Blog Insights

Siri, which debuted last week, is surely the first iPhone app that's the commercialized result of a multimillion-dollar Defense Department research project. It's a "virtual personal assistant" that uses voice recognition, your GPS location, and links to local information and services to respond to requests you speak into an iPhone...

Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything...

Last year I coordinated a technical book club here at Source Allies. This was my first experience doing one and I wanted to share my experience for the benefit of others who may be looking at starting one. The fact that we even started a book club was a big positive...

In reality it's likely your TFTP and NFS server are going to be the same server, however because we go by IP in this, it is hopefully easier to understand. The PXE client connects to the given IP and requests the file (pxelinux) The system then looks for a configuration file. sudo mount...

Why would you ever need that? Say you get a jar file. After using the jar for a while you realize that there is a bug in a class in the jar file. Unfortunately you also find out that the jar is no longer supported and there is no way you...

I've been working on a web-based tool that stores, among other network-related things, IP addresses. When I first started I stored each IP address as four TINYINTS (0-255 for each octet): mysql> desc ipaddresses; +----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type ...

Over the last several months I have worked on several content heavy websites for one of our partners. When I say “content heavy”, I mean that 80%-90% of the pages in the application are static, or at least mostly static, a customer name, membership number, etc may need to be...

I recently ran across the following article on a blog: Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people...

Sonar is a web based code quality analysis tool for Maven based Java projects. It covers a wide area of code quality check points which include: Architecture & Design, Complexity, Duplications, Coding Rules, Potential Bugs, Unit Test etc. Sonar has a rich set of features like what you would get...

Magento is an e-commerce framework that is used as an online shopping cart. I am going to talk a little bit about Magento extensions and why they are useful when wanting to customize your shopping cart. Magento extensions allow you to change functionality of the shopping cart while modifying little...