• As Big Data Takes Off, the Hadoop Wars Begin: Cloud Computing News « – It turns out "big data" isn’t just a buzzword, but a legitimate concern for companies across the board. The action is centered around Hadoop, the flagship technology for storing and processing large amounts of unstructured data.
• SharePoint: Is It Worth Using as a Collaboration Tool? – In this post, I want to step back a bit and ask a more existential question: should you even be using SharePoint 2010 for your collaboration platform in the first place?
• The RSA Hack: How They Did It – NYTimes.com – How did a hacker manage to infiltrate one of the world’s top computer-security companies? And could the data that was stolen be used to impair its SecurID products, which are used by 40 million businesses that are trying to keep their own networks safe from intruders?
• Google mobile search gets redesigned results for stocks – When you search for your favorite stock ticker symbol on your smartphone, you'll be presented with a result page that can be seen to the left in the image above. It displays an interactive graph on a 'card', and you can switch the amount of time that the graph covers by simply tapping on the buttons below it.
• Clever Title: "Intro to Scala for Java Programmers": slides, code, and links – Last week, I presented a talk titled "An Introduction to Scala for Java Programmers". I had a lot of fun making it, and I learned a ton. I thought it was interesting that the more I learned, the more I liked Scala.
• JDK 7: The New Objects Class – The java.util.Objects class is new to JDK 7 and its Javadoc states that the class is "since 1.7" and describes the class as: "This class consists of static utility methods for operating on objects. These utilities include null-safe or null-tolerant methods for computing the hash code of an object, returning a string for an object, and comparing two objects."
• What really happens when you navigate to a URL – In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL
• The Freight Train That Is Android « abovethecrowd.com – This is the part that amazes me the most. I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to “win” in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics
• kundera – JPA 1.0 Annotation based ORM library for the Cassandra database – The idea behind Kundera is to make working with Cassandra drop-dead simple and fun. Kundera does not reinvent the wheel by making another client library; rather it leverages the existing libraries and builds – on top of them – a wrap-around API to help developers do away with unnecessary boiler plate codes, and program a neater-and-cleaner code that reduces code-complexity and improves quality. And above all, improves productivity.
• The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have. – The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have.
• Cassandra gets ready for world domination and can MongoDB scale up like Cassandra? – After using Cassandra during development for the past 8 months my team and I made the decision to switch from Cassandra to MongoDB this morning. I thought I'd share some thoughts on why we did this and where Cassandra might benefit from improvement.

Daily del.icio.us for April 2nd through April 3rd

• Google mobile search gets redesigned results for stocks – When you search for your favorite stock ticker symbol on your smartphone, you'll be presented with a result page that can be seen to the left in the image above. It displays an interactive graph on a 'card', and you can switch the amount of time that the graph covers by simply tapping on the buttons below it.
• Clever Title: "Intro to Scala for Java Programmers": slides, code, and links – Last week, I presented a talk titled "An Introduction to Scala for Java Programmers". I had a lot of fun making it, and I learned a ton. I thought it was interesting that the more I learned, the more I liked Scala.
• JDK 7: The New Objects Class – The java.util.Objects class is new to JDK 7 and its Javadoc states that the class is "since 1.7" and describes the class as: "This class consists of static utility methods for operating on objects. These utilities include null-safe or null-tolerant methods for computing the hash code of an object, returning a string for an object, and comparing two objects."
• What really happens when you navigate to a URL – In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL
• The Freight Train That Is Android « abovethecrowd.com – This is the part that amazes me the most. I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to “win” in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics
• kundera – JPA 1.0 Annotation based ORM library for the Cassandra database – The idea behind Kundera is to make working with Cassandra drop-dead simple and fun. Kundera does not reinvent the wheel by making another client library; rather it leverages the existing libraries and builds – on top of them – a wrap-around API to help developers do away with unnecessary boiler plate codes, and program a neater-and-cleaner code that reduces code-complexity and improves quality. And above all, improves productivity.
• The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have. – The Little MongoDB Book; an ebook meant to help people get familiar with MongoDB and answer some of the more common questions they have.
• Cassandra gets ready for world domination and can MongoDB scale up like Cassandra? – After using Cassandra during development for the past 8 months my team and I made the decision to switch from Cassandra to MongoDB this morning. I thought I'd share some thoughts on why we did this and where Cassandra might benefit from improvement.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: Top Ten Reasons to use Google Plugin for Eclipse – So in no particular order, here are 10 reasons you should use Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE).
• Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year – It's pretty amazing what can happen when a group of talented people who trust each other get together and decide to make something awesome.

Daily del.icio.us for March 30th through April 2nd

• PyCon 2011: How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped – PyCon US Videos – 2009, 2010, 2011 – blip.tv – This talk will give an overview of the first two years of Dropbox, the team formation, our early guiding principles and philosophies, what worked for us and what we learned while building the company and engineering infrastructure. It will also cover why Python was essential to the success of the project and the rough edges we had to overcome to make it our long term programming environment and runtime
• High Scalability – High Scalability – 6 Lessons from Dropbox – One Million Files Saved Every 15 minutes – Dropbox saves one million files every 15 minutes, more tweets than even Twitterers tweet
• Microsoft SQL Azure vs. Amazon RDS – DevelopMentor – There are two major differences between the Microsoft SQL Azure and Amazon RDS platforms: pricing and capabilities. If price is no object and the user wants full features and high performance, then RDS is the obvious choice
• InfoQ: Adopting Apache Cassandra – Eben Hewitt introduces the Apache Cassandra project to those interested in getting a quick clear picture of what Cassandra is, what are its main features, what is the the data model used and the API.
• codeartisan: RSA Public Key Cryptography in Java – Public key cryptography is a well-known concept, but for some reason the JCE (Java Cryptography Extensions) documentation doesn't at all make it clear how to interoperate with common public key formats such as those produced by openssl
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: Update on GWT support for IE9 – In keeping with the GWT philosophy of making it possible to write no-compromise AJAX in any modern browser, GWT 2.3 (in progress) will support IE9
• kryo.se: iodine (IP-over-DNS, IPv4 over DNS tunnel) – iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.
• Shearing FireSheep with the Cloud | Stratum Security Blog – Quite simply, the solution I came up with was to create an EC2 instance with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server and setup OpenVPN and SideStep. This allows me to route all of my traffic over an SSL or SSH VPN to my EC2 instance and then out to the Internet.
• Learn Scala the Fun Way: With Processing – Processing is a simple programming language for creating visualizations. It's meant to be easy for non-programmers to learn. Artists can use Processing to create generative at programs known as sketches
• iPhone vs. Android – 45,000 Tests Prove Whose Browser is Faster | Blaze.io – Android’s browser is faster. MUCH faster. On average, Android 2.3 was a 52% faster than iPhone 4.3, with a median load time of 2.144 seconds vs. iPhone’s median load time of 3.254 seconds

Daily del.icio.us for March 17th through March 19th

• Check Your JMeter – Now Version 2.4 | Javalobby – Today the Apache Jakarta subproject JMeter is releasing the next version of its pure Java desktop app, JMeter, which is designed to load test functional behavior and gauge performance.  Features of the newly released JMeter 2.4 include JUnit 4 annotation support, JSR-223 test elements, and HTTPS session recording.
• Scala 2.8.0 final | The Scala Programming Language – It is finally here!! After many, many months of hard work, the Scala team is truly happy to announce the new, much-awaited stable release of Scala! The all-new Scala 2.8.0 final distribution is ready
• Scripting News: Apple’s brewing shitstorm – Apple is a company that desperately needs to grow up and wipe the smile off its face, and roll its sleeves up and start to appreciate that they're no longer the upstart, the underdog
• DNS gains added measure of security starting today ( – Security ) – The 13 globally distributed server clusters — known within Internet engineering circles as the Root Zone – will begin cryptographically signing DNS look-ups today.
• With Google as Partner, Verizon May Not Need iPhone – NYTimes.com – Verizon could decide that it does not actually need the iPhone, thanks to its deepening ties with Google.
• Sencha Docs gives JavaDoc a Facelift – Sencha – Blog – Sencha Docs offers a fresh take on API documentation for Java. Rather than modifying or restyling JavaDoc, we decided to start from scratch and build a new user interface experience using the JavaDoc parser and Ext GWT. Since Ext GWT is designed to build rich internet applications, it was a great framework with which to build a modern user experience.
• Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Increased 21 Percent in Second Quarter of 2010 – Worldwide PC shipments reached 82.9 million units in the second quarter of 2010, a 20.7 percent increase from the second quarter of 200
• AppleInsider | Report: Apple’s iPad to copy iPhone in eating up lion’s share of profits – Despite selling a small 3% minority of the world's mobile phones, Apple has surpassed the earnings of RIM, Motorola, Nokia, HTC and Sony Ericsson combined, and is estimated to widen its lead in the future, according to Goldman Sachs research cited by the Financial Times
• Survey: Oracle Not So Bad for Java and MySQL — Application Development Trends – The results of a survey, published this week by open-source business intelligence (B.I.) vendor Jaspersoft, seem to indicate that early concerns about the fate of Java and MySQL in the hands of Oracle have abated, at least for the present.
• eTown Radio Show 1008 – Natalie Merchant / The Horse Flies – eTown celebrates the return one of the world’s most respected recording artists, Natalie Merchant. Backed by her band, Natalie shares both brand new tunes and beloved favorites
• Java and security skills offer IT job security | Job search – InfoWorld – A recent survey by job-hunting site Dice.com found that the people who are hiring IT pros put Java/J2EE at the very top of their hiring criteria.

Daily del.icio.us for July 13th through July 15th

• Solving the Persistence Problem with Google AppEngine with SimpleDS – TheServerSide.com – SimpleDS provides a simple persistence framework for Google AppEngine that gets as little in the way as possible. It is barely a wrapper around Datastore APIs, providing mapping between Entity and Java classes
• Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″ (Exclusive Screenshots) – We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.
• The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash – Charlie’s Diary – I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new mark
• InfoQ: Using DNS for REST Web Service Discovery – Service Discovery can be easily introduced to systems of RESTful Web services by leveraging standard DNS mechanisms as specified by DNS-SD. DNS based service discovery is readily available to anyone in any system environment given the ubiquitous availability of DNS nameserver and resolver implementations.
• Lift – The Simply Functional Web Framework – Home – Lift is the only new framework in the last four years to offer fresh and innovative approaches to web development. It's not just some incremental improvements over the status quo, it redefines the state of the art
• Interview With Lift Creator – On Foursquare, Scala, and Lift 2.0 | Javalobby – With the impending release of Lift 2.0, DZone contacted David Pollak, the creator of Lift, to talk about Scala, web development, Foursquare, and what to expect in Lift 2.0
• Apple Sells One Million iPads – Apple® today announced that it sold its one millionth iPad™ on Friday, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. iPad users have already downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store and over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore. 
• Chrome again beats Firefox in browser gain race – Computerworld – Chrome was the only browser to gain significant usage share last month, and it again trounced Firefox.
• Novell and Red Hat prevail in user-interface patent case | Open Source – InfoWorld – Two open-source-software companies successfully thwart a patent infringement case
• YouTube – President Obama and Jay Leno at White House Correspondents Dinner – President Obama and Jay Leno trade jokes at the 2010 White House Correspondents Association Dinner in Washington, D.C.

Daily del.icio.us for May 2nd through May 5th

• Google Goggles ‘visual search’ arrives for Android | News | TechRadar UK – Google has announced a visual search application for Android phones called Google Goggles, allowing users to point their phone at anything, from buildings and landmarks to business cards and papers and search for it.
• SpringSource, Oracle To Back Modular Eclipse Project for Java — Application Development Trends – The module-based design principles defined by the OSGi have emerged as the de facto means of componentizing enterprise Java, said Michael Coté, industry analyst at RedMonk
• Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Public DNS – Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.
• SpringFuse – Getting Started Tutorial – In this tutorial you are going to learn how to generate your first Java/Spring/Hibernate based project using Springfuse. All in all, you should not type more than 3 commands from your console to have your first project running.
• InfoQ: Service Orientation Requires Data Orientation – In his follow-up post, Ash discuses practical approaches to data-orienting a service-oriented infrastructure. He outlines several prescriptive recommendations providing a holistic solution to a data integration problem for an enterprise:
• InfoQ: Beginning an SOA Initiative – Ian Robinson on what organizational and social issues should be addressed when starting a new SOA project by identifying business capabilities using user stories, describing services and their contracts, and how to set up teams for delivery.
• InfoQ: "SOA Governance" Revitalized – Miko Matsumura discusses why people are pursuing SOA, whether SOA is dead, what SOA Governance is, the relationship to SOA itself, how it differs from management, and how SOA differs from integration.
• George Dawoud’s Blog: Java + Spring + MediaWiki = JAMWiki – JAMWiki is a Wiki engine implemented using Java/JSP that attempts to provide much of the functionality of MediaWiki. It can be run with or without a database and is designed to be fast and easy to set up.
• Java Code generation for Spring, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Web Flow, JPA &Hibernate – Springfuse generates in a few seconds, Java Web applications that leverage Open Source technologies and standards. Springfuse uses the structure of your database as an entry point. The generation process is done in 3 easy steps.
• The Disco Blog » Blog Archive » To EasyMock or to Mockito? – While I’m only scratching the surface of features available in both libraries, Mockito’s API is more in tuned with my way of thinking

Daily del.icio.us for December 2nd through December 7th

I first discovered OpenDNS on Chris Pirillio's blog – OpenDNS is a free service that is designed to make your Internet browsing faster, safer and smarter. And guess what - it does that. OpenDNS is essentially a set of massive distributed DNS caches that allow faster name resolution and yet obey the TTL rules for each domain. They have a very fast geographically distributed network of DNS caches that allow for blazingly fast lookup times which allows for faster connections to those sites. The traditional ISP DNS lookup connects to one of the root name servers which in turn send you to the name server for the top-level domain which will then probably get you to the name-server that is hosting the DNS entry for the site you are trying to connect to. OpenDNS skips all of that and return the IP address of the site you are attempting a connection two in a single request.

The safer surfing part comes into play with the phishing filter built into OpenDNS. OpenDNS intercepts connections against known phishing sites, based on network analysis and feeds from other network operators including their new venture PhishTank. PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others submissions.

The smarter bit comes in the typo-correction feature of OpenDNS. So if you're going to google.com and misspell Google, OpenDNS first attempts to correct the typo and get you to the right site instead of the squatter sites that are just waiting for that misspelling to land you on their site.

I have been using OpenDNS for months now since I first read Chris's blog entry about OpenDNS and have been extremely happy with the free service. Can't beat the price – I can't really tell if my surfing is any faster but cognitively I know it is and that makes me happy.

Another thing that really stands out about OpenDNS is the service - I've had two occasions where I've contacted support to check on some DNS changes I made to move my domains from one hosting vendor to another and I got an almost immediate response both times. John Roberts, who is the VP of Product Development responded back in minutes to my query on both occasions and helped me by force clearing the cached entries for my domain.

Anyone and everyone can start using OpenDNS to surf smarter, faster and safer. Check out their Getting Started page for more information on how to change your router or computer DNS settings to start using OpenDNS.

OpenDNS Rocks