jollojou

The graph in the middle of the article forecasts that the number of mobile gadgets will almost double the number of PCs in two years.

A concise presentation of most of the core features of Objective-C. It lacks protocols, however.

Apple has a bunch of good tutorials, for example this one: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/cocoa/....

The article illustrates the well-known mantra "to survive, you must adapt to your environment".

In the IT industry, incrementally developing your existing businesses will quickly lead to oblivion. IBM succeeded in the transition away from the mainframe business, and thus IBM can be seen as an example what all the companies in the industry need to do to stay afloat.

I did not find this article a waste of time. It reminds me of Thomas Kuhn's view on scientific revolutions. Most of the time people try to solve problems by using already known patterns. Every now and then somebody comes up with a completely new idea; the new idea allows its possessors to solve the problems orders of magnitude better (i.e. faster, cheaper, ...).

It depends on the application(s) you wish to run on AWS. If your EC2 instance runs an HTTP server that is backed by an external database like RDS, your I/O bottlenecks is not the EC2 instance's disk.

The article points out rather successfully that once you know at least something about the internals of each AWS service, you can fit them into your particular needs.

That's correct. The problem is that the EC2 internal IPs change even though the instance would have an Elastic IP. EC2 instances use internal IPs when communicating with other EC2 instances (this is a feature of AWS DNS). As a consequence, Puppet clients cannot access the master by using the master's Elastic IP.

We configure our production servers and push new releases there with Puppet. I like Puppet: its fail-safe and reliable.

There is, however, one thing I don't fancy in it. Puppet does not support insecure client–master communication. Requiring SSL communication is OK, but one should be able to switch it off if it brings no value.

We are running our our servers on AWS, and we rely solely on AWS security groups to grant and deny accesses. Puppet's SSL traffic brings no additional security to us; it only complicates matters. For example: we would like to shut down the Puppet master EC2 instances when they are not needed. However, this is not possible, since after start-up the EC2 instances have new IPs, and this breaks the Puppet-signed SSL certificates.

The article quite well describes some of the valuable features of a good login UI.

The login page is (often) the first place a user encounter your site. If that page creates a sense of repulsion in the user or forces him to struggle, the user is probably left with a feeling that your site is against him. That's not something you want.

Its not difficult nor time-consuming to implement a proper login UI. However, surprisingly many sites don't pay enough attention to it.

Jeff, are there any plans to support mailbox provisioning?

At the moment I'm using Rackspace's REST API to create a mailbox for our new customers. I like their API, but I don't like the fact that we have to communicate with their IMAP and SMTP servers to receive and send email. It forces us to write a lot of bug-prone email handling code.

Could Amazon help in this kind of a scenario?

At the moment I'm able to launch applications in the US East region only. When will the other regions support Elastic Beanstalk?

Martin Fowler has a good article on the maturity levels of a REST API: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...

That article provides useful ideas and targets for developing a REST API. Recommended.

Can you please provide a reference?

While it is true that you cannot add new ones or remove existing ones, you can modify an existing security group of a running instance: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1145?_encoding=UTF8&jiveR....

I have been practicing ashtanga yoga 4-6 times a week for several years now. I must say that it suits well to a programmer. Even though I sit by the desk about 8 hours a day, I never have any aches or pains. The daily practice kind of moves the body to the background, since the body becomes quiet and it does not complain. Practicing yoga postures also involves meditation, so its a good way to relax.

I suppose this can be achieved by practicing martial arts as well. The main thing is to have a regular exercise that you find meaningful.

I remember when I purchased a shareware version of the first Doom. I ordered it by sending a post card to a Finnish game retailer. After a week or two, I received a few diskettes. I was thrilled: a new game was just delivered to my home!

This phenomenon of not remembering what I just read is familiar to me from the moments where I'm about to take an exam after a course. I usually go through the course material two or three times before taking the exam. Just before taking my place in the exam room, I test my self: "what were the five key points in chapter 3". Oh I can't recall them, I'm in trouble!

Fortunately the exams (at least in my university) did not focus on the student's ability to remember exact sentences or enumerate the "five bullets on chapter X". Like in real life, most of the exams required me to remember ideas and their implications, not exact phrases.

To sum, its not essential to be able to recall and speak out some random facts from a book. Its more important to comprehend what ideas were present in the book and what consequences those ideas might have on X or Y. Us humans are not computers but beings capable of creative thought.

This means that Oracle chose Mark Reinhold's plan B (http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/rethinking_jdk7).

From the point of view of a web application developer, JDK 7 is not very interesting. JDK 7 will contain a few language updates like switch-cases based on strings. No major changes or features that would radically change a web app developer's coding routines. What do you think?

Even though Atwood refers to version numbers as (false) indicators of progress, he has an important point: the earlier you release, the sooner you'll be able to make crucial corrections.

If your product managers are clairvoyant you do not need short release cycles. The PMs just tell the developers what kind of features the market will value in, say, three years. The development team is then able to concentrate on building a feature-rich and consistent product without the pressure of producing something quickly and then testing it on the market.

In any other case, you probably benefit from releasing several major versions within a couple of years.

A year ago I took the course on calculus and group theory. I worked on the course 15 to 20 hours per week for three months and received a good grade.

The course was worth the effort. It enhanced my engineer identity and brought me self-respect. Now that I've passed the course, I'm much more confident about my self; I feel that I can solve difficult problems if I want to. I know that I can concentrate.

In short, putting your self through advanced mathematics is a great way to improve your capability of facing and handling difficult issues.

I have always wondered why people keep so many browser tabs open. From my point of view, open tabs represent unfinished tasks or web pages I should go back to as soon as possible.

At work, I have four browser instances open: three Chromes and one Firefox. I have placed two of them on the same virtual desktop, and the remaining two browser instances are on separate virtual desktops. On the first virtual desktop I manage my work-related tasks, such as company email, Hudson and VersionOne, a project management tool for agile software. The browser on the second virtual desktop is for developing software: the web application I develop is on it. The third virtual desktop is for fun and free time use. Altogether I have about ten browser tabs open; even that is too much. I feel that the more tabs I have open the more fragmented my attention is.

The article succeeds at least in one thing. It shows that not everything Google releases is perfect and great. Keep your eyes open.

Wave is built with GWT (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/305043/aussie_devs_make_...), which has its own JavaScript compiler.

But do GWT and Closure use the same technology, that I don't know.

I think there is more to the post than that.

In addition to preparing to tough questions one should also write down the questions. The process of thinking the meanest and yet constructive questions puts you face to face with the problematic aspects of your idea or project.

Having merely the mind set of preparing for tough questions is not enough. You have to actually face them in order to gain more insight.

I'd introduce another perspective on rejection: having a rejective state of mind significantly reduces one's ability to analyse the situation at hand.

It's about prejudices. We all hold a large amount of prejudices even though we would consider our selves open minded. Prejudices result in cognitive responses where one rejects an idea at hand before one even starts to evaluate the pros and cons of the idea.

Techcrunch is down at the moment.

Without reading the article, it seems clear that Skype fears open source software because it's competitive advantage is based on its large user base. If open sourcing their software means that competitors can provide Voice Over IP services that leverage Skype's user base, Skype definitely should fear OSS.

What they are afraid of must be opening up the Skype communication protocol, not the software in it self.

I disagree with you. Wittgenstein's generation of philosophers did contribute something crucial to the twentieth century thought. At least Karl Popper (1902-1994) should be mentioned in this context. His arguments against the political philosophies that emphasise metaphysics are traces of the world that resulted in communism and fascism.

The German philosophers before Wittgenstein (Hegel especially) created a philosophical atmosphere in which it was acceptable to create large metaphysical constructions such as the proletarian state or the third Reich. Popper among the other liberal thinkers devoted significant part of their academic work to show that communism and fascism were founded on metaphysical constructions that could not deliver the dream they promised.

The JEE application servers are not supported either. But his is not a big issue, since one can always start the app server outside IDEA and still be able to debug it with the Community edition.

I appreciate the interview you did. I found it enlightening, and watching and listening the whole clip increased my knowledge and understanding on programming in general, as well as on functional languages and the background of Erlang and Haskell.

The second question ("Haskell and Erlang have 2 distinct models of concurrency, right? Haskell is going to side-effect free, Erlang is about messaging. Can you talk a bit about this in contrast to both models of concurrency?") was especially interesting to me. I'm not experienced with functional programming, and I'm interested in the unique characteristics of Haskell and Erlang. This question directed Armstrong's and Jones' discussion towards the differences in the languages, even though they did not clearly answer to the question.

For the sake of feedback, the question starting with "Yes. This is in sync with how things happen, but sometimes it gets out of sync. It's the same thing with when you are dealing with processors"(...) was a bit hard to grasp. The mental models related each programming languages are interesting, but your question directed the discussion away from the issue of mental models. Perhaps asking "what do you see as the mental models of Haskell and Erlang" would have done the job?

Anyway, thanks for the interview, it was beneficial to me, and I'm surely not the only one.

The author of the article has a good point on the limits of knowledge: journalists seldom ponder their argument's proneness to fallacy. The author also well emphasises that it is important to have at least a little bit of information about how the news story was created. This gives the reader a greater possibility to assess the plausibility of the story.

However, the author did not cover the issue of interpretation: the journalist always writes from her personal standpoint. This raises several questions: can the journalist write "neutral" news stories? how her political and cultural background affects the news story? how could she clarify the background for the reader?

Knowing how the journalists know what they know is not enough. I would like to know something about the journalist's scheme of interpretation in order to understand the news story she wrote.

What is your source?

The bug is an example of a problem associated with inductive inference. Relying on induction is tempting, and in most cases sufficient. However, this case proves that one should always be aware of the potential fallacy that is inherent in induction.