LOTW - 11 Oct 2010

Design Principles Behind Smalltalk - One of the most influential language although it didn't become popular. Java, Ruby all draw inspiration from it. If you are a programmer you owe it to yourself to go try Smalltalk. Squeak and Pharos are probably the more famous of the free implementation around.

Google's answers to Oracle's allegations

Doing quite a bit of PHP programming these days so there are the few links that might be useful
Using Emacs to edit php files
Geben + XDebug to debug php code on emacs -  Haven tried this, so far with PHP, doing print statements still works for me.

AptOnCD Backs up all the packages that you have installed, making it easy to restore your packages instead of downloading them all again.

LOTW - 4 Oct 2010

A really simple introduction to Map Reduce - Great intro to what Mappers, Groupers and Reducers are all about. I was scratching my head about Map Reduce before this came about.

How big are Facebook's data centers? This FAQ will tell you all that you need to know including servers, software, location and expansion plans.

Google URL shortener goo.gl opens for business

Heard of the Arduino, unknown to me there is actually a Netdunio yeap, and it runs on .Net. Scott Hanselman talks about it.

LOTW - 20 Sept 2010

I missed last weeks LOTW due to lots of work and basically I was lazy haha, so this week gonna do a bumper issue. Enjoy


97 things every programmer should know - I guess most would already know about this, every programmer should go read what's in there, there are so many pearls of wisdom, now we have a video by Kevlin Henney at the keynote at jazoon talking about. Slides can be found at the video link.


Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs


Google is going to release Wave in a Box, an installable version of Google Wave, since they have decided to discontinue Google Wave. The version is not going to have all the features of the original wave, but they are going to support federated across other Google wave boxes.


Lisp cabinet - For those who wants to tinkle with Common Lisp "Lisp Cabinet is a set of configuration files, tools and utilites bundled with automated installer to deliver full-fledged Emacs based Lisp development environment for Microsoft Windows"


Check out all the cool videos from NDC 2010 in this torrent
interested to hear Uncle Bob and Mike Cohn speak, Uncle Bob's slides from his Clean Code I Args are here.

Lamda the Ultimate has two posts that focus on Software Transactional Memory, one post quotes from a study that STM actually helps reduce errors as compared to the traditional locking model, while the other post talks about the support for STM in .NET and the decisions they have to make. I haven't really tried STM yet in any language, but basing modifications around a database like transactional model can probably make understanding and programming easier.

LOTW - 6 Sept 2010

Yahoo releases the Yahoo YUI Testing Interface it allows running to units tests in different browsers simultaneously.

The first step is to start from 37 signals - If you want to start something, just start, dont worry about it. As Yoda says "Do there is no try". Good advice for me ...

James Gosling creates a "Free Java from Oracle" t-shirt. Frankly I wonder what if Java was free from the beginning, would it reach the popularity that it has today? Look at those with ISO like organizations behind it like C++ or Ecmascript, they tend to have abit too much political maneuvering and arguing and it take a long time for them to agree on standards. For the one person system that Python, Ruby have, the seem to lack the mass acceptance that Java commands (because SUN was backing it up those days), yeap they are popular but are they really being used a lot in the Enterprise space?

Scott Hanselman talks about 2 tools he use for a more readable web, Instapaper and Readablility.

Google Code University  - Offers courses on C++, Python, Android, Web security, lots of good stuff comes with slides, assignments and videos.

Let's face it programmers are probably not the best designers in the world (me included), hope the following 2 links can help out.

20 useful free pdf books for designers and bloggers

10 resources for design challenged programmers

LOTW - 30 Aug

“My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means.” - Nice blog post about a non programmer and a programmer geek getting together and learning about each other. I agree with Renae, the important thing is to take an interest in what your other half does during work and his hobbies.

Patterns and Practices for Improving Personal Productivity, Time Management, and Effectiveness

Tim Daly writes about writing big Lisp applications.- Tim Daly responds to Steve Yegge's Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp. I let you make your own decision about whether Lisp is good. For me as a developer/programmer wanting to have more "breath" in your knowledge (I guess most of us are brought up in the OO kind of world), you owe your self to go try one of the functional languages, for me I am going to try Common Lisp and Clojure.

Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp - Pascal talks about why use Lisp and some of the common pitfalls and where to find more information on your discovery of Lisp. I was always a bit confused by the backquote operator ` in Lisp, his explanation is the easiest I have found. Gotta spend more time reading Practical Common Lisp !

LOTW - 23 Aug 2010

Oracle Sues Google - This must be the big thing this past week.
CNet's Report has a copy of the letter from Oracle's lawyers.
Top 5 grievances with Oracle -  A list of complaints about oracle and open source.
James Gosling foretold
Google saying that Oracle's suit is baseless.


Writing an operating system -  Something that I always wanted to try. Lets put that in the todo list !


F# in Visual Studio - Functional programming is getting lots of press these days, for the JVM; Clojure and Scala and for .Net F#, the video shows how F# can be use most effectively and introduces F# features like parallelism, succinct expressive syntax, rich access to .NET libraries.


You can get the beta Windows 7 Phone developer tools already. Singapore is one of the launch countries so we will have our own application marketplace here.


Scott Hanselman in his 56th Weekly source code talks about the Visual Studio 2010 training kit and some of the cool stuff in there. I was particularly interested in the Parallel Framework

LOTW - 9 Aug 2010

It's Singapore's National Day today! Happy 45th birthday Singapore!

How to win at Rock Paper Scissors -Not really relevant but it helps you beat your younger nephews and nieces at RPS.

How Yahoo does MySql HA - A blog post by Jay Jessen a MySql Guru at Yahoo.

Seven Open Solaris Home server tips  -  Tips for building an OpenSolaris homeserver with links to other peoples builds. Someone even used an EEEPC as a homeserver. Anyway I thought ZFS was cool stuff, just hope that Oracle can continue with OpenSolaris and start putting out releases. Nexenta looks like a good replacement.

IBM and DBS on the Jul 5th outage - On Jul 5th, DBS atms went down for for a period of almost 7 hours disrupting services, this is the report that attempts to explain why the outage occurs.

LOTW - 2 Aug 2010

Microsoft Web Matrix -A package containing IIS Developer Express, SqlServer Compact and a code editor for writing web based apps using ASP.NET, Javascript, HTML and CSS. Small installer, great for anyone i guess for trying Web stuff using MS Technology. From the description it can also code and deploy PHP applications.

Why your customers don't want to talk to you - Interesting read about how customers are increasing going on the self-service route.

Google Tech Talk Node.js: Javascript for the server - Presented by Ryan Dahl, the creator of the node.JS. Node's Goal (as take from the Node.js website) is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. It guess what's interesting is it's mainly callback style of programming and the fact that you program in Javascript.


Is good code impossible? - Nice read got it off Uncle Bob, quite a sad state but i guess its mostly true, The other main peeve i have is companies thinking good developers are easily replaceable .

LOTW - 26 Jul

The Future of C# Anders Hejlsberg talks about the future of the C# programming languages, its interesting on how C# 4 is moving to be more dynamic in nature, great integration with other languages, towards the end he showed how C# 4 can be executed in a REPL environment. No dates were set for C# 4.0 but it looks interesting.


UXMyths They collect the most common misconceptions about User Experience and Prove why its not true. I think all developers think about the User Experience when designing their software.



An introduction to Hadoop If you don't know what Hadoop is. check out this intro to it.

30+ HTML 5 techniques and examples 

LOTW - 19 JUL

CSS Zen Garden See what the happens when different CSS are applied on a page

The real life of social networks - Insightful research on how people use social networks. If you are building social networking apps, you should take a good look at this.

Google App Inventor -  Write android programs without knowing programming.

Doing some reseach on what are the popular languages, some lists below about language popularity
Transparent Language Popularity Index
Tiobe Community Programming Index
Languages uses in Github

Chron the Time traveling debugger (Java) ! A debugger that records all the steps that your program takes so that you can "go back" in time and playback how your program was executing.

Thats all for this week, till next time

Links of the week - Jul 12

Starting a new Links of the week (LOTW) posts. Everyweek there are so many interesting things out there. These are the few for this week.

"Never Use $_GET Again" http://dzone.com/v5On

Videos from NDC 2010 avaliable on torrent, relive 121 sessions!

From YDN Performance testing with Boomerang

Why Undergraduates Should Learn the Principles of Programming Languages