Using ETags to Reduce Bandwith & Workload with Spring & Hibernate
explore one of the lessor known facilities available to web application developers, the humble “ETag Response Header”, and how to integrate its use in a Spring Framework dynamic web application to improve application performance and scalability.
Gavin Terrill on InfoQ
Making a small Common Lisp project
I sometimes see people say they don’t know where to start when they want to write something in Common Lisp. Here’s what I do when I get an idea and I want to explore it with Common Lisp.
Zach's Journal — This really can be a barrier to getting started with Lisp.
POG - Password Operations Gem: Project Info
A Ruby gem for simplifying random password generation, password strength testing, password hashing and salting, and password-hash authentication.
RubyForge: POG — This is a pain to code properly, and so this is a very good idea.
An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You’re about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him?
These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the same answer
Paul Graham
SOCAN is sending thousands of letters to hair salons and barber shops across Canada reminding them to pay their annual fee for playing music. The collective says it targets a different business group every year - last year it was dentists, now it’s hair salons. The fee starts at $95 per year.
Michael Geist — You’d think they could find something better to do.
Friday Morning Surprise Essay Question
Compare and contrast
raganwald — A couple laws-of-computing :-)
Collaboration: the dance of contribution
People collaborate when they want to - but what gets them to want to? This report describes ways to improve people’s inclination to collaborate. The shortest answer is to lift others, increase safety, and make progress.
Alistair Cockburn, Humans and Technology — Alistair Crystal-Method Cockburn is always worth reading.
Best Graffiti ShowcaseDark Roasted Blend — Joke, video, and amazingly good graffiti.
Hypermiling :: Driving to save gas
What is hypermiling? According to a a fantastic August 2006 story in the Washington Post, it is a method of increasing your car’s gas mileage by making skillful changes in the way you drive, allowing you to save gas and thereby have an easier time withstanding the rising oil and gas prices.
Uncompetitive Canadian Pricing Threatens Mobile Internet
RIM has expressed frustration with Canadian pricing, predicting that carriers could sell “eight or nine times” more Blackberries if they lowered data prices to levels found elsewhere. Reduced sales are only part of the story. High data prices mean Canadians use the mobile Internet less than people in other countries, which Google has noted leads to lower Canadian usage of web-based email or online mapping services from wireless devices.
Michael Geist
AideRSS, which launches today, is a new type of RSS filtering service that uses a proprietary system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog. I first read about PostRank on Ilya’s blog last December and remember being very intrigued and thinking, “There’s a web service in this.” Just over 6 months later, Ilya’s idea is being born as AideRSS, which I have been playing around with for a little over a week.
First Look
As rewarding as web development is, it can also be a pain sometimes, especially if you spend half your time looking for the right tools and resources. Well, we’ve done the work for you with this one, and have compiled a list of over 120 web development resources to make your life easier.
Web Development Toolbox — Well, they’ve done some of the work anyway. Nice list.
What does CPAL mean and how did it get approved?
I will admit to entering the OSI’s deliberations of the recently approved Common Public Attribution License a little late, and leaving early, so I don’t have the full context as to how or why it was approved (given the stink around attribution licenses last year). I’m not a big fan of the license (having developed a distaste for this form of license in last year’s brouhaha over attribution licenses), but I applaud Ross Mayfield in the way he went about it.
The Open Road - CNET Blogs
Throughout much of the last decade the fashion in the enterprise software world has been to focus on one standard language for software development efforts. … The rationale for this is that developers find it hard to be proficient in more than one language. Sticking to a single language lowers the learning burden, particularly when hiring new people. … There’s some truth to this, but also much that’s missing.
Martin Fowler's Bliki
These bookmarklets let you see how a web page is coded without digging through the source, debug problems in web pages quickly, and experiment with CSS or JS without editing the actual page.
Some of these look really useful, especially the ones that display the current DOM as HTML. Handy when you have javascript mucking with the DOM.
Distributed Revision Control Systems: Git vs. Mercurial vs. SVN
But a couple weeks ago I saw a presentation online given by Linus on his distributed version control system named ‘git’ and was quite shocked. He spends almost all of the talk railing against CVS, and by proxy, its successor SVN.
RussellBeattie.com — I saw this video last week. I ended up trying both Git and Mercurial. Pretty convincing. Amazingly fast compared to Subversion.
Linus Torvalds on gitTech Talk — This is the video mentioned above talking about GIT vs CVS/Subversion
Supreme Court Ruling On Patent Obviousness Already Having An Impact
A judge had let the case move forward, but with the Supreme Court’s ruling, the judge has changed his mind, saying that the patents were obvious. The judge based his decision on the KSR decision, saying that the patents were simply a combination of ideas and inventions that were all publicly available – and combining them was an obvious next step. This is exactly what the Supreme Court intended, and hopefully more judges will start following suit in throwing out these wasteful patents and patent lawsuits.
Techdirt — That’s good… never thought it’d happen.
Our nightly log analysis showed that rendering speed has significantly degraded over the last few weeks. Since the whole point of MapBuzz is to share maps with others, we needed to find out what was taking so long.
A day of profiling and we had our answer. With a few simple changes we were able to reduce rendering time from 7.8 seconds to 0.92 seconds
One of the Web’s Little Mysteries
Why do people think content management is not possible for static websites?
Why do people think dynamic site generation is superior to a static website even when the site does not allow for any kind of reader contribution?
So. — Another post by me on my other blog.
Monolog Boxes and Transparent Messages
Dialog boxes are bad enough: they pop-up at inconvenient times, they derail our train of thought, and normally we don’t even read them. But this type of dialog box is worse. It’s not even a dialog box. It’s monolog box. There’s nothing one can do with this messages but click “OK”. Or wait and click “OK”. They have, as I’ve explained before, 0% efficiency.
Humanized:
DSL = Metalinguistic Abstraction
The idea of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) has been lately brought into attention by the freshly popular programming language Ruby. In particular, the famed web framework Ruby On Rails, which is built as a DSL on top of Ruby has been a prime example.
What most people are not aware of, however, is that DSLs is just a new incarnation of the very old concept born in the world of Lisp called Metalinguistic Abstraction. It is a recurrent theme in the seminal MIT textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) that was written in 1985 to present general computer programming concepts using the Scheme language (member of the Lisp family).
Ed Bendersky
So I was reading this article Making Rails go Vroom by Charlie Savage and thought maybe I’d profile a few of the more frequent actions in Raconteur, which is written in Rails.
The instructions provided in other posts by Carlie are perfectly clear and easy to follow but, inevitably, they don’t work for versions of Rails that don’t implement the aliasmethodchain method.
So. — That’s on my blog.
Experience Report: Scheme in Commercial Web Application Development
PLT Scheme has relatively few libraries in this area, and they haven’t been tested under high load. So we were gambling that Scheme would make us so productive we could develop our own libraries and the applications we were contracted to produce in the same time it would take to develop just the applications in another language. It was a gamble that paid off.
PLT Scheme Blog — Good to hear.
Full Text: Keen vs. Weinberger
his is the full text of a “Reply All” debate on Web 2.0 between authors Andrew Keen and David Weinberger.
WSJ.com — Might be fun.
