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.

Salesforce Winter 2010

I attended a good webinard/sales pitch from Salesforce yesterday. They did not get in much technical details but they did show us very impressive new features coming soon. The following list is in no way exhaustive (for this, go here) but are rather the elements that caught my attention:

• It will now be possible to use batch code for long processes. Obviously, the execution will be asynchronous and will also be possible to manage under a new feature: the scheduler;
• The have enhanced the custom settings;
• They have worked on the data import;
• I beleive using Google doc, they now have content management API;
• Support for OAuth v. 1.0.a;
• email is greatly improved;
• sandbox to production management will be easier;
• integration to Google Analytics in Visualforce;
• https will be available for site;
• a pilot for a new type of user called "High volume portal user" will take place;
• analytics presentation will greatly be improved with:
• chart mixers;
• color picker;
• hover;
• IPhone and Blackberry are now well supported;
• Community-answer pilot will take place, leveraging Twitter and other web 2.0 API;

Mobile in Africa

I'm currently involved in a grass root  project that aim at fostering education and sport in developing countries. Great project, well founded and very well led by people for which I have to utmost respect. Anyway, while beginning to work on the architecture of the project, I've found that my intuition regarding the internet, mobile and world development were shared by others.
From the very beginning of the WWW, the access to the information has been an ethical issue. I was involved in the techno-ethic center at the University and we were trying to reflect on those issues. There is so much information on the internet that having access to it has become an actual discriminating factor.
Obviously, if the authorities have only enough money to build a water well, they are not about to "waste" that on cables. Cell towers are much more cost effective and that is why mobile is such an important asset for those countries.
Google has already started fostering the internet access through mobile with its sms services. But what has cough my attention is MIT's effort with its Nextlab project. If you are at all interested with information ethics and concrete project to make the information available, please check them out. They are looking for partners.

AI and motivation

MIT's Technology Reviews have a nice article on the development of AI and the concept of motivation. The philosophical underlying is ignored but the math principle is, which makes it rather interesting to read.

Motorolla launch new cell with Android

At the Mobilize conference on Thursday in San Francisco, Motorola CEO Dr. Sanjay Jha unveiled an Android smartphone called CLIQ (all caps in the tradition of the RAZR and ROKR) that will be available soon from T-Mobile. The device features a new service called Blur that Motorola developed to bring deep social networking integration and Web synchronization support to Android handsets.


You can read the rest of the article at arstechnica


To me, the future for the emerging country's internet/communication infrastructure is with that type of mobiledon't think Mobillize 09 from GigaOM would not contredict me on this.

html5

Mark Pilgrim has publish one chapter of his upcoming "Dive into HTML5". You can find it here.

Managing geeks

This article from computerworld should be required reading from any executive. It is dead on.

Bit Torrent for legitimate use

I have been investigating the use of BitTorrent for video conference distribution for a NOG that cannot afford CDN's fees. Very interesting technology, full of possibilities. But then, Techdirt has a great post that sour my interest somewhat. you can find this post here.

RESTful vs SOAP:a business case

Weird that CTO's still think of WS as needing to be SOAP. I though I was missing something, that there might be some virtue to SOAP I was unaware of. Seems I did not miss anything and that soap is not perceived as a waste only by me. You can read an articulated reflexion on this subject here.

DimDim Video Conference

I was looking at open source solutions and found this product from DimDim. I really like to see the OS model successful.

Virtuous Circle

GigaOM is publishing two rather convincing cases on Apple's business strategy.

Apple is perpetuating a “virtuous cycle,” as Gene Munster put it in a recent research note, to keep users on the iPod Touch — an improved version of the lock-in provided by the old iTunes/iPod music ecosystem. Users buy the iPod Touch; download apps; developers promote their apps (and the iPod Touch platform), which leads to more consumers buying the iPod Touch. Even better (for Apple), customers can only purchase apps through the company, leading to even more device lock-in.

iPod sales might be dropping, but Apple says half of new purchases of the device are to customers who have never owned one before. I’m willing to bet that many of those customers are interested in Apple’s new Wi-Fi platform. And then, in an even more impressive version of the iPod halo, iPod Touch owners could look to Apple when it’s time to buy their next computer. A virtuous cycle indeed.

You can read the rest of this great post here and follow up with this

Windows 7 or Snow Leopard?

Well, after close examination, ComputerWorld concludes:

If you go by the scorecard, we have a tie -- Windows 7 and Snow Leopard each win five categories. Of course, going by a scorecard is too simplistic, because not all of the categories carry equal weight.

So which operating system is better? The near-simultaneous release of Snow Leopard and Windows 7 doesn't change the dynamic that has been in place for many years in the operating system competition between Apple and Microsoft.

Snow Leopard is more beautiful and elegant as well as simpler to use -- although with Windows 7, Microsoft has closed the gap between the operating systems, particularly when it comes to taskbar improvements.

Windows 7, on the other hand, remains the corporate standard, and nothing in Snow Leopard is likely to change that. And it's still a more tweakable operating system (although its critics may say that tweaking is mandatory in order to get it running right).

As for me, I'll continue to use both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. I can't remember another time in which Apple and Microsoft simultaneously released major upgrades to their operating systems. Both releases are big improvements. It's a golden time for operating system aficionados -- my recommendation is to use both and enjoy them if you can.

You can find the complete analysis here.

Amazon' SQS

Alan Williamson has published a neet class that apparently makes accessing SQS easy. You can get it here.

Testing vs Checking

I really like the distinction made between the two concepts here .

SEO: free tools list

SEOptimise has publish this list of free, yet still relevant, tips or tools.

Java and Cloud

Sun Developer Network has a great interview withAdam Bien on Java and the cloud. Check it out here

Clickstream

Seems like we can go much further in analytics than the usual, yet very interesting, Google Analytics and the likes. The concept is called "Clickstreams". One of the interesting proponent of the concept is crazyegg

Simple SSO

Seems there is a new free product avaiblable that makes using single sign on easier for web developer: https://rpxnow.com/

I read about it here