Joel Confino

Chariot Developer News Episode #52 – SIM Card Hacking, JS tools, Unix tools for BigData

Show Links Sim Card Hack exposes potentially – millions of phones, potentially. Here’s hoping our phones use Triple-DES encryption. Foundation -vs- Twitter Bootstrap – a good overview of both and their strengths. Great comments as well. Unix commands for data science That’s what i sed, unix util(s) for fun and profit, head to your couch, … Read More

Chariot Developer News Episode #51 – More dev history, new Web IDE, Big Data debates, and more

New AWS feature – Resource permissions for EC2 RDS http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/08/announcing-resource-permissions-for-amazon-ec2-and-amazon-rds/?ref_=pe_395470_31013550_7 History of tech – Vannivar Bush and Douglas Engelbart intersected – he read Vannivar’s future of tehchnology paper – http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-hut-where-the-internet-began/277551/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ Another browser-based IDE, but this one has lots of integration – https://codenvy.com/ Developers begin to focus new efforts on tablets, phones hold steady http://gigaom.com/2013/07/12/survey-far-fewer-developers-are-prioritizing-smartphone-apps-over-tablet-apps/ … Read More

Chariot DevNews Episode #50 – Phones hacked, security and passwords, and more

It’s our 50th episode! More to come, now weekly. Send us feedback on @techcast. Topics ARS – You can crack iPhone auto-generated hotspot passwords in seconds – http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/new-attack-cracks-iphone-autogenerated-hotspot-passwords-in-seconds/ Android phone #s breeched by Facebook app – http://www.darkreading.com/mobile/android-phone-numbers-leaked-by-facebook/240157723 – ARS – The more complex the rules, the more annoying, and is it really more effective than just a longer … Read More

Chariot DevNews Episode #49 – Tools all the way down

This week we’re reviewing our favorite tools, development and otherwise. Joel and Ken talk about: JSbin.com and JSFiddle.net – two browser-based tools that make fiddling with Javascript easy and fun Trello – a good project-board tool. Codiqa – a browser-based mobile IDE for PhoneGap/JQuery Mobile Apigee – web service / data service hosting platform. Cloudbees … Read More

What is Chariot Day?

No, Chariot Day is not a group of Ben Hur enthusiasts reenacting Roman-era racing.  Chariot Day is a one day technical conference put on by the techies at my company, Chariot Solutions, on a Saturday.  To borrow a phrase, Chariot Day is of the people, by the people, for the people.  It is loose, it … Read More

OpEd: Yammering about Scala, Java, and Winning

This is an opinion piece that represents the views of the author, and does not represent the official stance of Chariot Solutions. But sometimes it is fun to weigh in on the news of the day. There has been quite a dust up in the blogosphere about Yammer’s decision to switch from using Scala to … Read More

Groovy Algorithms: Shunting Yard

Groovy’s sugary syntax makes coding algorithms — dare I say it — fun.  The shunting yard algorithm, invented by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, is used to parse mathematical expressions.  You might have picked up on this already, but computers and people think differently.  We commonly use infix notation to write mathematical expressions.  It is … Read More

Akka Scheduler: Actors with Heartbeats

Akka is an excellent platform for writing concurrent applications using the Actor model. Chariot architect Anatoly Polinsky describes the Akka scheduler and how you can use it to create a heartbeat for an actor. From Anatoly’s blog: AKKA Scheduler: Sending Message to Actor’s Self on Start Akka has a little scheduler written using actors. This … Read More

Checklists and Document Inspections

John Shepard, one of our architects, blogged some interesting thoughts on what makes a document inspection. Most developers will tell you that code reviews are good, and also tell you they aren’t done regularly in their organization. But John goes beyond the scope of code to reviewing other documents such as requirements and technical specifications … Read More

Groovy Script to Tame Gmail Attachments

I like Gmail but it has a big short coming: you can’t sort mail by attachment size. This means that if you are running out of space in your Gmail account, you can’t easily find large attachments like that 25MB video that your friend sent you of his kid’s graduation or other large attachment that … Read More