Strategic Developer | Martin Heller

20 registrars control 90% of illicit domains, says Knujon

Martin Heller — 2008-05-12T07:35:54-08:00

I recently received a note from Garth Bruen, who with his father runs the anti-junk-mail site Knujon (no junk, backwards). Knujon has so far shut down over 50 thousand junk mail sites. The complete message follows: Martin, KnujOn is preparing for a presentation next week training conference at the High Technology Crime Investigation Association Ohio Spring Training Conference, and we thought it might be prudent to share some statistics featured in the presentation. Since 2005 Knujon.com has been collecting spam samples from the public. Not to build better filters or blacklists, but rather to use them for illicit site... READ MORE

TopCoder: developer productivity and code quality through competition

Martin Heller — 2008-05-09T08:36:31-08:00

Wednesday I had lunch with Mike Morris, Senior Vice President of Software Development at TopCoder. That's his picture at the left. He had an interesting story to tell. I was vaguely familiar with TopCoder through their programming contests. I was never interested enough to sign up for their site, and had no idea what kind of business model they had. Mike filled me in. He and the other founders of TopCoder had been at Tallán, a custom software development and consulting company. Tallán grew to something over 600 developers, was acquired by CMGI in CMGI's brief heyday, and then spun... READ MORE

Joyent has changed for the better, VP says

Martin Heller — 2008-05-07T11:55:37-08:00

When I wrote about the Morph Application Platform on Tuesday, I carelessly tossed off a reference to my mixed experience with Rails hosting at TextDrive, now called Joyent. Kristie Wells of Joyent asked me to clarify my experience privately, and has since given me permission to post our exchange. Here's my clarification: Kristie, you asked about my TextDrive hosting experience. It was for [name removed], in 2006. My name didn't appear on the account, but I supervised the software development. I'm no longer associated with those thieves. The deployment was successful, but lengthy and painful. I realize that the hosting... READ MORE

Stupid filter tricks

Martin Heller — 2008-05-07T07:08:15-08:00

Rails, and now Java, in the cloud

Martin Heller — 2008-05-06T13:03:57-08:00

I had a conversation today with David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. We were supposed to talk about how Morph Application Platform, which uses Amazon EC2 and S3 for on-demand cloud computing and storage along with its own routing and provisioning infrastructure, compares with Google App Engine, which uses Google's own cloud infrastructure. That part of the conversation was short, though, because beyond the fact that they're both on-demand cloud computing platforms, the two have nothing in common. I was put in mind of Shakespeare sonnet 130, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Google App Engine, as I've... READ MORE

Backbase meets AIR

Martin Heller — 2008-05-06T08:56:49-08:00

Pair programming at a distance

Martin Heller — 2008-05-04T12:01:19-08:00

Ajax Web suite boosts customer interactions

Martin Heller — 2008-04-30T08:18:56-08:00

Which clan are you?

Martin Heller — 2008-04-28T14:22:00-08:00

Imote2 .Builder Kit makes creating wireless sensor networks a snap

Martin Heller — 2008-04-25T12:10:07-08:00

I spent several hours today exploring the Crossbow Imote2 .Builder Kit, a "complete development environment for high performance wireless sensor networking (WSN) applications leveraging the Microsoft .NET Framework," as the company describes it. (I'd never say "leveraging" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence myself if I could avoid it, because of Microsoft's rather checkered legal history of "leveraging" its near-monopoly -- but oops, I did it again. Back to Crossbow.) The Imote2 .Builder Kit sells for $990 in the U.S. in small quantities. It includes three Imote2 processor boards, two Imote2 sensor boards, two battery boards, batteries, a USB... READ MORE

Going over to the dark side

Martin Heller — 2008-04-24T14:50:47-08:00

kannuu Developer Network open for business

Martin Heller — 2008-04-22T07:54:16-08:00

Is "professional software developer" an oxymoron?

Martin Heller — 2008-04-21T07:36:20-08:00

I've been reading Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development by Scott Bain (Addison-Wesley, 2008, $49.99, 0-321-50936-6). I'm finding it a thoughtful book, which makes a good case for the adoption of patterns, refactoring, and test-driven development. On the other hand, Bain leads with the premise that software development is not currently a profession. Why is that? It's not a matter of being paid for the work: it's because software development is too hard, too unpredictable, too chaotic. Of course, those are the things that make it fun. Bain admits that as well. I think it's no... READ MORE

DSM tool offers high developer productivity

Martin Heller — 2008-04-17T12:05:57-08:00

I should have known better than to write about a vendor demo, as I did on Monday for Telelogic Rhapsody. Now everybody wants to give me a demo. As the organ-grinder's song from The Threepenny Opera goes, "Oh, the line forms at the right, dears, now that Mackie's back in town." This morning's demo was a Web meeting, since the vendor, MetaCase, is in Jyväskylä, Finland. My Plantronics DSP headset worked well, the voice quality was good, and the VoIP delay wasn't all that bad as long as I didn't interrupt Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, CEO of MetaCase. Dr. Tolvanen's starting... READ MORE

Can Google Apps crack large enterprises? Today's IMAP outage casts doubt

Martin Heller — 2008-04-16T13:46:44-08:00

InfoWorld just ran an article questioning the idea of Google Apps in large enterprises: Can Google Apps crack large enterprises? | InfoWorld | News | 2008-04-16 | By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com One of my small enterprises uses Google Apps (and pays for the privilege), and this afternoon IMAP was out for about an hour. I'd say about half of us read our mail with IMAP, since it's a convenient way to get the messages into the local mail client while allowing for synchronization. Having the IMAP go down for an hour was unacceptable. Sure, we could fire up a browser... READ MORE