In Finland there has recently been quite a lot of public discussion about open data in daily news papers (http://bit.ly/sWb6ZA). The government has also agreed that all official data should be made public. However, the government has not stated anything about the means to make such data public.What do you see as the main obstacles to open data?
Apple has a bunch of good tutorials, for example this one: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/cocoa/....
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, ...).
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.
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 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.
Recently Amazon made Oracle database available an AWS service. What advantages Oracle databases have over MySQL? How about disadvantages (excluding the pricing, of course)?
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?
That article provides useful ideas and targets for developing a REST API. Recommended.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I have a master's degree in social science. My minor is in business administration. In addition to that degree, I have also studied about a third of a BSc degree in computer science. I currently work as a programmer.I'm having hard time deciding should I continue with my BSc degree or just continue with the programming job. The job in its self feels just fine to me, but I'm concerned about the...
But do GWT and Closure use the same technology, that I don't know.
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.
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.