mike.mainguy

I was reading up on the history of communication here and had to pause at how quickly things are changing. From the invention of written communication (3500BC) until the invention of the optical semaphore (1793), instantaneous and lossless long distance communication has been limited to how far you can shout/see. The rate of communication outside that range was limited to a max of about 200miles per day (speed of a horseback rider). This means, that for 5000 years it would take 1.5 days to send a message from Rome to Milan. Starting in 1793, this rate began to accelerate as a visual semaphore could drop that time significantly, but there was a huge amount of infrastructure to get this working. You needed towers, telescopes, and other things to make things work. In the space of 40 years, the electric telegraph greatly lowered the cost of long distance near light speed communication. For remainder of the 19th century, wired telegraph and eventually wireless telegraph lower the ...

Rational Application Developer Jabba the Hutt - BIG, SLOW, but also somehow powerful. You don't want to get on the wrong side of this IDE as you will be frozen in IBM consulting carbonite and NEVER get anything done. Netbeans Luke Skywalker- The hero who wins against all odds. However, In the software development universe, Luke actually turns to the dark side and joins Darth Vader. Visual Studio Emperor Palpatine - Having harnessed the dark side of the force, more powerful than you can ever imagine. Oracle JDeveloper Darth Vader - In the software world, after having turned Luke to the Dark side, Darth Ellison and Luke rule the Galaxy as father and son. TextMate Han Solo - Always seems to be there at the right time to help you out of a bind. No aspirations to rule the universe, but knows how to "get things done". Eclipse Battle Droids - There are millions of these, but they're all centrally controlled by someone whose motivations may be suspec...

Aside from supporting ruby, java, groovy, flex, and about a million other things, they actually have customer service. I don't mean "faceless mindless 3 levels of useless buearacracy" customer service, I mean "Holy crap, this guy WANTS to solve my problem" customer service. Recently I sent a note to intellij about an annoying, but not SUPER critical problem, to RAD or WSAD users (or just about any other software package), tell me the last time you sent an email and got this sort of help from a real person. Hello Michael, Please define "crashes". Serge Baranov JetBrains, Inc http://www.jetbrains.com "Develop with pleasure!" -----Original Message----- From: "Michael Mainguy" Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2010, 7:29:23 PM To: feedback@jetbrains.com Subject: IntelliJ IDEA 'Feedback' Product: IntelliJ IDEA Build: IU-95.627 OS: Windows Name: Michael Mainguy Country: United States TimeZone: America/Chicago...

Web development is often hampered by the fact that there are a variety of web browser rendering engines as well as a variety of javascript interpreters. This means that a developer might have to recode the same web site 4-5 times to account for all the variations. When you couple that variation with the fact that new browsers are released and developed all the time, people started to realize that there needed to be a "one stop shop" to write your code and run it anywhere. I suppose someone at google started down the GWT path because "write once run anywhere" has been Java's watchword almost since it's inception and a software holy grail since the 1970s . A basic problem with GWT is that it tries to give a java api for building screens which is alien for almost all web designers and front end developers. This means that there is an additional translation from "designer" world into "developer" world. Recently had the pleasure to m...

OK, quickly, you've got a new app that has gone "off the charts", it's hosted on EC2 and you want to be able to scale in order to meet demand. What do you do? While this is a great situation, too often the answer technical people come up with is either: #1 (customer answer) We need to get someone else to build this us, our IT guys don't know what they're doing. #2a (developer answer) Rewrite the app in (erlang, scala, ruby, java, C#) because our code sucks and isn't scalable #2b (developer answer) Switch to (Oracle, DB2, MySql, MongoDB, Terracotta, Spring, EJB3) because (Oracle, DB2, MySql, MongoDB, Terracotta, Spring, EJB3) doesn't scale well #3a (infrastructure answer) We need to buy more EC2 instances and "scale out" #3b (intrastructure answer) We need to bring it in-house and we'll get the biggest baddest server you can buy #4 (architect answer) Where's the bottleneck? OK, I know #4 isn't really an answer, but it i...

Next time you find yourself in a pointless argument with someone who "knows" statistics, remember the bottom statistic. On the flipside, it took me at least 30 minutes of watching videos and reading explanations to figure out how it could even be possible to propel something directly downwind, faster than the wind, propelled only by the wind .

I've been investigating methods of storing content online and ran across an interesting offering from cloudant . They offer a 2gb couchdb database for free. For folks who don't know, couchdb is a json/RESTful distributed document database. If you're trying to manage online content for a web application it has some interesting advantages over the competition. The most interesting advantages to me are: Native RESTful javascript/JSON API. The database itself uses http as the communication protocol Inherent MVCC support. This means old versions of a document live after they've been updated Built-in searching and materialized views. I can define some metadata about my content and instantly retrieve it Some of the competition in this case would be: Mongodb Amazon S3 While it turns out that S3 and MongoHQ both have free offerings, the online console at cloudant is the most user-friendly (as of this second).