Links for 2008-04-21

Articles:

1. Simplify Ajax development with jQuery - jQuery allows us to do DOM scripting, event handling, HTML animation, Ajax and more.
2. Don't burn your Bridges - "It is not good to leave in anger. I advise that you don't burn your bridges"?? I think the point is don't express your anger when you leave.
   

Sample Chapter

1. jQuery in Action
   • Chapter 1 - Introducing jQuery: The philosophy of jQuery is "Unobtrusive JavaScript", that is, to separate behavior from structure just as css does to separate style from structure.
   • Chapter 5 - Sprucing up with animations and effects

An Introduction to Enterprise Service Bus

The first chapter of Open-Source ESBs in Action has a good introduction to Enterprise Service Bus. The followings are discussed in the chapter.

• EAI vs. ESB
1. EAI products are based on the hub and spoke model. All data exchange is centralized in the hub.
   
2. ESB products are based on the bus model. Data are distributed to the destinations through the bus. In the distribution process, data/messages can be transformed or enhanced.
   
3. The data exchange in ESB products is based on open standards, such as, JCA, XML, JMS, and web services standards.
   
• Reasons to start thinking of an ESB
1. Necessity to integrate applications
2. Heterogonous environment
3. Reduction of total cost of ownership
   
• Core functionalities of an ESB
1. Location transparency
2. Transport protocol conversion
3. Message transformation
4. Message routing
5. Message enhancement
6. Security
7. Monitoring and management
• Current open source ESB projects
1. Mule
   
2. Apache ServiceMix
3. Open ESB
4. Apache Synapse
5. JBoss ESB
6. Apache Tuscany
7. Fuse ESB
8. WSO2 ESB
   
9. PEtALS
10. OpenAdapter

The authors also mentioned that Service Component Architecture (SCA) seems to be the next big thing in the ESB market. SCA is a specification based on the principles of service-oriented architecture. Vendors are investigating the possibility of transforming their ESB products to conform with the specification.

Links for 2007-11-17

Blogs:

1. 7 of the Hardest Things I Learned About Writing Software:
• Make choices - Don't make program too complicated. Make it work first.
  
• Delete code
• NIH (not invented here) - Reminds me things, such as Reinventing the wheel, Standing on the shoulders of giants, etc.
• UI is more important than code
  
• Solve Problems - Users don't care how you write your code. (That doesn't mean nobody care. Think about maintainability. But solving problems always come first.)
  
• You Are Different - Reminds me of this book.
  
• Documentation - If your program is so complex as that users have to read your manual to figure out, something is wrong with your program.
2. 1000 Lines Of Code - A rule of thumb following "Make choices" in the above post.

Sample chapter:

1. The Berkeley DB Book
   
• Chapter 1 - Introduction to Berkeley DB
  

Links for 2007-09-18

Blog:

1. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think: A list of pointers to the information about the authors of Beautiful Code. It's kind of who's who for me.

Sample Chapter:

1. Hacker's Delight
• Chapter 2 - Basics - 20 different kinds of methods for manipulating bits.

Links for 2007-09-10

Sample Chapter:

1. How I Became a Quant
   
• Chapter 1 - David Leinweber - The author talked about how he started in the military industry in 70's and entered into the finance industry in the 80's. AI played an important role for him to make the switch. Thought he didn't say much about how he applied AI to the stock market, it's a fun read.
  

Article:

1. A Little AI Goes a Long Way on Wall Street
• Written by David Leinweber and Yossi Beinart and published in 1994.
  
• According to the article, their product, MarketMind seems to be a rule-based system. It monitored the market according to the rules users specified and alerted users when conditions match. A rule editing tool was provided as well. Another system, Quantex, was integrated with MarketMind to provide automatic order generation and execution capability.
  
• The article read like a white paper, talking what their systems did, but not how. However, 2 techniques were mentioned, 'Rete matching' and 'Earley Algorithm'. I think I need to dig deeper.
  

Links for 2007-09-06

Articles:

1. Implementing a Publisher/Subscriber model for .NET Remoting
• I adopted the method in the article to handcraft redundancy capability in a risk-monitoring system I developed.
  
2. Memcached (Distributed Cache) ASP.net Provider
• Recently, I came across this article and hoped Memcached would be a better solution for my system. But according to this introduction, this tool seems to be suitable is for load balance, not for redundancy. Still, it's good to know.
• A windows implemention is available as well.
  
3. ASP.NET Charting with NPlot
• This article reminds me that there is an chapter in Windows Developer Power Tools devoted to this tool.

Blog:

1. Calling a Windows Service from ASP.NET via Remoting & IpcChannel
• Other than IpcChannel is not available in .Net Framework 1.1, the idea looks good.
  

Links for 2007-07-22

News

1. True random number generator goes online
• "the 'Quantum Random Bit Generator' (QRBG121), which is the engine for QRBGS, is a fast non-deterministic random bit (number) generator whose randomness relies on intrinsic randomness of the quantum physical process of photonic emission in semiconductors and subsequent detection by photoelectric effect".

Sample Chapter

1. Foundations of F#
   
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
  

Links for 2007-07-09

MSDN Articles

• System.AddIn namespace in Visual Studio Orcas
• CLR Inside Out: .NET Application Extensibility
• CLR Inside Out: .NET Application Extensibility, Part 2
• I think the key to understand the mechanism is to understand the interaction between the components, as described in the following paragraph,
  

  ..., it first creates the AppDomain that the add-in is going to run in and then loads the add-in, add-in view, add-in side adapter, and contract assembly into the newly created domain. ... Next, the system instantiates the add-in with its default constructor and the add-in adapter and passes the add-in, typed as the add-in base, to the adapter's constructor. Then it passes the add-in adapter across the AppDomain boundary typed as its contract, loads the host-side-adapter assembly, and instantiates an instance of the host adapter, passing the add-in adapter, typed as the contract, to its constructor. Finally, it returns the host-side-adapter to the host, typed as the host add-in view.
  

• CLR Add-In Team Blog
  

Sample Chapter

• Beautiful Code
• Chapter 4 - Finding Things : The author demonstrated text searching technique using regular expression in Ruby and binary search algorithm in Java.