New Groundwork Web dev framework shows promise
Although it shares a name with a systems monitoring tool and a content management system, the Groundwork software development framework could make a name for itself in mobile Web development.
The open source project, introduced earlier this month, is an HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript framework for rapidly prototyping and building websites and applications, said Gary Hepting, founder of Groundwork and an engineer at online television show provider SideReel. Currently in beta release, Groundwork leverages the Sass CSS preprocessor, which extends CSS3 by adding nested rules, variables, selector inheritance, and other features. "Groundwork offers an extremely flexible fractions-based grid system that can utilize halves through twelfths and two strategically targeted break-points, or media queries, that enable the ability to adapt layouts for mobile and handheld devices," Hepting said. Read more...
Facebook: We need to create our own dev and management tools
With nearly 1 billion users worldwide and 500 million people visiting its social network every day, Facebook has its work cut out for it in managing its systems. To help do that, the company has been developing its own management and development tools tuned to its specific needs, rather than relying on commercial offerings.
Tools in use include Perflab, for testing site changes committed by engineers; Gatekeeper, for advanced A/B testing of code changes; and Claspin, providing a high-density heat map for viewing a large set of servers. "We spent a lot of time building up the internal tool stack," said Jay Parikh, Facebook vice president of infrastructure engineering, at the O'Reilly Velocity conference Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif. The conference is focused on Web performance and operations, with Facebook serving as a prime example of the demands being made on the Web. Read more...
Computing fossils: Old tech holding on for dear life
Consider the abacus. Developed perhaps as long as 4,500 years ago, this handy gadget served the mathematical needs of merchants and accountants until the development of mechanical calculating machines in the 19th century. But the abacus hasn't been forgotten. Instead it still lives on in niches -- for instance teaching preschoolers the basics of counting.
There are a number of obsolete technologies and gadgets that have persisted from slightly less ancient times right down to the current day, though again in greatly diminished numbers and scope. A brief tour through these technological fossils serves as a lesson on the durability of items we sometimes think of as ephemeral. Read more...
Google confirms its search business faces new investigation in Argentina and ongoing probe in Korea
Google has confirmed that its business practices are under investigation in South Korea and Argentina, according to a regulatory filing, reported by Bloomberg.
While the Korean investigation is ongoing, the probe Argentina is a new development, and the country’s anti-trust organisation is assessing issues around the use of paid-for ads on the search engine.
“The Argentinian Competition Commission notified us that they are conducting a preliminary inquiry into our search and search advertising services, and we are of course happy to answer their questions,” a spokesman told Bloomberg. Read more...
Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others
Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.
There have been other attempts at creating a semantic database built from Wikipedia’s data before – for example, DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured content from Wikipedia and make it available online. The difference is that, with Wikidata, the data won’t just be made available, it will also be made editable by anyone. Read more...
Study finds internet addiction causes changes in brain development
Is Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) real? A new study suggests it may be — and that its effects can be seen in the human brain.
The study asked those between the ages 14 and 21 questions about how their internet use had negatively impacted their lives. Many of these questions run parallel to those that help diagnose an alcohol or drug problem: "Have you lied to your family members, therapist, or others to hide the truth of your involvement with the internet?" "Have you taken the risk of losing a significant relationship, job, educational, or career opportunity because of the internet?" Researchers followed up with questions to the subjects' friends and families. Read more...
Cloud’s new rules promise old-school satisfaction
Cloud computing is big business, in part because companies are happy to shell out lots of cash to buy themselves time and development flexibility.
In this quest to displace the operations bottleneck that exists within enterprises, developers are taking on more of the operations role for themselves and to reduce this new burden have started a mad rush to run anything and everything in the cloud.
We've long talked about the need to outsource everything but one's core business, but it's developers who are doing this far more than any other group within the enterprise.
Now we have databases in the cloud, logging in the cloud, and even network monitoring, thanks to Boundary's new service, in the cloud. Read more...
It’s not the coding that’s hard, it’s the people
The data about software development is sobering. Many projects end up over budget and over schedule, and one study puts the failure rate at one-in-five.
The path to better projects may be for software developers to become better people. A recent conference on agile development had new-age sounding sessions on such topics as "An Introduction to Non-Violent Communication for Agile Coaches," "Fear Driven Impediments" and "Collaborating with Non-Collaborators."
The stakes involved in getting software projects right can be huge. Development projects costing millions of dollars can become such a mess that businesses turn to people such as Billie Blair, an organizational psychologist and president and CEO of consulting firm Change Strategists Inc., to untangle the disorganization.
In nearly every case, Blair said the source of all project dysfunction is the project manager.
"Anything that goes awry in a company," said Blair, "can always be traced back to the manager." Read more...
HP sics Spaniards on Larry Ellison
Hewlett-Packard's legal fight with Oracle over Intel's Itanium processor has now landed in Spain.
On Friday, La Comisión Nacional de la Competencia (CNC), the Spanish antitrust authority, released a statement saying that it had launched for formal investigation into Oracle's decision to cease development of its database, middleware, and application software on the Itanium processor.
The Itanium chip is the heart of HP's Integrity line of midrange and big iron servers. HP is the main peddler of Itanium iron, and it is directly affected by Oracle's decision to stop development of future releases of its code on the chip. The Spanish investigation into Oracle is the result of a complaint that HP filed with the CNC on July 6. Read more...
Google Labs to be shut down
Google has decided to close its Labs initiative as part of the company's efforts to streamline its product portfolio and focus its development efforts.
The Google Labs website hosts early stage product prototypes that end users can try out without guarantees that they'll work well or even exist in the near future.
"While we've learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we're to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead," wrote Bill Coughran, senior vice president for Research and Systems Infrastructure, in a blog post.
During the company's most recent earnings conference call, co-founder Larry Page, who took over as CEO in April, said that the company was in the midst of trimming its broad palette of products and services, eliminating those that haven't proven popular and successful, like Google Health and Google PowerMeter, shut down in late June. Read more...