Programmers, designers, and sysadmins doing real good for humanity and the world in their spare time

The other week I was working on my compilers homework – the semantic analysis part is an object-oriented nightmare. Something called the visitor pattern to traverse trees and do weird stuff.

Combine BigMemory and Terracotta Server Array for Performance and Scalability exhausting hardware resources!

Kirk Knoernschild is one of the leading experts when it comes to the OSGi community. DZone recently had a chance ot interview him about his thoughts on modularity in 2012 and his new book is "Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples Using OSGi." The book introduces 18 patterns that will help you design more modular software.

How's this for hypocrisy: Mozilla says that Apple banning Firefox from iPads and iPhones is no problem, but Microsoft restricting the browser from using some features on some Windows 8 tablets may be illegal.

ORM are primarily used to avoid writing SQL and persist completely anemic domain, where all the logic reside on services. In such a scenario it is easy to abuse an ORM and probably in the long term the ORM could become much more a pain than a real help.

Two men in the United Kingdom who had lost their vision after birth due to a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, wherein light-sensitive cells in the eye stop working, just received the gift of sight due to an innovative new microchip implant. Surgeons partially restored vision to both men by implanting tiny electronic chips (0.12 by 0.12 inches) in a thin sheet of tissue at the back of the men’s eyes. When switched on, the chips perform the duties of the malfunctioning photoreceptors, converting light into electrical impulses that travel to the brain. A thin cable threaded beneath the skin connects the chip to a battery back, which sits under the skin near the ear.

As many as 79 percent of surveyed mobile app developers are planning to integrate HTML5 in the apps they will launch in 2012, while more than 1 billion HTML5 mobile browsers will be in the market in 2013; and over 80 percent of all mobile apps will be wholly or in part based upon HTML5 by 2015.

"Leading the Lean|Agile Enterprise: A Two-day Workshop" held by Dean Leffingwell @ Scrum-Day Dean Leffingwell one of the worldwide most accepted experts about scaling agile in large enterprises - is going to talk at scrum-day about "Leading the Lean|Agile Enterprise" beside this he teaches his two day Workshop about the same theme.

IPv6 has been on almost every IT team’s “to implement next year” list, but with World IPv6 Day happening on June 6th, many websites will be making the switch and staying there. Jim MacLeod, product manager, and the team from WildPackets have taken a closer look at 10 myths and set the record straight about this enigmatic protocol to help the transfer go more smoothly.

In this webinar Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop, describes what Lean ALM looks like and introduces the 4 tenets of Autonomy, Transparency, Adaptability and Collaboration (ATAC) that unite to maximize flow.

The following is an article written by TheCodeGeneral (not too sure who he is, but is quite respected in the community and very well read)

OPS: For the sake of this discussion... What do you mean when you say "private cloud, public cloud and data center"? CLOUDIFY: A data center is a bunch of machines that are running most of the time. It could be a bare-bones data center or a virtualized data-center. A private cloud is a data center that has an API for provisioning machines on-demand. It takes away the need to manually decide which VM runs on which physical machine for which user. A public cloud is like a private cloud, but each machine is billed by the hour.

Some more cool news has come out of this week's Lucene Revolution conference related to their theme of 'Solr's not just for search, it's for analytics. In addition to their Solr-as-a-Service cloud search platform, which is basically LucidWorks Enterprise on the cloud, Lucid Imagination has now announced the beta release of LucidWorks Big Data.

This week we look at how to hire a good mobile programmer, a round up of Big Data vendors and a new semantic search tool.

The issue that has held Windows Phone back the most thus far from reaching success is an important part of a smartphone many may take for granted: apps. While the Marketplace is nearing its first 100,000 apps and the quality has so far managed to hold its own, the only platform with native Xbox Live integration still can't definitively say it's 'the best platform for gaming' simply because they don't have the same arms race of innovation, graphics or gameplay mechanics as other platforms like iOS and Android.