Computer programming

"Programming Google App Engine is a new book from O’Reilly, written by Google’s Dan Sanderson. The App Engine, despite all its downtimes, is an interesting (Python/ Java based) environment with a focus on being scalable. And even if you already have a domain and server elsewhere, you could write the front-end on that server and have a JavaScript app on it communicate to a Python JSON API back-end over at the App Engine." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

The only things I usually notice are the datastore timeouts - which happens all the time when dealing with large chunks of data. When dealing with fragmented data, the timeout rate decreases a lot, sometimes even approaching zero. - Arnaldo M Pereira

"If you use the Sphinx search engine and have been watching the development branch (0.9.10) and wondering when to upgrade, I'm here to tell you that "now" is a great time." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Alta Elsta & I just completed the DTrace Quick Start Guide: Observing Native and Web Applications in Production mini-book. ... We talk about why DTrace is so different from any observation tools you may have seen. We cover basic DTrace concepts and some details on writing d-scripts. We also have a lot of sample scripts. Sections on using DTrace to observe MySQL and Drupal are included." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"The App Engine team is psyched to present version 1.2.6 of our SDK for both runtimes, Python and Java. This releases contains plenty of improvements and bugfixes, along with some exciting new features" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"We are excited to release the first milestone build for GWT 2.0 today. This milestone provides early access (read: known to still be unfinished and buggy) to the various bits of core functionality that will be coming in GWT 2.0." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"When Hudzilla isn't busy working on his free Mono tutorials using C#, he likes to hack on one of his pet Python projects: Gloss. It's hosted right here on TuxRadar and you may already have given it a try. If not, he wrote a short tutorial for PC Plus magazine a few months ago, and took the time to repurpose it for the web. So, if you fancy learning the fastest way to create Python games, read on as Hudzilla talks you through an example Gloss project..." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"The goal of the GWT Graphics library is to provide consistent cross-browser vector graphics library for Google Web Toolkit. It's open-source and licensed under the Apache License 2.0. GWT Graphics uses SVG and VML for creating graphics." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"European researchers have been working for years on a system that allows developers to create internet applications that can manage and fix themselves. Called SELFMAN, the project aims to address the challenges inherent in large scale applications. According to Peter Van Roy, project coordinator, "The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time. We wanted to make big internet applications easy, so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself. It will take the internet to the next level."" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

SKYNET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Roberto Bonini

Skynet type of thing has been in existence for long time now. DARPA has some visionaries with the right strings to pull it off. - TrafficBug

"Earlier today, we announced Translations for Facebook Connect, which simplifies and streamlines the process of translating a website into to any of the more than 65 different languages Facebook currently supports. As we continue to provide ways for you to increase distribution and add social context to any site through Facebook Connect, we want to make implementing these tools as seamless and simple as possible. To meet this goal, today we are launching the Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground -– tools that simplify the implementation process so that developers and non-developers alike can experience the benefits of Facebook Connect including increased traffic and site engagement." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"SmartGWT 1.3 has been released. The release notes can be found here. The new samples include an editable grid with group and column summaries. The other new samples can be found under the "New Samples" side nav item of the Showcase." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"If you don't use Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the GWT 1.7.1 release shouldn't interest you much -- you shouldn't see any changes. If you do use Mac OS X 10.6, good news. Running GWT with Java 6 has become simpler. Download it here." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"While learning a new ORDER BY syntax recently, as a diligent architect/DBA I reviewed the documentation. What I also found in the SELECT syntax which I did not also know was the keyword DUMPFILE. The SELECT Syntax from MySQL 5.1 Manual states: If you use INTO DUMPFILE instead of INTO OUTFILE, MySQL writes only one row into the file, without any column or line termination and without performing any escape processing. This is useful if you want to store a BLOB value in a file. It’s a shame there is no middle ground, where you get the features of OUTFILE (i.e. all rows), and the features of DUMPFILE (i.e. no heading)" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"So, as we all know, GWT hosted mode on the Mac with OS X Leopard didn’t work with Java 6 because Java 6 on the Mac was 64 bit only and the libraries used for hosted mode were 32 bit. You’d get java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError. The workaround was to use Java 5 for hosted mode. The release of Snow Leopard put paid to this scheme. In Snow Leopard you only have Java 6. A look at the installed Java versions shows 1.5 has been replaced by a link to CurrentJDK and CurrentJDK is 1.6." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Felipe Gomes has extended multitouch support in Firefox to reach into content space (i.e. us Web devs can use it!). Checking out the sexy demos in the video above will make you pine for the day (not long!) where all laptop screens support touch (my son thinks they are already ;)" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"One of the first experiments that I did with python and twitter was a BOT. I was interested in testing how would an interactive application work using twitter, and a reasonable model for me is that it would answer back when a user sent a message, after performing a given action. To test it, I built this bot, and it is kinda running at http://twitter.com/interweb. Send it a message and it answers back with the “feeling lucky” result in a google query. You may need to follow it to see the answer, according to your security options." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Recently, I've been studying ways of reducing the download size of Javascript applications produced by Google Web Toolkit, while preserving or improving startup time. There are a number of ways to do this, the first of which is to transform Javascript code into a form that is naturally more succinct, while eliminating unused code, or deferring the load of some code until later. Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff inherent in some of the fancier ways of making JS more succinct that use run-time code generation. This is put to good use in libraries like jQuery. For a large application, like Google Wave, this would increase startup time. Another technique is to teach a compiler even better optimizations for reducing redundant code, work which is ongoing in Google Web Toolkit. Other attempts to reduce JS size have looked at ways to remove extraneous whitespace, shorten identifiers, and tokenize/pack JS statements, and while the former two are win-win one-way transforms, the latter has the... more... - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"There's no shortage of malicious activity on the internet--by some accounts, cyberspace is dominated by it. The question is how to avoid it. Today, computer scientists outline a new way of predicting the next attack so that you can block it in advance. The new technique builds on perhaps the most common technique for avoiding unwanted internet activity: creating lists of the most prolific attack sources which are compiled, shared and then blocked. The trouble with blacklists is that it is reactive: it blocks malicious sites after they have attacked. The words stable door and bolted come to mind. Last year, computer scientists began exploring a potentially more effective approach: predicting the sites most likely to attack and blocking them in advance. The technique, called highly predictive blacklisting, uses data from past attacks to create a network-type graph out of the pattern of links between victims . It then runs a Google PageRank type algorithm for each victim looking for the most relevant attackers. The reuslting list is then used to block potential attackers in future." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"You probably know that it’s possible to set configuration variables to log queries that don’t use indexes to the slow query log in MySQL. This is a good way to find tables that might need indexes. But what if the slow query log isn’t enabled and you are using (or consulting on) MySQL 5.0 or earlier, where it can’t be enabled on the fly unless you’re using a patched server such as Percona’s enhanced builds? You can still capture these queries." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"GWT Mosaic XUL is a XML-based language that lets you build feature-rich GWT applications." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"After lot of work, I'm happy to introduce a new jqGrid realease. The work is just in alfa stage, but I hope that the final will be released soon. There are a lot of issueas that I should resolve. The most of them are (as usual) in IE browsers. The theme integration should be polished too.There are some missing things like zebra striping, but I do not find a class in UI theme roller that corresponds to this. Instead of this, I think that this is a good start. Enjoy" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"When it comes to form validation, it’s hard to have a versatile solution that works with every form. Figuring out how to display errors is not a simple task. This is something I tried to remedy with this script. When an error needs to be displayed, the script creates a div and positions it in the top right corner of the input. This way you don’t have to worry about your HTML form structure. The rounded corner and shadow are done with CSS3 and degrade well in non compliant browsers. There is no images needed." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Recently I was shown a demo of Seesmic Web, an application that lets you manage multiple streams and Twitter accounts. The demo was very cool and notable because Seesmic's related product is Seesmic Desktop, implemented in Adobe Air. Seesmic Web replicates the desktop functionality, but on the web using GWT. The team chose GWT to build Seesmic Web, and I was curious to hear about their experience. In case it helps others in the process of evaluating GWT for building web apps, here is the response I got back from Johann Romefort, CTO at Seesmic." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

""I am pleased to announce the release of SmartGWT 1.2. This version supports GWT 1.7 and has improved support for interoperability with core GWT widgets. Some other features include full Safari 4.x support, ListGrid performance improvements, support for all enabled grid cell editors, availability of the ResultSet API, and improved WebService support. Several new samples have been added along with a real world mini-application that demonstrates a range of SmartGWT UI components, data binding operations, and layout managers." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"During years, I have used AWK and Perl scripts for data cleaning. But yesterday, when I tried to clean some geolocalized data I realized that Perl was not the right tool. The solution : I have built a small application with GWT-Maps. Two hours later, I was able to clean my data. Nice." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Because GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is new and exciting it's easy to forget the lessons on clean GUI code structure that have been accumulated over nearly thirty years. GwtTest is good for testing UI-specific code in JavaScript. If you find yourself using GwtTest for testing non-ui client-side logic you may not have a clear View/Presenter separation. Separating the View and the Presenter allows for more modular, more easily tested code with shorter test times. Model View Presenter was introduced in another episode back in February. Here's how to apply it to a GWT app." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Advanced GWT Components library is a set of GWT widgets designed to simplify Web 2.0 UI development in Java. Components architecture is based on MVP pattern typical for Swing applications. The main entities of the library are Data Model, Advanced Widget and Event Listener." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"GWT is a very flexible environment that allows you to write a web application in Java and compile it to Javascript -- even for the iPhone. A number of people have fears with GWT, for instance * (not true) GWT isn't flexible which will lead developers down a dead-end path. * (not true) GWT is ugly, and can't be used to make "gucci" UIs. This post will show that these are just myths." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"Popular social-networking site Facebook was hit with a DoS (denial-of-service) attack Thursday, but the attack did not appear to be as severe as one that crippled Twitter the same day. Facebook reported on its own Facebook profile Thursday that users may have had trouble accessing the site or its services because of the attack, but that the situation seemed well in hand by late morning in California, where the company is located. “We have restored full access for most people,” the company reported. “We’ll keep monitoring the situation to make sure you have the reliable experience you expect from us.”" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"This library contains GWT API's addressing the new HTML 5 features which are supported by Mobile WebKit. API Libraries There are two categories of GWT API libraries this project's going to deliver: HTML 5 oriented and WebKit oriented. The former is about leveraging the latest developments in the HTML 5 space (which is closely followed by the WebKit implementation), and the latter category is UI related stuff. HTML5 libs The following libraries are suitable not just for the Mobile WebKit browser, also the latest desktop browsers (and Opera Mobile) offer these HTML 5 capabilities:" - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet

"The actual source code has been through thorough code review over the last year+ of use in various Google projects, including the new AdWords UI and Wave. Feedback and criticism is of course solicited, but I'm planning to submit this patch unmodified to serve as a base line." - Arnaldo M Pereira from Bookmarklet