• 10 Useful Tools For Cross-Browser Compatibility Check – In this article you will find ten useful tools that you can use for your cross-browser compatibility check
• Google Chrome Blog: Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings – In our new beta release, JavaScript is as quick as a bunny. With a new speed boost that we previewed in December, Chrome’s JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release
• Using Business Architecture to Drive IT/Business Alignment – Business architecture has its own goals and deliverables, such as defining a future state architecture and transforming an IT organization from simply delivering IT solutions to optimizing business processes and enabling business capabilities and services.
• Podcast Show Notes: William Ulrich and Neal McWhorter on Business Architecture (ArchBeat) – The latest ArchBeat podcast program features a four-part conversation with William Ulrich and Neal McWhorter, the authors of Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation, available from Meghan-Kiffer Press.
• How to Secure and Encrypt Your Web Browsing on Public Networks (with Hamachi and Privoxy) – Today, we're going to walk through setting up an encrypted proxy server on your home computer so you can secure your browsing session no matter where you're connected, keeping your private data significantly more private.
• Where are the software architects of tomorrow? – Coding the Architecture – To improve, software teams need some time away from the daily grind to reflect, but they also need to retain a focus on all aspects of the software development process. It's really easy to get caught up in the hype of the industry, but it's worth asking whether this is more important than ensuring you have a good pragmatic grounding
• Spring 3.1 Cache Abstraction Tutorial – Java Code Geeks – Spring Framework provides support for transparently adding caching into an existing Spring application. Similar to the transaction support, the caching abstraction allows consistent use of various caching solutions with minimal impact on the code.
• Webstock: An interview with the Daring Fireball – Technology – NZ Herald News – It's better to have two or three great people working on something than ten pretty good people.
• Obama’s 2012 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent – NYTimes.com – Explore every nook and cranny of President Obama's budget proposal.
• Apple Now The Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft – As of today, Apple's market cap is now $330 billion while Microsoft’s is $228 billion. In these past 9 months, Apple has gained $100 billion in value. Microsoft? $1 billion.

Daily del.icio.us for February 15th through February 19th

• Chromium Blog: HTML Video Codec Support in Chrome – Google's dropping support H.264 in the Chrome browser. Pretty ballsy move by Google – guess the ball is now in Apple's court!
• Daring Fireball Linked List: Google Dropping Support for H.264 in Chrome – I don’t see how Google keeps Flash but drops H.264 in the name of "openness" without being seen as utter hypocrites.
• Google Chrome Release Cycle – We basically wanted to operate more like trains leaving Grand Central Station (regularly scheduled and always on time), and less like taxis leaving the Bronx (ad hoc and unpredictable).
• How Personal Hotspot Works On The Verizon iPhone (Pictures) – There's actually only one key difference between the Verizon iPhone 4 and the AT&T iPhone: Personal Hotspots. Yes, the Verizon iPhone will come with this killer feature that will allow it to become an internet hub for up to 5 WiFi devices to connect
• Creating a Facebook Site with Google Apps – Creating a Facebook Site with Google Apps
• Dreamforce Recap / 2011 Salesforce Roadmap – A key takeaway from Dreamforce 2010 is that the Saleforce cloud is expanding beyond sales and that 2011 will see the launch of several exciting tools for enterprise development
• SpringOne 2GX 2010 Tech Talk: Introduction to Spring Roo – Over the holiday break InfoQ published another recording from SpringOne 2GX 2010. This presention features Rod Johnson and Stefan Schmidt giving a hands on introduction to Spring Roo.
• Google App Engine and JPA » Developer Papercuts – Using JPA on the Google AppEngine is straight forward. For some reason the documentation on the official Google App Engine side is not very easy to read therefore a little example here.
• InfoQ: Martin Odersky on the Future of Scala – In this interview Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala language talks about work on the next version of Scala and how the functionalities in the JVM help make Scala better. Odersky touches on how some of the most popular entities on the web, such as Twitter and LinkedIn use Scala.
• Dive into 2010 – “HTML5: Up & Running” sold over 14,000 copies in the first six weeks, of which about 25% were digital downloads and 75% were books on paper

Daily del.icio.us for January 10th through January 11th

• Joe Biden on Joe Barton: "Incredibly Out of Touch" | Blue Wave News – Joe Biden Says All That Needs to Be Said About Joe Barton’s Apology
• New JRockit book – A new book, "Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide", has just been published
• Introducing the Google Command Line Tool – Google Open Source Blog – GoogleCL is a pure Python application that uses the Python gdata libraries to make Google Data API calls from the command line.
• CHART OF THE DAY: Here’s Why Politicians Are Falling Over Themselves To Skewer BP Right Now – Pew research did a survey and the results are astounding — 59% of Americans are following the BP oil leak story (shown in the top blue bar below), which blows away the tiny 8% of Americans who care about the economy.
• Sencha launches HTML5 framework for mobile apps – The Sencha Touch framework enables developers to build rich Web applications offering native-like usability, according to Sencha. The framework is optimized for building applications for touch-based devices
• Forrester Projects Tablets Will Outsell Netbooks By 2012, Desktops By 2013 – The tablet era has just begun, but Forrester Research is already predicting tablet sales in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015
• iPad MiFi Conversion for Verizon | Dish Television High Definition Store – There is one major flaw with the iPad that’s been bothering me about it since day one: AT&T. As revolutionary and awesome as it is, the iPad deserves–and needs–a good internet connection, hence the reason Sprint and Verizon have been pushing the use of MiFi with the iPad.
• Turn Your Old Router into a Range-Boosting Wi-Fi Repeater [Router] – With the magic of DD-WRT, you can turn your older wireless router into a range-expanding Wi-Fi repeater to cover everywhere you need a connection
• Spring Framework 3.0.3 released | SpringSource Team Blog – After several weeks of fine-tuning and community feedback, Spring Framework 3.0.3 is now available. This release fixes more than a hundred minor issues reported against Spring 3.0.2. This release catches up with recent third-party releases: OpenJPA 2.0 final, Hibernate 3.5.2, and JBoss 6.0.0 M3, all of which are fully supported in combination with Spring 3 now.
• Ext JS + jQTouch + Raphaël = Sencha — Sencha Blog — JavaScript Framework and RIA Platform – Exciting things are happening! Today, we’re combining forces with the jQTouch and Raphaël projects, changing our company name to Sencha, and moving our web address from www.extjs.com to www.sencha.com.

Daily del.icio.us for June 15th through June 18th

• Alex Payne On the iPad – We have the technology and the incentive to build the future of computing in an open way. The only reason not to is greed, laziness, and hubris.
• Flash, iPad, Standards Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report – Developers who supplement Flash with HTML5 may soon tire of Flash—but Adobe has a brief but golden opportunity to create the tools with which rich HTML5 content is created. Let’s see if they figure that out.
• InfoQ: Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both – Scrum and Kanban are two flavours of Agile software development – two deceptively simple but surprisingly powerful approaches to software development. So how do they relate to each other?
• Integrating Spring Security with ExtJS Login Page | Loiane Groner – This tutorial will walk through how to configure ExtJS Login form (Ajax login form) instead of default Spring Security login.jsp.
• New Logitech Touch Mouse Turns Your iPhone or iPod Touch into a Wireless Trackpad and Keyboard | BLogitech – The Touch Mouse app turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wireless trackpad and keyboard for your computer, so you can point, click, scroll and type from afar, in any application, on a Mac or PC
• InfoQ: SOA Practioners Should Define Standards First – Choosing the right standards at the start of the SOA lifecycle is an important first step and one that is still overlooked by many practitioners today, with resultant problems.
• Sun.com is dead now – Just found that sun.com is now redirecting to oracle.com. Some days back I visited Sun’s original website. But it didn’t took long by Oracle to make it red
• Hyrum Wright: Why use Subversion? – Hyrum Wright, the President of the Subversion Corporation and our Director of Open Source Software, has taken some time to put together a brief presentation on "Why Subversion" where he talks about the benefits of using Subversion, some of the features it offers and the improvements over the last couple of versions what's next on the radar in Subversion 1.7.
• Citrix will have an iPad app to run Windows 7 sessions | Mobilize – InfoWorld – Want to run Windows 7 on the new Apple iPad? Citrix says it will soon be possible — at least virtually — using a new version of its Citrix Receiver software
• Apple confirms 3G VoIP apps on iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch – Apple Inc. confirmed last night that it is now allowing iPhone, iPad and iPod touch developers to build apps that can make Internet calls over a 3G cellular network
• With iPad Tablet PC, Apple Blurs the Lines Between Devices – NYTimes.com – After months of feverish speculation, Steven P. Jobs introduced Wednesday what Apple hopes will be the coolest device on the planet: a slender tablet computer called the iPad.

Daily del.icio.us for January 27th through February 1st

• State of the Art – With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like – NYTimes.com – When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
• Google Open Source Blog: Introducing WebDriver – WebDriver takes a different approach to solve the same problem as Selenium. Rather than being a JavaScript application running within the browser, it uses whichever mechanism is most appropriate to control the browser. For Firefox, this means that WebDriver is implemented as an extension. For IE, WebDriver makes use of IE's Automation controls
• Wolfram|Alpha Blog : The Computers Powering Computable Knowledge – Two supercomputers, just about 10,000 processor cores, hundreds of terabytes of disks, a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and what seems like enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort
• A World of Cables, Unknotted – The New York Times > Personal Tech > Slide Show – Cables are important, but they should not be expensive. To help untangle some of the confusion, here is a simple, somewhat opinionated taxonomy of most of the cables that we deal with in our lives. It’s completely up to date — until the tech industry adds another confusing format to the pile.
• Best Practices for building JSON REST Web Services « Building Feedly – A few of our friends have been asking us what are some of the best practices we learnt over the last two years designing and implementing RESTful Web Services as the back-end of the feedly service. Here is a quick/high level brain dump:
• OpenSSO Fedlet – ‘Best Innovation’ Award Winner at the European Identity Conference – In the category "Best innovation", the award went to the OpenSSO initative, founded and supported by Sun Microsystems. Their project, OpenSSO Fedlet has provided a lean solution for the Identity Federation
• Microsoft to Raise $3.75 Billion in Inaugural Bond Offering – Bloomberg.com – Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, plans to sell $3.75 billion of debt in its first bond offering, taking advantage of its top credit ratings to help fund a share buyback and technology investments.
• Judd Solutions: The Ultimate Enterprise Java Build Solution – Ultimate would be to add a server running TeamCity for the 'remote run' and 'pre-tested commit' features (as Developer assistant, and continuous compilation server it is a great add-on for a CI system)
• Sonar – Code quality management platform – Sonar enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. Sonar not only offers consolidated reporting on and across projects throughout time, but it becomes the central place to manage code quality
• Common Java Cookbook – If you want to learn how to combine common open-source Java utilities to create powerful Java applications and tools, the Common Java Cookbook is for you.

Daily del.icio.us for May 9th through May 14th

• Botnet master hits the kill switch, takes down 100,000 PCs – Ars Technica – Botnets aren't just dangerous because they can steal massive amounts of personal data and launch denial-of-service attacks—they can also self-destruct, leaving the owners of affected machines in the dust.
• SpringSource Team Blog » Jump into Roo for extreme Java productivity – Roo's mission is to fundamentally and sustainably improve Java developer productivity without compromising engineering integrity or flexibility.
• InfoQ: The Emergence of Virtual Service Oriented Grids – In much the same way the Internet changed business forever, virtual service oriented grid computing has the potential to force change once again
• Outside the Box() » Slick Speed – So in the interest of getting to the bottom of the story, I did a little unscientific testing of my own using Slickspeed, which tests selector engine performance.
• Apache Camel: tutorial-osgi-camel-part2 – Designing a Service Oriented Architecture seems very obvious for most of us but implies that different parameters are taken into account
• Fuji – The Next Generation of OpenESB | Java™ Software Development Videos and Tutorials Directory – Project Fuji forms the core component of Open ESB v3 effort and represents Sun’s next generation open source integration runtime, focused on providing a lightweight, developer-friendly, and extensible platform for composite application development.
• State of the Art – With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like – NYTimes.com – When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
• A Review of 5 Java JSON Libraries – Rob@Rojotek – If you are looking for a simple lightweight Java library that reads and writes JSON, and supports Streams, JSON.simple is probably a good match. It does what it says on the box in 12 classes, and works on legacy (1.4) JREs.
• google-gson – A Java library to convert JSON to Java objects and vice-versa – Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into its JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.
• Jailer – Database Subsetting and Sampling Tool – Jailer is a tool for database subsetting and sampling, schema browsing, and rendering. It exports consistent, referentially intact row-sets from relational databases. It removes obsolete data without violating integrity. It is DBMS agnostic (by using JDBC), platform independent, and generates DbUnit datasets, hierarchically structured XML, and topologically sorted SQL-DML.

Daily del.icio.us for May 7th through May 9th

• Fonera 2.0 Smart Router Connect Devices | Business 2.0 Press – The La Fonera 2.0 is a new smart wireless internet router that will let you connect a plethora of devices to access the internet from the router easily, anything from a printer, to hard drives, laptops, mp3 players, to other USB devices
• The importance of Composition | Code of Doom – In this article, I really want to discuss the importance of composition. I feel as programmers, many of us find inheritance easier and we often use it without thinking about the repercussions it may bring to us.
• Mitchell’s Blog » Blog Archive » The European Commission and Microsoft – Last month the European Commission stated its preliminary conclusion that “Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.”
• From Java to Java EE: Seven Principles of Lean Software Development – Lean Software Development has its roots in Toyota Production System and it helps software organizations optimize their processes and production methods in order to deliver their products to the market much faster and with better quality
• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash – Lean Software Development presents a set of thinking tools based on
  lean thinking that leaders continue to find useful for understanding agile software development.
• InfoQ: VMware Open Sources the View Client – VMware has open sourced its View Client software which enables connections from Linux clients to remote Windows desktops managed by VMware View. VMware would like to see their partners developing the client for non-x86 devices using operating systems other than Windows XP or Linux.
• Better Null Handling Strategies for Java | Code Monkeyism – Uploaded a presentation on “Better Null Handling Strategies for Java” to SlideShare
• Outside the Box() » Springing Around with ExtJS – To finally scratch that itch, and move further along the Spring amp; ExtJS path, I turned my demo project into a basic template. The zip archive that you can grab at the bottom is a fully-configured Spring web application, including Tiles, Spring Security, Spring MVC, custom JSON view, Transactions and a Datasource.
• Announcing This Year’s IDEAL Plugins! | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’re glad to announce the winners of the 3rd JetBrains IDEAL Plugin Contest!
  First of all we want to thank everyone who participated for their efforts and, of course, the plugins they have submitted. It was really exciting to examine every last submission. JetBrains staff, and especially the Contest Jury, had many pleasant and memorable moments reviewing and judging them all.
• Announcing the Article Search API – Open Blog – NYTimes.com – The Article Search API is a way to find, discover, explore, have fun and build new things. We’ve accumulated quite a few blocks/articles over the last 28 years — all of them tagged and labeled with loving care. So if you’ve ever wanted to do any of these things:

Daily del.icio.us for February 4th through February 7th

• Zimbra’s new Desktop: Look ma, no browser! | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built…largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this–or should be.
• Ext Road Map – Our goals for 2008 are to continue improving the 2.x version line by adding new components and enhancing some of the existing areas of functionality in Ext as shown below. Looking ahead to 3.0, there are some big new areas that we'll be getting into. In a
• The Making of MarkMail: Announcing an Informal Partnership with Codehaus – We're happy to announce we've developed an informal partnership with Codehaus to load all their mail archives and receive automatic notification of new Codehaus lists as they get created.
• A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) – A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) came by Yahoo to talk to a bunch of Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. After the meeting, I sat down with him for our Developer Spotlight series on YDN Theater to catch u
• Andres Almiray’s Weblog : Weblog – JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java.
• The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog – The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI ov
• Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | Crave : The gadget blog – The new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.
• Anthony Park :: 100% Geek Content by Volume » New Vista Media Center Plugin – MyNetflix (beta) – I’ve kept this pretty quiet, but I’ve been working on a new Media Center plugin for a little while now. It is now ready for beta testing, and I’ve decided to run a public beta for this one. MyNetflix features * View your Netflix queue * Browse movie
• Humanized > Our Products > Enso Launcher – Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.
• Martin Wolf : Advanced Java 5 Generics – Here's an article about a few of the more subtle aspects of Java 5 Generics. This is hardly the 1st article about this particular subject, but none of them explain it quite the way I would have wanted to see it when I was wrestling with this issue myself.
• Panopticon: The Power of Pre-Attentive Processing – Our visualization software is easy to use and is a great way to explore large datasets, identify outliers and find hidden patterns.

Daily del.icio.us for February 10th through February 14th

This is something I have been meaning to do for many years now but I finally took advantage of the Christmas break to put my Linksys Wireless Router (WRT54G) on steroids. Since I was upgrading my Windows machine from XP to Vista and my Linux machine from Dapper to Edgy (Ubuntu), I figured why not break – I mean upgrade everything.

First a little background – Linksys had used Linux as the OS of its network products including the ubiquitous WRT54G router. When Cisco acquired Linksys in 2003, they were forced to open source all of the Linksys code because of the GPL. This led to people to create updated versions of the code for these Linksys routers and soon people started adding features to the $60.00 router there were available in network devices costing a lot more than $60.00. Linksys (and Cisco) continued to make these Linux routers for a while and then switched to another real-time UNIX variant, VxWorks which removed the requirement for Cisco to release their software into the open-source community.

So I’ve been thinking about upgrading my existing Linksys router to another with Gigabit ports and so upgrading and potentially turning it into a brick didn’t seem that big a deal. In fact, a part of me was hoping the upgrade wouldn’t work so that I would have the excuse to replace a perfectly working router with another with additional goodies. There are a lot of different software packages out there for your Linksys router but I decided to use DD-WRT because of the features. I wanted to add WPA/WPA2, QOS and the ability to boost the radio transmission power. The default Xmit is set to 28mw and I bumped up mine to 70mw as the Xmit site suggested and I noticed a HUGE improvement in my wireless performance. Before the upgrade, the wireless was really weak in the other end of our house but know I get perfect connection that really awesome throughput. In fact, the strength of the signal was so high, I had to switch to another channel to let me neighbor’s wireless routers and phones work. The enhanced security was also a nice bonus – The other features like the ability to run a wireless business don’t interest me but the ability to VPN in really does. I haven’t had a chance to use that yet as I typically use a SSH tunnel to setup a proxy to securely access resources when I am using a public network but it’s a nice feature to have if you need security or as just paranoid of open/free/public networks. (As you should be)

To me, the coolest thing was the ability to SSH into my wireless router and browses the directory structure. The DD-WRT upgrade turned my router into an SSH server and so I can SSH into it to check out the configuration or even SSH out from the router itself.

Here are some screenshots taken from the interface – Before you decide to upgrade your router, please remember that there are no warranties and you could end up with a $60 brick.

Put Your Linksys Router on Steroids

So I’m stuck here in Kansas City airport on my way to San Francisco and I not that upset as I have my trusty Sprint EVDO card with me and I’m getting an average of 1 MB download speed. Who needs WiFi when EVDO gives you all the bandwidth you need and it’s almost everywhere. I have been getting 1 MB from my Sprint card consistently and the connection seems as reliable if not more so than the standard 802.11x connections I typically use when I travel. EVDO rocks!

EVDO – How I love thee!