Recent blog posts

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Future in Desktop Java: Is there any?

If you have been following recent developments around desktop Java, you might have noticed that things are not looking too good.

What Hadoop really is?

In this blog post I try to find out what Hadoop really is. What are the essential features that differentiate it in the area of distributed data processing? When to go Hadoop, and when not to? Oh, and I try to be a bit provocative, too...

Data Centers Finland presenations

<p>I recently attended the very interesting and useful <a href="http://www.datacentresfinland.com/">DataCentresFinland conference</a> in Kajaani where we have built our new datacenter. I presented twice, once on datacenters and once on CSC and HPC trends. The slides are here:</p> <p><a href="./resolveuid/0601b0b2fb452696e86e868935166dc6">Kajaani case study presentation</a></p>

SSL under the hood

Let's face it, inner workings of SSL are typically very far away from the subject matter that you should care about in your daily development work. But I would still urge developers to learn a bit more about SSL, because you might be surprised.

Embedding transformed source files into documentation wiki?

When using wikis for software documentation, it would be nice to be able to import some pieces of source code, transform them and attach into documentation. That way you would have nice human-readable documentation for that utility script or configuration file, and it would never go out-of-date! As far as I know, popular wiki platforms don't provide this kind of functionality. Or do they?

Kajaani datacenter presentation

<p>I recently presented at <a href="http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conferences/2012/stockholm-2012">DataCenterDynamics stockholm</a>&nbsp;on <a href="http://www.csc.fi/english/datacenter">CSC's new Kajaani datacenter</a>. As usual I've decided to share the slides here.</p> <p><a href="./resolveuid/e3876d5711b5143067d2c12d54252a1b">CSC MDC Kajaani Case Study slides</a></p>

Trello vs FogBugz vs JIRA

The Chipster development team switched from FogBugz to Trello some months ago. We had been using FogBugz for a year or two, before which we were using JIRA. At this point it is safe to draw some conclusions on if Trello rocks or not.

Decrypting cryptography

Understanding security is important for software developers, right? And SSL is a central technology when securing distributed software, right? So why do books and tutorials on the subject basically skip central aspects of SSL altogether?

Releasing Chipster 2.0.1

 

Something completely different?

From time to time, you see Chipster popping up in quite surprising ways...

Salvaging hard drives with ddrescue

As a Java programmer, you tend to not be bothered about hardware. Unfortunately sometimes hardware will come and pull out the rug from under you...

Packaging SSH Clients: PuttyTray redux and FileZilla

Secure SHell (SSH) is a popular low-bandwidth protocol to use remote devices via terminal sessions, tunnel connections and more. This post details one way to package open source windows clients for SSH and SFTP/FTP/FTPS (with UTF-8 support) to be distributed in a managed environment.

Data Center presentation

<p>I recently presented a summary of current data center trends and technology to an audience from Jyväskulä University. I wanted to share these slides with the audience because they include some useful links for further information. I'm sure others will find these slides useful.</p> <p>The topics covered include:</p> <ul> <li>What is driving data center innovation? <ul> <li>Web scale computing</li> <li>Economics and Metrics</li> </ul> </li> <li>Air cooling trends</li> <li>Separating hot and cold air</li> <li>Liquid cooling</li> <li>Modular buildings/containers</li> </ul> <p><a href="./resolveuid/24da0a768f0fccee7467c13e757d75ee">Data Center presentation is here (5.7MB PDF)</a></p>

Using Exchange 2007 calendar with Thunderbird plugin

If you have at least Thunderbird 3.0 and the possibility to install extensions, it's possible to use an Exchange 2007 or newer calendar within Thunderbird. The use includes making meetings and seeing other people's free/busy status when making reservations. The required plugin is here (requires lightning and minimum of Exchange 2007): https://addons.mozilla.org/en/thunderbird/addon/provider-for-microsoft-exchang/

Mac OS X key bindings in Java

Mac OS X key bindings in Java - How hard can it be? We've found out that our software does not follow all Mac conventions when it comes to keyboards shortcuts. This was a bit of a surprise, as everything has been done "by the book".

Performance comparison of streamed encryption and compression

In the last post I discussed encrypting users' data files when they move around in a distributed system, such as Chipster. The big practical question was not answered: Will it be fast enough? To answer that I did some performance tests and give the results here.

Encrypting and compressing your data on fly

When running a distributed system for data analysis, you have to take the big responsibility for your users' data. While doing development for our Chipster system, we started to think about the question: How to make that big responsibility smaller?

Bleak future of open source in open web?

In a recent issue of the Wired magazine the big theme was: Is the Web dead? The take home message was that the heterogenous collection of independent companies, public institutions and individuals that made up the Web in past has been largely replaced by large centralised services. If open Web is to lose ground for closed systems, will this happen also for open source?

Memory management in modern times

For us application programmers of modern times the canonical advice to memory management has been: don't do it. Trying to be too clever can lead to a serious degradation of performance, unless you are very careful. A couple of recent blog posts got me thinking that things are not so simple after all...

Firefox and Thunderbird updates with user rights

As network-using software, the web browser Mozilla Firefox and email suite Mozilla Thunderbird are especially fit to update themselves and keep vulnerability access time to a minimum. Here's how to configure them for self-updating with user-level rights.