RDS launch

Amazon has launched a new service yesterday. Finally, they offer a RDBMS as a service. MySQL 5.1 as it turns out was their choice. I'm good with that.
There are quite a few posts about this: no surprise: Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO has a post as well as Cloud Ave, RightScale and TechCrunch to cite only the ones on my RSS feed list.

ISMIR 2009

There are a few good posts on the web regarding ISMIR 2009. Seems it was once again the place to be for anyone having anything to do with music signal processing and information retrieval. Paul Lamere has a few posts already on the conference. We were working on many of the topics discussed during the conference: music instrument recognition, tempo, music similarity for recommendation purposes. Economic realities forced us to stop our researches but it is nice to see that people are making progress on those topics.

Waves and Raindrops

Mozilla is at it again.In many ways they have revolutionized browsers with Firefox and all the plugins that make it a favorite amongst developers and "normal" users. They also had a fairly descent mail client in Thunderbird. Now, they are taking a stab at the future of email with Raindrop. From what I could see and read on the web regarding that project, it sounds very interesting.Mashable makes the connexion between Raindrop and Google Wave: both are trying to re-invent web based communication.
You might also be interested in ReadWriteWeb take on Raindrop or that of WebMonkey or GigaOM or TechCrunch

5 new tech trends you can't afford to ignore

Hypebot has a short post on their take on the up and coming trend. Except for #5, I'm totally with them on this. Have a look at this post here.

Wave security

ReadWriteWeb has a good post on Google's Wave security. What I take away from this article has less to do with Wave per se as with the fact that security was a concern addressed from the start. One would wish this would be the "obvious" approach not worth mentioning in an interview. Since it's not the case, kudos to Google for showing the way both with their products and with their methodology.

When do we stop testing

DevelopSens Blog has a good post on heuristic for determining when we should stop testing. Some are obvious but others makes explicit some aspects of testing that are not always considered by Joe Dev.

Thinking like a programmer

InfoQ just posted a nice article on testing: Testing heuristic: Thinking like a tester .

InfoQ new posts

InfoQ is a great, great website. They just posted a couple of noteworthy articles:
- one article on a BE product called Apache Shindig
- one article on the role of the PMO
- one article on story points vs hours (which is curiously a continuous debate in every agile shops it would seem)

Lean

Forrester has just published a report on Lean in the enterprise called "Lean: The New Business Technology Imperative".
I'm a Certified Scrum Master and I manage using Scrum. It just fits who I am and what I think software development is: a team sport. My management philosophy is deeply rooted in Lean because this is what I do: I try to create value and despise wastes. Any waste.

Letter to the programmer

TestingReflections posted an article in the form of a letter. This should be required reading by anyone pretending to be a developer. As a matter of fact, I'm going to present it to my devs next Friday during our weekly developer meeting. Testing is a craft and  mastering it requires way more than techniques.

Creating an IPhone app

WebWorkerDaily.com has a very good post on what it takes to build a IPhone app. Based on an actual experience, it's a good article to read by someone considering making the effort associated with such an endeavor. Making a business case for developing a widget is not so obvious after reading this article...

cloud management

We're deploying Adsong on AWS in production. I'm considering aiCache and Right Scale to ease management of the infrastructure. I've been using AWS from their launch for testing/development purposes as it is a great service when doing machine learning.In production, it will be a first for me and the SLA is now a consideration.