SE News

A new approach to generating truly random numbers could lead to improved Internet security and better weather forecasts, according to researchers writing in the International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems.

Random numbers are a critical part of computer and Internet security. They allow websites and browsers to encrypt the data sent between them using a session key. Weather forecasters, climate scientists, economists, and epidemiologists also use random numbers to generate simulated data for their predictive models. Such simulations can test theories of hurricane formation, climate change, and the spread of disease epidemics, for instance.

http://www.drdobbs.com/security/223100204

Exposing Value with Metrics

Sometimes the toughest question to answer sounds very simple – “How are you doing?” When this question is asked of a CEO or CFO, the answer is usually a reflection of the financial state of the organization. However, when this same question is asked by the CEO to line of business leaders about initiatives and processes within the organization, it brings into play a complex set of interrelationships and dependencies.

Laura Mooney

http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/metrics_strategic_operational_performance-10017214-1.html

Configuration management is crucial to the smooth development of a product; the time you spend setting configuration management up properly is time you will save later.

Sound configuration management is fundamental to delivering a capable product: How can you evaluate what you have if you don’t know what you have? We suspect that inadequate attention to configuration management is the reason for the quantity of changes that plagues some products during development.

Kim Pries and Jon Quigley

http://www.softwaremag.com/L.cfm?Doc=1251-12/2009

Bonjour is Apple’s implementation of the Zeroconf protocol, which enables the automatic discovery of computers, devices and services on an IP network. Bonjour is Apple’s implementation of the Zeroconf protocol, which enables the automatic discovery of computers, devices and services on an IP network. In this article, you will learn how to implement Bonjour on the iPhone by using the NSNetService class to publish a service. You will also use the NSNetServiceBrowser class to discover services that have been published. In the next article, you will learn how to communicate with another device that you have discovered using TCP/IP.

Wei-Meng Lee

http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/44126

Many developers use entities in their XHTML for special characters, but in XML you can also define entities to make authoring easier, or to reference the content of external documents. Entities are also useful when you create a Document Type Definition (DTD) and want to reduce its apparent complexity to keep it readable by humans. This article will tell you all about XML entities and show you how to take advantage of them in your documents.

Chris Herborth

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-entities/

This article introduces Apache Wink, which is a framework for building Representational State Transfer (REST)ful Web services. Apache Wink is an Apache Incubator project. Its goal is to provide an easier method of writing RESTful Web services by providing the ability to use Java™ annotations to define services inside classes.

Nathan A. Good

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-richjava/

Éric Lévénez has compiled a computer languages timelime, listing the history of 50 programming languages in a chart.

Éric Lévénez

http://www.levenez.com/lang/

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has posted a draft set of APIs that Web applications could one day use to store structured content offline. The proposed standard, recently renamed as the Indexed Database API, will provide an interface that Web application developers could use to have a user’s browser store database content for offline use […].

Typically, today’s Web application, such as a browser-based e-mail client or a calendar, will draw its user data from a database that is accessible from a network. In some cases, however, the user may wish to use the application while not connected to the network. Web applications could use these APIs (application programming interfaces) to store copies of the data in the browser itself.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-IndexedDB-20100105/

The free lunch is over. Multicore processors are not just coming—they’re here. Leveraging multiple cores requires writing scalable parallel programs, which is incredibly hard.

Tools such as fork/join frameworks based on work-stealing algorithms make the task easier, but it still takes a fair bit of expertise and tuning.

Bulk-data APIs such as parallel arrays allow computations to be expressed in terms of higher-level, SQL-like operations (e.g., filter, map, and reduce) which can be mapped automatically onto the fork-join paradigm.

Working with parallel arrays in Java, unfortunately, requires lots of boilerplate code to solve even simple problems. Closures can eliminate that boilerplate. It’s time to add them to Java.

Mark Reinhold

http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/closures

I have never written a bad line of code.

When I tell people that, they often scoff and offer replies like “so you’re not a programmer then?” and “let me guess, you’re a coding deity or something?” Well let me say, I am a programmer and I am not Codethulu, but in the same manner that Al Gore can fly around the world in a private jet without polluting, I have negated my bad code footprint through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets.

Alex Papadimoulis

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Introducing-Bad-Code-Offsets.aspx

A Null object is an object that encapsulates the absence of an object. It provides the do nothing behavior and returns the defaults. The Null object is used whenever object reference would have been null. The use of Null Object pattern simplifies the client code and makes it less error prone.

Sajad Deyargaroo

http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_general/patterns/article.php/c16503/

Proponents of Agile and lean software development methodologies say they are becoming more popular than traditional sequential methods in corporate app-dev groups, but implementation of a pure Agile method is still a rarity in the enterprise.

“The movement to Agile is fundamentally changing the way in which organizations build software,” said says Forrester Research analyst Dave West, in a keynote address during the recent HP Virtual Conference 2009. “In situations where the requirements and the technology are far from understood — where there’s a lack of clarity — processes become more and more complicated. So a traditional approach, which requires planning, can’t possibly work.”

John K. Waters

http://adtmag.com/articles/2009/10/13/more-enterprises-lean-toward-hybrid-agile-development.aspx

Microsoft said on October 28th it will let developers who use Eclipse-based IDEs integrate their Java and PHP applications with the latest versions of Windows, Silverlight and the forthcoming Azure cloud platform.

At the Eclipse Summit in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Microsoft said it is working with Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec to allow developers using Eclipse IDEs to tap into features of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Silverlight and the Azure, which is set for release next month.

Jeffrey Schwartz

http://adtmag.com/articles/2009/10/28/microsoft-opens-windows-to-eclipse-developers.aspx

More projects seem to be coming across my desk that ultimately involve building information systems whose primary requirements come from legislation or regulations. And sometimes even the detailed requirements.

Legislation is sometimes quite a nice Requirement Specification: it is expressed in functional/quality terms rather than internal operations, and is pretty careful in its use of logic. It has been drafted by professionals, and vetted, and thought through. It avoids design and implementation issues almost entirely, so within the great waterfall you have a lot of agility.

Rick Jelliffe

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/09/what-are-useful-software-engin.html

Discover how to call stored procedures and functions in MySQL from PHP using three database extensions: MySQL, MySQLi, and PDO.

Stored procedures and functions are a new feature of MySQL 5.0. A stored procedure is a pre-built procedure containing one or more SQL statements stored in the database server.

This article shows how to create a few basic stored procedure and function examples, and call MySQL stored procedures and functions from PHP with the help of some database extensions.

Octavia Andreea Anghel

http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/42887