Interesting Snippets from 2012-09-21

• Commerce Weekly: Big data in retail - O'Reilly Radar

  Gary Hawkins at the Harvard Business Review took a look this week at marketing and research in the commerce space and argued that the costs associated with big data advantages may be wiping out the little guy.

• Online Python Tutor - Learn programming by visualizing code execution

  Online Python Tutor is a free educational tool that helps students overcome a fundamental barrier to learning programming: understanding what happens as the computer executes each line of a program's source code. Using this tool, a teacher or student can write a Python program directly in the web browser and visualize what the computer is doing step-by-step as it executes the program.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-09-17

• Java Memory Model Simplified - Java Code Geeks

  One of the best thing in java is that the developers are not required to handle the memory allocations when the objects are created. The JVM does that for us. Most of the time we just need the outer layer knowledge of heap memory and garbage collector. I will share some really interesting investigations that I had. I is a huge topic and I am writing from a point of view of a web application developer, what all minimum I thought we should understand about it.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-09-15

• Cubism.js

  Cubism.js is a D3 plugin for visualizing time series. Use Cubism to construct better realtime dashboards, pulling data from Graphite, Cube and other sources. Cubism is available under the Apache License on GitHub.

• Seriesly - Document Oriented Time Series DB

  So, I started writing a document-oriented time-series database in go two weeks ago. It’s really nothing groundbreaking, but it’s been quite fun. My purpose is to have a system that allows me to store arbitrary performance data captured as it’s seen in the wild, and then later come up with ways to look at it. Check out this real life example to get a feel for the kinds of captures we’re working with. This sample represents a single point in time, there may be many of these occuring at any frequency (well, nothing more frequent than once per nanosecond). From this, we can do arbitrary queries and report groupings at millisecond granularity.

• Incremental Mapreduce for Analytics with R

  I’ve been wanting to describe some of my work with using R to help me understand data I’m collecting in Couchbase Server† because I find it quite interesting, useful and easy. However, it’s been difficult for me to figure out a good starting point because I don’t know who the audience would be. That is, finding the right set of assumptions to get going has been quite hard.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-09-12

• Black Swan Farming

  I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.

• robicch/jQueryGantt · GitHub

  jQuery Gantt editor has been written by Roberto Bicchierai and Silvia Chelazzi

• goldmansachs/gs-collections · GitHub

  GS Collections is a collections framework for Java. It has JDK-compatible List, Set and Map implementations with a rich API and set of utility classes that work with any JDK compatible Collections, Arrays, Maps or Strings. The iteration protocol was inspired by the Smalltalk collection framework.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-09-07

• Test Mercenaries

  The Test Mercenaries were a team of engineers within Google dedicated to helping development teams improve their testing practices and code quality from late 2006 until early 2009. Two or more Mercs would be embedded within a development team full-time for months, using the Testing Grouplet’s Test Certified program as the basis for concrete action and improvement.

• Security 101 for Cloud – building it right | The Cloud Evangelist

  Cloud Security Alliance started many moons ago to put together an authoritative set of controls to allow you to get to work now building out your platforms or engaging with a Cloud provider regardless of the tenacity or the aggressive nature of your certification or audit model. The controls are designed to get you out the blocks building Cloud platformst that need to meet the regulations around ISO 27001/27002, ISACA COBIT, PCI, NIST, Jericho Forum and NERC CIP.

• Architecture

  Qubes implements Security by Isolation approach. To do this, Qubes utilizes virtualization technology, to be able to isolate various programs from each other, and even sandbox many system-level components, like networking or storage subsystem, so that their compromise don’t affect the integrity of the rest of the system.

  Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs), or “AppVMs”. E.g. user can have “personal”, “work”, “shopping”, “bank”, and “random” AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.

• Ingrater’s 3D Blog » Real World Comparison, GC vs. Manual Memory Management

  The astonishing thing here is, that the manual managed version compiled with dmd is still faster then the highly optimized GC version GDC generates. I could not compile my manually managed version with GDC yet as druntime for GDC has a completely different folder structure and quite some modifications.

  Most of this performance improvements come from the fact that the garbage collector does not eat any time. But also if you write code with a GC in mind you often do not think about the consequences when allocating memory, because the GC will deal with it. This often leads to highly imperformant code

• The Pragmatic Bookshelf | PragPub September 2012 | Thinking Functionally with Haskell

  Types are a description of the code’s inputs and outputs, and the check ensures that inputs and outputs match up and are used consistently. Modern type systems—such as in Haskell or above—are very flexible, and allow these descriptions to be quite detailed; plus they are not too obtrusive in use and often very helpful.

• enquire.js - Awesome Media Queries in JavaScript

  A lightweight JavaScript library for handling CSS media queries.

  Deal with your media queries being matched (and even unmatched!) Respond to browser events with aplomb And if you want to get really fancy, run one-time setup routines

• About Us · Zapier

  Syncing data on the web has always been a pain. Either you did it by hand or you buckled down and built it yourself with an API. If you weren't technical you had few places to turn for help. That's why we built Zapier. Zapier is for busy people who know their time is better spent selling, marketing, or coding. Instead of wasting valuable time coming up with complicated systems - you can use Zapier to sync the web apps you and your team are already using on a daily basis.

• Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools

  Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools is a collection of tools that we, the people behind Datavisualization.ch, work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly. This is not a list of everything out there, but instead a thoughtfully curated selection of our favourite tools that will make your life easier creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations.

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