Coding Daily

New Refcardz on Azure

May 4, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

This morning I was looking for a quick summary of Windows Azure Storage queues to pass to a colleague. I ran across a great new Refcardz by Brian H. Prince, an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft. Here’s the summary: This DZone Refcard on Cloud Computing with WIndows Azure Platform will introduce you to the platform and [...]

Design

.NET, azure

Architecting Facebook

May 2, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

As a technologist, I find myself wondering “how exactly do they do that?” a lot. This is especially true for large software systems. Even more so for large, successful software systems. So, what about Facebook? What’s their architecture? Ask and you shall find… A very knowledgeable gentleman, Michaël Figuière, Software Engineer at Xebia, did all [...]

Design

architecture

Visual Studio Async CTP

April 30, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

I just got the Visual Studio Async Community Technology Preview (SP1 Refresh) up and running and it is amazing. You can get it here. First, start with the Whitepaper: Asynchrony in .NET to get an overview of the new asynchronous features being developed for C#, Visual Basic and the .NET Framework. Then, download the C# [...]

Development, Tools

.NET

Dendrogram Plots

April 26, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

I recently attended the Wolfram Seminar, “Statistics and Data Analysis with Mathematica“. The discussion on Hierarchical Clustering was especially interesting to me. They showed a dendrogram plot for some sample text data. A dendrogram is defined here as: A dendrogram (from Greek dendron “tree”, -gramma “drawing”) is a tree diagram frequently used to illustrate the [...]

Design

math, mathematica

iOS Beta Builder

April 23, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

iOS Beta Builder is a very useful iOS deployment tool from a very generous developer, Hanchor LLC. An excerpt from the announcement: Enter ‘iOS BetaBuilder’ – a simple MacOS X app takes your archived IPA file and creates the required manifest and HTML files for wireless distribution. It even zips up a copy of the [...]

Deployment, Tools

iOS

Making S.T.U.P.I.D. Users S.M.A.R.T.

April 21, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

Whenever I need a full-strength dose of Usability Reality, I wander over to Boxes and Arrows, one of the best peer-written websites on design, user interaction, and information architecture. An article was posted yesterday that is brimming with brilliance: “Are your users S.T.U.P.I.D.? How good design can make users effective“. Please take the time to [...]

Design, Ideation, Usability

Fun with Perl: topbiz.pl

April 20, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

#!C:/Perl/bin/perl # Dom Virgilio # Grab top business stories from Yahoo RSS feed # Notes: perl topbiz.pl # turn on perl’s safety features use strict; use warnings; my $pathname = “http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/business”; use XML::RSS; use LWP::Simple; my $rss = new XML::RSS; my $url2parse = get($pathname) or die “Unable to access Yahoo RSS feed.”; $rss->parse($url2parse); # Print [...]

Development

Perl, scripts

“100% Code Coverage”

April 19, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

There’s a nice exchange of ideas going on in the DZone ‘Javalobby’ based on a Nicolas Frankel blog entry called “100% code coverage!” that was posted recently on “A Java geek!“. The original post is here. Frankel’s assertion “code coverage and test are completely different things” is right on the money… as is his very [...]

Development, Quality, Tools

quality, rant

MySQL Query Cache

April 17, 2011 by domvirgilio 0 Comments

First, for the uninitiated, here’s a little background: There are three primary MySQL caching techniques: file-based, application, and the built-in query cache. There’s a good overview of the techniques here. In the simplest sense, the MySQL Query Cache stores the text of the query and the result of the query in memory. The Query Cache [...]

Design, Tools

cache, mysql