Vinny Carpenter's blog

Daily del.icio.us for June 26th through July 5th

directjngine – A Java based implementation of the Ext Direct API – DirectJNgine is a Java based implementation of the Ext Direct API for ExtJs. DirectJNgine is feature complete, providing support for all kinds of requests: batched json requests, form posts with file uploads, requests from polling providers, etc.
Strongly Typed, Loosely Coupled: Java vs. Scala vs. Groovy – Performance Update – It's been quite a while since my post on the micro benchmark comparison between Java, Scala and Groovy.
XHTML 2 language dumped in favor of HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld – Looking to focus on the budding — and game-changing — HTML 5 specification, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) said Thursday it plans to increase available resources for the effort by discontinuing further development of XHTML 2.
Green's Opinion: Android versus iPhone Development: A Comparison – Android’s platform and developer tools are excellent. Leveraging Java and the Eclipse IDE are major winning factors for Android. Apple’s developer tools are shockingly bad by comparison
The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone – Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
Main Page – Smooks – Smooks is a Java Framework/Engine for processing XML and non XML data (CSV, EDI, Java et
InfoQ: Agilists and Architects: Allies not Adversaries Presentation – As Agile becomes more accepted, concerns from architecture groups are increasing. Traditional ways that architects engage with development groups conflict with Agile methods. This talk describes ways that Agile methods can benefit architects, addresses concerns architects express about agile, and proposes ways that architects and agile development teams can become allies.
Don't drive and listen to opera | The Car Tech blog – CNET Reviews – Retired F1 champion Michael Schumacher joins up with Bacardi on its campaign against drunk driving, although the drunk simulation in this video is very amusing. Watch as Schumacher pilots a Maserati around a course he has never driven, carting around three opera singers.
jQuery TOOLS – The missing UI library for the Web – jQuery Tools is a collection of the most important user-interface components for today's websites. This single JavaScript file weighs only 5.8 Kb
ProtoFish: advanced hover menu based on Prototype – TechBlog – ProtoFish is an advanced hover menu based on Prototype. You can easily add a delay to your menu (on mouseout) and choose your own hover class. All ProtoFish menu's will respond to users who use the TAB-key to navigate through your page

Daily del.icio.us for June 26th through July 5th

Michael Schumacher Drink & Drive Simulation

As seen on BBC Top Gear, Bacardi Limited Corporate Responsibility Ambassador Michael Schumacher promotes responsible drinking in this drinking and driving simulation video. The video was filmed at Ascari, Spain. For more information on the Champions Drink Responsibly campaign, go to www.championsdrinkresponsibly.com

Michael Schumacher Drink & Drive Simulation

Daily del.icio.us for June 24th through June 25th

Using Google JSON with Prototype and Java « timothypowell.net – In this example we will learn how to create a JSON object on the client using JavaScript (and Prototype), and how to process that same JSON object on the server using Java.
InfoQ: Keynote: From Margin to Mainstream – Innovation, Disruption and the Future of the Web – In this keynote, Mitch Kapor, looks back at disruptive technologies, like the PC, and derives insights which he then uses to project a possible future for the Web, including the "social web," 'data scarcity and data abundance," and "startups on the cheap
Maia Reaches Its First Milestone | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’re happy to announce the first Milestone release of upcoming IntelliJ IDEA 9, nicknamed Maia.
This release delivers a fresh preview of features and improvements we’ve implemented so far for IntelliJ IDEA 9
Open Group Releases Eclipse Tool To Ease TOGAF Development — Application Development Trends – The Open Group, a technology agnostic consortium focused on open standards and interoperability, this week released a tool intended to simplify use of TOGAF 9, a standard framework for enterprise architecture.
Coding Horror: The iPhone Software Revolution – I wrote this because I truly feel that the iPhone is a key inflection point in software development. We will look back on this as the time when "software" stopped being something that geeks buy (or worse, bootleg), and started being something that everyone buys, every day
Generation 5 » Closures, Javascript And The Arrow Of Time – Closures are a powerful and concise way to express your intentions to a computer: however, closures break some of the intuitive assumptions that people use to understand software — specifically, the idea that time moves downward through the execution of a procedure
Red Hat: Bad economy is good for open source | The Open Road – CNET News – Both Oracle and Red Hat are doing well, and Oracle is obviously dealing with much bigger wads of money, but it seems clear that Red Hat's open-source model is the big winner in the recession.
Create More Value Than You Capture – Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly's Twitter Boot Camp, June 15, 2009, New World Stages in New York City.
Apple's iPhone 3GS: What It Costs to Make – BusinessWeek – The 16-gigabyte iPhone 3GS actually costs slightly more to build than last year's iPhone 3G—$178.96, a difference of $4.63. However, that is much lower than estimates for the first-generation iPhone, which pegged the cost at $220.
Cisco launches Linux powered Wireless-N router – News – The H Open Source: News and Features – Cisco has announced the launch of a new Linux powered Wireless-N broadband router with Storage Link and media sharing functionality, the Linksys WRT160NL. The new 802.11n draft 2.0 router includes dual antenna with R-SMA connectors, a 400Mhz processor, 8 MB of Flash memory, 32 MB of DDRAM and a USB 2.0 port

Daily del.icio.us for June 24th through June 25th

Daily del.icio.us for June 17th through June 22nd

MockFtpServer – Home – The MockFtpServer project provides a mock/dummy FTP server implementations that can be very useful for testing of FTP client code. Two FTP Server implementations are provided, each at a different level of abstraction.
InfoQ: Is PHP Ready for the Enterprise? – Although PHP boasts of being the most widely used environment for web application development, it has been traditionally considered as not suitable for the enterprise. InfoQ has conducted a virtual panel regarding the evolution of the language/platform and its suitability in enterprise environments.
Enterprise Integration Patterns with Spring | Java™ Software Development Videos and Tutorials Directory – Patterns to be discussed include Message Channel, Message Endpoint, Channel Adapter, Content-Based Router, and more. After this session, you will have a clear understanding of how the Spring Integration API promotes the separation of concerns that is essential for producing maintainable, testable code.
Using the Google Collections Library for Java (1 of 2) | Java™ Software Development Videos and Tutorials Directory – In this session, you’ll learn how the open-source Google Collections Library builds on the excellent foundation of java.util, to provide more of the building blocks you need to do your job. You’ll see many examples of how your code can become simpler, safer, more flexible, and more powerful by adopting classes like ReferenceMap, Multimap, our immutable collections and many others.
Kevin O'Neill hired by USC as basketball coach – Los Angeles Times – O'Neill has been head coach at Marquette, Tennessee and Northwestern. He led Marquette to the NCAA tournament twice, reaching the Sweet 16 in 1994.
YouTube – John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner – Humorist John Hodgman was the entertainment headliner at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner. Mr. Hodgman roasted the president for being a "nerd", referencing his place in popular culture and passion for comics and science fiction
10 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Firebug – Nettuts+ – Firebug is one of the most popular tools used by web developers. In this article, we'll take a closer look at ten of its most attractive features.
Full Weblogic Load-Balancing in EC2 with Amazon ELB – The Server Labs Blog – This is the latest post in the series on deploying a Weblogic cluster in Amazon EC2. Previous posts have shown how to create and configure a weblogic cluster using either standard Amazon EC2 images or RightScale ServerTemplates and RightScripts.
Jeliot – a Java Program Visualization System | Java™ Software Development Videos and Tutorials Directory – Jeliot 3 is a Program Visualization application. It visualizes how a Java program is interpreted. Method calls, variables, operation are displayed on a screen as the animation goes on, allowing the student to follow step by step the execution of a program.
Are Pesticides Causing Parkinson's Disease? | Environment | AlterNet – Scientists are closing in on an inescapable conclusion: Pesticides may be a cause of Parkinson's disease.
Apache Stonehenge - – Stonehenge is a set of example applications for Service Oriented Architecture that spans languages and platforms and demonstrates best practise and interoperability.
Key Developments At JavaOne — Application Development Trends – We've seen the steady transition of leadership by Sun to open source, and that's just going to continue to accelerate

Daily del.icio.us for June 17th through June 22nd

Daily del.icio.us for June 12th through June 17th

Google: We want Chrome to grow the Web | The Open Road – CNET News – This is why we should be cheering Google's entry into the browser market–even if we ultimately want Firefox to win. Perhaps especially if we want Firefox to win.
Thoughts on Opera Unite | FactoryCity – Opera is attempting to take advantage of the rise of social networking (the verb) and bake it into the browser, as a personal extension to one’s computing experience. They accomplish this by embedding what amounts to a web server in the browser, and making it possible to share files, music and photos and to post notes or chat directly with your friends
An App, the GoodGuide, Aids in Careful Shopping – NYTimes.com – These days, every skin lotion and dish detergent on store shelves gloats about how green it is. How do shoppers know which are good for them and good for the earth?
The Best iPhone Apps for Kids – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – Say you were faced with a 3-year-old child on the verge of full meltdown — which iPhone apps would distract and delight him enough to avoid mayhem?
Iran's Disputed Election – The Big Picture – Boston.com – Following up from last Friday's entry about Iran's Presidential Election, Tehran and other cities have seen the largest street protests and rioting since the 1979 Iranian Revolution
Adobe makes Acrobat.com a business with paid accounts | Webware – CNET – With Acrobat.com, Adobe is coming a little late to a game that Google, Zoho and ThinkFree have been running for years, and that Microsoft is set to join very soon. What may make the difference is that Adobe can work these products very deeply into other pieces of its software. Whether that ends up being a liability compared to competing solutions that remain Web-only is unclear.
Mozilla Firefox.next peek: profiling yourself – One of the features planned for the next version of Firefox (tentatively named Firefox 3.6, but most accurately referred as Firefox.next) is about:me, a specially crafted web page that will let you see your browsing habits profile including most visited sites, time of the day and days you navigate most, how you access sites.
Twitter helps Dell rake in sales | Technology | Reuters – Dell said on Thursday it has raked in more than $3 million from Twitter followers who clicked through its posts to its Web sites to make purchases
BBC NEWS | Technology | No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe – Bowing to European competition rules, Microsoft Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer.
Performance, Scalability and Architecture – Java and .NET Application Performance Management (dynaTrace Blog) » Interoperability is more than just talking with each other – Microsoft and Sun recently announced their Open Source Project Stonehenge at the JavaOne conference. Stonehenge is a reference implementation that shows how to bridge the two major development platforms Java and .NET using Web Services

Daily del.icio.us for June 12th through June 17th

Daily del.icio.us for June 9th through June 12th

Optional Annotations – The JAX-WS programming model uses a number of optional annotations for adding details about your service, such as the binding it uses, to the Java code.
Ibatis Tutorial: Aggregation with groupBy – This tutorial builds on the knowledge from the Ibatis Inheritance Tutorial. As such the configuration and schema won't be repeated here for brevity.
The next feature I will introduce is dynamic grouping.
Jester – the JUnit test tester. – Jester finds code that is not covered by tests. Jester makes some change to your code, runs your tests, and if the tests pass Jester displays a message saying what it changed. Jester includes a script for generating web pages that show the changes made that did not cause the tests to fail.
Add-on Collector :: Add-ons for Firefox – Discover more of the best add-ons and organize your favorites in easy-to-manage collections. Subscribe to see how the collections you admire grow, and fans follow when you manage and update your own collections.
How the new smartphones stack up [PIC] – How the new smartphones stack up [PIC]
Moserware: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection – In just 220 milliseconds, two endpoints on the Internet came together, provided enough credentials to trust each other, set up encryption algorithms, and started to send encrypted traffic. And to think, all of this just so Bob can buy milk
Official Google Enterprise Blog: Use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps for email, contacts, and calendar – Today we're excited remove another key barrier to enterprise adoption of Google Apps with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook lets you use Microsoft Outlook seamlessly with Google Apps Premier or Education Editions.
Using Psychology To Save You From Yourself : NPR – This is the story of how obscure psychological research into human decision-making first revolutionized economics and now appears poised to remake the relationship between the government and its citizens.
Fox & Friends' Lingerie Football Romp | The Daily Show | Comedy Central – "Fox & Friends" thinks Sacha Baron Cohen's ass in Eminem's face is disgusting, but a lingerie football romp is the best thing on TV.
Red Hat's Fedora 11: So easy you'll forget it's Linux | The Open Road – CNET News – This is, in fact, Fedora 11's biggest selling point: it just works. And fast, too: from powering on to logging in takes 20 seconds or less. Beat that, Windows!

Daily del.icio.us for June 9th through June 12th

Daily del.icio.us for June 8th through June 9th

InfoQ: ActionScript 3 Site Framework – Fosfr – There are many different approaches to develop RIA based web sites. Flash sites are particular appealing to businesses or individuals involving in rich media contents. Fosfr is an ActionScript 3 site framework that is developed to build full Flash site. InfoQ interviewed Fosfr creator, Jeff DePascale, to learn more about the insights
Video: Google Web Toolkit: An Introduction by TheServerSide.com – This session teaches you the basics of Google Web Toolkit, How to implement Ajax-enabled applications in Java, Internationalization, Hooking into the browser history mechanism, Remote procedure calls.
InfoQ: REST is a style — WOA is the architecture. – Dion Hinchcliffe recently offered two related articles that explore relationships between Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) and other technologies. The first deals with WOA and REST; the second looks at WOA and SOA. The main point of the first article: REST is a style and WOA is the architecture. The second article argues that WOA is really a highly complimentary sub-style of SOA and explores the implications of this simple observation.
JavaFX squares off against AJAX | Developer World – InfoWorld – In a mock debate focused on the rich Internet application development realm, AJAX was pitted against Sun Microsystems' JavaFX Friday, with proponents for both technologies pointing up their entrant's high points and the low points of their rival.
Google Translator Toolkit – Google Translator Toolkit is a new service that lets you translate documents by editing the translations automatically generated by Google. "Google Translator Toolkit allows human translators to work faster and more accurately, aided by technologies like Google Translate."
The Joy of Less – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com – If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies.
Stephen Colbert Takes His Show on the Road to Baghdad – NYTimes.com – It was Sunday night in Baghdad, and President Obama was ordering Gen. Ray Odierno, the commander of the American troops here, to shave Stephen Colbert’s head
Gizmodo – iPhone 3GS Complete Feature Guide – apple iphone 3gs – The iPhone 3GS has a new processor built-in. Apple claims that it is up to two times faster than the previous generation: Launching messages is 2.1 faster, load the NY Times in Safari: 2.9 times faster. It also consumes less, which has an impact on the improved battery life.
Apple – Mac OS X Snow Leopard – Enhancements and Refinements – Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes refinements, both big and small, to
a wide range of applications, processes, and interface elements.
Study Highlights SOA Herd Mentality — Application Development Trends – Gartner suggests that SOA adopters start small, identifying specific business benefits and focusing, as part of an iterative effort, on achieving them.

Daily del.icio.us for June 8th through June 9th

Daily del.icio.us for June 4th through June 8th

Missing At WWDC: Steve Jobs, AT&T (AAPL, T) – Apple (AAPL) unveiled new MacBooks, a new Mac OS, a new iPhone OS, and a new iPhone at its Worldwide Developers Conference today. But two things were missing: Jobs & AT&T
AT&T: The iPhone's anchor | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Today, that exclusive deal is the anchor that’s keeping the Apple and the iPhone from showing its true potential at redefining the mobile phone, smartphone and even handheld computer spaces.
The Best Online Tools for Personal Finance – WSJ.com – Consumers are paying closer attention to what they buy, how much they save, and where they invest. These resources can be a huge help. Even better, most of them are free.
Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog: Lean and Kanban Software Development Digest – Lean and Kanban software development adoption is growing. More and more companies setup Kanban Boards, limit WIP and eliminate Muda.
This collection of links will help you understand all that buzz around Lean/Kanban and decide whether it is worth trying.
HOWTO: Connect to MySQL in SSIS | Idea Excursion – The MySQL team did just that with Connector/NET 6.0, their ADO.NET provider. This tool allows us to use the the ADO.NET connections in SQL Server Integration Services to easily connect to MySQL. This is a walk through on how to connect to MySQL with SSIS 2005 utilizing the Connector/NET 6.0 ADO.NET provider.
10 Essential SQL Tips for Developers – Nettuts+ – SQL is yet another essential language for developers wishing to create data-driven websites. However, many developers are unfamiliar with various aspects of SQL; so in this article, we'll analyze ten essential tips.
InfoQ: Top 10 Changes in Flex 4 – This week, Adobe released their first official beta of Flex 4, codenamed Gumbo. The release includes a number of major changes. This list gives a high level overview of the items that have changed in the latest version of the popular RIA framework.
YouTube – Leo Laporte Blows up at Mike Arrington on the Gillmor Gang – June 6, 2009 – Leo Laporte calls out Mike Arrington of TechCrunch after Leo got mad at him for implying that his opinion of the Pre was effected by the fact he had a free review unit.
Remembering Tiananmen, 20 years later – The Big Picture – Boston.com – Yesterday, June 4th, 2009, marked the 20th anniversary of the military crackdown on student protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China
Google Code Blog: Introducing Page Speed – Page Speed is a tool we've been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages — it's a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug. When you run Page Speed, you get immediate suggestions on how you can change your web pages to improve their speed.
Spring 3.0 Jumps on Java – InternetNews.com – Version 3.0 of the open source Spring Java framework is nearing completion and is set to offer Java developers new capabilities to rapidly develop applications. SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson will detail the new capabilities of Spring 3.0 during the JavaOne conference this week in San Francisco.

Daily del.icio.us for June 4th through June 8th

Daily del.icio.us for June 3rd through June 4th

State of the Art – Palm Gets It Right With Pre, Its New Smartphone – NYTimes.com – The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed. That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubinstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 16 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to out-iPhone the iPhone.
agile @ Atlassian – Practical Insights Into Agile Software Development – We're not a "follow the rules" software company and we know there is no single recipe for practicing agile development. We were once hungry for practical tips, so we thought we should share our agile story…
Flex, RIA | Adobe Labs – Adobe Flash Collaboration Service – Adobe Flash Collaboration Service allows you to build real-time, multi-user applications with Flex in less time than ever before. And because Acrobat.com hosts the service, issues like deployment, maintenance, and scalability are taken care of for you.
Exchanges, Banks and Brokerages Start Tweeting by Wall Street & Technology – Exchanges, brokerages, banks and regulators are all jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and exploring new ways to reach out to their customers — and sometimes their foe.
Adobe Releases Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst And The Flex 4 framework | IndicThreads – Adobe Systems has announced the beta availability of Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly named Adobe Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst and the open source Flex 4 framework.
Common Java Cookbook – This collection provides expert tips for using Java-based utilities from projects such as Apache Commons, Apache Lucene, and Apache Velocity.
InfoQ: Flex Open Source Data Visualization Framework: Axiis – A new open source addition to the Adobe Flex world is Axiis, a data visualization framework released in May under the MIT license. Data visualization is a term frequently used to describe graphical views of application data, such as charts and graphs.
FasterXML – Faster, better open source XML and JSON parsing for the Java platform. – FasterXML is pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the Jackson open source (ASL) JSON processor. Jackson provides three ways to consume/produce JSON with Java — JAXB-like object binding, StAX-like low-level streaming API, and a DOM-like tree model.
State of the Art – Palm Gets It Right With Pre, Its New Smartphone – NYTimes.com – The star of this summer blockbuster is Palm. Over the years, this once-great company lost its talent for everything but making business blunders. Pundits were predicting Palm’s passing — but then the new Palm Pre appeared
Ext JS – Ext JS 3.0 RC2 Release – Stable, Robust, and Enhanced – We are pleased to announce that the latest release candidate of Ext 3.0 is now publicly available.
500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

Daily del.icio.us for June 3rd through June 4th

Daily del.icio.us for May 27th through June 2nd

Amazon Web Services Blog: Setting up a Load-Balanced Oracle Weblogic Cluster in Amazon EC2 – Oracle recently made available a set of AMI images suitable for use with the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. I found the two images (32-bit and 64-bit) that contain Weblogic (along with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 and JRockit) the most interesting of the lot. This article will explain how to set up a basic two-node Weblogic cluster using the 32-bit Weblogic image provided by Oracle with an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
The Atlassian Blog – Introducing Confluence 3.0 – Meet the Macro Browser – Confluence 3.0 introduces the Macro Browser, a new way for users of all experience levels to build content-rich pages in seconds. The macro browser exposes the macros in your Confluence site – charts, task lists, photo galleries, RSS feeds and more – through a point-and-click graphical interface.
Google Soups Up Enterprise Search Appliance – Google's plan is to make GSA the most powerful, all-encompassing enterprise search server in the world and the first choice over Microsoft and products from Vivisimo, Endeca and Autonomy.
Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: When You're a Productivity Suite, Everything's a Nail – Ultimately, this is just one facet of the "which tool to use?" problem I outlined previously, and it extends to most tools in the information worker toolbelt, from using e-mail for collaboration instead of a collaborative workspace to collating changes in Word docs instead of using a wiki
mockito – simpler & better mocking – Mockito is a mocking framework that tastes really well. It lets you write beautiful tests with clean & simple API. Mockito doesn't give you hangover because the tests are very readable and they produce clean verification errors
IntelliJ's Maia shapes up against Eclipse • The Register – Maia will support version three of the Spring open-source Java programming framework, which will be detailed at next week's JavaOne in San Francisco, California, along with support for the OSGi modular Java framework and Apache's Tapestry component-based framework.
OpenXava – AJAX applications from JPA entities – OpenXava is a productive way for creating AJAX Enterprise Applications with Java. Indeed, it's faster developing with OpenXava than with Ruby On Rails, Spring MVC, or any other MVC framework.
Distributor – Distributor is a software TCP load balancer. Like other load balancers, it accepts connections and distributes them to an array of back end servers. Distributor is compatible with any standard TCP protocol (HTTP, LDAP, IMAP, etc.) and is also IPv6 compatible. Distributor has many unique and advanced features and a high-performance architecture
Server Fault – Server Fault is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for system administrators and IT professionals – regardless of platform. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Gawker – 'Page's Law' Is Google Founder's Next-Best Shot at Immortality – Larry Page – Page's Law is the inverse: It says software gets twice as slow every 18 months. This helps explain why your computer seems to get slower as it ages, even though the hardware inside remains unchanged.
Google Declares 'The Web Has Won' – InternetNews.com – "The Web has won — it's the dominant programming model of our time," said Vic Gondotra, Google's vice president for engineering.

Daily del.icio.us for May 27th through June 2nd

Daily del.icio.us for May 24th through May 27th

Op-Ed Columnist – Cheney Lost to Bush – NYTimes.com – But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.
Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O – O'Reilly Radar – If you're like me, you had no idea there was so much HTML 5 already in play. When I checked in with my editors at O'Reilly, the general consensus was that HTML 5 isn't going to be ready till 2010.
Dwyane Wade, hours before declaring for the NBA Draft. – Those are the words we used to describe Dwyane Wade just months before the 2003 NBA Draft. Wade’s gone through a lot since his triple-double in the NCAA Elite Eight, but you can bet he’s still the same guy—bringing the entire package both on and off the court
Maia EAP is finally here | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’ve been blogging about the cool new features implemented in the EAP builds of Maia (IntelliJ IDEA 9) for a while, and now at last you can download and try the new build for yourself.
Atlassian Developer Blog – Introducing the Atlassian Plugin Exchange – I'm excited today to announce the availability of Atlassian's newest website, the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. The Plugin Exchange provides an easy way to find, download, and review plugins for all Atlassian products.
New Red Hat Rules Tool Ties Java Developers to Business Users — Application Development Trends – Red Hat yesterday released a new business rules platform that the company said will make it easier for Java developers and business users alike to build policies and processes into their applications.
Held hostage by the health system – The Boston Globe – The reason our health system is in such trouble is that it is set up to generate profits, not to provide care. We rely on hundreds of investor-owned insurance companies that profit by refusing coverage to high-risk patients and limiting services to others
Uploading a file with Flex and Java | Adobe Developer Connection – This article shows how to develop a Flex and Java file upload mechanism for attaching images to an employee list. In the process, it demonstrates Flex's ECMAScript for XML (E4X) language extension, custom components, classes, and events, as well as a Java-like properties file
Flex 3 Video Tutorial: Webservice Create, Update and Delete (CRUD) | 19Nates – This video series shows you how to create, update and delete records in a SQL database through a .NET webservice and have that displayed in Flex through a datagrid. I also have a little form on there. Watch the overview video to learn more
Google App Engine Support | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – If you are developing a Java application for Google App Engine, try Google App Engine Integration plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. It will be bundled with the first Maia EAP, but you can download it right now and use with IntelliJ IDEA 8.x

Daily del.icio.us for May 24th through May 27th

The insides of my new computer

I am amazed at the size of the heatsink and the fan strapped on top of the Intel Core i7 processor.

The insides of my new computer

Daily del.icio.us for May 14th through May 21st

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 64 Bit – This AMI comes with Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5 Update 2 and Oracle WebLogic Server 10gR3 software pre-installed and configured for the 64 Bit platform.
Amazon’s New Service Goes Postal Over Slow Broadband – Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, explains in a blog posting that it would take up to 13 days to sling a terabyte of data across a 10 Mbps network, which is pretty darn slow. So Amazon is offering customers the chance to store their data on an external device, ship it via post, and Amazon will load it into S3.
Skype Gets the Oprah Treatment – Digits – WSJ – Will Skype get an Oprah boost? The software already has more than 400 million registered users around the world, although it is more popular in parts of Asia and Europe than Winfrey’s home territory in the U.S.
Daring Fireball: The Next iPhone – A next-generation iPhone to be released in July, with roughly double the CPU horsepower and an improved video-capable camera, with 16 and 32 GB storage capacities.
Fresh Update: IntelliJ IDEA 8.1.2 | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We have just released a fresh IntellIJ IDEA update — 8.1.2
Amazon Web Services Blog: New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch tracks and stores a number of per-instance performance metrics including CPU load, Disk I/O rates, and Network I/O rates. The metrics are rolled-up at one minute intervals and are retained for two weeks
Corner Office – Meetings, Version 2.0, at Microsoft – Question – NYTimes.com – This interview of Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Wanted: One Mobile Device, for a 24/7 Life – In order to make this happen, targeted re-engineering of mobile devices and device management technologies is essential.
Left Right Left Right Left by Coldplay | Uncrate – As a gift to their fans, Coldplay is giving away its new live album Left Right Left Right Left. With a track listing that includes "Clocks," "Viva La Vida," and "Fix You," it's a strong effort on its own, but as a free download, it's a no-brainer.
Ext JS – Ext JS 3.0 – Remoting for Everyone – Ext.Direct aims to solve this issue for developers creating Ext JS applications by providing a single communication point with the server-side.

Daily del.icio.us for May 14th through May 21st

My New Birthday Present

My brother is awesome and not only because he buys me the best geeky birthday present. For my birthday this year, he bought me a new DELL XPS desktop with the latest Intel Core i7 processor. The Core i7 is a quad-core processor with hyper-threading that appear as 8 separate processors to the operating system, giving the machine some serious processing horsepower.

My configuration is the Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz), 6GB of RAM (DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz), ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB video card and Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives for a total of 1.2 TB onboard. The machine also came with combo Blu-Ray/DVD/CD reader and burner along with 64-bit Vista. Here are the complete tech specs for the geeks out there.

Qty	Item Number	Description
1	224-3607	Studio XPS 435MT
1	311-9770	Intel Core i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz)
1	311-9800	6GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1067MHz
1	310-9731	Keyboard included in Dell Bluetooth Package
1	320-7771	ATI RADEON HD4670 512MB
1	341-8397	Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual640GB Hard Drives
1	421-0084	Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium 64-Bit
1	310-1966	Mouse included with Keyboard purchase
1	430-3347	Integrated 10/1000 Ethernet
1	313-7184	Blu-Ray, DVD+R/RW, CD-RW Drive
1	313-7186	Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
1	310-5408	Free Recycling Kit
1	310-9562	Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
1	341-8296	Dell 19 in 1 Media Reader withBluetooth 2.0

Here are some screenshots from the computer with more geeky goodness

My New Birthday Present

Daily del.icio.us for May 9th through May 14th

State of the Art – With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like – NYTimes.com – When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
Google Open Source Blog: Introducing WebDriver – WebDriver takes a different approach to solve the same problem as Selenium. Rather than being a JavaScript application running within the browser, it uses whichever mechanism is most appropriate to control the browser. For Firefox, this means that WebDriver is implemented as an extension. For IE, WebDriver makes use of IE's Automation controls
Wolfram|Alpha Blog : The Computers Powering Computable Knowledge – Two supercomputers, just about 10,000 processor cores, hundreds of terabytes of disks, a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and what seems like enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort
A World of Cables, Unknotted – The New York Times > Personal Tech > Slide Show – Cables are important, but they should not be expensive. To help untangle some of the confusion, here is a simple, somewhat opinionated taxonomy of most of the cables that we deal with in our lives. It’s completely up to date — until the tech industry adds another confusing format to the pile.
Best Practices for building JSON REST Web Services « Building Feedly – A few of our friends have been asking us what are some of the best practices we learnt over the last two years designing and implementing RESTful Web Services as the back-end of the feedly service. Here is a quick/high level brain dump:
OpenSSO Fedlet – 'Best Innovation' Award Winner at the European Identity Conference – In the category "Best innovation", the award went to the OpenSSO initative, founded and supported by Sun Microsystems. Their project, OpenSSO Fedlet has provided a lean solution for the Identity Federation
Microsoft to Raise $3.75 Billion in Inaugural Bond Offering – Bloomberg.com – Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, plans to sell $3.75 billion of debt in its first bond offering, taking advantage of its top credit ratings to help fund a share buyback and technology investments.
Judd Solutions: The Ultimate Enterprise Java Build Solution – Ultimate would be to add a server running TeamCity for the 'remote run' and 'pre-tested commit' features (as Developer assistant, and continuous compilation server it is a great add-on for a CI system)
Sonar – Code quality management platform – Sonar enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. Sonar not only offers consolidated reporting on and across projects throughout time, but it becomes the central place to manage code quality
Common Java Cookbook – If you want to learn how to combine common open-source Java utilities to create powerful Java applications and tools, the Common Java Cookbook is for you.

Daily del.icio.us for May 9th through May 14th

Daily del.icio.us for May 7th through May 9th

Botnet master hits the kill switch, takes down 100,000 PCs – Ars Technica – Botnets aren't just dangerous because they can steal massive amounts of personal data and launch denial-of-service attacks—they can also self-destruct, leaving the owners of affected machines in the dust.
SpringSource Team Blog » Jump into Roo for extreme Java productivity – Roo's mission is to fundamentally and sustainably improve Java developer productivity without compromising engineering integrity or flexibility.
InfoQ: The Emergence of Virtual Service Oriented Grids – In much the same way the Internet changed business forever, virtual service oriented grid computing has the potential to force change once again
Outside the Box() » Slick Speed – So in the interest of getting to the bottom of the story, I did a little unscientific testing of my own using Slickspeed, which tests selector engine performance.
Apache Camel: tutorial-osgi-camel-part2 – Designing a Service Oriented Architecture seems very obvious for most of us but implies that different parameters are taken into account
Fuji – The Next Generation of OpenESB | Java™ Software Development Videos and Tutorials Directory – Project Fuji forms the core component of Open ESB v3 effort and represents Sun’s next generation open source integration runtime, focused on providing a lightweight, developer-friendly, and extensible platform for composite application development.
State of the Art – With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like – NYTimes.com – When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
A Review of 5 Java JSON Libraries – Rob@Rojotek – If you are looking for a simple lightweight Java library that reads and writes JSON, and supports Streams, JSON.simple is probably a good match. It does what it says on the box in 12 classes, and works on legacy (1.4) JREs.
google-gson – A Java library to convert JSON to Java objects and vice-versa – Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into its JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.
Jailer – Database Subsetting and Sampling Tool – Jailer is a tool for database subsetting and sampling, schema browsing, and rendering. It exports consistent, referentially intact row-sets from relational databases. It removes obsolete data without violating integrity. It is DBMS agnostic (by using JDBC), platform independent, and generates DbUnit datasets, hierarchically structured XML, and topologically sorted SQL-DML.

Daily del.icio.us for May 7th through May 9th

Daily del.icio.us for May 2nd through May 7th

Agile Architecture : Software & Technology @kirkk.com – Agile practices play a critical role in agile architecture. Test-driven development lends you the courage to undergo architectural evolution. Continuous integration accommodates architectural shifts by ensuring issues encountered while refactoring are identified and corrected quickly. Supplementing your up-front design approach with an emergent strategy emphasizing spikes or proofs helps verify the architectural vision.
Googleplex in 200 Seconds – Quick tour of Googleplex, Google's Mountain View headquarters
Fresh Update: IntelliJ IDEA 8.1.1 | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’ve just released the fresh IntelliJ IDEA update version 8.1.1 You’re welcome to see what has been fixed and grab the fresh update off the shelf.
Ext JS – Ext JS 3.0 RC1.1 Released – There are many enhancements in Ext JS 3.0, too many to include in a single post. Some of the major features in Ext JS 3.0 are the splitting of Ext Core and Ext JS, Charting for visualizations, additional User Interface improvements, CRUD-like support with Ext.data.DataWriter, Remoting using Ext.Direct, CSS enhancements to make theming easier, and Accessibility improvements – Section 508 and ARIA support. We also fixed several browser issues for the latest Chrome and Safari releases and added IE8 support.
If You Tweet It, They Will Come – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com – First, something about Twitter creates trust and togetherness; some of my actors drove over an hour to a place they’d never been, responding to a 140-character request from a person they’d never met. No other technology, online or off, would have resolved my quest so satisfactorily.
Ubuntu on Amazon Web Services | Ubuntu – Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon gives you the power of Ubuntu combined with the flexibility of Amazon's cloud computing service. Ubuntu's modularity, virtualization capabilities, range of applications and optimised performance make it the perfect solution if you're deploying applications on Amazon's Elastic Computing (EC2) cloud.
A new JDBC Driver for SQL Server – Microsoft SQL Server today announced the general availability of the JDBC v2.0 driver has been released. This release continues Microsoft's commitment to the Java community and non-Microsoft centric programming platforms. The driver can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/jdbc.
Anthropology: The Art of Building a Successful Social Site – ReadWriteWeb – Picture if you will, a collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch
Wade scores 41 as Heat slam Hawks to set up Game Seven | Sports | Reuters – Dwyane Wade scored 41 points to lead the Miami Heat to a 98-72 victory over the Atlanta Hawks on Friday and force a deciding Game Seven in their Eastern Conference playoff series
Google Code Blog: Gmail for mobile HTML5 Series: Using AppCache to Launch Offline – Part 1 – On April 7th, Google launched a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices built on HTML5. We shared the behind-the-scenes story through this blog and would like to share more of our learnings in a brief series of follow up blog posts.

Daily del.icio.us for May 2nd through May 7th

Daily del.icio.us for April 29th through May 1st

Pat Patterson : Superpatterns: Thomson Reuters on deploying OpenSSO Enterprise to a Global User Base – In the video, Chris explains how OpenSSO is on track to provide single sign-on across Thomson Reuters' Markets services to 330,000 users worldwide by the end of 2011
OpenSSO – Overview, Stories and Roadmap – TheAquarium – wikis.sun.com – Sid and Ajay will present a technical overview of OpenSSO (Resource Center) and then will explain how it is being used in a real-world deployment. The presentation will end with a roadmap for the features in future releases of OpenSSO.
Verizon uses OpenSSO in Very Large (Over 40M Users) Deployment – Dan reports on the use of OpenSSO, a Massive Verizon Wireless Deployment that has over 40,000,000 users, 1,000,000 logins per day, and peaks at 4,000 logins per minute. Additional details at the slides and recordings of the March 19th, Online Webinar, which is also available as a PodCast.
2009 Formula One season, wet & dry – The Big Picture – Boston.com – The 2009 Formula One World Championship season has held only 4 rounds so far (of a scheduled 17), and has experienced extremes of dry and wet weather already – heavy downpours in Malaysia and China, followed by dry desert heat of over 37 degrees C (100 F) in Bahrain
Official Google Enterprise Blog: Sync Google Apps user accounts with your LDAP system – This new utility is a software component that helps maintain security by running behind the firewall and pushes directory information to Google Apps – including mailing lists, groups and user aliases – to match the organizational schema in the LDAP system.
WebLogic Server – Oracle Wiki – WebLogic Wiki
Java / Oracle SOA blog: Using the WebLogic deployment plan to change your ear / war for production – This is the first in a series of several articles that explore some of the new features in Apache Pivot 1.1. Pivot is a Java-based RIA toolkit that is currently undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. This article discusses Pivot's support for drag and drop.
Exploring Apache Pivot 1.1, Part 1 | InsideRIA – This is the first in a series of several articles that explore some of the new features in Apache Pivot 1.1. Pivot is a Java-based RIA toolkit that is currently undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. This article discusses Pivot's support for drag and drop.
With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – The Yahoo! Query Language lets you query, filter, and join data across any web data source or service on the web. Using our YQL web service, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint. YQL uses a SQL-like language because it is a familiar and intuitive method for developers to access data. YQL treats the entire web as a source of table data, enabling developers to select * from Internet
In Major Shift, Apple Builds Its Own Team to Design Chips – WSJ.com – Apple Inc. is building a significant capability to design its own computer chips, a strategy shift that the company hopes will create exclusive features for its gadgets and shield Apple's work from rivals.
Java Tips – The new Java Tips blog, which debuts today, will feature short, relevant tips, tricks, workarounds and introductory tutorials, from one Java developer to another.

Daily del.icio.us for April 29th through May 1st

Daily del.icio.us for April 27th through April 28th

Easier testing with EasyMock – Join Elliotte Rusty Harold for a look at some hard unit tests made easy through mock objects — more specifically, the EasyMock framework. This open source library saves you time and helps make your mock-object code concise and legible.
InfoQ: 13 Reasons for Java Programmers to Learn Flex and BlazeDS – This article outlines the 13 reasons why Java programmers should learn Flex and BlazeDS. It talks about why Flex with BlazeDS is one of the best choices for developing rich Internet applications (RIAs)—from highly interactive websites to enterprise applications with Java back ends
RubyMine Features :: Ruby on Rails IDE. Code editing, code completion, refactoring, ruby debugger. Best HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing support – JetBrains RubyMine IDE provides a comprehensive Ruby code editor aware of dynamic language specifics and delivers smart coding assistance, intelligent code refactoring and code analysis capabilities. Easy project configuration, integrated Ruby Gems manager, Rake support — it's got everything a Ruby developer needs in a development environment
Google Launches Public Data Search & Charts During Wolfram Alpha Demo – Google promises to add public data for answers on prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires amongst others. Currently this data is coming from produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, but Google does hope to bring in more public data sources.
10 Essential Firefox Plugins for the Infosec Professional | dmiessler.com – Shown below are the information security related plugins I recommend any infosec professional (or enthusiast) install upon spinning up a new Firefox instance.
NPR: Power Hungry: Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid – The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation's electrical systems.
Op-Ed Columnist – To Tweet or Not to Tweet – NYTimes.com – I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.) I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.
The White House – Press Office – President Obama Announces Members of Science and Technology Advisory Council – PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.
Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy? – Companies are realizing that people are talking about them whether they like it or not. As a result, they’re deciding whether they should consider having a social media presence, and hence, a policy. A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.
Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-Book Application for the iPhone – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Seeking to strengthen its presence on the iPhone and iPod Touch, Amazon has acquired Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, a popular free e-book application for the iPhone, according to Lexcycle’s blog.
Raible Designs | Ajax Framework Analysis Results – Way back in January, I wrote about how my colleagues and I were evaluating Ajax frameworks to build a SOFEA-style architecture. To make our choice, we used the following process:

Daily del.icio.us for April 27th through April 28th

Daily del.icio.us for April 21st through April 22nd

Terracotta Bolsters Java In-Memory Caching Platform — Application Development Trends – Terracotta 3.0 improves throughput of Java-based applications three-fold while reducing database loads by 60 percent compared to the previous version. Terracotta 3.0 also offers new APIs for cloud and grid-based applications, and management and developer interfaces.
PBS Brings Bugs, Presidents and Soufflés to the Web – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – public TV stations are taking more risks, and on Wednesday they introduced a fancy new video portal at PBS.org/video. It replaces a hodgepodge of sites, with different features, run by the producers of each of the network’s programs and by its member stations.
Bluetooth 3.0 + HS gets official, adds speed with 802.11 – The new standard obviously catapults Bluetooth into a new dimension; rather than being good for nothing more than sending images from one phone to another or syncing a fitness module to a DAP, v3.0 is nimble enough to handle camcorder-to-HDTV, PC-to-PMP and UMPC-to-printer transfers. In fact, the inclusion of the 802.11 Protocol Adaptation Layer (PAL) provides increased throughput of data transfers "at the approximate rate of 24Mbps
Oracle expected to slash thousands of Sun Microsystems jobs – San Jose Mercury News – Coleman believes Oracle could shrink, sell or shut down Sun's high-end server products and storage business. "The servers are being dramatically squeezed by the next generation of servers and blades," a type of server, Coleman said. "Sun's storage business is not a leader and it's being squeezed by commodity storage" competitors.
The True Cost of Amazon's New Kindle – BusinessWeek – A teardown analysis of the Kindle 2 by market research firm iSuppli estimates the cost to build the device at $185.49, or about 52% of its retail price of $359.
AppleInsider | End users, developers seen flocking to iPhone apps on wide scale – A mobile analytics firm has published new findings which show the iPhone taking the majority of the app market — especially when it comes to the sheer number of users. Examining 8 million users and 100 apps, researchers at Flurry hint that Apple's handset has a conspicuous market share lead among developers, the number of apps and the actual range of customers for those apps.
Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 17.5 seconds! – So how fast did Ubuntu 9.04 boot with a solid-state drive? Really freaking fast. Like, “I can’t believe it’s already done” fast. Well, here, watch for yourself:
The Community for Skyway Users, Developers, and Contributors – Featured Download – Similar to Grails, Skyway Builder allows developers to quickly scaffold a CRUD application, but unlike Grails, the generated code isn't Groovy – it's pure Java and Spring.
Evolutionary Goo » Blog Archive » Larry Ellison’s Cloud Computing Comments Revisited – The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements
byteonic.com » Comprehensive analysis on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems – Oracle announced today of acquiring Sun Microsystems for a total price of $7.4 billion. This transaction has long lasting and possibly game changing impact on the several market segments in the IT industry. My analysis is listed below under each of the market segments.

Daily del.icio.us for April 21st through April 22nd