InfoQ: Bruce Eckel on Python, Java, Flex, and RIAs
O’Reilly: Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access
It’s Only Software: 5 Minute Guide to Spring and JMX
Yet Another Java Blog: 5 Part Series: Intro to Caching,Caching algorithms and caching frameworks
Eli Bendersky: A year with Python
itzer.com: Java Kicks Ruby on Rails in the Butt
Tom Baker, writing for O’Reilly’s Inside RIA: Getting Involved in Higher Education – some great thoughts on why developers should consider teaching.
Jon Moore on RSA Public Key Cryptography in Java
Arpit Mathur: My experience with Git and why I think Open Source projects should be released on Git
Aaron Held: Peeling back the onion of stupidity
Mat Schaffer: What I Learned About Cookies This Week
And a shout out to Roz Duffy for encouraging me (and others) to read “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko” – a fantastic career (and life) improvement guide – written manga style!
Inquirer: Bari Pepe, 46, Years of trauma behind her, now she wants to aid others – ex-addict acheives master’s in social work. Very inspiring story. Read it.
The Boston Globe: Inside the baby mind: It’s unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby’s brain. – “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” – Metafilter thread.
New Yorker: The secret of self-control. – let your toddler’s imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.
Hacking Education – A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It – straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
CSMonitor: In tough times, graduates (and parents) assess the worth of a liberal arts education – just an opinion – I think liberal arts majors are well positioned for the economy of today and tomorrow.
Deseret News: Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says
Tom Baker: Getting Involved in Higher Education – software engineers should seriously consider teaching, here’s why.
Slashdot.org: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?
Inquirer: Daniel Rubin: Grads, please note: It’s not about you
xkcd: 1000 Times – its all about context isn’t it?
NPRbackstory is an automated Twitter feed that attempts to add context to the news stories trending popular today according to Google’s Hot Trends. It leverages NPR’s archives (very smart, as Joshua Benton notes archives are underused assets), and Yahoo! Pipes to produce a RSS feed that is fed into the NPRbackstory account. It was developed by Keith Hopper of NPR’s Public Interactive group.
Read Joshua Benton’s piece at Nieman Journalism Lab
Read more about it at Keith Hopper’s blog.
Check out his other Twitter related project – Twitterstars – a tool to find local Twitter power tweeters.
Kellie Carter and Dave Cooksey will lead a discussion on user-centered design and ways in which to improve Philadelphia.
For details on Monday’s get together check out refreshphilly.org.
Its an important discussion and I believe some positive efforts for the city are bound to spring from it.
For whatever reason, the latest release of Netbeans was giving me some issues. Over at “Java How To…” was an excellent short piece on avoiding common Java heap space configuration errors in all sorts of containers, environments, and IDEs. It’s one for your bookmarks.
Another tip – close the Tasks pane – it triggers excessive scanning on large projects. Open it when you have the opportunity to. But the last thing you want is to shut down with it open – it will simply make start up intolerable if you have a very large project opened.
There is an open ticket working on the worst offender keeping me from adopting Netbeans enthusiastically – excessive “Project scanning”.
Yesterday afternoon, encouraged by Roz, I found a way to attend BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. I’m happy I listened to her. It was a great event.
I was late, but in time for four discussions, the biggest highglight of those was TechnicallyPhilly. They gave an enthusiastic, concise description of what they do, how central community and chosen niche were to it, and even had some hints on how to earn a living doing it. Other interesting discussions included Scott Karp’s presentation on Publish2 and collaborative news rooms, and the folks behind copress.org, who while working to solve problems commonly found in college online news organizations, are inadvertently addressing many of the problems found in large mainstream online news organizations. There is another presentation, on how to make money on the Internet, that was infuriating for how it looked down on people. As Chris Krewson ponintedly asked, “The take away seems to be that the public is stupid and so are your advertisers”.
Biggest highlight for me was getting to meet Amy Z. Quinn after all these years. Amy is someone I “met” online via Philly Future more than three years ago. As were meeting Howard Weaver and Scott Karp for the first time and getting a chance to hang out and catch up with Wendy Warren, Chris Krewson, Aaron Couch, and Chris Anderson.
BTW, if you want a terrific summary of how news gets chosen for Philly.com’s (and more than likely the majority of news orgs) home page, the tensions present in its production and what drives it, Chris’s research paper: “Web Production, News Judgment, and Emerging Categories of Online Newswork in Metropolitan Journalism” is where you want to go.
Yesterday was quite a day. In the morning I went out with fellow co-workers to Hunting Park to help do some clean up and planting for Comcast Cares Day. It was a small personal victory for me. Previous two years I haven’t been able to attend due to the back pain issue. This year, not only could I attend, but I was able to assist for a few hours. There are pictures up on Flickr. Felt great to go out and lend a helping hand with fellow friends.
danieltenner.com – Dealing with impossible crises – Absolutely terrific advice for participating in group problem solving (something that many have trouble with).
The Buzz Bin – The Cultural Challenge to Integration – about breaking down silo walls.
Beth’s Blog – Silos Culture Inside the Walls of Nonprofits Prevent Effective Social Media Use – yep – they exist in non-profits as well.
Lessons Learned: Five Whys – great technique to drill down to root causes.
scottberkun.com – Top ten reasons managers become great
Matt Jones: Data as Seductive Material
Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth
Artima: What I learned at Java Posse Roundup ’09 – some good advice here.
Netbeans.org: NetBeans Platform – some nice inspiration here among those using the Netbeans platform.
Hacker News: Ask HN: Is it worth a back-end developer’s time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS (yes!)
WikiWikiWeb: Specialization Is For Insects
Computerworld: Researchers: Databases still beat Google’s MapReduce
SmoothSpan Blog: AmazonFail Shows Data Matters Too
imagine27: 2009-04-09 live lisp art opengl synth sound – wow – slow build – but that’s part of why its worth it.
grok2.com: quoting Fred Brooks – Why is programming fun?
SEOmoz: How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time
Bb RealTech: My Abbreviated Self – thoughts on the evolving HTML5 spec.
CSSquirrel: Comic Update: Madness? This is HTML5!
rc3.org: Do what you can’t not do:
So my suggestion would be find a way to get paid to do the thing you can’t stop yourself from doing. The best programmers are people who can’t stop programming. The best writers are people who find themselves wanting to write when they’re doing other things. Do what comes naturally.
btw – I’m posting regular links at del.icio.us again – here’s my programming link stream.