Your Daily Dose of Vax

As I write this today, I am sitting in the emergency room with a friend who is horribly ill with some food-borne illness. It's not a bad place to write from: relatively quiet, cool, ample power for my laptop. There is no wireless network, but I think there's one nearby I can walk to.
Now that I have been exposed to this nasty infection, I felt I needed to apply some severe VAXinations. Thus, today, we have our daily dose of vitamin V in the form of a Vax Station 3800. this poor machine is long gone, recycled and ground up into base elements to satisfy the needs of rabid commodity speculation. The DEC Stations looked just like this machine, and all of them had little plastic skirts on the bottom hiding some non-rotating wheels. Great little computers for surfing. That's surfing as in “Standing on top of it and riding it while someone pushes,” not surfing as in “can run a Web browser.”

Monday's Linkapalooza

Naturally, Linkapalooza isn't coming out until News on Monday. But until then, I think we can allow you to sneak a peak at the forthcoming Linkapalooza. Observe:


The best thing yet found in the Android source code.

The story behind the massive network and infrastructure behind those cheap “Single?” signs on lawns.

JavaScript graph plotting tool.

50 Must read books on Web development.

Tips for preparing a technical presentation.

n introduction to Microsoft's F#

Today's Random Wikipedia Entry: Blogging!

Two Updated IDEs

This week saw the release of two major updates to two very different IDEs. The first was Komodo 5.0, ActiveState's dynamic language-focused IDE for Ruby, Python or Perl fans. Hence the dragon above. Actually, it was something of kismet here, because today, as it happens, the front page Wikipedia random entry just happened to be about the lovely green fellow you see above. Naturally, with the open copyright image therein, we just had to use him here.

The second big updated IDE is IntelliJ's IDEA 8.0, which arrived yesterday. We'll have a full story, as always, at SD Times dot com next week. But until then, here's a snippet of what we'll be saying about the release:

SQL has come home to roost in the new IDEA. JetBrains, on Thursday, November 6, released IntelliJ IDEA 8, the latest update to its popular Java IDE. But Java was hardly the focus of this release, which includes SQL query design and management tools for the first time. A new UML class browser has also been added, expanding the capabilities of this IDE beyond just Java and into the ephemeral support languages and structures commonly used in enterprise applications.

For IntelliJ loyalists, version 8 updates the core editor with new refactorings and code inspections. Also new to this version are tools for working with unit tests, and the new “dataflow to this” command. Both should help developers get a handle on confusing code when debugging.

On the framework and protocol front, IDEA 8 brings Spring support up to date with version 2.5. Included in that support is the ability to deal with Spring Dynamic Modules, all the rage of late in the component-based development crowd. Beyond that, IDEA also brings in support for Jboss Seam.

Just in time for the completion of JSR 311, IDEA also adds support for dealing with and creating RESTful Web services.