Monday, 18 March 2013

Our first year. A new web conference - - Scott Hanselman

There's a new web conference happening in Vegas next month and you should join us. John Papa, myself and our friends pulled in the speakers from a combination of invitations and submitted talks. It's called anglebrackets.org and I hope to see you there.

AWS GovCloud (US) Region Announces Amazon SWF

AWS GovCloud (US) Region Announces Amazon SWF We are delighted to announce that Amazon Simple Workflow is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region! Amazon Simple Workflow provides customers with the building blocks and processing engine to handle the complexity of application infrastructure programming and state machinery.

Announcing Web Camps Spring Tour 2013 - Jon Galloway

Announcing Web Camps Spring Tour 2013 Whew! Seems like we just got back from the Winter tour, and we're off again! We've got eleven international events coming up in March and April. Some are already sold out, so register today!

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #58) - Windows Azure - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #58) - Windows Azure - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Cross-Post: Windows Azure Updates: HTML5/JS (CORS) support, Mercurial, DropBox and Hadoop - Windows Azure - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Today we released a number of great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Mobile Services: HTML5/JS (CORS) Client Support and Windows Phone 7.5 Support Web Sites: Mercurial Source Control Support, DropBox Support HDInsight: New offering that enables you to easily deploy and manage Hadoop Clusters All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services are still in preview).

Samsung Galaxy S4: Apple needs to go big with the iPhone 5S, or go home | ExtremeTech

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is an omnipotent smartphone -- an omniphone -- that gives us our first real glimpse at a future where all our computing needs are satisfied by the same device. Be it productivity, content consumption, or playing games, it's now clear that the future of personal computing is consolidation in a single portable device; most likely a smartphone.

High Scalability - High Scalability - Beyond Threads and Callbacks - Application Architecture Pros and Cons

Monday, March 18, 2013 at 12:37PM There's not a lot of talk about application architectures at the process level. You have your threads, pools of threads, and you have your callback models. That's about it. Languages/frameworks making a virtue out of simple models, like Go and Erlang, do so at the price of control.

Haswell leaks: Significant performance boost mixed with odd design decisions | ExtremeTech

Intel's Haswell is an exciting chip. Last IDF, we covered the CPU's features and specifications last fall, including its vastly improved cache bandwidth, new transactional synchronization extensions, and lower TDP targets. At the time, we speculated that the combination of features could significantly improve performance in both desktop and mobile configurations.

Google BigQuery Ratchets Up Evolution of New-Age Data Analysis | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Google was sitting on two massive collections of data describing its App Engine, a web service where software developers can build and deploy online applications. One data set described the way people used the service, and it spanned 2 terabytes of information, or roughly 2,000 gigabytes.

robots.net - Random Robot Roundup

We've got two weeks of random stories to unload from the editor's inbox, so let's get started! The University of Michigan says roboticists have a lot to learn from cockroaches. Researchers at Purdue think they're onto a solution for the dendrite problem that causes lithium-ion batteries to explode, and it could make batteries safer, while allowing higher energy densities and faster charging.

MooTools - Contributing to MooTools

Sometimes we get requests from people that want to contribute to MooTools. In this post I would like to give some pointers how one could help, but first I'll tell how I got involved in the MooTools project. It was late 2009, the MooTools Forge (plugin repository) was just released, and I was learning JavaScript and MooTools by creating many plugins.

CircuitLab (YC W13) has 70K monthly users for its browser-based electronics design and simulation tool - Y Combinator Posthaven

CircuitLab is coming up on its one year anniversary, and the startup (now part of Y Combinator's winter 2013 cohort) now boasts 70,000 monthly active users, who run an average of one circuit simulation every six seconds.

Crunch Big Data in the Cloud with Windows Azure HDInsight Service - Windows Azure - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Editor's Note: This post comes from Eron Kelly, General Manager for SQL Server Product Management. This is the first in our 5-part blogging series on HDInsight Service. Microsoft has been hard at work over the past year developing solutions that allow businesses to get started doing big data analytics with the tools and processes familiar to them.

StyleUp (YC W13) recommends daily personalized outfits tailored to your style and location - Y Combinator Posthaven

On StyleUp, you sign up for the daily email by taking a 30-second survey to determine your style. You are shown various pictures of styled outfits, and you choose which outfit identify. You also include your location because each outfit recommendation is tied to the weather where you are, and you pick when you want to receive each email (i.e.

Experiments find strongest shapes with 3-D printing

Jamming lends itself to soft robotics, in addition to other applications as explored in a workshop at the University of Chicago last October. In recent computer simulations and experiments, Jaeger, the William J. Friedman & Alicia Townsend Professor in Physics, and graduate student Marc Miskin investigate another aspect of jamming.

Google Chrome Blog: Bringing Chromebooks to new frontiers (literally)

For our international readers, additional details can be found for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Over the past few months, Chromebooks have become a part of everyday life for many people - a computer for the kitchen, for on the go, or for sharing with the family (or not).

3D-printed gun maker Defense Distributed now federally licensed to make, sell guns | ExtremeTech

Defense Distributed, the organization known for being the driving force behind the 3D-printed gun movement, is now licensed to manufacture and sell firearms and ammunition in the United States. Over the weekend, the group posted a picture of the license on its Facebook page in celebration.

Webinar Replay: Multi-Client Development with Spring | SpringSource.org

No application is an island and this is more obvious today than ever as applications extend their reach into people's pockets, desktops, tablets, TVs, Blu-ray players and cars.

Errplane (YC W13) launches performance monitoring and alert service for web apps - New Relic, Pingdom, Airbrake all in one - Y Combinator Posthaven

About a third of the current Y Combinator class is already using the service, which Dix co-founded with Todd Persen, as well as a number of other companies, including Garry Tan's Posthaven for Posterous exiles, VHX, Brewster, Amicus and RingRevenue. Across all of these beta customers, the system currently handles about 30 million data points per day.

ET deals: $300 off Dell XPS 14 ultrabook with Nvidia 630M graphics | ExtremeTech

The model on sale today is powered by a third generation Core i5-3317U, which sports dual cores that clock between 1.7GHz and 2.6GHz, offering a careful trade-off between performance and battery life. You also get NVIDIA graphics with Optimus technology, seamlessly switching between the integrated HD 4000 chip and the powerful GeForce GT 630M 1GB GPU.

Google Open Source Blog: Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013!

Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013!

Riding Rails: [SEC] [ANN] Rails 3.2.13, 3.1.12, and 2.3.18 have been released!

Rails versions 3.2.13, 3.1.12, and 2.3.18 have been released. These releases contain important security fixes. It is recommended users upgrade as soon as possible.

Using Tailbone to talk to App Engine with JavaScript - Google Developers Blog

By Doug Fritz, Creative Lab Today we're sharing a small open source project called Tailbone that lets developers read and write to the Google App Engine Datastore using JavaScript. We're hoping that it makes App Engine a bit more accessible to developers who aren't familiar with Python, Java or Go, or prefer not to use them.

CodePlex - Open Source Project Hosting

Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to find open source software or create new projects to share with the world.

Researchers create self-powered artificial retina from optoelectronic polymer | ExtremeTech

Interfacing neurons to electronics has already given us tremendous technologies including brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and deep brain stimulation (DBS). The bridges to optical interfaces for the brain have already begun to be built -- first with optogenetics, and more recently, directly through optically active materials.

Google App Engine Blog: Using Tailbone to talk to App Engine with JavaScript

Today's post comes from Doug Fritz from the Data Arts Team of the Google Creative Lab. In this post, Doug shares a small open source project for reading and writing to the Google App Engine Datastore with JavaScript.

Magento Ecommerce Blog | Magento

See Magento's Partner Pavilion for the first time at Internet Retailing Expo on March 20-21! Internet Retailing Expo is the only opportunity in the UK to blend marketing with technology, logistics with customer facing design, mobile with instore experience - the full range of skills and capabilities to sell in the multichannel era.

DailyJS: OrganicJS, HALbert, BromBone

Although PhantomJS is extremely useful, there are times when you don't want to include the dependency in a server-side project. I've considered making my own mini REST services for such cases, so the "heavier" dependencies like PDF generation or PhantomJS are split off into their own self-contained projects.

Adobe Marketing Cloud Goes Mobile

New Mobile Capabilities Added to Analytics, Social, Advertising, Targeting and WEM Solutions SALT LAKE CITY, Adobe Summit, The Digital Marketing Conference - March 6, 2013 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has introduced new mobile marketing capabilities to each of the five solutions in the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

030613AdobeDigitalMarketingSummit

SALT LAKE CITY, Adobe Summit, The Digital Marketing Conference - March 6, 2013 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today opened Adobe Summit, The Digital Marketing Conference, where more than 4,500 digital marketers and senior leaders representing the world's top brands have gathered to learn the latest about marketing trends, share best practices, and network with industry experts and peers.

Adobe and BSA Urge Congress to Support Software Innovation by Improving Patent Quality and Curbing Opportunistic Litigation

Adobe VP Dana Rao testifies against Patent Assertion Entity profiteers; stresses importance of software patents SAN JOSE, Calif. - March 14, 2013 - Dana Rao, vice president of Intellectual Property and Litigation at Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE), today appeared before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet.

Ring of Bitcoins: Why Your Digital Wallet Belongs On Your Finger | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Two weeks ago, Charlie Shrem got hacked and robbed, Bitcoin-style. Criminals got into a brokerage account used by his transaction services company, Bitinstant, and emptied more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency out of the account. Bitcoins are the digital equivalent of cash, and they can be traded instantly and anonymously.

BBC: Cracking the Code | Raspberry Pi

Last week's Cracking the Code had a segment featuring a very familiar little computer, and a guy with a weather balloon whom you might just recognise. Isn't it interesting how much more technical detail this kids' show goes into compared to some of the adult tech news coverage we see on TV?

Nvidia gave AMD the PS4 because console margins are terrible | ExtremeTech

Consoles have historically been seen as banner products for the companies that manufacture or design their hardware. Nvidia's original Xbox win was a sizable windfall for the company in 2002-2003 and the GPU designs of the Xbox 360 and PS3 (built by AMD and Nvidia respectively) were topics of intense discussion when those consoles were new and exciting.

Collaborate, Learn, Innovate! · YDN Blog

Coming Soon To The UK: Yahoo!'s Hack Day Europe on April 27-28 Hack days are one of the many ways we actively promote innovation through experimentation around Yahoo!. With that, Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) is thrilled to announce the upcoming Yahoo! Hack Europe: London on April 27-28, 2013.

2014 Chevy Impala review: Chevy nails infotainment with updated MyLink | ExtremeTech

Chevrolet this month resurrected the riches-to-rags Chevrolet Impala with a dazzling iteration of the My Link infotainment system and an adaptive cruise control system that sets new bang-for-the-buck standards. Owing to GM's weak finances the past few years, Chevrolet was forced to build a less complex, more approachable music, navigation and phone interface.

Open Source Project Mimics Yahoo Pipes On Your Own Machine | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Web applications are so very convenient. But there's always a rub. When you move your life onto the web, you lose control of your data. And - who knows? - your web app of choice may even vanish from the face of the earth while you're still using it.

robots.net - Robohub: The use of robots in warfare

For the latter half of this past week, the focus at Robohub.org has been the use of robots in warfare. This event was launched with an editorial including links to related posts, both new and older, and to responses from the Robots by Invitation panel of experts to the question "How will robots shape the future of warfare?"

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP development team announces the release of PHP 5.5.0alpha6. This release fixes some bugs from alpha5. It also serves as a delay for our next release, beta1, integrating ZendOptimizer+ OPCode cache which is not ready yet to be merged. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

A week of symfony #324 (11->17 March 2013) - Symfony

A week of symfony #324 (11->17 March 2013) This week the Locale component was refactored into two new Symfony components: Icu and Intl. Meanwhile, the first speakers of the Symfony Live Portland 2013 conference were announced and the full schedule for the Symfony Live Paris 2013 conference was published.

Lollipuff (YC W13) launches an eBay-like marketplace for authenticated designer clothing and accessories - Y Combinator Posthaven

On Lollipuff, the founders employ a combination of human expert authenticators with a patent-pending process to ensure that the goods on the site are real. For now, Lollipuff focuses on three of the most designer brands on auction sites: Chanel bags, Christian Louboutin shoes, and Herve Leger dresses.

Phys.Org Mobile: Eagle-eyeing researchers design swooping quadrotors with claws (w/ video)

15:20, Electronics/Robotics A still image comparison between the eagle and the quadrotor. Credit: Justin R. Thomas(Phys.org) -Scientists working on robots often concentrate on how to mimic the shape and movements of animals that show exceptional efficiencies in varied tasks; a recent team accomplishment takes a page out of the study of eagles, in order to create a flying robot that can similarly swoop down and grab objects the way an eagle can fish with its natural claws.