Unless your Flex 2 project has to go to production this month, switch to Flex 3. Now. Flex 3 final Beta days are almost over and it brings you lots of goodies. If you are still thinking of using AJAX or JSF for your data intensive business application, just stop it, will you! Just take care of your business with Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS.
Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem. Here’s a little gotcha you can try:
echo 09," => (09) <br>"; echo 9," => (9) <br>";
If you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken. Try it. Also see the followup.
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Apparently, the participants in the U.S. ‘Cyber Storm’ war games are familiar with the Kobayashi Maru, because some of them tried to cheat by hacking the games themselves. They also prepare for some very interesting scenarios. Among other things, the organizers are worried about having too many people on the ‘No Fly’ list show up at an airport, finding ‘mystery liquids’ in the subway, and having bloggers reveal the classified location of railcars with hazardous materials. The Department of Homeland Security has already analyzed the results of the games, and plans to hold ‘Cyber Storm 2′ in March.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
willdavid writes “Paul McDougall reports in InformationWeek on Microsoft’s new online comic. The Heroes Happen Here comic strips are being created by Jordan Gorfinkel, a former DC Comics editor who helped revitalize the Batman series. ‘Tech workers who in the middle of the night fix a downed server or take on a computer virus don’t really have extraordinary powers. It just seems that way. But a new comic book has debuted in which IT pros literally are superheroes. The daily Web comic, called Heroes Happen Here, features tech savvy crime fighters like Lord Firewall, who “stands between chaos and order” and says things like “begone vermin!”‘” And because it’s never easy, in order to read the archives of the comic you’re going to need to install Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Erris writes “A member of the Baton Rouge LUG noticed that Cox checks the text of outgoing email and rejects mail containing key phrases. I was aware of forced inbox filtering that has caused problems and been abused by other ISPs in China and in the US. I’ve also read about forced use of ISP SMTP and outbound throttling, but did not know they outbound filtered as well. How prevalent and justified is this practice? Wouldn’t it be better to cut off people with infected computers than to censor the internet?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
dratcw writes “The first commercial LAN was based on ARCnet technology and was installed some 30 years ago, according to a ComputerWorld article. Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, recalls the early battles between the different flavors of LAN and says some claims from the Token Ring backers such as IBM were lies. ‘I know that sounds nasty, but for 10 years I had to put up with that crap from the IBM Token Ring people — you bet I’m bitter.’ Besides dipping into networking nostalgia, the article also quotes an analyst who says the LAN may be nearing its demise and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds. Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ficken writes “The great micro vs. monolithic kernel is still alive and well. Andy Tanenbaum weighs in with another article about the virtues of microkernels. From the article: ‘Over the years there have been endless postings on forums such as Slashdot about how microkernels are slow, how microkernels are hard to program, how they aren’t in use commercially, and a lot of other nonsense. Virtually all of these postings have come from people who don’t have a clue what a microkernel is or what one can do. I think it would raise the level of discussion if people making such postings would first try a microkernel-based operating system and then make postings like “I tried an OS based on a microkernel and I observed X, Y, and Z first hand.” Has a lot more credibility.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Less than 10 years ago, still in its infancy, the Internet was a land of promise for businesses. Companies saw bright new ways to increase their agility, reach more customers and to deliver new, never-before-seen services. Unquestionably since then it has transformed the way consumers and businesses exchange information and has become a vital part of nearly every organization’s communication and operational architecture.
4D announced the release of 4D Ajax For Dreamweaver v11, a plug-in for Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 that inserts 4D Ajax objects into standard web pages. 4D Ajax for Dreamweaver v11 has been updated to include support for 4D’s newest 4D Ajax objects, Dashboards and Dashboard Charts. These customizable objects allow developers and designers alike to integrate business intelligence applications into new or existing websites with minimal effort.
As the momentum for the new class of SOA middleware continues to grow, developers are looking for simple yet scalable solutions that can integrate disparate data across a variety of on-premises, on-demand and Web 2.0 information sources and applications. With many of such data integration problems being relatively small in scope, companies can’t justify bringing expensive middleware to solve small problems. Some of the projects are built using work-arounds and custom coding. The result is prone to operational risk, high maintenance costs, and is inevitably inefficient. After this session you will: Understand the impact of data mashups on developer community, Find out how to select mashup technologies and tools for your next data integration project, Discover tips, best practices, and strategies for leveraging these tools and solving most common challenges.