links for 2010-04-30: Response to Jobs missive against Flash; Another view on VMforce; Indians most hated team?

• The parallel world of Apple: Where open is not always open - Correctly points out the similarity in Apple's lack of openness particularly around iTunes.
  
• Steve Jobs on Flash: Correcting the Lies - Pokes holes in many of Steve's points, but (if you have a lot of time) read the comments and see holes poked in his hole poking.  It is entertaining, but he goes a bit far I think.
  
• Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife - Clearly points out the hypocrisy regarding use of Cocoa, H264 being as if not more proprietary than Flash, and iTunes locking users in more than Flash.  How is Apple "open" one might ask?
  
• Though Miffed, Media Companies See Silver Lining In Apple-Adobe Tiff - Rather than pout about it, media companies are looking for ways to make a buck.  Too bad the record and movie industry has fought technology when they could have embraced it and been innovative.
  
• VMforce - Another Cloud Computing Solution for Java - Asks how they get to claim they are the first enterprise Java Cloud when other vendors have been supporting Java in the Cloud for some time.
  
• Report says Indians most hated team - The natural response would have been that everyone hates the "Evil Empire", but no, it is the Indians and the Yankees are only the 5th most hated.

links for 2010-04-29: AWS to be as big as Amazon retail?; Steve Jobs on Flash; Backlash against PowerPoint; Flash History

• Amazon Looks to Widen Lead in Cloud Computing - Opens a new data center in Singapore, but also says "Amazon Web Services can be as big as our retail business, in the fullness of time".
  
• Steve Jobs thoughts on Flash - He makes several good points, but calling Adobe closed and proprietary given Apple's tools target a single platform (vs many) and the closed nature of the App Store (vs anyone can create an app without approval) is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black.  And if third party software not taking advantage of new APIs and features is really so terrible, let the market determine that and decide.
• We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint - "Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs."
• Flash History - A good reminder that Flash did fill a need, but he also had a zinger directly at Cupertino: "... a platform with a vendor who gets to decide what’s allowed to run is profoundly uninteresting to me anyhow."
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com and VMware Up The Ante In The Cloud Wars With VMforce - Good summary.  Pits the Java offerings vs Azure.
  

links for 2010-04-28: Android momentum; Microsoft and Open Source; VMforce; Web vs Enterprise; AWS Presentations

• Google: Numbers favor Android over iPhone - Some interesting stats and trends, and Apple and Microsoft certainly are validating that Android is a threat to them.
  
• Microsoft contributing to OSS - GPL even.
• The Java cloud? VMforce – Quick Analysis - Force.com gets real Java (well, Tomcat + Spring, no Java EE) and VMware gets a customer buying into their message/vision.
  
• Salesforce.com's partnership with VMware: Offense, defense or something in between? - Another view.
  
• Cassandra and The Enterprise Tension - MySQL responded to the tension one way, what will other tools built for the Web do when confronted by the "opportunity" to go after the enterprise too/instead?
  
• AWS Presentation Roundup - A good source for a variety of presentations on the Cloud and Amazon.

links for 2010-04-27: Promising cancer research; VMware and Salesforce; Gizmodo iPhone raid

• Substance in Breast Milk Kills Cancer Cells, Study Suggests - Research takes awhile, but this sounds like a great start.
  
• VMware, Salesforce announce VMforce platform, bring Java to cloud - More details needed, but sounds like it could be interesting.
  
• Understanding the legal issues that are clouding the Gizmodo iPhone raid - It is somewhat surprising that the police would mess this one up.  Pressure from Apple I'm guessing led to the hasty actions.
  

links for 2010-04-26: Chances are; Apple goes after Gizmodo

• Chances Are - Learn more about conditional probabilities.
• Cops raid Gizmodo editor's home over lost iPhone, raise questions of legal search upon journalist - Does Apple have the judicial system in their pocket?

links for 2010-04-25: Is Apple or Adobe or Google open?; iPhone crimes; Amazon building out capacity

• Apple channels Google, Microsoft to attract developers - No one is fully open, but everyone tries to play the "open" card as they see fit.
  
• Tech cops are investigating possible crimes over lost iPhone prototype - Was Gizmodo committing a crime?
  
• Amazon to build out capacity for cloud, fulfillment and third party services - "... the need for more capacity means that fledgling businesses like Amazon Web Services ... are growing at a healthy clip."  Use of the Cloud is growing!

Flash Performance Issues on Mac OS X

There has been a lot of debate about the lack of Flash support on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, and part of the larger debate is that Adobe hasn't invested in Flash support on OS X sufficiently leading to performance issues on that platform.  As I use a Mac, I've suffered from some of these issues including high CPU utilization when watching video using Flash to having the fan turn on when the system is seemingly idle because a Flash applet or two in a web-page is using excessive CPU.

So, I was pleased to hear the Adobe is promising to address these performance issues in the forthcoming Flash 10.1 release.  I was more pleased to see that release candidate 2 is available and downloaded it and installed it to try things out.

For my test, I elected to compare CPU utilization of the Flash plug-in while watching a Dodger game on MLB.com.  On a side note, this service which provides the ability to watch out of market games in HD on a computer or on  many mobile devices is an awesome service and I highly recommend it.

Using the latest Flash 10.0, I observed the CPU utilization of the process running the Flash player at around 90-95%.  Good thing I have a dual core machine (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo), but it is still working pretty hard to play the streaming video.

With 10.1 RC2, I did observe a slight decrease in utilization to around 80-85%, so it has improved, and it may improve more before the final release.

But the performance is still well short of Flash on Windows it would seem as an old notebook I have with an AMD Turion 64 Mobile ML-34 at 1.8 GHz can watch the same HD stream using around 80% CPU and that is a single core machine.  For comparison, according to cpubenchmark.net the old notebook has a 437 CPU rating and the Mac is around 1400 so even using 1 core at around 700, the Mac is "using" 560 while the old PC is "using" 350, so more efficient.

Let's hope the work Adobe is doing to improve the performance of Flash on the Mac continues.

links for 2010-04-23: Flash, Adobe, and Apple; What makes SaaS successful; Red Hat to follow VMware into cloud databases?; Letterman on iPhone prototype

• The Flash fracas between Adobe and Apple (FAQ) - A good summary of the arguments on each side.
  
• VCs: What makes SaaS successful? - Some interesting thoughts on where SaaS should and should not be used.
  
• VMware’s Database Play: Will Red Hat Follow? - It seems like a natural step to do so.
  
• Letterman on the lost iPhone prototype - His rant before the list is interesting, and a few of the items on the top-10 list are great.

links for 2010-04-22: Oracle on OpenESB; Android on iPhone; Dell Android phone

• OpenESB under Oracle - Frank writes what has been said on the mailing lists in bits and pieces.  It is now time for the community to step up, especially with Frank leaving Oracle to go to Google.
• Android running on iPhone - If only Apple actually allowed this stuff, think of the innovation we might have.
• Dell Thunder explodes Android with 4.1-inch OLED screen, promises Hulu app - 4.1 inch display, Flash, Hulu app, what's not to like?
  

track links for 2009-04-22: Tyson Gay breaks sprint barriers; Penn and Drake Relays

I'm a big track and field fan so with the start of the outdoor season, I'll start periodic "track links" entries, the first today.

• With sub-45 run, Gay becomes first to break three major sprint barriers - Amazingly, no one else has ever gone sub-10, sub-20, and sub-45.  This could mean a great year for Tyson.
• The Penn Relays - Start today!  Some great early season high school and college action with some "USA vs the World" action thrown in in the relays.
• The Drake Relays - The action isn't only in Philly.  Lagat headlines the invitational mile.
• Comprehensive broadcast schedule - Great resource to see what is on TV and streaming.

links for 2010-04-21: VMware's "database" play; AT&T buoyed by iPhone; 2010 NFL projected records; Adobe giving up on iPhone

• VMware’s SpringSource Redis and Rabbit acquisitions: A Database Play is Emerging - Just don't call it "database" apparently.  But as Paul Martiz said, "... we are adding to the repertoire of underlying middleware and technologies that we think are going to be needed to generate – to develop a new generation of applications." appears to be a strong plan.
  
• AT&T earnings propelled by iPhone activations, connected devices like e-readers, GPS systems - If this causes them to continue to invest more in their network, all good.
  
• 2010 NFL projected records - With the draft tomorrow, will your favorite team improve?  These projected records serve as a good baseline of what to expect next year and an interesting use of data from last years performance.
• Adobe casts Flash lot with Android; Drops iPhone plans - Will this bite Apple in the future?  "The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms."  Note that I've increasingly seen Flash crashing or hogging CPU on a Mac, but that too could be part of the Apple/Adobe battle.
  

links for 2010-04-20: E-commerce witch hunt; ODF plugin no longer free; Oracle Java virtualization on JRockit, not Sun JVM; NoSQL and Cloud; iPhone leak loses customer

• Amazon's suit vs. North Carolina about preventing e-commerce witch hunt - Let's hope the witch hunt is prevented.
  
• $9,000 is the new 'free' for Oracle - This one doesn't make sense to me.  Why start charging, with a 100 user minimum, for something that isn't going to be adopted if it is charged for?  Especially since there is an open-source offering?  (I have not tried it)  How does this drive adoption?  And not only are they charging for it but are going to charge you maintenance too.  To top it off, the licensing information says there is a 90 day eval but you have to pay to download it.  Hmmm.
  
• Oracle Introduces Java Virtualization Solution for Oracle(R) WebLogic Suite - Sounds like a useful offering.  Perhaps it was in the works before the acquisition closed and is the reason, but what does it being based on JRockit say about the Sun JVM?
• NoSQL Needed For Cloud-Sized Data - Use the right tool for the right scenario.
  
• Peek at lost-and-found iPhone seals deal on Droid Incredible - The leak has affected at least one decision.

links for 2010-04-19: Integrals explained; Gosling's departure; iPhone 4 sneak peek

• It Slices, It Dices - Moving on from derivatives to integrals.
• Next for Gosling? - Sheds a little more light on the subject but still doesn't say why he left.
• iPhone 4 in the wild? - I feel sorry for the Apple employee that lost it ...

links for 2010-04-18: Jive goes after open-source; iPhone app approval issues

• Why is Jive bad-mouthing Drupal and Liferay? - They've already pulled the whitepaper and backtracked which is probably wise.  I wonder who ok'd the strategy in the first place?
  
• As Apple reconsiders Pulitzer winner's iPhone app, news outlets should think twice about iPad strategy - More odd approvals of iPhone apps.
  

links for 2010-04-17: iPhone users aren't sheep; MySQL threats; What is/isn't Cloud?; RAIC; Volcano impact to flights

• News Flash: iPhone users aren't sheep - "Supporting contentious software like Adobe Flash and Sun's Java would instantly make Apple's products much more compatible with the Web as we know it, further enable its app developers, and Apple would get brownie points with its own fans for giving them a choice to install it or not."
• YourSQL, MySQL, and NoSQL: The MySQL Conference Report - With the emergence of many other databases for the Web, Oracle being the custodian of MySQL is no longer the greatest threat.
• But is that really Cloud? - Unsure what is/isn't Cloud?  Take the test.
• RAIC?  What's that? - Read and learn.
• Google Earth animation of UK Air Traffic problems - Interesting to see how everything changed over the course of a day or so.

links for 2010-04-16: McNealy Speaks; Microsoft and Google on collision course; Cloud printing

• Scott McNealy can still dish - "... in the ‘80s we were preaching that the network is the computer. Shame on us for not summing it up in one word – cloud"
• Microsoft, Google On Office Computing Collision Course - Interesting how they are converging on the same space.  Much like various vendors in the middleware space converged on SOA platforms from EAI, BPM, and app-servers.
• First look: Google Docs gets realtime collaboration - The presence feature sounds very nifty and useful.
• Printer drivers: A thing of the past? Google, HP seem to think so - Isn't a printer driver still required where the printer is attached?
  

links for 2010-04-15: Google and Sun vision and results; Free meals for biking; Opera on iPhone

• Google and Sun: Same vision, different results - "... it's hard to realize a "network is the computer" future when you're stuck selling the hardware to power that network, rather than profiting from the software running atop the network, as Google does."
  
• Danish eco-hotel offers pedalpower free meal - Ride a bike, get a free meal!
  
• Opera off to nice iPhone start; Will it have staying power? - "But here’s the big question: What happens to Opera when all the included mobile browsers—Webkit based and otherwise—improve?"
  

links for 2010-04-14: Twitter ads; VMware/SS acquires RabbitMQ; Apps=Fish, Data=Wine

• Quicktake Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem - It will be interesting to see this play out.
  
• Twitter predicts the future? - Great example of how the influx of data we have today can be used.
• SpringSource Acquires RabbitMQ Cloud Messaging Technology - A continuation of their move into the Cloud.
  
• Oracle drops top architect into MySQL skeptic zone - "If Oracle corporate hoped Screven's message would draw applause based on some collective relief it was wrong: just one person in the hushed room clapped - furiously - and this was possibly one of Oracle's employees spotted at the show trying to cheerlead a round of unspontaneous applause."
  
• Infosys lands deal to manage Microsoft's internal IT services - A great win for Infosys.
  
• Why applications are like fish and data is like wine - "But if we look at business architectures data has the longest shelf life, followed by business logic, followed by presentation."
• Bravo Apple - "Finally, Apple is doing away with those arrogant upstarts who think then can write a few lines in a high level language and call it a program."

links for 2010-04-13: New Google Docs; Adobe and Apple; Abandoning iPhone Development; iPad Review; Twitter news; Stats and views on taxes

• With Rewrite, Google Docs Takes Microsoft Office Head On - More collaboration is good, see more details here.  The city of LA is easing over by just not upgrading Office without justification.  Another more detailed story here.
  
• How Do Google, Microsoft Clouds Stack Up? - A nice comparison of pricing and what is required from each vendor to do office collaboration in the Cloud.
  
• Adobe at fault with Apple? - Sounds like they burned a few bridges they wish were still there now.
• I’m Abandoning iPhone Development - Sad to see an "ask permission" environment stifle creativity and innovation.
  
• Apple's iPad Not Ready For The Enterprise - Author fails to get the point that the iPad isn't intended to be a general purpose laptop replacement.  But getting documents on/off the device does seem awfully clumsy.
  
• Twitter Open-sources the Home of Its Social Graph - Good news for developers.
  
• Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads - The long awaited business plan.  Will users revolt against ads in their personal stream?
  
• Tensions Rise for Twitter and App Developers - Turning the dial from ubiquity to figuring out how to make money.
  
• 66% say American is overtaxed - Some interesting stats and data.
• "In Fiscal Year 2009, 50% of all federal spending went to national defense, Social Security and Medicare. When the cost of veterans affairs are included, that number grows to 53%. Five percent (5%) paid interest on the federal debt, and 42% was used for everything else in the budget."
• "Fifty-two percent (52%) of voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on the issue of taxes. Thirty-four percent (34%) trust Democrats more on the issue. Republicans also are trusted more on health care and the economy."

links for 2010-04-12: What Microsoft and Apple can learn from Ubuntu; Who will buy Palm?; Greenplum moves data to Cloud; Calculus explained

• One big thing Microsoft, Apple, and all CTOs can learn from Ubuntu - "What Canonical does really well is to methodically produce incremental upgrades to its OS. It is transparent about its goals and plans, and it releases its software on schedule. In fact, this incremental approach is Ubuntu’s most potent competitive weapon against rivals Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X."
  
• Who may buy Palm? - Interesting question.
• Greenplum pushes enterprise data cloud with new releases - Interesting that McNeally is an advisor to Greemplum and they have their sights set on Oracle.
  
• Change We Can Believe In - The next in an excellent series of blog entries explaining math.

Are the Red Sox and Yankees Slow? Let's look at the data

There has been a bit of hubbub about the pace of play in Yankees and Red Sox games after umpire Joe West call their slow play embarrassing.  Their first 3 games of the year were longish at 3:46, 3:48, and 3:21 but justifications for it include lots of hitting to the importance of the games to being national TV games with longer commercial breaks.

Rather than just throw various arguments around, lets go to the data to take a look at what it tells us.  The length of a game should be roughly determined by the number of innings, number of pitches, number of in inning pitching changes, and duration of the commercial breaks.  With that in mind, I looked at the three Yankess vs Red Sox games and then all the American League games played on 4/9 to compare them.

All the data is in a Google Docs spreadsheet, and includes the game time, innings, pitches, in inning pitching changes, and commercial length based on if it is a national TV game or not.  Using these stats I calculate the average time per pitch, which all things being equal should be pretty consistent from game to game.

Date	Game	Time per Pitch
4/6	Yankees / Red Sox	0:35
4/9	Yankees / Rays	0:33
4/4	Yankees / Red Sox	0:32
4/9	Red Sox / Royals	0:31
4/7	Yankees / Red Sox	0:31
4/9	Blue Jays / Orioles	0:30
4/9	Twins / White Sox	0:28
4/9	Athletics / Angels	0:28
4/9	Indians / Tigers	0:27
4/9	Mariners / Rangers	0:26

Now, admittedly it is a small sample size, but it seems pretty clear that there is something common about the 5 slowest games from the selected games.  Given that I've factored in a bunch of stuff, why is this?  It is likely caused by visits to the mound by the manager (which are limited) or fellow players (which aren't) and batters stepping out between pitches, and that is what Joe West was complaining about.

Is it the end of the world if some games are a few seconds per pitch slower than others?  In the grand scheme of things, probably not, but MLB has decided to try to speed things up and from the data above, it appears Joe West singling out the Yankees and Red Sox as the biggest offenders could very well be true.

links for 2010-04-10: Corporations that don't pay taxes; Site speed affect search results; Microsoft and Cloud apps

• Outrageous: Exxon Mobil Paid No Income Tax in 2009 - I am no tax expert and I'm sure there is some valid reason for it, but it just seems wrong.
• Using site speed in web search ranking - Too bad we don't have such incentives for native apps too!
• 2010 versions of Office, SharePoint pressure Google to respond - But still has a different approach than Google if this is true: "... gaining access to the browser-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will require users to have access to SharePoint 2010 and a license to Microsoft Office 2010".

Further Analysis of Java Platform Survey Results

I wrote about some initial observations and issues with a recent Java platform survey earlier today, but couldn't help myself and downloaded the raw data and did some further analysis myself and came across some additional interesting observations.

First, I dug into the Java EE app server data and like Rich fixed some of the grouping, specifically trying to get proper JBoss and Tomcat numbers.  Our numbers differ a bit as I think he may be double counting a bit for Tomcat and JBoss which I made sure not to do.

I've ignored Jonas/JRun/Jetty/Orion so the other likely represents GlassFish and Geronimo.  My chart shows JBoss behind WebSphere but ahead of WebLogic.

Since multiple answers were allowed though, it is interesting to see which combinations are most common.

Here, Tomcat is clearly the preferred second app server in a dual strategy, but perhaps surprisingly, there is a fair number that have both WebSphere and WebLogic.

Last, I took a closer look at the operating system data.  I first combined the different Linux responses into a single one.

As I mentioned in my earlier entry, Linux usage is nearly surpassing Windows and Solaris is well behind those two.

Next I looked at what operating systems were commonly included in the same response.

Not surprisingly Windows and Linux are the most common combination and the combinations with Solaris fall behind with Linux and Solaris slightly behind.

These results may match what you'd intuitively expect, but it is always good when the data backs up your intuition.

Java Platform Survey Results - Flaws and Observations

I love surveys and analyzing the resulting data from them, so was interested to take a look at Replay Solutions write up from their 2010 Java Platform Survey.  Unfortunately, as is the case with many survey's, the way the data is presented has some issues that could result in folks making the wrong conclusions.

Rich correctly pokes holes in the report pointing out the strange grouping of results, the significant "other", and the egregious omission of GlassFish from the survey (quite possibly the bulk of the 18% "other").  If GlassFish was even only half of the "other" it would be 9% and equal to Jetty and way ahead of Jonas/JRun/Orion (which were grouped together for some reason) and Resin, each at only 2%, which would seem to clearly justify GlassFish being called out on its own.  They do provide the raw data which is fantastic, but re-analyzing the data can't fix not asking the right questions.

But there were a few other items in the report that I found interesting.

The "most important Java IDE in 2010" is, no surprise, Eclipse, but NetBeans is a pretty solid #2 at 17% ahead of JDeveloper at 12%.  This would seem to support Oracle's decision to not kill NetBeans, but it is still unfortunate that it appears to be being relegated to a minor role.

And given all the noise about the Cloud, only 14% of the respondents indicate they will be deploying to the Cloud in 2010 with an astounding 67% having no plans.  Now I'm sure the adoption is still way up from 2009 and 14% is still significant, but the IT industry still appears to be cautious about going hole hog into the Cloud.  For those looking to use the Cloud, Amazon EC2 is still dominant at 13% but with "other" at 14% there seems to again be a missing option in the questions.

As far as operating systems for deployment go, Windows is no surprise leading at 57% but with Red Hat Linux at 35% well ahead of Solaris (18%) and other Linux variants close behind Solaris (SUSE 12%, other Linux 16%), Linux is arguably threatening Windows for the #1 spot.

Last, it is a bit of an odd question on frameworks and services as options to answer included everything from Spring to JMS to ESBs, but it is interesting to see that messaging/integration technologies like JMS and ESB at 29% and 24% are well ahead of Swing and JPA (21% and 15%) and not that far behind Spring and Hibernate (36% and 37%).

As always, data is fun to look at.

links for 2010-04-09: iPad review; Google Trips/Tricks/Hacks; iPhone Dev Agreement bans code gen; GrandCentral to Google Voice; ELB Sticky Sessions; iPhone OS 4.0 "me too"

• Reading is delightful on the iPad – The iPad Review – Quick Analysis - A great "read only" device, but a bit expensive since you probably already have a phone and laptop.
  
• GrandCentral founder: How to get over an App Store rejection - Wondering about the roots of Google Voice and what else Google is doing with collaborative audio/video?
  
• 10 Google hacks to make life easier - A bunch I knew and use, some I didn't.  Very informative.
• Elastic Load Balancing with Sticky Sessions - A nice alternative to having to understand and configure application server clustering.
  
• New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone Compiler - Apple continues to be very closed.  Why should it matter if code generation or cross compilers are used?
  
• Dissecting Apple's iPhone 4.0's sources of 'me-too' inspiration - "Add it up and Apple’s latest iPhone 4.0 push has a lot of me-too features involved. If you swapped Steves (Jobs for Ballmer) at this keynote, the guy from the Redmond would get crushed with these features. The Steve from Cupertino gets applause."

First impressions of Amazon Simple Notification Service

Amazon introduced their new Simple Notification Service (SNS) earlier this week and with a background and interest in integration and messaging I had to take a look.

The sign-up process is simple enough and I added access to it from my existing Amazon Web Services account and was pleased to see that current pricing includes a Free Tier that provides 100K requests and notifications (1K e-mail notifications) for free.  With that, I launched into the getting started guide.

I downloaded the CLI (minor nit, the guide gave the wrong pointer to where to download it, but was easily found), already had Java installed, so I set the required environment variables and was off an running.  There was a mention that the CLI was for Windows and Linux, but I forged ahead on my Mac figuring it would just work, and thankfully it did.

I followed the guide to create a topic, subscribe to it using e-mail, publish a message, and get the notification.  It all worked very nicely and as one would expect.  So, it works, but using a command line tool to send myself an e-mail isn't terribly useful or interesting and if that is all I did, this would be a pretty boring blog entry!  How about something more interesting then?

I have a weather station set up at home along with a web-site for viewing the current weather and uploading historical data to the Weather Underground.  I find myself checking the current conditions periodically, but polling for that kind of thing is a bit cumbersome.  It seems like having a notification pushed to me when certain conditions occur might be more useful and enter SNS to help solve that for me.

So, I wrote a script that I have cron run every 10 minutes that checks the temperature and pressure and if the change is greater than a certain threshold, publishes a notification to my "Weather" topic.  I'm then able to subscribe to the topic so that I'm sent an SMS when a weather notification is published.  Using SNS, I was able to set this up in a matter of minutes and now have something that will just run for me from now on.  Note that I did this on Linux as that is what is running on the machine my weather station is connected to so indeed it does work on both OS X and Linux.

One might ask, why use SNS to do the notification when I could have just had my script do it?  Great question, and if my only goal was to do just this notification for just myself, just hardcoding it in the script would be fine.  But using SNS decouples the components of the application that gives more flexibility and allows the consuming services to be independent of the producer.  It enables new styles of programming centered around asynchronous messaging.

For example, what if others want to also get the notification?  Or if rather than just sending an e-mail I'd like to have a consuming service log the notifications or perform some other processing on the data?  By using SNS to decouple the services, this is easily possible by simply adding subscriptions for each new consumer and I can avoid having to modify or maintain my script with details it really shouldn't be concerned with.

With SNS Amazon has a nice complement to the Simple Queue Service (SQS) that has been around for a little while.  Interested in learning more about asynchronous messaging?  Give one or both a try.

links for 2010-04-08: C overtakes Java; Amazon SNS; Statistics and Data; Oracle and MySQL; iPhone OS 4

• TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2010 - C is #1 again overtaking Java!  Due in part to other languages supported on JVM but interesting nonetheless.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) - Notifications/events in the cloud.  Good stuff.
• Why I'm Taking Statistics - It's all about the data!
• Oracle to Outline Strategy for MySQL - State of the Dolphin, Tuesday next week.
• Apple's iPhone OS event: What to expect -
  

links for 2010-04-06: Amazing photos; GlassFish Roadmap; Germany anti Google; No Flash on iPad, no problem; BPM about to explode

• This amazing photo of Earth cost only $750 to take - Great picture.
  
• The power of nature - Some more great pictures.
• GlassFish Roadmap FAQ - Official answers to some things I observed or speculated on.
• Germany anti Google Street View? - Nice geek humor.
• No Flash on iPad? No problem – we’ll redesign the site says NPR and others - As long as they do it in a standards compliant way using HTML5 and the like, this is great.  Just don't let it be something proprietary.
  
• Analysts vs Consultants - Amusing.
• BPM about to explode - There certainly isn't less need for BPM!

links for 2010-04-05: Limits and π; Everything a game?; Rimini vs Oracle

• Take It to the Limit - Ever wonder how to calculate π?  Or prove the area of a circle is πr²?
  
• Why games will take over our lives - I'm not sure we'll have wifi enabled toothbrushes in 5 years, but everything social is fair game.
• News Analysis: Rimini Street Countersues Oracle - I don't know specifics, but competition is good as long as contracts and IP rights aren't being violated.
  

links for 2010-04-02: Integration is the new Innovation; Danger of Freemium; Should you buy an iPad?

• Integration is the new innovation - It is true.  Name an application that is written from scratch.  The majority are an assembly that use a web/app server, some middleware, frameworks, libraries, etc. along with some new code to deliver an integrated solution.
  
• A case study: The danger of freemium - Letting people use your service for free does introduce a different dynamic that must be addressed.
• Should you buy an iPad? - Your answer in a tidy flowchart.

links for 2010-04-01: NoSQL = Manual vs Auto; Automated Journalism; Scatterplots with R; Will the cloud rain cash?; Bing killing OpenOffice?; Logarithms

• The NoSQL Debate: Automatic vs. Manual Transmission - A good metaphor.  Perhaps NoSQL should really be abbreviating "Not Only SQL" and not "No SQL"?
  
• Automated Journalism: In the US, algorithms are already reporting the news - Reposted from a comment to yesterday's links, very interesting.  "do algorithms steal the work of journalists - or help them to cope with information overload?"
• "Different" by Youngme Moon - Great way to promote a book, and piqued my interest in it.
• How to: make a scatterplot with a smooth fitted line - I did not know about R (probably should have), but appears to be a cool tool for working with data.  Love it.  And provides a source for unemployment data should you want it.
  
• When will cloud computing start raining cash? - "... there's a tremendous amount of trial and evaluation happening right now, which should translate into paid engagements in the very near future."
• Lawson ERP on Amazon Web Services - An example of the move to the cloud.
• Bing trying to kill OpenOffice? - An update at the end of the story says it is a technical issue, but this makes one think about the control we give to the search engine we use.
• Apple: Simplicity taken too far? - "I've heard a growing chorus of open-source voices shifting from Microsoft as (open-source) public enemy No. 1 to Apple."
• Opinionator - Power Tools - If you never understood logarithms in school, this is a good read.