“Show, not tell” is something that works every time like a charm. This is simply because the burden of proof is no longer in question once you show. Even people who just “tell” know that “show, not tell” is better. The Articulate Incapable A class of people who are “articulate incapable” are creating a new kind of problem for everyone else. Once someone has had a bad experience with one or more “articulate incapable” people, they suspect everyone else. Because they don’t know whether you belong to the class of “articulate…
Software Development
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Most Topular Stories
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The curious case of “Show, Not Tell”
Rajesh Setty » Blog10 May 2012 | 1:22 am -
RIP Camp Bears
Simply Ryan15 May 2012 | 11:23 pmI’m sad to inform you that Camp Bears (the first real-time virtual world for kids on the iPad) has been removed from the iTunes Application store and that I am prohibited from using the code or relaunching the application. Synopsis of Camp Bears -
Microsoft Bizspark Startup Challenge 2012
Ginktage14 May 2012 | 11:35 amMicrosoft Bizspark Startup Challenge, a Microsoft Initiative Challenge to find entrepreneurs with innovative business ideas and that can significantly impact their markets. Microsoft Bizspark Startup Challenge 2012 includes the Cloud Computing and Mobile Application category and includes the following below winning criteria. Innovation Market Potential Management Capability GScore Microsoft Bizspark Startup Chall Read More.... -
Please Learn to Write
Rands In Repose16 May 2012 | 11:19 amThere's been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I don't have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff Atwood's piece because, well, I agree that it's pretty silly to think that the world is going to be a better place if the Mayor of New York City learns how to code. I agree with Atwood that his valuable time would be better spent elsewhere. I believe there are essential skills you learn as an engineer who codes. It teaches you how to structure your thinking, and the process looks something like this: I have this thing I want to to… -
Machine Learning in Action
The Endeavour15 May 2012 | 8:23 amA couple months ago I briefly reviewed Machine Learning for Hackers by Drew Conway and John Myles White. Today I’m looking at Machine Learning in Action by Peter Harrington and comparing the two books. Both books are about the same size and cover many of the same topics. One difference between the two books is choice of programming language: ML for Hackers uses R for its examples, ML in Action uses Python. ML in Action doesn’t lean heavily on Python libraries. It mostly implements its algorithms from scratch, with a little help from NumPy for linear algebra, but it does not use ML…
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Google Developers Blog
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Fridaygram: App Engine search, rock-tossing chimp, man vs. beast
11 May 2012 | 3:16 pmBy Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor Google App Engine has a well-deserved reputation for regularly adding cool new features and other improvements. This week the team launched full-text search, which has been a hotly desired feature since the earliest days of App Engine. The new App Engine Search API enables you to search documents using lots of options, including searching specific fields and creating results snippets. At Google, it’s always fun to build new frontiers in search. The App Engine Search API is a powerful tool indeed, but it probably couldn't defend you against an… -
Pricing plan announced for Google Cloud SQL
10 May 2012 | 12:00 pmBy Joe Faith, Product Manager Google Cloud SQL provides a fully managed database service for Google App Engine applications. Hosted on Google's infrastructure and based on the familiar MySQL database, Google Cloud SQL automatically provisions and maintains your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services. In March, we were delighted to welcome our 10,000th developer on Google Cloud SQL, joining businesses like Daffodil, who halved their development time by building on Google's platform. Since the preview launch in October 2011, we’ve been busy working on improving the… -
New Google Analytics Easy Dashboard Library
9 May 2012 | 12:21 pmJeetendra Nick By Jeetendra Soneja and Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team Many developers save time by using the Google Analytics API to automate Analytics reporting tasks. For example, you can use the API to create a dashboard to report data across multiple profiles. The Google Analytics Apps Gallery includes many 3rd party solutions that do this. What if you want to build something quickly that’s custom-tailored to your business? You would typically have to spend time learning the API, figuring out how to handle authorization, then deciding how to integrate this data with a… -
Experience Google I/O 2012 anywhere
8 May 2012 | 9:45 amDylin Robert By Robert Do and Dylin Martin, Google I/O Team In 2011, Google I/O hosted 5,500 developers from 65 countries in San Francisco, but this audience was dwarfed by the more than 1 million developers from 161 countries tuning in via livestream. Next month developers worldwide will come together for three days of coding, sharing and inspiration in this year’s keynotes, sessions and Sandbox demos. And if you’re not joining us in person on June 27-29, this year’s I/O Extended and I/O Live will be even bigger and better, with more I/O Extended locations and more sessions streamed… -
Fridaygram: Doodle competition, nasty prehistoric fleas, cupcake map
4 May 2012 | 2:55 pmBy Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor Everybody likes Google Doodles, those creative modifications of the Google logo that appear every so often on google.com and other Google search homepages. To let budding artists try their hand at doodling, we’ve hosted various Doodle 4 Google competitions around the world. This year’s Doodle 4 Google was open to U. S. students enrolled in schools serving grades K-12. This week we announced the 50 state finalists, divided by grade group, and they’re very creative. Take a look, but more than that, you can vote for your favorites, one per…
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Apple Developer News
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iTunes Connect Supports More Than 25 Languages
3 May 2012 | 1:15 pmNow you have more ways to reach millions of users around the world. We have expanded language support in iTunes Connect, so you can localize app metadata, keywords, and screenshots in 10 new languages: Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish, Finnish, Danish, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, and Greek.Check out the iTunes Connect Developer Guide for details on adding new localizations. And learn about other resources for Internationalization and Localization. -
New Resources for Promoting iOS Apps
30 Mar 2012 | 7:15 pmWe’ve added new resources to the App Store Resource Center that make it even easier to promote your apps worldwide. The updated App Store Marketing and Advertising Guidelines for Developers provides helpful information on using the App Store badge—including new localized versions in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese—as well as featuring Apple products in marketing materials, creating custom photography and video, promoting apps with accessories, and more. Visit the App Store Resource Center. -
Optimizing Connections to the Apple Push Notification Service
21 Mar 2012 | 6:32 pmThe Apple Push Notification Service provides a high-speed, high-capacity interface, so you should establish and maintain an open connection to handle all your notifications. Connections that are repeatedly opened and closed will affect the performance and stability of your connection to the Apple Push Notification Service and may be considered denial-of-service attacks. You should also connect regularly to the feedback service so you don’t send notifications to devices that no longer have your app installed. Learn more about connecting to the Apple Push Notification Service. -
Higher Limit for Over-the-Air Downloads
20 Mar 2012 | 4:15 pmGreat apps come in all sizes. If you happen to offer a larger app, we’ve made it even easier for App Store customers to get your app wherever they are. We’ve raised the Wi-Fi download requirement from 20 MB to 50 MB so customers can download apps up to 50 MB in size over their cellular data network. -
Get Started with Developer ID
27 Feb 2012 | 4:20 pmThe Mac App Store is the safest place for users to get software for their Mac, but we also want to protect users when they download applications from other places. Developer ID is a new way to help prevent users from installing malware on their Mac. Along with Gatekeeper, a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion, signing applications with your Developer ID certificate provides users with the confidence that your application is not known malware and has not been tampered with. Get started with Developer ID today and prepare your applications for Gatekeeper. Learn more.
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dzone.com: latest front page
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Safari’s WebSocket implementation and Java: Problematic!
16 May 2012 | 1:11 pmQuick survival guide for Safari and WebSockets. -
Giving.Code::Description("Doing good with programming and design")
16 May 2012 | 12:14 pmProgrammers, designers, and sysadmins doing real good for humanity and the world in their spare time -
Silicon Valley Is Stuck In An Uncanny Valley Of Density
16 May 2012 | 11:09 amAlmost every piece of open land in the San Francisco Bay area that can be developed has been. There are a great many multifamily dwellings, especially in San Jose, if not Palo Alto. All of the remaining open space is park land or in some way not available for development. Further, the transportation infrastructure is similarly saturated. -
Microchips, lollipops and echolocation: New ways to help the blind see
16 May 2012 | 10:52 amTwo men in the United Kingdom who had lost their vision after birth due to a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, wherein light-sensitive cells in the eye stop working, just received the gift of sight due to an innovative new microchip implant. Surgeons partially restored vision to both men by implanting tiny electronic chips (0.12 by 0.12 inches) in a thin sheet of tissue at the back of the men’s eyes. When switched on, the chips perform the duties of the malfunctioning photoreceptors, converting light into electrical impulses that travel to the brain. A thin cable threaded… -
What Does 'Real Time' in 'Real Time Big Data' Mean?
16 May 2012 | 10:52 amLately there has been lots of noise about "Real Time" Big Data. Lots of companies that associate themselves with this term are generally in analytical space and to them it really means "low-latency" for analytical processing of data which is usually stored in some warehouse.
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Ajaxian » Front Page
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Rails cache sweeper redux
27 Apr 2012 | 10:03 pmMichael Mahemoff writes: To be effective, Rails cache sweepers need to be more fully understood. They know no standard, so you must employ art. He goes on: Sweepers observe both your models and your controllers, but most workarounds focus on their controller nature. Importantly: the sweeper must be explicitly added as an observer. Even more important is redux. Read all about [Rails cache sweeper redux] it. -
Node.js – The objective is absolutely fast I/O
30 Mar 2012 | 10:03 pmNode.js employs an event-driven architecture and a non-blocking I/O model, and it provides some blindingly fast performance to some types of data-intensive Web apps. It is about JavaScript on the server side. LinkedIn, Yahoo and eBay are among ardent Node.js users, and none other than Microsoft has discussed end-to-end JavaScript coverage on its Azure cloud. The objective is absolutely fast I/O. This article features Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman, who discusses the roots and reason of node.js. He said: “Why we did it is, at Joyent we have a lot of servers, more than most companies… -
Winding road of open-source webOS
2 Feb 2012 | 4:21 pmHP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end. Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript framework aside from any success or failure webOS ultimately achieves. -
Shim uses node.js to test sites on multiple browsers
14 Jan 2012 | 10:01 pmShim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited. The shim, once loaded in a device’s browser, opens and maintains a socket connection to the server, according to to Shim’s developers. Shim was written in 2011 by Chris Marstall, Creative Technologist at the Boston Globe. The software has been open sourced. Write… -
HipHop Virtual Machine for PHP
10 Dec 2011 | 8:15 pmFacebook Software Engineer and HipHop for PHP team member Jason Evans provides details on Facebook’s move to a new high-performance PHP virtual machine. Described by Evans is ”a new PHP execution engine based on the HipHop language runtime that we call the HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm).” He sees it as replacement for the HipHop PHP interpreter (hphpi). He continues: We have long been keenly aware of the limitations to static analysis imposed by such a dynamic language as PHP, not to mention the risks inherent in developing software with hphpi and deploying with hphpc. Our…
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PHP.net news & announcements
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PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13 Released!
8 May 2012 | 12:44 pmThe PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13. All users are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or PHP 5.3.13 The releases complete a fix for a vulnerability in CGI-based setups (CVE-2012-2311). Note: mod_php and php-fpm are not vulnerable to this attack. PHP 5.4.3 fixes a buffer overflow vulnerability in the apache_request_headers() (CVE-2012-2329). The PHP 5.3 series is not vulnerable to this issue. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on… -
PHP 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 and the CGI flaw (CVE-2012-1823)
6 May 2012 | 4:00 pmPHP 5.3.12/5.4.2 do not fix all variations of the CGI issues described in CVE-2012-1823. It has also come to our attention that some sites use an insecure cgiwrapper script to run PHP. These scripts will use instead of "$@" to pass parameters to php-cgi which causes a number of issues. Again, people using mod_php or php-fpm are not affected. One way to address these CGI issues is to reject the request if the query string contains a '-' and no '='. It can be done using Apache's mod_rewrite like this: RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^[^=]*$ RewriteCond… -
PHP 5.3.12 and PHP 5.4.2 Released!
3 May 2012 | 11:00 amThere is a vulnerability in certain CGI-based setups (Apache+mod_php and nginx+php-fpm are not affected) that has gone unnoticed for at least 8 years. Section 7 of the CGI spec states: Some systems support a method for supplying a [sic] array of strings to the CGI script. This is only used in the case of an `indexed' query. This is identified by a "GET" or "HEAD" HTTP request with a URL search string not containing any unencoded "=" characters. So, requests that do not have a "=" in the query string are treated differently from those who do in some… -
DevConf 2012
27 Apr 2012 | 12:20 amDevConf 2012 in Moscow, Russia on Jun 9 - Jun 10 DevConf is the ultimate meeting place for russian-speaking web-developers, combining several language-specific conferences under one roof. This year DevConf will include the following sections: DevConf::PHP(); DevConf::Perl(); DevConf::RoR(); DevConf::Python(); DevConf::Javascript(); Each section will feature several talks from the active contributors/authors of the language. Among the invited speakers are Derick Rethans (XDebug creator), David Soria Parra (active PHP contributor), Andrey Aksyonov (author of Sphinx), Alexander Makarov (one of… -
PHP 5.3.11 And PHP 5.4.1 Released!
26 Apr 2012 | 5:50 amThe PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.11 and PHP 5.4.1. These releases focuses on improving the stability of the current PHP branches with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related. Security Enhancements for both PHP 5.3.11 and PHP 5.4.1: Fixed bug #54374 (Insufficient validating of upload name leading to corrupted $_FILES indices). (CVE-2012-1172). Add open_basedir checks to readline_write_history and readline_read_history. Security Enhancement affecting PHP 5.3.11 only: Fixed bug #61043 (Regression in magic_quotes_gpc fix for CVE-2012-0831).
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SOTC Recent Posts
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Javascript Tutorial - Design for Testability
19 Apr 2012 | 10:31 amIf you've ever built a client/server application, you know how tedious it can be get access to a working server in order to test client functionality. With the right design, however, this is a headache we don't have to experience. This approach was used by our team recently when developing the Facebook game, Tic-Tac-Together, and proved to be quite successful. The root of this design involves encapsulating the communication layer into separate objects, which you should be doing anyway. Putting communication logic directly in your higher-level code is just asking for future maintenance… -
Top 10 jQuery Plugins for Programmers
22 Mar 2012 | 12:17 pmWe all love jQuery. Its a simple fact that it provides powerful tools to get your JavaScript done right. However, one of its most powerful features is its extensiblity, and many developers have taken full advantage of this. This has created plenty of plugins to choose from, and today we are going to look at some of our favorite ones to hit the scene. #10: jQuery UI Site | Demo This is one of the most extensive and flexible JavaScript UI frameworks out there. jQuery UI offers up everything from simple yet fancy buttons to complete accordions and autocompletes. It also has a pretty simple and… -
Pulse v1.0 Released
12 Mar 2012 | 2:04 pmWe've been hard at work and the effort has paid off. As of today, Pulse is ready for the mainstream. We've open-sourced the project and we've chosen the MIT license, which gives devs a lot of flexibility in how they use the framework. There's still a lot of work that needs to get done, like making the website better, more supporting documentation, and definitely some example games, but none of that is needed for you to download and begin using Pulse. Even though it's released, we're nowhere near done with it. We've got an endless backlog of awesome features that we're dying to add, and Pulse… -
Javascript Snippet - Tables and innerHTML
9 Mar 2012 | 9:07 amIn a previous tutorial we showed you how to dynamically add and remove rows from a table. This is a very useful technique, but sometimes you might need to add entire bits of HTML into a table as just a string. In this situation, things can get a little tricky. Let's say you have a table, and you need to insert HTML into it. Either you have a AJAX call that returns a string of HTML, or you just like slapping HTML into a table. Sometimes that's just what you have to do. In the tutorial mentioned above, DOM methods were used to insert rows. While this is the preferred and suggested method, from… -
HTML 5 Canvas Tutorial - Drop Shadows
21 Feb 2012 | 9:15 amWhile working on the Pulse graphics engine I'm learning all kinds of new techniques and tid bits about Canvas. One of the latest things I've been playing around with and working on is creating shadows. This is actually pretty easy with the JavaScript drawing api available for canvas. It actually just takes a few properties set on the canvas context. Before jumping into the code there are a couple of items to note. First, you can selectively apply a shadow by using the save and restore methods on the context. Second, for performance reasons make sure to draw shadows as infrequently as you can.
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Signal vs. Noise
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We're hiring: Help us significantly improve conversion and retention
14 May 2012 | 12:18 pmWe’re looking for another teammate. This time we’re looking for someone who is completely focused on improving conversion and retention. You love moving the needle, one small step at a time. This job is all about seeing untapped potential. Conversion could be financial (get more people to start a trial or complete it – what we consider a “sale”), or outcome-based (inspire people to create more Basecamp projects by showing them creative ways to use Basecamp they never thought of before). Or something else. Retention could be reducing cancellations, or reducing… -
Taking the Pain Out of MySQL Schema Changes
14 May 2012 | 8:53 amA common obstacle we face when releasing new features is making production schema changes in MySQL. Many new features require additional columns or indexes. Running an “ALTER TABLE” in MySQL to add the needed columns and indexes locks the table, hanging the application. We need a better solution. Option 1: Schema Change in Downtime This is the simplest option. Put the application into downtime and perform the schema change. It requires us to have the application down for the duration of the “ALTER TABLE”. We’ve successfully used this option for smaller tables… -
Basecamp in Antarctica
10 May 2012 | 9:39 amWe have customers around the world doing extraordinary things with our software, but Ben Saunders is taking it to a whole new level. Ben and his team are using Basecamp to organize an expedition to the South Pole and back, unsupported and on foot. This is the same journey Captain Robert Scott died trying to achieve 100 years ago, and no one has attempted it since. Ben has been a professional polar explorer for more than 10 years and is one of only three people to complete a solo journey to the North Pole. He will be joined by Alastair Humphreys, who has cycled 46,000 miles around the world,… -
Sortfolio: Going once, going twice...
7 May 2012 | 5:19 pmA year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp. Sortfolio continued to run itself for another year, generating over $200,000 in profit for us during that time. Our paying customer count continues to hover consistently in the 170s, each paying $99/month to be listed as a premium member. The price We’ve put Sortfolio on the clock: We either sell it by… -
VIDEO: Keynote by David from RailsConf 2012 on progress…
1 May 2012 | 2:05 pmKeynote by David from RailsConf 2012 on progress, curiosity, fear, and the danger of easy-bake ovens.
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MapQuest Dev Blog
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MapQuest Attends the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon
16 May 2012 | 9:48 amThis past Friday, I attended an AT&T Mobile App Hackathon and had the pleasure of speaking about the MapQuest APIs in front of some of southern Florida’s top developers, entrepreneurs and other technology enthusiasts. They were a friendly, fantastic group who spent the evening (and well past midnight) forming into teams, collecting their thoughts, and devising a plan for the all-day hackathon event the following day. As with many applications built today, geolocation plays a large role in creating context and relevance, and is considered an expected feature among top apps. With the… -
Updated Flash Samples Explorer and DGLux MapQuest Component
21 Mar 2012 | 9:20 amDevelopers who are using the MapQuest Flash Maps API may have noticed recent changes to the MapQuest Flash Samples Explorer application. The Samples Explorer application is intended to highlight the functionality of the Flash Maps API by providing interactive samples and easily-downloadable source code. Quite a few of the existing samples have been revised to incorporate additional functionality and two new samples have been added: search map and alternate routes. Search Map is a sample that dynamically displays results from the MapQuest Search Web Service based on the extent of the map. -
Updated MapQuest OSM Tiles and More OpenStreetMap Switchovers
1 Mar 2012 | 5:09 pmIs 2012 the year of Open mapping? We’ve been ecstatic to see the energy around OpenStreetMap, and have noticed several applications recently convert to using MapQuest-OSM tiles and other companies like foursquare embrace OpenStreetMap as a foundation of their business. We’re going to dive into two of applications that chose MapQuest Open and examine the process they undertook to reach that decision. First, we’d like to talk about changes we’ve made to our MapQuest-OSM Tiles in order to deliver better, faster and more reliable maps. MapQuest-OSM Tile Changes This week… -
MapQuest Releases Native Mobile Mapping APIs for Android and Apple iOS
8 Feb 2012 | 6:15 amToday we’re excited to announce the production release of our Android Maps API and the beta release of our Apple iOS Maps API. We think you’ll find these as a great alternative to the native Google mapping APIs. Both APIs have been designed as “drop in” replacements for the native Google mapping APIs. To switch simply include our API instead of the native API. We used the same object model as the native API, while of course extending it to add great features such as integrated driving directions plus the ability to use OpenStreetMap data or our licensed datasets. -
Mobile Flash Maps API v7.0.7 released with Dev Girl coverage!
13 Dec 2011 | 9:48 amWe’re excited to announce the latest update to our Mobile Flash Maps API, for both licensed data and open data. What’s new you ask? Primarily two things. First, we overhauled the touch interaction with the map. This includes vast improvement to pinch zoom, as well as the expected defaults of double tap to zoom in and two finger tap to zoom out. The easiest way to check these improvements out are by downloading our Flash Maps API Showcase app in either iTunes or Android Marketplace. If you want to see how it was built, you can download the sample mobile map application…
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A List Apart
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Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point
15 May 2012 | 1:44 pmResponsible responsive design demands responsive images—images whose dimensions and file size suit the viewport and bandwidth of the receiving device. As HTML provides no standard element to achieve this purpose, serving responsive images has meant using JavaScript trickery, and accepting that your solution will fail for some users. Then a few months ago, in response to an article here, a W3C Responsive Images Community Group formed—and proposed a simple-to-understand HTML picture element capable of serving responsive images. The group even delivered picture functionality to older… -
Application Cache is a Douchebag
8 May 2012 | 7:00 amWe’re better connected than we’ve ever been, but we’re not always connected. ApplicationCache lets users interact with their data even when they're offline, but with great power come great gotchas. For instance, files always come from the ApplicationCache, even when the user is online. Oh, and in certain circumstances, a browser won't know that that the online content has changed — causing the user to keep getting old content. And, oh yes, depending on how you cache your resources, non-cached resources may not load even when the user is online. Lanyrd’s Jake Archibald illuminates… -
Say No to Faux Bold
8 May 2012 | 6:59 amBrowsers can do terrible things to type. If text is styled as bold or italic and the typeface family does not include a bold or italic font, browsers will compensate by trying to create bold and italic styles themselves. The results are an awkward mimicry of real type design, and can be especially atrocious with web fonts. Adobe’s Alan Stearns shares quick tips and techniques to ensure that your @font-face rules match the weight and styles of the fonts, and that you have a @font-face rule for every style your content uses. If you’re taking the time to choose a beautiful web font for your… -
Content Modelling: A Master Skill
24 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amThe content model is one of the most important content strategy tools at your disposal. It allows you to represent content in a way that translates the intention, stakeholder needs, and functional requirements from the user experience design into something that can be built by developers implementing a CMS. A good content model helps ensure that your content vision will become a reality. Lovinger explains how to craft a strong content model and use it to foster communication and align efforts between the UX design, editorial, and technical team members on your project. -
Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist
24 Apr 2012 | 7:59 amWhat does content strategy mastery look like? As in any field, it comes down to having master skills and knowing when to apply them. While there are different styles of content strategy (from an editorial and messaging focus to a technical and structural focus), the master content strategist must work with content from all angles: messaging architecture and messaging platforms; content missions and content management. Above all, she must advocate for multiple constituents, including end users, business users, stakeholders, and the content vision itself. Rachel Lovinger shares the skills that…
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Ruby News
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Ruby 1.9.2-p320 is released
21 Apr 2012 | 6:21 pmRuby 1.9.2-p320 is released.This release include Security Fix for RubyGems: SSL server verification failure for remote repository. And many bugs are fixed in this release. Security Fix for RubyGems: SSL server verification failure for remote repositoryThis release includes two security fixes in RubyGems. Turn on verification of server SSL certs Disallow redirects from https to http Users who uses https source in .gemrc or /etc/gemrc are encouraged to upgrade to 1.9.2-p320 or 1.9.3-p194.Following is excerpted from RubyGems 1.8.23 release note [1]."This release increases the security used when… -
Ruby 1.9.3-p194 is released
19 Apr 2012 | 10:19 pmRuby 1.9.3-p194 is released.This release include Security Fix for RubyGems: SSL server verification failure for remote repository. And many bugs are fixed in this release. Security Fix for RubyGems: SSL server verification failure for remote repositoryThis release includes two security fixes in RubyGems. Turn on verification of server SSL certs Disallow redirects from https to http Users who uses https source in .gemrc or /etc/gemrc are encouraged to upgrade to 1.9.3-p194.Following is excerpted from RubyGems 1.8.23 release note [1]."This release increases the security used when RubyGems is… -
RubyTeach 2012
10 Apr 2012 | 1:53 pmVancouver, BC May 29th to 31st, 2012 RubyTeach is part of DevTeach and it offer 3 days of training between May 29th and May 31st. A total of 11 sessions on Ruby and over 30 sessions on Web Development (jQuery, HTML5, CSS) and Agile. The best experts in the industry are presenting their knowledge and expertise. This is your chance to learn and network with the experts. Learn more… -
Matz Earns the FSF's 2011 Free Software Award
29 Mar 2012 | 8:55 amThe Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. This year, it was given to Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), the creator of the Ruby programming language. Matz has worked on GNU, Ruby, and other free software for over 20 years… Read the full article. -
Ruby 1.9.3-p125 is released
16 Feb 2012 | 6:03 amRuby 1.9.3-p125 is released. This release include a security fixes of the Ruby OpenSSL extension. And many bugs are fixed in this release. == Fixes Fix for Ruby OpenSSL module: Allow "0/n splitting" as a prevention for the TLS BEAST attack Fixed: LLVM/clang support [Bug #5076] Fixed: GCC 4.7 support [Bug #5851] other bug fixes See tickets and ChangeLog for details. == Downloads NOTE: Repackaged on 2012-02-17 02:04:00 UTC to fix [Bug #6040]. http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.bz2 SIZE: 9733962 bytes MD5: 702529a7f8417ed79f628b77d8061aa5 SHA256:…
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Scott Hanselman
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The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't make sense anymore
9 May 2012 | 4:42 pmThe Floppy Disk Icon means "save" for a whole generation of people who have never seen one. — Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 9, 2012 What happens when all the things we based our icons on don't exist anymore? Do they just become, ahem, iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery? Floppy Disk - Save Save? Save where? You know, down there. Adding the Arrow to the 3.5" floppy makes me smile. Is it pointing to under my desk? What's a floppy? Why not a USB key? Maybe a cloud icon? That will be easy since there is only One Cloud Icon in the world. Radio Buttons - Mutually Exclusive… -
The Nerd Parent's Guide: When and how to introduce your kids to Star Wars
7 May 2012 | 6:19 pmLet me start by saying I'm not a big Star Wars guy. I enjoyed the films when I was growing up (I think I saw the original (Ep. 4 ANH) in 1980 along with Empire Strikes Back in 1980) but I haven't thought much about them since. That said, I appreciate the films and I like movies in general. Watching movies with my kids (usually Pixar movies) have brought us a lot of shared joy as a family. However, Star Wars are fun and classics and we wanted to share them with our kids in a way that worked for everyone given their age and our parenting style. TL;DR Version Show Star Wars to your kids… -
Introducing Workspace Reloader - A Visual Studio AddIn to save your open files across project reloads
2 May 2012 | 1:39 amA while back my buddy Sam Saffron (from Stack Overflow and Mini Profiler) complained to me on Skype that he was finding it very irritating that every time he updated his project outside of Visual Studio he would be prompted to "Reload Project" and would lose all his open files because Visual Studio would close them. This apparently is becoming kind of an issue at Stack Overflow. Since they use distributed source control and often have a dozen or more folks all coding inside the same project they are integrating all the time. They'll be deep into something, update their project to… -
Back to Basics: Moving beyond for, if and switch
26 Apr 2012 | 2:59 pmI visit a lot of customers and look at a lot of code. I also worked with a number of large production code bases in my previous jobs and I see a lot of ifs, fors and switches. I see loops inside of loops with ifs inside them, all doing various transformations of data from one form to another. I see strings getting parsed to pull bits of data out in ways that are easy to say in English but take 100 lines to say in code. Should they? When we are just getting started programming we learn about if first, then for, then the much abused switch statement. I saw this little snippet on Miguel's blog a… -
A world of pretty cloud drive icons - SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, BitBucket and GitHub
24 Apr 2012 | 12:50 pmToday Google Drive and Windows SkyDrive came out with clients for Windows and Mac. There's also SkyDrive apps for Windows Phone, iPhone, or iPad and OneNote apps that sync to SkyDrive for Windows Phone, Android,iPhone, or iPad. I'm a paying DropBox customer myself with over 60 gigs in there. I also use BitBucket and GitHub for source code. I also like tidy and pretty icons, for folders, programs and external drives. I made custom icons for the Visual Studio Command prompt as well as Visual Studio in PowerShell. I put all these new cloud folders as well as my GitHub and BitBucket folders…
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The Register
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Pirate Bay struggling to get on feet after DDoS to the knee
16 May 2012 | 1:29 pmAnonymous says 'not us, dude' The Pirate Bay claimed to be “getting back up! Stronger than ever!” this evening after crumpling under a DDoS attack for most of today.… -
UK.gov's G-Cloud 2.0 pushes back launch date
16 May 2012 | 1:03 pmPublic sector IT bazaar turns to open source The launch of the second version of the UK government’s IT shopping catalogue G-Cloud has slipped to the end of spring.… -
Nvidia shows off superjuiced Kepler GPU
16 May 2012 | 12:27 pmFrom workhouse to racehorse HPC blog There were quite a few surprises in today’s GTC12 keynote by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang.… -
Mobile fee dodgers will get away with enough cash to bail out Greece
16 May 2012 | 12:01 pmUS code paranoia lets cash trickle through cracks Mobile customers are dodging fees running to hundreds of billions of dollars by a combination of accident and design – both facilitated by badly designed billing systems which aren't up to the task. However, US paranoia plays its part too.… -
Samsung and SK Hynix shares slide on Apple snub
16 May 2012 | 11:32 amMemory-makers hurt by losing contract to bankrupt Elpida Shares in Samsung have fallen over 6 per cent on news that Apple preferred to place huge chip orders with bankrupt firm Elpida Memory.…
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pmarca
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The CEO’s Weekly Checklist
14 May 2012 | 3:23 pmIn his latest blog post, my partner Scott Weiss offers a few suggestions for what a CEO should be doing on top of his or her expected responsibilities. You can read his checklist here. Filed under: Uncategorized -
Our Philanthropic Commitment
25 Apr 2012 | 3:45 pmWe are delighted to announce that the six General Partners of Andreessen Horowitz, with our families, are all committing to donate at least half of all income from our venture capital careers to philanthropic causes during our lifetimes. The reason is simple. We are fortunate to work with some of the best entrepreneurs and technologists in the world, and in the process help create great and valuable companies. That activity, done well over decades, can generate a lot of money that can then be productively deployed philanthropically back into the society that makes it all possible. We… -
A Clarification With Respect to Yahoo
9 Dec 2011 | 11:57 amOver the last several weeks, there have been erroneous reports in the press that my partner Jeff Jordan and/or I might become an operating executive of Yahoo in some capacity. To be crystal clear, neither Jeff, nor I, nor any of our partners at Andreessen Horowitz, are in the running for, or would accept, any operating role at Yahoo, including CEO, acting CEO, chairman, or executive chairman. Jeff and I have high regard for Yahoo, but we are fully committed to our day jobs as general partners at Andreessen Horowitz and board members of our portfolio companies. Filed under: Uncategorized -
Merging Glam and Ning
20 Sep 2011 | 6:01 pmToday, my company Ning, where I serve as chairman and cofounder, is announcing that it has agreed to merge into Glam Media. In this post, I’d like to briefly explain the whats and whys, and to thank a lot of people who have worked very hard to get us to this point. Ning is my third company, founded several years ago by Gina Bianchini and myself, and run for the last couple years by my close friend and colleague Jason Rosenthal. Over the last two years, Jason and his team have brilliantly executed a dramatic transformation of the company and today Ning hosts over 100,000 social… -
Primer for Hiring Execs
14 Oct 2010 | 1:48 pmAndreessen Horowitz prefers funding companies whose CEO is a co-founder. We also prefer founders who are technical. Put the two together, and you often have a CEO who has to hire executives into roles (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support, finance) she has never done before. How in the world do you interview and recruit someone for a role you’ve never done before? Start with Ben’s latest blog post “Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Someone Good?“. Filed under: Business, Startups
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Rajesh Setty » Blog
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9 Ways to Ensure that You Don’t Get Good Help
11 May 2012 | 1:39 pmHere are 9 ways to ensure that you DON’T get good help: 1. You Feel entitled to receive help This is the number one reason most people go wrong. Nobody is entitled for anything. An exception may be with members of your circle of love but other than that you got to earn your way into getting good help. 2. Your timing is Wrong Mediocre help is everywhere and good help will ALWAYS be scarce. This means people who can provide good help are busy. Sometimes they are VERY busy. You catch them on those times and your chances will be slim. 3. You are an opportunity cost rather than an… -
The 110% Question
10 May 2012 | 1:04 pmGiving your 110% to something or the proverbial “walking the extra mile” is generally good. There is one dilemma that comes with it. If you don’t notice it, you may end up putting your energy in the wrong place. The Wrong Question The dilemma or the catch is in situations where you have to stretch and go beyond the call of duty. Let’s take a hypothetical situation where you are bringing your 110% into the game. Unfortunately, the situation is such that your 110% is not sufficient to make things happen. It requires a lot more from you. One option is that you keep giving… -
The curious case of “Show, Not Tell”
10 May 2012 | 1:22 am“Show, not tell” is something that works every time like a charm. This is simply because the burden of proof is no longer in question once you show. Even people who just “tell” know that “show, not tell” is better. The Articulate Incapable A class of people who are “articulate incapable” are creating a new kind of problem for everyone else. Once someone has had a bad experience with one or more “articulate incapable” people, they suspect everyone else. Because they don’t know whether you belong to the class of “articulate… -
Burden for Some or Blessing for Many?
9 May 2012 | 1:59 amAsk anyone a simple question: Do you want to be a 1) burden for some OR 2) blessing for many Rarely will anybody pick the option 1. Nobody wants to be a burden for some. Besides, it would be politically incorrect to pick that choice, don’t you think? So, it is safe to assume that 99.9% of the people will pick option 2. They want to be a blessing for many. In other words, intention-wise, we are all doing good. Majority of the people want to change the world for the better. Then, why do you think we have so many problems? The answer is in the old adage – “knowing is not doing… -
My job is done!
7 May 2012 | 9:18 pmThe real problem is not with the problem who don’t get their job done. They will be weeded out sooner than later. The problem comes when people just get their job done AND nothing else, consistently and over a long period of time. Think about it. It seems like unfair to complain about people who get their job done. Why blame them? The birth of mediocrity Mediocrity is not meeting the standards expected. That would be non-performance. Mediocrity takes birth when people choose to do JUST what is required of them. If everyone in a department, takes that approach, the choreographer (the…
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Jon Udell
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Concerned about smart meter privacy? Richard Stallman is looking for someone to lead the charge.
15 May 2012 | 9:36 amMy recent column on smart meters came to the attention of Richard Stallman, who worries about the privacy and surveillance issues I alluded to. In the course of our email discussion a question came up that I’d like to answer but can’t. When a smart meter is utility-owned, rather than DIY like mine, do any of the providers offer choice with respect to the granularity of the data feed that’s phoned home? In theory it would be possible to opt out of a realtime feed and only use the meter to automate the monthly accounting that’s currently still done by a visiting person. -
Why not tip for excellent online customer service?
14 May 2012 | 7:14 amA couple of weeks ago all the posts here became invisible. There didn’t seem to be anything I could have done wrong to cause that, so I wrote to the support team at WordPress.com about it. I got a prompt acknowledgement from Erica V. that something was, indeed, wrong. Soon after that she confirmed that the problem was fixed. That left me feeling pretty good about WordPress.com. It’s a free service, after all, I’m only a customer in a rather minimal way: I pay for domain name redirection and for the ability to edit my CSS file. Yet the customer service I received was… -
Hours, days, who’s counting?
9 May 2012 | 3:06 pmYesterday’s post contains an error so embarrassing that I was briefly tempted to yank the whole thing. But of course That Would Be Wrong. What’s more, the error supports the larger point I was trying to make before I derailed myself. I was talking about Bret Victor’s notion of explorable explanations, which he illustrates on a page called Ten Brighter Ideas. I’d looked at it before, but when I revisited it yesterday I had trouble believing that the following claim could be true: If every US household replaced 1 incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb,… -
Meta-tools for exploring explanations
8 May 2012 | 5:39 pmAt the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in January, Bret Victor gave a brilliant presentation that continues to resonate in the technical community. No programmer could fail to be inspired by Bret’s vision, which he compellingly demonstrated, of a system that makes software abstractions visual, concrete, and directly manipulable. Among the inspired were Eric Maupin and Chris Granger, both of whom quickly came up with their own implementations — in C# and ClojureScript — of the ideas Bret Victor had fleshed out in JavaScript. Others imagined what the… -
Searching for Andy: an Ob-Platte puzzle
1 May 2012 | 9:49 amIn Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Douglas Hofstadter (and a crew of talented students) argue that analogy-making is a core characteristic of human intelligence. The book is full of delightful puzzles. One class of puzzle goes like this: What is the Ob of Nebraska? (The Platte. Hence the name for these: Ob-Platte puzzles) What is the Newark of Delaware? What is the Gettysburg of Hawaii? The authors write: If one were to ask, “What is the Atlantic City of France?”, a large number of people would undoubtedly answer “Monaco”, even knowing full well that Monaco is…
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Rands In Repose
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Please Learn to Write
16 May 2012 | 11:19 amThere's been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I don't have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff Atwood's piece because, well, I agree that it's pretty silly to think that the world is going to be a better place if the Mayor of New York City learns how to code. I agree with Atwood that his valuable time would be better spent elsewhere. I believe there are essential skills you learn as an engineer who codes. It teaches you how to structure your thinking, and the process looks something like this: I have this thing I want to to… -
Two Universes
9 May 2012 | 1:09 amYou wake up in a small, enclosed glass cube. There's a bed, a toilet, a radio playing music, and other bare essentials, but no door. You have no idea why you are here or what's going on. After a few minutes of looking around your tiny space, a calm yet creepy electronic voice begins speaking. The voice explains that you're part of a testing program, and a moment later a door-sized, orange-tinged portal opens. Portal, developed by Valve Software in 2007, is a first-person puzzle-platform game where you're running around with a gun that shoots... doors. The handheld Portal gun allows you to… -
10 Years
22 Apr 2012 | 2:53 pmApril 2012 represents the 10th anniversary of Rands in Repose. I don't normally celebrate these occasions, but serendipity has given me something to talk about. As you might have noticed, I've recently made a few design changes to the site. I'm honored to participate in Hoefler & Frere-Jones private beta for their forthcoming web fonts offering. Frequent readers will appreciate and understand the use of my beloved Sentinel for headlines as well as the revised header, but I believe the bigger impact is where I hope you spend most of your time - the body typeface. H&FJ's screen version… -
Hacking is Important
12 Mar 2012 | 8:56 pmBack in the early 90s, Borland International was the place to be an engineer. Coming off the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland was the third largest software company, but, more importantly, it was a legitimate competitor to Microsoft. Philippe Kahn, the CEO at the time, was fond of motorcycles, saxophones, and brash statements at all-hands meetings: "We're barbarians, not bureaucrats!" At the time, Kahn was not only navigating the integration of Ashton-Tate, he was in the midst of moving the product suite from DOS to Windows. All the products were complete object-oriented rewrites and they… -
A Dependable iPad
3 Mar 2012 | 3:32 pmApple is maintaining a difficult balance with the iPhone and the iPad. On one end, they appear to want to release each product yearly. The first four iPhones were either announced or arrived in early June, until the iPhone 4S was announced in early October with initial shipments two weeks later. So far the iPad debuts in the March/April time frame. This yearly cadence mirrors the fashion industry, where each year something new and beautiful to covet is introduced. However, these devices are expensive. In the US, the carrier supported 32GB iPhone 4S is currently $299 and the 32GB iPad 2 is…
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Think Vitamin
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Free Video: iOS Blocks and Categories
15 May 2012 | 10:42 amIn this 5:30 minute video, you will learn that a category is used to define additional methods of an existing class without subclassing. And blocks are simply a block of executable code that have access to local variables and can be stored or passed around. This video is the first video in the iOS Blocks and Categories badge from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos. The entire Blocks and Categories badge consists of the following videos: Categories Blocks – Part 1 Blocks – Part 2 Other topics on Treehouse include topics like …… -
Free Video: iOS Property Lists
30 Apr 2012 | 9:01 amIn this 6:46 minute video, you’ll learn about property lists also known as a “plist”, a structured data representation used as a convenient way to store, organize, and access standard types of data. This video is the first video in the iOS – App Settings badge from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos. The entire iOS Tutorial – App Settings: Property List consists of the following videos: Property List Settings Bundle NSUserDefaults Setup Defaults Change Notification Other topics on Treehouse include topics like …… -
Free Video: Ruby Hashes
25 Apr 2012 | 1:45 pmIn this 7:18 minute video, you’ll learn what hashes are, how they work in Ruby, and how to create them yourself. This video is the first video in the Ruby Hashes badge from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos. The entire Ruby Arrays badge consists of the following videos: Creating Hashes Keys and Values Working With Hashes Iteration Enumerable Other topics on Treehouse include topics like … Accessibility HTML Website Basics CSS3 Aesthetic Foundations HTML5 iOS Development JavaScript Responsive Web Design Ruby New videos are added regularly,… -
Tony Hsieh and Zach Ware of Zappos – Speaking at FILive!
18 Apr 2012 | 10:49 amWe have an amazing late addition to our Future Insights Live show taking place in Vegas in less than 2 weeks time…. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and Lead Developer, Zach Ware - will be joining us on stage for a special extended Keynote! That’s right – the infamous Vegas company will be joining us to discuss The City As A Startup. Zappos are helping accelerate community, learning, and serendipity in downtown Vegas to generate productivity, innovation, and happiness and will share their insights with you. If you’d like to see Tony and Zach on stage, they’ll be speaking on… -
Free Video: Building Accessible Charts
11 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amIn this 6 minute video, you’ll learn how to create a simple bar graph from scratch by using HTML and CSS. This bar graph is made with screen readers in mind, and doesn’t make use of images or browser plugins. This video is the third video in the Accessibility: Web Apps badge from Treehouse, a high-quality video training site with hundreds of short videos. The entire Accessibility: Web Apps badge consists of the following videos: Forms Tables Charts and Graphs Other topics on Treehouse include topics like … Accessibility HTML Website Basics CSS3 Aesthetic Foundations HTML5…
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ScottGu's Blog
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Great Free Course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps With EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery
20 Apr 2012 | 12:55 amPluralsight has developed a great training course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps with EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery. It is presented by the most excellent Dan Wahlin, and is really comprehensive. Details of the course outline can be found here. Free 1-Month Subscription to the Course Pluralsight is offering a special promotion that allows you to get a free 1-month subscription to watch the above course as many time as you want at no cost. There is no obligation to buy anything at the end of the offer and you don’t need to supply a credit card in order to take part in it. -
Announcing Windows Azure Media Services
16 Apr 2012 | 9:26 amI'm excited to share news about a great new cloud capability we are announcing today - Windows Azure Media Services. Windows Azure Media Services Windows Azure Media Services is a cloud-based PaaS solution that enables you to efficiently build and deliver media solutions to customers. It offers a bunch of ready-to-use services that enable the fast ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming (both live and on-demand) of video. It also integrates and exposes services provided by industry leading partners – enabling an incredibly deep media stack of… -
April 14th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API and Visual Studio
14 Apr 2012 | 9:19 pmHere is the latest in my link-listing blog series: ASP.NET Easily overlooked features in VS 11 Express for Web: Good post by Scott Hanselman that highlights a bunch of easily overlooked improvements that are coming to VS 11 (and specifically the free express editions) for web development: unit testing, browser chooser/launcher, IIS Express, CSS Color Picker, Image Preview in Solution Explorer and more. Get Started with ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms: Good 5-part tutorial that walks-through building an application using ASP.NET Web Forms and highlights some of the nice improvements coming with ASP.NET… -
“Unplugged” LIDNUG online talk with me on Monday (April 16th)
14 Apr 2012 | 2:45 pmApril 16th Update: You can listen to an audio version of the talk I did online here This coming Monday (April 16th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session. The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time). I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun. Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting. We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics. Any topic or question is fair game. You can learn more and register to attend the online… -
ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source
27 Mar 2012 | 7:02 pmMicrosoft has made the source code of ASP.NET MVC available under an open source license since the first V1 release. We’ve also integrated a number of great open source technologies into the product, and now ship jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, jQuery Validation, Modernizr.js, NuGet, Knockout.js and JSON.NET as part of it. I’m very excited to announce today that we will also release the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor) under an open source license (Apache 2.0), and that we will increase the development transparency of all three projects by hosting their…
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Perlbuzz
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Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-05-14
14 May 2012 | 2:20 pmThese links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. YAPC::NA will be livestreamed in real-time for free (blog.yapcna.org) Introduction to how to do Perl one-liners (catonmat.net) NYTProf, File IO, and an Optimization Gone Awry (modernperlbooks.com) Reddit API for Perl (blogs.perl.org) Lots of Perl authors at YAPC::NA this year (blog.yapcna.org) Review of "Programming Perl, 4th ed." (i-programmer.info) Don't use Cache::Memcached for UTF8 strings (domm.plix.at) PerlGSL, interfaces to the GNU Scientific Library… -
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-05-07
7 May 2012 | 9:26 amThese links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Always encode and decode Unicode at the edges of your program (perl.com) mod_perl 2.0.6 released (blogs.perl.org) Comments are open on the Perl Foundation's latest grant proposals (news.perlfoundation.org) Creating weekly schedule charts with HTML::Template (blog.nu42.com) Playing music with Audio::Beep (blog.und3f.com) Tad McClellan has passed away (blogs.perl.org) Coding before having expert-level understanding is OK (modernperlbooks.com) -
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-04-30
30 Apr 2012 | 12:45 pmThese links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. In case you have a burning need to use ಠ_ಠ for warnings/errors: (metacpan.org) Expanded the "More Tools" page of the ack website: (betterthangrep.com) Help your users by including alternatives for them to choose from! YAPC::NA is NOT sold out. Still 30 tickets left. Sign up now! (blog.yapcna.org) Before you send a patch, send an email (petdance.com) For want of a newline (blogs.perl.org) Use the command "perldoc -q whatever" to search the Perl FAQ for… -
Before you write a patch, write an email
27 Apr 2012 | 9:00 am(Originally posted to my non-Perl blog) I often get surprise patches in my projects from people I’ve never heard from. I’m not talking about things like fixing typos, or fixing a bug in the bug tracker. I’m talking about new features, handed over fully-formed. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes the case that the patch doesn’t fit the project, or where the project is going. I feel bad turning down these changes, but it’s what I have to do. Sometimes it feels like they’re trying to do their best to make the patch a surprise, sort of like working hard to buy… -
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-04-23
23 Apr 2012 | 10:14 amThese links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. User-friendly CLI apps with MooseX::App (blogs.perl.org) An age report for git repos (blog.urth.org) Sane time zone management in PostgreSQL (justatheory.com) Integrating Perl with the nginx web server (blogs.perl.org) The price of cleverness (YAML is not safe) (blogs.perl.org) By the way, all Perlbuzz tweets are from the command line via @ttytter, a Perl 5 Twitter client Expanded the "More Tools" page of the ack website: (betterthangrep.com) Help your users by…
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Official jQuery Blog
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Just Added: Training at SF jQuery Conference!
3 May 2012 | 7:03 pmIn response to the flood of requests and emails, and our original promise to work on this, we’ve got an announcement: we’ve added a single day Beginner/Intermediate training right before the San Francisco jQuery Conference :) Tickets are on sale now (left side, below the fold). The training will be provided by our friends at Bocoup, and hosted by the ever-generous folks at Microsoft. Here’s a snippet of what Trainers Ben Alman and Rebecca Murphey will be covering: At Bocoup’s intermediate one-day jQuery training, you’ll work with jQuery veterans to build a foundation… -
Getting Touchy About Patents
10 Apr 2012 | 2:07 pmTouch events have become a hot topic for web developers as more and more companies move into the mobile space. Most of us know that touch events support single and multi-touch tracking. Some of us know the trickiness of working with touch and mouse at the same time. Fewer know that there are multiple touch event models, and even fewer have tried to support multiple models at the same time. I’d like to talk about where we are today, how we got here, and the potential problems we may face in the future. A Brief History Back in 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, and with it came touch events. -
Bowling for jQuery – April 2012, Washington, D.C.
26 Mar 2012 | 11:00 amThe jQuery team is going bowling and we’d love to have you join us! We’ll be spending the evening of Friday, April 13th at King Pinz in Leesburg, VA, a bit outside of Washington, DC. We’ll have a private room with 6 lanes from 6 to 10 PM. The night will feature unlimited bowling, dinner, desserts, drinks, and billiards. There’s even a cigar bar, if you’re into that! Very limited space – get your ticket fast. Bowling Private room with 6 lanes Unlimited bowling (shoe rental included) for 4 hours Cozy couches with cocktail tables King Pinz: Photos Private… -
jQuery 1.7.2 Released
21 Mar 2012 | 4:13 pmjQuery 1.7.2 is looking good! The release candidate went smoothly so we’ve made only one small change and are releasing it to your eager hands today. You can get the oven-fresh code from the jQuery CDN now, with Google and Microsoft CDNs soon to follow: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.min.js (minified, production) http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.js (unminified, debug) Note: If you’re using jQuery Mobile, please use jQuery 1.7.2 only with jQuery Mobile 1.1. For previous versions of jQuery Mobile, stay with jQuery core 1.7.1 or earlier. You can use the bug tracker to report… -
Announcing the 2012 San Francisco jQuery Conference!
20 Mar 2012 | 11:40 amIt’s that time of year again…time to talk about the next jQuery Conference! Mark your calendars for June 28th and 29th. By popular demand, the next jQuery Conference will be in San Francisco proper (as opposed to Mountain View), at the fantastic UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center. If you haven’t been to an event there before, some highlights: Pretty much the best conference wifi we’ve ever worked with Pretty much the best conference food we’ve ever eaten Free flowing coffee, sodas and drinks all day long Great space, with comfy seating, great AV, parking,…
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Channel 9
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Stephan T. Lavavej: Core C++, 1 of n
16 May 2012 | 9:21 amStephan T. Lavavej, aka STL, is back on C9! This time, STL will take us on a journey of discovery within the exciting world of Core C++. We know lots of folks are either coming back to C++, coming to C++, or have never left C++. This lecture series, in n parts, is for all of you! Only STL can make that work (novice, intermediate, and advanced all bundled together and presented in a way only STL can do.) Thank you, STL. We're so delighted to have you back!In part 1, STL focuses on Name Lookup, which is a surprisingly complex process.Remember Herb… -
Ping 141: The new Bing, Disney Kinect, Soundwave, 360's on sale
15 May 2012 | 10:30 amPaul and Laura sit down, chat, reflect on the past, wax poetic, dig deep and roll with the punches while they discuss all this and more:The new Bing! [06:14]Disney Kinect titles & Make a Wish [02:25]Microsoft Soundwave [11:40]360's for cheap [16:00] -
Countdown to TechEd Europe 2012: The Center of IT
14 May 2012 | 4:13 pmGet a glimpse at what it is like to be at the Center of IT this June in Amsterdam! One of the top reasons delegates attend TechEd Europe is the networking opportunities. Denise (@teched_europe) stops by to talk about some of the networking opportunities you will have at this year's event: the Delegate Party at the Amsterdam ArenA on Wednesday 27 June and in the Connect Lounge with Channel 9 Live, PASS, the MVP Program, Microsoft Certification, INETA, GITCA and the Server and Cloud Community Ninjas.Register for the event Browse the great content and build your schedule online or… -
Dare Obasanjo: SkyDrive - Personal Storage in the Cloud
14 May 2012 | 11:00 amIt's been way too long since Dare Obasanjo (of RSS Bandit and Carnage4Life fame) has appeared on C9. The last time was several years ago in an interview conducted by me and Scoble on a summer day outside of building 35 on the main MS campus in Redmond. What's Dare been up to since we last spoke? Turns out, quite a bit Dare works on the Live SDK team. They recently shipped the SkyDrive API. If you're not familiar with SkyDrive, it's a cloud-based personal file storage service, allowing users access to any file, anytime, anywhere... (we talk about what exactly that means and how it… -
Project Detroit: An Overview
14 May 2012 | 11:00 amIn this article, we will give an overview of the technical side of Project Detroit, the Microsoft-West Coast Custom Mustang creation. If you're not already familiar with this project, you can find more information here. Key Design DecisionsIt’s important to keep in mind that this car was built for a TV show with a set schedule. As a result, there are a number of unique design decisions that came into play.ScheduleWorking backwards, the reveal for the car was set for Monday November 28, 2011 at the Microsoft Store in Bellevue, Washington. We started the project in early August, which…
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java.net
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Neal Ford - Functional thinking: Functional design patterns, Part 3
15 May 2012 | 10:37 pmhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ft12/index.html?ca=drs- Neal Ford presents Functional thinking: Functional design patterns, Part 3: This Functional thinking installment continues my investigation of alternate, functional solutions to Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns. In this article, I investigate the least understood but most powerful of those patterns: Interpreter... Community: General -
John Clingan: SecuritEE in the Cloud
15 May 2012 | 10:27 pmhttps://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/entry/securitee_in_the_cloud John Clingan recommends SecuritEE in the Cloud: Java EE 7 and the Cloud theme continue to move full steam ahead. In a PaaS environment where infrastructure is shared and configuration tends to be split between the PaaS Provider (vendor or IT) and the PaaS user, security requires additional flexibility... Community: Java Enterprise -
Arun Gupta - JSON-P: Java API for JSON Processing (TOTD #178)
15 May 2012 | 10:19 pmhttps://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/entry/json_p_java_api_for Arun Gupta offers JSON-P: Java API for JSON Processing (TOTD #178): JSR 353 is Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P) and will define an API to process (e.g. parse, generate, transform, and query) JSON. This JSR will be delivered as part of Java EE 7. The API will allow to produce and consume JSON in a streaming fashion... Community: Java Enterprise -
Jean-Francois Arcand: Writing Portable HTML5 Server Side Events Applications using the Atmosphere Framework
14 May 2012 | 10:59 pmhttp://jfarcand.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/writing-portable-html5-server-side-evens-application-using-the-atmosphere-framework/ Jean-Francois Arcand demonstrates Writing Portable HTML5 Server Side Events Applications using the Atmosphere Framework: The Atmosphere Framework easily allow the creation of HTML5 Server Side Events (SSE). Better, any existing Servlet based application can add SSE support without any changes to their existing application. HTML5 Server Side Events (SSE) are getting more and more adopted and... Community: Java Enterprise -
Arun Gupta: Java Day, Istanbul, May 2012 Trip Report
14 May 2012 | 10:54 pmhttps://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/entry/java_day_istanbul_may_2012 Arun Gupta shares Java Day, Istanbul, May 2012 Trip Report: About 120+ attendees at Java Day, Istanbul learned about Java EE 6/7 earlier today. The Java track had about 100 attendees during most of the day. I gave 4 sessions...The attendees were generally quiet but the hands-on session had some interesting conversations around Java EE 6 usage... Community: Java Enterprise
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The Daily WTF
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Long Distance
15 May 2012 | 8:00 amLawrence's employer had heard that this newfangled "Desktop PC" could reduce their IT costs, and they wanted in on it. It was the mid 80s, and at the time, their plants scattered all over Alabama connected to a central mainframe via dumb terminals connected over very expensive leased lines. It was time to upgrade, and Lawrence wasn't in charge of it. He didn't get called in until things went wrong. "This new PC system is really slow," he was told while on a plant tour. That didn't sound likely- the PCs were running blisteringly fast 4.77MHz, 8088 CPUs with 16Kb of RAM, and since someone had… -
Coded Smorgasbord: FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL and More
14 May 2012 | 8:00 am"We're had been using a manufacturer's web service, but started getting errors all of a sudden," wrote Peter Lindgren. "Something has really, really failed." <StatusCode>InternalServerError</StatusCode> <StatusDescription>Internal Server Error</StatusDescription> <WebHeaders> <X-Backside-Transport>FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL</X-Backside-Transport> </WebHeaders> "Fortunately, a short time later, it started working again with this message." <StatusCode>OK</StatusCode>… -
Error'd: Squared Interior Design
11 May 2012 | 8:00 am"I found this ad for an interior design company," wrote Wouter, "they probably do a lot of rectangular designs." "How am I supposed to troubleshoot this?" wonders Jeff Mitchell. "I'm not really sure what happened here, but I had to use Chrome's developer tools to hack my birthdate into the form so I could submit it," writes Dave. "I need this form to renew my immigration documents," writes Jack Nathan, "what do i do now?!?" "I found this ad for an interior design company," wrote Wouter,… -
CodeSOD: Epoch Billing System
10 May 2012 | 8:00 amEverybody in the IT department was quite happy -- even a little surprised -- with how well the outsourced project to replace the legacy billing system was progressing. Well, actually, the project managers weren't all that surprised. Over the past four months, they'd pumped out reams of specs and design documents, often boasting that their level of planning hadn't been seen since the Apollo missions. So, for them, the fact that everything was turning out as designed spoke volumes about the success of their planning and processes. New Billing Code Jeff and the other developers who were stuck… -
The Online Ordering System
8 May 2012 | 9:30 amLocal businesses aren't exactly known for their web savviness or IT prowess. And for the most part, that's just fine. You'd be better off judging a prospective attorney on the suit he wears rather than the website he maintains, as that at least has some tangential relationship to practicing law. But usually, you'd just go with whomever a trusted colleague recommended, anyway. For restaurants however, this is quickly changing. With smartphones becoming the norm, many people will use the web to discover the restaurants around them, see what menus they have, and get a general vibe for the place.
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The Old New Thing
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Sure, we do that: Context menu edition
16 May 2012 | 9:00 amA customer reported a problem that occurred only when they installed a particular application. If they uninstalled it, then the problem went away. After installing the application, the "Run As" context menu option stopped working. The customer didn't provide any other details, but we were able to make an educated guess as to what was going on. A common programming error in context menu extensions occurs in extensions which add only one menu item. These extensions ignore the parameters to the IContextMenu::InvokeCommand and simply assume that the only reason the method can be called is if the… -
Microspeak: The parking lot
15 May 2012 | 9:00 amMike Dunn wonders what the Microspeak term parking lot means. I'm not familiar with this term either, and the first document I turned up during my search was a PowerPoint presentation that said "Avoid using Microsoft jargon terms, such as parking lot and dogfood." Yeah, that wasn't much help. From what I can gather, the term parking lot started out as a term used during brainstorming sessions. You've got a bunch of people in a conference room tossing out all sorts of ideas. The traditional way of organizing the ideas is to write each one on a Post-It® note and stick it on the whiteboard. -
What is the historical reason for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000) returning 2?
14 May 2012 | 9:00 amCommenter rs asks, "Why does Windows (historically) return 2 for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000) while Wine returns zero?" The MulDiv function multiplies the first two parameters and divides by the third. Therefore, the mathematically correct answer for MulDiv(1, -0x80000000, -0x80000000) is 1, because a × b ÷ b = a for all nonzero b. So both Windows and Wine get it wrong. I don't know why Wine gets it wrong, but I dug through the archives to figure out what happened to Windows. First, some background. What's the point of the MulDiv function anyway? -
Warum deine Mutter Deutsch spricht
11 May 2012 | 9:00 amThis upcoming Sunday is Mother's Day in the United States. In recognition of the holiday last year, a local church displayed the following message on its message board: "God couldn't be / everywhere / so God made mothers / German speaking." This explains why your mother speaks German. POIDH The church in question has an evening German-language service, and the advertisement for that service juxtaposed against the Jewish proverb produced an unexpected result. -
When you crash on a mov ebx, eax instruction, there aren't too many obvious explanations, so just try what you can
11 May 2012 | 9:00 amA computer running some tests encountered a mysterious crash: eax=ffffffff ebx=00000000 ecx=038ef548 edx=17b060b4 esi=00000000 edi=038ef6f0 eip=14ae1b77 esp=038ef56c ebp=038ef574 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz na po nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010202 FOO!CFrameWnd::GetAssociatedWidget+0x47: 14ae1b77 8bd8 mov ebx,eax A colleague of mine quickly diagnosed the proximate cause. *Something* marked the code page PAGE_READWRITE, instead of PAGE_EXECUTE_READ. I suspect a bug in a driver. FOO is just a victim here. 0:002> !vprot 14ae1b77 BaseAddress: 14ae1000 AllocationBase:…
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Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog
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Common Lisp: The Untold Story
2 May 2012 | 8:13 amCommon Lisp: The Untold Story, by Kent Pitman. A nice paper about the history of my favorite lightweight dynamic language. This paper summarizes a talk given at “Lisp50@OOPSLA,” the 50th Anniversary of Lisp workshop, Monday, October 20, 2008, an event co-located with the OOPSLA’08 in Nashville, TN, in which I offered my personal, subjective account of how I came to be involved with Common Lisp and the Common Lisp standard, and of what I learned from the process. Some of my favorite parts are: How CL was viewed as competition to C++. (Really, what were they thinking?) How CL was a… -
Evaluating the Design of the R Language
24 Apr 2012 | 7:34 pmFrom our recent discussion on R, I thought this paper deserved its own post (ECOOP final version) by Floreal Morandat, Brandon Hill, Leo Osvald, and Jan Vitek; abstract: R is a dynamic language for statistical computing that combines lazy functional features and object-oriented programming. This rather unlikely linguistic cocktail would probably never have been prepared by computer scientists, yet the language has become surprisingly popular. With millions of lines of R code available in repositories, we have an opportunity to evaluate the fundamental choices underlying the R language design. -
Why and How People Use R
20 Apr 2012 | 10:54 pmCompelling lecture by John Cook Abstract: R is a strange, deeply flawed language that nevertheless has an enthusiastic and rapidly growing user base. What about R accounts for its popularity in its niche? What can language designers learn from R's success? -
Iverson's _A Programming Language_
15 Apr 2012 | 2:49 pmOnline. It's never too late to familiarize yourself with the classics. -
Retrospective Thoughts on BitC
23 Mar 2012 | 6:08 pmI believe Dr. Shapiro posts here sometimes, and I'm sure plenty of people here have already seen and read the post, but for those of you who wouldn't otherwise see it: Retrospective Thoughts on BitC answers: What Ever Happened To BitC? In the large, there were four sticking points for the current design: The compilation model. The insufficiency of the current type system w.r.t. by-reference and reference types. The absence of some form of inheritance. The instance coherence problem.
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cssplay.co.uk
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Interactive Marquee for Safari, Chrome and Firefox
13 May 2012 | 7:00 pmA second version of the marquee demo using CSS3 and keyframes to produce an interactive marquee for any length of text. -
Content: image gallery version #2 for the iPad etc..
29 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pmUsing :before/:after and content: together with the general sibling selector to produce a CSS only gallery with minimal code for the iPad etc.. -
CSS ONLY click action multi-level menu suitable for the iPad etc..
26 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pmUsing just CSS to produce a multi-level menu with a click action instead of the normal hover suitable for the iPad. -
CSS Stacked Slideshow #2
24 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pmUsing CSS to produce an animated stack of images, version 2. -
An Anywidth Menu version 6 suitable for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch
18 Apr 2012 | 7:00 pmA simpler version of the Anywidth v5 menu, using the latest techniques and discoveries for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. NO need for a special 'close' button or tab.
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Coding Horror
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Please Don't Learn to Code
15 May 2012 | 4:38 amThe whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this: 10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR" 20 GOTO 10 Fortunately, the odds of this technological flight of fancy… -
This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details
7 May 2012 | 3:41 amFair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count. We've used automated cat feeders since 2007 with great success. (My apologies for the picture quality, but it was 2007, and camera phones were awful.) Feeding your pets using robots might sound impersonal and uncaring. Perhaps it is. But I can't emphasize enough how much of a daily lifestyle… -
Buying Happiness
3 May 2012 | 5:00 pmDespite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point. Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects… -
Trust Me, I'm Lying
1 May 2012 | 8:48 pmWe reflexively instruct our children to always tell the truth. It's even encoded into Boy Scout Law. It's what adults do, isn't it? But do we? Isn't telling the truth too much and too often a bad life strategy – perhaps even dangerous? Is telling children to always tell the truth even itself the whole truth? One of the most thought provoking articles on the topic, and one I keep returning to, year after year, is I Think You're Fat. It's about the Radical Honesty movement, which proposes that adults follow their own advice and always tell the truth. No matter what. The [Radical Honesty]… -
Geekatoo, the Geek Bat-Signal
27 Apr 2012 | 2:15 amTo understand this story, you need to understand that grandchildren are like crack cocaine to grandparents. I'm convinced that if our parents could somehow snort our children up their noses to get a bigger fix, they would. And when your parents live out of state, like ours do, access to the Internet isn't just important. No. It is life threatening. Like Gator in Jungle Fever, grandparents just gotta get their fix of the grandkids every month. And if they don't, if their Internet is broken for any reason, you're going to get an earful via telegraph and facsimile and registered letter until you…
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Martin Fowler
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photostream 25
10 May 2012 | 11:46 amWinterthur, DE -
Retreaded: StandardStoryPoints
10 May 2012 | 11:30 amRetread of post orginally made on 06 Sep 2004 I've heard a couple of questions recently about coming up with a standard story point mechanism for multiple teams using extreme programming's planning approach. The hope is have several teams all using equivalent story points, so that three story points of effort on one team is the same as on another. I think trying to come up with this at best of limited value, and at worst dangerous. The estimating system of extreme programming is based on XpVelocity and YesterdaysWeather. Inherent in this is the idea that when you make estimates, the actual… -
Bliki: OrmHate
8 May 2012 | 10:31 amWhile I was at the QCon conference in London a couple of months ago, it seemed that every talk included some snarky remarks about Object/Relational mapping (ORM) tools. I guess I should read the conference emails sent to speakers more carefully, doubtless there was something in there telling us all to heap scorn upon ORMs at least once every 45 minutes. But as you can tell, I want to push back a bit against this ORM hate - because I think a lot of it is unwarranted. The charges against them can be summarized in that they are complex, and provide only a leaky abstraction over a relational data… -
photostream 24
5 May 2012 | 9:04 amBoston, MA -
Retreaded: PublishedInterface
3 May 2012 | 9:18 amRetread of post orginally made on 26 Dec 2003 Published Interface is a term I used (first in Refactoring) to refer to a class interface that's used outside the code base that it's defined in. As such it means more than public in Java and indeed even more than a non-internal public in C#. In my column for IEEE Software I argued that the distinction between published and public is actually more important than that between public and private. The reason is that with a non-published interface you can change it and update the calling code since it is all within a single code base. Such things as…
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Yahoo! User Interface Blog
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YUI and Travis sitting in a git-tree
11 May 2012 | 2:47 pmOver the last few weeks, I have spent a great deal of time getting YUI’s core tests executing on Travis CI. As of today, every push to our YUI 3 repo on GitHub results in over 6,000 (6,053 to be exact) unit tests being executed and logged. These tests include 1,130 of our core JavaScript-only unit tests executing natively inside of Node.js on versions 0.4.x and 0.6.x (with 0.7.x support to be added soon). We follow that with our full unit test suite (4,923 tests), running with my command-line YUITest/PhantomJS wrapper, Grover. Today I want to tell you a little more about how and why we… -
YUI 3.6.0 PR1 Is Now Available
11 May 2012 | 2:18 amWe are pleased to announce the availability of YUI 3.6.0 PR1 for community testing and feedback. Please take a moment to check it out via CDN or download. Here are the target dates for all YUI 3.6.0 milestones: PR1 – May 8, 2012 PR2 – June 12, 2012 PR3 – July 17, 2012 GA – July 31, 2012 An overview of items we are working on for YUI 3.6.0 include: ScrollView enhancements DataTable features and performance improvements Charts bug fixes Image preview feature in Uploader Popup Calendar YUI seed and global refactored for performance We are also taking steps to condense our… -
YUIDoc 0.3.0 is Official!
9 May 2012 | 4:05 pmToday we are pleased to announce the official release of the new YUIDoc, our JavaScript documentation generator. YUIDoc is a Node.js application that generates API documentation from comments in source, using a syntax similar to tools like Javadoc and Doxygen. YUIDoc is currently powering the API documentation for YUI and has been actively updated over the last year. [View Larger Image] YUIDoc provides: Live previews. YUIDoc includes a standalone doc server, making it trivial to preview your docs as you write. Modern markup. YUIDoc’s generated documentation is an attractive, functional… -
YUI: Open Hours Thurs May 10th
9 May 2012 | 12:44 pmYUI 3.5.0 Uploader Uploader was another component that saw a major upgrade in 3.5.0. Of the many changes, one big one was the addition of support for native features in browsers supporting HTML5. Join us for a discussion with its author, Allen Rabinovich, in which we’ll talk about how Uploader is structured, some of the challenges with modern techniques that needed to be addressed, and what’s on the roadmap for upcoming versions. Time & Details We’ll be online on Thursday from 10am to 11am PDT. This week, we’ll be trying out Google Plus Hangouts on Air, so the… -
Announcing YUI 3.5.1
7 May 2012 | 7:04 pmWe are pleased to announce the availability of YUI 3.5.1 on CDN or as a download. YUI 3.5.1 is a smaller scoped release of bug fixes only. Enjoy!
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Ruby Inside
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The Mega April 2012 Ruby and Rails News Roundup
27 Apr 2012 | 9:45 amWelcome to April 2012's bumper pick'n'mix of Ruby and Rails news and releases, fresh from the pages of Ruby Weekly. Highlights include: Matz's new Ruby implementation, MobiRuby (Ruby for iOS), Passenger 3.0.12, Ruby 1.9.3-p194, TorqueBox 2.0, Adhearsion 2.0, and Dr Nic's App Scrolls. Headlines Ruby 1.9.3-p194 Released A small version bump for Ruby 1.9.3 which includes a security fix for RubyGems (and therefore an updated version) along with oodles of minor tweaks and fixes. MRuby: A Lightweight Ruby Implementation by Matz It's been in the making for a while (remember RiteVM?) but this week… -
The Mega March 2012 Ruby and Rails News and Release Roundup
11 Apr 2012 | 7:17 pmAnd again, a mixture of travel, illness, and exhaustion have prevented me from my weekly updates on here (although Ruby Weekly is still going out on a weekly basis!) so here's a bumper update for all of the top Ruby and Rails news from March 2012. Highlights include: Matz wins a prize, Ruby is approved by the ISO, some awesome jobs, Bundler 1.1, Vagrant 1.0, Rails 3.2.3, Avdi Grimm's Object on Rails book, the Pragmatic Programmers release some more awesome books and, of course, a lot more. Headlines Matz Wins FSF's 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software Free Software Foundation… -
The Mega Ruby News and Release Roundup for February 2012
2 Mar 2012 | 9:34 amOops! I forgot to post the weekly Ruby news updates from Ruby Weekly to Ruby Inside in February so.. here's a mega roundup of all that was new in the Ruby and Rails worlds in February 2012. I'll try to keep posting every week from here on - sorry. Highlights include: a new Ruby 1.9.3 release, REE's end of life, Spree 1.0, some Rails 4 news, Devise 2.0, a new private gem hosting service.. and that's just scratching the surface :-) Enjoy! (And don't forget to subscribe to Ruby Weekly if you want to receive something like this every week via e-mail or The Ruby Show if you want it in… -
This Week in Ruby: Rails 3.2, Rails Tutorial, and Why You Should Learn Smalltalk
27 Jan 2012 | 7:35 pmIt's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-) Headlines Rails 3.2 Released DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of… -
This Week in Ruby: Nominate Your Ruby Heroes, Include/Extend, Ruby on Netbeans, Jekyll-Bootstrap, and more
20 Jan 2012 | 10:32 amWelcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, my Ruby e-mail newsletter. Headlines Vote for your 'Ruby Hero' in the Ruby Hero Awards The Ruby Heroes awards run each year and present 6 community nominated 'heroes' with an award at RailsConf. Nominations are now open so go and drop your nomination for the Rubyist whose code has brightened up your life the most in the past year. Heroku Receives InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award Sorry it's just a press release but it's great to see a company that came up from the Ruby world continue to do well. Congrats to the Heroku team.
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Channel 9
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Stephan T. Lavavej: Core C++, 1 of n
16 May 2012 | 9:21 amStephan T. Lavavej, aka STL, is back on C9! This time, STL will take us on a journey of discovery within the exciting world of Core C++. We know lots of folks are either coming back to C++, coming to C++, or have never left C++. This lecture series, in n parts, is for all of you! Only STL can make that work (novice, intermediate, and advanced all bundled together and presented in a way only STL can do.) Thank you, STL. We're so delighted to have you back!In part 1, STL focuses on Name Lookup, which is a surprisingly complex process.Remember Herb… -
Ping 141: The new Bing, Disney Kinect, Soundwave, 360's on sale
15 May 2012 | 10:30 amPaul and Laura sit down, chat, reflect on the past, wax poetic, dig deep and roll with the punches while they discuss all this and more:The new Bing! [06:14]Disney Kinect titles & Make a Wish [02:25]Microsoft Soundwave [11:40]360's for cheap [16:00] -
Countdown to TechEd Europe 2012: The Center of IT
14 May 2012 | 4:13 pmGet a glimpse at what it is like to be at the Center of IT this June in Amsterdam! One of the top reasons delegates attend TechEd Europe is the networking opportunities. Denise (@teched_europe) stops by to talk about some of the networking opportunities you will have at this year's event: the Delegate Party at the Amsterdam ArenA on Wednesday 27 June and in the Connect Lounge with Channel 9 Live, PASS, the MVP Program, Microsoft Certification, INETA, GITCA and the Server and Cloud Community Ninjas.Register for the event Browse the great content and build your schedule online or… -
Dare Obasanjo: SkyDrive - Personal Storage in the Cloud
14 May 2012 | 11:00 amIt's been way too long since Dare Obasanjo (of RSS Bandit and Carnage4Life fame) has appeared on C9. The last time was several years ago in an interview conducted by me and Scoble on a summer day outside of building 35 on the main MS campus in Redmond. What's Dare been up to since we last spoke? Turns out, quite a bit Dare works on the Live SDK team. They recently shipped the SkyDrive API. If you're not familiar with SkyDrive, it's a cloud-based personal file storage service, allowing users access to any file, anytime, anywhere... (we talk about what exactly that means and how it… -
Project Detroit: An Overview
14 May 2012 | 11:00 amIn this article, we will give an overview of the technical side of Project Detroit, the Microsoft-West Coast Custom Mustang creation. If you're not already familiar with this project, you can find more information here. Key Design DecisionsIt’s important to keep in mind that this car was built for a TV show with a set schedule. As a result, there are a number of unique design decisions that came into play.ScheduleWorking backwards, the reveal for the car was set for Monday November 28, 2011 at the Microsoft Store in Bellevue, Washington. We started the project in early August, which…
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CodePlex
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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 15, 2012
15 May 2012 | 8:30 pmCodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 15, 2012Popular Releases51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.9: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.91. Added Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure.DynamicModuleHelper back into Activator.cs to ensure redirection works when… -
CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012
14 May 2012 | 9:51 pmCodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012Popular ReleasesActipro WPF Controls Contrib: v2012.1: Updated to target WPF Studio 2012.1 Changes target framework to .NET 4.0, uses native WPF 4.0 DataGrid, and Prism 4.1.FileZilla Server Config File Editor: FileZillaConfig 1.0.0.1: Sorry for not including the config file with the previous release. It was a "lost in translation" when I was moving my local repository to CodePlex repository. Sorry for the rookie mistake.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.25: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone… -
CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 13, 2012
13 May 2012 | 3:03 pmCodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 13, 2012Popular ReleasesGardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator version 1.5.0: ChangesVersion 1.5.0 contains a number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly. The default encoding of the *.y file is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The /report option has been improved, as has the automaton tracing facility. New facilities are included that allow multiple parsers to share a common token type. A complete change-log is available as a separate documentation… -
CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 12, 2012
12 May 2012 | 4:35 pmCodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 12, 2012Popular ReleasesKanboxAPI: KanboxAPI beta: 已实现接口 Token Info List DownloadMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected… -
Easy Credential Caching for Git
11 May 2012 | 7:30 pmA common question since launching our Git support is whether there is a way to cache your username and password so you don’t have to enter it on every push. Well thanks to Andrew Nurse from the ASP.Net team, there is now a great solution for this! Credential Caching in Windows to the Rescue Using the Git extension point for credential caching, Andrew created an integration into the Windows Credentials store. After installing git-credential-winstore instead of getting that standard prompt for a username/password, you will get a Windows Security prompt. From here your credentials…
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Planet MySQL
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MySQL Workbench 5.2.40 GA Released
16 May 2012 | 11:10 amThe MySQL Developer Tools team is announcing the next maintenance release of it’s flagship product, MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.40. This version contains more than 28 bug fixes applied over version 5.2.39. MySQL Workbench 5.2 GA • Data Modeling • Query • Administration Please get your copy from our Download site. Sources and binary packages are available for several platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/ Workbench Documentation can be found here. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/index.html Utilities Documentation can be found… -
MySQL Backup & Recovery Essentials
16 May 2012 | 11:02 amDownload PDF Presentation A hardware, software or human failure can occur at any time. Are you prepared? Many organizations take a risk of serious data loss and system downtime with inadequate procedures in place to support a disaster recovery. This presentation covers the essentials of MySQL backup and recovery options, identifying the necessary tools for an effective strategy to support data resilience and business continuity for your organization. MySQL has no one single unbreakable backup solution, so it is important to understand the impact of MySQL replication, storage engines,… -
Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2
16 May 2012 | 10:55 amI have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, but still the tool serves well for benchmark purposes. OK, let’s start off with the configuration details. Configuration First of all let me describe the EC2 instance type that I used. EC2 Configuration I chose m2.4xlarge instance as that’s the instance… -
Register to our live webinar and learn how to protect your sensitive information using Real-Time Dynamic Data Masking
16 May 2012 | 9:09 amDynamic Data Masking is an emerging technology that provides real-time data masking in changing environments, typically in production databases. GreenSQL Dynamic Data Masking enables you to mask or randomize any sensitive information stored on MS SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Register Now! When? Wednesday, May 23, 2012 (9:00 am PDT; 12:00 pm EST; 16:00 pm GMT; 19:00 pm GMT+3:00) In this webinar, David Maman, GreenSQL Founder and CTO, will explain: What Real-Time Dynamic Data Masking is? How to dramatically reduce the risk of a data breach? How to better comply with… -
SwRI Chooses TokuDB to Tackle Machine Data for an 800M+ Record Database
16 May 2012 | 8:58 amTackling machine data on the ground to ensure successful operations for NASA in space Issues addressed: Scaling MySQL to multi-terabytes Insertion rates as InnoDB hit a performance wall Schema flexibility to handle an evolving data model The Company: Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is an independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization. The staff of more than 3,000 specializes in the creation and transfer of technology in engineering and the physical sciences. Currently, SwRI is part of an international team working on the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS)…
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mySQL DBA
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Speeding up EC2 work by using AWS tools and scripts to bypass the AWS management console
14 May 2012 | 3:58 pmBelieve me managing EC2 instances is not as simple or magical as marketers would like for you to believe. The cloud gets complicated when it gets bigger. EC2 really only enables a person to ignore power, network layout (which is bad), and getting more servers that end up costing more then actual servers fast.Things that EC2 is missing to make life easier for the developer:Ability to update all servers with packages and code. Natively they do not support the ability to push files or install new software packages to server groups. Thus install cluster-it and puppet and write your own deploy… -
mySQL 5.6 looks very promising
7 May 2012 | 8:02 pmI have been doing some research lately on various mySQL related features and found myself distracted by mySQL 5.6. If everything that I am reading is correct, this should be the best mySQL version yet.mySQL 5.6 will have multi thread replication, making time delayed slaves-an actual feature and not a byproduct of replicating high write volumes. Also, crash safe replication! When a master crashed and corrupted the binary log this was a pain in the ass to fix. In the past I had to write scripts to walk the primary key and do a checksum on each returned table chunk and pick which row was correct… -
Sizing EC2 Servers to get more Bang for the Buck
26 Apr 2012 | 7:03 pmTo launch an app there was a tried and true process. The process in the past was to rent a server in a managed hosting facility. Get a few more as you grow, then build a model showing that it would be cheaper to get your own cage and finance servers. If the app continues to grow, build a model showing it would cost cheaper and allow for more rapid growth if you built your own datacenter after multiple requests for more power, space and moving to larger spaces with more power. Now we have a new Step. If Step 1 is managed hosting then Step 0 is putting your application in the cloud i.e. -
mySQL Shards, Gearman, rabbitMQ, NodeJS, JSONP Push for Fault Tollerant Realtime Notification Feed
23 Mar 2012 | 8:18 pmOver the past few weeks, I have been tweaking my feed system to be truly real-time. The hypothesis is, if end users are pushed content without forcing them to refresh a page they will interact on the content-which in turn turns a consumer into a producer of content causing virality within subnetworks of the Graph. The Graph is all the connections on the site while subnetworks are personal connections i.e. your friends, their friends etc. Additionally to note there are many more consumers then producers.My hypothesis was wrong. Or is it? I couldn't accept the conclusions drawn from the usage… -
Asyncronous Shard Queries in PHP using mysqlnd enabling the feed load 10 times faster.
24 Feb 2012 | 7:24 pmA few years ago I wrote about Asynchronous Shard Queries verses Synchronous Shard Queries, and in this post I talked about having to write a server to handle this for me in Java. Now I do it in PHP and got great results that are posted below.Building the Feed was taking 100ms up to 40 seconds on the initial load, if the feed is out of cache. This is not acceptable for me as an engineer or the users I serve. Although the 40 seconds was rare it still is wrong.The problem is as I added more shards to handle our data growth, the feed got proportionally slower. To build the feed for large users I…
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MySQL Performance Blog
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Training in London next week
16 May 2012 | 11:24 amI’m going to deliver MySQL Training next week (May 21-24) in London. This is a rare opportunity as I do not personally deliver a lot of Training, especially outside of US. There are still some places left if you want to sign up. You will also get a signed copy of High Performance MySQL 3rd edition as an attendee. -
Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2
16 May 2012 | 10:55 amI have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, but still the tool serves well for benchmark purposes. OK, let’s start off with the configuration details. Configuration First of all let me describe the EC2 instance type that I used. EC2 Configuration I chose m2.4xlarge instance as that’s the instance… -
Percona Server 5.5.23-25.3 released!
16 May 2012 | 7:09 amPercona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.23-25.3 on May 16, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.23, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.23-25.3 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.23-25.3 milestone at Launchpad. Bugs Fixed: Percona Server would crash on a DDL statement if an XtraDB internal SYS_STATS table was corrupted or overwritten. This is now fixed by… -
Announcement of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.23
14 May 2012 | 12:33 pmOur previous GA release of Percona XtraDB Cluster caused a lot of interest and feedback. I am happy to announce next version Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.23, which comes with bug fixes and improvements. List of changes: Fixes merged from upstream (Codership-mysql) Support for MyISAM, now changes to MyISAM tables are replicated to other nodes Improvements to XtraBackup SST methods, better error handling New SST wsrep_sst_method=skip, useful when you start all nodes from the same sources (i.e. backup) Ability to pass list of IP addresses for a new node, it will connect to the first available… -
Testing Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo
10 May 2012 | 3:30 pmI was lucky enough to get my hands on new Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo card. So I decided to run the same series of tests I did for other Flash devices. This is ioDrive2 Duo 2.4TB card and it is visible to OS as two devices (1.2TB each), which can be connected together via software RAID. So I tested in two modes: single drive, and software RAID-0 over two drives. I should note that to run this card you need to have an external power, by the same reason I mentioned in the previous post: PCIe slot can provide only 25W power, which is not enough for ioDrive2 Duo to provide full performance. I mention…
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Polymath Programmer
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I was at Barcamp Singapore 8!
15 May 2012 | 10:40 pmI attended some talks at Barcamp Singapore 8 held at Tembusu College. I also gave a talk on “Vlogging on YouTube”, which had less-than-enthusiastic reviews. -
Losing weight in different cultures
8 May 2012 | 7:42 amGenerally speaking, “losing weight” is a bad thing in Asian cultures, because it means you don’t have enough food to eat. -
Are you afraid to start your own business because…
5 May 2012 | 5:51 amyou’re afraid people will ask for refunds, and you don’t make any money at all. If you have a steady paycheck, the company paying you your salary is not going to ask for your salary back, right? But if you have your own business, and if your customers ask for a refund? Then you’d have rendered a service or provided a product, but you don’t get paid. If that’s the case, why are there so many food stalls here in Singapore? Singaporeans are notoriously picky eaters. It can’t be that every single food stall sells delicious food, right? What are you truly scared… -
Collision detection in merging Excel cells
4 May 2012 | 7:25 amYou can merge cells in Excel. “Duh!” you say. So how does Excel ensure that the cells you want to merge don’t overlap any existing merged cells? How do you check programmatically that the cells you want to merge won’t overlap any existing merged cells? Well, that was the problem I faced while writing my spreadsheet library software (check out SpreadsheetLight here!). The inkling of an idea was formed when I visited StackOverflow. Can’t remember what I was there for, but the answer page wasn’t about Excel or spreadsheets. It was about collision detection. -
$100 Startup bundle
1 May 2012 | 12:18 amI respect Chris Guillebeau a lot (possibly even a raving fan). His book $100 Startup is going to be on sale soon. But the more important reason is that you can get that together with a bunch of business-y stuff at Only72 right now for $100 total (yes, that’s totally an affiliate link). Out of all the products in the bundle, I’m interested in the “How To Make iPhone Apps With No Programming Experience” ebook, the small business infrastructure ebook, and guide to publishing ebook. You want to start a business? This’ll get you started. Hurry, it’s only on sale…
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Pushing Pixels
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Retro:Active #599
22 Apr 2012 | 9:20 pmIllustrations by Jack Hughes. Related posts: Retro:Active #532 Tender Buttons Synthesizer by Jack Hughes.... -
Retro:Active #598
22 Apr 2012 | 9:13 pmIllustration for Wired Italy by Two Arms Inc. -
Retro:Active #597
22 Apr 2012 | 9:07 pmSpring/Summer ’12 collection by Dori Tomcsanyi. -
Retro:Active #596
22 Apr 2012 | 8:51 pmPromotional materials for Alicia typeface by Alexander Wright. -
Retro:Active #595
22 Apr 2012 | 8:43 pmKatryn Kruger for Stella March 2012. Photography by James Meakin. Related posts: Retro:Active #572 Reese Witherspoon for Glamour UK March 2012 by Simon Emmett....
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No Fluff Just Stuff
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Windows Phone Export is Coming To Tiggzi App Builder
16 May 2012 | 1:00 pmYes, this is pretty cool: Windows Phone export in Tiggzi will be available tomorrow. -
Programs and Technical Debt
16 May 2012 | 11:00 amOnce you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always separated by function and time zone. So, my nice example of a collocated team in Thoughts on Infrastructure, Technical Debt, and Automated Test Framework, rarely occurs in a program, unless you have cross-functional teams collocated in a program. If they do,… -
Tiggzi At AnDevCon Conference: Building Android Apps With Cloud-based Mobile App Builder
16 May 2012 | 8:00 amWednesday and Thursday this week the Tiggzi team will be at AnDevCon conference in San Francisco. Stop by our stand and learn how to build Android apps, connected to any REST API using Tiggzi app builder. What’s really nice is that you can build an app in Tiggzi, export the Android binary, and instantly publish it to Google Play Store. -
This Week in Grails (2012-19)
15 May 2012 | 4:00 pmWe’re getting ready to release Grails 2.1, with a release candidate hopefully this week. The cache plugins I mentioned last week will be released around the same time, and the ‘core’ cache plugin will be a default plugin in BuildConfig.groovy. I released an update of the database-migration plugin to address some bugs that were keeping that from being a default plugin, so that will also be included by default in BuildConfig.groovy. I’ve been working on a Grails book to be published this fall. The plan is that it will be an advanced book, and presume that you already… -
WTFWG
15 May 2012 | 1:00 pmThis morning, Ian Hickson emailed the WHATWG mailing list mentioning that a attribute that was currently being discussed on the list (srcset) is now added to the draft of the spec. To understand why this sucks, a little background is needed. Responsive images are a difficult beast to tame: there really isn’t a good solution for them today. As a result, some discussion started on the WHATWG mailing list months ago about what to do. The WHATWG pointed out that the list was for standardizing and suggested it would be better if the discussion were moved into a community group. So,…
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www.thoughtworks.com aggregator
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Mark Needham: Haskell: Writing a custom equality operator
16 May 2012 | 8:16 amIn the comments on my post about generating random numbers to test a function David Turner suggested that this was exactly the use case for which QuickCheck was intended for so I’ve been learning a bit more about that this week. I started with a simple property to check that the brute force (bf) and divide and conquer (dc) versions of the algorithm returned the same result, assuming that there were enough values in the list to have a closest pair: prop_closest_pairs xs length xs >= 2 ==> dcClosest xs (fromJust bfClosest xs) I could then run that as follows: > import… -
Andy Marks: Why proposals suck…
15 May 2012 | 11:05 pmToday, I feel like a massive RANT. Although I’d rather book myself in for a root canal than get involved in creating proposals or responding to RFPs, I do find myself in this position frequently these days and I’ve yet to develop a suitably sustainable perspective on these things to make them enjoyable. Hell, forget enjoyable as a goal – I’d settle for a beige sort of feeling rather than the darker colours I tend to find myself wallowing in during those times. And here’s why – proposals suck. The act of building them… sucks. The process they are… -
April Johnson: why try agile?
15 May 2012 | 12:45 pmLast week I completely re-worked the short presentation I share with nonprofit clients who want to get others in their teams excited about what agile practices can do for them. If you’re a staff member or volunteer on a team, this stuff can be so very helpful. Check out the presentation: Agile – What is it and why should I care?. And feel free to ask questions. Or steal it! -
Jim Highsmith: All Projects are Not the Same
15 May 2012 | 12:25 pmOne of the big problems with successfully executing projects is that while we know projects are very different from each other, we often manage them and measure their success in the same way. Think for a moment about the oft quoted Standish reports in which project success is measured on the traditional iron triangle basis of meeting scope, schedule, and cost plans. In their scheme, all projects, of any type, are successful or not based on the same criteria. A friend of mine worked on a project recently where the client said, “I have a fuzzy vision of what we want. I don’t have any idea… -
Jaco Pretorius: Book Review: User Stories Applied
15 May 2012 | 9:00 amTLDR Version: User Stories Applied is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the ideas behind user stories. The book has very good examples and guidelines on writing better user stories and integrating them into your development process. User Stories Applied is a book that has often been mentioned to me in the six months I’ve been at ThoughtWorks and over the last two weeks I finally managed to get my hands on a copy. It’s not a very long book (230 pages) and it took me about 3 plane trips to finish it. The Good This book provides a very good…
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Android Developers Blog
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Using DialogFragments
8 May 2012 | 1:00 pm[This post is by David Chandler, Android Developer Advocate — Tim Bray]Honeycomb introduced Fragments to support reusing portions of UI and logic across multiple activities in an app. In parallel, the showDialog / dismissDialog methods in Activity are being deprecated in favor of DialogFragments.In this post, I’ll show how to use DialogFragments with the v4 support library (for backward compatibility on pre-Honeycomb devices) to show a simple edit dialog and return a result to the calling Activity using an interface. For design guidelines around Dialogs, see the Android… -
Android C2DM — Client Login key expiration
13 Apr 2012 | 11:44 am[This post is by Francesco Nerieri, engineering team lead for C2DM — Tim Bray]In the upcoming weeks, some of the older Client Login authentication keys will expire. If you generated the token you’re currently using to authenticate with the C2DM servers before October 2011, it will stop working. If the response from the C2DM servers contains an Update-Client-Auth header, you’ll need to replace the current token with the one included in the header. // Check for updated token header String updatedAuthToken = conn.getHeaderField(UPDATE_CLIENT_AUTH); if (updatedAuthToken !=… -
New Seller Countries in Google Play
12 Apr 2012 | 3:30 pmOver the past year we’ve been working to expand the list of countries and currencies from which Android developers can sell their products. Starting today, developers in Czech Republic, Israel, Poland, and Mexico can sell priced applications and in-app products on Google Play, using their local bank accounts for payments. Welcome developers! If you develop Android apps in one of the new countries and want to get started selling them, visit play.google.com/apps/publish and set up a new Google Play developer account. Once you’ve uploaded your apps, you can price them in any available buyer… -
Accessibility: Are You Serving All Your Users?
10 Apr 2012 | 12:35 pm[This post is by Joe Fernandez, a technical writer for developer.android.com who cares about accessibility and usability. — Tim Bray.]We recently published some new resources to help developers make their Android applications more accessible:Accessibility Developer GuideImplementing Accessibility Training“But,” you may be thinking, “What is accessibility, exactly? Why should I make it a priority? How do I do it? And most importantly, how do I spell it?” All good questions. Let’s hit some of the key points.Accessibility is about making sure that Android users who… -
A Faster Emulator with Better Hardware Support
9 Apr 2012 | 1:00 pm[This post is by Xavier Ducrohet and Reto Meier of the Android engineering team. — Tim Bray.]The Android emulator is a key tool for Android developers in building and testing their apps. As the power and diversity of Android devices has grown quickly, it’s been hard for the emulator keep pace. Today we’re thrilled to announce several significant improvements to the emulator, including a dramatic performance upgrade and support for a broader range of hardware features, notably sensors and multi-finger input.Added GPU SupportThe system image we’re shipping today has built-in GPU support…
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Amazon Web Services Blog
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Domain Verification for the Amazon Simple Email Service
15 May 2012 | 6:26 pmThe Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) makes it easy and cost-effective for you to send bulk or transactional email messages. As I described in my introductory post (Introducing the Amazon Simple Email Service), you must verify the email address (or addresses) that you plan to use to send messages. The initial verification process must be repeated for each email address. Today we are introducing a new SES feature. You can now verify an entire domain, and then send email from any address in that domain. In addition to saving you time and effort, this new feature now allows you to use Amazon SES… -
AWS Cloud Storage for the Enterprise
15 May 2012 | 3:01 pmThere are a lot of storage options available to AWS users -- Amazon S3, Elastic Block Storage, and the AWS Storage Gateway, along with ancillary services such as Amazon CloudFront for content distribution, AWS Direct Connect for dedicated network connections, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce for large-scale data processing. Our customers are using these services to implement cloud-based backup, disaster recovery, and archiving for entire enterprises. In order to help you make sense of all of these options and to give you a better sense of how AWS can help you, we have created a day-long event… -
AWS Week in Review - May 7, 2012
14 May 2012 | 10:50 amLet's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, May 7 We released the EC2 VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter version 1.2.0. Tuesday, May 8 The Relational Database Service now supports SQL Server. You can now run .NET applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Wednesday, May 9 We introduced APIs and IAM support for the AWS Storage Gateway. We announced that re: Invent, the first AWS conference for customers and partners, will take place later this year. We added a third Availability Zone to the US West (Oregon) Region. Citrix announced that a tech… -
Amazon CloudFront - Support for Dynamic Content
14 May 2012 | 2:38 amIntroductionAmazon CloudFront's network of edge locations (currently 30, with more in the works) gives you the ability to distribute static and streaming content to your users at high speed with low latency. Today we are introducing a set of features that, taken together, allow you to use CloudFront to serve dynamic, personalized content more quickly. What is Dynamic Personalized Content?As you know, content on the web is identified by a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator such as http://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/console_cw_est_charge_service_2.png . A URL like this always identifies… -
AWS 포탈 - 한국어 컨텐츠 추가
11 May 2012 | 12:29 am더 많은 고객들이 손쉽게 AWS 접근할 수 있도록, AWS 포탈에 또 다른 새로운 언어를 추가하였습니다. 우리는 지속적으로 성장하고 있는 한국 기업들과 개발자들을 지원할 수 있다는 것을 확신시켜 드리기 위해 한국어 컨텐츠를 추가하였습니다. 이미 많은 수의 한국 대기업들과 스타트업 업체들, 그리고 연구기관들AWS와 함께 하고 있습니다. 예를 들면: 케이스 스터디 다수를 포함해서, 대부분의 기술 및 마케팅관련 페이지들이 이미 한글화 되어있으며,…
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Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist
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Another Fortune 500 using NServiceBus
10 May 2012 | 6:38 amIt isn’t common for us to get permission from our larger customers to go public with their use of NServiceBus. That’s why we’re really happy that Johnson Controls, number 67 on the Fortune 500 has given us the green light to publish this testimonial: “NServiceBus is a part of the site-to-cloud connectivity which provides secure, reliable and fast transfer of large buildings data volumes to the Johnson Controls Panoptix applications. A commercial building can generate millions of data points a day that need to be quickly processed, analyzed and transformed into… -
Logically Distributed, Physically Centralized
6 May 2012 | 5:56 pmWhen people pull back the covers on something like MSMQ, particularly its private queues (the way NServiceBus uses it), and they see that MSMQ is storing its messages in C:\Windows\System32, well, they’re not particularly happy. One of the reasons they worry about these types of distributed or federated queue-based solutions has to do with physical failures. The concern is that messages would be lost if there was a hard drive failure. The preference for centralized message broker type solutions is that we can set it up on a nice RAID infrastructure that will take care of any physical… -
NServiceBus Studio Presentation Online
24 Apr 2012 | 3:44 pmLast week I gave a presentation at Skills Matter titled Modeling Distributed Systems with NServiceBus Studio. The recording is online here. I’m not putting NServiceBus Studio online just yet – we’ve got a fair bit more work to cover use cases like authentication and logging, but it will be coming online soon. I don’t think we’ll be able to offer the full round-tripping model-to-code-back-to-model abilities for some time (as they’re horrendously difficult to do well), but I do hope we’ll be able to find an economic model that will allow us to offer… -
Modeling Distributed Systems User Group Presentation
13 Apr 2012 | 4:42 amThis Wednesday I’m going to be giving a talk at Skills Matter in London called Modeling Distributed Systems with NServiceBus Studio. UPDATE: Recording is now online here. You might remember that I announced NServiceBus Modeling Tools about 6 months ago, well this is going to be the next generation of those tools. Here’s the abstract: As developers build larger and more distributed systems than ever before, many questions come up around modeling like, how do I represent services, how do I compose these services into physical endpoints, and how should cross-cutting concerns like… -
Feedback from the NServiceBus community
5 Apr 2012 | 7:02 amIn life, it’s rare that you get credit in proportion to the amount of effort you put in. That’s why it’s important to take a moment and really appreciate the few sincere kudos that come your way. The NServiceBus team really burned the candle at both ends around the release of version 3.0, and although there were some bumps along the way, we got through it and have a very solid and feature rich product to show for it. I’d like to take this opportunity and relay some of the feedback we got on the NServiceBus discussion group so that as many people as possible hear it,…
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Agile Software Development
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Test-Driving QML. Helsinki version
16 May 2012 | 9:00 amOn May 16, 2011 I was taking part in the Helsinki Qt meetup . I was talking there about how you can test-drive your QML projects using a semi-official qtest-qml library. Here are the slides and the example code. Test driving-qml View more presentations from AgileArtem. This presentation has only minor changes from a year old Tampere version. -
Daily wallpaper 1.1 for Nokia N9. Knows how to cut and rotate
18 Jan 2012 | 3:23 amDirect Nokia Store link - http://store.ovi.com/content/214273 I've released the free Daily Wallpaper for Nokia N9 a couple of months ago. Since that time it enjoyed nearly nine thousands of downloads (quite a number for this platform) and was keeping me personally entertained. Once an hour (or once a day or once a month) it is downloading the fresh cool wallpaper from flickr and every time I unlock the phone I can enjoy a new interesting photo. Since the moment of release, the most popular request (sometimes even causing the low rating in the Nokia Store) was not to rotate the too wide… -
Winter holidays: 50% discount on Easy Discount Calculator for Nokia N9 and Symbian phones
28 Dec 2011 | 6:47 amFor those too busy to read the whole post: from now and until the end of winter you can get Easy Discount Calculator for Symbian and Nokia N9 for 50% cheaper (1 euro in most of the countries) from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742 I am a big fan of small utilities tuned for the very concrete purpose. And I don't enjoy messing with the lots of discount calculations. You know, when one headset for my phone was 49 euro and now it it is 33% cheaper, but then there is the other one that used to be 69 euro and now it is 40% cheaper. How much do they actually cost? Simple, elegant,… -
Daily Wallpaper - a top photo & video download for Nokia N9. Free until Christmas 2011
18 Dec 2011 | 1:48 pm -
How to make your QML applications scale to and look nice on Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and android
9 Oct 2011 | 7:35 amYesterday I was talking at the 2nd Tampere barcamp about how you can make your application automatically scale to different devices, yet allow for pixel perfect fine-tuning when needed. We used this approach for Easy Discount Calculator that is to my understanding the first real app available simultaneously for Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and Android (on some Android devices it runs smoothly, on som it has problems due to bugs in not yet mature the porting technology). Unfortunately the presentation may not make much sense to you if you haven’t been to the barcamp as well, but you may like to…
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All About Agile | Agile Development Made Easy!
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Build Less, Start Sooner
9 May 2012 | 2:30 amJeff Patton recently reminded me of two simple strategies for software development that I’ve talked about from time to time—Build Less Software and Start Sooner. I thought I’d follow up on Jeff’s blog and revisit these simple, but powerful strategies. First, managers and executives complain a lot... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management... -
Alternatives to bureaucratic hierarchy
7 May 2012 | 10:59 amI don’t doubt that its possible to have an organization with out traditional managers. I’ve read about Semco and Morningstar Farms. I’ve talked to people who work at Gore. My husband works for a less well know firm that doesn’t have traditional managers. But those companies... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management... -
An Agile Game – Management by Walking Around
7 May 2012 | 2:30 amImage: Stuart MilesIt’s time for another Agile game that you coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters out there can use to educate your teams. This is a fast, easy and physically engaging one that illustrates how simple rules and time boxes can create a s... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management... -
Self-Awareness Matters: Finding Your Filters
3 May 2012 | 12:41 pmI remember sitting in a project meeting back when I worked for a Big Company. The project manager, Ted, announced the top three priorities. When I offered a different view point, Ted declared, “You’re wrong. We decided on these priorities yesterday.” He didn’t notice six... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management... -
No Bull!
2 May 2012 | 8:57 pmSimon Baker from Energized Work has written a great paper about whether or not twelve years of agile has really changed anything in the world of software development? In the paper, Simon writes about the industry as a whole and his own personal experience, in what I think is a really interesting... Visit my blog for the full story, links and lots more content on agile development and agile project management...
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Agile Development Blog: Scaling Software Agility
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Annual planning (not) by a cookbook, Part 2: “Guess Who’s Coming to Planning?”
27 Apr 2012 | 10:16 amWelcome back to my series on Rally’s process for annual planning. In the first post of this 4-part series about our planning, I offered you a glimpse into how we conducted some of the initial planning Iteration approach: from executive visioning through departmental ORIDs into deep preparation for the Iteration 3: the planning meeting. We chose to act as chefs in our approach versus follow a recipe. Our annual planning has iterations To reset the stage a bit, let me give a high-level view of our overall planning approach. Think about 5 iterations (not levels, iterations) of planning. We… -
5 Ways to Cheat Brooks’s Law and Speed Development Time
17 Apr 2012 | 2:03 pm“Can’t we just add more people to this project and ship sooner?” Many of us in the industry know this doesn’t tend to work very well. Back in the ’70s, in “The Mythical Man Month,” Fred Brooks coined a law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. At Rally, I think we’ve figured out how to cheat this law. Back in October, we had a market event looming. Rally was planning to launch our new Portfolio Management solution in December, and our marketing group was lining up speakers like Geoffrey Moore to help launch the product in… -
Rally Is Denver Post’s “Top Workplaces 2012” Winner
16 Apr 2012 | 11:26 amIn Sunday’s Denver Post, Rally is celebrated as the Top Midsize Employer in Colorado. And, as if this exciting news weren’t enough, our CEO and my business partner for the last 20 years, Tim Miller, is also honored as a Top Leader in the state. He is one of only three executives selected from almost 200 local companies considered. Of course, this is not much news for me:) The results of The Denver Post’s 2012 Top Workplaces are based on surveys completed by over 25,000 local employees, highlighting local organizations that strive for excellence in their workplaces. The… -
Adventures at Agile India, with Craig Langenfeld
13 Apr 2012 | 1:11 pmCraig Langenfeld, Rally international technical account manager, traveled from Australia to India to attend the inaugural Agile India event. He shares his experience. Agile India! Rally has enjoyed partnering with many Indian teams throughout the years, so I was thrilled to be a part of the first Agile India conference. After spending time with my Indian counterparts, it’s clear that Agile is critical to changing the way software teams work together in India. It was impressive to see that this inaugural conference was sold out with over 700 attendees from 21 countries present. It… -
Rally’s London Agile Portfolio Management Forum
10 Apr 2012 | 4:58 pmAs part of the ongoing Agile Portfolio Management Series, Rally held an event in London on Friday, 30 March. Minutes from the Liverpool Street tube station, about 100 business, product and project managers met at the Andaz Hotel to discuss how to bridge the gap between development execution and business strategy. We not only had an impressive line-up of speakers, including Gartner Research Director David Norton, it was obvious that the attendees were passionate about enabling an iterative, flexible and pragmatic approach to aligning their organization’s development teams and their portfolio…
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Successful Software
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An experiment with Pinterest
7 May 2012 | 1:00 pmPinterest is the latest darling on the social media scene. Pinterest reportedly hit ten million monthly unique visitors faster than any other website. It is currently claimed to have some 15 million users. Basically it allows you assemble (‘pin’) images from anywhere on the web into themed folders (‘pinboards’). You can download browser plug-ins that allow you to pin an image from a website to one of your pinboards in a few clicks. The social element comes from ‘following’ other Pinterest users and commenting on and re-pinning their images. It is a simple… -
Competition
15 Apr 2012 | 6:04 amA couple of years ago I got to drive a Centurian tank. 50 tons of clanking, smoke belching, killing machine. I can only imagine how terrifying it must be for an infantry man up against one of these heavily armed and armoured monsters. But, quite unexpectedly, I felt very vulnerable in the tank. My top lip was exactly level with a big spike of metal that formed part of the drivers hatch – if we had stopped suddenly I would probably have lost teeth. I could hardly move without bashing a knee or elbow on something hard. It was so noisy I could barely hear the shouting of the instructor,… -
TestLab² offer
1 Mar 2012 | 6:30 amThe blog is being sponsored this month by TestLab², a software testing and QA company based in the Ukraine. I have used TestLab² on a number of occasions for third party testing of PerfectTablePlan releases on both Windows and Mac OS X. They found a number of bugs that I hadn’t been able to find on my own (testing your own software is always problematic) and gave me additional confidence that I hadn’t let any embarrassing bugs make it through into the final binaries. Their prices are very reasonable (from $20/hour) and I have always found them to be very professional and… -
The microISV test
23 Feb 2012 | 6:20 amOk, so you’ve set yourself up as a one man software company and you’ve made some sales. But are you a real microISV/micropreneur/indie/startup? Take the test below and find out. You checked the number of sales you made overnight before you had your breakfast this morning. You measure the price of desirable objects (cars, houses, Xboxes) in terms of the number of licences you need to sell. You’ve outsourced some work to someone with no idea what they look like and only a vague idea where they live. When booking a hotel you are more interested in how good the Internet… -
A curated list of 200 articles for microISVs and startups
1 Feb 2012 | 9:00 amI have been steadily adding to the curated list of links on this site. Currently there are links to 200 articles, loosely categorized into topics such as ecommerce, market research, product naming, Pay Per Click and SEO. I have tried to select articles that contain ‘actionable’ information, rather than wafflely articles about ill-defined subjects such as time management and motivation. Some of the articles linked to were written by me, but the majority weren’t. I hope you find something useful. I would be surprised if you don’t. Go to the links page Filed under:…
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Encosia
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REST vs. RPC in ASP.NET Web API? Who cares; it does both.
25 Apr 2012 | 11:32 amIt’s probably an understatement to say that ASP.NET Web API has sparked a bit of debate about RESTful design lately. Web API’s new features like content negotiation, flexible media formatters, and improved JSON formatter are great, but they’ve been presented as features that are tied to the REST paradigm. That may seem troubling if you’re more accustomed to .NET’s RPC endpoints like ASMX, WCF, and even the way ASP.NET MVC controller actions are often used as a makeshift API. A couple months after the new incarnation of Web API was announced, I’m still… -
Facebook is retaining Instagram’s users, not acquiring them
9 Apr 2012 | 4:27 pmThere’s been plenty of cynical talk going around about today’s news that Facebook is acquiring Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. One of the most salient points is the simple arithmetic on how much Facebook is paying for each of Instagram’s roughly 30 million users. With Facebook paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 per Instagram user, that seems fairly pricey compared to Facebook’s own valuation of roughly $120 per user. What’s missing from that math is that Facebook users spend a huge amount of their time sharing and viewing photos. According to… -
Someone should copy these 4 features from the Zenbook
3 Apr 2012 | 5:17 pmIt’s been a few months since I began reviewing ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 based on day-to-day use, and it’s time to wrap the process up with a third and final post. The original plan for this series of reviews was that I’d write three posts about the Zenbook, finishing with one that summarized my experience using it regularly for a few months. Unfortunately, the trouble I had with its keyboard sabotaged that plan. If you haven’t been following along, a month with the Zenbook’s keyboard was all I could endure. However, almost every other aspect of the UX31 put it solidly in the running as… -
Cooking the books is hard and doesn’t help anyone
21 Mar 2012 | 9:48 amThe IE team published an in-depth post over the weekend, raising a few concerns about StatCounter’s methodology (or lack thereof) for reporting browser market share. Their points were interesting to consider, but one of them stood out to me: You’ll notice some pretty big differences in the weighting of StatCounter versus Net Applications. First and foremost, the most populous country in the world, China, doesn’t make the top 20 for StatCounter, when in fact it represents the world’s largest internet population. To further explore this problem, we re-ran the StatCounter numbers and… -
jQuery, ASP.NET Web API, and Json.NET walk into a bar…
13 Mar 2012 | 9:58 amThere’s been some confusing back and forth lately about ASP.NET Web API and JSON. During the time between the last WCF Web API preview and the current ASP.NET Web API beta, it’s clear that effort has gone into smoothing out some of DataContractJsonSerializer’s (DCJS) quirks. However, while things like DateTime and Enum deserialization have been improved, issues have still persisted with Anonymous Types, Dictionaries, and DateTime serialization. Unfortunately, the underlying cause of those remaining issues was too fundamental to simply spackle over. One of the most…
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The Endeavour
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Mars, magic squares, and music
16 May 2012 | 6:59 amAbout a year ago I wrote about Jupiter’s magic square. Then yesterday I was listening to the New Sounds podcast that mentioned a magic square associated with Mars. I hadn’t heard of this, so I looked into and found there were magic squares associated with each of solar system bodies known to antiquity (i.e. Sun, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). Here is the magic square of Mars: The podcast featured Secret Pulse by Zack Browning. From the liner notes: Magic squares provide structure to the music. Structure provides direction to the composer. Direction provides… -
Machine Learning in Action
15 May 2012 | 8:23 amA couple months ago I briefly reviewed Machine Learning for Hackers by Drew Conway and John Myles White. Today I’m looking at Machine Learning in Action by Peter Harrington and comparing the two books. Both books are about the same size and cover many of the same topics. One difference between the two books is choice of programming language: ML for Hackers uses R for its examples, ML in Action uses Python. ML in Action doesn’t lean heavily on Python libraries. It mostly implements its algorithms from scratch, with a little help from NumPy for linear algebra, but it does not use ML… -
Criteria for a computing setup
14 May 2012 | 6:05 am“My setup” articles have become common. These articles list the hardware and software someone uses, usually with little explanation. The subtext is often the author’s commitment to the Apple brand or to open source, to spending money on the best stuff or to avoid spending money on principle. I don’t find such articles interesting or useful. Vivek Haldar has written a different kind of “my setup” article, one that emphasizes the problems he set out to solve and the reasons for the solutions he chose. Here are a couple excerpts describing his goals for… -
Solutions to knight’s random walk
10 May 2012 | 7:10 amMy previous post asked this question: Start a knight at a corner square of an otherwise-empty chessboard. Move the knight at random by choosing uniformly from the legal knight-moves at each step. What is the mean number of moves until the knight returns to the starting square? There is a mathematical solution that is a little arcane, but short and exact. You could also approach the problem using simulation, which is more accessible but not exact. The mathematical solution is to view the problem as a random walk on a graph. The vertices of the graph are the squares of a chess board and the… -
A knight’s random walk
8 May 2012 | 7:33 pmHere’s a puzzle I ran across today: Start a knight at a corner square of an otherwise-empty chessboard. Move the knight at random by choosing uniformly from the legal knight-moves at each step. What is the mean number of moves until the knight returns to the starting square? There’s a slick mathematical solution that I’ll give later. You could also find the answer via simulation: write a program to carry out a knight random walk and count how many steps it takes. Repeat this many times and average your counts. Related post: A knight’s tour magic square
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ProgrammableWeb
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72 Medical APIs: Avvo, National Library of Medicine and NHS
16 May 2012 | 10:00 amOur API directory now includes 72 medical APIs. The newest is the pVerify API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Avvo API. We list 2 Avvo mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of medical APIs. In terms of the technical details, REST and XML lead the way. There are 45 medical REST APIs and 30 medical SOAP APIs. Our directory lists 62 medical XML APIs and 13 medical JSON APIs. The most common tags within medical are 27 science medical APIs, 18 health medical APIs and 14 reference medical APIs. On the mashup side, we list 14… -
Gumroad Aims To Make Selling Items as Simple as Sharing Them
15 May 2012 | 3:53 pmEver tried to sell something on the Internet and hoped that the process was simpler than what it currently is? What if selling an item on the Internet was as simple as sharing the item for sale with your friends on the social web? Gumroad, a San Francisco based startup has adopted that philosophy and wants to take the pain out of selling an item on the web and it also provides the Gumroad API for its core features. Gumroad simplifies the process of selling any item by doing things in a certain way. First, it wants you to sell your item to your friends, followers in the same way that you… -
Why REST Keeps Me Up At Night
15 May 2012 | 2:34 pmThis guest post comes from Daniel Jacobson (@daniel_jacobson), director of engineering for the Netflix API. Prior to Netflix, Daniel ran application development for NPR where he created the NPR API, among other things. He is also the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide and a frequent contributor to ProgrammableWeb and the Netflix Tech Blog. With respect to Web APIs, the industry has clearly and emphatically landed on REST as the standard way to implement these services. And for good reason… REST, which is generally implemented as a one-size-fits-all solution, is an excellent choice for… -
API Strategy Lessons from Factual’s Upgrade of its Mobile/Local APIs
15 May 2012 | 10:21 amThis guest post comes from Dan Woods, CTO and Editor of CITOResearch.com and co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide. He writes about API Strategy and related topics. Factual Inc, a company founded by ex-Googler Gil Elbaz that is creating a collaborative data platform, announced extensions to its Factual APIs today that are aimed at improving the ability to target advertising and provide other geo-based capabilities in mobile applications. The three new APIs, Geopulse, Reverse Geocoder, and World Geographies, fill gaps and extend the scope of Factual’s API portfolio. But the way that Factual… -
45 Coupons APIs: Groupon, 8coupons and US Yellow Pages
15 May 2012 | 10:07 amOur API directory now includes 45 coupons APIs. The newest is the Wishpot Coupon API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Groupon API. We list 10 Groupon mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of coupons APIs. In terms of the technical details, REST and XML lead the way. It should be pointed out that only 30 APIs in this category have a protocol listed. Many providers in this space do not make their documentation openly available instead preferring to partner with developers before providing access. There are 29 coupons REST…
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The Programmer's Paradox
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Bag O'Tricks
8 May 2012 | 5:39 pmThere are at least two different approaches to computer programing. The first approach comes from slowly building up an understanding of coding ‘tricks’. These are simple ways to solve simple problems. Initially, people start with the basic language features: assignments, conditionals, loops and functions. As they figure them out these go into their Bag O’Tricks. Then they start adding in -
Structured Questioning
8 Apr 2012 | 2:36 pmI worked with a person who believed that the secret to getting things done was just to make a list, then start checking off items as they were done. For anyone that’s worked on a large software development project, they know that it’s just not that easy. Different items depend on each other, progress varies, people come and go, and that leaves a dynamic shifting landscape that continuously -
Organization
30 Mar 2012 | 4:31 pmThere is one simple, yet fundamental rule for organization: if someone hasn’t explicitly organized it, then it is disorganized. I believe that one can infer this from the properties of our physical reality. We know for instance, that entropy always wins. What starts as chaos, ends in chaos. Order is a temporary state of affairs. So, without explicit action, order is highly unlikely. This -
Lost in Thought
14 Mar 2012 | 10:46 amComputers are stupid. They take massive lists of instructions and mindlessly process them one by one. That’s purely mechanical, the result of billions of nearly invisible gates flip-flopping in a sea of electrons. A consequence set in motion by these sets of instructions.Software -- when it is written well -- can be quite intelligent. It can remember things for you, help you organize them, -
Working Environments
12 Mar 2012 | 4:52 pmI’ve become increasingly interested in the different types of working environments currently available for programmers and software developers. My past has included a wide variation of project sizes, companies, technologies and system quality. That gives me a sense of how much variance is out there in different development shops, but my exposure has been limited to companies in Toronto,
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Programming By A Tool
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Coffeescript versus Javascript example for FUN
3 May 2012 | 12:28 pmCoffeescript: window.someList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] addOne = (item) -> 1 + item window.runThings = () -> addOne item for item in someList Coffeescript compiled to JavaScript: (function() { var addOne; window.someList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; addOne = function(item) { return 1 + item; }; window.runThings = function() { var item, _i, _len, _results; _results = []; for (_i = 0, _len = someList.length; _i < _len; _i++) { item = someList[_i]; _results.push(addOne(item)); } return _results; }; }).call(this); -
Nemerle MVC 3 project
1 Apr 2012 | 10:57 amYou can get it from my new git hub disaster. Just out of curiosity I was trying to see if I could get a basic MVC 3 project going with Nemerle. Never heard of Nemerle? Yeah neither had I up until last week. It’s a pretty powerful .Net language that can be used to expand the default functionality of .Net. It’s worth checking out. -
Arg… Will have to actually start posting more content
27 Mar 2012 | 10:19 pmSome interesting things to come. Totatlly not a lie and I’m totally not tipsy right now. Once I figure out this “git” thing the kids are talking about, I’ll start posting my futile attempts to turn C# into a functional language. -
Fizzbuzz in Scheme/Racket
27 Mar 2012 | 10:17 pmNo idea why I did this… (define (fizzbuzz listIn [currentList empty]) (define (showWhich itemToTell) (let ([testString (string-append (if (= (modulo itemToTell 3) 0) "Fizz" "") (if (= (modulo itemToTell 5) 0) "Buzz" ""))]) (if (= (string-length testString) 0) itemToTell testString))) (define (add-head-to-list itemList listTAddTo) (append listTAddTo (list (showWhich (first itemList) )))) (cond [(null? listIn) currentList] [(null? (rest listIn)) (add-head-to-list listIn currentList)] [else (fizzbuzz (rest listIn) (add-head-to-list listIn currentList))])) -
Create An X Delimited String From A Char List Using Linq Aggregate
8 Mar 2012 | 1:16 pmA quick example of how to use the Aggregate method to create a string of delimited members, or in this case characters. You might wonder why this example, or at least you should. It’s true, the character list to delimited string is pretty useless, but some idiot from where I work needed it. [TestMethod] public void GetStringFromCharacters() { var charList = Enumerable.Range(0, 10).Select(x => 'a').ToList(); charList .Aggregate(, (inner, outer) => inner + outer.ToString() + ) .Should() .Be("a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a"); } The big thing here is the “” in the Aggregate method…
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Embedded Computing Design » News
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WIN Enterprises Announces Affordable Desktop Appliance Featuring Intel D2500HN Mini-ITX SBC
14 May 2012 | 9:01 amNorth Andover, Mass. – May 14, 2012 – WIN Enterprises announces the PL-60570, an affordable, compact desktop appliance with Intel® D2500HN, a mini-ITX SBC. The Intel® Desktop Board D2500HN optimizes the performance of the Intel® Atom™ processor D2500 and the Intel® NM10 Express Chipset. The appliance supports general computing, thin client applications, and delivers plenty of performance to support the rich Internet experience demanded by today’s business user. The 1.86GHz processor features integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3600, enabling… -
NEW 3200 MHz VCO FROM CRYSTEK CORPORATION
14 May 2012 | 8:38 amFort Myers, FL – May 11, 2012 – Crystek’s CVCO55CCQ-3200-3200 VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) operates at 3200 MHz with a control voltage range of 0.5V~4.5V. This VCO features a typical phase noise of -115 dBc/Hz @ 10KHz offset and has excellent linearity. Output power is typically +6 dBm. Engineered and manufactured in the USA, the model CVCO55CCQ-3200-3200 is packaged in the industry-standard 0.5-in. x 0.5-in. SMD package. Input voltage is 6V, with a typ. current consumption of 27 mA. Pulling and Pushing are minimized to 0.3 MHz and 0.1 MHz/V, respectively. Second… -
Agilent Technologies Offers DVD with 2012 DesignCon Material
11 May 2012 | 3:23 pmWhat: A composite of the 2012 DesignCon educational forums & workshops. This new DVD showcases tools, demos, videos, and presentations including:· Design and Simulation· Validation of a Model· Debug, Validate and Characterize· System Test· Compliance Testing· Compliance Standards InformationWhen: Available now Where: www.agilent.com/find/HSD-PinpointAdditional Information: www.agilent.com/find/HSDTopics covered in this articleModeldebug -
Sangoma Releases New ISDN Options for Telecom System Innovators
11 May 2012 | 10:19 amToronto, Canada — Sangoma Technologies Corporation (TSX VENTURE:STC), a leading provider of hardware and software components that enable or enhance IP Communications Systems for both voice and data, announced the release of its B500 Basic Rate Interface (BRI) Telephony Interface Board. Designed for simple integration with open source projects, including Asterisk and FreeSWITCH, as well as other open source and proprietary PBX, Switch, IVR and VoIP Gateway applications, the B500 provides solution provides developers with an efficient and cost-effective connectivity solution. “Many… -
NEW Dual Frequency Multi-GNSS Constellation Simulator
10 May 2012 | 2:46 pmROCHESTER, NY USA — Spectracom, a business of the Orolia Group (NYSE Alternext Paris – FR0010501015 – ALORO) and the leading provider of practical test solutions for GPS and GNSS devices and systems, today announced its new L1+L2 dual frequency 32-channel multi-GNSS simulator, the GSG-62. The GSG-62 offers multiple frequency band operation, multiple GNSS constellation simulation, and expansion capability for more frequency bands and channels. Spectracom’s newest addition of industry leading simulators extends the brand’s reputation for portability, flexibility…
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9lessons Programming Blog
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Create a RESTful Services API in PHP.
14 May 2012 | 12:23 amAre you working with multiple devices like iPhone, Android and Web then take a look at this post that explains you how to develop a RESTful API in PHP. Representational state transfer (REST) is a software system for distributing the data to different kind of applications. The web service system produce status code response in JSON or XML format. Read more » -
Facebook Style Emotions Jquery Plugin
23 Apr 2012 | 12:52 amIntroducing a new jQuery emotions plugin, This helps you to convert text symbols to emotion images like how social chat editor works. This plugin developed by ArunKumar Sekar using javascript regular expression match rules. In first version we providing facebook emotion theme, next release we are going to include some more better emotion icons. Read more » -
Bootstrap Registration Form Tutorial.
16 Apr 2012 | 11:42 pmThis post is a continuation of my previous post Bootstrap tutorial for blog design and already explained about fluid page design. Today let's look at the form HTML elements that comes with Twitter Bootstrap toolkit using these I made a rich registration/sign up form with validation in 10 mins . Bootstrap helps you to produce clean and highly usable applications, it will reduce larger engineering efforts and gives uniform application solutions. Read more » -
3D Covers Pro: Create Photo Realistic High Resolution 3D eCovers
16 Apr 2012 | 11:23 amSeems movie stars and celebrities aren't the only ones getting facelifts these days. Software, information products, web apps and eBooks are all taking advantage of 3D High Resolution eCover graphics. Instead of the traditional 2D graphics, which are bland and don't stand out, these new 3D graphics use either smart templates or action scripts to both cut the learning curve down, but also produce the best quality representative graphics over and over again. Read more » -
File Upload Progress Bar with Jquery and PHP.
9 Apr 2012 | 2:32 amWe received many tutorial requests from 9lessons readers that asked how to create file upload progress bar with PHP and Jquery. In this post Arun Kumar Sekar had developed few lines of code using PHP APC library, it is very simple getting the server file upload process every few second and increasing the bar color using jquery css property. Just take a look at this demo. Read more »
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Learnivore!
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RailsCasts #350 REST API Versioning (Railscasts - free)
15 May 2012 | 7:00 pmAPIs should be consistent, but it is difficult to do this when returning a JSON response along side the HTML interface. Here I show how to add a versioned, RESTful API. The version can be determined from either the URL or HTTP headers. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews! -
RailsCasts #351 A Look at Meteor (Railscasts - paid)
15 May 2012 | 7:00 pmMeteor is a JavaScript framework for building rich client-side applications. Here I re-create the Raffler app to compare with Backbone.js and Rails. Meteor may not be related to Rails, but I think many will find it interesting. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews! -
Play by Play: Kyle Neath (Peepcode - paid)
14 May 2012 | 7:00 pmKyle Neath was the first designer hired at GitHub. He has had a hand in most of the projects shipped during that time (the website, GitHub Issues, GitHub for Mac, and others). Kyle is a master of his tools and takes a practical approach to design. Rather than focusing solely... HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews! -
RailsCasts #207 Syntax Highlighting (revised) (Railscasts - paid)
10 May 2012 | 7:00 pmHere I compare several syntax highlighting solutions and show how to use Pygments in a Rails app. I also show how to integrate it with Markdown and add caching. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews! -
RailsCasts #348 The Rails API Gem (Railscasts - free)
8 May 2012 | 7:00 pmIt is often asked: Is Rails a good fit if I only need to serve an API? In this episode I show how to use the Rails API gem to create a slimmer Rails application designed to respond with JSON. HackerBooks.com - find and explore books from StackOverflow and HackerNews!
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C Languages
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How To Be A Programmer - Useful Guide For Beginners, Intermediate And Advanced Levels
9 May 2012 | 3:30 amEven after it was first published 10 years ago, this is a good comprehensive write-up for begineers, intermediate and advanced programmers. -
Programmers, Complexity Is Not Your Friend
7 May 2012 | 4:04 am"A good developer has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity. A good developer smells complexity a mile away, and constantly shifts the code to keep his eyes to the front and his back upwind just so complexity can’t sneak up on him. It’s only by diligently trying to avoid all complexity that one can in fact avoid unnecessary complexity." -
The Database As Queue Anti-Pattern... Or Is It?
30 Apr 2012 | 6:46 pmIs there an absolute rule where using your database as a queue is ALWAYS an anti-pattern? I take a look at one of my projects and why we choose to go with it. -
Where Do Software Engineers And Developers Post Their Resumes?
9 Apr 2012 | 7:33 pmYour friendly neighborhood programmer guy is interested in finding out where you post your resume... Dice? Monster? CareerBuilder? Indeed? SimplyHired???? -
Discovering A New Hobby... And Programming Is Still Part Of It!
9 Apr 2012 | 6:53 pmTraining! Yes, providing training! I never thought this would be really interesting. I'm trying a gig volunteering to provide some .Net training to some COBOL programming friends.
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Rss | PHP on Google App Engine
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16 May 2012 | 11:43 am
16 May 2012 | 11:43 am...
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Free IT - Software & Development Magazines and Downloads from alltop.tradepub.com
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Free Trial Download: VIPRE Antivirus Business Software
14 May 2012 | 2:00 amVIPRE Antivirus Business is the cost-effective and easy-to-manage business virus protection for small- and medium-sized businesses. It's easy to set up and use via an intuitive management console. It's the business antivirus built with IT administrators in mind. Try VIPRE free for 30 days to see how this security solution can benefit your organization.Request Free! -
Increase Sales and Conversions With a Well-designed Web Site
7 May 2012 | 1:50 pmCreating an online presence is just as important as getting your name out to your local consumers. Grow with the Internet by learning how to pick the right type of design for your market as well as how to sell directly from your website.You will also receive free price quotes from web design vendors that best fit your needs.Request Free! -
Six Steps for Orchestrating the Requirements Process
3 May 2012 | 1:20 pmHow do you become an agile enterprise but still deal with all the intricacies of managing an effective and controlled requirements process? The latest research shows that almost 50% of organizations struggle with managing customer requirements because they use hybrid agile and waterfall approaches. Organizations that do hybrid development face unique challenges in dealing with the impact of changing requirements across projects, maintaining traceability across the application delivery lifecycle, and working with disparate tools and processes. Read this white paper from requirements management… -
Creative Shorts: Business Agility through Agile Lifecycle Practices
3 May 2012 | 1:20 pmIn this report, discover the strategy for employing Agile lifecycle practices to ensure end-to-end agility for application and service delivery.Request Free! -
VDI Monitoring & Performance Management Best Practices with Brian Madden & Gabe Knuth
1 May 2012 | 2:00 amDownload this On-Demand Webinar and learn more about:User experience focus vs application silo focusQuick identification of performance bottlenecks vs fingerpointing between network, server, desktop teamsProactive vs reactive performance management Turning data overload into actionable insightUnderstanding the whole VDI environment end-to-end vs silo focusInsight into user and application behavior and performance impactTools for VDI planning and design vs implementation Why monitoring of virtual desktops is different from virtual serversHow to right-size your VDI infrastructure Agent vs…
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Latest from developerFusion
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Media: #350 REST API Versioning
16 May 2012 | 2:51 amAPIs should be consistent, but it is difficult to do this when returning a JSON response along side the HTML interface. Here I show how to add a versioned, RESTful API. The version can be determined from either the URL or HTTP headers. -
Article: An Introduction To WebSockets
15 May 2012 | 7:49 amIn this article, Shwetank Dixit introduces the WebSockets protocol and API, the problem they are designed to solve, and the first few lines of code to get you started enabling your web applications with this technology -
Article: Building Your First Data Cube
11 May 2012 | 7:25 amIn this extract from Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Programming, the authors demonstrate how to create a 'simple' OLAP cube using the AdventureWorks database as the data source -
Article: Force-Directed Graph Layout in WebSharper
17 Apr 2012 | 6:57 amIn this tutorial, Anton Tayanovskyy demonstrates how to build an interactive force-directed graph visualization running in the browser. -
Media: #340 DataTables
11 Apr 2012 | 11:59 pmDataTables makes it easy to convert a plain HTML table into one with pagination, sorting, and searching - all done with JavaScript and jQuery. Here I show how to set this up and use a Rails application as the data source.
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Software Product Development | Software Testing Tutorial | Software Process
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Explain Test case, Test Script, Test Environment, Test Procedure and Test Log?
16 May 2012 | 1:23 pmThere are several terms related to software testing like test cases, test scripts, test environment, test procedures, test logs and the list goes on. So many terms make the whole concept of testing go topsy turvy inside our brains. What is a Test Case? - A test case can be thought of as a case or a set of conditions that when executed or implemented will determine whether the aspect of -
Explain Scrum - a type of an agile method?
16 May 2012 | 5:08 amScrum as we all know is the agile software development methodology most in use nowadays for the development of many types of software systems and applications. It has been classified under the category of iterative and incremental development methodologies that works in an excellent way in managing the software products and projects. It also helps in management of the application development. -
How does a DU path segment play a role in data flow testing?
15 May 2012 | 1:21 pmWhenever you would have came across the topic of data flow testing, you surely would have heard about the term “du path segment” but still not familiar with it! This article if focussed up on the du path segments and what role it has got to play in the data flow testing. We will discuss the du path segments under the context of data flow testing and not as a separate topic so that it becomes -
How does a definition use association play a role in data flow testing?
15 May 2012 | 5:25 amDefinition use association is one of the terms that appear at the scene of data flow testing and quite many of us are unaware of it. This article is all about the concepts of the definition use associations and what role does they have got to play in the data flow testing. The definition use association forms quite an important part of the data flow testing. Let us see how! First we are -
How to define boundaries between automation framework and a testing tool?
14 May 2012 | 1:25 pmAutomated software testing is difficult to be carried out on its own and thus requires support. This support is supplied by a frame work which is automated for all kinds of testing and is commonly known as the “test automation framework”. To define it formally we can say that it is a set of the below mentioned aspects: Assumptions whether true or false, Concepts providing support to
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Simply Ryan
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RIP Camp Bears
15 May 2012 | 11:23 pmI’m sad to inform you that Camp Bears (the first real-time virtual world for kids on the iPad) has been removed from the iTunes Application store and that I am prohibited from using the code or relaunching the application. Synopsis of Camp Bears
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ViralPatel.net
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Deleting Multiple Values From Listbox in JavaScript
15 May 2012 | 8:08 amThere was a requirement of deleting multiple options from a listbox using JavaScript. User can select multiple items from a Listbox. Once the delete button is pressed, remove all the values that are selected from the combobox.Now the most intuitive solution for this problem would be to iterate through each option from the listbox and delete it if it is selected. So one would write following piece of HTML & JavaScript.The HTMLDefine a simple listbox with id lsbox and two buttons, Delete & Reset. <table> <tr> <td align="center"> <select… -
org.hibernate.AnnotationException: No identifier specified for entity
10 May 2012 | 6:53 amWhen you are writing a piece of code from scratch a lot of time you do silly mistakes and still wonder why its not working. Well same thing happened the other day when I added a Hibernate Entity class in one project and was struggling to make it work.The exception was: org.hibernate.AnnotationException: No identifier specified for entity: net.viralpatel.hibernate.Employee at org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationBinder.bindClass(AnnotationBinder.java:650) at org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationConfiguration.processArtifactsOfType(AnnotationConfiguration.java:498) at… -
Android: Trigger Media Scanner Programmatically
7 May 2012 | 3:20 pmWhile working on an Android App, I had to integrate the Camera API. User can take a photo from App and process it. With Android the Photo that you click cannot be accessed until the media scanner runs and index it. It is possible to triggeer programatically the Media Scanner in Android. Check the below code snippet: import android.content.Intent; import android.net.Uri; import android.os.Environment; ... ... sendBroadcast( new Intent(Intent.ACTION_MEDIA_MOUNTED, Uri.parse("file://" + Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory())) ); ... Here we are using sendBroadcast method from… -
How To Enable Camera in Android Emulator
7 May 2012 | 3:05 pmBy default when you create an Android Virtual Devices (AVD) in Android, the Camera is disabled. So if your application uses Camera API, it might not work properly in Android Emulator. Also SDCard must be defined in emulator in order to use Camera.To enable Camera in your Android Emulator, just add following highlighted code in your AVD’s config.ini file. You can find the config.ini file under your user directory/.android folder.File: ~/.android/config.ini hw.lcd.density=160 skin.name=HVGA skin.path=platforms\android-9\skins\HVGA hw.cpu.arch=arm abi.type=armeabi vm.heapSize=24… -
How to Resize Image Dynamically in PHP
3 May 2012 | 1:42 pmToday almost every website you visit show content in form of thumbnails. Thumbnails are nothing but images displayed next to the content. Be it News website or a blog, displaying images next to content is key to appeal user. Even our blog shows images as thumbnails on home page.A prerequisites to show Thumbnail in a webpage is that thumbnail must be small enough. So that many thumbnails can be loaded as fast as possible. Hence almost every website resize the image to create small thumbnails.So how to do this on the fly? How to resize an Image dynamically in PHP?There is an extremely useful…
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Mr.Bool - Recent posts!
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Simulating mouse click and Keyboard press with Java and Pixel color determiner (Anurag Jain)
15 May 2012 | 6:19 pmIn this article we will: Simulate keyboard clicks, Move your mouse or produce mouse click, Determine pixel information from screen coordinates. -
Exploring Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Server and Client Controls (Ayad Boudiab)
15 May 2012 | 11:18 amAjax is a combination of CSS, HTML, JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest. In this course, we are using the Microsoft implementation of Ajax with ASP.NET. We will discuss the server and the client portions. -
Starting with Ajax - Exploring Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Server and Client Controls - Lesson 1 (Ayad Boudiab)
14 May 2012 | 8:28 pmIn this video, we are continuing the ASP.NET 4.0 discussion. One subject that we promised to come back to us Ajax. Instead of posting the whole page to the server every time the user takes an action (clicking on a button), we can send Async requ -
How to be a good web developer (VARUN ARORA)
14 May 2012 | 7:41 pmAll the below listed skills if acquired would help a web developer to sustain a healthy position in the web market though all web developers dont succeed to attain each of them. -
How to use the Position property - CSS (Leandro Adriano Oriente)
11 May 2012 | 10:09 pmIn this article I will teach you to use the Position property of CSS. Remembering that this is a property of CSS 2.1 and works perfectly in all modern browsers.
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samaxes
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Java EE 6 Testing Part II – Introduction to Arquillian and ShrinkWrap
3 May 2012 | 8:51 amIn Java EE 6 Testing Part I I briefly introduced the EJB 3.1 Embeddable API using Glassfish embedded container to demonstrate how to start the container, lookup a bean in the project classpath and run a very simple integration test. This post focus on Arquillian and ShrinkWrap and why they are awesome tools for integration testing of enterprise Java applications. The source code used for this post is available on GitHub under the folder arquillian-shrinkwrap. The tools Arquillian Arquillian brings test execution to the target runtime, alleviating the burden on the developer of managing the… -
Java EE 6 Testing Part I – EJB 3.1 Embeddable API
6 Dec 2011 | 8:32 amOne of the most common requests we hear from Enterprise JavaBeans developers is for improved unit/integration testing support. EJB 3.1 Specification introduced the EJB 3.1 Embeddable API for executing EJB components within a Java SE environment. Unlike traditional Java EE server-based execution, embeddable usage allows client code and its corresponding enterprise beans to run within the same JVM and class loader. This provides better support for testing, offline processing (e.g. batch), and the use of the EJB programming model in desktop applications. [...] The embeddable EJB container… -
Changing URL parameters with jQuery
20 Sep 2011 | 9:32 amYou can find plenty of resources about this topic just by googling the web, most of which will point to jQuery plugins. But the fact is that it’s so easy to achieve this by simply using jQuery that you do not need a plugin. The code is pretty much self explanatory: /* * queryParameters -> handles the query string parameters * queryString -> the query string without the fist '?' character * re -> the regular expression * m -> holds the string matching the regular expression */ var queryParameters = {}, queryString = location.search.substring(1), re =… -
Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess
23 May 2011 | 9:44 amWeb performance is getting more and more attention from web developers and is one of the hottest topic in web development. Fred Wilson considered it at 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps as the #1 principle for successful web apps. First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. Faster website means more revenue and traffic Amazon: 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales (source: Greg Linden, Amazon). Google: 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches… -
Stripes framework XSS Interceptor
3 Aug 2010 | 9:08 amI have created a new project at Google Code named Stripes XSS Interceptor. This project escapes all the parameters that Stripes binds during its Validation & Binding phase using a wrapped request object (a convenient implementation of the HttpServletRequest interface). The code follows the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) security guidance posted at OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). Please feel free to report any bug you find in the project Issue Tracking. Related PostsJava Web Development with Stripes frameworkStripes framework and jQuery AutocompleteStripes framework and jQuery:…
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Javarevisited
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Difference between java and javaw executable commands
28 Apr 2012 | 10:37 pmdifference between java.exe and javaw.exe commands was the recent java question asked to one of my friend. while running java program on windows you might have noticed that they will appear in task manager as either java.exe or javaw.exe, also in JAVA_HOME/bin we see these two java commands java.exe and javaw.exe, do you know difference between java.exe and javaw.exe ? surprisingly not many java programmer know answer of this java interview question, may be because java developers has not paid enough attention to these commands. any way here we will see few differences between java and… -
Java program to reverse a number - Example tutorial
19 Apr 2012 | 2:00 pmHow to reverse a number in Java without using any API or write a simple Java program to reverse a number is common programming questions asked on fresher level software engineer interviews. Reversing a number is also popular homework questions on many Java programming courses on school, colleges and training institutes. I personally feel java program to reverse number is good programming exercise for some one who is just started learning programming in Java or any other programming language because of its simplicity and little bit of trickiness which shows how to use operators for programming… -
How to measure elapsed execution time in Java - StopWatch Example
18 Apr 2012 | 1:00 pmThere are two ways to measure elapsed execution time in Java either by using System.currentTimeinMillis()or by using System.nanoTime(). These two methods can be used to measure elapsed or execution time between two method calls or event in Java. Calculating elapsed time is one of the first thing Java programmer do to find out how many seconds or millisecond a method is taking to execute or how much time a particular code block is taking. Most of Java programmer are familiar with System.currentTimeInMillis()which is there from beginning while a new version of more precise time measurement… -
Difference between List and Set in Java Collection
17 Apr 2012 | 3:09 amWhat is difference between List and Set in Java is a very popular Java collection interview questions and an important fundamental concept to remember while using Collections class in Java. Both List and Set are two of most important Collection classes Java Program use along with various Map implementation. Basic feature of List and Set are abstracted in List and Set interface in Java and then various implementation of List and Set adds specific feature on top of that e.g. ArrayList in Java is a List implementation backed by Array while LinkedList is another List implementation which works… -
How to invoke method by name in java dynamically using reflection
16 Apr 2012 | 12:55 pmIn Java you can invoke any method by its string name dynamically using reflection API. java.lang.reflect API provides powerful reflection mechanism which can load classes by its name even if classes are not available at compile time, Can get all methods including private and public from class and allow you to invoke any method dynamically using reflection. For those who are new in Java this sound pretty strange that at runtime you provide a method name using string and Java can run that method without any code for calling the method during compilation, but Reflection is such a powerful…
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NeverFriday
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Random Interesting Questions on StackOverflow #1
5 May 2012 | 2:42 pmJust a list of some interesting questions found on StackOverflow. What is the point of setters and getters? Reducing If-Else statements in Java When is unit-testing inappropriate or unnecessary? Writing commit messages as a solo developer How should I test randomness? The modern way to perform error handling Tags: programming -
Code is up for the om-web-pack
24 Apr 2012 | 4:21 pmI forked the cl-web-utils and oauth2 libraries and started work on a Twilio API. You can check out the whole project here: https://gitorious.org/om-web-pack As a change of pace I'm using LispWorks Personal Edition in Windows 7 (64-bit). I've already encountered a compilation error in cl-web-utils. It has to do with the helpers file which has some useful macros and functions, however most of them don't seem to be used and I feel like some of them can be inlined or replaced with functions from Alexandria or another library. We'll see what happens with that. The changes I'm making to oauth2 are… -
Node.js and Web Server Architecture Performance
21 Apr 2012 | 12:17 pmSince I got an ACM subscription, I have been interested in knowing what research papers have practical implications for web developers. There was a blog post by Ted Dziuba that blasted the hype surrounding Node.js, calling it a cancer on the developer community and suggesting that the performance is sub-par and the language used, JavaScript, contains flaws as bad as those found in PHP. He did a micro-benchmark and the amount of requests that Node.js could handle with the simplest function and with a modest load was tiny. There was a reply to this by Joshua Kehn where the example used by… -
ACM Subscriptions Are Worth The Price
20 Apr 2012 | 9:12 pmIt seems that a lot of computer scientists and programmers assume that the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is a mere publisher of computer science papers. They forget that the ACM hands out the Turing Award which has been awarded to several prominent computer scientists such as Alan J Perlis, Marvin Minsky, Edsger W Dijkstra, Donald E Knuth, and Barbara Liskov. When I subscribed as a professional, I gained access to the digital library which is rich with computer science papers which are sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical. The papers are found in the numerous transactions and… -
HackTO hackathon aftermath (raw notes)
15 Apr 2012 | 12:00 amThese are the raw notes I wrote down after I left the hackathon...You can check out the code I wrote here completed some sort of application for the hackathon, was screwed over by the Wi-Fi routers. Discovered flaws in oauth2 and cl-web-utils packages. Drakma wasn't bad, needs more examples and a bit more documentation for the major functions. Hunchentoot was very easy to use and get started with. The easy handlers were a godsend. Cl-who was painful to use when I wanted to re use snippets of HTML. I ended up not using parenscript or css-lite; they're far more useful with a good set of macros…
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code-diesel
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Downloading Gmail attachments using PHP
7 May 2012 | 4:01 amAutomatically extracting attachments from Gmail can be important for reasons where you need to process the attached files periodically with a CRON job. Also it can be useful for automatically archiving important attachments. Below is a simple proof-of-concept plain PHP code, devoid of any object-oriented features that extracts attachments from your Gmail account. It uses PHPs imap extension to access the inbox. Before you proceed make sure that imap is enabled in your Gmail settings page. All attachments downloaded in the following code are saved in the current folder, which you can easily… -
Auto Saving your web form data
2 May 2012 | 7:45 amThere is nothing more frustrating than filling a complex web form and just as you are ready to submit it, you accidentally hit refresh, close your window tab or the browser just crashes on you. Only if you could add some kind of auto-save feature to the form to mitigate this problem. Applications like Gmail, WordPress both support the auto-save feature, albeit in a technically different way. Persisting your form data With the HTML5 local storage feature, your web applications can now save the form data in the local storage until the time it is submitted or reset. This will help avoid users… -
Protocol Relative URLs
19 Apr 2012 | 1:16 amOne little gem I recently encountered is protocol-relative URLs. This solves the headaches of the age-old problem of creating URLs which work whether you’re in SSL mode or normal http. For example take the following image : <img src"http://some-domain.com/images/logo.png"> If the browser is viewing the current page in through HTTPS, then IE will throw the famous “This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items” error message. To prevent that from happening we can use protocol-relative urls. So the above will be coded as given below. <img… -
PHP 5.4.0 in a nutshell
6 Apr 2012 | 2:18 amAlthough purists have always sneered upon PHP for being a “patched” language; the evolution of PHP over the years, with new features added in every version, has only increased its popularity. The latest 5.4 release has followed the trend with some major feature additions. The following post describes some important changes in PHP 5.4. Arrays Arrays are one of the important elements of any programming language. Although PHP’s support of arrays is good, I had always found the ‘array’ constructor to be an eye sore. PHP 5.4 finally gets the short array syntax, available in… -
Printing selective DOM elements on a page
20 Mar 2012 | 1:23 amPrinting web pages from JavaScript, although not a common scenario, can be easily accomplished with some simple code. On the other hand, selectively printing some elements from a web page – like a div or a paragraph, can be challenging. Fortunately there are libraries available that can make the task easier. One such useful jQuery plugin is jQuery PrintElement, which allows you to selectively print a DOM element. Usage is extremely easy; just select any element from a webpage and fire the ‘printElement’ method. For example if you have a div like the following: <div…
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Ginktage
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Xamarin Designer for Android released for Visual Studio and MonoDevelop
14 May 2012 | 1:14 pmXamarin Designer for Android was released few days back that enables the Android developers to create some cool layouts for the Apps from Visual Studio and MonoDevelop. With the Xamarin Designer for Android available for Visual Studio, the developers can get some what experience that is closer to the C# developers expecting from the Visual Studio IDE. Want to know more about Xamarin Designer for Android, Check the Read More.... -
Microsoft Bizspark Startup Challenge 2012
14 May 2012 | 11:35 amMicrosoft Bizspark Startup Challenge, a Microsoft Initiative Challenge to find entrepreneurs with innovative business ideas and that can significantly impact their markets. Microsoft Bizspark Startup Challenge 2012 includes the Cloud Computing and Mobile Application category and includes the following below winning criteria. Innovation Market Potential Management Capability GScore Microsoft Bizspark Startup Chall Read More.... -
Fix for IntelliSense feature in SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 may stop working after you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1
13 May 2012 | 6:33 amToday , i encountered a wiered thing in my SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 where the intellisense was somehow not working in SSMS 2008 R2 . I had only SQL Server 2008 R2 Express installed on my machine and had recently installed the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 on my Windows 7 System and assumed that this could have caused the issue . If you are one of those users who faced the same issue , th Read More.... -
Excel 2010 specifications and limits
12 May 2012 | 12:03 pmFound this interesting post on the Excel specification and limits for Microsoft Excel 2010 . The Excel specification and limits talks about various specifications and limits for Microsoft Excel 2010 that includes Worksheet and workbook specifications and limits Calculation specifications and limits Charting specifications and limits PivotTable and PivotChart report specifications and limits Shared workbook specifi Read More.... -
Download – White Paper for Integrating FireMonkey into Your VCL, C# and C++ Applications
10 May 2012 | 12:05 pmIf you are one of the developers who work on C# , C++ or VCL in Delphi and interesting in developing for Mac via FireMonkey , here’s a free White Paper for Integrating FireMonkey into Your VCL, C# and C++ Applications that is available for download . What is FireMonkey ? “FireMonkey is the first native CPU and GPU powered platform for rich business applications. In this paper, we will look at what is re Read More....
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Svitla Systems Inc.
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Flash vs HTML5
16 May 2012 | 10:55 amFlash has been a long-standing industry favorite among software developers, but the relatively new HTML5 is gaining popularity for its versatility in the increasingly mobile platform marketplace. So the question needs to be asked: which framework reigns in the programming world?Flash has built a solid base of developers and users since its release in 1996. According to Adobe, by 2010 Flash was used almost exclusively for integrating graphics and playing audio and video on web pages. Developers have become very familiar with the functionality of Flash, making it ideal for problem solving. With… -
What the Cloud means for Mobile Development
14 May 2012 | 7:29 amThe world is becoming increasingly mobile as the marketplace continues to shift toward tablets and smart phones. These mobile platforms are creating dramatic changes for software developers as the push for connectivity increases. One of the changes influencing this paradigm shift is Cloud technology. Software like Microsoft Azure encourages collaboration between team members and customers, because it connects developers to virtual servers worldwide. This allows teams of developers to work on projects from any location with web access. It also enables team members to track tasks and the… -
Interview with Nataliya Anon, CEO Svitla Systems Inc.
8 May 2012 | 4:03 amThe whole interview by Donald Landwidth you can listen directly here. If you don’t have enough time, you can read only interesting info for you from the text below.Nataliya, you have 2 Master Degrees. Not many people have that. How did you get them?My first Master Degree was an entrance to US, I came to the Univesity of Kanzas and did my Masters in accounting and information systems and then worked for Ernst and Young for several years, but always had in mind that I would like to start a business and business school was always on my horizon. I got applied to Stanford and got accepted and… -
Interview with Junior Ruby Developer. First steps in Ruby.
3 May 2012 | 5:26 amOur Junior Ruby Developer Roman Franko answered about his first steps in Ruby on Rails development. How have you decided to be a developer?Everything has begun at the moment when I’ve got my first own computer. It was Mac LC III with MaC OS 7. I had been studying in the College of Radio-Electronic Instrument and started to deal with hardware from my beginning. Later I installed Doom II on it. Computer upgrade at the end of 90s had finished with changing platform to PC with Windows and then Linux environment. After college I passed exams to National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv… -
Specifics of Android development. Useful tips from developers.
23 Apr 2012 | 3:47 amAndroid OS is the most dynamic platform for mobile development. What should developer remember when programming for Android? Are there any bottlenecks? We asked our Mobile Department team to answer several questions conserning the programming for Android, its present tips and future. Hope this will help you to understand this OS better. You are welcome to ask any questions if you need our help.Is there a concept of architecture in programming for Android and how to choose it?Google uses the Dalvik virtual machine to run their applications. This imposes certain limitations on the application…
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CodePorting Blog
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Migrating C# unsigned integer types to Java using CodePorting C#2Java
15 May 2012 | 11:43 pmIn one of our previous blogs post; we have shown you how developers can migrate C# properties to Java using CodePorting C#2Java. CodePorting is determined to automate migration of C# code to Java including those language constructs which are not available in Java. This is done by CodePorting C#2Java engine by intelligently producing auto generated code. Unsigned data types contain more data range in same amount of memory as that of their signed counter parts. This is because unsigned data type does not need extra bit to store sign. C# provides eight predefined signed and unsigned… -
Migrating C# properties to Java using CodePorting C#2Java
9 May 2012 | 12:50 amCodePorting C#2Java translates C# constructs to Java code which are not available in Java by using auto-generated code. C# provides properties, which are members that have flexible mechanism to read, write or compute the values of private fields. Properties are also called accessors. But Java does not have equivalent of properties. While migrating code, CodePorting C#2Java engine intelligently generates code to provide same functionality as provided by accessors. Following example shows migration of C# properties in Java: C# Code: namespace CSharp2java.Tests.Convert.Properties… -
Migrating C# using Statement to Java using CodePorting C#2Java
2 May 2012 | 1:07 amCodePorting C#2Java translates C# code to Java code which is ready to be compiled. C# defines scope by using statement, outside of which an object or objects will be disposed. But in Java there is not equivalent syntax for using statement. While migrating code, CodePorting C#2Java engine intelligently handles this by producing try/catch block in Java code. Using this technique purpose is achieved and code remains with same formatting. Following example shows migration of C# using statement in Java: C# Code: using System.IO namespace… -
CodePorting Expert’s Newsletter April 2012
30 Apr 2012 | 6:47 amWelcome to the April 2012 Edition of the CodePorting Expert’s Newsletter. We bring you the most exciting news and insights about the activities at CodePorting during last month. So lets get started! CodePorting Stats CodePorting has been growing at great pace during April 2012 as well. Total commulative usage of CodePorting is now 3.7 million lines of code in first 4 months, while the usage in April 2012 alone is 500 thousand lines of code. Development Updates During April 2012, following new features have been introduced into CodePorting: CodePorting website has been upgraded in terms… -
CodePorting C#2Java API Samples for Ruby & C# on GitHub & CodePlex
25 Apr 2012 | 2:08 amCodePorting C#2Java helps its advanced users to use SDK APIs to translate C# code to Java inside their own code. CodePorting API SDK samples are hosted on GitHub and Microsoft’s opensource project hosting website CodePlex. These samples are currently in C# and ruby, more languages will be coming soon. These samples illustrate steps required to get your project ported by writing your own code consuming CodePorting C#2Java APIs. Followings are the locations of API SDK samples. One can get code from repository of his choice. CodePlex .NET Samples ruby Samples GitHub .NET…
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Platformability
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SCALING AGILE – THE WORLD IS ALL THAT IS THE CASE
15 May 2012 | 9:56 amTHE WORLD IS ALL THAT IS THE CASE There’s a flurry of activity when projects kick off, resources have to be marshalled and often teams need to be informed of a good deal of information around the thinking behind the work at hand. As that ship leaves port upon its venture for treasure (aaargh!), point to point conversations are difficult to manage across a sizable group. For companies on the move, it raises the ever present question of how to scale agile practices. For smaller teams in the same room or space, these conversations often go on in the open. But as you delegate tasks… -
Visualizing Option Prices
10 May 2012 | 3:39 amThe easiest way to make sense of a lot numbers is to turn them into a picture. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise: While it takes a lot of conscious effort to see trends, movements and tendencies within a large set of figures we find it rather easy to deduce the same from a visual relationship. Consequently, financial professionals find themselves surrounded by all kinds of charts and diagrams every day. Line Charts to visualize performance, candlestick charts to show the relationship between intraday movement and open / close rates, heat maps to visualize volume and so on…… -
Why 100% Code Coverage is not enough
8 May 2012 | 5:39 amIntroduction When it comes to software testing and code quality it is not always clear what the Test Coverage is – respectively what areas of the application need more attention regarding testing. Questions like: - Do we have enough tests? - Do the tests cover enough paths of the code? are quite common but tricky to answer. Measuring the Code Coverage seems to be the perfect solution. But to be honest – I am not absolutely convinced and do not trust these numbers alone. If you write your Tests just to meet the coverage target, you might miss some critical tests around edge cases… -
Performance Testing (part 2) – Tools, Environments, Observer effects
1 May 2012 | 4:31 amContinuing from part one, this performance testing blog will concentrate on how to test the System Under Test having already decided what needs to be tested and at what level which was covered in part one. Will you be using third party tools or writing your own framework, or just writing to log files and then analysing them? What are you going to use to do your testing and in particular will the performance monitoring be separate to the application or embedded within it. Even if you use third party tools it may still be necessary to embed links or functions within your code. Alternatively… -
Money Phone
27 Apr 2012 | 9:57 amHaving gone to the ‘Internetworld 2012′ event, there seems to be a clear emerging trend for mobiles, which should come as no surprise. We are all going to be using our phones to pay for things from now on. Phoney Barclaycard has a rather strange solution to this that they have just announced, a ‘Pay Tag’, basically a sticker that you can “decorate” your phone with and turn it in to a kind of oyster card to pay for items £15 or less, no PIN, No security checks. They have teamed up with Orange and use the phone for authentication, using all the data for…
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Visual Basic Source Code
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Visual Basic .Net 2010 Basic Image/Picture Editing
14 May 2012 | 10:04 pmDescription: Visual Basic .Net 2010 on how to edit image/picture during runtime using System.Drawing and System.Drawing.Imaging. Basic editing tools like cropping, rotate images, zoom, flip horizontal/vertical, negative effect and gray scale. Download Project Screenshot -
Visual Basic 2010 .Net GDI Brushes Sample
14 May 2012 | 9:49 pmDescription: A simple visual basic 2010 .net sample on how to use GDI+ Brushes sample using System.Drawing.Drawing2D. Download Project Screenshot -
Visual Basic 2010 Game Action and Drawing Sample
5 May 2012 | 12:29 amDescription: Visual Basic 2010 game action and drawing is controlled by several classes that act together. The main game classes are the Grid and Block classes. The PointTranslator class adds utility functions for drawing the blocks. The HighScores class handles retrieving and setting scores. Download Project … Continue reading → -
Visual Basic 2010 File System Sample
5 May 2012 | 12:13 amDescription: Visual Basic 2010 sample program of file system on how to copy directory, delete directory, move directory, view directory properties and view drive properties. Download Project Screenshot -
Visual Basic 2010 Explorer Style Sample
2 May 2012 | 8:59 pmDescription: DirectoryScanner – This is a simple application that scans all directories and sub-directories in either all logical drives or a user-selected starting directory. The list of drives is obtained by using the method. A tree view control displays the … Continue reading →
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Code Corner
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TSQL: Mix column names and ordinals in ORDER BY
16 May 2012 | 10:52 amIt might be a weird scenario from a parallel universe, but in infinite dimensions it is bound to happen to someone else besides me. If you’re getting results from a query where you know some columns by name and others only by their ordinal position (e.g. if SQL is built dynamically and can change based on different condition) – you add sorting to that query by both ordinal position of a column and column name and even throw an expression into the mix. Allow me to illustrate: Let’s get back to basics, namely Northwind database. If I ran a query like this: SELECT * FROM… -
UltraWebGridExcelExporter: Export more than 65536 rows
14 May 2012 | 12:37 pmWhen exporting data from Infragistics UltraWebGrid into Excel using UltraWebGridExcelExporter ordinary a very basic code similar to this is used: ' ' define Exporter "xMyExporter" ' define UltraWebGrid "xMyGrid" and load grid with data, then: ' xMyExporter.ExportMode = UltraWebGrid.ExcelExport.ExportMode.Download xMyExporter.Export(xMyGrid) That’s it. But, if your data exceed 65536 rows you will get an error: System.InvalidOperationException: The maximum number of rows in an excel worksheet with the current format is: 65536 This is not Excel Exporter limitation. In… -
(Possible) solution for MSChart ArgumentException The image is not found error
11 May 2012 | 4:59 pmIf you’re using Microsoft’s .NET charting control on your ASP.NET pages you may receive an annoying error [ArgumentException]: The image is not found. at System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler.ProcessSavedChartImage(HttpContext context) at System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler.System.Web.IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) I… -
Select Distinct DataRows from ADO.NET DataTable using LINQ
11 May 2012 | 3:37 pmIf you’re trying to retrieve distinct rows from your ADO.NET data table using code like From oRow As DataRow In dtTable.Rows Select oRow Distinct or (From oRow As DataRow In dtTable.Rows Select oRow).Distinct() You may find that rows that are being return are not unique. That’s because by default LINQ compares table rows by reference. If you need to compare by actual values – use DataRowComparer in Distinct method call: (From oRow As DataRow In dtTable.Rows Select oRow).Distinct(DataRowComparer.Default) Related Posts:Group By and Aggregates in .NET DataTableShowing ALL… -
GW BASIC in your browser!
1 May 2012 | 1:33 pmNow this just bring a nostalgic tear to your eye. Cory Smith of AddressOf implemented Classic DOS GW BASIC entirely in Silverlight. It’s beautiful, give it a go! Related Posts:VB for AndroidVisual Basic FTW!
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Making the Switch
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Finance for Developers: A Concise Tutorial
9 May 2012 | 6:48 amWe developers like to think that we are the “smart masses” and better than everybody else. However a lot of us have trouble in balancing our accounts, controlling our money, or even have accumulated rather big balances in our credit cards. Because most of us aren’t experts in finance. Some may (like most people) tend to over-simplify things that they don’t know much about. To put things into perspective, just look at your non-techie colleagues that downloads funny-funny applications from who-knows-where, forwards them in e-mail attachments, and get shocked when their… -
Word Clouds for Twitter
30 Apr 2012 | 11:08 pmHi Everyone, We’re very close in releasing a more trimmed-down version of Resonate. Why? Resonate have been brewing for too long without any feedback from you guys, our users. This can lead us to the dangerous path of making apps that you won’t love. So instead of including every feature that should be in Resonate, instead this new app will have only one feature and the feedback gained from it will guide us on how we should make Resonate. The single sole feature is Twitter Word Clouds. That is, the app will summarize your twitter timeline into a jumble of words, allowing you to… -
Blood & Glory: Invictus!
25 Apr 2012 | 7:35 amI’m pleased to announce that I have completed the entire campaign in Blood & Glory for iOS. All flawless victory without spending any (real) money from my part. I know this sounds cheesy, but I also learn how to multitask by playing Blood & Glory during commuting and listening to knowledge podcasts. It is one of the very few iOS games that doesn’t take over the audio during play and I could listen to podcasts like Mixergy, The Lifestyle Business Podcast, and iDeveloper Live while playing the game (iOS game makers: please resist the urge from taking over the audio that… -
News Anchor for Mac OS X 2.4.6 Beta 3
17 Apr 2012 | 9:42 pmHi News Anchor users, This is a followup to my earlier post on News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1. I’ve decided not to make that version generally available due to a crashing bug and have a Beta 3 release for another round of testing. What happened to Beta 2? There wasn’t much change there worthy of a blog post and I’ve just updated that last post to use the Beta 2 binary. You can download News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 3 from this link. It looks like enabling garbage collection did more harm than good. The garbage collector triggers consistent crashes when playing a channel episode… -
Wrapping C-Style Callbacks with Blocks
11 Apr 2012 | 8:02 amIf you ever done any non-trivial C programming, you’d probably come across this kind of callback API: void processStuff(StuffCollection* lotsaStuff,int (*callBack)(Stuff* item,void* data),void* data); Typically StuffCollection represents a composite structure that contains one or more Stuff object and the API call processStuff iterates through those objects and invokes your callback function. You can pass some state information into your callback through the opaque data parameter. If you’ve experienced this it’s quite a pain in the rear to package all state information into…
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Justin Cooney - Programming Tips
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IIS6 – Change the ASP.NET Version Without Restarting the W3SVC Service Using Aspnet_regiis.exe
16 May 2012 | 1:15 pmChanging the ASP.NET version of a Web site in IIS6 using the IIS Manager GUI requires a restart of the W3SVC service. This means that all sites on your Web server will be affected and sessions will be lost. This isn’t really desirable behavior if you are hosting more than one site on a Web Server. Although one doesn’t often need to upgrade the ASP.NET version of a Web site, it’s important to know how to do so without affecting the remaining sites on the server. Also, when you are creating a new Web site IIS6 doesn’t allow you to select the version of ASP.NET that you… -
McAffee ePO Conflicts with IIS (and how to Resolve the Conflict)
11 May 2012 | 4:24 pmIt appears that McAfee’s ePO system causes conflicts with Web servers when it is hosted on the same machine as for example a Web server like IIS. Why is this? I experienced this conflict on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server that was set up with IIS 7 and McAfee’s ePO system. Apparently McAfee’s ePO system runs on Apache behind the scenes and requires port 443 to be available. This causes a conflict with Web servers such as IIS which also need port 443, so either one or the other breaks if they are both up and running on the same server. The fix for this is actually quite… -
Find Out Your Visitor’s Position Using HTML5 Geolocation
10 May 2012 | 3:47 pmReblogged from Zeeshan Akhter: Geolocation is a way for the user to retrieve their position and share where they are. This can be done in a few ways, by using a GPS as the one in your new smartphone or connected to your computer is the most precise method. But for users without GPS the browser will use your IP and or try to find nearby WLAN stations, however this is not as precise but gives some idea of where they are. Read more… 1,082 more words A very interesting article about writing HTML5 Geolocation written by Zeeshan Akhter -
Ajax – How can I upload files asynchronously with jQuery? – Stack Overflow
9 May 2012 | 8:16 amSee on Scoop.it – JQuery-Features Here is a very interesting discussion on the StackOverflow forums about using JQuery to build an asynchronous file upload component. People propose many different solutions such as Flash, a hidden IFrame, or to using HTML5. Although the discussion happened some time ago between 2008 and 2009, it is still relevant and interesting to read today. See on stackoverflow.com Filed under: Mini Updates, Programming -
VSTO for MS Outlook 2007 – Using msocontroledit and msoControlComboBox in the Commandbars
4 May 2012 | 9:48 amOutlook Custom Search Fields VSTO for MS Outlook can be a powerful way to customize Outlook programmatically. However, the syntax can be finicky at times and I have found a few instances where the programming logic becomes tricky. For example, you can use VSTO to add a text box to the Outlook command bar window. This can be put to a number of good uses when building a custom component for Outlook. My thoughts behind adding the controls to Outlook were to allow the user to select a type of search to run in the custom dropdown list, and then to use the text box for the user to add text that…
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SharePoint2010,Asp.net,Csharp,Ektron CMS,Jquery ,Sql Solutions
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how to execute sql query in c sharp
16 May 2012 | 12:26 pmHere i will show how to Excute the sql query in sql server using c#. public void executeSqlfileincsharp(string connectionStringName, string executesqlFileName) { string sqlConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[connectionStringName].ToString(); FileInfo file = new FileInfo(executesqlFileName); string sqlString = file.OpenText().ReadToEnd(); using (SqlConnection mySqlConnection = new SqlConnection(sqlConnectionString)) { string[] spliter = { Environment.NewLine, " GO ", Environment.NewLine }; string[] sqlArrayString = sqlString.Split(spliter,… -
What is a partial class and how to use in c sharp
15 May 2012 | 11:57 amIt was introduced under 2.0 framework which allows you to split a class o n to multiple files Advantages: Splitting huge volumes of code into multiple files which makes managing easier.Allows multiple programmers to work on the same class at the same time.grouping related code of a class in separate files Here i will show how to develop a partial class in csharp.For this add a class to the project naming it as File1.cs and write the following code partial class parts { public void test1() { Console.Writeline("method1"); } public void test2() { Console.Writeline("method2"); } } add one more… -
What is Interface and how to use it in asp.net
14 May 2012 | 12:20 pmIn object oriented programming the code can be defined under another container known as interface.which can be defined with only abstract methods in it.Inheritance is organised as implementation and interface inheritance .Implementation inheritance is achieved through classes which is always single.Interface inheritance is achieved through an interface which is multiple .Multiple inheritance is supported through interfaces under java and .net languages[<modifiers>]interface<name>{<abstract members>;}-->An interface cannot contain variables in it-->members of an… -
convert uppercase to lowercase in xslt
12 May 2012 | 12:33 pmHere i will show how to translate the uppercase letter to lowercase using xslt.For this i have created a variables ,which are used in this conversion process.Then the result will be assigned to one parameter which is "purl".<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:param name="CurrentUrl"></xsl:param> <xsl:param name="PUrl"></xsl:param> <xsl:variable… -
how to create object in asp.net
11 May 2012 | 12:39 pmWe can create the object of a class from any where either in the same class or from the other class.When created with in a class we created under main method.As it was the entry point Syntax to create an object <class> <obj>=new <class>([<arglist>]) program p=new program() p.method1(); p.method2(); p.method3(); Here program p is object , program p=new program() is for allocate memory
