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Google Code Blog
The Future of Web Performance at Google I/O: JavaScript

DeWitt Clinton

8 May 2008 | 1:52 pm

By Steve Souders, Member of Technical StaffThis post is one in a series that previews Google I/O, our biggest developer event in San Francisco, May 28-29. Over the next month, we'll be highlighting sessions and speakers to give Google Code Blog readers a better sense of what's in store for you at the event. - Ed.In April I announced that I'm starting another book. The working title is High Performance Web Sites, Part 2. This book contains the next set of web performance best practices that goes beyond my first book and YSlow. Here are the rules I have so far:Split the initial payloadLoad…
Guido van Rossum releases Mondrian-clone: Rietveld

Dion Almaer

8 May 2008 | 12:50 am

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer ProgramsGuido van Rossum, Python creator and member of the App Engine team, gave a talk on Mondrian which is the tool he created to work with the code review process at Google.The Mondrian tool itself was tied to internal technology, but he took the time to built an inspired version on App Engine. Part of the work was having it work with Subversion as the SCM. The name of the tool is Rietveld, and here is what Guido said on the Python mailing list to announce it:I've always hoped that I could release Mondrian as open source, but it was not to be: due to its…
Google Developer Podcast Episode 15: Google App Engine

Dion Almaer

30 Apr 2008 | 11:19 am

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer ProgramsUsing iTunes? We had the pleasure to talk to some of the Google App Engine team to discuss the recent launch that Dick uses the tagline as "Your apps, our servers". We get to chat with tech lead on the project Kevin Gibbs, product manager Pete Koomen, and Guido van Rossum. I don't think we need to introduce Guido!The podcast starts out answering why Google App Engine was created, and why Python was chosen as the first language. We then hear about the work that goes into making a language hardened for the platform itself.Of all of the APIs that we…
Cuzillion: Check your zillion web pages

Dion Almaer

29 Apr 2008 | 8:21 am

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer ProgramsSteve Souders, member of the performance group at Google, has released a new open source tool called Cuzillion. Steve was constantly creating sample test web pages that he used to test out theories on Web site performance. He realized that he was repeating a lot of the same steps, so why not create a tool that would enable him to build the samples quickly. Thus, Cuzillion was born.If you take a look at the UI above, you will see that it is mimicking a Web page, with a <HEAD> and <BODY>. On the left hand side you select types of elements;…
Google App Engine Hack-a-thon coming to your coast!

DeWitt Clinton

24 Apr 2008 | 2:56 pm

By Amanda Surya, Google Developer ProgramsIn May, we'll be holding two Google App Engine Hack-a-thons at Google's offices. The first one will be in New York, May 7th, from 10am - 6pm, and the second one in San Francisco, May 16th, 10am - 10pm. This is a great opportunity to get started on Google App Engine. You can code along with us in building an app from start to finish or you can bring your existing apps and get some help and guidance from Google engineers.Check out the full details of these events and RSVP for either the New York Hack-a-thon or the San Francisco Hack-a-thon. Or both, if…

Apple Developer
Release Note: Java for Mac OS X v10.5 Release Notes Update 1

1 Jan 2009 | 11:00 am

Lists resolved and outstanding developer issues with Java for Mac OS X v10.5 Update 1.
Release Note: Java for Mac OS X v10.5 Update 1 Release Notes

2 May 2008 | 12:00 pm

Lists resolved and outstanding developer issues with Java for Mac OS X v10.5 Update 1.
Technical Note: Compressing QuickTime Movies for the Web

1 May 2008 | 12:00 pm

TN2218: Describes how to create QuickTime content optimized for use on the Web
Release Note: Java for Mac OS X v10.5 Release Notes Update 1

29 Apr 2008 | 6:00 pm

Lists resolved and outstanding developer issues with Java for Mac OS X v10.5 Update 1.
Reference: Mac OS X Man Pages

29 Apr 2008 | 6:00 pm

HTML versions of the Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Xcode Tools, and CHUD man pages.

Dzone
The hidden value of processing.js

bloid

11 May 2008 | 4:50 pm

The ever wonderful John Resig finally posted his totally awesome processing.js code to the web. If you haven’t seen it, you should go take a look. The Wired Compiler blog said “…this might be the most impressive thing we’ve ever seen.” And I agree, but probably not for the same reasons that they cite.
Pimping Builds

jkorab

11 May 2008 | 2:26 pm

Cool ways to tweak your Ant and Maven builds from the "Pimp My Build" session at JavaOne.
Should you really learn another language?

bloid

11 May 2008 | 1:31 pm

Blogger Gustavo Duarte cursed in church when he said that learning new programming languages is often a waste of time. He initially called his post, “New Languages Considered Harmful”, a wordplay on Dijksta’s classic paper on gotos, but after the reactions he got, he toned it down a bit and it’s now called *”Language Dabbling Considered Wasteful”.
invokedynamic: Is It What We Really Need?

alext

11 May 2008 | 1:12 pm

invokedynamic from prospective of Groovy Core Developer
inputEx — a YUI-based Forms Utility

kouphax

11 May 2008 | 12:44 pm

Parisian coder Eric Abouaf (aka “Neyric”) released version 0.1.0 of his YUI-based forms library, inputEx.

Ajaxian
Exclusive Mastering Dojo Chapters

Dion Almaer

9 May 2008 | 5:10 pm

Craig Riecke, Rawld Gill, and Alex Russell, along with the Pragmatic Programmers themselves have been kind enough to give the Ajaxian community some exclusive extracts from the Mastering Dojo beta book. What do we have on the docket? First, we have details on the Dojo DOM Apis. Specifically, the author takes us through a challenge involving interview questions and manipulating the DOM for them. We end up seeing code that uses dojo.query, and class addition such as: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: function layout1(){ dojo.addClass(dojo.query("form>…
oEmbed makes embedding third party videos and images a breeze

Chris Heilmann

9 May 2008 | 4:33 am

Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce and Revision3 are the first services to support oEmbed, an easy way to allow embeding media from a certain URL in a third party site. From the oEmbed site: oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. This means that if you for example find a nice photo on flickr, you can take the URL and easily turn it into embed-able data: Original URL:…
Processing.js: Port of the Processing language to JavaScript and Canvas

Dion Almaer

8 May 2008 | 10:54 pm

John Resig has completed 7 months of work to produce a port of Processing, the "programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities", which aims to teach the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks. One of the stated aims of Processing is to act as a tool to get non-programmers started with programming, through the instant gratification of visual feedback." Processing.js uses Canvas and obviously JavaScript to get the job down in the browser. John…
Ajax Pioneer Week: Alex Russell of Dojo

Dion Almaer

8 May 2008 | 9:51 am

Last, but never least, is Alex Russell of the Dojo Toolkit and SitePen. In Alex's five minutes of video footage for our JavaOne talk, he explained how Dojo enables you to built fantastic, responsive applications for everyone. The everyone piece revolves around accessibility too, which is core to Dojo thanks to work from Becky Gibson and others on the team. The Dojo grid and charting packages are very rich these days, and continue to get better. Alex also noted in a separate discussion how there are subtle advantages to the charting package such as being able to print the darn things out…
Growl for Windows and a Web Notification API

Dion Almaer

8 May 2008 | 9:38 am

I have talked before about the desire for a Notification API on the Web. As a Mac user, I would love to see Growl from JavaScript, and there have been libraries written from as far back as protoGrowl. The difference is between a JavaScript API that does notifications on the desktop, versus trying to get little custom notifications inside the browser window itself. I am talking about the former. Brian Dunnington has developed Growl for Windows, and with his latest version, he allows you to talk to the system via JavaScript. You can check out the growl.js library. What was interesting was the…

PHP.net releases
PHP 5.2.6 released!

Webmaster

30 Apr 2008 | 10:00 pm
PHP 4.4.8 released!

Webmaster

2 Jan 2008 | 10:00 pm

PHP.net news & announcements
PHP 5.2.6 Released

Webmaster

1 May 2008 | 4:27 pm

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediateavailability of PHP 5.2.6. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.6: Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin. Fixed integer…
Google Summer of Code: php.net students

Webmaster

22 Apr 2008 | 11:04 am

The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Ten students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer: Zend LLVM Extension by Joonas Govenius, mentored by Nuno Lopes PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans PhD (PHP Docbook) Project by Rudy Nappée, mentored by Hannes Magnusson Replace auto* with CMake by Alejandro Leiva Rojas, mentored by Pierre A. Joye gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier Rewrite the run-tests.php script by Cesar Montedonico, mentored by Travis Swicegood PHP Bindings for…
Call for speakers for Forum PHP Paris 2008

Webmaster

13 Apr 2008 | 9:56 pm
PHP DC conference 2008

Webmaster

13 Apr 2008 | 10:00 am

The DC PHP Developers Group recently announced Kshemendra Paul as a featured keynote speaker at the DC PHP Conference & Expo, June 2-4, 2008, at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Paul, chief architect for the Office of Management and Budget Executive Office of the President, will be presenting on "Federal E-Government and Enterprise Architecture Updates." Join hundreds of PHP practitioners, business managers, and government officials from around the world in the exchange of ideas and solutions for building a better web application infrastructure. The DC PHP…
TestFest 2008

Webmaster

30 Mar 2008 | 1:06 pm

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors. All it takes is someone…

Switch On The Code
C# Snippet Tutorial - Dictionary Collections

The Hairiest

8 May 2008 | 12:41 pm

So, we have all used arrays, and even sometimes a nice HashTable to get things sorted and organized. There are so many uses for an array, and even more for a nice HashTable. But, have you ever noticed that a HashTable is all objects? The Key in each Key/Value Pair is an Object, along with the value itself. But what happens if you don't need something so generic as an object? Well, you can get really specific and really crazy with a collection called Dictionary.
Visual Studio - How To Create Item Templates

The Tallest

7 May 2008 | 6:03 am

Visual Studio actually has a very powerful wizard and template system, which when used correctly, can automate large amounts of tedious work. Today we are going to take a look at how to create Item Templates for Visual Studio, which is actually extremely simple to do.
C# Snippet Tutorial - Custom List Sorting

The Reddest

6 May 2008 | 5:39 am

The List is one of my favorite additions to the .NET framework. It has built-in mechanisms to perform efficient sorting and searching. In this snippet tutorial, I'm going to demonstrate how to customize the sorting routines used by the List class.
C# Snippet Tutorial - Modify a Cell’s Selected Text

The Reddest

2 May 2008 | 5:25 am

In this short tutorial, I'm going to show you how to change the text selection in a DataGridViewCell. There's lots of reasons why someone would want to do this, like if someone enters something incorrectly, maybe you want to select all the text so they can enter something else.
Building Flex Degrafa Tic Tac Toe - Part 1

The Fattest

1 May 2008 | 9:55 am

This is the first of a several part tutorial that is going to explain how the Tic Tac Toe application was built using Flex and Degrafa. If you haven't checked out the introduction to the game we are going to build check out the Introduction to Tic Tac Toe using Degrafa and Flex. In this first part I am going to go over how to do some basic drawing using Degrafa and creating the game grid.

MSDN: U.S. Local Highlights
The Newest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report

9 May 2008 | 10:55 pm

The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) provides an in-depth perspective on the changing threat landscape, including software vulnerability disclosures and exploits, malicious software (malware), and potentially unwanted software.
.NET Framework 3.5 Download Now Available

9 May 2008 | 10:55 pm

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 contains many new features building incrementally upon .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0, and includes .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1.
Check Out What's New in Visual C# 3.0

9 May 2008 | 10:55 pm

This lab walks you through the new features of C# 3.0: auto-implemented properties, implicitly typed local variables, implicitly typed arrays, extension methods and more.
Stay Sharp on SQL Server 2008 and Stay Ahead

9 May 2008 | 10:55 pm

After completing this lab, you will be able to launch the Report Designer preview, create a data source and a data set, design a new report using the Report Designer of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, and more.
Windows Vista Link of the Day - Podcast

9 May 2008 | 10:55 pm

Listen to a podcast that showcases how Microsoft IT deployed Windows Vista wireless group policy.

37signals Product Blog
PC Magazine and Declutter It agree: Fight clutter with Backpack

37signals

9 May 2008 | 7:47 am

In 12 Tech Tools to Clear Your Clutter, PC Magazine offers up ways to tidy up your tech life. The piece recommends getting started with Backpack. Wouldn't it be great to get those pictures off your digital camera already? Scan that stack of business cards and get them into Outlook? Transfer videotapes and camcorder footage onto DVD so you can actually watch your home movies? Arm yourself with a smartphone and take your e-mail, calendar, and contacts on the go?...Here are our picks for the best stuff to get you organized—and maybe even help you stay that way: Getting Started A good way to…
Revixio, creators of CorePage, inspired and informed by Getting Real

37signals

8 May 2008 | 6:50 am

CorePage is "an instant link page system." Its About page gives a hat tip to Getting Real: We'd like to acknowledge the inspiration and information we received from a great web application development company called 37signals. Many of us at Revixio have used their products for years and are unabashedly huge fans. We also read and recommend their book, "Getting Real" and adopted their iterative development process in the creation of CorePage. We built CorePage using Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework that they pioneered. Finally, thanks to their CEO, Jason Fried, for his advice and…
Getting the most out of Backpack as a GTD ("Getting Things Done") solution

37signals

7 May 2008 | 6:56 am

Brett Kelly, a programmer from Southern California, writes The Cranking Widgets Blog, a personal productivity blog that focuses on David Allen's Getting Things Done. He recently published a post about why he loves Getting Things Done with Backpack. So, what does Backpack bring to the table that makes me so giddy? Well, several things, actually… Polish - Seriously, Backpack looks and acts just like you want it to. One of the driving concepts in the development process at 37signals is that you only include the features that you think most people will need. Obviously, there are tons of…
CEO suggests using Basecamp to encourage accountability and participation

37signals

6 May 2008 | 6:52 am

Small Business Trends is a publication for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Zane Safrit, former CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, just published an article there called Time-Generating Resources for CEOs. Today’s competitive pressures force CEOs to squeeze the most out of shorter and shorter time segments, those brief-fleeting moments in-between interruptions... want to share with you the resources I found over those 7 years that gave me greater amounts of uninterrupted time. He leads with Basecamp as his first suggestion. BASECAMP. It’s a wiki product offered and hosted by…
30 sleeps creator: "Getting Real has played an integral role in my pursuit of happiness"

37signals

5 May 2008 | 6:53 am

Brad Bollenbach is applying the Getting Real approach to life hacking with his site 30sleeps.com. It's a site for people who want to change their lives, with the idea being that it's a lot easier to make changes if you take them one month at a time. Brad wrote to tell us more about how Getting Real has influenced him. As an entrepreneur, writer, UI designer, and software developer, your philosophy of "Getting Real" is the motive power that's brought my business ideas to life. It's helped me make lightweight a lifestyle, and driven me to Get Shit Done (TM).

Oracle Technology Network Headlines
Download Oracle SQL Developer 1.5

9 May 2008 | 3:54 pm

This new production release provides a multitude of new features, including support for integrated version control systems, CVS, and Subversion.
Download Oracle JDeveloper 11g Technology Preview 4

2 May 2008 | 9:41 am

This Technology Preview release includes a full development environment for Java EE 5 as well as new features for AJAX developers, including new ADF Faces Rich Client components.
The Oracle Fusion Developer's Guide to JavaOne 2008

28 Apr 2008 | 12:25 pm

Chat up JavaOne Rock Star Cameron Purdy and SOA guru Dave Chappell; see the Thomas Kurian keynote (and Oracle-led sessions on JPA, RIA, and more); and get free passes to a special showing of "Iron Man" - just for starters!
Creating Oracle Coherence Caches in Oracle JDeveloper

28 Apr 2008 | 12:24 pm

Learn how to create and configure an Oracle Coherence cache in Oracle JDeveloper, step by step.
Technical Article: Authorizing Access to Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Data

18 Apr 2008 | 2:41 pm

Authorizing access to individual data objects based on spatial and temporal references is a complex task. Read this case study to learn one feasible approach.

Signal vs. Noise
How to make a music video

Sarah

10 May 2008 | 6:23 pm
[Sunspots] The small steps edition

37signals

9 May 2008 | 7:44 am

Innovation requires a fascination with wonder “Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain. If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.” Larger design businesses don’t allow good design to happen “The problem is that the structures of most larger design businesses cannot effectively facilitate the transmittal…
Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details

Matt

8 May 2008 | 6:47 am

More ammunition for why you should fire the workaholics: They don’t actually get more done. Q: Do workaholics accomplish more than people who work fewer hours? A: Often, they don’t. That is because, as perfectionists, they may become so fixated on inconsequential details that they find it hard to move on to the next task, [Psychiatrist Bryan] Robinson said. As Gayle Porter [a professor who has studied workaholism] put it: “They’re not looking for ways to be more efficient; they’re just looking for ways to always have more work to do.” Good advice for anyone…
Help save the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Park Inn Hotel in Mason City Iowa

Jason

6 May 2008 | 5:57 pm

The Park Inn Hotel (and attached City National Bank building) in Mason City Iowa is the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world. It’s in desperate need of financial support to save the building. On March 12, Wright on the Park (WOTP) received a Vision Iowa grant of $7,500,000 from the Iowa Department of Economic Development for the continuation of the rehabilitation of both building segments. Along with the Vision Iowa grant, the sale of Historic Preservation Tax Credits is expected to yield another 67% of the total funding. For the first time, Mason City residents…
[Screens Around Town] Facebook, MyPunchBowl, Nashbar, Quest Diagnostics, and Bearskinrug

Matt

6 May 2008 | 9:54 am

Facebook Sean Iams writes: Very cool feature on Facebook: When you’re typing a message, and you happen to include a valid link (i.e. http://www.37signals.com) in the body, Facebook automatically looks up the site and pulls back a description and a list of images that help explain the site. You then have the option to send the message with the image + description as an attachment or send the message without any attachment. It drastically clarifies the message with no additional effort whatsoever. Quick, simple, and easy :) MyPunchBowl Matt Douglas at MyPunchBowl writes: Thought you would…

MapQuest Developer Blog
Where is MapQuest

Josh Babetski

9 May 2008 | 3:45 am

Continuing our string of weekly trade show announcements, we'd like to let you know that MapQuest is a Platinum Sponsor of and will be attending the annual Where 2.0 Conference being held next week in Burlingame, CA from May 12th to the 14th. (For those of you not familiar with the Valley, the show is right outside the San Francisco Airport.) If you're attending the show, stop by and tell us what you're working on and how MapQuest can help. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs
Map It! - Building a MapQuest Mac OS X Dashboard Widget - Part 7 - Address Book Integration

John Fronckowiak

8 May 2008 | 2:08 am

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. - Carson McCullers In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Advantage API by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. Part 5 discussed adding widget options including the default zoom level,…
Zoom Levels and Image Overlays

Joel Tulloch

6 May 2008 | 4:38 am

In this post I will continue my discussion of overlays in the MapQuest JavaScript API 5.2. My last two posts covered a couple of methods for adding rollover functionality to overlays. Over the next couple of posts I will discuss some of the options that are available when working with image overlays. There are a few things that set image overlays apart from the other overlay types. The one that poses the biggest obstacle is image resolution. Since an image overlay is "pinned" to a map with Lat and Lng coordinates, there is a significant difference in resolution required to display an image…
Meet Us at JavaOne

Josh Babetski

2 May 2008 | 3:25 am

MapQuest will be in attendance at JavaOne being held next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. You can visit us in the Pavilion at booth #1124; a number of the MapQuest Developers will also be running around and attending sessions. Feel free to stop and talk with us. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs
Map It! - Building a MapQuest Mac OS X Dashboard Widget - Part 6 - Directions

John Fronckowiak

1 May 2008 | 2:26 am

Stand in the place where you live, Now face North, Think about direction, Wonder why you haven't before - REM In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Advantage API by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. Part 5 discussed adding widget options including the default zoom level, specifying point of interest icons, and…

A List Apart
Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow

30 Apr 2008 | 4:21 am

Q. What technology do you need to build the next Flickr? A. Trick question. What you need to build the next Flickr is people. George Oates, a key member of the core team that shaped the Flickr community, shares lessons that can help you grow yours. Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!
Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?

29 Apr 2008 | 4:55 am

Just because a design convention exists doesn't mean it works. Our field runneth over with design patterns, but is low on evidence of their utility. Jessica Enders drops some science on the widespread belief that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along a table row. Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

CFLEX
Best Practices: Cooking CRUD with Flex and BlazeDS

28 Apr 2008 | 10:34 am

Using the code generator Clear Data Builder
Creating a Multi User Flex Application Using JMS

22 Feb 2008 | 11:53 am

Leverage the Java Messaging System
Progressively Downloaded Video Player

19 Feb 2008 | 4:13 pm

Useful when a streaming media server is unavailable
Create XML From String

19 Feb 2008 | 4:05 pm

Useful in merging XML with PDF
Working with Querystrings

19 Feb 2008 | 3:50 pm

Using url embedded querystrings to leverage in your application

CFlex Aggregation of Macromedia Flex in the News
New PyAMF Release Improves Support for Google App Engine

10 May 2008 | 5:00 pm

PyAMF 0.3.1 was released this week, just in time to meet the increased interest on Python and RIA generated by the recent preview release of Google App Engine and the announcement of Adobe's Open Screen Project.
Product review: Adobe Flex Builder speeds RIA development

27 Apr 2008 | 5:00 pm

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/24/17TC-adobe-flex-builder_1.html
JackBe Offers Second Generation of Enterprise Mashup Platform

27 Apr 2008 | 5:00 pm

JackBe, a provider of enterprise mashup software, announced from the Web 2.0 Expo, the availability of the second generation of its enterprise mashup platform. Presto 2.0 brings enterprise mashups to the business user through enterprise-ready mashup widgets known as Mashlets . The major advancements in Presto 2.0 also include mashup connectivity for a wide range of enterprise products including Microsoft Excel, HP SOA Systinet, Adobe Flash/Flex, ExtJS, Java, Web 2.0 portals such as Netvibes and Pageflakes and all major corporate portals including Oracle, BEA, IBM and JBoss. Created in three…
Albumprinter launches Albelli software for Photobucket users

24 Apr 2008 | 5:00 pm

Albumprinter launches Albelli software for Photobucket users Computer Business Review - UK Developed using the Adobe Flex 3, an open source Flex framework that facilitates the development of rich internet applications, the software is deployed on ... See all stories on this topic
The Test Center guide to rich Web app dev tools

22 Apr 2008 | 5:00 pm

Rich Internet applications, or RIAs, comprise a spectrum of application types and technologies. The lightweight end of the spectrum has seen most of the attention in recent months, with Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's AIR (Application Integrated Runtime) getting attention as the new kids in town. But AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is still where most of the lightweight action resides. And despite the recent focus on lightweight app dev, significant developer focus remains on the heavyweight tools in the Microsoft .Net and Sun Java worlds.

Google Testing Blog
TotT: Testable Contracts Make Exceptional Neighbors

dastels

1 May 2008 | 10:06 am

Consider the following function, which modifies a client-supplied object:bool SomeCollection::GetObjects(vector* objects) const { objects->clear(); typedef vector::const_iterator Iterator; for (Iterator i = collection_.begin(); i != collection_.end(); ++i) { if ((*i)->IsFubarred()) return false; objects->push_back(*i); } return true;Consider when GetObjects() is called. What if the caller doesn't…
GTAC: Call for Proposals

Patrick Copeland

29 Apr 2008 | 3:51 pm

Posted by Lydia Ash - GTAC Conference ChairOverviewThe Test Automation Conference has been hosted by Google over the past several years bringing together a select set of industry practitioners as speakers and participants around the topic of software testing and automation. The annual conference provides a forum for presentations on important topics in our field connecting professions with others in their field through collaboration and targeted breakout sessions, but also has served the testing community by bringing the presentations public allowing anyone access to the information.GTAC…
GTAC 2008 in Seattle

Patrick Copeland

19 Apr 2008 | 9:36 am

Before the end of our last Google Test Automation Conference in August 2007, we were already getting questions from participants and blog readers wondering about the next conference. Now we can tell you when and where that will happen (drum roll please)... the 2008 Test Automation Conference will be held October 23 and 24 in Seattle. More details will be coming shortly...As with previous years, the focus of the conference will be solving software engineering challenges using tools and automation, with special focus on SaaS. Engineers in the testing world are frequently so busy shipping…
TotT: Avoiding Flakey Tests

dastels

17 Apr 2008 | 9:05 am

Flaky tests make your life more difficult. You get failure notifications that aren't helpful. You might become numb to failures and miss an actual failure condition. Your changes might get unfairly blamed for causing a flaky test to fail. Unfortunately, a myriad of factors can make a test flaky. Today, we tackle a simple example: file access from a unit test. Take this function and its test:def CreateGapLease(self): data_file = open('/leases/gap', 'w+') data_file.write(contract_data) data_file.close()def…
TotT: Time is Random

dastels

3 Apr 2008 | 10:56 pm

How can a method be well tested when it's inputs can't be clearly identified? Consider this method in Java:/** Return a date object representing the start of the next minute from now */public Date nextMinuteFromNow() { long nowAsMillis = System.currentTimeMillis(); Date then = new Date(nowAsMillis + 60000); then.setSeconds(0); then.setMilliseconds(0); return then;There are two barriers to effectively testing this method:There is no easy way to test corner cases; you're at the mercy of the system clock to supply input conditions.When…

Ted On Flex
8.1 Megapixel Camera for $160

Ted Patrick

10 May 2008 | 9:25 am

It seems amazing to me that camera prices have fallen so rapidly yet the cameras are capable of so much more. I am headed on vacation this week and decided to get a new point and shoot camera. Shockingly the same Panasonic Lumix camera I paid for 2 years ago costs 70% less and actually has more features. In the small I got an inexpensive 8MegaPixel camera but in the large I am wondering about the overall market effect of commodity low cost high capacity digital devices. I think we are seeing the arrival of the real digital era where everyone is transferring high quality images using very low…
Next Dreamweaver - A killer app for HTML/JS/AJAX

Ted Patrick

8 May 2008 | 1:44 pm

Every once in a while I peek over the fence to see what the HTML/JS camps at Adobe are working on and was I in for a suprise. I really believe that the next Dreamweaver release is a killer app for HTML/JS/AJAX design and development. It is rare for me to label something a killer app but I have never seen first class tooling for html/js like this before.The team has made several key product decisions, embedding Webkit, that have resulted in some amazing features and workflow for building web pages (dare I call them that anymore). I visited with Scott Fegette and he briefed me on what they were…
Verizon on Flex 3

Ted Patrick

6 May 2008 | 4:41 pm

Verizon just released a new Flex 3 application for selling ringtones and ringbacks. The site is excellent and the use of transitions and dynamic data is visually stunning. It is one of the best Flex apps I have seen in a while. It also is also one of the first full ecommerce experiences in Flex that I have seen. You can search, preview, and buy any ringtone or ringback on Verison online. Way cool!VERIZON MEDIA STORECheers,Ted :)
Flex 4 - Enhanced States

Ted Patrick

6 May 2008 | 7:21 am

The Wiki over at opensource.adobe.com is in full swing and recently the States enhancements were posted here I really like the changes as states were so complex to think about and edit without the design view. The new inline States allow you to declare state changes within components using a simple syntax and some new attributes. Before you had to define all the delta values externally within a state tag and this was very hard to edit by hand. Here are a few examples:Inline States Syntax ( Note use of "includeIn" and "excludeFrom" ):<m:states>…
Feed Me - Feeds.adobe.com Launches

Ted Patrick

5 May 2008 | 8:42 pm

Thank God, the new feeds.adobe.com is up!! It was like someone had turned off the air. Special thanks to the team that put in a ton of work on getting feeds.adobe.com. I know Christian Cantrell, Mike Chambers, Ben Forta, Jonathan Wall, and many others worked hard to make this happen. Also the time frame for this massive architecture change is really impressive. To go from a single server to 7 inside of 2 weeks time is really amazing. Here is the new architecture:1 - Load Balancer5 - Apache + CF8 Clustered1 - Database Server MYSQL1 - Feed Aggregation Server (reads all RSS and populates…

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen
The Weekly Source Code 26 - LINQ to Regular Expressions and Processing in Javascript

Scott Hanselman

10 May 2008 | 12:57 am

I've been getting more and more interested in how folks extend their applications using plugins and things. In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer, Dear Reader, I present to you twenty-sixth (half a year!) in a infinite number of posts of "The Weekly Source Code." Sometimes when I read code, I kick myself (mentally) and say "Man, I should have thought of that!" Then I realize I'm not nearly as good a programmer as I think I am, and then I just let the source just wash over my brain. Here's some source by smart people I've been reading this…
TypeConverters: There's not enough TypeDescripter.GetConverter in the world

Scott Hanselman

9 May 2008 | 9:54 pm

While reading source today, I saw some code in the wild today that looked roughly like this (not the actual code): type = typeof(T);if (type == typeof(Boolean)){ returnValue = (T)((object)Convert.ToBoolean(value));}else if (type == typeof(String)){ returnValue = (T)((object)value);}else if (type == typeof(Int16)){ returnValue = (T)((object)Convert.ToInt16(value));}else if (type == typeof(Int32)){ returnValue = (T)((object)Convert.ToInt32(value));}//...and on and on for a dozen+ types You get the idea. This isn't that uncommon, I've seen it more of than not. The person who is writing it…
Introducing RockScroll

Scott Hanselman

9 May 2008 | 2:23 pm

When I came to Microsoft I saw a really cool tool being used internally and immediately wanted to work with the author, Rocky Downs (who is blogless, but exceeding talented), to get it released. Fast forward to now, plus an installer, and here it is. The basic (as in "only") idea is that RockScroll extends the scrollbar in Visual Studio to show a syntax highlighted thumbnail view of your source. This is really useful for those excessively long source code files you know you have. It's just one DLL and you can turn it off from Tools|AddIns just by un-checking the checkbox. Enjoy!
Hanselminutes Podcast 110 - Microsoft Research: Spec#

Scott Hanselman

8 May 2008 | 12:23 pm

My one-hundred-and-tenth podcast is up. This episode was recorded at the ALT.NET Open Spaces Conference in Seattle a few weeks back. I got to sit down with two gentlemen from Microsoft Research, Mike and Rustan, and talk about Spec# after their presentation at the conference. What's Spec#? Currently it's a new language that is essentially extensions to C# 2.0. For example: class ArrayList { public virtual void Insert(int index , object value)requires 0 <= index && index <= Count;requires !IsReadOnly && !IsFixedSize;{ . . . } See all that new stuff BEFORE the first curly…
RFC: OpenTweets - Why is Microblogging centralized?

Scott Hanselman

2 May 2008 | 11:20 pm

I'm thoroughly enjoying Twitter (follow me!) Apparently others are enjoying it also as there's a funny estimate that it's costing $14 billion in lost productivity (via a back of envelope calculation). There is about a million people on Twitter and maybe 60k adding each a month. Certainly it'll be blocked by most corporate firewalls soon for just this reason. Twitter is also down ALL the time and it's been having weekly (daily?) scale problems for a YEAR, culminating in rumors that the development team is leaving Ruby on Rails that have been denied by Evan Williams (via a "Tweet," of…

Reg Developer
Sick of JavaOne? - You will be

9 May 2008 | 5:19 pm

Suspected Norovirus stalks halls With Sun Microsystems banging on about Web 2.0 and mashups for days, anyone would be excused for feeling ready to hurl by day-three of its annual JavaOne conference.…
Microsoft appeals record European Commission fine

9 May 2008 | 12:30 pm

Once more unto the bench Microsoft is appealing a record European Commission fine for not complying with a milestone European Commission anti-trust ruling.…
Live Mesh: Hailstorm take 2?

9 May 2008 | 8:30 am

Give it a fair crack Keep an open mind, says Spolsky, in a rant about both unwanted mega-architectures, and the way big companies snaffle up all the best coders.…
Vista security credentials tarnished in malware survey

9 May 2008 | 5:14 am

Better off with a Win 2000 box Windows Vista is better at protecting against malware than XP but more easily infected than Windows 2000, according to a study by Australian anti-virus firm PC Tools.…
Sun Java chief to developers: 'We're genetic freaks'

9 May 2008 | 1:53 am

Time to change your definition of 'application' JavaOne Todd Fast, chief architect in Sun Microsystems' Java Enterprise tools group, took a big gulp of Web 2.0 Kool-Aid at JavaOne while telling professional developers they must embrace a broader definition of "application" if they are to take advantage of the current sea change in the way software is built and delivered.…

Flash Magazine
AS3 Photo gallery

Sorin Haidan

10 May 2008 | 1:15 pm

In this tutorial we will build a photo gallery. We will load the paths to the photos from an xml file and will use the Tweener class to add some nice transitions.
Scrolling photos loaded dynamically with ActionScript 3

Sorin Haidan

10 May 2008 | 12:09 pm

In this tutorial we will learn how to scroll some photos that we will load dynamically from an xml file and we will scroll the photos using a custom scrollbar.
Create the Earth and heavens in less than an hour with Away3D

Jens C Brynildsen

8 May 2008 | 5:41 am

3D is one of the many cool things made possible with Flash Player 9 and the super fast Virtual Machine. This tutorial will show you how to create a realistic looking interactive earth, complete with a sun and a starlit sky. Scared? Don't be - it's easy with Away3D!
Welcome back M/AXNA!

Jens C Brynildsen

5 May 2008 | 10:11 pm

MXNA is back online, but the last traces of Macromedia disappeared in the process
Open Screen Project - Adobe opens even more

Jens C Brynildsen

30 Apr 2008 | 8:58 pm

Today, Adobe skips all licensing fees for devices and opens up the SWF and FLV specs for anyone to create devices supporting Flash. According to Dave McAllister of Adobe, the goal is to create a consistent experience across all devices and they're not afraid this will cause player fragmentation.

Joel on Software
Architecture astronauts take over

30 Apr 2008 | 10:01 pm

It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control." What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away. I tried to coin a term for the kind…
Stack Overflow Podcast #2

22 Apr 2008 | 7:10 pm

The next podcast is up. Today we talked about why we're doing a podcast in the first place, took some questions/suggestions from listeners, and got into a fight over whether programmers should learn C. Guess which side I took. There are some improvements, already. First, there's an RSS feed, so you can subscribe and get each weekly podcast pushed to you. Here's how you would subscribe using Apple iTunes, for example: Run iTunes Choose Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast Paste in this URL: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/index.php?feed=podcast There is no step 4. Now, depending on your settings…
stackoverflow.com

16 Apr 2008 | 7:43 pm

What is stackoverflow.com? Nothing, yet. But here's the concept: Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can't figure something out, they type a question into Google. And sometimes, the first result looks like it's going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it's a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you…
First Joel on Software conference

14 Apr 2008 | 9:14 am

Registration is now open for Business of Software 2008 (the first ever Joel on Software conference). Neil has lined up great speakers: Seth Godin, Business Week's "Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age", is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time. Eric Sink, founder of SourceGear, author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" and the person who coined the term "Micro ISV" Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year's Software Idol competition Richard Stallman launched the…
Fire and motion, small business edition

9 Apr 2008 | 1:24 pm

“If the flight attendants on the JAL 747 from Tokyo I'm on right now were to, in a remarkable lapse of Japanese standards of service, throw me off the plane with a parachute, I could do a pretty nice roll when I hit the ground.” From my Inc. Magazine column for April (subscribe here). And with that, I promise to stop telling shaggy dog stories about my days in the army. Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

blog.pmarca.com
In praise of dual-class stock structures for public companies

Marc Andreessen

6 May 2008 | 3:45 am

A dual-class stock structure means that a company has two different classes of common stock. Each class of stock has the same economic ownership of the company, yet different voting rights. In a typical scenario, Class A shares have a single vote per share, whereas Class B shares have 10 votes per share, for any shareholder vote. Using this mechanism, for example, the Class B shareholders might only own 20% of the company in economic terms but have a clear majority voting position relative to the Class A shareholders. In short, Class A shareholders have shares labeled with the earlier letter…
Examining Microsoft's and Yahoo's unspoken concerns

Marc Andreessen

2 May 2008 | 3:47 am

In this post, I discuss what I believe are some unspoken concerns that weigh on the decisions both Microsoft and Yahoo are making during this very exciting takeover battle. Quick status update, largely derived from the excellent Wall Street Journal and its role as official public go-between: Various forms of backchannel communication and price negotiation have been happening between the Microsoft and Yahoo teams this week -- including via the press. Microsoft and Yahoo still disagree on price -- Microsoft is at about $33/share and Yahoo is holding out for about $36/share, maybe more -- and…
Don't fool yourself -- they're coming for us

Marc Andreessen

29 Apr 2008 | 1:27 am

[Link: Watch a robot reassemble itself without human help.]
If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo

Marc Andreessen

28 Apr 2008 | 1:12 am

[Revision 1.1; see change log at the end of the post.] We have seen extensive press coverage of Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo over the last few months, including notably excellent coverage from Silicon Alley Insider and the Wall Street Journal. However, I have not seen a detailed analysis of how a full hostile takeover might play out -- the kind of analysis that you would be receiving if you were a Microsoft or Yahoo board member. So I asked a pair of expert corporate attorneys -- Michael Sullivan and Ed Deibert at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk and Rabkin in San Francisco -- to work up…
Charlie Rose interviews a special guest

Marc Andreessen

21 Apr 2008 | 1:56 pm

For those of us who are fans of Charlie... [Link: Charlie Rose interviews Charlie Rose.] [Hat tip: Very Short List.]

Jon Udell
That word, syndication, I do not think it means what you think it means

Jon Udell

8 May 2008 | 6:04 am

Something about the title of this week’s Perspectives interview, OpenSearch federation with Search Server 2008, has been nagging me ever since I wrote it. In the interview, Richard Riley and Keller Smith describe how the new Microsoft search server can extend its reach by sending queries to other search services that can return results as OpenSearch-compliant RSS or Atom feeds. We call this activity federation, but the enabling technology is syndication. So is the group of participating servers a federation, or is it a syndicate? Some definitions of federation, from 1 dictionary.com and…
Calendar software is natural for reading, but not for writing

Jon Udell

5 May 2008 | 7:23 am

In response to a popular recent item — “We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?” — Sarah Allen echoes my favorite Sergey Brin quote. Sergey said: “I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand.” Sarah, citing weblog software as an example of software that enables people to write naturally, goes on to say: Likewise, it is natural to record calendar information overlaid on a timeline with day, week, and month views that mimic traditional paper…
A conversation with Janis Dickinson about citizen science

Jon Udell

5 May 2008 | 6:40 am

On this week’s Interviews with Innovators I spoke with Janis Dickinson, director of citizen science at the Cornell Ornithology Lab. We talked about several of the lab’s projects that involve collection and analysis of volunteer observations about birds and bird habitats. Courtesy of the eBird project, for example, here is a view of first sightings of common bird species in New Hampshire. At first glance it might be tempting to see the preponderance of dates in the current decade as an effect of global warming. But to support that interpretation, you’d have to answer a bunch…
Stonewall Farm, Darby Brook Farm, and the collaborative curation of data

Jon Udell

2 May 2008 | 11:07 am

Lately I’m obsessed with figuring out how to harness the cognitive surplus and put it to work doing better social information management. The other night I attended a kick-off meeting for a group interested in advancing the cause of local food production in our region. Inevitably the discussion turned to questions that require data to answer. Who are the local producers? Where are they? What do they produce? In the ensuing discussion, various sources of data emerged. There’s a USDA website, a state government website, a special-interest website, this or that blog. Two things were…
Negotiating shared responsibility for community information

Jon Udell

28 Apr 2008 | 9:02 am

This week’s Interviews with Innovators show is a conversation with Raymond Yee, author of the recently-published Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. The book is chock full of good examples. Even if you’re an experienced developer of mashups that involve Flickr, del.icio.us, Eventful, and the various mapping services, you’ll learn helpful strategies for using these services individually and in combination. What we wound up mostly talking about, though, is the vast space of information that’s not currently available to be mashed up. That might be because the information isn’t…

Craig Campbell's School of Flash
Flash CS3 Tutorial - Movie Clip Buttons

Craig

9 May 2008 | 9:12 pm

Many Flash beginners stick with using button symbols when creating navigation links for their Flash websites. And why not! That’s what button symbols are made for, right? Well, you can also create buttons using movie clip symbols. Movie clip buttons are basically buttons on steroids. With movie clip buttons, you have much more control over how your button behaves. For example, when you’re dealing with your button symbol’s timeline, there’s only so much you can do on the button’s “over” state. If you want, you can stick a movie clip symbol within your…
Homestar Runner

Craig

7 May 2008 | 12:11 pm

From time to time, I like to showcase Flash work that other people are doing, and it would be impossible to do so without at some point mentioning Homestar Runner. If you’ve never heard of Homestar Runner, then you’re really missing out. Creators Matt and Mike Chapman have built a small empire on a few crudely animated–and insanely hilarious–characters. Don’t get me wrong when I say “crudely animated.” The Brothers Chapman have developed a style that works for them and that allows them to dish out a cartoon every week (most of the time), and…
Flash CS3 Tutorial - ActionScript 3 Preloader

Craig

28 Apr 2008 | 9:17 pm

There is very little that will push users away quicker than a bulky Flash website with no preloader. Without a preloader, your users will have nothing to look at but a blank screen until your Flash file has fully loaded. For users with a speedy broadband connection, this may not be much of an issue (depending on the size of your file), but for people with sluggish connections, it’s imperative that you give them some kind of indication that everything is loading properly. 1. Create your preloader bar. For this example, I’ll be drawing a basic rectangular bar that will expand within…
Flash CS3 Tutorial - Volume Toggle Switch

Craig

22 Apr 2008 | 4:28 pm

Today’s tutorial is Part 4 of a series of tutorials on creating a music player using Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3. The previous tutorials can be found here: Using Sound in ActionScript 3.0 Creating a Volume Slider Creating a Pause Button If you haven’t read these tutorials yet, then I strongly urge you to check them out. The Flash file we’ll be starting with can be found at the bottom of the Pause Button tutorial. 1. Open up pause.fla and take a look at the ActionScript. This file contains all the ActionScript we’ve worked on to date. If there are parts of this…
ActionScript 3 Tutorial - What Happened to getURL?

Craig

17 Apr 2008 | 9:55 pm

For those of you who are new to ActionScript 3, you might be wondering what happened to the getURL() function. It used to be so easy to create outbound links in Flash with just a single line of code inside the onRelease event for your buttons. Which brings up another question…what happened to the onRelease event? If you wanted to create a link to another website in ActionScript 2, here’s what it would have looked like: Ah, if only it were still so simple! First of all, the way we handle events in AS3 is a little different. We’re still attaching functions to event handlers,…

IBM developerWorks
The future of PHP

Discover PHP's new features and syntax improvements and see how they will take this already-popular scripting language to the next level. Learn how Unicode support, Web 2.0 features, and other changes make PHP V6 more robust, as well as more international.
Easily migrate WebSphere Application Server Community Edition applications to WebSphere Application Server

Alleviate much of the manual work required to migrate simple J2EE applications from WebSphere Application Server Community Edition to WebSphere Application Server using the new WebSphere Application Server Migration Assistant. This migration tool, available from alphaWorks, helps make the transition as easy as possible.
Using XQuery and VoiceXML: Create a dynamic VoiceXML application

Employ XQuery with XML documents to build complex and dynamic systems that take input and information from a VoiceXML environment and combine them with existing XML documents to produce interactive applications.
Debug and tune applications on the fly with Firebug

Speed up the tasks of debugging and tuning your Web and Ajax applications using Firebug, a free, open source extension for the Firefox browser. Use Firebug to monitor, edit, and debug live pages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript code, and tune network traffic.
Java theory and practice: Getting wild with generics

Close Explore how veteran Java developer Brian Goetz deciphers some of the weirder-looking error messages emitted by javac, and learn his tricks and workarounds to simplify using generics.

BASH Cures Cancer
Processing XML on the Command Line

Brock Noland

24 Apr 2008 | 9:08 pm

The other day on the cURL email list, someone asked: Could someone please tell me (preferably with an example) of how I could parse and xml like the following: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?> <FileRetriever> <FileList> <File name=”AMERI08.D4860.ZIP” /> <File name=”DTCCRSF.D4861.ZIP” /> <File name=”DTGSS01.D4862.ZIP” /> <File name=”DTGSS02.D4863.ZIP” /> <File name=”DTGSS03.D4864.ZIP” / </FileList> </FileRetriever> This is not appropriate for…
Do not close stderr

Brock Noland

22 Apr 2008 | 9:25 pm

A few years ago, I wrote a post commenting on how ugly this was: $ someprog 2>/dev/null I was nearly imploring the reader to close stderr: $ someprog 2>&- Some very knowledgeable anonymous commenter explained why that was a bad idea. At the time, I didn’t understand exactly what they were saying. As such, I deleted the post. Yesterday, for no particular reason, the implications of closing stderr popped into my head. In the shower no less. I wrote a simple little C program named do-not-close-stderr.c. It takes two parameters, a string you want written to a file and the file you…
prepend to a file with sponge from moreutils

Brock Noland

17 Apr 2008 | 12:37 pm

A few weeks I wrote about a tool, which helps you easily prepend to a file. I submitted prepend to moreutils and Joey was kind enough to point out this could be done with `sponge’. sponge reads standard input and when done, writes it to a file: Probably the most general purpose tool in moreutils so far is sponge(1), which lets you do things like this: % sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd Two days ago Joey released version 0.29 of moreutils including a patch by yours truly (with much help from Joey). sponge: Handle large data sizes by using a temp file…
Bug in Curl is fixed

Brock Noland

14 Apr 2008 | 10:11 am

I love curl. I use it quite often to perform HTTP HEAD requests: $ curl -I http://bashcurescancer.com HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:11:35 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) X-Pingback: http://bashcurescancer.com/wordpress/xmlrpc.php Last-Modified: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:38:11 GMT Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 However, I sometimes forget if a HEAD request is -I or -i, as such I usually specify them both. Lowercase i is “include headers in output” and uppercase I tells curl to use HEAD instead of GET. When you use -I, -i is implied. Given all this,…
using kill to see if a process is alive

Brock Noland

9 Apr 2008 | 9:43 pm

I am making some changes to the moreutils sponge command. Sponge provides a method of prepending which is less specialized than my prepend util. However, it has trouble with large amounts of input. Regardless, while testing my changes, I want to watch it operate. Normally, you would just do so from a second terminal. That is a pain. kill -0 can be very useful for this. After backgrounding the command, I assign the pid (via the variable $!) to $pid using eval. eval is needed to stop BASH from expanding $! until after the background operation. After that, I enter a while loop on kill -0 $pid,…

ScottGu's Blog
Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time)

ScottGu

6 May 2008 | 1:38 am

One of the things I like to track are book sales on Amazon.com, which provides a useful data point to monitor what developers are interested in on any given day. I use the www.TitleZ.com site (which is built using ASP.NET) to track specific titles I want to watch - it then generates a report showing real-time Amazon sales ranking data, as well as 7 day, 30 day and 90 day sales ranking averages. This morning I pulled up my report and saw the usual books near the top of my list, and was about to navigate away when I noticed the eye-popping amazon ranking of the top book…
April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight

ScottGu

28 Apr 2008 | 10:35 pm

Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support. In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update: The ASP.NET team last week released an update of…
Slides from my ASP.NET Connections Orlando Talks

ScottGu

27 Apr 2008 | 9:51 pm

Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below: General Session The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here. In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here. I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here. I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework…
ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview

ScottGu

16 Apr 2008 | 9:56 pm

We recently opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex Project that we will be using to provide previews (with buildable source code) for several upcoming ASP.NET features and releases. Last month we used it to publish the first drop of the ASP.NET MVC source code. This first drop included the source for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release that we shipped at MIX, along with Visual Studio project files to enable you to patch and build it yourself. A few hours ago we published a refresh of the ASP.NET MVC source code on the site. This source refresh is not an official new ASP.NET MVC preview…
April 11th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight

ScottGu

11 Apr 2008 | 12:04 am

Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET More ASP.NET Security Tutorials: The last three of Scott Mitchell's excellent ASP.NET security tutorials. His final three articles cover how to select user accounts, recover and change passwords, and unlock and approve user accounts. Building a VS 2008 Styled Grid with the ListView and DataPager Controls: Matt Berseth has a great article that talks about techniques you can use with…

Stevey's Blog Rants
XEmacs is Dead. Long Live XEmacs!

Steve Yegge

28 Apr 2008 | 4:01 am

"We're going to get lynched, aren't we?" — Phouchg And you thought I'd given up on controversial blogs. Hah! Preamble This must be said: Jamie Zawinski is a hero. A living legend. A major powerhouse programmer who, among his many other accomplishments, wrote the original Netscape Navigator and the original XEmacs. A guy who can use the term "downward funargs" and then glare at you just
Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate

Steve Yegge

24 Apr 2008 | 5:59 pm

I recently switched to using OS X full-time for all my client-side computing. Still using Linux on the backends, of course, at home and at work, but I now use Macs for my client machines. I'm not a Mac fanboy. I'm sort of a wannabe Mac fanboy, but I'm not familiar enough with the OS yet (either as a user or as a programmer) to really rave about it. I will say this: it was kinda fun turning
js2-mode: a new JavaScript mode for Emacs

Steve Yegge

30 Mar 2008 | 8:51 pm

I've written a new JavaScript editing mode for GNU Emacs, and released it on code.google.com. This is part of a larger project, in progress, to permit writing Emacs extensions in JavaScript instead of Emacs-Lisp. Lest ye judge: hey, some people swing that way. The larger project is well underway, but probably won't be out until late summer or early fall. My new editing mode is called js2-
Four console games you might like...

Steve Yegge

16 Mar 2008 | 8:42 pm

I only play a handful of games a year, so I haven't written a game review since my post on Oblivion a year ago. But since then I've played a few unusually good games, including one awesome PS/3 title last weekend, so I figured it's time for another review. First, here's my gamer profile, so you can decide now whether reading any further is worth your time. I'm a console guy. I don't play
Get that job at Google

Steve Yegge

12 Mar 2008 | 6:16 pm

I've been meaning to write up some tips on interviewing at Google for a good long time now. I keep putting it off, though, because it's going to make you mad. Probably. For some statistical definition of "you", it's very likely to upset you. Why? Because... well, here, I wrote a little ditty about it: Hey man, I don't know that stuff Stevey's talking aboooooout If my boss thinks it's

Planet Catalyst
Five a day, May 10

Brian

10 May 2008 | 7:31 am

My latest five: RT #33158 - rejected (DBIx::Class) RT #25445 - already applied (DBIx::Class) RT #26978 - closed (DBIx::Class) RT #31473 - closed (DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader) RT #29041 - fixed this last year (Catalyst::Plugin::Session::PerUser) Read and post comments | Send to a friend
Five a day, part 3

Brian

9 May 2008 | 7:53 am

I ventured into some DBIC related bugs this time. RT #32497 - rejected (Catalyst::Model::DBIC::Schema) RT #31848 - doc fixed (Catalyst::Model::DBIC::Schema) RT #29282 - duplicate (DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader) RT #23749 - already patched this last... Read and post comments | Send to a friend
(Five a day) x 2

Brian

8 May 2008 | 2:18 pm

I ended up doing twice my quota for today (it's easy to take care of the low-hanging fruit). A variety of Catalyst::* and DBIx::Class tickets were closed. RT #15941 - rejected (Catalyst::View::TT) RT #32254 - duplicate (Catalyst::Plugin::Authenti... Read and post comments | Send to a friend
Catalyst book code

Jonathan Rockway

23 Apr 2008 | 8:45 pm

For a while, people have been requesting runnable code for the apps in my book. It has actually been available for a while, but apparently doesn't show up in Google results. It's because there is book called "Catalyst Code" that obscures results for the logical catalyst book code queries. Amusing. Anyway, every application (in runnable form) is available here: http://jrock.us/Catalyst-Book-Code-20080131.tar.gz Enjoy. BTW, I really don't think you're going to learn anything if you just cut-n-paste from the code. The best way to use the book is to actually read the…
Rose::HTML::Form and DBIx::Class

zby

21 Apr 2008 | 6:14 am

Has anyone tried that combination?

Perl Buzz
Colons invalidate BEGIN and END blocks

Andy Lester

7 May 2008 | 10:35 pm

Take a look at this block of code and see if you can guess what it does. END: { print "Exiting...\n"; } print "s = $s\n"; BEGIN: { $s = 'Hello from the BEGIN phase'; } You'd expect that the BEGIN block sets $s at compile time, so then that gets printed in the print statement, and then the END block executes at the end of the program. Yes, it would, except that those aren't BEGIN & END blocks. They're normal blocks that just happen to be named BEGIN and END. Credit Randy Lauen for bringing this to my attention. Today at my day job he found a horrifying code construct, one that I'd been…
Perl must decentralize, diversify and colonize

Andy Lester

5 May 2008 | 11:00 pm

Perl's big problem is one of perception. The other day, a job candidate asked me "You're moving your web apps from PHP to Perl? Shouldn't it be the other way around?" Why did he think that? The candidate knew no Perl, and only a bit of PHP, so had no technical reason to believe that PHP was better than Perl. So why did he think Perl was subservient to PHP in the web arena? What I suspect is that Perl is just less visible, and not just in the sense of crap like the TIOBE index where it equates hits for "Foo programming" popularity of the Foo language. I'm talking about in the real way…
Big improvements in mini-CPAN tools

Andy Lester

5 May 2008 | 8:53 am

The minicpan tool in CPAN::Mini lets you keep a copy of the most recent revisions of each module on the CPAN. Having a mini-