Stanford Web Applications course lectures

You can now watch the fall 2010 Stanford Web Applications course containing 104 recorded lectures. The course contents are:

1. INTRODUCTION
2. HTML and CSS
3. URLs and Links
4. The Ruby Language
5. Rails Introduction
6. Introduction to SQL
7. Active Record
8. HTTP and HTTPS
9. Cookies and Sessions
10. Forms
11. Javascript
12. The Document Object Model (DOM)
13. Events
14. AJAX
15. Security: Network Attacks
16. Security: Session Attacks
17. Security: Isolation
18. Security: Code Injection
19. Security: Phishing Attacks
20. Large-Scale Applications
21. Datacenters
22. Deploying Web Applications
23. Course Wrap-Up

The importance of knowing Unicode

Here are some resources about Unicode, handling special characters and the importance to care for data encoding when writing code:

First there’s Joel Spolsky’s classical article about Unicode and Character sets: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). Read it to get a feeling for the importance of knowing how data is encoded.

Then there’s this great comment by Tom Christiansen to a Stack Overflow question about using UTF-8 in Perl.

A large part is Perl specific and if you want an in in-depth analysis about things you have to consider while writing Perl code go ahead an read it.
But it includes a part, called Assume Brokenness, that lists a large number of points of interest that apply to almost every programming language.

The writer of the comment also has a presentation about Unicode support and pitfalls in several programming languages: Unicode Support Shootout – The Good, the Bad, & the (mostly) Ugly (HTML presentation / PDF).

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

So true.

comic, source

Inzage in je gegevens bij Facebook

Geïnteresseerd in de informatie die Facebook over je bewaart, dan is dit overzicht een begin. Een begin, want niet alles wat bekend is wordt daarin genoemd.

Wil je zo’n overzicht van je eigen gegevens dan kan deze instructie helpen bij het aanvragen.

Tuning Oracle UCM 11 & Site Studio performance

Practical tips from Bex Huff about performance tuning Oracle UCM 11g (& WebCenter). He also mentions a presentation he gave about tuning UCM Site Studio.

Testing JavaScript with JsTestDriver

JsTestDriver is a tool to execute unit tests for your JavaScripts. This article explains how to write tests and use the tool to automate testing your code in several browsers.

Agile Chronicles #12: Technical Debt

Via some route I got to this interesting article by Jesse Warden about technical debt, especially when using Scrum. Two great quotes:

If your team is working on fixing bugs, they aren’t working on user stories.

Bugs do not deliver business value, their cost of fixing is part of realizing the original story.

It’s generally assumed that 80% of your 2 week Sprint is spent refactoring. I’ll let that sink in.

Think about that! To realize user stories, 80% of the sprint the team is busy adapting existing software to make sure the new feature fits perfectly. Scrum doesn’t mean quick & dirty programming.

In Scrum preventing technical debt is a daytime job. If you don’t pay enough attention it will come back and you’ll have to pay with interest.

Continuous Integration for the world – Agile 2011

Presentation with demos showing current tools used in the devops space and pointing out similarities between the release process of code and servers:

• veewee : creating a Just Enough Operating system
• Vagrant: spinning up an Ubuntu box
• Chef: provisioning the box with an apache server
• Cucumber-Nagios: testing the provisioned box with Jenkins and Ccucumber-Nagios
• Mccloud: repeating the same process on ec2 instead of Virtualbox

This demonstrates the concept of infrastructure as code and virtualization to define and build infrastructure based on text files. Those files can be version-controlled and tested like regular code. The artefact ami, image, can then be deployed on an infrastructure.

Java Summer Workshops on Greenfoot and Alice

Introductory workshop to programming with Greenfoot and Alice. Greenfoot and Alice are visual educational tools for learning the basics of Java programming and problem solving skills. In this workshop, students used only drag and drop functions to create their animations.

JVM Language Summit 2011 Sessions

You can now watch the presentations of the recent JVM Language Summit and see the presentation slides.

Apart from the keynotes the presentations cover the topics JVM Capabilities, Language Implementations on the JVM, Java SE 8 and Emerging Technologies.