Monday, November 21, 2011

Paragon drive backup

I successfully migrated my Windows XP partition to a
bigger drive using this software.  Not only that, it took
a Linux/WinXP dual boot drive and faithfully replicated
the whole thing on a new drive, all in one fell swoop.
I tried to do this once in the past with ntfsclone and
System Rescue and just made a mess.  Pretty cool.

NFJS Fall 2011 day 3

Best presentation of the day: Tim Berglund's Complexity
Theory and Software Development.

Ted Neward's A Busy Developer's Guide to Java 7 was
entertaining, not that much to cover unfortunately when
it comes to new features of the Java language.

Lately I keep hearing about jQuery to I went to Nathaniel
Schutta's jQuery presentation.  That was pretty interesting,
seems like an easy framework to learn.

Links:

Golly
Why I still prefer prototype to jQuery

Sunday, November 20, 2011

NFJS Fall 2011 day 2

Presentation of the day: 'Gradle: Bringing Engineering Back to
Builds'.  Gradle seems to be the cool build tool this year.  I'm
always lagging a couple of years behind as I'm finally getting
comfortable with Maven.

Brian Sletten's HTML5 presentation was also pretty good.
HTML5 is here, although technically the spec is not final yet.

Ken Sipe's Continuous Delivery presentation was also good,
though in my case he was preaching to the choir.  The
importance of repeatable builds, automating every step of the
process, etc.

Matthew McCullough did an interesting and thought-provoking
presentation on game theory and economics.  Not about coding
so much as about managing your career or your business.

Again, IntelliJ IDEA not in sight anywhere.  I think it's because
none of the presenters is actually working in the Java language
these days.  Tim Berglund was using The One True Editor (Emacs),
though he mentioned that STS (what I use) has support for Gradle.

Some frustration today with multiple presentations I would have
liked to attend scheduled at the same time.  It was helpful that I
could cross several presentations off due to having already seen
them at Denver JUG.

Links

HTML5 browser test
Smashing Magazine
HTML5 Presentation
Canvas Demos
Sublime Video - HTML5 Video Player (kind of a misnomer...)

Saturday, November 19, 2011

NFJS Fall 2011 day 1

Cool presentation of the day was Matthew McCullough's
'Cascading through Hadoop: a DSL for simpler MapReduce'.
See Cascading.  We're using Hadoop at work so I'm looking
into this.

Two presenters were using Eclipse rather than the JetBrains
IntelliJ IDEA IDE that was formerly ubiquitous among the
NFJS presenters.  Go, free software!

Links:

Toward a Commodity Enterprise Middleware (AMQP)
Simple Made Easy
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar