iWeb Tech News Highlights
iWeb reports from VM World
As leaders in innovation, iWeb couldn’t miss the chance to attend one of the world’s biggest IT shows, VM World, which took place in San Francisco from August 26-30.
Focusing on discussions around virtualization, cloud solutions and the future of information technology, the event filled three halls in the Moscone Center, housed dozens of innovators and technology leaders, and welcomed thousands of IT specialists from around the world.
In amongst the crowd, delegates were eager to discover and discuss what is around the corner in the IT market for 2013 and beyond. With five days of sessions and labs, there was plenty to keep people interested and inspired. Two recurring themes throughout the conference were the latest developments in cloud computing and the implications of post-PC hardware for businesses and organisations.
Debating the hybrid cloud
Ten years ago, most people looked at virtualization with scepticism, but today most tier-3 and tier-4 applications are virtualized and major players like Microsoft, Citrix and VMware are well established in the field. So with virtualization now taken as given, attention has turned to the cloud. More precisely, the private cloud.
A new take on the already popular public cloud environment, the private cloud targets all the advantages of cloud computing while seeking to create a more controlled infrastructure in order to tackle certain security problems that showed up during the evolution of the public cloud.
The big question when creating a private cloud infrastructure, which was fervently debated at the conference, is which elements need to be public and which need to be private. This mix of private and public – known as the hybrid cloud – incorporates instances of the public cloud within the fabric of the private cloud to quickly achieve as many of the desired advantages as possible. For example, disaster recovery and the creation of an on-the-fly, scalable solution for high traffic peaks.
The post-PC era
In the post-PC era, tablets and smartphones have quickly become essential business tools, empowering users to work and communicate in a more convenient and efficient manner than ever before. This has important implications for the people responsible for leveraging the benefits new hardware can deliver.
As well as offering flexibility to the end user, the ability to incorporate heterogeneous platforms into a solution also offers IT departments more flexibility when looking at organizations’ many requirements. These days, tablets, smartphones and laptops can be sourced, mixed and matched from different vendors, and different equipment provided from one employee to another depending on their particular needs.
For business IT, this complexity opens up both opportunities and challenges. VM World provided ample opportunity for delegates to get informed about the possibilities and start thinking about how to tailor access and applications to individual users while ensuring that critical data is secured from falling into the wrong hands.
As a showcase for ever-expanding horizons and opportunities, VM World provided the healthy combination of lots of ideas and little consensus, with the exception of the common sentiment that these remain exciting times for IT specialists. With such a growing interest in the private and hybrid cloud, it will be intriguing to see the evolution that takes place between now and next year’s conference. As ever, only time will tell.
By Eric Sarault, B.Eng @VMWorld2012
VM World Europe takes place October 9-11 in Barcelona, Spain.
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Rapid prototyping, Hadoop, pattern matching in python, open source microblogging
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 12th, here are the highlights:
- FlairBuilder is a very interesting prototyping tool for user interface designers. Unlike Balsamiq or iPlotz, FlairBuilder makes it possible to create actionable prototypes
- Hadoops sorts a Terabyte of data in 62 seconds
- Laconica is an open source micro-blogging platform. Interesting if you want to provide a Twitter-like service for your employees or for an organization
- Python programmers: Pattern matching in Python
iWeb Tech News Highlights: social app for the entreprise, habits of highly effective developers, CouchDB on Wheels, botnets
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 11th, here are the highlights:
- CubeTree is a new interesting application which has the same features as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, but for the Entreprise. Think intranets, Q&As, as well as project management
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective developers
- Botnet master hits kill switch, takes down 100,000 PCs
- an interesting experiment: CouchDB on Wheels
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Twitter search, network capacity, Google chart
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 7th, here are the highlights:
- Twitter will start indexing links for search, which will turn into a competitor to Google Search
- 2 different reports show that the telecommunications industry is out of capacity for the Internet, at its current growing rate, while another analysis shows that networks infrastructure spending is booming.
- Draw beautiful charts with Google Chart, through a javascript library
- Estonia planning 100Mbps Internet connections for its net-izens
iWeb Tech News Highlights: the end of RSS, a mini-Google in Ruby, and notes for software designers
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 6th, here are the highlights:
- TechCrunchIT writes that it’s the end for RSS
- Ilya Grigorik’s presentation on building a “mini-Google” in Ruby at RailsConf
- Sid Meier, an icon in games development, lists his rules for software design and development. It’s interesting if you are a programmer, a designer or a even a web entrepreneur.
iWeb Tech News Highlights: web marketing, F.lux, micropreneurs
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 5th, here are the highlights:
- Creating Buzz 101 for websites: from 0 to Forbes in under a week
- F.lux: software to make better lighting for your computer
- a micropreneur’s perspective: Selling physical products vs digital products
- BlackBerry Curve more popular than the iPhone
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Client-side frameworks, SMS, Ethernet
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 4th, here are the highlights:
- A list of client-side frameworks (mostly Javascript frameworks, but also other frameworks like Flex)
- The L.A. Times tells why text messages are limited to 160 characters (and in a way, why we have 140 characters now for services like Twitter or identi.ca)
- Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? an article at MacWorld, about the popularity of WiFi networks
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Commercial databases, FF3.5, Django, Facebook haystack
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 1st, here are the highlights:
- A blog post discusses the value of commercial databases (Oracle, MS SQL) vs open-sourced databases (MySQL, PostregreSQL, sqlite…). The author argues using Oracle is only justified in only 1% of cases.
- New features for the 3.5 version of Firefox.
- jspern is a mini-framework for Django to create REST APIs
- Facebook: efficient storage of billions of photos. The blog post at the Facebook engineering blog has more details about their Haystack system (servers, software, protocols etc.)
- Ars Technica: Twitter’s growth can’t be sustained
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Google Maps API, Internet Warfare, TokuDB
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 29th, here are the highlights:
- Edushi is a Google maps mashup with 3D visuals. It’s impressive and lets us see what can be done with the Google Maps API.
- The new ground zero in Internet Warfare
- Tokutek’s TokuDB claims to speed up MySQL by a factor of 10
iWeb Tech News Highlights: product leverage, advertising, CSS with Compass
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 27th, here are the highlights:
- How to leverage product development for your web company
- How much ads cost is an article revealing rates if you want to advertise on different media (TV, cable, magazine, Internet, radio). This is especially useful if you want to put ads on your website and negotiate with advertisers
- Compass is a CSS framework (video tutorial on how to use it)
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Wireframes, Apache Optimization, Windows 7
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 23rd, here are the highlights:
- I ? wireframes is a blog/slideshow referencing interesting wireframes patterns
- How to optimize your website with mod_deflate
- Massive botnet, 2 million infected. The new network is operated out of Ukraine
- Microsoft Windows 7 is a gift to Google, writes Silicon Alley Insider
iWeb Tech News Highlights: CSS for programmers, the Pirate Bay, memcached
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 20th, here are the highlights:
- Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design, with a few guidelines for those new to web design
- The team behind the Pirate Bay were found guilty last Friday. The trial was symbolic of the fight between the music industry and common practices on the Internet (file-sharing and downloading)
- peep is a new tool that allows a sys-admin to see what’s currently in memcached
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Gzip, Github issue tracker, Passenger for Nginx
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 17th, here are the highlights:
- Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step, just by gzipping served content
- GitHub Issue Tracker, a new feature at the code repository service, that will allow developers to manage issues, with a Gmail-like clean interface
- Phusion’s One Year Anniversary Gift: Phusion Passenger 2.2.0. Phusion has released a new version of Passenger that works with nginx. Previously, it was only available for the Apache web server. Good news for Rails developers, who now have more deployment choices.
- Google Shows a 3% Sequential Dip In Revenues: First One Ever. Google also layed off recently engineers and workforce, and stopping recruiting
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Computing History, Successful User Interfaces, steps to virtualization
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 16th, here are the highlights:
- 10 Development that changed the Face of computing, highlighting revolutionary technologies such as the Internet, Photoshop, Unix, and graphical operating systems
- 8 Characteristics of Successful User Interfaces. The Usability Post blog shows a few guiding principles if you’re building the front-end and the user interface of an application
- Six Steps to a successful virtualization deployement. Ars Technica sums up comments and advices by its community on how to use virtualization software on servers.
iWeb Tech News Highlights: preventing XSS Attacks, Cheat Sheets, voip platform
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 15th, here are the highlights:
- How To Prevent XSS Attacks. Preventing XSS attacks is especially important these days, especially in the light of the Twitter worm which happened this weekend
- 70+ Practical Cheat Sheet For Web Designers and Web Developers, covering most popular platforms and technologies
- Tropo.com is a new web service which allows you to add telephony functions to your website, through an API
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Search Engine Optimization, php, Google Analytics
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 9th, here are the highlights:
- Search Engine Optimization Tips by Gabriel Weinberg, who runs a search engine
- 10 Reasons why php is still better than Ruby
- Google Analytics might bring 40% of websites down, later this year
iWeb Tech News Highlights: checklists, Continuous deployements, twitter, and newspapers’ future
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 8th, here are the highlights:
- Smashing Magazine publishes a QA checklist which will help you when launching a website. To be compared with the Web Application checklist published on the iWeb blog.
- a podcast with Timothy Fitz (imvu), and the benefits of continuous deployements in software engineering.
- Twitter traffic explodes, and not being driven by the usual suspects (comscore)
- Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, tells newspapers how to run their business. M. Schmidt hinted at advertising, micropayments and subscriptions for the newspapers’ business model
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Facebook Haystack, url shorteners, notifications, and new broadband
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 6th, here are the highlights:
- Facebook has deployed a new architecture to deal with the billions of photos uploaded by users. It’s called Haystack and there’s an interesting article here detailing the setup
- Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us, writes why url shorteners such as tinyurl or bit.ly are bad the Internet
- User Experience design at Mozilla.org: designing Notifications that integrate with the user’s flow
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Effective design elements, Conficker Eye Chart, Hulu and hackers
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 3rd, here are the highlights:
- Smashing Magazine once again publishes a massive post: 10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques
- If you are worried about Conficker on your PC, here’s a Conficker eye chart, which will allow you to see if your computer is potentially infected or not
- Hulu tries HTML encoding trick to protect streaming content. A programmer found quickly a work-around though
- Digg has launched DiggBar. There’s nothing revolutionnary in the diggbar, however, if you have a portal or a media website, the concept of a browser bar (à la StumbleUpon or Facebook or Digg) can be interesting to keep users in your portal.
iWeb Tech News highlights: Firefox 3, open source software, remote kill switches
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 1st, here are the highlights:
- Firefox 3’s market share now exceeds IE7’s
- a list of 25 Highly anticipated open source releases coming this year
- Ericsson is launching a new broadband wireless card which allows a remote kill switch. It’s for laptop users who would want to disable their laptop in case it gets stolen
- Lots of worry but minimal impact so far for the Conficker worm. The story sounds a lot like the Y2K drama
iWeb Tech News Highlights: ui interfaces, iPhone app for Skype, youtube-like growth
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 30th, here are the highlights:
- 10 Creative & RIch UI interfaces and how to create them
- Skype has released an iPhone application. ReadWriteWeb writes that Skype might be the biggest winner from the web2.0 era
- If you are starting a website, and looking for ways to jumpstart its growth, Jawed Karim tells how YouTube started off
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Tech History, Zend, Advertising
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 26th, here are the highlights:
- The odd fate of 25 legendary tech products and services, on Technologizer
- Zend Framework Hello World Dependency Graph (gif). To be compared with other php frameworks
- If you are a publisher, there’s an interesting article on New York Times on the value of clicks and new companies collecting user behavior
- How Google routes around outages
- All five smartphones survive the PWN2OWN hacker competition
iWeb Tech News Highlights: fast polling, first Linux Botnet, Flash vulnerabilities
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 25th, here are the highlights:
- Fast polling using C, memcached, nginx, and libevent, by the development team at plurk
- Psyb0t is the first Linux botnet, targeting routers, broadband equipment and other MIPS devices
- If you’re interested in building a geo-aware service, here’s a free database of geolocated IP addresses
- HP SWFScan is an utility by the HP Security Laboratory to help developers find security vulnerabilities in files produced on the Adobe Flash platform.
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Skype, traffic for web2.0 apps, and open source components for the iPhone
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 24th, here are the highlights:
- Skype goes corporate with SIP Support, allowing small and big businesses to benefit from Skype low-cost telephony. Another article explains how Skype goes around corporate firewalls
- How to get traffic for your web2.0 application
- The Three20 Project, where an iPhone developer wants to offer open source components for iPhone app development
iWeb Tech News Highlights: Internet advertising, XSS, faster code, contextual UI, and iPhone applications
The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 23th, here are the highlights:
- Why Advertising is failing on the Internet, an opinion piece on TechCrunch
- XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) Prevention Cheat Sheet
- How to write Fast Code (turns out to be optimizing for less code than optimized code)
- Contextual User Interfaces
- Another blog post on how the iPhone is the next desktop platform

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