Interesting Snippets from 2012-09-07

• Test Mercenaries

  The Test Mercenaries were a team of engineers within Google dedicated to helping development teams improve their testing practices and code quality from late 2006 until early 2009. Two or more Mercs would be embedded within a development team full-time for months, using the Testing Grouplet’s Test Certified program as the basis for concrete action and improvement.

• Security 101 for Cloud – building it right | The Cloud Evangelist

  Cloud Security Alliance started many moons ago to put together an authoritative set of controls to allow you to get to work now building out your platforms or engaging with a Cloud provider regardless of the tenacity or the aggressive nature of your certification or audit model. The controls are designed to get you out the blocks building Cloud platformst that need to meet the regulations around ISO 27001/27002, ISACA COBIT, PCI, NIST, Jericho Forum and NERC CIP.

• Architecture

  Qubes implements Security by Isolation approach. To do this, Qubes utilizes virtualization technology, to be able to isolate various programs from each other, and even sandbox many system-level components, like networking or storage subsystem, so that their compromise don’t affect the integrity of the rest of the system.

  Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs), or “AppVMs”. E.g. user can have “personal”, “work”, “shopping”, “bank”, and “random” AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.

• Ingrater’s 3D Blog » Real World Comparison, GC vs. Manual Memory Management

  The astonishing thing here is, that the manual managed version compiled with dmd is still faster then the highly optimized GC version GDC generates. I could not compile my manually managed version with GDC yet as druntime for GDC has a completely different folder structure and quite some modifications.

  Most of this performance improvements come from the fact that the garbage collector does not eat any time. But also if you write code with a GC in mind you often do not think about the consequences when allocating memory, because the GC will deal with it. This often leads to highly imperformant code

• The Pragmatic Bookshelf | PragPub September 2012 | Thinking Functionally with Haskell

  Types are a description of the code’s inputs and outputs, and the check ensures that inputs and outputs match up and are used consistently. Modern type systems—such as in Haskell or above—are very flexible, and allow these descriptions to be quite detailed; plus they are not too obtrusive in use and often very helpful.

• enquire.js - Awesome Media Queries in JavaScript

  A lightweight JavaScript library for handling CSS media queries.

  Deal with your media queries being matched (and even unmatched!) Respond to browser events with aplomb And if you want to get really fancy, run one-time setup routines

• About Us · Zapier

  Syncing data on the web has always been a pain. Either you did it by hand or you buckled down and built it yourself with an API. If you weren't technical you had few places to turn for help. That's why we built Zapier. Zapier is for busy people who know their time is better spent selling, marketing, or coding. Instead of wasting valuable time coming up with complicated systems - you can use Zapier to sync the web apps you and your team are already using on a daily basis.

• Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools

  Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools is a collection of tools that we, the people behind Datavisualization.ch, work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly. This is not a list of everything out there, but instead a thoughtfully curated selection of our favourite tools that will make your life easier creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations.

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