Top Programming Blogs
Share the Top Programming Blogs on
Joel on Software
New StackOverflow developer Kevin Montrose (6,878 reputation) added a neat feature to the career site that makes it a zillion times easier to file a CV if you’ve already put in your job and education history on LinkedIn or FaceBook. Try it out. Need to hire a really great programmer? Want...
Raising money for StackOverflow
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meeting more VCs, and doing a road show for the other firms...
In the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If you hire sales and marketing staff too early, they don’t really get much traction, and you may start to think that sales and...
My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach it not to jump on people, not to poop in the house, to sit on command, and to never, ever, ever chew on...
Steve Krug has written a follow up to his usability classic Don’t Make Me Think. The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple “hallway” usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended. Need to hire a really great...
“As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a ‘keep everyone on the same page’ problem. But often what they actually have is a ‘stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on...
MapQuest Developer Blog
ButtonQuest: Secret Button Carriers - Announced!
Earlier we told you about the contest we're doing at SXSW - ButtonQuest - where you can enter to win one of three Apple(R) iPads[TM]. While we've already announced several locations of where the MapQuest team will be at handing out buttons, we have also enlisted "Secret Button Carriers" who...
ButtonQuest: A Chance to Win an iPad!
Earlier this week we announced a way for people attending SXSW to win an Apple(R) iPad[TM], it's called ButtonQuest. Wanna play? Here's how: YOUR MISSION?: Find as many MapQuest Star buttons as you can. WHAT IS IT?: Play MapQuest ButtonQuest and earn entries to win one of three Apple iPads! HOW...
MapQuest Officially Announces Launch of Platform V6 At SXSW
It must be official, we have a Press Release! It has a very catchy title: MapQuest Engages Developer Community with Presence at SXSW; Shows Easy-to-Use, Developer Friendly Tools. Over the last eight months we have overhauled the MapQuest Platform from top to bottom. We have re-written every key component,...
We're on a Panel at SXSW Interactive
Location is going to be a very popular topic this year at SXSW Interactive. It's no surprise really. Geolocation features and applications are changing how we interact and consume information. These changes can be seen in the way news stories get reported, location data is visualized in near real-time (like...
MapQuest Traffic Service Goes Live!
Another week, and another production launch to the MapQuest Web Services. This time around it is the new Traffic Service. Since I have already blogged about its features and functions when we pushed it to beta, I'll just provide a brief summary and encourage you, dear reader, to click through to...
A BBQ Quest with MapQuest at SXSW!
Mid-March is almost upon us. For thousands, this time of year means one thing: time to go to Austin, TX for SXSW! MapQuest is no exception. In addition to helping attendees get around Austin and find venues for the Interactive, Film, and Music portions of the conference, we'll have a...
Google Code Blog
Coming soon: Gmail contextual gadgets available for trusted testers
At Campfire One this week we announced that we will soon open Gmail contextual gadgets as a new extension point for developers. These gadgets can smartly draw information from the web and let users perform relevant actions based on the content of an email message, all without leaving the Gmail...
Integrate, Publish, Sell - The Google Apps Marketplace
The Google Apps Marketplace, announced this evening at Campfire One, allows you to publish applications which integrate with Google Apps and sell them to more than 2 million businesses. Listing your integrated cloud app on the Google Apps Marketplace enables it to have seamless OpenID-based single sign-on with Google...
Open Source Projects - Apply for Google Summer of Code
Google Summer of CodeTM, our flagship program to introduce college students to open source development, opens today. Over the past five years, we've seen more than 3,400 successful students "graduate" from the program, and we're looking forward to welcoming another group of students for our sixth year. We're now accepting...
The Business of Code, The Code of Business
This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that gives a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This post is written by Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures (and still enjoys writing code!). Albert will be speaking...
Registration for Google I/O 2010 is now closed
This year's conference is now sold out, which means we'll be seeing over 4,000 of you on May 19-20 at Moscone West! For those of you who can't join us in person, video recordings of all sessions and keynotes will be available on YouTube following the conference.Continue to follow us...
SCVNGR and QR codes in location-based mobile gaming
This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This guest post is written by Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja of SCVNGR, who's creating a mobile game for the conference.SCVNGR...
Encosia
ASMX ScriptService mistakes: Installation and configuration
Continuing my series of posts about ASMX services and JSON, in this post I’m going to cover two common mistakes that plague the process of getting a project’s first ASMX ScriptService working: Installing System.Web.Extensions into the GAC and configuring your web.config. System.Web.Extensions (aka ASP.NET AJAX) The ability for ASMX services to return...
ASMX and JSON – Common mistakes and misconceptions
While we were recording episode 5 of Mastering jQuery, I found myself running down a lengthy list of misconceptions and potential pitfalls when it comes to using ASMX services for AJAX callbacks. After years of fielding questions revolving around that topic, I suppose I’ve developed a decent handle on the...
How you can force the Ajax Script Loader to use jQuery 1.4
If you’ve already begun using Microsoft’s new Ajax Script Loader with a CDN-hosted version of jQuery, today’s release of jQuery 1.4 may have left you wondering how to upgrade. Personally, I didn’t want to wait on a new version of Start.js, nor did I want to abandon the script loader...
3 years of Encosia, the best of 2009, and my gratitude
On this day in 2006, I wrote and published a short post here about something that had eluded my attempts at searching for an answer. I thought that archiving the information online might help if I needed to find it again later, and that it might help anyone else who...
Mastering jQuery now available at TekPub
If you haven’t been following the progress of Rob Conery and James Avery’s new venture, TekPub, you’ve been missing out on some great instructional videos. I especially like that they trend slightly Alt.NET, giving you more balanced information than is sometimes available from “official” .NET screencasts. For the past few weeks,...
Emulate ASP.NET validation groups with jQuery validation
In my most recent post, I demonstrated a workaround to allow using the jQuery validation plugin with WebForms pages. The basic idea was to trigger validation only on submissions that occurred within a single logical form, instead of catching submissions anywhere on WebForms’ all-encompassing physical form. This approach worked fine for...
Pure Danger Tech
Learning Clojure #13: Making my code suck less
A couple weeks ago I wrote this tortured Clojure code to build up a string I needed: (defn make-clauses [props] (letfn [ ;; make a single clause from a property name and its index (make-clause [prop index] (str "make...
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Recently at the Lambda Lounge, we spun up a study group for the classic text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka SICP) – thanks to Ken Sipe for the push! For many years this text was used for the introductory course at MIT (and other institutions). I read SICP...
I read Joel Spolsky’s departure from blogging earlier this week but haven’t had time to respond till now. I actually think Joel has a key insight in this piece (although he got it from the inimitable Kathy Sierra), which is that the key is not to talk about your...
I had a case today where I really wanted effectively a Java switch. cond seemed like overkill but then I stumbled on condp which is still more powerful than switch but pretty great for what I needed. The condp function has the following specification: clojure.core/condp ([pred expr & clauses]) where: pred –...
Learning Clojure #11: JDBC metadata in Clojure
Going back a couple weeks I was porting some Java code to Clojure. This Java code was very simply pulling all column names in the database. Here’s the full code in all it’s awesomeness: package d2rq.validation; import java.sql.Connection; import java.sql.DatabaseMetaData; import java.sql.DriverManager; import java.sql.ResultSet; import java.sql.SQLException; public class DatabaseMetadataScraper implements MetadataScraper { ...
It's Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens
Interfaces and Implementations
Consider a Java interface and class: Dog and DefaultDog. Which of these two conventions is best? Option 1 : Dog Name the interface Dog and call the implementation something like DefaultDog or DogImpl. Option 2 : IDog Name the interface IDog and call the implementation Dog, DefaultDog, or whatever else you can come up...
Check out my new hand crocheted Android robot: I got the first one! You can get these on Etsy for $15. This is a much better picture:...
Win 7 Printing to Airport Printer
We have a combination of Mac and Windows machines in our house, and I was unable to get a new Windows 7 64-bit machine to print. The printer is shared using an Airport Extreme Base Station. I downloaded Bonjour for Windows and it immediately detected the printer. Everything seemed OK, but...
I just chatted with T-Mobile about the Nexus One phone. Here’s the conversation… You have been connected to _Kristi J. _Kristi J: Hi Eric, welcome to T-Mobile live Chat. I’m _Kristi and I will be happy to assist you. Please give me a moment to review your question. _Kristi J: I can definitely...
Teaching my boys right from wrong… Aidan Prefers Chrome from Eric Burke on Vimeo....
Custom HTTP Headers with GWT RPC
Prior to GWT 2.0, there was no easy way to add custom HTTP headers when making remote procedure calls. The new RpcRequestBuilder in GWT 2.0 makes it easy to add custom headers. // start with a custom RpcRequestBuilder RpcRequestBuilder reqBuilder = new RpcRequestBuilder() { @Override protected RequestBuilder doCreate(String serviceEntryPoint) { ...
Ruby Inside
11 New Ruby Delights (For If/When You’re Tired of Rails 3.0)
Sick of Rails 3.0 yet or still enjoying your Sinatra, Rango, Ramaze, Cramp, or totally non-Web-based development? OK - I've sniffed out 12 new, interesting Ruby related libraries or blog posts just for you! with no Rails whatsoever!...
Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku
Toto (GitHub repo) is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata. At only 300 lines, it's easy...
Rails 3.0 Beta/Prerelease Available Now and How To Install It
Today, Rails core member Jeremy Kemper dropped the words that lots of ardent Rails developers have been waiting for: "Rails 3 beta is LIVE." It's true! Rails 3.0's first approved beta/pre-release version is now live and ready for you to install....
Get to the Scottish Ruby Conference – 26-27 March, 2010
If you fancy a trip to the land of fried confectionary and heart disease, the Scottish Ruby Conference (previously Scotland on Rails) is selling tickets for its third event: Scottish Ruby Conference 2010. It takes place on 26-27 March, 2010 and the early bird tickets sold out in a mere...
Rails 3.0’s ActiveModel: How To Give Ruby Classes Some ActiveRecord Magic
One of the biggest benefits of bringing Merb developer Yehuda Katz on board to work on Rails 3.0 has been his relentless pursuit of extracting out all of Rails' magical abilities from their monolithic encasings and into separate, manageable chunks. A case in point is ActiveModel, a new library...
The Old New Thing
Simplifying context menu extensions with IExecuteCommand
The IExecuteCommand interface is a simpler form of context menu extension which takes care of the annoying parts of IContextMenu so you can focus on your area of expertise, namely, doing the actual thing the user selected, and leave the shell to doing the grunt work of managing the UI part. I've never needed a...
Why does the OLE variant date format use 30 December 1899 as its zero point?
In 2006, via the suggestion box, Chris J asks why the OLE variant date format has such a strange zero point. Its zero point is 30 December 1899, as opposed to 1 January 1900 (SQL Server's zero point) or 1 January 1970 (the unix zero point). It turns out I don't have to answer this because Eric...
Application compatibility layers are there for the customer, not for the program
Some time ago, a customer asked this curious question (paraphrased, as always): Hi, we have a program that was originally designed for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but we found that it runs into difficulties on Windows Vista. We've found that if we set the program into Windows XP compatibility mode, then the program runs fine on Windows Vista. What changes do...
At an informal gathering, my colleagues and I started talking about our experiences being interviewed at Microsoft. One of the people there remembered how one of the pieces of feedback on the interview lo these many years ago was that although my colleague was certainly smart enough and hardworking enough, there seemed to be insufficient enthusiasm for...
Willy-Peter Schaub was puzzled by a sign reminding drivers that the fine for obstructing an intersection is $101 and wonders what the extra $1 is for. The laws of the State of Washington defer the monetary value of traffic fines to the Infraction Rules for Courts of Limited Jurisdiction (more commonly known as the IRLJ), specifically section 6.2: Monetary...
PSM_ISDIALOGMESSAGE is to modeless property sheets as IsDialogMessage is to modeless dialog boxes
Dialog boxes and property sheets are similar in that most of the time, you use them modally. You call DialogBox or PropertySheet, and the function doesn't return until the user closes the dialog box or property sheet. But you can also use dialog boxes and property sheets modelessly, using CreateDialog or by including the PSH_MODELESS flag when you...
Perlbuzz
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2010-01-07
These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. Decoding climate change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth (radar.oreilly.com) Musical chord analysis with CPAN (use.perl.org) Schwern on......
Devel::NYTProf 3.0 is out, more mindblowing than ever
Go run to the announcement about Devel::NYTProf v3.0. Marvel at the code profiling goodness. Highlights include: Ability to profile opcodes, which means... NYTProf can now profile slow regular expressions More detailed stats on BEGIN blocks Treemap of subroutines Tracking of......
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-12-22
These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. How to import Gravatars into Gmail with 121 lines of Perl (dagolden.com) RT @davorg From Amazon.com: After viewing......
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2009-12-08
These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com. blogs.perl.org is a new, modern blogging platform for the Perl community (blogs.perl.org) Michael Peters gives thanks for some......
By Matt Follett It's the time of year for Advent Calendars and it looks like the Perl community isn't disappointing this year. Perl Advent Calendar The first day talks about using Package::Alias to alias Mouse to Moose. RJBS Advent Calendar......
Christmas brings the RJBS Advent Calendar
By Ricardo Signes Back when I first started learning Perl 5, I was excited to find the Perl Advent Calendar. It was a series of 24 or so short articles about useful Perl modules or techniques, with one new entry......
Life Beyond Code
Photo Courtesy: AceFrenzy on Flickr You may have very little use of a single puzzle piece. I can’t argue with that. But let’s explore that a little further… Being likable alone may not be an asset but not being likable may be a liability Having long term relationships alone may not be an...
You’ve probably seen those thirty-minute, late-night television infomercials that tell you a story about a product in all its glory. After about twenty minutes into the commercial, you have been repeatedly told that your life is incomplete without this latest gizmo. You’ve heard others enthusiastically state how the item changed their...
Watch the stories (pun intended)
You can check the time on your cell phone. Or you could buy a reasonably good watch for less than $100. So, why would anyone buy a watch that is north of $2500. Obviously not just to check the time. So, it must be the stories that the watch makers tell about why...
The problem is never the problem…
In this short (around 2-minutes) video, one of my heroes, Tom Peters explains (with examples) why the problem is never the problem, the response to the problem is. Totally loved the video and is embedded below for you: Why did the 2-minute video touch my heart? The way I look at it, the...
Photo Courtesy: Amitabh Bacchan’s blog Criticism is part of life. If you are doing anything significant, there will always be some criticism from someone Why? Simply because you can’t please everyone. A simple thing to do is to handle criticism with grace. Here is an example of how Amitabh Bacchan (who needs no introduction for...
Faster, better and cheaper OR…
I watched the keynote speech for iPad and was fascinated by what I saw. For those of you who missed it, you can now watch it on the Apple website at the link below: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ This post is not about singing praises for iPad but simply to highlight how the iPad has...
A List Apart
E-books aren’t going to replace books. E-books are books, merely with a different form. More and more often, that form is ePub, a format powered by standard XHTML. As such, ePub can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites. That's great news for publishers and standards-aware web...
Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web
You’ve probably heard that Apple recently announced the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update....
Accent Folding for Auto-Complete
Another generation of technology has passed and Unicode support is almost everywhere. The next step is to write software that is not just “internationalized” but truly multilingual. In this article we will skip through a bit of history and theory, then illustrate a neat hack called accent-folding. Accent-folding has its...
Training the Butterflies: Interview with Scott Berkun
Whether it’s in front of a huge audience or a handful of executives, smooth public speaking is essential to a successful web design career. Yet most of us are more afraid of speaking in public than we are of death. In a lively give-and-take, Liz Danzico interviews Scott Berkun, author...
When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, we must ensure that the site says or does precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Understanding the...
Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, including undermining a user’s trust by failing to meet a basic expectation. But with design patterns gleaned from offline applications, plus a dash of JavaScript, we can provide feedback and reduce password errors without compromising the basic user...
dzone.com: latest front page
The definition of virtual Linux is as fluid as the Linux platform itself. For the desktop user, virtual Linux translates into being able to use Linux without changing their existing operating system. For those working with servers however, virtual Linux can mean something very different altogether. In both instances, virtual Linux...
88 Tips to Make You a Productive Freelancer
A Huge list to change your life in a Huge way. Manage your time properly with this in depth and informative article, guaranteed improve your work-life....
All About Tables – jQuery Plugin
Yes HTML table tag is not recommended in designing your websites anymore but it is still very useful especially in displaying a tabular data. In this article I will be featuring a list of jQuery plugins that are utilizing the html table tag....
Search engine for Android developers
Search engine for Android developers build on Google Custom Search...
Objective-C for Java Programmers
The design of Java was heavily inspired by Objective-C, but many people find learning Objective-C after Java to be a difficult challenge. In the first of a two-part series, David Chisnall, author of Cocoa Programming Developer’s Handbook, looks at the similarities and differences in the semantics of the two languages....
Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow
I remember teaching user interface design courses back in the mid-nineties. In those courses there was a slide entitled “Rapid Prototyping,” and on that slide were all the reasons why rapid prototyping was a bad idea. Most of the reasoning centered around prototyping tools being so complex back then, they...
The Endeavour
A sort of command line for your browser
Quix is a sort of command line for web browsers. It’s a bookmarklet, a piece of JavaScript you save like a bookmark. When you launch Quix, it opens a small dialog that lets you enter brief commands for common browser tasks. For example the gs command does a Google search...
Frozen baby woolly mammoth Top 200 blogs for developers Greece’s debt Code is expendable; developers are not Wanting it both ways Code bubbles Psychological disorder quiz...
Does gaining weight make you taller?
In his autobiography, The Pleasures of Statistics, Frederick Mosteller gives an amusing example of why observational studies are no substitute for doing experiments. We are all familiar with the idea that we can estimate height in male adults from their weight. … But not one of us believes that adding 20...
I learned a useful new phrase today: numerator-only data. This is data without anything to compare it to, no denominator. I ran across the term in Frederick Mosteller’s autobiography. He illustrates the problem with the following old joke. “Why do the white horses eat more than the black horses?” “Don’t know. Why?” “Because...
Allen from the Wave Behind blog translated my blog post Just in case versus just in time into Chinese. I appreciate that Allen went to the trouble of doing the translation. I can’t read Chinese, but people who can told me he did a good job. Mark Biek pointed out the...
A childhood question about heat
When I was a little kid, I asked some adults the following question. If hot things cool, and cool things warm up, could something hot cool down and warm back up? The people I asked didn’t understand my question and just laughed. I have no idea how old I was, but I...
Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist
I hear this too often: “X sounds like a great pattern, but it’s overkill for small applications”. Many patterns have been subjected to this including (but not limited to): SOA, DDD, CQRS, ORM, etc. Often the statement is made by a person without experience in the given pattern (though possibly...
Well, it’s been a long time coming. NServiceBus 2.0 RTM is now generally available. There were some small tweaks after the RC2 but I’m happy to say that, all in all, this was a very quiet stabilization period. Key customers have reported very high levels of satisfaction with the NServiceBus stability, scalability,...
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on Command/Query Responsibility Segregation in London. The recording of the talk is online here. There is one important thing that I didn’t have enough time to cover, but I want you to keep in mind as you’re watching this. It is that...
Eventual Consistency Is Just Caching
People seem to make a big deal about eventual consistency. Those same people don’t seem to think twice about using a cache to improve the performance of their system when the database can’t handle it. That cache holds a copy of data that isn’t 100% synchronized with the database. That’s...
I’ve been hesitant to blog about the dates and locations that I offer courses. While any independent consultant can’t be above some shameless self-promotion, I’ve tried to keep this blog focused on content that is applicable to the broadest cross-section of my readership. Course information was something that I had...
NServiceBus 2.0 Release Candidate 2 Available
So it’s been about 6 months since my last NServiceBus post and since then about 1000 new people have subscribed to this blog so they might not know anything about it. For a bit of history, see the post (from almost exactly a year ago) describing the 1.9 release of...
No Fluff Just Stuff
Lovely Review of Manage Your Project Portfolio
Steve Berczuk has a lovely discussion of Manage Your Project Portfolio. You can see his review here. Tweet This Post ...
Open Source Your Project (with Jasig)
Here is the full screencast from my Jasig 2010 Conference Session on "Open Sourcing Your Project (with Jasig)". Enjoy! read more...
Live from DrupalCamp Nashville
Dear Reader, I’m sitting here in a session at DrupalCamp Nashville on the Vandy campus. The day has been great and the Nashville Drupelars should be commended for running such a great camp. From a conference organizer PoV, this camp has run smoothly. The Wi-Fi is rock solid, the sessions...
JBoss Tools team released JBoss Tools version 3.1 this week. It’s the best IDE for doing enterprise Java development with JSF, RichFaces, Seam, JPA, Hibernate more. You now get JSF2 as well as CDI support. You may or may not have known but over 50% of code in JBoss Tools...
Open Source Update: jQuery PeriodicalUpdater, TestingLabs, GPars, etc.
I’ve done a fair bit of fairly small open source updates recently. jQuery PeriodicalUpdater: The main function now returns a handle that can be used to call stop(), thereby ignoring any updates that may come back and preventing future updates from being sent. TestingLabs: I released TestingLabs 0.4 to work with Grails...
I am tired of maintaining blog software on my own, so I’ve created a new blog here. This site will stick around indefinitely, but I won’t be posting here, and I probably won’t be very responsive to comments. ...
Latest from the Lounge
IT Industry Trends Create Jobs for Server Admins
...
Microsoft Certifications in Today's Job Market
...
...
...
Windows Azure is Released in Beta
...
Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog
Most of you have probably heard about Microsoft's now-completed Visual Studio 2020 competition, where the grand prize was to meet Scott Guthrie, the effective head of the Developer Division. People were invited to make submissions, and one of them was shown on Code Project and began life as the...
Have tracing JIT compilers won?
I've been watching the interpreter and JIT compiler competitions a bit in the JavaScript and Lua worlds. I haven't collected much organized data but the impression I'm getting is that tracing JIT's are turning up as the winners: sometimes even beating programs statically compiled with GCC. Is there a growing...
Extending the Scope of Syntactic Abstraction
Extending the Scope of Syntactic Abstraction by Oscar Waddell and R. Kent Dybvig, POPL '99. (Also: Waddell's thesis with the same title.) The benefits of module systems and lexically scoped syntactic abstraction (macro) facilities are well-established in the literature. This paper presents a system that seamlessly integrates modules and lexically scoped...
From the title Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? — or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis(Y. Lazebnik 2004) would seem pretty off topic for LtU. It starts with a humorous take on how biologist might try to understand the workings of a radio, but it ends in a...
Objects to Unify Type Classes and GADTs
Objects to Unify Type Classes and GADTs, by Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira and Martin Sulzmann: We propose an Haskell-like language with the goal of unifying type classes and generalized algebraic datatypes (GADTs) into a single class construct. We treat classes as first-class types and we use objects (instead of type...
Testing release of a platform for hosting pure functional web applications
I'd like to announce the public debut of a service I've been working on. Among other things, it provides "cloud hosting" for web applications written in Ur/Web, a domain-specific functional language for "Web 2.0 programming." http://www.graftid.com/ This service (called Graftid) also enables communities of developers to work together to build tools...
Knowing .NET
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-14
Signing off so that I can watch the Oscars spoiler-free. Up “Hurt Locker”! Down “Avatar”! # Edward Tufte takes Gov’t app’t to chair production of reports on recovery spending. http://bit.ly/aTiWaf # First good rain in Kona in months yesterday afternoon. Cleaned out sky for gorgeous stars and blazing mars. # Any other...
Worldess Wednesdays - Anchaline Pool, Honaunau
...
Recently Bookmarked on Delicious…
My Delicious Bookmarks ayende’s Example.MapReduce at master - GitHub / mapreduce performance c# Using Mongo With LINQ / linq mongodb nosql database Directed Edge - Blog - On Building a Stupidly Fast Graph Database / algorithm concurrency database performance graphs google-diff-match-patch - Project Hosting on Google Code / programming algorithm diff match text The Ultimate...
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07
Applying for data-centric jobs. I think of myself as an algorithm / performance guy, so it’s weird to write cover letters with DBA stuff… # USA vs CAN hockey game was epic. Hope it helps NHL. Togue-wearing syrup-suckers: health-care AND gold? # Skinput from CMU and MSR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCgY_RIvDyE Possible apps: “Ouch! Quit...
Misleading Photo For New Microsoft Tablet Formfactor
Twitter’s buzzing with technolust based on an Engadget article picturing a Microsoft concept-computer. Looks lovely, but the photo is misleading. It shows lines of cursive writing that are fraction of a size of the reader’s fingernail. Take a look at this blowup: Based on my fingernail, that cursive writing is about 3mm...
Electronic Review Copies: Kudos to ORA & MS Press
O’Reilly and Microsoft Press have recently switched to using eBooks as the preferred media for distributing review copies. Like all book reviewers, I receive more books than I actually review. However, since I live in Hawaii, the physical and energy waste of a book that goes unread and for which...
Jon Udell
The other day I read the following statement in the Economist: Sensitivity of the data will decide if an application is suitable for processing in the cloud. The writer does not mention, and probably is unaware of, the principle of translucent data. In a translucent database, the data is encrypted and thus...
The other day my colleague Scott Hanselman wrote a useful essay called 10 Guerilla Airline Travel Tips for the Geek-Minded Person. It’s a mixture of technical and social strategies. The tech strategies include marshaling data with the help of services like Tripit, FlightStats, and SMS alerts. The social strategies include...
Atul Gawande on why heroes use checklists
The sound track for yesterday’s run was a compelling talk by Atul Gawande about his new book The Checklist Manifesto, which grew from an article in the New Yorker. Although his story is grounded in the practice of health care, the lessons apply much more broadly to every field...
Hey Honda, I paid for that data!
Yesterday at the Honda dealer’s service desk I found myself in an all-too-familiar situation, craning my head for a glimpse of a screenful of data that I paid for but do not own. Well, that’s not quite true. I do have a degraded form of the data: printouts of work...
Talking with Duncan Wilson about architecture in the age of networked services
My guest for this week’s Innovators show is Duncan Wilson, an engineer with the global consulting firm Arup. We met at the 2010 Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium, where the theme was city as platform. His presentation, and our follow-on conversation, prompted me to read a couple of books that...
Upcoming talk at Kynetx Impact
As Phil Windley mentioned the other day, I’ll be speaking at the Kynetx Impact conference, April 27-28 in Salt Lake City. Last year I interviewed Phil about what Kynetx does. It’s hard to boil it down to an elevator pitch without examples, so here’s one that came up today: Scott...
Ruby News
RubyNation, Washington D.C.’s Ruby Community Conference, will be held April 9 and 10, 2010, in Reston, VA, USA. You can learn more and register here: http://rubynation.org/ But hurry! RubyNation is close to being sold out....
WEBrick has an Escape Sequence Injection vulnerability
A vulnerability was found on WEBrick, a part of Ruby's standard library. WEBrick lets attackers to inject malicious escape sequences to its logs, making it possible for dangerous control characters to be executed on a victim's terminal emulator. We already have a fix for it. Releases for every active branches are to follow this...
We now have a series of patches to fix various bugs against 1.8.7 so I (Urabe Shyouhei) decided to release them. Here they are. ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.gz ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.bz2 ruby-1.8.7-p248.zip And excuse me for absence of a detailed release note... Please read the ChangeLog instead. Checksums: MD5(ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.gz)= 60a65374689ac8b90be54ca9c61c48e3 SHA256(ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.gz)= 5c9cd617a2ec6b40abd7c7bdfce3256888134482b22f933a061ae18fb4b48755 SIZE(ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.gz)= 4831010 MD5(ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.bz2)= 37e19d46b7d4b845f57d3389084b94a6 SHA256(ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.bz2)= 3d238c4cf0988797d33169ab05829f1a483194e7cacae4232f3a0e2cc01b6bfc SIZE(ruby-1.8.7-p248.tar.bz2)= 4153123 MD5(ruby-1.8.7-p248.zip)= 819b9db9bcd4aa9a70f1193380a318c9 SHA256(ruby-1.8.7-p248.zip)= c133ecf35d5509e61443db05c9691bea6c6f63b87600a452b742014767bd98b3 SIZE(ruby-1.8.7-p248.zip)= 5889980 ...
Ruby 1.9.1-p376 just has been released. This is a patch level release of Ruby 1.9.1 and includes the fix of CVE-2009-4124.CVE-2009-4124The previous release, Ruby 1.9.1-p243 has a security vulnerability that allows heap overflow. This vulnerability was found by Emmanouel Kellinis, KPMG London.I recommend all Ruby 1.9.1 users to upgrade to...
There is a heap overflow vulnerability in String#ljust, String#center and String#rjust. This has allowed an attacker to run arbitrary code in some rare cases. CVE-2009-4124 Vulnerable versions All releases of Ruby 1.9.1. This vulnerability does not affect Ruby 1.8 series. SolutionPlease upgrade to Ruby 1.9.1-p376. <URL:ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.bz2> CreditCredit to Emmanouel Kellinis, KPMG London for disclosing the problem...
MountainWest RubyConf 2010 will be held March 11 and 12, 2010, in Salt Lake City, UT, USA. http://mtnwestrubyconf.org Talk proposals are being accepted right this very minute! Submit yours here. But don’t delay! The submission deadline is midnight (MST) on December 31st, 2009....