SELECTED INDUSTRY BLOGS
Having kids is clearly impacting my assessment of applications… And there is no greater proof for this than a new product by IncrediMail called PhotoJoy, an application I would never have given a second thought were I not a father of two. PhotoJoy is a free downloadable application that uses your photos to produce neat desktop widgets, 3D photo screensavers and wallpaper collages. You can either use photos located on your computer, or ones uploaded to your Flickr account. PhotoJoy can also use
The Water Snake Attacks!
An article in PC Gamer is titled: “Birth of a Nation: Does Eve Online’s Budding Democracy Represent the First Virtual Sovereign State?” Well, no, because the Council of Stellar Management that as elected by gamers does not have any real authority. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating case of governance…and hard to generalize from. That is, it’s a great example, but I’m not sure of what.
BTW, while I'm mentioning flames, of all the comments I got, publicly and privately on my bit about FreshAir, the vast majority didn't respond to the substance of my piece, proving once again that the Internet has no subtlety. You're either for me or against me, seems to be the attitude of most commenters. Well, I could be for you in some ways and not for you in others. I thought Gross did a competent, even admirable interview. I just thought it was gutless to do it with Ayers who had already be
Unless you've been in a cave for the last few months, you'll know that Apple's iPhone Platform is one of the most exciting Mobile Platforms for the last few years, not only for consumers but now for business.
A recent article on CNN about the sales success of the iPhone game Trism spurred me to write about how addicted I am to that game. Shortly after the App Store launched, I looked for something fun to play. I originally thought I’d go with the classic Bejeweled, but reading the reviews, everyone loved Trism. What convinced me to buy it is that it was a puzzle game that incorporated the accelerometer, so it became kind of multidimensional. The mechanic is not only clever — it enhances g
The “season to be jolly” is coming up fast, which given the world news might be more of a challenge this year. Therefore I quote the following,  found accidentally while researching for a blog post the other day, and attributed to the late Spike Milligan: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! Wha
About 40 attendees at the very first meeting is really a good start. And the discussions, both at the end of my speech and at the restaurant, were pretty pretty interesting. Technorati Tags: JUG Lugano...
FORTRAN was a programming language for crunching numbers. It provided limited textual support, primarily for the labeling of output. It did this with Hollerith constants. Hollerith constants were named for Herman Hollerith, who adapted the punched card for data processing. To make a Hollerith constant, enter the number of characters, then the letter H, and then the characters. 13HHELLO, WORLD! ALGOL 60 had better textual support, adding a structure called a string which was a s
Stack Overflow Podcast episode 30 is up, with special guest Richard White of UserVoice. Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Mike Vizard at eWeek recently hosted a podcast with ITKO???s John Michelsen, on "Application Development in the Clouds." In this conversation, John and Mike talk about how cloud computing is going to upend the way IT organizations think about SOA and application development in general. Mike started by mentioning the increased number of dependencies that SaaS brings to SOA testing. John said Mike really nailed the problem - it is something we are seeing in every engagement that relies on third p
MAX, as a big brother hosts a number of small unconferences, which are located in the well equipped half-open spaces in the hallway. They have AV, comfy coaches, and are less formal gatherings of the developers. At 8:30AM I was sitting at 360MAX unco
Mr. Zucker's relationship with Mr. Weinstein is also the subject of commentary in the court papers. At a meeting in January 2007 between the two, Mr. Weinstein told Mr. Zucker: "You can only have in your life five true friends, and I consider you one of my five friends. And I'm telling you, I will not embarrass you." When the Weinstein Company filed its reply to the lawsuit last month, it claimed that Mr. Weinstein told Mr. Zucker that a person "has about 15 friends in the business world" and t
Over at the American Express OPEN Forum, I posted an article explaining “The Art of Laying People Off.” Actually, I hope you don’t have to read it.
For those who Twitter, the Ruby on Rails Bible book now has a Twitter feed of its own. You can follow Ruby on Rails Bible for content updates and corrections, new content, discussion about the book and its contents, and Rails knowledge sharing. You
 ** Hot News **       Software Tool & Die (my company) is pleased to announce that they have released an update to their STD Foundation Classes for PocketBuilder (PK). This latest release coincides and complements the lat
Last week at IBM Montpellier the upcoming OSGi 4.2 release got a bit closer, and Yan Pujante presented LinkedIn's requirements. Peter can't believe what Yan is saying... ! In the now usual pattern for a two-day expert group face to face, the first day was given to the core platform expert group (CPEG) and the second day to the enterprise expert group (EEG). Neither can the rest of us...! The work to produce the enterprise edition of the OSGi specifications is roughly divided between th
We have just posted an updated PDF of the Flash Platform ActionScript 3 RIA API Guide. The new guide includes updated apis for Adobe AIR 1.5, Flex 3.2 and Flash Player 10. You can find more information on the guide, as well as download the PDF from the developer center. You can view some images of the previous guide here. We also have printed versions of the guide. If you are MAX, you can find one in your goodie bag. If you are not at max, I will be sending some guides and new eboy sticker shee
HTML 5 Websockets and the K team's open source project Kaazing Gateway reaches India and the India developer community. Sidda Eraiah will be presenting 2 sessions @ IndicThreads Conference 2008, Pune, India: How to build an enterprise trading solution using HTML 5’s WebSockets The Future of the Web: HTML 5, WebSocket, Java and Comet Sidda has also written a very nice article for IndicThread on Comet, Websockets, and Server-sent Events. The article provides a 4 step mini-howto on WebSoc
I bought my wife a Nokia 5310 MusicExpress phone recently.  She had used the 6210i for a long time and wanted something that had the same ease of use but that was slim, had a radio, and allowed her to play music.  The 5310 was ideal. My wife has a Mac and as per normal the phone was not supported on iSync, the built-in Mac device syncing service.  You can add the 5310 to isync by downloading a package to provide the device with isync here
I have received a note from Mike Card that I would like to share with you. Please note that the registration link sent by Mike (see below) is not yet active...."The OMG is hosting an Object Database Standard Definition Scope meeting in Santa Clara, CA at the Hyatt Regency on Tuesday afternoon, December 9th. The purpose of this meeting will be to define what the scope of the new object database standard should be.We have already done some work in this area but more remains to be done. Our goal is
HTTPS Tunneling, also called HTTPS Proxy, SSL proxy, or SSL tunneling, refers to sending HTTPS content via a proxy server. This is a very common usage scenario over the web. Unfortunately, I have not found any Java server that supports this yet. Tomcat chokes up quickly if you tunnel HTTPS messages. Other Java servers don’t even come close. Jetty is the furthest and closest to supporting it. Greg Wilkins even wrote two examples showing Jetty’s proxy support (ProxyServlet and Asy
ICANN has opened up the process for gTLD. I’m certain that we’ll now finally see .mac and .msn. The application process looks grueling, and the application fee is expected to be a relatively staggerring $185,000, so don’t expect to see .dojo, .sitepen, or .dylan any time soon. That said, if someone wants to set up .lan, I’ll be first in line to pay for dy! For now, I’ll stick with dylan.io.
I came across this interesting post: How Mashups Could Eliminate Integration Projects by Loraine Lawson. In a related post, she refers to John Crupi's article Enterprise Mashups Part I: Bringing SOA to the People which I would recommend to readers who want to understand JackBe's take on defining mashups. Anyway, Loraine's post led me to Ron Schmelzer's ZapFlash. Here are some excerpts of Ron's article that caught my eye, with my take on them.Excerpt from ZapFlash:A year or two ago, assuming tha
I’m giving a presentation on “Top 10 Software Engineering Concepts” at a CompAid “Software Best Practices” conference in Chicago on November 13th. I hope you’ll be there in person to hear all the nuances; but if you’re stuck in some other part of the world, you’re welcome to download the (10 megabyte) PDF version of the presentation, which has a whole bunch of embedded links to other presentations, publications, books, articles, Websites, etc.  

WELCOME TO ISSJ BLOGS

Welcome to blog-n-play, bringing you a roundup of the latest words from i-technology bloggers around the net. "Industry Blogs" that you read here are independently run, and are separate from SYS-CON Media's blog-n-play "Author Blogs" and "Reader Blogs." We're just happy to bring you links to them via the magic of RSS. Please join SYS-CON's blog-n-play and start blogging within minutes!

Would like to see your favorite "Industry Blogs" here? Let us know by emailing us at... editorial(at)sys-con.com!



Direct from Web 2.0

Jetty and HTTPS Tunneling
HTTPS Tunneling, also called HTTPS Proxy, SSL proxy, or SSL tunneling, refers to sending HTTPS content via a proxy server. This is a very common usage scenario over the web. Unfortunately, I have not found any Java server that supports this yet. T
Who Should Be USA’s CTO in the Obama Administration?
Jeremy Geelan is speculating who should be America’s CTO in the Obama administration. He says: As former IAC executive Julius Genachowski was appointed yesterday to President Elect Obama’s transition team, speculation is growing as to th
Razor Optimizer, a New Approach for Ajax Optimization
I am excited to announce the early beta release of Razor Optimizer, a JavaScript optimization tool for reducing code footprint and increasing runtime performnace. As a cross-browser web application itself, Razor Optimizer can be access either onlin
JavaScript Optimization Techniques Today
The wild popularity of Ajax fueled widespread usage of JavaScript. Almost every web 2.0 application relies on JavaScript to deliver front end interactivity. A growing list of JavaScript libraries (over 200+) are being created by various Ajax develop
Yahoo’s Performance Rules
Yahoo’s Performance team summarized their experience in web performance optimization into 14 rules in general (Reference 4, http://stevesouders.com/examples/rules.php): 1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests 2. Use a Content Delivery Network 3. Add an Expires
Front End Performance and Today’s Typical Web Sites
In order to understand how the front end, especially JavaScript, is impacting web performance today, some typical web pages were studied. The following table shows content composition of the front pages of two representative web sites, American Airli
Web Peformance Factors
Every web application requires satisfactory performance in order to be functional. Every web application has its own context that different factors influence performance differently. Since the beginning of the web, there have been many performance tu
Running Toronto Marathon - 9/28/2008
A couple of years ago my friend Kaushal Vyas blogged about his first marathon experience. His blog entry started with some quotes from Lance Armstrong on his first marathon: “the hardest physical thing I have ever done. Even the worst days in the t
JavaScript Execution Context, Closure, Eval and “this” Keyword
These are a few key concepts of JavaScript language that developers should know: execution context, activation object, variable instantiation, scoping, closure, eval and “this” keyword. Knowing these would help one tremendously in Ajax d
Ajax-heavy Applications on Google Chrome
“This is the best browser so far” is that I can say after being a Chrome user for one day.  First of all, I was glad to find out that I haven’t found Chrome breaking any web application yet, especially Ajax applications. I was a li

FEATURED WHITE PAPERS
ADS BY GOOGLE
YOUR FEEDBACK
Tim Tyler wrote: It should be noted that the course is NOT approved by VMWare. There is no VMWare certification following this course.
William Louth wrote: You forgot JINSPIRED which has delivered the first feature rich and scalable activity-based costing (ABC) solution for enterprise applications that dynamically assigns costs to applications, services and components based on multi-resource consumption, delivering a unified approach to performance man...
Mike DiPetrillo wrote: Just an FYI...The numbers IDC is posting don't match what Gartner is seeing. There are some problems with IDCs numbers. More details here: http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/10/gartner-market....
Jeremy Geelan wrote: Even though Google's maybe the elephant in the cloud, there are at least 49 others competing already in the cloud computing space including not just Amazon and Microsoft but also Akamai, Force.com, IBM, Sun, VMware and a host of others. I had a first shot at a Top Fifty list here: ...
Mike DiPetrillo wrote: Fault tolerant servers are nice and some applications do warrant that. However, the VAST majority of applications running in a x86 environment can tolerate being down for 2 minutes which is as long as it takes for HA services built into most virtualization offerings to reboot the VM on another syste...



TODAY'S TOP LINKS YOU MUST CLICK ON !
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE WIRES

DataCore, the leading provider of storage virtualization software, and Promise Tech...

Business.com has announced the availability of CloudBase, a high-performance data warehouse system t...
SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, on Nov. 19-21, 2008 in San Jose, CA, ...
"Virtualization will help our customers be more agile and efficient," noted Mike Neil this morning a...
Level 3 Communications has announced that it has been selected to provide caching and downloading se...
Microsoft on Monday pushed multi-tenant SaaS versions of Exchange and SharePoint out of the beta nes...
The future of cloud computing is all about lowering costs and getting the ability to easily move bet...
In his virtualization session on Nov. 21 at the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo i...
With an ever increasing variety of physical and virtual endpoints, companies are rapidly facing the ...
In his Cloud Computing Keynote in San Jose, CA, on November 20th – entitled "A Head in the Cloud -...
Server virtualization has moved well beyond the arena of early adopters and is an accepted solution ...
Firstservis and 3Tera have announced that 3Tera has chosen Firstservis as the first reseller and dis...
"SOA evolves in a set of micro domains," stated Intel's Joshua Painter, as he examined the state of ...
rPath has announced support for the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux operating systems as part of rBuilder an...
Capgemini has announced an agreement signed between Capgemini UK plc and Amazon Web Services, extend...
At the end of one of the worst days in the history of Wall Street, when every metric ultimately reac...
EMC has announced the newest versions of data protection software. These new updates are part of int...
Apple’s not the only one telling people to "Think Different." So is an outfit called Mindjet. It's...
Referred to by many names – server virtualization, OS virtualization, kernel virtualization – vi...
"The days of Cloud 1.0 are here," stated Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens in his session this morning at SY...
This is an incredibly important time for the cloud computing area. What are some of the new directio...
ADS BY GOOGLE