Strategic Developer | Martin Heller

Avoiding Vista?

Martin Heller — 2008-05-15T11:07:50-08:00

How badly do you want a MacBook Air?

Martin Heller — 2008-05-14T11:11:43-08:00

At least partially in response to my coverage of TopCoder last week, I have been getting a spate of programming contest and community announcements. ZocDoc is an API for doctor appointments. Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) is a grid-based application platform for the development and deployment of scalable applications in Java, Spring, .NET or C++. Notice what these two have in common: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 ZocDoc Announces Developer Contest - Win a MacBook Air! Today, ZocDoc kicked off a contest for software developers to create new applications that help patients book doctor appointments anywhere on the web. ZocDoc users... READ MORE

Visual Studio 2008 SP1: To beta, or not to beta?

Martin Heller — 2008-05-13T11:37:56-08:00

As I mentioned in An old Visual Studio problem rears its ugly head back in February, I've been looking forward to SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and NET Framework 3.5. Why? These are supposed to fix most of the problems I've been having with Visual Studio, and restore most of the functionality that was cut from the initial 2008 release. SP1 is out, but only as a first beta-test version. As is true with most beta-test products, there are risks to running it, ranging from a high likelihood of encountering new bugs to a low likelihood of trashing your system... READ MORE

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