which they hope to resolve code portability issues. Corfield is a strong proponent of open source and he has worked on open source projects for about fifteen years. The For ColdFusion Foundation, Corfield explains, is intended to make ColdFusion more open and to provide a central location for key projects. The foundation is in its early stages, but Corfield says that they already have a partnership with JBoss. Finally, Corfield talks about what's on the horizon for the ColdFusion ecosystem.

• Quartz Scheduled Jobs

  Antonio Gonzalez

  9 Feb 2010 | 10:51 am

  An updated guide to integrating Quartz into j2ee applications

• IronPython and the Entity Framework Part 5.0 – Concluded

  CodeJustin

  9 Feb 2010 | 10:33 am

  This is the final part of the series on using IronPython together with the Entity Framework.

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  Ajaxian » Front Page

• Rotating maps with CSS3 and jQuery

  Chris Heilmann

  9 Feb 2010 | 7:07 am

  One of the things I always want to do with online maps is rotate them – I am used to that with real, physical maps. As physical maps become a lot more clever these days (for example have you seen the zoomable map?) it is time we can do this with the online ones, too. Whilst Google supports this in the satellite and hybrid maps, the basic ones still can’t be turned. Which is why I took CSS3 transformations (wrapped in a very useful jQuery plugin) and voila – rotating is possible: Read more about the implementation and some of the things that need fixing in the original blog…

• Faye: Bayeaux protocol Comet server for Node.js

  Dion Almaer

  9 Feb 2010 | 3:24 am

  James Coglan has ported a Ruby/EventMachine Comet server to offer a new Node.js server on the Bayeux protocol. The project is Faye and you can check out the code on GitHub. On the client side: PLAIN TEXT HTML:   <script type="text/javascript" src="/comet.js"></script>   <script type="text/javascript">     CometClient = new Faye.Client('/comet');     CometClient.connect(); </script>   PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:     CometClient.subscribe('/path/to/channel', function(message) {     // process received…

• Think You Know Javascript? Try this Quiz!

  Michael Mahemoff

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:49 am

  If you know you think you know your objects from your arrays and your null from your undefined, here's a quiz for you from Perfection Kills. I was recently reminded about Dmitry Baranovsky’s Javascript test, when N. Zakas answered and explained it in a blog post. First time I saw those questions explained was by Richard Cornford in comp.lang.javascript, although not as thoroughly as by Nicholas. I decided to come up with my own little quiz. I wanted to keep question not very obscure, practical, yet challenging. They would also cover wider range of topics. There are fourteen questions in…

• Javascript ePub Readers

  Michael Mahemoff

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:34 am

  eBooks have gone mainstream, and right now the open ePub format is getting a lot of attention, being the iPad's book format of choice. Often overlooked in gadget-centric media is the fact that ePub is based on web standards, and therefore amenable to being rendered in the browser, sans plugins. Pure Javascript ePub readers are starting to crop up, and Keith Fahlgren has written about several of them: Just in the last few days, details emerged of two new JavaScript ePub readers, rePublish from Blaine Cook (@blaine) and JSEpub (screenshot) from August Lilleaas (@augustl). These two new readers…

• Pseudo 3D tricks from old computer games for all your Canvas needs

  Chris Heilmann

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:04 am

  It is quite interesting to see how technology moves in circles. With canvas being the new fun toy to play with for creating browser-based games we have to find solutions to fake a 3D environment to be really fast (sure there is Canvas 3D but it is overkill for most games). The trick is to dig into the tricks arsenal of old-school game development on machines full of win like the Commodore 64 or Amiga. Louis Gorenfeld some very detailed explanations on how to fake 3D including some of the formulas used in the days of 8 bit. He is also working on some demo code which you can help him with by…

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  PHP.net releases

• PHP 5.3.1 released!

  Webmaster

  31 Dec 1969 | 4:00 pm

  There is a new PHP release in town!

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  PHP.net news & announcements

• ConFoo Web Techno Conference

  Webmaster

  16 Jan 2010 | 5:25 am

  PHP Quebec and the ConFoo team is pleased to announce the schedule of the ConFoo Web Techno Conference. With over 130 presentations in 8 rooms, ConFoo brings you the best of Web development. The event will take place on March 8th to 12th in Montreal, at the prestigious Hilton Bonaventure Hotel. Over 100 specialists will be present at the conference to share their knowledge during talks and training. Among them will be: Rasmus Lerdorf, Terry Chay, Chris Shiflett and Morgan Tocker You would not want to miss the following presentations: HTML5: Where Are We Now? (Mark Pilgrim), Andrei's…

• PHP 5.2.12 Released!

  Webmaster

  17 Dec 2009 | 4:41 am

  The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.12. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.12: Fixed a safe_mode bypass in tempnam() identified by Grzegorz Stachowiak. (CVE-2009-3557, Rasmus) Fixed a open_basedir bypass in posix_mkfifo() identified by Grzegorz Stachowiak. (CVE-2009-3558, Rasmus) Added "max_file_uploads" INI directive, which can be…

• PHP UK Conference 2010

  Webmaster

  9 Dec 2009 | 5:38 am

  PHP London are pleased to announce the date, venue and registration availability of their 5th annual UK PHP conference, building on the success of previous events and accommodating the continual growth of the PHP community and PHP development industry. The event takes place on Friday 26th February 2010 at the Business Design Centre in the Islington area of London. Information on the venue is available on our website. Registration is now available, with an early bird discount of £20 putting the price at £100 (ex. UK VAT), available for the rest of December 2009, increasing to £110 during…

• PHP 5.3.1 Released!

  Webmaster

  19 Nov 2009 | 9:41 am

  The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.1. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.1: Added "max_file_uploads" INI directive, which can be set to limit the number of file uploads per-request to 20 by default, to prevent possible DOS via temporary file exhaustion. Added missing sanity checks around exif processing. Fixed a safe_mode bypass in…

• PHP UK Conference 2010 Call For Papers

  Webmaster

  30 Oct 2009 | 6:19 am

  The main focus of the PHP UK conference is obviously the talks that are given, and so we hope to attract the best PHP speakers from around the world. We are looking for talks relating to any non-basic aspect of the PHP programming language, be it mainstream, advanced, niche or non-technical. Speakers will be invited to the pre-conference dinner, likely to be on Thursday February 25th 2010 and the post-conference social dinner after the event. The deadline for this call for papers is the end of Saturday 31st October 2009.

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  SOTC Recent Posts

• Python Snippet - Random Numbers

  The Hairiest

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:58 pm

  Programming, the final frontier......ok, so maybe programming is not really the "final" frontier, but it sure is close. Final frontiers aside, a couple weeks ago we had our second installment into pygame. It was fun, and we added some cool new features. However, after looking over what I wanted to add for the third installment, I decided to go over something in python itself.

• Pygame Primer, Mark 2 - Movement

  The Hairiest

  15 Jan 2010 | 8:31 am

  A long time ago, in a tutorial far away... Ok, so maybe it hasn't been that long since our last foray into the world of programming, but it sure seems like it sometimes. On a more serious note, however, a while back we did go over some very basic things involving Python and a library known as Pygame. Today my friends, we will be continuing on this path, and adding to what we build that fateful December day.

• 2,000,000 Visits and Growing

  The Fattest

  14 Jan 2010 | 10:13 am

  Another year has come and gone here at Switch On The Code and that means it's time to look back at 2009 and how we did. First I have say it was a great year and we really did a lot of new things here. We started podcasting, doing video tutorials, and much more. A new version of the site was launched built completely in Drupal just about 1 year ago exactly. Now I really hope that this year will bring just as many goodies.

• Rose-Hulman CSSE Unconference Video - Save the Code, Save the World

  The Reddest

  16 Dec 2009 | 12:34 pm

  This talk will cover some basic tools that you can start using now that can save you a lot of time on your work. Some of these tools include version control, build systems, static analysis, debuggers, profilers and IDEs.

• Flex Datagrid Percentage Width Columns

  The Fattest

  15 Dec 2009 | 8:45 pm

  I have a multitude of tutorials on the Flex Datagrid here at Switch On The Code and none of them show you how to use percentage widths in your Datagrid. Now at the surface this seems really easy, but the way they implemented it in Flex is very unintuitive. So, today I am going to show you how to quickly get percentage based columns in your datagrid.

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  MSDN: U.S. Local Highlights

• U.S. MSDN Premium Subscribers: Test and Develop at No Cost on Windows Azure

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:43 pm

  As an MSDN Premium Subscriber, you can leverage your MSDN subscription to obtain over 700 hours of compute time on Windows Azure to test and develop your latest cloud applications. U.S. developers can also benefit from no-cost phone and e-mail technical support to help fast-track your cloud application development by using Front Runner for Windows Azure.

• Learn from the Best in Web Design and Development at MIX10

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:43 pm

  MIX10 favorites Scott Guthrie and Bill Buxton have been announced as keynote speakers. Come hear these experts and others speak on UX, design, Windows phone, and much more. Register by February 21st to take advantage of the US$200 discount on your pass.

• Join a Live Webcast on Detecting and Mitigating Security Issues Using the CAT.NET Tool

  5 Feb 2010 | 2:13 pm

  In this live Security Talk webcast, discover how CAT.NET includes a set of FxCop security rules that help you identify security flaws in a managed-code (C#, Visual Basic .NET, Visual J#) application you are developing.

• $50,000 PhizzPop Design Challenge

  5 Feb 2010 | 2:13 pm

  Web design agencies and partners called to submit a redesign strategy incorporating Microsoft Web Technologies for bgca.org, the Web site for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Deadline for entries is February 19, 2010.

• SDL Quick Security Reference: Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection Attacks

  2 Feb 2010 | 10:18 am

  With the SDL Quick Security Reference (QSR), the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team introduces a series of basic guidance papers designed to address common vulnerabilities from the perspective of multiple business roles - business decision maker, architect, developer, and tester/QA. These papers are intended to help you address a critical business problem now while moving you toward SDL adoption in the future.

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  37signals Product Blog

• New in Campfire: Chat highlights and improved transcripts

  37signals

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:10 am

  We use Campfire constantly at 37signals. We're in it all day long. It's where we gather, collaborate, communicate, and share in real-time. We don't know how we'd run our business without it. Today we launched a few great new features we think you're really going to like. Now it's easier to spot what's important and find images in the transcript browser. Chat highlights The first improvement are chat highlights. Highlights let you mark any line in the chat room with a star. Those starred chats then appear in a special "highlights" section of the…

• Centripetal Software offers comprehensive backup solution for business users of Basecamp

  37signals

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:42 am

  Centripetal Software offers what it calls "the most comprehensive backup solution on the market for business users of Basecamp." It will perform a backup of all of your data, files and writeboards from Basecamp and have it delivered directly to you by Dropbox or FTP. You can access your data at anytime because it's stored in formats you already use, not proprietary formats that requires special software to open. The automated scheduling of the product allows you to setup your backup and then not think about it again. Centripetal Software offers a 30 day free trial on every backup job with…

• Basecamp turns 6

  37signals

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:11 am

  Today Basecamp turns 6. We launched Basecamp in February 2004 - here's the original post that launched it all. This Signal vs. Noise post offers some of our favorite Basecamp stats compiled over the years.

• Step-by-step tips on creating a public page in Backpack

  37signals

  4 Feb 2010 | 9:22 am

  Create a Quick and Simple Webpage with Backpack shows you how to, well, you can guess. Have you ever wanted to make a quick webpage? Not a full site, but simply a page with information, some pictures and perhaps a map or video? Backpack from 37signals is a great tool for keeping track of your personal and business information, but it can also be used to quickly make a public or private site... One of the great things about Backpack is how easy it is to edit anything in your page. Simply hover over the content and a handle will appear. From that, you can delete or edit the content, or can drag…

• New in Basecamp: Reply to assignment emails

  37signals

  3 Feb 2010 | 7:03 pm

  When you assign a to-do or milestone to someone in Basecamp you have the option of notifying them via email. If you check the box, the person will receive an email listing the to-do or milestone, along with a link back to that to-do or milestone. What we found was that a fair number of people were replying to that notification email. They either had questions about the to-do or milestone, or they just wanted to make a note about it. Whatever the reason, the email reply wouldn't be received by the project, or the person who assigned the to-do or milestone, because the email address the…

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  Signal vs. Noise

• PHOTO: Stewart Butterfield's resignation letter

  37signals

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:12 am

  Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter from Yahoo (from Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up)

• PHOTO: There's quality control for you. This is

  David

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:06 pm

  There’s quality control for you. This is the latest entries in the Entertainment category on iTunes.

• The App Store: Quality control without the quality

  David

  8 Feb 2010 | 1:42 pm

  I love my iPhone and I love Apple (cue images of flag pins and “I love muh countray!”), but I believe they’re blowing it with the App Store gate keeping. That’s of course not a new opinion. Developers left and right have been decrying the broken process. But there’s nothing like feeling it on your own bones to make the point. We have a couple of new features in the wing for Campfire. They’ve been done for more than 10 days now. Why haven’t we released them yet? Because the iPhone app Ember needed to have a simple regular expression updated to support…

• Scope a variable to a block in your template code

  Ryan

  8 Feb 2010 | 10:38 am

  Sometimes you are coding a template and you need to refer to the same method chain over and over. For example, you’re coding a template that summarizes activity on recent messages. You iterate through a block of messages, and for each message you want to display some information pertaining to the last comment. You could do it like this: <div class="active_messages"> <% @active_messages.each do |message| %> <h1><%= message.title %></h1> <div class="latest_comment"> <div class="avatar"> <%= avatar_for(message.comments.last.creator) %>…

• Descriptive words and phrases found on a $6 bottle of hand soap

  Jason F.

  8 Feb 2010 | 9:38 am

  Extremely mild Richly foaming Naturally gentle Deeply cleanses Nourishes Pure and soothing Synergistically Refresh and restore Skin radiance Cool soothing Protects and restores balance Harmonize and replenish Additional moisturizing benefit What doesn’t this stuff do? Lather up and this naturally gentle, richly foaming, pure and soothing nourishing cleanser will synergistically refresh, harmonize, replenish, protect and restore balance with cool soothing botanicals. Kinda ridiculous, isn’t it? Reading this should remind you to read your own site, your own marketing copy, your own…

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  MapQuest Developer Blog

• Search Service Part 3 - Other cool twiddly bits

  Antony Pegg

  2 Feb 2010 | 7:39 am

  In my last two posts I covered the basics of ways you can search, and what data you can search using our new Search Service. For this post I'm going to cover some of the cool things the service has to offer that didn't fit into my previous posts. If you haven't already, you might want to check out Search Service Part 1 - How to Search and Search Service Part 2 - What can I search? before reading this post. Other things the Search Service can do Search by Travel Time or Distance This is not so much a separate search, instead, something you can do on a radius search using the units= parameter.

• Search Service Part 2 - What can I search?

  Antony Pegg

  28 Jan 2010 | 2:00 am

  In my last post I described the various ways you can search using the new Search Service. This post I am focusing on what you can search; in other words, the data that is available in the Service. What you can search against: Hosted Data These are data tables that MapQuest keeps on its own servers for you to search against. There are two main types of Hosted Data: those we provide (like the NAVTEQ POI tables) and those you can upload yourself through our Data Manager tool on the Developer Network. There are a whole bunch of tables we have up for searching against. The documentation contains a…

• Search Service Part 1 - How to Search

  Antony Pegg

  27 Jan 2010 | 5:00 am

  Before Christmas we pushed the new Search Service out to Beta and then expanded its features in subsequent pushes. At this point, it's pretty much fully baked, and more than complete enough to deserve some blogging. It's taken me a while to pull this post together, mainly because every time I tried to write about the new search service, I was defeated by the amount of functionality, options, and flexibility it possesses. It's not a simple "gimme Pizza in Denver" search (although it can be) - it's a lot more hardcore than that. It's a Spatial Search Service, which allows you to search against…

• Traffic Service released to Beta

  Antony Pegg

  21 Jan 2010 | 5:00 am

  Now that we've completed and released the new Geocoding service, Directions Service, and Static Map Service, we're moving on to the next round of web services. The first one up to the plate is the new Traffic Service. This is actually the second Beta release, and we have three functions completed now: One to get a list of markets, one to get a list of the current traffic incidents in a given area, and a third to get a raster image of the traffic flow conditions to overlay on a map. The first function, /traffic/v1/markets?, is a simple call to get a list of the markets for which we have…

• W00t! More Updates: Address Point Geocoding, Map Styles, & Free Edition Geocoder Data

  Deb Tankersley

  20 Jan 2010 | 4:00 am

  Last week, we released some really great new stuff for the MapQuest Platform: address point geocoding data for the United States for our Enterprise Edition customers, a new default static map style for all SDK users and Navteq United States street level geocoding data for our Free Edition folks! Address Point Geocoding Address Point Geocoding (APG) data for the MapQuest Platform is a great win for our customers - enabling more accurate placement of your location on the map and improved routing as well. Using APG is easy - it's already built into our default geocoding configuration, so you…

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  A List Apart

• Words that Zing

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am

  When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, we must ensure that the site says or does precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Understanding the rhetorical concept of kairos can help us craft a context for the opportune moment and hit the mark with appropriately zingy text.

• The Problem with Passwords

  9 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am

  Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, including undermining a user’s trust by failing to meet a basic expectation. But with design patterns gleaned from offline applications, plus a dash of JavaScript, we can provide feedback and reduce password errors without compromising the basic user experience or losing our visitors’ trust.

• Using SVG for Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part II

  26 Jan 2010 | 1:00 am

  In Part II, dig deeper into the technology behind using SVG for your site design. Explore how to incorporate SVG in a cross-browser friendly manner, including using SVGWeb to ensure that the SVG shows in Internet Explorer. And discover the unique characteristic that makes SVG ideal for page backgrounds: scalability.

• Using SVG For Flexible, Scalable, and Fun Backgrounds, Part I

  26 Jan 2010 | 1:00 am

  Many of us think of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an also-ran: fine for charts and tables, but not much else. Yet SVG can actually enhance a site’s overall design, and can be made to work in even the most stubborn browser. In Part I of a two-part series, Shelley Powers covers important basics of working with SVG, including browser support and accessibility.

• The Survey, 2009

  15 Dec 2009 | 2:00 am

  For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

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  CFlex Aggregation of Macromedia Flex in the News

• What's Coming Up in 2010, and Beyond, for Web Development

  31 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Examples of RIA include AJAX, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, Curl, Mozilla's XUL and JavaFX. Combine these technologies with the features of HTML5, ...

• Forrester?s outlook for 2010: less fat, more meat

  31 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm

  NET platforms to less-expensive alternatives such as Adobe Flex, Apache Tomcat, Dojo, Google Web Toolkit, and other open-source platforms and frameworks. ...

• Actuate Invites Developers to Get BIRT-y with Flash and Flex

  26 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Contest for Adobe and BIRT Developers Open for Entries London, UK. ? January 25th, 2010 ? Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: ACTU), the people behind BIRT?, today issued a challenge to developers familiar with Adobe® or BIRT: to combine BIRT and Adobe technologies in powerful and innovative ways. The Get BIRT-y with Flash and Flex Contest offers a cash prize of up to $5,000 and all winning applications will be listed on the BIRT Exchange Marketplace http://www.birt-exchange.com/marketplace/, an open software showcase on the most active online BIRT community, where any developer can promote, share…

• Roundarch Uses The Cloud and Adobe FLEX To Deliver Global Experiences

  26 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm

  CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Roundarch, a leader in digital design and implementation, and Varian, Inc. have announced the reopening of The Varian Experience, An Online Event. This online experience augments the traditional trade show experience by taking it to an entirely new level with a rich landscape of information, resources and solutions built upon an updated technology framework, and a cutting edge hosting solution. ?We wanted to completely rethink the way Varian communicates and interacts with its global audience. We used our comprehensive understanding of many different technologies to…

• 2010 Content Technology Predictions

  14 Dec 2009 | 4:00 pm

  In particular Adobe Flex -- as a content-app development and deployment framework -- will fail to reach critical acceptance. To be sure, Flex can work well ...

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  Ted On Flash

• Improve Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0

  Ted Patrick

  7 Feb 2010 | 7:53 pm

  Adobe engineering is headed into the final stretch of development of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0. We need community help to identify quality issues with your deployed and in-development content. While both Flash and AIR are tested extensively internally, every beta we receive valuable feedback from the Flash community and beyond.Here is how you can get involved:Download and install Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 and AIR 2.0 Beta 2Test the new beta runtimes with your content and applications.Log bugs at bugs.adobe.com. Engineering teams use your bug reports to reproduce errors and improve the…

• Simple Method Closure in AS3

  Ted Patrick

  15 Jan 2010 | 3:23 pm

  Method closures allow you to bind variables into the scope of an anonymous function. Watch the value of local variable 'i' in the example below in the returned anonymous function. It is a bit twisted but results show the scope of local variable 'i' is bound in the returned function from newCounter.CODE AT PASTIEpackage{ import flash.display.Sprite; public class ClosureAS3 extends Sprite { public function ClosureAS3() { init() //giv-em-the-jit :) } public function init():void { //create a counter var counter1:Function = newCounter(); trace( counter1() ); //1 trace( counter1() ); //2 trace(…

• Making Su (sudoku)

  Ted Patrick

  14 Jan 2010 | 12:23 pm

  Mid November I wanted to develop a Sudoku puzzle for AIR/Flash Player/iPhone called Su. The geeky hidden goal of the project was to keep the game very simple relying on as few event listeners as possible and having as few display objects in the player at any one time. At first I went about exploring how to take a simple game data model (Array) and render out the state of the game using many display objects. In a 9x9 sudoku puzzle that meant 81+ displayobjects at a minimium. Not that player can't manage this number of items but keeping track of all the items got to be fairly tedius and memory…

• Sizing AIR NativeWindow to Stage

  Ted Patrick

  23 Dec 2009 | 4:36 pm

  There is a big difference between nativeWindow size and the stage size within an AIR application. Depending on what type of window you are displaying and what OS you are using, the actual size of the stage may vary wildly. This post will cover how to determine the system chrome metrics and resize the nativeWindow in both Flex 4 and AS3. Here is how it works:My application is a Sudoku puzzle app (320x480) and I wanted it to have chrome matching the native OS of the end user. Given I know the stage size, I needed to dynamically measure the system chrome metrics and resize the surrounding…

• CoolIris Express Launches - Put a 3D wall anywhere using Flash Player

  Ted Patrick

  8 Dec 2009 | 9:53 am

  CoolIris launched their Express online editing tool for making 3D walls. The app generates a Flash 3D wall with photos or videos. Here is one I made in a few seconds for MAX 2009:Cheers,Ted :)

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  Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen

• SmallestDotNet Update - Now with .NET 4 support and an includable JavaScript API

  Scott Hanselman

  8 Feb 2010 | 9:44 pm

  A few years back I wrote a post on the size of the .NET Framework. There's historically been a lot of confusion on the site of the .NET Framework. If you search around on the web for ".NET Framework" or ".NET Framework Redistributable" you'll often get a link to a 200 meg download. That download is the complete offline thing that developers redistribute when they want to install the .NET Framework on any kind of machine without an internet connection. The .NET 3.5 Client Profile is more like 28 megs and the .NET 4 Client Profile is a looking smaller that than, in fact.

• Hanselminutes Podcast 199 - How Craigslist Works - with Jeremy Zawodny

  Scott Hanselman

  5 Feb 2010 | 5:47 pm

  My one-hundred-and-ninety-ninth podcast is up. I chat with Jeremy Zawodny, a developer at Craigslist on how the system is put together. How many servers do they have? How does it all fit together and what are the major technology problems they have to solve? Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show Jeremy's Blog and Jeremy on Twitter Jeremy Zawodny on Wikipedia Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is our sponsor for this show. Building quality software is never…

• Installing and Setting Up and Encoding for IIS 7 Smooth Streaming and Silverlight

  Scott Hanselman

  4 Feb 2010 | 11:17 pm

  I heard someone saying they were having trouble setting up Smooth Streaming for IIS, so I wanted to try it myself. If you just want to see Smooth Streaming work, visit http://www.smoothhd.com/ for some sample demos. They'll adapt to your bandwidth and look as nice as they can. If you want to fake a low-bandwidth situation, you can use the player at http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming and play with limiting the bit rate. Step 0: Got IIS? I've got IIS 7 because I've got Win 7. If your Win 7 installation doesn't have IIS yet, go to Programs and Features and click "Turn…

• Back to Basics - Keep it Simple and Develop Your Sense of Smell - From Linq To CSV

  Scott Hanselman

  4 Feb 2010 | 2:26 pm

  I was working with a friend recently on a side thing they were doing. They wanted to create an "Export" function for some small bit of data and start it from their website. You'd hit a URL after logging in Some data would come out of a database You'd get a .CSV file downloaded You could open it in Excel or whatever. I spoke to my friend and they said it was cool to share their code for this post. This post isn't meant to be a WTF or OMG look at that code, as is it meant to talk about some of the underlying issues. There's few things going on here and it's not all their fault, but it…

• Hanselminutes Podcast 198 - Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) with Erik Meijer

  Scott Hanselman

  3 Feb 2010 | 10:38 pm

  My one-hundred-and-ninety-eighth podcast is up. I sit down with Erik Meijer from the Cloud Programmability Team to hear about the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx). Rx is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections. Sound boring? Not even a little. Rx is a prescription for awesome. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show Rx Team Blog Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) B# .NET Blog Wes Dyer's Blog Jeffrey Van Gogh's Blog Danny van Velzen's Blog Lambda the Ultimate Blog Rx on Channel 9 Do also remember the complete archives are always…

• 
  The Register

• Upstart crimeware wages turf war on mighty Zeus bot

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:48 am

  All your bots belong to us Purveyors of a new botnet toolkit are touting a feature aimed at aspiring cybercriminals: the opportunity to commandeer computers already compromised by an established crimeware package known as Zeus.…The power of collaboration within unified communications

• Riverbed WAN optimizers get SSDs, 10 GE

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:46 am

  3X throughput, 2X connections WAN optimization appliance maker Riverbed Technology has taken the wraps off its Steelhead 7050 boxes, which sport the first solid state disks used in such an appliance as well as 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on the data center side and over 1 Gb/sec of WAN bandwidth on the wide side.…What is your recession sales strategy?

• PayPal suspends India service

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:16 am

  Why? Mind your own business PayPal, eBay's payment system, has suspended all payments to personal accounts in India.…Offloading malware protection to the cloud

• Nasuni provides cloud-based filer

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:15 am

  Just add storage Startup Nasuni says it has cracked the problem of storing files directly in the cloud with a software virtual NAS appliance.…Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

• Avatar whups Confucius's sorry ass

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:12 am

  Eastern philosophy no match for 3-D wizardry Sci-fi epic Avatar has administered a righteous kicking at the Chinese box office to a locally-produced film about the life of Confucius - despite the authorities' reported attempt to ensure the home-grown product's success.…The power of collaboration within unified communications

• 
  Flash Magazine

• Doc - offline Actionscript documentation

  Jens C Brynildsen

  8 Feb 2010 | 1:35 am

  Do you use Flash CS4? Then you may have noticed that the documentation requires that you are online. Doc is a free AIR application that can index and display any ASDoc generated documentation in a snappy, searchable desktop application. If you've been looking for a better solution to looking up the AS3 reference, look no further.

• Using Away3D with Flex

  Jens C Brynildsen

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:36 am

  A common question about 3D engines is how to use them with the Flex framework. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to build your own Away3D Flex Component that will play nicely when the user changes the size of their browser or other components.

• Everyone to their bases - Flash is under attack!

  Jens C Brynildsen

  2 Feb 2010 | 12:55 pm

  YouTube is testing video delivery using the HTML5 draft and the Open Standards crowd says Flash will die. The iPad will not support Flash and tech journalists make bold headlines and proclaim the death of Flash. A Javascript experiment plays back Flash files and bloggers proclaim Javascript is the new Flash. Apparently the Flash platform is under attack these days but what else is new?

• Mobile development alternatives

  Jens C Brynildsen

  29 Dec 2009 | 12:54 pm

  So you had planned spending the holiday checking out Flash CS5 and now feel at a loss with what to toy with during the holidays? Here's some alternative ways of authoring iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile applications.

• Adobe and Omniture

  Jens C Brynildsen

  27 Dec 2009 | 11:17 am

  Adobe's acquisition of Omniture puzzled many in the Flash community. Omniture CEO Josh James appearance at the Adobe MAX conference made several community members question if this deal was right for Adobe. Why would Adobe enter the business of tracking and analytics? In this xmas interview, we've talked to Adobe officials to get some answers to the questions we and others in the community had.

• 
  Joel on Software

• Why testers?

  26 Jan 2010 | 1:04 pm

  My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach it not to jump on people, not to poop in the house, to sit on command, and to never, ever, ever chew on the iPad. Never. Good girl. With dogs the main trick to training is that feedback has to be immediate. If you come home to discover that, hours before, the dog tipped over the garbage can in the kitchen, it’s too late for training. You can yell at her but she just won’t get what you’re going on about. Dogs are just not that smart. For programmers, getting…

• Rocket Surgery Made Easy

  25 Jan 2010 | 1:21 pm

  Steve Krug has written a follow up to his usability classic Don’t Make Me ThinkThe sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easyis a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple “hallway” usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended.   Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• A little less conversation

  22 Jan 2010 | 12:33 pm

  “As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a ‘keep everyone on the same page’ problem. But often what they actually have is a ‘stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something’ problem.” From my latest Inc. column: A Little Less Conversation   Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• Secret language

  30 Dec 2009 | 7:01 am

  Microsoft Careers: “If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in ‘Compete’, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!” This is ironic, to use the Alanis Morissette meaning of the word…

• Let’s stop talking about “backups”

  14 Dec 2009 | 7:30 am

  Is your desktop backed up? Did you backup that server? Are your backups on a different machine? Do you have offsite backups? All good questions, all best practices. But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore. And that’s when you discover that: The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost The server had enormous amounts of configuration…

• 
  Life Beyond Code

• The Distinguish Cycle – Where do you want to begin?

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:01 am

  For those of you who have reading this blog for a while, you know that one of the themes on the blog is how to escape the prison of commodotization – being one of the many. Why? Simply because commodotization erodes value. If you are valuable and can distinguish yourself, you can claim a premium in the marketplace. Of course, nobody is smart to be able to permanently distinguish themselves because for anything that is getting a premium, there are others who will follow suit and compete for attention until that “anything” is commodotized and loses the early premium that…

• The problem is never the problem…

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:01 am

  In this short (around 2-minutes) video, one of my heroes, Tom Peters explains (with examples) why the problem is never the problem, the response to the problem is. Totally loved the video and is embedded below for you: Why did the 2-minute video touch my heart? The way I look at it, the statement can be extended to many other things – such as an “opportunity.” An opportunity is not an opportunity unless you do something about it. The trick is in “taking action” and doing something about what we are faced with. And, that is in our control. ---Related Articles at…

• A killer app – “Free” + “Social Proof” + Now!

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  7 Feb 2010 | 12:01 am

  The other day, I was at the Campbell post office standing in the line waiting for my turn. It was a long line so (as usual) I was busy browsing a book. The person in front of me brought me out of my dream when he stepped out asking me to hold his place. I nodded and continued reading. I couldn’t help notice what the person did. There was a box to drop off a business card to win a prize at the end of the month. The person dropped off his business card and walked back. I looked at the box again. There were probably 200 other business cards in the box. Not fully believing what I just saw,…

• Grace and Elegance

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  6 Feb 2010 | 12:01 am

  Photo Courtesy: Amitabh Bacchan’s blog Criticism is part of life. If you are doing anything significant, there will always be some criticism from someone Why? Simply because you can’t please everyone. A simple thing to do is to handle criticism with grace. Here is an example of how Amitabh Bacchan (who needs no introduction for anyone who has heard of Bollywood) handled criticism from another superb Bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah. Here it is, in his own words (on his blog) [ Note: I made VERY minor edits for the sake of readability. Emphasis is mine ] A question came my way…

• A gentle push…

  thinksulting@gmail.com (Rajesh Setty)

  5 Feb 2010 | 12:01 am

  When you are on the fence, sometimes all it requires is a gentle push and you will move to one side. But someone or something has to give that gentle push. It does not take a lot of effort (remember: it’s gentle) but someone still has to do it. With that in the background, let’s put the “proverbial” fence aside and take a real situation. You are contemplating whether to attend a networking event or not. You want to do it but you also have other competing priorities to take care of. You know that in the long run it will help you but there are some short-term fires to…

• 
  Jon Udell

• Producing and consuming OData feeds: An end-to-end example

  Jon Udell

  9 Feb 2010 | 9:56 am

  Having waxed theoretical about the Open Data Protocol (OData), it’s time to make things more concrete. I’ve been adding instrumentation to monitor the health and performance of my elmcity service. Now I’m using OData to feed the telemetry into Excel. It makes a nice end-to-end example, so let’s unpack it. Data capture The web and worker roles in my Azure service take periodic snapshots of a set of Windows performance counters, and store those to an Azure table. Although I could be using the recently-released Azure diagnostics API, I’d already come up with my own…

• Listen, talk, breathe

  Jon Udell

  4 Feb 2010 | 5:39 am

  Linda Stone, coiner of the marvelous phrase continuous partial attention, has lately been exploring another modern pathology she calls email apnea, which means failure to breathe while checking email. In retrospect, we shouldn’t be surprised. Look: The new 25-payline special edition of Wheel of Wealth will have you holding your breath in excitement… Play Online Slot Machine Game. Coin in – spin – hold your breath……Watch those symbols…..Will it or won’t it? After the first two hits you’re holding your breath for the third reel… We…

• Talking with Sal Khan about YouTube tutoring as guerilla public service

  Jon Udell

  1 Feb 2010 | 7:07 am

  My guest for this week’s Innovators show is Sal Khan. He’s the creator of http://khanacademy.org, a catalog of more than 1000 YouTube video lessons in math, physics, biology, chemistry, and economics. All of these videos are made by Sal himself, in an engagingly personal style, using simple screencasting tools. When I first got interested in screencasting, I envisioned the medium not only as a way to demonstrate software, but also as a way to share knowledge at Internet scale. Sal’s work fulfills that vision, and points the way toward a profound and much-needed disruption of…

• OData for collaborative sense-making

  Jon Udell

  29 Jan 2010 | 7:54 am

  OData, the Open Data Protocol, is described at odata.org: The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for querying and updating data. OData applies web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The other day, Pablo Castro wrote an excellent post explaining how developers can implement aspects of the modular OData spec, and outlining some benefits that accrue from each. One of the aspects is query, and Pablo gives this example:…

• “That’s an engineer’s solution!”

  Jon Udell

  21 Jan 2010 | 4:32 pm

  I’m listening to the audio version of a very cool talk given by astronaut-turned-artist Alan Bean. (Skip the hokey intro, though, and jump in at minute 7 when he starts.) He tells great stories about the space program, but also offers wider perspectives on life, art, and human potential. Along the way, he tells an amusing anecdote about the famous picture of Neil Armstrong planting an American flag onto the moon’s surface. Armstrong told Bean it had been a scary moment, and Bean asked why. Armstrong said (as paraphrased by Bean): Well, I couldn’t get that flag into the…

• 
  Rands In Repose

• A Story Culture

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  7 Feb 2010 | 6:57 pm

  The Editor and I don't argue, we discuss. We're arguing... discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet. I say, "Information just keeps getting smaller. We're sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We're just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There's no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds."…

• Wanted

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  3 Jan 2010 | 8:55 pm

  Jesse walked. Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch. Their morning starts at 9am, and at 9:15 I got a call from HR: "Jesse's not here". Bad traffic, miscommunication, there were a dozen good reasons he wasn't there, but I instantly felt a rock in my stomach: "Jesse walked". A quick call to my recruiter and the mystery began to unfold, "Oh, yeah, he called…

• A Creative Soundtrack

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  24 Dec 2009 | 10:09 am

  The first story I wrote for myself was a piece of fiction about God being sent to high school. I was, not surprisingly, in high school at the time. What was surprising was the vein of writing I found in myself. I sat down at the computer and the story just showed up -- seven pages of it. As the creative burst subsided, I stared at those seven pages in the word processor -- Wordstar -- and I began to fret about line spacing, page numbers, and other formatting decisions. I was silently asking myself, "How am I going to make this palatable to the editor? To the publisher?" My first story ever.

• Gaming the System

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  13 Dec 2009 | 12:24 pm

  On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard. The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in a moment of desperation. It was end game. The time in the project where you pay for every single shortcut you've taken, for every specification you didn't write, and for all the warnings from engineers that you've ignored. All the data is grim. Bug arrival rates are…

• Up to Nothing

  michael.lopp@gmail.com

  28 Nov 2009 | 8:32 pm

  In Silicon Valley, you burn a lot of calories. It's not just the daily burn of your gig, it's everything else involved in staying afloat in a valley which is constantly reinventing itself. You sign up for every new service and spend the prerequisite 3.7 minutes to determine "Does this matter?" You surf the web, you tweet, you update your Facebook, all of which brings a constant flood of new data that needs to be sifted, sorted, and assessed. You have compatriots in this caloric consumption. They randomly walk into your office or your life and with them they bring additional reasons to burn…

• 
  VITAMIN

• The Pipeline with Dan Benjamin

  Keir Whitaker

  9 Feb 2010 | 5:48 am

  Dan Benjamin recently blogged about his decision to venture into full time podcasting. We love to hear about anyone branching out and trying new things so we wish him all the best with his venture. Two of his new shows solo shows are The Pipeline and The Conversation: The Pipeline, an interview show talking with designers, developers, writers, and entrepreneurs. Episode one featured Jeffrey Zeldman and upcoming shows will include Kottke, Storey, Vaynerchuk, Coudal, Mann, Siracusa, and many more. The Conversation, a live-streamed talk show featuring topical discussions, reviews, special…

• Future of Web Design London 2010 is go

  Keir Whitaker

  9 Feb 2010 | 4:56 am

  We are delighted to announce that Future of Web Design will be returning to London for the 4th year running. Taking place from May 17th – 19th 2010 in the heart of London it will be packed full of great talks, workshops and networking opportunities. Grab the early bird discounts There are a number of early-bird offers available including £195 off a two day conference pass, they are limited in number so grab them whilst they’re hot. Amazing speakers Here’s just a few of the great speakers we have lined up for this year. Full details of their sessions are available on the new…

• Designing for donations

  Jaan Orvet & Andreas Carlsson

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:57 am

  Donating money to a charity should be as quick and easy online as it is to stuff a few coins in a collection pot on the high street. It should also be apparent what the money will be used for. With these two things in mind, it is surprising how often charities miss the mark when it comes to their online donation screens. Fiddly pull-downs, peculiar microcopy, trillions of steps, and minimal transparency. Here are some of our step-by-step notes and drafts from a concept exercise on behalf of a well-known charity. The goal was to create a screen that encourages more site visitors to give, and…

• Bulletproof backups for MySQL

  Chris Lea

  4 Feb 2010 | 5:27 am

  You have all your important data backed up, right? I mean, come on folks, it’s 2010. We may not have flying cars yet like we’re supposed to, but “having backups” is a problem that’s solved. And I’m sure you’ve solved it. I’m sure you sleep well at night knowing that if a comet hit the data center where your website lives, and everything was completely destroyed, you could get back up and running somewhere else quickly enough. Except that the chance this is actually true for you, statistically, is very small. If we look at the statistics, then…

• Future of Web Apps Miami: Are you coming?

  Keir Whitaker

  3 Feb 2010 | 3:09 am

  Save $50 off your pass by entering promo code THINKVITAMIN when booking your pass. Only 9 left! Buy your tickets now » Did you know Carsonified, the team behind Think Vitamin, also run a number of web industry events? In a couple of weeks we head off to Florida for the third Future of Web Apps Miami. It’s going to be a great three days (February 22nd – 24th) and will feature great speakers, in depth workshops and free University sessions all delivered by leading industry figures. Here’s a quick round up of what’s happening: Companies speaking at FOWA Miami 2010…

• 
  IBM developerWorks

• Writing a custom Dojo application

  Explore the tips, techniques, and pitfalls when developing Web 2.0 and Dojo applications. Learn from the authors' experiences when moving from Object Oriented development techniques to creating a prototype using the Dojo widget and template pattern along with JavaScript/Dojo objects.

• Debug Java applications remotely with Eclipse

  Perform application debugging remotely using the Eclipse built-in remote Java application configuration type. In this article, get real-world examples such as debugging programs on dedicated machines like Web servers, whose services cannot be shut down.

• New IBM Business Process Management Journal

  In this journal's premier edition, discover how to develop a business event processing application and how to leverage BPM, SOA, and EA to align business and IT. Plus, get answers to some of your common questions about WebSphere Business Modeler.

• Dependency injection with Guice: Testable code with less boilerplate

  Get better testing and modularity while taking away the pain of writing your own factories with Guice, Google's open source dependency injection framework for Java development. Take a tour of the most important concepts, which will leave you ready to Guice up your applications.

• XSLT as a language compiler: Use XSLT to produce PostScript from XML

  Explore the concept of XSLT as a programming language compiler, specifically as you create an XML facade in front of PostScript, to produce PostScript files from XML documents. Learn about using a stylesheet as an implicit language definition, get the basics of PostScript, and see the layers of abstraction involved in creating an XML-to-PostScript compiler.

• 
  ScottGu's Blog

• VS 2010 / .NET 4 Release Candidate

  ScottGu

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:39 pm

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu This afternoon we made available the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release candidates.  You can find download links here. Right now the downloads are available only to MSDN subscribers.  Starting Wednesday (Feb 10th) everyone will be able to download them (regardless of whether you are a MSDN subscriber or not). Background on the Release Candidate I blogged about us deciding to ship a public VS 2010 release candidate last December.  The primary motivation behind…

• jQuery 1.4.1 Intellisense with Visual Studio

  ScottGu

  8 Feb 2010 | 10:30 pm

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu A few people have emailed me recently asking about the availability of a Visual Studio –vsdoc intellisense hint file for jQuery 1.4.1.  I blogged about –vsdoc files in the past – they provide additional intellisense help information for Visual Studio, and enable you to get a richer intellisense experience with dynamic Javascript libraries.  If you are using VS 2008 SP1 you’ll want to download and install this patch in order to have VS 2008…

• Built-in Charting Controls (VS 2010 and .NET 4 Series)

  ScottGu

  7 Feb 2010 | 9:54 pm

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the fifteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers a nice addition to ASP.NET and Windows Forms with .NET 4 - built-in charting control support. ASP.NET and Windows Forms Charting Controls A little over 14 months ago I blogged about how Microsoft was making available a free download of charting controls for both ASP.NET 3.5 and Windows Forms 3.5.  You can download and use these…

• ASP.NET MVC 2 (Release Candidate 2) Now Available

  ScottGu

  5 Feb 2010 | 12:44 am

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu Earlier this evening the ASP.NET team shipped ASP.NET MVC (Release Candidate 2) for VS 2008/.NET 3.5.  You can download it here. The RC2 release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is a follow-up to the first ASP.NET MVC 2 RC build that we shipped in December.  It includes a bunch of bug fixes, performance work, and some final API and behavior additions/changes.  Below are a few of the changes between the RC1 and RC2 release (read the release notes for even more details):…

• Nice “Quick Hit” Videos about ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010

  ScottGu

  28 Jan 2010 | 9:12 pm

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] I’ve been working on a series of blog posts the last few months that cover some of the new features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010. Earlier today someone pointed me at some nice “quick hit” videos that have been published that also provide quick first looks at some of the new features coming with ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010.  These videos aren’t an exhaustive list of everything new – but do provide a great way to quickly learn about many of the cool new…

• 
  Perlbuzz

• Help keep the world safe from SQL injection

  Andy Lester

  6 Feb 2010 | 12:42 pm

  A while back, I put up bobby-tables.com as a repository for showing people the right way to handle external data in their SQL calls. Whenever someone pops up on a mailing list or IRC and they're building SQL statements using external tainted data, you can just refer them to the site. In the past few days, I've spiffed up the site (with design help from Jeana Clark) and added pages on Perl and PHP. I need more examples, though. It's 2010, and there's no reason anyone shouldn't know about parameterized SQL calls. The site source is hosted on github, so if you have any contributions, please fork…

• Perlbuzz news roundup for 2010-02-01

  Andy Lester

  1 Feb 2010 | 8:43 am

  These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Famous Perl One-Liners Explained, Part IV: String and Array Creation (catonmat.net) Run invdividual Test::Class methods in vim (blogs.perl.org) A regular expression tip every day from @regextip (and not just Perl regexes) A few resources for women in open source (itworld.com) The next QA hackathon: What do you need? (blogs.perl.org) YAPC::NA 2010 dates announced: June 21-23, 2010 (news.perlfoundation.org) Pod: Now with sane web links (justatheory.com) Creating…

• Perlbuzz news roundup for 2010-01-07

  Andy Lester

  7 Jan 2010 | 7:48 am

  These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Decoding climate change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth (radar.oreilly.com) Musical chord analysis with CPAN (use.perl.org) Schwern on a pet peeve of mine: Numbered test file abuse (use.perl.org) eumm-migrate - easy way to migrate to Module::Build (use.perl.org) Readable Perl (blogs.perl.org) CPAN's greatest hits: Path::Class (use.perl.org) Spreadsheet::WriteExcel now supports embedding charts (blogs.perl.org) Cool things in Perl 6: Subsets (blogs.perl.org)…

• Devel::NYTProf 3.0 is out, more mindblowing than ever

  Andy Lester

  28 Dec 2009 | 5:53 pm

  Go run to the announcement about Devel::NYTProf v3.0. Marvel at the code profiling goodness. Highlights include: Ability to profile opcodes, which means... NYTProf can now profile slow regular expressions More detailed stats on BEGIN blocks Treemap of subroutines Tracking of which subs called which other subs Graphing of sub calls Improved report output Ability to merge profile runs, such as when a process spawns other processes like mod_perl code does. Already I have found that my regular expression compilation is taking 6% of the runtime in my sample runs in ack. I had no idea. Just…

• Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-12-22

  Andy Lester

  22 Dec 2009 | 11:42 am

  These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. How to import Gravatars into Gmail with 121 lines of Perl (dagolden.com) RT @davorg From Amazon.com: After viewing "Data Munging With Perl" 61% of customers buy "I Drink For A Reason" (@davorg is the author of the book) ack 1.92 is now out (betterthangrep.com) Why learn Perl in 2009? (news.ycombinator.com) Screencast about ack from @yerhot (fosscasts.com) Presenting Module::Starter 1.54 (use.perl.org) Make the pragmas stop! (justatheory.com) A collection of…

• 
  Knowing.NET

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07

  larry

  7 Feb 2010 | 5:00 pm

  Are there any shows on the Discovery Channel that are NOT narrated by Mike Rowe? # Resolved: Pair programming is NOT a good idea when learning an API. Debate? (Pair prog is BEST way to learn an API?) # Colorado Springs going to cut 1/3 of streetlights to aid city budget. Sounds like a good idea to me — I hate streetlights. # The @dailyshoot is “Show whether it’s more like Spring or more like Winter.” One of those “Why, yes, I _do_ live in Hawaii…” days… # Did a good deed today but my car just failed it’s safety check and it’s $500 to…

• These Divergent Times

  larry

  1 Feb 2010 | 9:26 am

  My latest column for SD Times argues that right now, it’s smarter to specialize, not generalize, in your programming career.

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-31

  larry

  31 Jan 2010 | 5:00 pm

  Gorgeous AM — Southern Cross, Scorpio rising — before dropping Tina off at KOA for biz trip to HNL. # Surprisingly un-blown-away by iPad. I like the keyboard dock (can I get that for my iPhone) and lower-than-expected $, but otherwise… # Vog-free days are bittersweet: Fracking gorgeous reminder of how oppressive the vog is. # I’ve used fullscreen touchpad keyboards and fullscreen touchpad keyboards stink. Back of iPad is curved like iPhone 3GS, so RLY sux. # Jobs “purchased” True Compass eBook for $14.99. Kindle price for “TC” is $9.99. Demo…

• Tablet PC Programmer Responds to Apple iPad

  larry

  27 Jan 2010 | 7:55 pm

  The Apple iPad is primarily a device for consuming, not creating, media. I spent several years developing software for Microsoft’s Tablet PC, only to be dismayed that the market for such software didn’t evolve quickly. As a person who’s switched from Windows to OS X for much of my day-to-day work and as a very happy owner of an iPhone, I had high expectations for the iPad, announced today. Given the speculation that swirls around Apple products prior to their launch, and the thesis that Apple had been delaying the release of a Tablet form-factor for years in order to get…

• Wordless Wednesday - Whalesong (Video)

  larry

  27 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am

• 
  Official jQuery Blog

• The Official jQuery Podcast – Episode 9 – David Artz, Aol.

  Ralph Whitbeck

  29 Jan 2010 | 6:34 pm

  In this prerecorded episode from Washington DC, we sit down with David Artz, Director of Website Optimization at Aol. David talks to us about the conviences and challenges of using jQuery at the enterprise level. You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3. Here are the show notes for this episode: Permanent Sponsors Interview Who is David Artz? Director of Website Optimization Manage front-end development best practices (speed, SEO). How Aol. currently uses jQuery Plugins that Aol uses Challenges Corporations like Aol face by using jQuery at…

• 14 Days of jQuery Summary: Days 8-14, jQuery 1.4.1 Released

  Ralph Whitbeck

  29 Jan 2010 | 10:13 am

  In case you’re not following along with the 14 days of jQuery, here’s a summary of what has been released for days 8-14. Highlights On Day 12, the jQuery team released jQuery 1.4.1, the first bug release to jQuery 1.4. jQuery 1.4.1 is now the latest release of jQuery; take a moment to review the 1.4.1 release notes. On Day 13, the team announced the new jQuery Meetups site. We want to help foster local meetups and eventually try to provide more resources to your groups. On Day 14, the jQuery UI team released jQuery UI 1.8 Release Candidate 1. The team would love you to test and…

• The Official jQuery Podcast – Episode 8 – api.jquery.com

  Ralph Whitbeck

  22 Jan 2010 | 9:25 am

  In this episode we are at the Aol. headquarters in Washington DC filming video and releasing jQuery 1.4 for the 14 Days of jQuery. In this episode we talk with Karl Swedberg and Paul Irish about the new api.jquery.com documentation site. You can subscribe to the show in iTunes via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3. Here are the show notes for this episode: Interview Api site overview Based on Packt Reference guide New features of the site Disqus XML Feed Mobile reference guide already using xml dump Fully working demos version change/addition log more relevant searches How can…

• 14 Days of jQuery Summary: Days 1 – 7

  Ralph Whitbeck

  20 Jan 2010 | 11:08 am

  In case you’re not following along with the 14 days of jQuery, here’s a summary of what has been released thus far. Pre Release Day 1 New jQuery API Site Pre Release Day 2 jQuery 1.4rc1 Day 1 jQuery 1.4 Released jQuery 1.4 Live Q&A Day 2 HD version of jQuery 1.4 Q&A Media Temple Giveaway jQuery Podcast episode 7 with John Resig Day 3 Internal Changes in jQuery 1.4, with John Resig Day 4 Getting Involved in the jQuery Community, with Karl Swedberg Day 5 appendTo Training Drawing jQuery 1.4 Hawtness #1, with Paul Irish Day 6 jQuery In The Enterprise Day 7 New jQuery Forum…

• The Official jQuery Podcast – Episode 7 – jQuery 1.4 Release (John Resig)

  Ralph Whitbeck

  15 Jan 2010 | 11:38 am

  In this episode we are at the Aol. headquarters in Washington DC filming video and releasing jQuery 1.4 for the 14 Days of jQuery. In this episode we talk with John Resig after the live uStream keynote to get more insight into the jQuery 1.4 release. You can subscribe to the show in iTunes via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3. Here are the show notes for this episode: Interview jQuery 1.4 overview Major Contributors A look behind the scenes to get the release complete what are the main reasons people should upgrade to 1.4? Performance gains overview New functionality overview New…

• 
  Channel 9

• PhizzPop Develop & Design Challenge

  Laura Foy

  9 Feb 2010 | 9:48 am

  The unique nature of The Phizzpop Design Challenge is that it pits agency Davids and Goliaths against one another to show the most innovative integration of Microsoft technologies to achieve the website redesign goals of BGCA. Don’t miss your opportunity to show off your skills to an elite panel of judges, advance BGCA's mission, and land $50k in the process. Download the brief and get started today!

• Jason Zander: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Released

  Charles

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:06 pm

  The Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is here! Your Beta 2 feedback has been incredibly helpful to the engineering team. A big Thank You from Visual Studio! Here, Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander sits down with us to discuss how the Visual Studio engineering team addressed your Beta 2 feedback and made some helpful updates to the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Jason even demos some of the improvements made in the VS 2010 RC — and on quite a modest PC. Jason and his team went to great lengths to improve the overall experience of writing applications inside VS 2010.

• Help Desk Episode 1 with Chris Pirillo (Pilot) - Show Notes

  Nic Fillingham

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:46 pm

  Show Notes & Links from Help Desk Episode 1 (Pilot) 1. Bas (from the Channel 9 forums) [8:33] How do I change the program associated with an extension when you choose 'edit' from a file's context menu? Answer: Gov says that this must be edited manually in Windows 7 A Bing search finds this 3rd party app for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that claims to be able to edit file associations (including “Edit”): http://defaultprogramseditor.com/ 2. @r*er (via Twitter) [9:37] @ch9live What is the easiest way to have a window maximized across multiple screens? Answer: Chris suggests:…

• Ping 47: Avatar, FourSquare, Bing & Twitter, Farmville

  Laura Foy

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:56 pm

  Paul decided to take a little vacation so our good friend Adam stepped in to bring us the hottest stories on Microsoft Campus. Some are.... James Camerons Avatar & Microsoft Office for Mac loves you! FourSquare coming to Windows Mobile Bing Twitter Maps Farmville & MSN Games

• TWC9: Sara Ford, recognize touch gestures, make Windows 7 into a hotspot

  Dan Fernandez

  5 Feb 2010 | 11:31 pm

  This week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by special guest host Sara Ford to discuss the week's top developer news, including: Sara's leaving the CodePlex team to work as a Developer Evangelist Nitin Bharti - 7-Part video series on using Microsoft Expression Blend, via Alvin Ashcraft Interesting because: It's a free set of videos that cover the essentials of using Blend, including controls, data-binding, animation, and more John Papa - Creating Custom Pre-loaders/splash screens in Silverlight Interesting because: There are certain things you can and can't do in Silverlight's splash screen Channel…

• 
  TheServerSide.com: News

• “Father of Java” James Gosling to keynote at TSSJS 2010

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:19 am

  This is the first opportunity youll have to hear Mr. Goslings unique perspective, including everything from JavaFX, Glassfish, Java EE 6, devices on the edge, realtime systems and dynamic languages on the JVM everything that contributes to the potent mix that characterizes Java today.

• Milton 1.5.1 released

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:45 am

  Milton is a server side library for implementing WEBDAV servers. It can be used in transactional business applications, content management systems and so on. This release has improved custom property support, Quota support, Digest authentication and improved pluggability and extensibility.

• Jclouds beta includes compute and storage cloud portability

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:41 am

  Latest release of jclouds includes new BlobStore and Compute APIs and over a dozen cloud services to choose from.

• BugTracker with Twitter Connector and Ajax Workflow Editor

  5 Feb 2010 | 9:59 am

  The verside.org online workbench (developed in the Open-jACOB project) provides a framework for designing custom web applications with the build in Ajax workflow editor and twitter connector.

• Oracle's Bold Plans for Java Bode Well

  4 Feb 2010 | 8:51 am

  Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that any doubts regarding Oracle's stewardship of Java have been dispelled now that Ellison and company have made it clear that they are very interested in making Java an even stronger alternative to .Net.

• 
  Java.net

• Continuous Blog (the Official Hudson Blog) Debuts

  editor

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:45 pm

  R. Tyler Ballance says Welcome to Continuous Blog!: Hello and welcome to "Continuous Blog", the official Hudson weblog! If you don't mind me saying so, I think its arrival is long overdue. Since Hudson started in November of 2006, there hasn't been a central "voice" for the project. In just a few short years Hudson has grown into a substantial project with hundreds of plugins and thousands of users around the world. Kohsuke's nice Java-based extensible continuous integration server has grown up into fantastic tool with a great community around it... Community:  Java Tools

• Aquarium: GlassFish Support, HA, Clustering and More

  editor

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:40 pm

  Peligri provides an update on GlassFish Support, HA, Clustering and More: The Sun-Oracle Strategy WebCast and subsequent Webcasts and Docs generated multiple comments and discussions threads in the Web from which I want to highlight a few comments in here. Please check the original posts for context, clarification and caveats... Community:  Java Enterprise

• ISN TV: Refactoring (Parallelizing) Java Applications

  editor

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:35 pm

  On Twitter, Intel's Aaron Tersteeg pointed his followers to today's Parallel Programming Talk on Intel Software Network TV. The title of today's broadcast is "Refactoring (Parallelizing) Java Applications with Professor Danny Dig (University of Illinois U-C)." You can watch it Live on ISN TV at 8:00 AM Pacific Time (U.S.), Tuesday, February 9. If you can't see it live, just revisit the Parallel Programming Talk on Intel Software Network TV site later, and you'll be able to watch the recorded show. Community:  Java Enterprise

• 
  The Daily WTF

• Tales from the Interview: The Missing Interview, Infantile Expectancies, & More

  9 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  The Missing Interview (from Charles Ross) I went for an interview to work as a junior IT support Engineer at a certain Royal bank here in Scotland. It was a late interview, around 4:45 in the afternoon, and I turned up at 4:30, sharply dressed, and with all the documents I'd been requested to bring. Since this was a bank and security was a must, I had a full five year history sitting in front of me. I sat down and was quickly ushered into an interview room. I sat there for 20 minutes waiting, occasionally sticking my nose out the room to see if anyone was coming. After another ive or so…

• CodeSOD: Phishing for a Refund

  8 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  As I'm sure is the case with many of you, I sure do love me some tax refund. Once my W2's and other year-end tax forms documents come in the mail, I get my e-File in and wait for my refund to be direct deposited. Now, since the whole refund process involves computers and the internet, of course, it's a prime target for spammers and phishers who want nothing more than to ignite a little FUD and get some of your hard earned cash. The below snippet comes courtesy of Andy F. who writes, "Idiotic spammers and phishers probably provide your site with a glut of terrible code, but I got a…

• Sponsor Appreciation, Banzai Bouncer, Untraditional Data Rack, & More

  5 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.   The Daily WTF Sponsors   Microsoft WebsiteSpark - a great program for web shops and freelance web developers and designers where you get some great software (Visual Studio Pro, SQL Server, Server 2008, etc), at no upfront cost for three years; it also provides support and resources to help grow business   Peer 1 -…

• Emergency Faxes

  4 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  As far as technologies go, faxing is ancient. It predates the telephone by over a decade and, despite vast advances in scanning and email technology, the fax still remains a standard form of communication. When a transmission goes out, the occasional telecommunication ‘hiccup’ or line noise can corrupt the fax. Most modern fax machines have some rudimentary error handling that will alerts the user that the fax should be resent. This method of managing failures has been working so well that no one really saw fit to change it. That is, until a business analyst at Torre L’s…

• CodeSOD: Almost Counting Past 100

  3 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  "At the contract shop where I work," writes John S., "I have been assigned to a new web-enabled mapping program to help take a look at some of the issues they've been having." "When an item is added to a map, it is given a label, such as Item #1, Item #2, etc., with the number on the label incrementing for each new item. We had been having a problem where map labels were not being assigned uniquely when there were more than 100 items per map. It was always starting at Item #100 when reloading the map from the database. This was causing issues since it was the map…

• 
  The Old New Thing

• No matter what you do, someone will call you an idiot, part 2

  oldnewthing

  9 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

  There was quite a bit of reaction to what I thought was a simple "Hey, here's what's going on" article from last year, specifically on how the Adaptive Display Timeout means that Windows doesn't always start the screen saver exactly on time. As you may recall, this feature adjusts the time it takes for the screen saver to activate if the user keeps dismissing it immediately after it starts. One of those small things that makes the computer adapt to you rather than vice versa, and an adaptation that you probably don't even notice when it happens. I think these two responses below summarize the…

• Moving by staying put

  oldnewthing

  9 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

  A few years ago, Michael Kaplan opined on his distaste for office moves, particular the ones for which there appears to be very little benefit. One of his options was "interview with whatever group moves into Building 24 and work for them instead." Many years ago, an organizational change to the project I was working on resulted in my group ceasing to exist. The reason isn't important to the story; what's important is that the members of that group were redeployed to other parts of the project. At the time, I hadn't yet learned that material goods are a burden, and I dreaded moving offices…

• The 2010/2011 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

  oldnewthing

  8 Feb 2010 | 7:00 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 Gerard Schwarz's final season as the orchestra's music director. Week Program Comments 18 12 9A 9B 6AB 6CD 6EF 6G 4B BB MM RA RB BS SS 09/232010 Foote: Francesca da Rimini Brahms: Symphony #3 Prokofiev: Piano Concerto #2 Okay?AwesomeGood          …

• For better performance, set all your monitors to the same color format

  oldnewthing

  8 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

  Pplu wonders why programs run more slowly when the system is running with multiple monitors. Well, for one thing, of course, when you have more than one monitor, there's more stuff on the screen for the system to keep track of. It's the same reason that programs run more slowly on a large monitor than on a small monitor. And if there's only one monitor, then functions like MonitorFromPoint become trivial if the flag is something like MONITOR_DEFAULTTONEAREST, because when there's only one monitor, answering questions like "What monitor is closest to this point"? becomes very easy. If your two…

• A simple Venn diagram teaches you the difference between Norway and Sweden

  oldnewthing

  5 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

  Not sure it helps, though.

• 
  Lambda

• Resolving and Exploiting the k-CFA Paradox

  8 Feb 2010 | 9:24 am

  Resolving and Exploiting the k-CFA Paradox, Matthew Might, Yannis Smaragdakis, and David Van Horn. To appear in PLDI 2010. Low-level program analysis is a fundamental problem, taking the shape of "flow analysis" in functional languages and "points-to" analysis in imperative and object-oriented (OO) languages. Despite the similarities, the vocabulary and results in the two communities remain largely distinct, with limited cross-understanding. One of the few links is Shivers's k-CFA work, which has advanced the concept of "context-sensitive analysis" and is widely known in both communities.

• Continuity Analysis of Programs

  4 Feb 2010 | 9:01 am

  Continuity Analysis of Programs, Swarat Chaudhuri, Sumit Galwani, and Roberto Lublinerman. POPL 2010. We present an analysis to automatically determine if a program represents a continuous function, or equivalently, if infinitesimal changes to its inputs can only cause infinitesimal changes to its outputs. The analysis can be used to verify the robustness of programs whose inputs can have small amounts of error and uncertainty -- e.g., embedded controllers processing slightly unreliable sensor data, or handheld devices using slightly stale satellite data. Continuity is a fundamental notion in…

• Monads in Action

  3 Feb 2010 | 5:17 am

  Monads in Action, Andrzej Filinski, POPL 2010. In functional programming, monadic characterizations of computational effects are normally understood denotationally: they describe how an effectful program can be systematically expanded or translated into a larger, pure program, which can then be evaluated according to an effect-free semantics. Any effect-specific operations expressible in the monad are also given purely functional definitions, but these definitions are only directly executable in the context of an already translated program. This approach thus takes an inherently Church-style…

• HipHop: Facebook runs compiled PHP on its servers

  2 Feb 2010 | 4:42 pm

  While PHP deservedly gets a terrible rep around programming language folks, this is still an interesting announcement: HipHop compiles PHP down to C++ and gets about a 2x speedup. HipHop will be released as open source, and is currently in production use, serving 90% of Facebook's traffic. It makes me wish Facebook used Python: a large-scale deployment like this would be a great boon to the PyPy project.

• Delimited Control in OCaml, Abstractly and Concretely, System Description

  25 Jan 2010 | 9:27 am

  Delimited Control in OCaml, Abstractly and Concretely, System Description We describe the first implementation of multi-prompt delimited control operators in OCaml that is direct in that it captures only the needed part of the control stack. The implementation is a library that requires no changes to the OCaml compiler or run-time, so it is perfectly compatible with existing OCaml source code and byte-code. The library has been in fruitful practical use for four years. We present the library as an implementation of an abstract machine derived by elaborating the definitional machine. The…

• 
  cssplay.co.uk

• CSS3 3D Spheres

  Stu Nicholls

  5 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Using CSS3 to style different color square boxes into 3D spheres.

• CSS3 'Drop Everything'

  Stu Nicholls

  5 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Using CSS3 to produce a multi purpose dropdown menu system that can contain any information.

• CSS3 Parallax Scrolling

  Stu Nicholls

  3 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Using CSS3 to parallax scroll text.

• CSS3 Duff Roll

  Stu Nicholls

  2 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  The previous demo adapted to have a continuous left to right rolling can.

• CSS3 Can Roll

  Stu Nicholls

  1 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  Using CSS3 selectors to animate two static images to give 3D effect.

• 
  Coding Horror

• Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas

  Jeff Atwood

  25 Jan 2010 | 8:00 pm

  How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much: It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution. I was reminded of Mr.

• The Great Newline Schism

  Jeff Atwood

  18 Jan 2010 | 5:00 am

  Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline? Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Well, except when they are. The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines. Did you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly never thought much about…

• A Democracy of Netbooks

  Jeff Atwood

  8 Jan 2010 | 5:00 am

  I'm a big fan of Joey DeVilla's excellent blog, Global Nerdy, but I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: he end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to please everyone and pleases no one. Consider the factors: Size: A bit too large to go into your pocket; a bit too small for regular day-to-day work. Power: Slightly more capable than a smartphone; slightly less capable than a laptop. Price: Slightly higher than a higher-end smartphone but lacking a phone's capability and…

• Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

  Jeff Atwood

  29 Dec 2009 | 5:08 am

  I'm a big fan of John Gruber's Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don't think anyone's quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset: Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile,…

• Building a PC, Part VI: Rebuilding

  Jeff Atwood

  17 Dec 2009 | 6:30 pm

  I can't believe it's been almost two and a half years since I built my last PC. I originally documented that process in a series of posts: Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot Building a PC, Part II: Burn in Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking Building a PC, Part IV: Now It's Your Turn Building a PC, Part V: Upgrading Now, lest you think I am some kind of freakish, cave-dwelling luddite, what with my ancient two and a half year old PC, I have upgraded the CPU, upgraded the hard drive, and upgraded the video card since then. I also went from 4 GB of RAM to 8 GB of RAM, but I didn't happen to…

• 
  ASP.NET News

• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 Release Candidate 2

  4 Feb 2010 | 9:00 pm

  ASP.NET MVC is a free, fully supported framework that enables developers to quickly build standards-based, SEO-friendly Web sites by offering complete control over the HTML and URLs. Learn more about this release, and provide feedback to the team.

• New Articles and Updates to the ASP.NET Wiki

  3 Feb 2010 | 9:00 pm

  Expand and share your knowledge about the AJAX Control Toolkit, ASP.NET Open Source Projects, Web Services, and more in the ASP.NET Wiki. Earn Community Recognition points by contributing!

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Just Got Easy

  31 Jan 2010 | 9:00 pm

  Start with the free download, review your website, and make changes fast. The SEO Toolkit with its detailed analysis and search engine friendly suggestions helps improve the relevance of your website in search results right away. The SEO Toolkit will help you increase website traffic and revenue, influence and update search engines, and improve customer experience. For more information or to download, please visit the Free SEO Toolkit page.

• Six New Upcoming Webcasts!

  28 Jan 2010 | 9:00 pm

  Don't miss upcoming webcasts on ASP.NET Web Forms and AJAX 4! Register for an upcoming webcast to hear directly from the product team and industry experts on current and upcoming technologies, or watch the archived webcasts.

• Listen to New Podcasts

  26 Jan 2010 | 9:00 pm

  We’ve added more shows to the Podcasts page. Listen to hours of podcasts on issues of interest to all ASP.NET developers from .NET Rocks!, Hanselminutes, the Misfit Geek, and more.

• 
  Martin Fowler

• Texas Speaking Events Rescheduled

  Martin Fowler

  The family medical issue has been resolved happily, so I’m free to go back on the road. We’ve thus rescheduled the events I was supposed to do last month in Texas. On February 23rd I’ll be speaking at DFW Scrum in Dallas. On February 25th ThoughtWorks is organizing a technology forum in Austin. As is usual for me, I haven’t planned exactly what I’ll talk about yet, but it’ll revolve around my usual topics of software design and agile methods.

• ConversationalStories

  Martin Fowler

  Here's a common misconception about agile methods. It centers on the way user stories are created and flow through the development activity. The misconception is that the product owner (or business analysts) creates user stories and then put them in front of developers to implement. The notion is that this is a flow from product owner to development, with the product owner responsible for determining what needs to be done and the developers how to do it.A justification for this approach is that this separates the responsibilities along the lines of competence. The product owner knows the…

• DslBookRoadmap

  Martin Fowler

  Time for another update on my DSL book's progress, since I've not been writing anything else recently.I had my first round of technical review late in 2009 and have been incorporating comments into the current drafts. Progress on this has gone well, in large part because travel is light this time of the year. I'm also integrating my book production process into that of Pearson's.The next visible targets are a second round of technical review and the launching of a roughcut. We're hoping to get these going in the next couple of months. The roughcut will also allow people other than official…

• Apologies for Canceling Texas Speaking Events

  Martin Fowler

  I’m afraid I’ve had to cancel my speaking events in Dallas and Austin next week due to a family medical problem. As I write this, it’s not clear how serious the problem is going to be, but there is a good chance that I won’t be able to travel to Texas next week. As a result we felt it was best to cancel the events, while we still have a few days notice. We do intent to reschedule as soon the as dust settles. My Texas ThoughtWorkers are very keen to have me come out and do these talks, so we want to do them as soon as we reasonably can. My apologies for this, and I hope…

• TechnicalDebtQuadrant

  Martin Fowler

  There's been a few posts over the last couple of months about TechnicalDebt that's raised the question of what kinds of design flaws should or shouldn't be classified as Technical Debt. A good example of this is Uncle Bob's post saying a mess is not a debt. His argument is that messy code, produced by people who are ignorant of good design practices, shouldn't be a debt. Technical Debt should be reserved for cases when people have made a considered decision to adopt a design strategy that isn't sustainable in the longer term, but yields a short term benefit, such as making a release. The…

• 
  Articles, Opinions & Lab - MIX Online

• Design for tables

  Tim Aidlin

  8 Feb 2010 | 3:34 pm

  Years ago, around the time of MIX06, I had a great conversation with a friend who was working on a design for the Microsoft Surface. He said he had to basically re-learn user interface design during the process, since Surface’s screen presented a totally new user experience: a horizontal interface that multiple users (and objects, for that matter) could approach from any direction — a far bigger challenge than a regular computer screen presents. In his office, he showed me a giant sheet of paper with arrows pointing inward from all directions. He said this reminded him just how different…

• Incarnate Updates: BlogEngine.NET Support and Service Improvements

  Karsten Januszewski

  5 Feb 2010 | 12:06 pm

  We are excited to announce support for Incarnate in the latest BlogEngine.NET release. In addition, we have made some improvements to the Incarnate service itself. Here’s the scoop: BlogEngine.NET Support With the release of BlogEngine.NET 1.6, Incarnate is now supported.  We worked with the team behind the project and they added the infrastructure in their engine to support other avatar providers in addition to Gravatar.  Now, they have a field that stores an avatar URL in association with each comment, which works for both their XML provider and their SQL provider. While…

• I Can Haz Data Visualization?

  Thomas Lewis

  4 Feb 2010 | 8:24 am

  Everybody loves good data visualization. The New York Times has been especially good at using data visualization to demonstrate the power of information visualization as a communication tool. We thought the topic was intriguing enough to create a lab about it. As you may know, we have a sister conference called MIX where we will be hanging out at in March. We want one of you to be there with us (actually, we want all of you there). So we want to take our love of data visualization and our love of giving you something free to give you a chance to win a free ticket to MIX10. We also will be…

• Ninja Coders and Despot Designers: Game Over

  Joshua Allen

  1 Feb 2010 | 1:58 pm

  Our industry has just been changed forever. Many have predicted that this day would come, and it finally has -- design has irreversibly supplanted development as the center of gravity in software projects. OK, so maybe that's a bit dramatic. The revolution has taken longer than a day, and will continue for some time. But I believe we can safely say that we're past the turning point.  Design has won. This is a topic that Nishant and I have discussed many times, but the "eureka!" moment for me happened when I was building a Web application to handle MIX Open Call voting. It was a…

• Kindle vs. iPad vs. Weimaraner

  Nishant Kothary

  29 Jan 2010 | 11:39 am

  As I suspected, my RSS reader was flooded with the inevitable "Kindle vs. iPad: Which one will triumph?" posts yesterday. I read a handful of posts from the usual suspects like CNET, Mashable, and even the NY Times, and I'm done. Journalism may be dead, but in the last 24 hours we've demonstrated that we're going to assassinate its apparent savior—blogging—using the same militaristic tactics. It's a nice molotov cocktail: a couple shots of "Relativity" (a concept from Predictably Irrational's first chapter, which holds that humans are deeply evolutionarily wired such that they can't…

• 
  Yahoo! User Interface Blog

• YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years”

  Eric Miraglia

  3 Feb 2010 | 12:44 pm

  In the first part of Douglas Crockford’s five-part series on the JavaScript programming language, he explores the historical context from which JavaScript emerged. But he begins with a little bit of his own history, relating his efforts as a child to build a homemade computer: I found some pieces of particle board and a saw and I sketched out what it was going to look like, and started sawing. I sawed, and sawed, and sawed. The particle board was really, really hard, and the saw was really, really dull. I sawed for what must have been at least two minutes, and then I gave up. OK,…

• Fybit Riatrax4Js: Program YUI in Java

  Erol Koç

  2 Feb 2010 | 11:08 am

  About the Author: Erol Koç is a co-founder of Fybit, a Switzerland based startup company. Before joining Fybit, he worked as a software architect for a security company where he was the tech lead for the product’s web frontend. He has an MS degree in computer science from ETH Zurich. During an internship at IBM, he contributed to the Eclipse project. Fybit Riatrax4Js: Write YUI in Java YUI is not only a fantastic JavaScript library, it is also a great community. Developers contribute to YUI and allow others to benefit from it. Now, Fybit joins the YUI community with Riatrax4Js, a…

• The YUI Team is Looking for a World-Class Engineer to Work on Frontend CI, Build Systems, and QA

  Eric Miraglia

  28 Jan 2010 | 8:30 am

  If working alongside people like Douglas Crockford and on the team that created YUI (Matt Sweeney, Adam Moore, Dav Glass, Jenny Donnelly, Luke Smith, Tripp Bridges, Allen Rabinovich, Alaric Cole, Satyen Desai, and others) sounds like a good way to spend your time, read on: We’re hiring. We’re looking for a great engineer to help us improve every aspect of our continuous integration (CI) process, including the way we build, document, test, and deploy our code. To succeed in this role, you’ll have to be: familiar with best practices in frontend engineering (e.g., this video…

• Crockford on JavaScript: Night One Recap, and More Tickets Released

  Eric Miraglia

  26 Jan 2010 | 2:25 pm

  About 200 people gathered in URLs Café at Yahoo! last night to take in the first installment of the Crockford on JavaScript lecture series. Douglas took the audience through a selective history of computer science and programming languages, focusing on the evolution of those features and conventions that would later give shape to JavaScript. While we’re working on video from last night, we wanted to share a few pictures and to let you know that we’re adjusting our ticketing limits — if you visit the lecture series page and follow the RSVP links, you’ll now see…

• In the Wild for January 19, 2010

  Eric Miraglia

  19 Jan 2010 | 7:32 am

  News and notes follow from the past week in the YUI community. As always, please let us know via the comments or @yuilibrary if we missed something good. YUI DataTable, TabView and More on SpokenWord.org (thanks, @dougkaye): Doug Kaye wrote in to tell us about YUI use at SpokenWord.org, his fantastic audio content portal.  They’ve done a nice job bringing TabView and DataTable together in their feed browser — check out the IT Conversations feed for a sample. (Original source.) YUI 2.7.0 on the Palm WebOS App Directory: Although I imagine this site is going to evolve a lot over…

• 
  Ruby Inside

• Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources To Get You Going

  Peter Cooper

  5 Feb 2010 | 3:27 pm

  Whenever something's a really "big deal" in the Ruby world, we cover it - even if it makes more sense on Rails Inside (which is now switching to a user contributions model). Given that, we've gone through all the latest and greatest Rails 3.0 related links and put together a ton of them to help you on your way with the recently released Rails 3.0 beta. Enjoy! Getting Started / Must Reads Rails 3.0 Release Notes - An epic amount of documentation from the Rails Guides project. If you're already pretty familiar with Rails 2.x and just want to know what's new and updated, this is the place to…

• Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku

  Peter Cooper

  5 Feb 2010 | 12:22 pm

  Toto (GitHub repo) is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata. At only 300 lines, it's easy to hack to your own taste, too. Alexis has decided to push Toto by demonstrating how easy it is to deploy - for free - on the Heroku platform. You can literally get a blog up on Heroku within 5 minutes, even if you haven't already got a Heroku account (I just tried it). How To Do It Here are…

• Rails 3.0 Beta/Prerelease Available Now and How To Install It

  Peter Cooper

  4 Feb 2010 | 7:29 pm

  Today, Rails core member Jeremy Kemper dropped the words that lots of ardent Rails developers have been waiting for: "Rails 3 beta is LIVE." It's true! Rails 3.0's first approved beta/pre-release version is now live and ready for you to install. Unfortunately, the installation process isn't as easy as Jeremy explains. RubyGems doesn't support the installation of prerequisites on pre-release gems, so you need to install them all manually. I think I have some instructions to cover that (works on 1.8.7 and 1.9.1): gem install i18n tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis…

• MacRuby 0.5 Released: A Significant, Stable Release

  Peter Cooper

  1 Feb 2010 | 4:23 pm

  MacRuby has hit a significant milestone in its development today: version 0.5! The key features include improved HotCocoa support (though this is now maintained separately from core on GitHub), better Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and support for OS X 10.6's Grand Central Dispatch. Give It A Go! If you've got a Mac and haven't yet tried out MacRuby, give it a go - its speed and general level of support for Ruby is very impressive. You can download MacRuby as a standalone package with installer (for OS X 10.6 and higher) or if you're using RVM, do an update and then rvm install macruby to…

• A Video Interview With Ruby’s Creator, Matz

  Peter Cooper

  26 Jan 2010 | 5:20 pm

  Ruby's creator and benevolent dictator Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto has done a video interview for InfoQ at the QCon enterprise software development conference. You can watch the video on InfoQ's page (or, if you're a member of InfoQ, download an MP3). In the interview, Matz talks about what he'd do if he were recreated Ruby from scratch today, lazy evaluation, Erlang, actor models, typing, his opinions on alternative Ruby implementations, and continuations. Matz also recommends reading O'Reilly's Beautiful Code (Amazon link) but humbly advises against reading Chapter 29 - a chapter that he…

• 
  Channel 9

• PhizzPop Develop & Design Challenge

  Laura Foy

  9 Feb 2010 | 9:48 am

  The unique nature of The Phizzpop Design Challenge is that it pits agency Davids and Goliaths against one another to show the most innovative integration of Microsoft technologies to achieve the website redesign goals of BGCA. Don’t miss your opportunity to show off your skills to an elite panel of judges, advance BGCA's mission, and land $50k in the process. Download the brief and get started today!

• Jason Zander: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Released

  Charles

  8 Feb 2010 | 5:06 pm

  The Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is here! Your Beta 2 feedback has been incredibly helpful to the engineering team. A big Thank You from Visual Studio! Here, Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander sits down with us to discuss how the Visual Studio engineering team addressed your Beta 2 feedback and made some helpful updates to the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Jason even demos some of the improvements made in the VS 2010 RC — and on quite a modest PC. Jason and his team went to great lengths to improve the overall experience of writing applications inside VS 2010.

• Help Desk Episode 1 with Chris Pirillo (Pilot) - Show Notes

  Nic Fillingham

  8 Feb 2010 | 4:46 pm

  Show Notes & Links from Help Desk Episode 1 (Pilot) 1. Bas (from the Channel 9 forums) [8:33] How do I change the program associated with an extension when you choose 'edit' from a file's context menu? Answer: Gov says that this must be edited manually in Windows 7 A Bing search finds this 3rd party app for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that claims to be able to edit file associations (including “Edit”): http://defaultprogramseditor.com/ 2. @r*er (via Twitter) [9:37] @ch9live What is the easiest way to have a window maximized across multiple screens? Answer: Chris suggests:…

• Ping 47: Avatar, FourSquare, Bing & Twitter, Farmville

  Laura Foy

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:56 pm

  Paul decided to take a little vacation so our good friend Adam stepped in to bring us the hottest stories on Microsoft Campus. Some are.... James Camerons Avatar & Microsoft Office for Mac loves you! FourSquare coming to Windows Mobile Bing Twitter Maps Farmville & MSN Games

• TWC9: Sara Ford, recognize touch gestures, make Windows 7 into a hotspot

  Dan Fernandez

  5 Feb 2010 | 11:31 pm

  This week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by special guest host Sara Ford to discuss the week's top developer news, including: Sara's leaving the CodePlex team to work as a Developer Evangelist Nitin Bharti - 7-Part video series on using Microsoft Expression Blend, via Alvin Ashcraft Interesting because: It's a free set of videos that cover the essentials of using Blend, including controls, data-binding, animation, and more John Papa - Creating Custom Pre-loaders/splash screens in Silverlight Interesting because: There are certain things you can and can't do in Silverlight's splash screen Channel…

• 
  Latest from the Lounge

• Windows Azure is Released in Beta

• Will Healthcare IT Create More Jobs for DBA’s?

• Going green with a widget

• 
  Paul Graham: Essays

• Apple's Mistake

• What Startups Are Really Like

• Persuade xor Discover

• Post-Medium Publishing

• The List of N Things

• 
  CodePlex

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 08, 2010

  8 Feb 2010 | 12:40 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 08, 2010New ProjectsAgile Poker Cards for Windows Mobile: During a scrum or other agile processes, you have to estimate the size of a user story during a planning session. With the Agile Poker Cards progr...Allegro.net Computational Libraries: Allegro.net libraries provide computational support on the .NET platform. Allegro Mathlib contains classes that implement mathematical operations. ...Assembly Signer: This tool is designed to sign unsigned assemblies(in compiled libraries) with specified key .snk file for .net 1.1 and…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 07, 2010

  7 Feb 2010 | 11:43 am

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 07, 2010New ProjectsATAPI - Managed TAPI wrapper for TAPI 2.0: Managed .NET library for interacting with the Microsoft Telephony API (TAPI) 2.x. This library is for creating clients that consume telephony serv...BahaiReader: BahaiReaderBenchmarks, Performance and Speed Tests for the .NET and Mono Frameworks: Benchmarks, performance and speed tests of basic algorithms, structures and patterns for the Microsoft .NET Framework and Novell Mono Framework. G...Campus RTS: This is an RTS game built with Microsoft's XNA Framework built by four…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 06, 2010

  6 Feb 2010 | 11:50 am

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 06, 2010New Projects3D XNA Gizmo: A 3D XNA Gizmo usable for your Level Editor. Gizmo & EditorComponent are light-weight alternatives of the 3D Gizmo used in Core Engine ( http://c...ARSoft.Tools.Net - C# DNS and SPF Library: This project contains a complete managed .Net dns client and SPF implementation. It's written in C# and fully compatible with .Net 3.5 and Mono 2.Contraction Timing & Logging: This is a simple powershell script designed to allow the act of recording contractions to be a simple…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 05, 2010

  5 Feb 2010 | 11:02 am

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 05, 2010New ProjectsAlphaLanguage: 練習として作ってみた言語 永遠のα版Asp.NET Two-Way DataBind Controls: These controls have the same capabilities the Windows Forms controls have. With them you can use the two-way databind funcionalities. To use these ...Azure Table Query: Web role project for running linq queries against Azure table storage. Useful for testing linq queries as well as retrieving and downloading data ...bk0007: Saari umar…

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 04, 2010

  4 Feb 2010 | 1:35 pm

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 04, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC Attribute Based Route Mapper: This is a helper extension which automatically registers all website routes containing inside custom attributes in ASP.NET MVC controller methods.AutoSuggest: Autosuggest makes it easier for users to find values in an HTML SELECT element with a large number of OPTIONS. It is developed in JavaScript and ca...Chapman University - CPSC236: Nash Spence: This is simply my code to turn in for the class CPSC236 at Chapman Univesity.EasyNet:…

• 
  Planet MySQL

• 451 CAOS Links 2010.02.09

  The 451 Group

  9 Feb 2010 | 8:45 am

  Ken Jacobs departs Oracle. Linus loves his Nexus One. And more. Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca “Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.” # As Matt Asay noted, Ken Jacobs’ departure from Oracle is a significant loss for MySQL. # Linus Toravlds gave the Nexus One his personal thumbs-up. # Glyn Moody outlined the H.264 video standards debate. # Oracle job cuts affect GNOME accessibility work but, as Joe Brockmeier pointed out, the blame lies with everyone. # SourceForge project administrators can now decide if their…

• When should we expect the next stable MySQL release beyond 5.1?

  Jay Janssen

  9 Feb 2010 | 6:12 am

  I'm not sure I care what the version number is (5.3,5.4,5.4,6.0), and you can talk about milestone releases all you want. What really matters to me is when we'll have something beyond 5.1 marked as GA. Will it be 5.5? When should I expect that?   5.4 was announced last year at the conference with lots of performance fixes for the mysql server itself. Great. Until those changes percolate up into a stable release, they aren't worth too much to me. With all the hoopla about the release cycle, I haven't seen any results in the form of new features/fixes making it to stable any faster than…

• MySQL University: MySQL Galera Multi-Master Replication

  Stefan Hinz

  9 Feb 2010 | 6:01 am

  This Thursday (February 11th, 14:00 UTC), Seppo Jaakola & Alex Yurchenko will talk about MySQL Galera Multi-Master Replication. Galera provides synchronous multi-master replication and uses a certification-based replication method for replicating transaction write sets in a DBMS cluster. The replication method requires close co-operation with database transaction processing and DMBS must support a specific replication API to be compatible with Galera. Codership has integrated Galera replication in the InnoDB storage engine, and the resulting MySQL/Galera cluster product has been published…

• Monotonic functions, SQL and MySQL

  Shlomi Noach

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:47 pm

  In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function which preserves the given order. [Wikipedia] To be more precise, a function f is monotonic increasing, if for every x ≤ y it holds that f(x) ≤ f(y). f is said to be strictly monotonic increasing is for every x < y it holds that f(x) < f(y). So, if we follow values in some order, we say that f is monotonic increasing if f’s value never decreases (it either increases or stays the same), and we say that f is strictly increasing if f’s value is always changes “upwards”. Monotonic functions…

• TOTD #121: JDBC resource for MySQL and Oracle sample database in GlassFish v3

  Arun Gupta

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:00 pm

  This blog clearly explains how to configure the MySQL sample database (sakila) with GlassFish. Even though the instructions use a specific database but should work for other databases (such as Oracle, JavaDB, PostgreSQL, and others) as well. The second half of the blog provide specific syntax for the Oracle sample database. Download sakila sample database and unzip the archive. Install the database as described here - basically load and run "sakila-schema.sql" and "sakila-data.sql" extracted from the archive. Create a new MySQL user account using MySQL CLI Admin and assign…

• 
  mySQL DBA

• innodb_file_per_table, shrinking table spaces and the data dictionary

  Dathan Vance Pattishall

  4 Feb 2010 | 11:24 am

  INNODB has some irritating gotchas that makes disk space management hard. In 2002ish INNODB, added innodb_file_per_table to get around allot of these issues, but it does not fix everything.If you are running innodb_file_per_table, you will notice in your database directory db.opt - database characteristics file. tablename.frm - the table structure. tablename.ibd - the actual innodb table space file Imagine that you have a table with 10 million rows and you delete say 5 million rows in multiple chunks around 400K chunks, because deletes are slow. Next, you notice that the table space file did…

• Scaling to 200K Transactions per Second with Open Source - MySQL, Java, curl, PHP

  Dathan Vance Pattishall

  8 Jan 2010 | 4:21 pm

  I'll be giving a web presentation Jan. 19th 2010. If you would like to check it out please do!Scaling to 200K Transactions per Second with Open Source - MySQL, Java, curl, PHPI thought it went well. I will post the link to the slides here :)

• Asynchronous Queries verses Synchronous Queries

  Dathan Vance Pattishall

  9 Nov 2009 | 4:58 pm

  In a procedural language without the use of threads (or Inter Process Communication via forks), to execute I/O requests they are done one after another. Synchronous Queries produce at best a Big-O of N such that N is an element of I/O communication (queries) and N equals the number of queries needed to achieve the requested dataset.With IPC or threads we can speed up common O(N) problems to reduce the N with parallelism, its still functionally a O(N) yet from a single instance point of view N is much less because threads (IPC) takes that Serial computing component and executes the code in…

• Steps I take before upgrading mysql

  Dathan Vance Pattishall

  9 Oct 2009 | 3:34 pm

  I am not a fan of upgrading mySQL unless I need to. I am of the mind if it is not broke don't fix it, but when I do upgrade I follow these general steps. If I have run into a mySQL bug, I look to see if that bug is fixed by searching the mySQL bug database. If I've notice a performance bottleneck, I look to see if the performance bottleneck has been fixed by searching the same database. I will NOT upgrade to the latest and greatest version of mySQL (5.4) I stay within my branch (5.0). These are my three general motivations that drive my upgrade decisions. Anytime I upgrade I also make a list…

• Nagios Event Handlers - Love them

  Dathan Vance Pattishall

  9 Sep 2009 | 11:30 am

  What is Nagios? Nagios IMHO is the best Open Source monitoring system out there. It supports hosts checks, a level to determine on a host level if a box is considered "up". It supports service check, a level to determine if a particular service such as mySQL is up. It has features to log all events to a flat file or to a DB. It can notify you when a service is in a warning state, error state or unknown state.For the purpose of this article, I am going to talk about handling events such as a clearing up swap.First, let us look at some configuration of Nagios. We are going to define a command,…

• 
  MySQL Performance Blog

• Introducing tpce-like workload for MySQL

  Vadim

  8 Feb 2010 | 9:30 am

  We have been using tpcc-mysql benchmark for long time, and there many results published in our blog, but that's just single workload. That's why we are looking into different benchmarks, and one of them is TPCE. Yasufumi made some efforts to make TPCE working with MySQL, and we are making it available for public consideration. You can download it from our Lauchpad Percona-tools project, it's bzr branch lp:~percona-dev/perconatools/tpcemysql Important DISCLAIMER: Using this package you should agree with TPC-E License Agreement, which in human words is: You can't name results as "TPC Benchmark…

• New OLAP Wikistat benchmark: Introduction and call for feedbacks

  Vadim

  28 Jan 2010 | 7:08 pm

  I've seen my posts on Ontime Air traffic and Star Schema Benchmark got a lot of interest (links: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/01/07/star-schema-bechmark-infobright-infinidb-and-luciddb/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/02/analyzing-air-traffic-performance-with-infobright-and-monetdb/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/10/26/air-traffic-queries-in-luciddb/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/ ). However benchmarks by itself did not cover all cases I would want, so I was thinking about better scenario. The…

• Percona is hiring a Shift Support Captain

  fernando

  26 Jan 2010 | 6:31 am

  Percona is hiring. As part of our growth process, we introduced the role of the Shift Support Captain in 2009 (see the original announcement here) to provide customers with a 24x7 technical contact person. The Shift Support Team dispatches incoming emergencies, assigns new issues, handles or escalates incoming Nagios alerts from some customers, and in general makes sure things get handled and customers get the attention they need. You must be detail oriented, service oriented, tech savvy and as all Percona staff, able to work from home with little supervision. This is a growth position, so…

• Community Events February-March

  Morgan Tocker

  22 Jan 2010 | 1:13 pm

  February and March as busy months for Community events.  There's MySQL University, Fosdem, the Seattle MySQL Meetup & Confoo.ca. Here are the details: February 4th - I'll be presenting a talk via MySQL University on Optimizing Queries with Explain.  This talk will be about learning to read the output from MySQL's EXPLAIN command, and optimizing some example queries from the IMDB dataset.  At 5.7G in InnoDB tables imported before any secondary key indexes IMDB is one of my new favorite example databases.  It's about the right size on most desktop PCs that you can measure the difference…

• When should you store serialized objects in the database?

  Morgan Tocker

  21 Jan 2010 | 1:39 pm

  A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically. So when is it a good idea to use this technique? If the application really is schema-less and has a lot of optional parameters that do not appear in every record, serializing the data in one column can be a better idea than having many extra columns that are NULL. The restriction on this, would be that…

• 
  Observations by Kaj Arnö @Sun

• kajtajm: Planning my first Python / PyObjC / MySQLdb project

  kaj

  17 Jan 2010 | 6:21 am

  Never have I planned a program so much in detail before starting coding. And stranger still, I’m planning the program to be coded in a language in which I haven’t written a single line of code. Nonetheless, I’m eager and it feels good. I woke up early this Sunday, my mind concentrating on the many steps I will have to take before the first project will see the light of day. I had planned eight prerequisite lessons before even starting the coding. And despite receiving many good pieces of advice, nobody had relieved me of my main worry — the input grid for the data…

• Rediscovering Programming with Python, Cocoa and PyObjC

  kaj

  16 Jan 2010 | 2:04 am

  Use PyObjC to code Python under the Mac Cocoa framework, and MySQLdb to interface with MySQL! That’s the advice I got in reply to my recent blog. The discussions were so inspiring that I spent all time when out running yesterday daydreaming about how wonderful it will be to rediscover the aesthetics of programming and regain the control over my personal IT. So, to recap a bit of my thinking: Once a programmer, always a programmer. If you’ve learned how to code and to master your own IT life to a certain degree, you get used to it. At least I did. But then fate wrote a declaration…

• Developing small Mac apps with MySQL

  kaj

  15 Jan 2010 | 1:52 am

  What tool should I use to develop small MySQL end user applications on my Mac? Let me start by saying that I don’t know the answer, and I’m looking for your guidance. To make my question more specific, let me describe my background and what I want. I started my professional career in the 1980s as a developer using a tool called FOCUS by Information Builders. Terminology was different in those times. Focus was “a hierarchical database” and a “4GL“, which stood for “Fourth generation programming language“. Presumably, 4GLs saved lots of…

• Call for Papers for MySQL Conference 2010 — by 27 Jan 2010

  kaj

  21 Dec 2009 | 2:53 am

  For this year’s MySQL Conference (and by “this year”, I do mean 2009), I wrote the blog entry about opening the Call for Papers over three months earlier. The blog entry was in early September 2008, and the deadline was in late October 2008. Next year, the MySQL Conference 12-15 April 2010 in Santa Clara has a tighter Call for Papers. It’s now open, and it closes 27 January 2010. This has its drawbacks (a short time for you to propose, a short time for the program committee to review), but it also has a clear benefit for the participant: Over three months more…

• MySQL 5.5.0-M2: A Milestone Ready To Download

  kaj

  15 Dec 2009 | 4:38 am

  Good news: As you read this, you can very soon start downloading the first version of MySQL 5.5 from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/. Some things are the same as before, others are different. Let’s start by looking at the version string, SELECT VERSION(); mysql> SELECT VERSION(); +--------------+ | version()    | +--------------+ | 5.5.0-m2-log | +--------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) mysql> And let’s look at the highlights of the release notes, or better still, MySQL 5.5 in a nutshell in the manual on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html. Top of…

• 
  Polymath Programmer

• Answers to philosophical questions must be reasoned

  Vincent

  8 Feb 2010 | 7:00 am

  My friend wrote a short guide on what makes a question philosophical. The 3 conditions for a question to pass the philosophical test are interesting. Has not been answered by science The obvious reason is that, if it’s answered by science, there’s no point in answering it (philosophically). For example, “Can penguins fly?” is answered by science. It’s “no”. Their bodies aren’t made for flying. Although… More than one possible answer If there’s only one answer, there’s no point in answering it. For example, “Is 1+1 =…

• Hungarian notation gone terribly wrong – lust

  Vincent

  5 Feb 2010 | 6:45 am

  I was working on some legacy code in PowerBuilder, when I saw the name of a user interface control (heavily anonymised and fun-ised): lust_staffname Let’s break that down: local (as opposed to global) user (I think? User-created as opposed to system/standard) static text (the Label equivalent in ASP.NET) I wonder what was going through that programmer’s mind when he wrote that… ===== Talk with me on Twitter or Facebook Hungarian notation gone terribly wrong – lust

• Making things happen

  Vincent

  1 Feb 2010 | 5:58 am

  This is a short announcement, and a slight deviation from the usual topics (not that the topics are consistent, but … never mind). I’m excited to say that my Math Wizard ebook is going to be launched in about 9 days. Launch date is 10 February, and the time is UTC 1400 (2pm London-ish) EST 0900 (9am New York-ish) Singapore 2200 (10pm. Because I’m like Cinderella. I have to go before midnight.) Thank you for reading Polymath Programmer, with the wide (and sometimes weird) variety of topics covered. This ebook product I created is an amalgamation of my interests in math and…

• Do beer ladies need a career path?

  Vincent

  25 Jan 2010 | 5:22 am

  Beer ladies, in the Singapore context, are women who serve beer at the local coffee shops. They generally chat with the (generally male) customers so they are more likely to buy more beer. Maybe it’s obvious to you, but it still needs to be said. And we’re talking about this because I went to a philosophy cafe session recently. And that was the topic. We generalised the term “beer ladies” for our discussion (including child stars and air stewardesses). And you can add in your comments on the original post “Do beer ladies need a career path?“. Be careful. My…

• Calculating column widths in Excel Open XML

  Vincent

  18 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am

  Commenter Roie said that the formula for calculating column widths in Excel Open XML should still be manageable. This is despite the scary formula mentioned before: width = Truncate([{Number of Characters} * {Maximum Digit Width} + {5 pixel padding}] / {Maximum Digit Width} * 256) / 256 So I put on my explorer’s hat, and decided against my better judgement to delve into that inexplicable equation. Turns out, it wasn’t too bad. Here’s a screenshot of the resulting Excel file: The code is almost the same as when we’re setting custom column widths, but here it is in its…

• 
  James Gosling: on the Java Road

• OK, it's time to look forward...

  jag

  22 Jan 2010 | 7:31 am

  Enough of being maudlin, it's time to look forward to being a unified company: Sun + Oracle = Snorcle ? Where else would Duke need a snorcle, but in an aquarium visiting a glassfish? You'll find all the images here. Thanks to Rich Green for open sourcing Duke.

• So long, old friend...

  jag

  21 Jan 2010 | 6:20 am

  (get a mug)

• This Modern Age is Weirdly Cool

  jag

  12 Jan 2010 | 12:17 pm

  Having spent most of my life turning science fiction into reality, I'm incredibly amused by the recent Blessing of the Plow service performed in London. Another step in the journey: The congregation at St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London raised their mobiles and iPods above their heads and Canon Parrott raised his voice to the heavens to address the Lord God of all Creation. “May our tongues be gentle, our e-mails be simple and our websites be accessible,” he said. Great efforts have been made to modernise the Church of England, but its liturgy dates from before the arrival of the…

• My new favorite source of t-shirts

  jag

  29 Dec 2009 | 10:26 am

  The designer(s) at HeadlineShirts commit regular acts of pure genius. I've been addicted to t-shirts for years. I particularly like ones that make satirical statements. These are all cranked to eleven. Update: for those who don't get the say "Tweet" again design, you'll just have to watch Pulp Fiction.

• Looking forward to a little Peace on Earth....

  jag

  17 Dec 2009 | 11:05 pm

• 
  It's Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens

• Win 7 Printing to Airport Printer

  Eric Burke

  6 Feb 2010 | 8:47 am

  We have a combination of Mac and Windows machines in our house, and I was unable to get a new Windows 7 64-bit machine to print. The printer is shared using an Airport Extreme Base Station. I downloaded Bonjour for Windows and it immediately detected the printer. Everything seemed OK, but printing always failed. This led to many hours of failed searching and troubleshooting. I found many people have the same problem, and many solutions being offered. Nothing worked, until I noticed the “here” link: With those highlighted circles, it seems painfully obvious. But the…

• T-Mobile Support Session

  Eric Burke

  6 Jan 2010 | 7:50 am

  I just chatted with T-Mobile about the Nexus One phone. Here’s the conversation… You have been connected to _Kristi J. _Kristi J: Hi Eric, welcome to T-Mobile live Chat. I’m _Kristi and I will be happy to assist you. Please give me a moment to review your question. _Kristi J: I can definitely understand your interest in this new device. I’d be more than happy to get further information about that for you today. Eric Burke: ok _Kristi J: You can only order the phone through the www.Google.com/phone website. _Kristi J: The phone is being sold exclusively by Google, and…

• Aidan Prefers Chrome

  Eric Burke

  27 Dec 2009 | 4:16 pm

  Teaching my boys right from wrong… Aidan Prefers Chrome from Eric Burke on Vimeo.

• Custom HTTP Headers with GWT RPC

  Eric Burke

  22 Dec 2009 | 12:09 pm

  Prior to GWT 2.0, there was no easy way to add custom HTTP headers when making remote procedure calls. The new RpcRequestBuilder in GWT 2.0 makes it easy to add custom headers. // start with a custom RpcRequestBuilder RpcRequestBuilder reqBuilder = new RpcRequestBuilder() { @Override protected RequestBuilder doCreate(String serviceEntryPoint) { RequestBuilder rb = super.doCreate(serviceEntryPoint); rb.setHeader("username", "sookie_stackhouse"); return rb; } }; // as with any other RPC, use GWT.create(...) to generate the client proxy MyServiceAsync service = (MyServiceAsync)…

• State Capitals 1.1.2

  Eric Burke

  14 Nov 2009 | 11:07 am

  I just fixed a few bugs in State Capitals: I drew the Hawaii state capital star on the wrong island (epic oops) The “Move Known States to Last” preference was ignored, so you could not disable that behavior I also reworked the graphics for Alaska and Hawaii. These two cards now show the state positions relative to the lower-48 states. Publishing to the Market Once I built the StateCapitals.apk file, I decided to announce my progress on Twitter in real time. Here are my updates: Update 1: OK, I just compiled a new build of State Capitals for #android. It is 12:45 PM and I am…

• 
  Pushing Pixels

• You can’t please all of the people all of the time

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  2 Feb 2010 | 9:09 am

  You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Sometimes, you have to make a few people really unhappy in order to make everyone else a little bit happier. Don’t let angry customers dictate your application design – the application isn’t as important to them as it is to you. Keeping your application healthy is your responsibility. From the excellent “Removing Features” by Lukas Mathis • Respect the Terms of Service • Follow me on Twitter • • Support my open-source projects - view my Amazon wishlist • The RSS feed and emails sent from the…

• Drinking From The Firehose – Design Inspiration January 2010

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  1 Feb 2010 | 8:04 pm

  Image by Joi Every month this series is tracking the latest design trends and collecting the best examples of modern web designs. Here is the list for January 2010 with almost 2000 links from 57 aggregator posts: 65 Resources for Nature-Inspired Design from Vandelay Website Design Showcase Of Modern Navigation Design Trends from Smashing Magazine PANTONE is blowing up in 2010 from Fuel Your Creativity The Most Creative 50 Wordpress Themes of 2009 from Inspired Magazine Showcase Of 50 Best Inspiring Gaming Websites from 1stwebdesigner A Showcase of Clean White Web Designs from Web Design…

• Live wallpapers with Android SDK 2.1

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  1 Feb 2010 | 12:07 pm

  Live wallpapers are now part of the officially supported APIs in Android SDK 2.1, and today i’m going to talk about how to start writing your own live wallpaper. By the end of this tutorial you should be able to create your own live wallpaper, test it on a Nexus One device and get it ready for publishing on the Android Market. Getting started Download Android 2.1 SDK Download Eclipse 3.5 Install and configure Android Development Tools plugin for Eclipse The plumbing The SDK comes with a sample live wallpaper that can be found in the platforms/android-2.1/samples/CubeLiveWallpaper…

• SwingX date pickers in Substance 6.0

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  27 Jan 2010 | 10:07 pm

  The core Substance look-and-feel library is in the feature freeze state, and it’s time to tie the loose ends. Over the next couple of weeks i will be updating documentation, fixing bugs and perhaps adding a few new skins. Along with that, i will polish the visuals of third-party components covered by the Substance plugins that i maintain, and today it’s time to talk about the date picker component from SwingX. The ever-changing plans for Swing in JDK 7 (which went from grandiose to acceptable to almost non-existent) at one time included a new date picker component available in the…

• Custom component states in Substance 6.0

  Kirill Grouchnikov

  22 Jan 2010 | 10:24 pm

  Today i’m going to talk about the last big change that went into the next release of Substance look-and-feel – enhanced support for component states. What is a component state? Let’s take a look at buttons – the most basic building blocks on any UI toolkit. Buttons usually have icons and texts so that the users know what will happen when they click them. In addition, modern UI toolkits provide rich texturing capabilities that allow skinning different parts of the button visuals – such as background, border and focus ring. These visuals usually depend on the…

• 
  No Fluff Just Stuff

• Caltrain Engine 919 at Diridon Station

  Sean Kane

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:00 am

  San Jose Diridon Train Station with Caltrain Engine 919 underway.

• Spring Web Flow RefCard

  Craig Walls

  9 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

  In case you've not heard or don't follow me on Twitter, I'm pleased to announce that my fourth DZone Refcard, one covering Spring Web Flow, was released today. You can also read a short interview that I did with James Sugrue. In case you're wondering...yep, I'm still working on Spring in Action 3. In fact, I'm now writing the Spring Web Flow chapter...so I get a chance to expand on what's in the Refcard. It's a lot of fun writing Refcards, but it's incredibly difficult to cram so much good material into less than 6 pages. In fact, despite my best efforts to keep it brief, over 2 pages of…

• Getting MySql Running on Azure

  Josh Holmes

  9 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  There are a few applications that I’m playing with in Windows Azure that are reliant on MySql for various reason. For example, I’m working with a group that is doing Joomla development and it’s completely dependent on MySql. Mostly this is due to using MySql native drivers rather than using a database independent layer such as ADO.NET in .NET or PDO in PHP or leveraging database specific features that are only found in MySql. Regardless of the reason, for me to run these applications in Windows Azure, I have to get MySql running in Azure. I found that it wasn’t as hard as I initially…

• Great Review of Manage Your Project Portfolio

  Johanna Rothman

  8 Feb 2010 | 2:00 pm

  Erik Gfesser posted a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. Thanks, Erik! Tweet This Post

• New England Software Symposium - Mar 5 - 7, 2010

  8 Feb 2010 | 1:00 pm

  No Fluff Just Stuff is pleased to announce the New England Software Symposium, Mar 5 - 7, 2010. Catch these Featured Sessions The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Functional Java by Ted Neward Much noise has been made in recent years about functional languages, like Scala or Haskell, and their benefits relative to object-oriented languages, most notably Java. Unfortunately, as wonderful as many of those benefits are, the fact remains that most Java developers will either not want or not be able to adopt those languages for writing day-to-day code. Which leaves us with a basic question: if I…

• 
  Planet TW

• Ye Zheng: 走进Scala——Singleton

  9 Feb 2010 | 7:50 am

  Singlton是一种为许多人熟知的设计模式，到了Scala这里，它成了语言的一部分，换句换说，我们不必像Java那样费劲的自己实现。下面就是一个Singleton：object Singleton {  def show = println("I am a singleton")}（Singleton.scala）这里，我们用object进行声明，它会创建这个一个类，这个类只有一个实例，名字就叫Singleton。我们可以这样使用它：  Singleton.show编译一下：  scalac…

• Julias Shaw: I love xkcd too

  9 Feb 2010 | 4:16 am

  We Love xkcd Share and Enjoy:

• Paulo Caroli: Mobile Me iDisk and rsync

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:14 am

  I’ve been using Mobile Me since 2002. (Then it was called .Mac). One of the features I really like is the iDisk. This is really convenient when you have to transfer large files. Also, I use it to keep a set of files I need again and again for my work as an agile coach. To make the access transparent and fast you can keep a copy of your iDisk on the local Macintosh HD and use it like any other drive. There is a sync process running in the background taking care of the data syncing. Very nice and convenient. In the beginning I could put a symbolic link into the local iDisk to reference a…

• Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-02-08 [del.icio.us]

  9 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am

  Cut 'em Off at the Horsehead Nebula! Firefly - Stagecoach in Space. Adjust Mac volume by quarter units The Diplomatic Pouch Trimester Secret Caves of the Lizard People Integrate Tornado in Django

• Patrick Kua: Articulate your Incompetence

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:28 pm

  A few weeks back, Andy and I got together to walk through all the different iPhone examples that we’ve been playing around with. We both learned a great deal. I’ve found that teaching whilst learning is actually the most effective way of learning. There’s something about trying to put words to the things that you think you know that makes you reason actually how little you really know. I think the best learning model where this experience fits in is the following model: Unconscious Incompetence -> Conscious Incompetence -> Conscious Competence -> Unconscious Competence The act…

• 
  Eric.Weblog()

• Obstacles to an enterprise DVCS

  29 Jan 2010 | 5:00 am

  On 26 January 2010 I gave a presentation to Software GR.  The talk was an overview of several trends that we have seen in the version control tools market over the last 40 years.  I often like to follow a talk like this by publishing the same content here on my blog in the form of a complete article.  This time I think I'll just eliminate a lot of the tldr problem and summarize the highlights: The two big trends in version control today are Integration and Decentralization. Integration is driven by ALM.  It is the desire to have all tools used by a development team fully…

• Reflecting on our "SourceSafe Must Die" Campaign

  15 Jan 2010 | 6:10 am

  "Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just ... do ... things. -- The Joker On the product side of marketing, planning has served me well. But on the marcomm side, you know, I just ... do ... things. And since the whole point of marcomm is to draw attention, I try to do things which are at least a little outrageous:     Years ago we wanted to tell people about SourceOffSite as a telecommuting solution, so we gave away boxer shorts at trade shows and ran ads advising…

• Comments disabled

  30 Dec 2009 | 7:34 am

  Short Version Sorry folks, until further notice, my blog does not support comments. Long Version I've been using Haloscan for comments on this blog. Haloscan is being turned off by the company that acquired it. That company offered a transition to a new service, but that transition requires more effort than I am willing to invest (zero). I downloaded all the old comments in some sort of XML file, but doing anything with that file would require effort. Investigating other ways of providing comments for this blog would also require effort. A day may come when the laziness of this blogger fails,…

• My excuses for not blogging about the Microsoft/Teamprise deal

  13 Nov 2009 | 10:51 am

  People keep asking me why I haven't blogged about the Microsoft acquisition of our Teamprise division. Well, it's kind of complicated. It all started three days before the signing of the deal when my laptop died.  And I mean it's really dead.  It won't boot, from any device. Great timing, eh? Fortunately, all I really needed for working on the deal was email and Microsoft Word, so I just switched over to my netbook. I completely forgot about the MacBrick Pro until this weekend when I realized that the press coverage was going to hit Monday morning and the only installation of my…

• Vault 5.0 has shipped

  30 Jul 2009 | 8:52 am

  Hooray!  Vault 5.0 has shipped! The release notes contain an overview of what's new.

• 
  Android Developers Blog

• Live wallpapers

  Romain Guy

  5 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

  With the introduction of live wallpapers in Android 2.1, users can now enjoy richer, animated, interactive backgrounds on their home screen. A live wallpaper is very similar to a normal Android application and has access to all the facilities of the platform: SGL (2D drawing), OpenGL (3D drawing), GPS, accelerometers, network access, etc. The live wallpapers included on Nexus One demonstrate the use of some of these APIs to create fun and interesting user experiences. For instance, the Grass wallpaper uses the phone's location to compute sunrise and sunset times in order to display the…

• Android at Mobile World Congress

  Eric Chu, Android Mobile Platform

  26 Jan 2010 | 4:55 pm

  I'm happy to announce that we'll be hosting a very special Android Developer Lab at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on Wednesday, February 17th as part of the inaugural App Planet event.There will be technical presentations throughout the day and a developer lounge where you can talk to Android team members and meet others in the growing Android developer community.Whether you’re already developing Android apps, you're an experienced mobile developer, or you’re considering making your first foray into writing mobile applications, the Android Developer Lab will provide access to…

• Android Developer Labs World Tour

  Reto Meier

  22 Jan 2010 | 3:21 pm

  Late last year, we held a series of developer labs to give you a chance to ask questions and play with some new hardware. One of the most common questions we received was, "When are you going to visit my city?" It's a good question, and we're pleased to answer it today.The Android team is embarking on a world tour, which will include cities in Europe, North America, and Asia. At each stop, we'll be delivering an update on the state of the Android platform—including a look at the latest Android hardware. It's a great opportunity to meet like-minded Android app developers, play with the…

• Android at the 2010 Game Developers Conference

  Eric Chu, Android Mobile Platform

  22 Jan 2010 | 11:11 am

  2009 has been a great year for Android Market. With the support of developers like you, Android Market now has more than 20,000 applications. Of these applications, games have proven to be particularly popular with Android users. Seven of the ten most popular paid applications on Android Market are games, so there's a significant opportunity for game developers as the number of Android devices continues to grow at a rapid pace.To better support this trend, we are increasing our support of Android game development. As a first step, we will be presenting a number of Android sessions at the Game…

• IRC office hours update

  Megha Joshi

  20 Jan 2010 | 9:12 am

  You may recall that we announced IRC Office Hours for Android app developers back in December. We just want to provide a quick update that upcoming office hours will be held on Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. PST, instead of twice weekly. These will be held in the #android-dev channel on irc.freenode.net as before. Please post your questions on Stack Overflow with "from-irc" tag in addition to "android" tag one day before office hours. We will follow up on those specific questions during office hours, and will also post answers after. We hope to see you there!

• 
  OpenSocial API Blog

• Using IBM Mashup Center to build interoperable Web 2.0 applications with OpenSocial gadgets

  Lane LiaBraaten

  4 Feb 2010 | 5:44 pm

  Greetings…As many of you know, IBM is committed to building and advancing open standards and platforms. Openness fosters an ecosystem of innovation, promotes customer choice, and allows enterprises to build solutions that best meet their needs. We’ve been working with the OpenSocial Foundation to help define and implement the requirements of enterprise customers.Recently, we put together an article that can be found on DeveloperWorks that describes how you can use IBM Mashup Center to build complex Web 2.0 applications that use OpenSocial gadgets by simply dragging them from a pallet and…

• MySpace SF devJam on Jan 14th

  Chris Chabot

  6 Jan 2010 | 8:23 am

  MySpace is hosting a developer event at our San Francisco office on January 14th where developers can come and learn about the MySpace Developer Challenge, meet the MySpace developer team, and hack away with us! This MySpace devJam “hackathon” is a great way to turn the ideas you've been thinking about into something real and live on the site. The objective is to create something interesting, preferably that you can enter in our developer contest by the end of the day. We'll have coding sessions for each contest category and give you an update on our OpenSocial work and new APIs. It's…

• The MySpace Developer Challenge

  Chris Chabot

  4 Jan 2010 | 8:44 am

  Calling all developers! MySpace is hosting the MySpace Developer Challenge, a competition aimed at encouraging further innovation from the developer community. We believe the best onsite and offsite integrations with MySpace are not here yet and the MySpace Developer Challenge intends to find them. We also want to reward innovative developers big and small and recognize them as much as we can. Developers can participate by creating a new MySpace application or integrating our API's on their website. The Challenge will feature monetary and promotional prizes, to be given out to those…

• RenRen Launches OpenSocial 0.9 Support

  Lane LiaBraaten

  30 Dec 2009 | 11:30 am

  As one of the leading social networking sites in China, renren has always been a close partner of OpenSocial, following all the product and technology progress of OpenSocial. After one month of intensive development and testing, the renren Open Platform formally announced the support for OpenSocial 0.9.This OpenSocial upgrade on Renren consists of the following progress:Full support of all the features of OpenSocial v0.9A more friendly payment interfaceSupport for the RESTful API of OpenSocialMore useful info on the wikiAfter one year’s growth, over 2,000 third party applications have been…

• "Enterprise OpenSocial White paper" now available!

  Chris Schalk, Google Developer Advocate

  22 Dec 2009 | 3:05 am

  OpenSocial emerged from the demands of consumer-facing social networking sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning. The rise of online social networking, and the changing nature of the consumer web, have both made OpenSocial increasingly relevant to business and enterprises. Beyond social capabilities for accessing and sharing user profile, relationship and activity data, OpenSocial can also be used as a general purpose web application integration technology, providing open standards for browser-based components known as gadgets. For non-browser/ui data transfer OpenSocial also includes a…

• 
  Amazon Web Services Blog

• New Feature: Amazon S3 now supports Object Versioning

  AWS Evangelist

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:56 pm

  We've added beta support for Versioning across all Amazon S3 Regions. Versioning provides an additional layer of protection for your S3 objects. You can easily recover from unintended user errors or application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving. Once you have enabled Versioning for a particular S3 bucket, any operation that would have overwritten an S3 object (PUT, POST, COPY, and DELETE) retains the old version of the object. Here's a simple diagram of Versioning in action: Each version of the object is assigned a version id. For example, each…

• Kindle: more than an e-book reader, it's a development platform

  AWS Evangelist

  5 Feb 2010 | 4:14 pm

  Last month we announced the forthcoming release of the Kindle Development Kit, a suite of programming interfaces, tools, and documentation that allows you to build active content that you can promote in the Kindle Store. I travel a lot, and I'm seeing more and more Kindles every time I fly. Kindle owners never hesitate to tell me how much they love their devices and its capabilities -- the long battery life, an easy-on-the-eyes display, an incredibly convenient form factor, the instant gratification of accessing and downloading new content on-the-go whenever something strikes their…

• Debug your Elastic MapReduce job flows in the AWS Management Console

  AWS Evangelist

  3 Feb 2010 | 8:47 am

  We are excited to announce that we’ve added support for job flow debugging in the AWS Management Console – making Elastic MapReduce even easier to use for developing large data processing and analytics applications.  This capability allows customers to track progress and identify issues in the steps, jobs, tasks, or task attempts of their job flows.  The job flow logs continued to be saved in Amazon S3 and now the state of tasks and task attempts is persisted in Amazon SimpleDB so customers can analyze their job flows even after they’ve completed.   Very simple…

• AWS Outbound Data Transfer Prices Reduced By $0.02/GB

  AWS Evangelist

  1 Feb 2010 | 10:11 pm

  We've reduced the prices for data transfer out of AWS by $0.02 (two cents) per GB across all regions. Effective February 1, 2010, pricing for data transferred out of Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon VPC will change as follows: Level Old Price New Price First 10 TB per month $0.17/GB $0.15/GB Next 40 TB per month $0.13 $0.11 Next 100 TB per month $0.11 $0.09 Over 150 TB per month $0.10 $0.08 Pricing for data transferred out of Amazon CloudFront will change as follows (these are prices for the US region; prices in the other regions have also been…

• Server Density - Easy Server Monitoring

  AWS Evangelist

  28 Jan 2010 | 10:18 am

  The Server Density monitoring service now supports Amazon EC2 using data collected and made available via Amazon CloudWatch and an optional lightweight monitoring agent. Provided as a fully managed hosting service, Server Density can provide a snapshot of server status at any time. Alerts can be triggered from any of the metrics and can be delivered via cell phone (SMS), email, or iPhone. All of the data can be graphed, and a "tactical overview" dashboard provides a quick look at the latest monitored values for each server under management.  There's a free level (one server…

• 
  Pure Danger Tech

• Learning Clojure #3: Sorted Maps

  Alex

  9 Feb 2010 | 11:33 am

  This is a quick one. I had a map in Clojure and I needed a sorted version of it. Most commonly I’ve created maps in Clojure using the literal syntax: { }. There are also functions hash-map and sorted-map available. If you want, you can make the analogy to HashMap and TreeMap if you are Java minded although note they are NOT HM or TM. Instead these are Clojure “persistent” data structures that are an intrinsic part of the language. Back to the problem at hand… I had a map and I needed a sorted-map. You can do this as follows: ; dummy existing map (def existingMap {:dog…

• Learning Clojure #2: contains?

  Alex

  8 Feb 2010 | 7:50 pm

  I spent 30 minutes today learning that contains? has surprising (to me at least) behavior on indexed collections. I expected it to tell me whether the vector contains an item and indeed this is how it works on collections like lists, sets, maps, etc. For example: user=> (contains? #{ "a" "b"} "a") true user=> (contains? { :a 1 :b 2 } :a) true user=> (contains? ["a" "b" ] "a") false What? Check the docs: user=> (doc contains?) ------------------------- clojure.core/contains? ([coll key]) Returns true if key is present in the given collection, otherwise returns false. Note that for…

• Learning Clojure #1: What’s up doc?

  Alex

  8 Feb 2010 | 7:22 pm

  This is the first in probably a long series of Clojure mini-blogs as I’m learning Clojure. I’ve only been using it in earnest for a week or so but I keep coming across little things I have to track down. One thing that has been indispensable while learning Clojure is the ability to search for and view Clojure docs and look at the source for Clojure functions. At the REPL, this is extremely handy. Let’s start with where these docs come from in the first place. Every function can have a doc description (similar to Javadoc) attached to it like so: (defn rocks "Tell everyone…

• Revelytix is hiring

  Alex

  26 Jan 2010 | 7:06 am

  Recently I joined Revelytix and we’ve opened a St. Louis development office in Kirkwood. We are currently interviewing Java developers and looking to hire three people. If you’re looking for a challenging position in a startup company in St. Louis, this is it! You can find the job description here. If you’re interested, you can send me a resume at amiller at revelytix.com. Please, only St. Louis-based developers – no relocation, no telecommute, no recruiters. In addition, we are looking for Flex developers in the Washington, DC area (specifically Hunt Valley, MD) where…

• St. Louis is Hopping!

  Alex

  22 Jan 2010 | 10:01 pm

  People keep remarking to me how much stuff is going on in St. Louis…and they’re right! This joint is hopping. It’s a fun place to be right now. I can’t even make it to all the things I’d like to go to anymore. Highlighting some upcoming events: Arch Reactor Open House – Jan. 30th from 4-10pm, the St. Louis hackerspace will have an open house to show off their new space. Come check it out! St. Louis Innovation Camp – Feb. 26-28th the St. Louis Innovation Camp will host St. Louis innovators and entrepreneurs as they learn about how to launch their dream…

• 
  Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist

• NServiceBus 2.0 Release Candidate 2 Available

  udidahan

  1 Feb 2010 | 5:13 am

  So it’s been about 6 months since my last NServiceBus post and since then about 1000 new people have subscribed to this blog so they might not know anything about it. For a bit of history, see the post (from almost exactly a year ago) describing the 1.9 release of NServiceBus here. What’s New The quickly approaching next release of NServiceBus will be version 2.0 and is a big step from 1.9. After 2 betas and 2 release candidates, this version has had a longer stabilization period than any of the versions so far (1.4-1.9). Many of my clients are already using it in production and…

• Non-functional Architectural Woes

  udidahan

  12 Jan 2010 | 8:29 pm

  As I sit here in the lounge at Bogota airport waiting for my delayed flight, I remembered something interesting that came up in my 2-week training/consulting in Cali. It’s not a question that came up, or anything like that. It was that I suddenly noticed a pattern in many of my consulting and training clients over the past years. And as I thought about it, I realized that it was prevalent in our industry as a whole – in the literature, on the web, everywhere. It’s how people think about functional and non-functional requirements. The problem with categorization There’s…

• Scalability Podcast on Herding Code

  udidahan

  11 Jan 2010 | 11:44 am

  The great folks over at Herding Code were nice enough to interview me back in November as I was over in Paris giving my 5-day SOA course. We talked about quite a lot of topics related to scalability. Click here for the full list of topics and to download the podcast. Let me know what you think or any questions you may have in the comments.

• Clarified CQRS

  udidahan

  9 Dec 2009 | 6:57 am

  After listening how the community has interpreted Command-Query Responsibility Segregation I think that the time has come for some clarification. Some have been tying it together to Event Sourcing. Most have been overlaying their previous layered architecture assumptions on it. Here I hope to identify CQRS itself, and describe in which places it can connect to other patterns. Download as PDF – this is quite a long post. Why CQRS Before describing the details of CQRS we need to understand the two main driving forces behind it: collaboration and staleness. Collaboration refers to…

• Search and Messaging

  udidahan

  1 Nov 2009 | 9:33 pm

  One question that I get asked about quite a bit with relation to messaging is about search. Isn’t search inherently request/response? Doesn’t it have to return immediately? Wouldn’t messaging in this case hurt our performance? While I tend to put search in the query camp in the when keeping the responsibility of commands and queries separate, and often recommend that those queries be done without messaging, there are certain types of search where messaging does make sense. In this post, I’ll describe certain properties of the problem domain that make messaging a good…

• 
  Agile Software Development Made Easy!

• 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Must Be Driven from the Top

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:00 am

  Agile development is often initiated by the development team itself. Whilst they may find some good advantages, the most profound benefits of agile software development will not be realised unless it is driven from the top.Here's why:1. Multi-disciplined teamsOne of the key concepts of agile development is the idea of multi-disciplined teams - "one team". An agile development team needs all the skills necessary to complete its task from cradle to grave. From initial request to delivery to market, the team should be able to deliver without reference to another team.Having multi-disciplined…

• Special Offer! Get My Agile eBook And Presentations For Just $10 For 1 Month Only

  2 Feb 2010 | 1:31 am

  Hi everyone! I've been really pleased with how well my eBook has beeen selling. I normally sell it for $25, but I've decided to do a special offer for 1 month only. It's a kind of belated new-year sale I suppose you could say!Throughout February, you can now get my 55-page eBook - Agile Software Development Made Easy! - for just $10.I've updated all my posts in the series '10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development' and 'How To Implement Scrum in 10 Easy Steps'. I've brought the text up-to-date with my current thinking, and in a few cases I've expanded on the points on my blog. I've also…

• Pair Programming - An Extremely Agile Practice

  31 Jan 2010 | 4:17 am

  Pair Programming. It's probably one of the most extreme practices of eXtreme Programming (XP). It's an area of agile software development that polarises opinion.The concept is simple enough. Two developers work side by side on the same piece of work, sharing a keyboard and screen and working together to produce the code.The main advantage of pair programming is usually cited as improving quality, which also improves productivity further down the line.Another advantage is spreading knowledge, as at least two people will know each area of the system. And it can also help with skills development…

• Agile Visitors in 2009

  30 Jan 2010 | 1:44 am

  Hi everyone! This blog just seems to keep on growing! It's a bit belated, but I just had a look back at last year's stats...2009 brought over 750,000 page views from 200,000 people! That's astonishing to me - it's so good to think that this blog might have helped so many people.Thank you all for visiting!Kelly.Photo by Sreejith K

• 'All About Agile' is no more!

  26 Jan 2010 | 4:34 am

  Back in September, I renamed this blog from 'All About Agile' to Agile Software Development Made Easy!If you are one of the many people kind enough to link to my blog on your home page, but you're still listing me under the old name, please would you update the link text to Agile Software Development Made Easy!That would help me with Google and obviously it's better to use the new name. Much appreciated!Kelly.

• 
  Chris Spagnuolo's EdgeHopper

• Sage Advice from a Climbing Master

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  6 Feb 2010 | 1:10 pm

  Earlier today, I jokingly asked Tom Danielson of Team Garmin-Transitions for some advice on training for the Mt. Evans Hill Climb. Tom holds the record for the Mt. Evans Hill Climb (as well as the Mt. Washington Race to the Clouds) so I figured he’d know best.  His response to me via Twitter was classic and I thought I’d share it with anyone else out there training for Mt. Evans: So, there you have it, some sage advice from the climbing master! Similar Posts: 2010’s Goal or What Did I Get Myself Into? The Fake Tour de France Video My Favorite Training Videos

• 2010’s Goal or What Did I Get Myself Into?

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  2 Feb 2010 | 11:01 pm

  I just made a race commitment earlier this week and entered the 2010 edition of the Bob Cook Memorial Mt. Evans Hill Climb…YIKES!  I’ve been wanting to race this one for a few years now, but something always got in the way (little things like a herniated disc).  Well, provided I stay healthy until July, I’ll be climbing to the top this year on North America’s highest paved road…hopefully.  It’s strange but the second I pushed the submit button on my entry, I felt butterflies in my stomach and my legs suddenly felt really tired!  I think my body was asking “What the…

• The Training Cave

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  1 Feb 2010 | 11:01 pm

  It’s Groundhog Day here in the U.S. and Canada and we’re all waiting for the little prognosticating rodent to stick his head out of his burrow and let us know how much longer we’ll have to endure riding indoors this winter!  I’m hoping not too much longer!  But, in honor of Punxsutawney Phil’s moment in the sun (or hopefully not), I thought I’d share some pictures of what my training cave looks like.  If you want to spread the winter cheer, poke your head out your burrow and let me know what’s in your training cave or better yet, send along some pix and I’ll post them…

• By the Numbers: January

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  1 Feb 2010 | 4:20 am

  Wow, January has flown by already!  I mentioned earlier this month that I was using Daytum to to do some basic tracking and sharing of some of my daily personal stats, so, here is my January by the numbers.  And yes, it was a very “indoor riding kind of month” around these parts. Similar Posts: The Training Cave 9 Ways to Stay Fit this Winter My Favorite Training Videos

• Cyclemeter iPhone App Giveaway

  chris@edgehopper.com (Chris Spagnuolo)

  31 Jan 2010 | 11:33 am

  Me and my friends at Abvio are teaming up this week to give away 10 FREE copies of their latest iPhone app for cycling, Cyclemeter 2.0.  Cyclemeter is iPhone-centric. No Web site logins, no uploads, no ads. Your iPhone has all the cycling data you want, right when you want it.  Click on the button above to take the full Cyclemeter Tour. Entry Requirements To enter for a chance to win, just head over to Abvio’s Cyclemeter website and take the Cyclemeter Tour.  Then come back here to Zen on Two Wheels and leave a comment on this post telling us what you liked most about the app before…

• 
  Agile Commons

• Some Silly Advice

  Alan Atlas

  26 Jan 2010 | 3:53 am

  I’ve noticed a piece of advice repeated in many Agile blogs, articles, and books. Seeing it makes me roll my eyes until it hurts. (Why I would hurt myself on purpose will be the subject of another post, on a blog reserved for psychotherapists.) Even my very most favorite Agile book, “Scaling Lean & Agile Development” by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, has a section in there with this advice. I saw it in Jim Highsmith’s new book, too, although by the time he’s done discussing it he does make a couple of good points. It’s an old piece of advice that pre-dates Agile. What is this old…

• Moving Beyond Pull Systems Requires a Culture of Innovation

  Ryan Martens

  21 Jan 2010 | 3:33 am

  How to Foster A Culture of Innovation “It took me more than 53 years to understand that culture isn’t just important, it is everything.” -Lou Gerstner In the coming decade, software and product teams must provide the critically needed innovative approaches to organizations throughout the world. The visual metaphors and practical, hands-on ideas in these posts will give executives, managers, and engineers ways to speed up this evolution. Starting on Monday. To make and maintain a culture of innovation requires a team to consider that task as a part of their work, complementary…

• Define Kanban in 130 Characters or Less — Can You Do It?

  Jean Tabaka

  20 Jan 2010 | 3:24 am

  Recently, I was working on an introductory presentation about Kanban. A “thorough” Google search revealed how drawn out and convoluted many Kanban explanations can be. Was there one true answer I was missing? Something nice and succinct like, say, a tweet on twitter? Acting on this and laziness, I decided to pose the following question to twitter: I was so surprised by the number of great responses that I’ve decided to compile and share them with you here: giff24: #kanban 130 chrctrs? PLS!!! I dnt hve time or patience 2 rd that much erwilleke: #kanban combines systems…

• “Why Lean and Agile Go Together” on Forbes.com

  Ryan Martens

  13 Jan 2010 | 4:18 pm

  Looking for the perfect trend article to pass on to your executives about Agile development? Check out Dan Woods‘ well-researched, executive-level article “Why Lean and Agile Go Together” on Forbes.com Jargon Spy. Dan describes how the Agile impact in software is similar to the Lean impact in manufacturing of the 90’s.  I initially struggled with the analogy until I realized he is not saying that software development is like manufacturing. He is saying that the concepts and techniques applied in Lean manufacturing are coming to large-scale software development. I…

• “Telling” and Agile Enterprise Adoptions Do Not Go Together

  Ryan Martens

  11 Jan 2010 | 8:24 am

  I have been back in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook this week thinking about strategies for creating a shared vision to 2020 at Rally. With our newest round of funding, we will be growing rapidly in multiple locations and beyond the max tribe size of 150-170 people. (Dunbar’s Number)  Over that last year, we grew the business well but without advancing our total headcount numbers.  Now with headcount growth slated in the field and in two development centers, we need a stronger foundation to steer our growth.  Doing this work, hit me with a BFO (Brilliant Flash of the Obvious) that is…

• 
  Successful Software

• Mailplane

  Andy Brice

  3 Feb 2010 | 3:22 am

  I recently did a day of consulting for Ruben Bakker of  Mailplane. I looked in depth at his marketing and did a screencast of myself downloading, using and buying Mailplane. We also discussed some ideas for a new product. At the end of the process he was kind enough to write me this testimonial: How can I improve my sales? How can I make my application more profitable? Which of my ideas could be the next software product? With these questions in mind I hired Andy. He evaluated my small business, tested the product, checked the product website/store, and we discussed my strategy. Andy knows…

• An interesting application of genetic algorithms

  Andy Brice

  25 Jan 2010 | 8:27 am

  I recently watched an interesting BBC documentary called “The secret life of chaos”. It did a good job of explaining how interesting patterns could arise from very simple rules and how these could be further shaped by evolution to create the sort of complexity we see in the living world. It is well worth watching in full. I have been interested in genetic algorithms for some time and use a genetic algorithm to optimise seating plans in my own PerfectTablePlan software. So I was particularly interested in a segment towards the end, where they showed how naturalmotion.com have used…

• Haiti disaster relief

  Andy Brice

  16 Jan 2010 | 1:51 pm

  David Trump of the ASP is offering free software licences to people who contribute to Haiti disaster relief. This seems like a great idea to me, so I am copying it for PerfectTablePlan. I am going to try it for 24 hours and see how it goes. I am blogging about it here in case other software vendors are inspired to try it. Posted in miscellaneous, software Tagged: appeal, charity, disaster, haiti, PerfectTablePlan, relief, software

• How to build an igloo

  Andy Brice

  13 Jan 2010 | 3:14 pm

  We have had loads of snow here in the UK. Loads by UK standards anyway (I don’t think a Scandinavian would be very impressed). So I decided to take full advantage of the flexibility my job allows and build an igloo. It was my second attempt and it turned out much better than rather wonky one I did a few days ago. This post is a quick overview of the modest amount I have learnt about igloo building, in case you are inspired to build your own. First of all, building materials. The snow needs to be the sort you can squash together to make a snowball. If it is too powdery to stick together,…

• Should you offer a money back guarantee?

  Andy Brice

  11 Jan 2010 | 2:29 pm

  A few weeks ago I was going to buy a digitizer tablet for my PC. Then I noticed in the vendor’s terms and conditions that they wouldn’t accept a return once I had opened the packaging. But I couldn’t know if the tablet works until I open the packaging. Duh. I didn’t buy it. Similarly I look for a sensible money-back guarantee whenever I buy software. I don’t remember ever invoking such a guarantee for software, but it is nice to know that I could if I wanted to. Also, I see the lack of such a guarantee as a warning signal that the vendor isn’t confident…

• 
  Encosia

• How you can force the Ajax Script Loader to use jQuery 1.4

  Dave Ward

  14 Jan 2010 | 9:24 pm

  If you’ve already begun using Microsoft’s new Ajax Script Loader with a CDN-hosted version of jQuery, today’s release of jQuery 1.4 may have left you wondering how to upgrade. Personally, I didn’t want to wait on a new version of Start.js, nor did I want to abandon the script loader now that I’ve become accustomed to its benefits. No doubt, an upcoming ASP.NET Ajax Library iteration will update Start.js’ jQuery definition to reference jQuery 1.4.x. Regardless, knowing how to patch the script loader on your own terms is something that will be of recurring usefulness. Luckily, the…

• 3 years of Encosia, the best of 2009, and my gratitude

  Dave Ward

  21 Dec 2009 | 9:35 am

  On this day in 2006, I wrote and published a short post here about something that had eluded my attempts at searching for an answer. I thought that archiving the information online might help if I needed to find it again later, and that it might help anyone else who had been similarly unable to track down the answer. Three years later, the site has served over one million page views to JavaScript enabled browsers in the last year alone, and thousands of you keep tabs on the site’s updates through RSS, email, and/or Twitter. One step at a time, it’s astonishing just how far this thing has…

• Mastering jQuery now available at TekPub

  Dave Ward

  16 Dec 2009 | 6:52 am

  If you haven’t been following the progress of Rob Conery and James Avery’s new venture, TekPub, you’ve been missing out on some great instructional videos. I especially like that they trend slightly Alt.NET, giving you more balanced information than is sometimes available from “official” .NET screencasts. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with James to record a series of episodes for TekPub myself: Mastering jQuery. Mastering jQuery walks through the basics of using jQuery, the revolutionary JavaScript framework that makes writing client-side code fun and easy, and then…

• Emulate ASP.NET validation groups with jQuery validation

  Dave Ward

  24 Nov 2009 | 9:51 am

  In my most recent post, I demonstrated a workaround to allow using the jQuery validation plugin with WebForms pages. The basic idea was to trigger validation only on submissions that occurred within a single logical form, instead of catching submissions anywhere on WebForms’ all-encompassing physical form. This approach worked fine for a single logical form, but wasn’t robust enough when handling validation for multiple logical forms on a single page. Additionally, it did not properly handle the enter key, allowing users to (perhaps accidentally) slip past validation if they simply…

• Using jQuery validation with ASP.NET WebForms

  Dave Ward

  4 Nov 2009 | 1:57 am

  You’ve probably noticed that Jörn Zaefferer’s jQuery validation plugin has been gaining momentum in the ASP.NET community lately. Between Microsoft’s implied endorsement via ASP.NET MVC 2.0 integration and the plugin’s recent inclusion on the Microsoft AJAX CDN, adoption is only increasing. Unfortunately for those who don’t or can’t use ASP.NET MVC yet, using the validation plugin within WebForms applications can be tricky. Because the WebForms Postback model requires that the entire page be contained within a single form element, form submissions that shouldn’t trigger…

• 
  The Endeavour

• Malaria on the prairie

  John

  9 Feb 2010 | 9:17 am

  My family loves the Little House on the Prairie books. We read them aloud to our three oldest children and we’re in the process of reading them with our fourth child. We just read the chapter describing when the entire Ingalls family came down with malaria, or “fever ‘n’ ague” as they called it. The family had settled near a creek that was infested with mosquitoes. All the settlers around the creek bottoms came down with malaria, though at the time (circa 1870) they did not know the disease was transmitted by mosquitoes. One of the settlers, Mrs. Scott, believed…

• Apple are evil?

  John

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:41 am

  Mike Croucher wrote a post the other day explaining why he’s going to buy an iPad. He said that one of the objections to the iPad he’d heard was Apple are evil because they take away control of how we use their devices. I teased Mike that I would never say “Apple are evil.” On this side of the Atlantic we’d say “Apple is evil.” But in the UK it is accepted usage to say “Apple are evil.” “Apple” is a collective noun when used to refer to Apple Inc. British English treats collective nouns as plural, but American English treats…

• Twitter daily tip news

  John

  8 Feb 2010 | 8:26 am

  I have five Twitter accounts that send out one tip per day, including a new one I just added last week. Regular expressions @RegexTip started over today. It’s a cycle of tips for learning regular expressions. It sticks to the regular expression features common to Python, Perl, C#, and many other programming languages. This account posts Monday through Friday. Keyboard shortcuts @SansMouse gives one tip a day on using Windows without a mouse. By practicing one keyboard shortcut a day, you can get into the habit of using your mouse less and your keyboard more. This cycle of tips started…

• You can’t force people to provide metadata

  John

  7 Feb 2010 | 3:46 pm

  I ran across a long rant from Steve Yegge this evening about junior programmers. In a nutshell, Yegge says they like to play around with metadata rather than getting real work done. Here’s an insightful observation Yegge makes along the way. And Haskell, OCaml and their ilk … try to force people to model everything. Programmers hate that. These languages will never, ever enjoy any substantial commercial success, for the exact same reason the Semantic Web is a failure. You can’t force people to provide metadata for everything they do. They’ll hate you. Related post:…

• Weekend miscellany

  John

  6 Feb 2010 | 4:06 am

  Computing Online diff tool HTTP flowchart Astroinformatics Python propaganda How to safely store a password Google Docs dropping IE6 support Why it’s hard to move Facebook off PHP Keyboard shortcuts for Windows, Mac, and Linux Math Fundamental examples in math Daily fact from algebra and number theory 62nd Carnival of Mathematics Miscellaneous Always wear your seatbelt Space shuttle repaired with duct tape (lunar rover too) How to peel a pummelo. YouTube video with nice soundtrack.

• 
  Programmable Web

• Vancouver Olympics Mapped by Google and Microsoft

  Adam DuVander

  8 Feb 2010 | 10:57 pm

  The Winter Olympics start this weekend and there’s no shortage of ways to enjoy them. That includes via map mashups showing facilities, parking and the path of the torch relay. All thanks to the Google Maps API and Microsoft’s Bing Maps API. Microsoft’s Vancouver office even put together a contest for its developers to create useful visitor applications. Among the half dozen entries are the parking finder shown below and MoBuddy, a mobile social networking app that was awarded the gold medal. The official site of the olympic games gets in on the fun, too. It uses a Google…

• Google’s Secret Weather API

  Adam DuVander

  8 Feb 2010 | 11:43 am

  It’s 54 degrees today in Mountain View, which any Googler could tell you by looking outside… or by using the company’s undocumented weather API. The service was created for use with iGoogle, but the interface is easily discoverable and covers a handful of other features, in addition to weather. Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company. One reason Delimarsky found it useful is that Google left little work to the developer: Unlike many others, the XML response for Google…

• Get 60,000 Concert Setlists with the Setlist.fm API

  Matthew Casperson

  7 Feb 2010 | 11:39 pm

  Setlist.fm, a service that allows music buffs to post setlists from live music performances, has opened up access to a beta version of their API. Setlist.fm made this announcement in their blog: We’re proud to announce the first version of the new setlist.fm Application Programming Interface. The setlist.fm API has been designed to give you easy access to setlist data in order to build fancy websites and other applications. The REST service provides methods to get both setlists and components of setlists such as artists, cities, countries or venues, and is free for non-commercial use.

• 6 New APIs: Powerful Americans, Moods, Museums, Web Analytics and Web Hosting

  John Musser

  6 Feb 2010 | 10:35 pm

  Last week was a busy one for new APIs and in addition to the 7 new APIs we profiled earlier this week, here are 6 more new listings from our API directory. These include an API for tracking political and business relationships (an “involuntary facebook of powerful Americans”), a real-time website analytics service API, an API for getting the Mood of the Nation, a ringtone search API, a museum geolocation service, and an API for internet hosting and resellers. Below are more details on each of these new APIs: LittleSis API: LittleSis is a free database tracking the key…

• 40 APIs Used in 7 Days: Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, and WeatherBug

  John Musser

  5 Feb 2010 | 11:10 pm

  This past week 15 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 40 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include BooRah Restaurant Search, FlightStats, Google Wave, Livekick, Mobypicture and True Knowledge. The most often used APIs this week are Flickr, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Search (6 APIs, 8 mashups), Mapping (5 APIs, 13 mashups) and Photos (4 APIs, 7 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:  Amazon eCommerce used in Insider Arts, Tinkrbox  BooRah…

• 
  Software Made Simple

• iPad Musings

  Paul Lefebvre

  2 Feb 2010 | 11:48 am

  I don’t know if the iPad is something I’ll get, but it sure looks cool. I’ve already had two friends of mine, who are not computer-savvy at all, say they really want one! One friend just bought a netbook because she wanted a small, portable computer to do some light internet surfing, email and general writing. I tried to talk her into a Mac, but even used ones were more than she wanted to spend. After the iPad announcement, she said “I’m returning my netbook and buying and iPad. It’s exactly what I want.” Another friend owns a hair salon and was…

• ExpressCard SSD in MacBook Pro

  Paul Lefebvre

  26 Jan 2010 | 8:47 am

  I’m always looking for ways to get more speed out of my MacBook Pro. Last month, Mac OS X Hints published a hint about using an ExpressCard SSD in a MacBook Pro. Then early this month, Rob Griffiths of Macworld (and the Mac OS X Hints guy) posted both an article and video on how he bought and set one up with his MacBook Pro. The speed improvement seemed pretty impressive, so I ordered one myself (from TigerDirect). Specifically, I ordered the FileMate SolidGo 48GB ExpressCard Ultra SSD. I usually order tech gear like this from NewEgg, but TigerDirect had a better price ($140 vs. $170)…

• Installing Windows 7 x64 on a MacBook Pro Using Bootcamp

  Paul Lefebvre

  5 Oct 2009 | 8:38 am

  I have been running Windows 7 RC x86 (the 32-bit version) in Bootcamp for several months now. It’s worked well, but I really didn’t like that it couldn’t see the full 6GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro (Late 2007). Snow Leopard comes with new Bootcamp drivers that support 64-bit Windows and adds a new file system driver to allow you to read your OS X files while in Windows. So I decided it was time to upgrade. I quickly learned that I would need to to a complete reinstall. Microsoft doesn’t let you do an in-place install from a 32-bit version of Windows to a 64-bit version.

• Dead MacBook Pro Displays: Final Update

  Paul Lefebvre

  24 Sep 2009 | 1:08 pm

  I’m back up and running. This post is being written on my repaired MacBook Pro! Wednesday night (9/23) the status of my laptop changed from “On hold” to “Repaired”. And to my surprise this morning I saw that it was out on a FedEx truck for delivery to my house. Apple had shipped it overnight from their repair facility in Texas! Upon opening the laptop, it showed two items as being repaired: 605-1791 Logic Board (No Video) 616-0261 Battery (Runtime Too Short) I had never noticed that my battery runtime was too short, but then I don’t use the MacBook Pro on…

• Dead MacBook Pro Displays: Update 2

  Paul Lefebvre

  22 Sep 2009 | 6:13 am

  It appears a lot of people have been affected by the NVIDIA chip bug. A poster on the Apple Discussion forums posted that he suspects more people are being affected by this now because of Snow Leopard, which uses the GPU more heavily. This seems plausible to me. Anyway, still no love for my MacBook Pro. It’s been sitting at the Apple Repair Center since 9/15 with the status “On hold – Part on order”. As of today that means the part has been on order for a week and still hasn’t arrived. So more waiting for me. Considering that others have said the repair has taken…

• 
  The Programmer's Paradox

• The Generation of Complexity

  Paul W. Homer

  7 Feb 2010 | 1:10 pm

  "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."  -- Albert Einstein When I was younger, I had a tendency to view history as being a smooth transition between the major events of mankind. Things progressed, we evolved and gradually we got to the point we are at today, with our knowledge and our technologies. All in a nice neat, smooth line. However, as you delve deeper and

• Real Difficulties

  Paul W. Homer

  10 Jan 2010 | 11:30 am

  I've been Cantoring about set theory for a few posts now and I can't find any obvious inconsistencies. No holes, no places where 135 years of brilliant people pounding on it have left in-roads. There are aspects of the way set theory handles various infinities that I wonder about, but within the context of set theory itself, it all appears consistent. Still, this is unsatisfying because it

• A Very Large Structure

  Paul W. Homer

  30 Dec 2009 | 8:20 pm

  You'd think I'd learn. You really would. I've posted a number of entries about issues with ZFC set theory, all of which, through the patient help of a number of readers, have proven to not live up to their expectations. As it stands, nothing I've said so far has shown any real problems within set theory. ZFC set theory has proven itself durable, and although I find some non-intuitive attributes

• Cantor's Lost Surjection (Revised)

  Paul W. Homer

  24 Dec 2009 | 10:41 am

  Revision 2.0: Dec 28, 2009 -- I've made the changes suggested by Chad Groft, and boris in their excellent comments. Before you go any further, PLEASE read this introductory paragraph fully and carefully. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been writing several posts about a very subtle problem in ZFC set theory, whose results wind through a great deal of the existing work. I may be right, I may

• Crank it Up

  Paul W. Homer

  19 Dec 2009 | 11:49 am

  What I am about to say, if true will really surprise a lot of people. We all have a tendency to believe that once something is locked in stone, then by virtue of that, it is unshakable. Well, that's mostly true, but mankind has a vast amount of learning left to do... Picture a spreadsheet, but it's no ordinary spreadsheet. To the left and to the right it extends out infinity. Up and down it also

• 
  CodeHill

• Top 5 CSS Tutorial Sites

  Amgad Suliman

  8 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  Because of its features that made web designing a lot easier and convenient, CSS has become one of the many popular languages in web designing and layout. Another reason for its popularity is because of the ease of the demand for it in the industry. Today, several websites have been put up to provide people [...] Related posts:5 Important Keys to Website Design How to Choose Website Designers The Ups And Downs Of Using CSS

• Use of H1 tags in SEO

  Amgad Suliman

  4 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  H1 tags are one of the most important part of SEO which is the header tag situated in body of a website. It can be termed as the most simple form of header found on a web page. Through h1 tags search engines come to know about the site content details. If its used in [...] Related posts:Common Website Mistakes Understanding SEO Terminology for Better Website Marketing Common Mistakes When Learning SEO

• Why High Quality Web Design is So Important

  Amgad Suliman

  1 Feb 2010 | 6:00 am

  There once was a time on the Internet when web design wasn’t very important. Maybe a decade ago or so, the main thing you had to do was just have a website. That factor alone would give you a strong advantage in the marketplace, and you’d have a leg up on your competition who didn’t [...] Related posts:5 Important Keys to Website Design How Important is Website Usability Growing Importance of Website Seal

• Growing Importance of Website Seal

  Amgad Suliman

  28 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

  Establishing trust with the customers is highly essential for earning profits and higher sales. The trust factor is same for a physical shop as well as a website. If you have offered quality product first time, the same thing is expected when they come second time for purchase and if you fail to offer that [...] Related posts:Why High Quality Web Design is So Important 5 Important Keys to Website Design How to Choose Website Designers

• Common Website Mistakes

  Amgad Suliman

  25 Jan 2010 | 6:00 am

  Websites engage in search engine optimization in order to gain more visitors via search engines. But website owners need not only consider attaining new visitors but should also focus on making the old ones want to come visit back. In no particular order, here are the list of what may be considered as “common website [...] Related posts:Common Mistakes When Learning SEO Use of H1 tags in SEO Understanding SEO Terminology for Better Website Marketing

• 
  Programming By A Tool

• Apple’s Latest Innovation Is Astounding, A Real Game Changer

  Sean

  27 Jan 2010 | 11:42 am

  I don't know how they did it, but they made the world's first shrink ray. Amazing.

• Get the jQuery DatePicker to Work With jQuery Modal Dialog

  Sean

  27 Jan 2010 | 11:35 am

  Being that I am the man, I thought I would share this little thingy with you because... well I'm the man. So here's the issue:  You have a date picker, a modal dialog, and you can't see the calendar when you click on the icon and/or textbox. First thought, 'WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN TO ME???!?!' Second though, 'I wonder if that tool knows how to get past this.' Good news! I do. Turns out it has to do with the z-index. The modal dialog by default has a z-index of 1000ish when showing. (And any modal dialog "above that" will increase it's z-index to match.) If the calendar isn't higher than that,…

• ByATool.com Is Looking For Writers

  Andre

  19 Jan 2010 | 1:05 pm

  Yeah, you read that right.  ByATool.com is looking to add one to three writers with various IT backgrounds.  This is not a job, it is simply an avenue for you to get your work read.  We want to know what YOU want to write about.  It's no fun to be given a topic to write about when your passion lies elsewhere. Please contact us at the address listed below so we can discuss this one-on-one! What we need from you: Name: E-Mail: What would you like to write about: How often would you like to write: Please submit this simple information, along with an example blog post to iwanttowrite [at]…

• Dear Microsoft,

  Sean

  16 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am

  If it takes a whole paragraph to explain what "continue" means,  maybe you should rethink the button text and/or layout. Sincerely, Sean

• jQuery Modal Dialog : Hide That Stupid X Button / Windows Close Button

  Sean

  12 Jan 2010 | 8:05 am

  This is quick one, so hold on to your... whatever. Want to get rid of that X at the top right of the modal "Control"? Well here it is: (The bold part, moron) jQuery('#WaitingDiv').dialog({ autoOpen: false, bgiframe: false, height: 150, width: 200, modal: true, open: function(event, ui) { jQuery('.ui-dialog-titlebar-close').hide(); } }); And that's really it. Just thought I'd pass that on to you, the consumer. On a side note, the big movie thing is the canceling of Spiderman 4 or at least going in a new direction. As much as I don't care, it might lead to my dream come true: A spiderman movie…

• 
  Embedded Computing Design

• Cartika Selects CloudLinux OS As Part of its New CartikaCloud Offer

  9 Feb 2010 | 10:19 am

  Princeton, NJ (February 8, 2010) – Cloud Linux Inc, an innovative, privately funded technology company serving the needs of web hosts and datacenters, announces it has been selected by Cartika, an industry innovator in cloud hosting services, to be the Linux Operating System (OS) platform for their new CartikaCloud initiative. This announcement is significant as it marks the first CloudLinux hosting partner, following its market debut less than 30 days ago. Cartika, who just announced its CartikaCloud service, selected CloudLinux because of their LVE℠ technology which allows…

• Cartika Selects CloudLinux OS As Part of its New CartikaCloud Offer

  9 Feb 2010 | 10:19 am

  Princeton, NJ (February 8, 2010) – Cloud Linux Inc, an innovative, privately funded technology company serving the needs of web hosts and datacenters, announces it has been selected by Cartika, an industry innovator in cloud hosting services, to be the Linux Operating System (OS) platform for their new CartikaCloud initiative. This announcement is significant as it marks the first CloudLinux hosting partner, following its market debut less than 30 days ago. Cartika, who just announced its CartikaCloud service, selected CloudLinux because of their LVE℠ technology which allows…

• Broadcom Introduces 65nm 3G HSPA Chipset Solution to Enable High-Speed, Low Cost Smartphone Devices

  8 Feb 2010 | 10:08 am

  IRVINE, Calif., Feb. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ:BRCM) , a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced a new single-chip HSPA (high-speed packet access) baseband processor and a radio frequency (RF) transceiver solution that integrates all of the key 3G (third generation) cellular and mobile technologies for powering the 3G smartphone and smart feature phone product segments. The advanced baseband processor is the first to provide extremely high-speed cellular connectivity with advanced, built-in graphics…

• An 8.9″ Touchscreen System ideal for home automation and point of sale

  8 Feb 2010 | 6:16 am

  Designed as an ideal solution for Home Automation, Point of Sale and many other aesthetically demanding vertical markets the fanless PDX-089T is based on the 1GHz Vortex86DX CPU and features a Compact Flash and Micro SD slot, LAN, two USB 2.0 ports, one RS-232 port and Mini-PCI expansion. 512MB DDR2 memory is fitted as standard and optional audio line out, an additional USB port and wireless LAN are available on request. Fitted with an 8.9″ 1024×600 resolution TFT display with user friendly viewing angles of 100° (vertical) and 140° (horizontal) and LED backlight with a…

• Surface Mount Technology Corp. Sponsored Robotics Team Wins State Championship

  8 Feb 2010 | 6:10 am

  On Saturday, January 30th, the Surface Mount Technology Corp sponsored robotics team from Hortonville High School won the Wisconsin FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) competition, and is heading to the world championship in April. Surface Mount Technology Corp. provides sponsorship and Surface Mount Technology Corp. staff are involved in coaching the team. Hortonville High School students Mitchell Kettner, Max Wilson, Sam Murphy and Trevor Carter won the Regional FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) competition held at UW-Milwaukee on Saturday, January 30. Their team is known as the Kinetic Polar Bears. FIRST,…

• 
  Ruminations of a Programmer

• Scala Self-Type Annotations for Constrained Orthogonality

  Debasish

  7 Feb 2010 | 9:07 am

  I talked about orthogonality in design in one of my earlier posts. We had a class Address in Scala and we saw how we can combine it with other orthogonal concerns without polluting the core abstraction. We could do this because Scala offers a host of capabilities to compose smaller abstractions and build larger wholes out of them. A language is orthogonal when it allows such capabilities of composition without overlaps in functionalities between the composing featuresets.The design of Scala offers many orthogonal features - I showed some of them in my earlier post. The power of mixins for…

• A new way to think of Data Storage for your Enterprise Application

  Debasish

  20 Jan 2010 | 8:26 pm

  A couple of posts earlier I had blogged about a real life case study of one of our projects where we are using a SQL store (Oracle) and a NoSQL store (MongoDB) in combination over a message based backbone. MongoDB was used to cater to a very specific subset of the application functionality, where we felt it made a better fit than a traditional RDBMS. This hybrid architecture of data organization is turning out to be an increasingly attractive option today with more and more specialized persistent storage structures being developed.In many applications we need to process graph data structures.

• A Case for Orthogonality in Design

  Debasish

  10 Jan 2010 | 6:43 am

  In Learning, using and designing command paradigms, John M Carroll introduces the notion of lexical congruence. When you design a language, one of the things that you do is lexicalization of the domain. If we extrapolate the concept to software designs in general, we go through the same process with our domain model. We identify artifacts or lexemes and choose to name them appropriately so that the names are congruent with the semantics of the domain. This notion of lexical congruence is the essence of having a good mnemonics for your domain language. I found the reference to Carroll's work…

• 
  Wazoo Enterprises

• things just got a teeny bit brighter for flash monetization

  wazoo

  7 Feb 2010 | 3:20 am

  On one of my linkedin groups, Alex posted this one (thanks Alex!). One of the “mantras” within the world of online development during 2009 was monetization via micro-transactions. I’ve talked about it, along with just about every other Flash developer. At first I was a bit leery that north american players just wouldn’t latch onto the model as much as they have over in Asia. Kongregate just posted a few statistics about their API, and I think it shows some promise that perhaps the model can be supported after all.

• analyzing system performance with nvidia and vs2008

  wazoo

  5 Feb 2010 | 11:52 am

  Back in December 2009, NVidia put this presentation together on the ability to analyze system performance using NVidia’s Nexus and Visual Studio 2008. From the NVidia developer website you can sign up for beta access to Nexus. It looks like a great addition to your suite of profiling / analyzing tools.

• choice of game technology decision graph

  wazoo

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:28 am

  budget vs. time vs. skill David over at Wolfire Games put together a well crafted and executed piece on revisiting the dreaded “OpenGL vs. Direct3D” debates. I think while these debates are great (and still important), the choice of graphics layer has almost been marginalized by the access provided by today’s hardware and OS solutions along with the tools available to us. If you have a (download) product supporting both Mac and PC, then your fastest path to a release is most likely via OpenGL support. But your options for traveling that path are wide open, with the only…

• marketing and publicity for startups

  wazoo

  4 Feb 2010 | 3:05 am

  A friend of mine forwarded me this presentation on the “12 golden rules for publicity and marketing for startups”. It’s a good quick view, which I think provides enough of a breakdown that even a game development startup can learn from. I think twitter and social media in general are tools and channels that small team and/or one-man content creators can really really benefit from. Rather than have your “message” be routed through teams of lawyers and PR firms (such as on web copy), you get a chance to meet and connect with real people. Some of them will love you,…

• the camel101 team provides an update to “gemini”

  wazoo

  2 Feb 2010 | 7:20 am

  Over on camel101.com, the team is plugging away on their new release “Gemini”. It’s been labeled as a space realtime strategy game, but I’m also really just after ship-to-ship combat in space. I mean really…who isn’t? Check out the latest “cinematic camera” feature that they’re working on.

• 
  9lessons

• Open Source Ecommerce PHP Softwares.

  9 Feb 2010 | 9:59 am

  Are you looking for PHP open source applications. Just take a look at this post the best open source ECOMMERCE softwares. Try these with XAMPP 1.6.8 (Complete Pack) website link click here MagentoCommerceFew days back I had experimented it's really powerful software but it's working on XAMPP Ver 1.6.8 ZenCartZen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping

• PHP Login Script with Encryption.

  5 Feb 2010 | 10:23 am

  In this post I want to explain how to insert encrypted password while registration and accessing the same with login time. I had implement this at labs.9lessons.info login page. I'm just storing encrypted user password in database. Demo username ='test' and password = 'test' Download Script     Live Demo Database MySQL admin table columns id, username, passcode. CREATE TABLE admin ( id INT

• 9lessons Labs Release.

  31 Jan 2010 | 7:22 am

  .ads{ display:none; } Hi Friends, I had developed an application using Jquery, Ajax, PHP and Mysql. Hosted this files at URL labs.9lessons.info. I just combined previously posted tutorials on 9lessons blog. Today I'm releasing second preview please use it and give your feedback, every feedback is appreciated! Thanks! #sideside { display:none; } http://labs.9lessons.infoApplication Interface

• PHP Time Stamp Function.

  24 Jan 2010 | 2:52 am

  I had developed a date time stamp function using PHP and implemented this at labs.9lessons.info. It is very important for social media web applications. I hope it's useful for you. Facebook Wall Script 2.0 Download link : http://labs.9lessons.info/status.php?msgid=150 Download Script     Live Demo time_stamp.php Contains PHP code. You have to use the time_stamp() function to display the

• Redirect The Sub Domain To a Sub Folder with .htaccess

  11 Jan 2010 | 4:17 am

  In this post I want to explain " How to redirect the sub domain to a sub folder with .htaccess". I had implemented this for labs.9lessons.info and demos.9lessons.info. I hope it is useful for you. Example .htaccess code You have to replace your sub domain and sub folder name. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^demos\.9lessons\.info$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/demos/ RewriteRule (.*

• 
  Just a tech stuff

• Download files from Amazon’s S3

  Karol Zielinski

  1 Feb 2010 | 3:43 am

  I had lots of files in my bucket on S3. That’s why downloading these files via firefox plugins wasn’t the best possible idea. I had to create script, which will do it for me.   Ok, so let’s code something… We need to have one external library in our environment. It’s boto (Python interface to Amazon Web Services). Now, create new file (let’s call it ‘download_files_from_s3.py’) and add there: from boto.s3 import Connection import StringIO import getopt, sys class Downloader(): base_dir = None bucket_name = None aws_access_key_id =…

• Some of the buttons in eclipse don’t work

  Karol Zielinski

  29 Jan 2010 | 3:32 am

  Some time ago I realized that some of the buttons in my eclipse don’t work. I mean that I can’t press it by clicking, but I can press it using keyboard. To fix it… I had to create new file. It won’t be a long advice. Everything what I need to do is to create new file (let’s call it eclipse_run.sh) and add there something like: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true PATH_TO_YOUR_ECLIPSE_RUN_FILE So on my computer it will be: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true /home/karol/Pulpit/eclipse/eclipse We should have an ability to run it, so we have to do: sudo chmod +x eclipse_run.sh The end.

• Get number of your subscribers from Feedburner

  Karol Zielinski

  27 Jan 2010 | 3:54 am

  While we already know how to create script for getting number of followers from twitter – now it’s the best time for getting number of subscribers from feedburner. Everything will be done in python (django). What is Feedburner? It’s a great tool for managing RSS feeds. Why I may want to have number of subscribers? Because we may want to show that number on our website. We will use Feedburner’s API. What you should read is: Past Basic Feed Awareness Data I will use XMLObject class to parse XMLs, because I simply like it. Ok, let’s code… Open your *.py file…

• Build firewall on server (ubuntu)

  Karol Zielinski

  25 Jan 2010 | 3:39 am

  I would like to secure my VPS. That’s why I had to find some more informations about firewalls. The most interesting idea… “firewall” via iptales. However managing iptables is a litlle bit complicated, so I decided to use UFW. What you have to know: UFW is not the firewall. UFW just configures your iptables And that’s what I was looking for. First… check what you have installed on your server and which ports are opened. Do it by ‘ps -aux’ and ‘nmap’. Consider which ports you would like to have opened and which ones should be closed.

• Get number of your twitter followers in python

  Karol Zielinski

  18 Jan 2010 | 4:01 am

  We already know how to implement functionality for automatic adding statuses to twitter. Today we will implement a functionality for automatic downloading a number of your twitter followers in python (django).   Everything via twitter API. We will use only one method from this API, so we need to read “Twitter REST API Method: followers ids” section in this documentation. You can find this section here. Let’s fun. We will download amount of followers of @develway. That’s an account of a website for IT specialists and programmers. Open *.py file (for example…

• 
  Learn jQuery Now

• Creating a jQueryUI Accordian

  admin

  5 Feb 2010 | 4:29 pm

  An accordion is the ideal choice for when you have to put a lot of information on the screen, but you do not have a lot of screen real estate available for that information. Luckily for us we can... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• A Brand New Look, Some Changes, and An Announcement

  admin

  26 Oct 2009 | 11:14 am

  I have made a lot of different changes to the website this weekend and I thought I should let everyone know about what is happening with the website. First are foremost, I have changed the design of... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Use hoverIntent To Capture Your Users Mouse Intentions

  admin

  14 Oct 2009 | 11:00 pm

  First of all, allow me to apologize for that title. There really is no better way to describe in a concise way what hoverIntent does. HoverIntent is a jQuery plugin that helps you capture mouse... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• Use jQuery To Make Multiple Columns The Same Size

  admin

  8 Oct 2009 | 2:03 pm

  Probably just about every web developer has run into this problem. You have a two or three column layout on your website and your center column has a ton of great content that spans a very long way... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• A Multi-Purpose jQuery Toolkit Plugin

  admin

  7 Oct 2009 | 2:02 pm

  With all my journeys using jQuery, I have begun creating a special library file that contains little things that are not readily available in other plugins, but are incredibly useful. I was thinking... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

• 
  Jolicloud Blog

• Featured apps on Jolicloud this week: Ustream.tv, Lunch, Prezi, Howcast, Radio Tuna, Paper Critters, and more.

  Jolicloud Team

  29 Jan 2010 | 10:07 am

  Our latest additions to the directory: Ustream.tv Ustream.tv provides a platform for lifecasting and live video streaming of events. It enables anyone with a camera and a connection to the web to broadcast to a global audience, create their own channel on Ustream.tv, or broadcast through their own site. You can also simply visit the site to [...]

• New apps on Jolicloud: BirdHerd, Nirvana, Stack Overflow, Topikality, Carbonmade, and more.

  Estelle Ricoux

  22 Jan 2010 | 9:12 am

  Our weekly additions to the directory: BirdHerd BirdHerd is an easy and useful tool to add contributors to a single Twitter account. Just choose which other Twitter users should have the ability to tweet from the account. They will then be able to direct message the account and their DMs will appear in the timeline with a [...]

• This week’s app selection on Jolicloud: Teambox, Cacoo, Verb, Noteflight, tunesBag, Foodista, and more.

  Jolicloud Team

  15 Jan 2010 | 9:46 am

  What’s new on Jolicloud this week: Teambox This Twitter-like project management tool facilitates collaboration and notifies team members of additions and changes to projects. Teambox lets teams create unlimited projects for free. It comes with a neat interface where every project includes forums, task lists, wiki pages, people (collaborators) and chat. Teambox will work fine for freelancers [...]

• New apps and updates this week on Jolicloud: Boxee Beta, Flavors.me, Vim, PoketyPoke, tDash and more.

  Jolicloud Team

  8 Jan 2010 | 10:00 am

  Some important updates are available on Jolicloud today: FireFox 3.5.7, Adobe AIR 2 Beta, and Boxee Beta. To upgrade to the latest versions, just click on ‘Update All’ on your Jolicloud dashboard. Boxee Beta The new version of Boxee, the open source platform that integrates personal media with Internet media and social networking has received a complete [...]

• New apps on Jolicloud this week: Living Stories, TeuxDeux, Audacity, Pictory, 22tracks and more.

  Jolicloud Team

  24 Dec 2009 | 4:40 am

  Our latest additions to the Jolicloud directory: Living Stories The New York Times and The Washington Post have been working with Google on an innovative news site that combines new ways to interact with news and quality reporting. Living Stories offers everything there is to know about current top stories, from updates to people, photos and graphs, [...]

• 
  Goyello blog

• Getting More From The Lime Testing Framework

  Jakub Zalas

  9 Feb 2010 | 3:27 am

  Lime is a testing tool bundled with symfony. It can be, however, used separately with any PHP application. It is a great alternative for famous PHPUnit. Its advantage is simplicity. Since writing tests with lime is dead easy it’s a perfect choice for unit testing newbies. Simplicity What makes lime so powerful is that almost no effort is [...]

• Are company meetings useless?

  Aga Gibowska

  5 Feb 2010 | 5:48 am

  The company life is all about communication be it direct, face-to-face or virtual and remote with colleagues, clients and company partners. Have you ever counted how many meetings you attend in the period of a month or a year? Many people’s work days consist of meetings almost entirely. After all these hours of discussing most [...]

• Early bird warning: Windows 7 RC shut down begins

  Peter Horsten

  4 Feb 2010 | 11:11 am

  Are you one of those early birds who installed the then free available Windows 7 Release Candidate? Fun is over. Beginning March 1, the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) will start to shut down every two hours in preparation for its expiration on June 1, 2010. That means you will need to migrate your [...]

• A product launch to dream of: Windows 7 market share increasing quickly

  Peter Horsten

  4 Feb 2010 | 7:15 am

  Most of us will remember a rather dramatic introduction of Windows Vista several years ago. With a lot of marketing power users were forced to switch to a not very well performing new operating system. There were many complaints about the big amount of bugs and the poor performance. Microsoft seemed to ignore the complaints, [...]

• Despite having innovative tools people don’t collaborate

  Aga Gibowska

  4 Feb 2010 | 1:34 am

  We all know that only the “learning organizations” have a bright future ahead. Knowledge is the key predictor of success. So why aren’t we eager to share our knowledge? Why often people working for the same organization don’t cooperate? Nowadays, with the development of IT industry companies give their employees the variety of tools to make [...]

• 
  Raakesh.com

• Dash Robot - Robotic Cockroach

  Raakesh

  19 Jan 2010 | 8:12 am

  A new cockroach like robot was invented by researchers at University of Berkeley. This little device was built using computer and cell phone scraps. The mini robot runs straight in a line, at the speed of more than 1 meter per second, and can withstand a fall from 28 meters. read more

• Google Chrome Operating System to be launched shortly

  Raakesh

  11 Jan 2010 | 4:53 pm

  "Is Google going to take over the world with this?" My answer is "NO" but it is really interesting how Google Inc can just about do anything they want, while so many companies out there are just busy competing. It is Google's Business Model that just lets them make a new product and have it delivered to millions of users on the very first day and then start making billions of dollars with those apps, without their users paying them a dime.read more

• Google's Strategic Placement of Ads

  Raakesh

  4 Jan 2010 | 1:24 pm

  If you are like me, and use Gmail I am sure you would have accidentally clicked Google Ads placed just upon the "Back to Inbox" link. Since I am also an advertiser, every time I accidentally click on a sponsored ad, I go "Ouch" as I didn't really intend to click on the ads. But, in the process of this little accident, the advertiser lost money, and Google made money. I am not saying this is a scam, but this is a very strategic placement of ads because of these reasons: 1. The ads are relevant to the email I just opened.read more

• Roboform Now Supports Chrome Browser

  Raakesh

  3 Jan 2010 | 3:14 pm

  Great News for Roboform Users Roboform now supports Google Chrome / Chromium web Browsers I know at least 20 people who have not been able to use Google Chrome because it was not supported by Roboform. Roboform is one of the most revolutionary products for password / login management which has an addictive personality. 9 out of 10 users who start using Roboform to manage their passwords for various web sites they visit, have become hooked to it totally.read more

• Google Real Time Search is here

  Raakesh

  11 Dec 2009 | 12:48 am

  Welcome Real Time Search Talk about search engine optimization, but don't ignore social media. Yes, finally social media has made an impact on how the web works and the Big G decided to include real time data in searches. This feature is called Google Updates. read more

• 
  Learnivore!

• Rails 3 Beta and RVM (Railscasts - free)

  7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  JavaScript Performance Rocks! - 3 books on Ultimate Web App Performance Get started with Rails 3.0 Beta and install Ruby 1.9.1 using RVM: Ruby Version Manager. Stay tuned to the end for a challenge on giving back to open source.

• Introduction to Grails - Part 2 (Teach Me To Code - free)

  7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  JavaScript Performance Rocks! - 3 books on Ultimate Web App Performance In this screencast, we continue on our task of creating a 'Stack Overflow' clone by adding more domain classes and relationships between them. We also cover how to test your classes using integration tests.

• Episode 10 - Intro to Macros (Full Disclojure - free)

  7 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  JavaScript Performance Rocks! - 3 books on Ultimate Web App Performance In this episode I provide a basic introduction to Macros in Clojure.

• Test-Driving Your Own Hacker Blogging Engine (Remi - paid)

  6 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  JavaScript Performance Rocks! - 3 books on Ultimate Web App Performance Coders tend to like minimalist blogging engines. Give a developer something that processes a directory of markdown and textile files and they’re usually happy. In the Ruby world, we have LOTS of platforms for doing this: Jekyll is a popular platform that’s actually built into Github Toto was just announced...

• SSH Tunneling (aka port forwarding) (Fosscasts - free)

  4 Feb 2010 | 4:00 pm

  JavaScript Performance Rocks! - 3 books on Ultimate Web App Performance SSH is a great tool and allows for more than just logging into a remote machine. SSH allows you to forward a port so TCP/IP traffic can travel safelythrough SSH. Not only is this secure, but it allows you to do many things - like get around firewalls. In this...

• 
  SHAZAML!

• Creating a Hello World Application for Boxee

  Mark Tucker

  2 Feb 2010 | 7:58 am

  My first exposure to Boxee was a few weeks ago as I read the news from CES 2010. Boxee is media center software that runs on a variety of operating systems and touts itself as “the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet and computer on your TV.” In its support forum knowledge base under the question “What is Boxee?” you can read the following: Boxee is a social media center. With Boxee you can play videos, music and pictures from your computer, local network, and the Internet. You can also share with your friends what albums you’re listening to, what movies and TV…

• Hidden Mysteries – Civil War

  Mark Tucker

  15 Dec 2009 | 5:31 pm

  Along the lines of the last post on Family Mystery, here is a hidden object game about the Civil War.  As you play Hidden Mysteries – Civil War, you learn more about 3 individuals on both sides of the conflict as you collect personal artifacts: For those genealogists out there, it would be interesting to learn if James Philip Munroe, Richard Anthony Boyer, or William Alexander Walker were real people.

• Family Mystery

  Mark Tucker

  14 Dec 2009 | 5:14 pm

  One of my passions is family history (also called genealogy) and I like the idea of games on the topic.  Here is only that I found called Family Mystery: The Story of Amy: If you are interested in family history as well, check out my other blog, ThinkGenealogy.

• Dragon’s Lair

  Mark Tucker

  11 Dec 2009 | 10:33 pm

  When I played Dragon’s Lair in the arcade in the early 1980’s the graphics and animation blew me away.  It was a leap forward in video game animation and encouraged the use of laserdisc in other arcade machines.  I admit that I was never very good at the game and poor Dirk the Daring would often get attacked by skulls. Great to see Dragon’s Lair available for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

• Hidden Object: Episode 14 – Shake it up

  Mark Tucker

  25 Nov 2009 | 5:05 am

  So far in the game, we have particles when an item is clicked, a hint to show the location of an unfound item, but what should we do if the player goes berserk and wildly clicks all over the place in hopes of finding a difficult-to-find item? In this episode of Creating a Hidden Object Game is Silverlight 3 we will add an earthquake effect if the player clicks too many times in a 5 second interval. Let’s first start with the shake effect.  The magnifierCanvas Canvas contains the background image and all Paths for each clickable item. We will create a new storyboard called…

• 
  Tales from the bits

• Apple – iPad

  gb

  27 Jan 2010 | 1:39 pm

  The newiPad from Apple is simply fantastic. It has a multi-touch high resolution screen which makes surfing on the Internet, reading emails, browsing photos, watching videos a new experience. Some technical specifications: Height: 9.56 inches (242.8 mm) Width:  7.47 inches (189.7 mm) Depth: 0.5 inch (13.4 mm) — extremely slim!! Weight: 1.5 pounds (.68 kg) Wi-Fi model; 1.6 pounds (.73 kg) Wi-Fi + 3G model The display is a 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-back-lit glossy wide-screen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology. The resolution is 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch…

• Microsoft released the fix for the vulnerability in IE

  gb

  22 Jan 2010 | 2:28 am

  According to Microsoft the vulnerability was in the mshtml.dll.  Those who install the update are NOT vulnerable and are protected from all known attack vectors.  There is a full description on Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002 – Critical.

• Aerobic exercise grows brain cells

  gb

  22 Jan 2010 | 2:16 am

  From Physorg.com:  A study on mice showed that  even a few days of running or jogging stimulates the brain to grow new cells in a part of the brain involved in memory and recall. The study was done by neuroscientists from University of Cambridge in the UK and the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore in the US. Running mice grew an average of 6,000 new brain cells per cubic millimeter in the dentate gyrus part of the hippocampus. Exercise keeps the brain healthy by increasing synaptic plasticity and by stimulating the brain to produce new cells(neurogenisis=neuro+genisis[birth]).

• Bill Gates launches new site.

  gb

  21 Jan 2010 | 12:17 am

  The Gates Notes, is the names of the new web site that Bill Gates launched. Todd Bishop in his blog states that Bill will “be writing about what’s on his mind, posting information from his trips, and sharing excerpts from his exchanges with experts and leaders in areas including science, energy, philanthropy and other global issues.” Communication is a key factor when you want to achieve a goal. It is nice that Bill Gates shares his thoughts and interests and that he is open for conversation. The site has good content. What will be the next step?

• Vulnerability in Internet Explorer

  gb

  18 Jan 2010 | 1:32 am

  The recent attack to Google, Adobe and other companies revealed a vulnerability that exists in many versions of Internet Explorer. According to Wired the attack was ultra sophisticated and targeted source code from Google, Adobe and dozens of other high-profile companies. The level of sophistication was equal to the attacks seen in defense industry. Microsoft has released a Security Advisory (979352). The products that are vulnerable are Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 on supported editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server…

• 
  My Dev Central

• Handling beans with BlazeDS and Flex

  sgermain

  19 Jan 2010 | 10:56 am

  I recently did a little bit of testing around some concepts with BlazeDS and Flex for a game I’m writing with a friend. The game needs to be multi-player and online. Since the game will have some synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous operations going on in the same session, I needed to have an efficient way of passing data from the messaging system to the remoting system. I decided to use a bean. Creating a singleton controller, I can put whatever data I want in my bean and keep it in memory, passing it back and forth between my controllers. Here’s a small example of how to use…

• HTML in Flash/Flex

  sgermain

  19 Jan 2010 | 10:02 am

  I was mandated at work to work on the company’s website. Since the site needs to incorporate a blog for several employees, the option of writing the whole site in Flash was out of the question, as people would embed whatever videos from YouTube, images from various places, etc. The support for HTML rendering with Flash Player is fairly limited. Not anymore! Today, I decided to simply Google Flash HTML renderer and I come across this little marvel: http://code.google.com/p/htmlwrapper/. It’s a fairly advanced HTML renderer. It supports most of the features that one would need on a…

• Developing for Google Wave

  sgermain

  9 Jan 2010 | 6:02 am

  Hi! I don’t know how many of you had the chance to play with Google Wave at all, but I had the opportunity to fool around with it a bit. I’m quite amazed of how things turned out, even though their interface needs quite a bit of work. The overall performance of the system is a little disappointing, but I try to keep in mind that this is only a preview version. As soon as it hits the beta stage, I think we’ll see some major improvement across the board. Even though the system is only an alpha version (or preview, call it what you will), Google still released some information…

• Zend Framework 2.0

  sgermain

  2 Jan 2010 | 8:10 am

  Zend announced back in November of 2009 that the next major release of Zend Framework was on the way. They published the new framework’s roadmap and some of the new features. The upcoming release of Zend Framework has PHP 5.3 as a requirement, as it relies on namespace support. The main changes to Zend Framework is the MVC implementation, but there are many architectural and design changes as well. Here’s a summary of the new features. The goal of Zend Framework is to improve the overall consistency, more consistent APIs relating to constructors, options and exceptions. Unified…

• Timers vs Enter Frame

  sgermain

  31 Dec 2009 | 10:07 am

  I was working on a project not too long ago where the original developer was using Timers to time his animations and events firing. It resulted in a pretty horrific view when the app was run on a slower computer. All timings were off, events were not fired, or fired late, even, in some cases, in advance. I did a little bit of research and found this article: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=910. In this article, Keith Peters demonstrate that there is a misconception with the Timer theory of “a millisecond is a millisecond”. A lot of people rely on this theory to justify the use of…