Defending Network Performance with Packet Level Detail My favorite war room accusation is: "It's always the network at fault!" Whether you're the one taking the blame or the one pointing the finger likely has everything to do with which seat you occupy in that war room. I suppose that comes with the territory, because at the same time there seems to be a consensus that the network is vital to understanding that holistic "Big Picture" on how application delivery is experienced by your end users. I suppose we'll have to live with those accusations, but we don't have to take the blame. Here's how you can defend yourself. The view from the network provides both context and accuracy relative to performance and availability problems in your environment. Collecting a combination of network-based performance information and data obtained from points in the application deliv... (more)

Open Source Selenium Web Application Testing System

Selenium is a free Web Application Testing System. It gained lots of popularity since it is available. It’s integration to FireFox – which allows instant record/replay as well as the scripting option - makes it a great tool for functional web testing. BrowserMob on the other side leverages Selenium by providing an automated load-testing environment for Selenium scripts all configurable online via a Web Dashboard. Tagging Web Requests In my recent blog post – Get more out of functional web testing: How to correlate test reports with server side log information? – I discussed the problem that testing results are usually not linked to the log and diagnostics information captured by the application under test. The blog entry offered a way to link the two sides using HTTP Tagging via an HTTP Proxy. Tagging individual Web Requests allows linking each individual request ... (more)

Appcelerator Named "Platinum Sponsor" of AJAX World RIA Conference, October 20-22, in San Jose, California

SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global rich Internet technology provider Appcelerator named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's upcoming AJAX World Conference & Expo 2008 West, which will take place October 20-22, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California. Appcelerator, Inc. is an open source software company specializing in products and services for rapid rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA- Click Here to Register for the Conference! based services development. The Appcelerator Platform SDKs enable developers to develop rich Ajax and DHTML applications using cross-browser widgets, a unique Web Expression Language and other open standards-based languages like HTML and CSS - without the use of Javascript. Appcelerator supports most languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl. ... (more)

Big Data Kills 30-Year-Old Market

Data Services Journal If you’ve got simply scads of data – and why wouldn’t you? – it’s doubling every 18 months – and are shuttling it to an application for analysis, you’re doing it wrong. That’s so…so, well, 1980. According to Aster Data, applications need to go to “Big Data,” not the other way around. And to do that the company’s got a massively parallel data-application server that can embed applications inside a massively scalable MPP data warehouse and analyze petabytes of data – or terabytes, if that’s all you’ve got – ultra-fast. Apps are automatically parallelized for scale; users can take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data. The widgetry runs on a cluster of commodity boxes. Figure five servers to start although parallelized applications can utilize terabytes of memo... (more)

The 'Internet of Things' and Data Analytics By @MapR | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]

The Internet of Things is tied together with a thin strand that is known as time. Coincidentally, at the core of nearly all data analytics is a timestamp. When working with time series data there are a few core principles that everyone should consider, especially across datasets where time is the common boundary. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Jim Scott, Director of Enterprise Strategy & Architecture at MapR Technologies, will discuss single-value, geo-spatial, and log time series data. By focusing on enterprise applications and the data center, he will use OpenTSDB as an example to explain some of these concepts including when to use different storage models. Speaker Bio: Jim Scott, Director of Enterprise Strategy & Architecture at MapR Technologies, has held positions running Operations, Engineering, Architecture and QA teams in the Consumer Packaged... (more)

Cloud People: A Who's Who of Cloud Computing

Behind every cloud service or cloud-based solution, there are real people... A robust ecosystem of solutions providers has emerged around cloud computing. But who are the CEOs & CTOs behind those providers, who are the internal and external entrepreneurs driving companies involved in the Cloud, who are the leading engineers, developers, analysts, researchers, marketing professionals, authors...who, in short, are the people behind the cloud? This list will be updated weekly between now and November 4-7, 2013, when 13th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley opens its doors in the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. Here are some highly prominent "Cloud People" to kick off with... RANDY BIAS | @randybias "Randy Bias is visionary. He sees things others don't." [Emphasis added.] That is how Mårten Mickos puts it, as succinctly as ever.... (more)

Rackspace Cloud APIs Open Sourced

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer Rackspace Hosting Thursday open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. It says it worked with developers in an open community to create the specifications and they can now copy, implement and modify the specs, which Rackspace figures should help enable a "truly open cloud." Of course Eucalyptus already offers an open source cloudware. Eucalyptus Systems CTO Rich Wolski said he welcomed Rackspace's decision to provide its client-side tools as open source because it will help achieve cloud interoperability. Rackspace is also making its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C# and Ruby available under the MIT license. The source code is up on GitHub, a public software versioning system, at http://github.com/rackspace, where external developers can con... (more)

GMA Coverage of Pacquiao-Clottey Fight a Disgrace

The good news is that people are able to watch Manny Pacquiao's fights here in the Philippines free of charge, on the leading broadcast television network, GMA. The bad news is that GMA shamelessly fills its coverage with enough commercials to choke an elephant. Estimates of poverty in the Philippines vary, but it's realistic to say that 40% of the country's 92 million people fall below a poverty line no matter where it's drawn. Another 20% or so struggle to have more than one meal a day. About 25 million fall into an emerging "middle class," but this is a middle class along the lines of the US in 1963. So even though the pay-per-view theaters and coliseums were full today with fans of Pambansang Kamao (the National Fist), generally paying between $5 and $20 apiece, the reality is that the vast majority of people here watched the fight on GMA. And GMA was utterly disg... (more)

Delivering Breakthrough Performance with 802.11ac

Consumers are continuing to adopt multiple connected devices and video content is expected to reach more than 70 percent of global traffic. This growth and the increased reliance on wireless networks is putting stress on existing 802.11a/b/g/n networks. As a result of this high usage, users are likely to experience deteriorated performance, choppy videos and slower load times. At a time when IT managers report that network users are now averaging more than one Wi-Fi connected device per person, solutions to handle the rapid growth of devices are at a premium. The next generation of the 802.11 standard, or IEEE 802.11ac, promises to finally break the wireless Ethernet gigabit barrier. This technology will deliver higher bandwidth while retaining better quality of experience (QoE) for end users, and is expected to be adopted rapidly into all markets: residential, ent... (more)

Choosing Your First Programming Language

By BryanHalfpap Many new programmers struggle when it comes to selecting their first language to learn.  Which is easiest, the most professionally useful, the most newbie-friendly?  Lets find out by showing you a range of options, their strengths and weaknesses, and some information about the most common programming languages in demand today.  At the end, we’ll make some recommendations and you’ll understand a bit more about why they were chosen. The Task At Hand Every job requires the right kind of tool, and each programming language can be thought of as a separate tool.  Just like some tools are good for hammering nails, driving screws, and leveling screws, some programming languages are innately more suitable than others for tasks like designing a website, interpreting text, or reacting to user input. Lets go through a few common use cases: Language Typical Us... (more)

Red Hat Named "Platinum Sponsor" of Virtualization Conference & Expo

Red Hat is a  trusted open source provider.  Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training, and consulting services worldwide to help enterprises take full advantage of the value of open source technology. For more information, please visit www.redhat.com/                   Red Hat CTO Delivers Virtualization Keynote Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote entitled "The Future of the Virtual Enterprise" at SYS-CON's  Virtualization Conferenc... (more)