Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Interesting Snippets from 2012-07-31
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Gradle - Overview
At the heart of Gradle lies a rich extensible Domain Specific Language (DSL) based on Groovy. Gradle pushes declarative builds to the next level by providing declarative language elements that you can assemble as you like. Those elements also provide build-by-convention support for Java, Groovy, OSGi, Web and Scala projects. Even more, this declarative language is extensible. Add your own new language elements or enhance the existing ones. Thus providing concise, maintainable and comprehensible builds.
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BBC News - Viewpoint: How PowerPoint changed Microsoft and my life
Microsoft recently reported the first quarterly financial loss in its history. The reason was a big acquisition gone sour. Microsoft had to write off more than $6bn (£3.8bn) that it had spent to acquire Aquantive, an online advertising business.
By contrast, Microsoft's earliest acquisition, PowerPoint, has been a financial success. Microsoft bought PowerPoint 25 years ago, on 31 July 1987.
The result may have been more valuable to Microsoft than any of the more than 100 acquisitions it has made since.
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Chaos Monkey Released Into the Wild - Slashdot
"Netflix revealed today that they've released Chaos Monkey, an open source Amazon Web Service testing tool that will randomly turn off instances in Auto Scaling Groups. 'We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient. We are excited to make a long-awaited announcement today that will help others who embrace this approach. ...source code for the founding member of the Simian Army, Chaos Monkey, is available to the community.'"
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pathod
pathod is a pathological HTTP/S daemon, useful for testing and torturing HTTP clients. At pathod's heart is a tiny, terse language for crafting HTTP responses. The simplest way to use pathod is to fire up the daemon, and specify the response behaviour you want using this language in the request URL.