Several years ago I had the need of keep in sync three computers.  After some questions on a java mailing list, a very smart guy suggested me Unison.

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc). However, there are several points where it differs:[…]

read the rest on  Unison File Synchronizer.

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YASnippet is a template system for emacs. It allows you to type a abbrevation and automatically expand the abbreviation into function templates.

Bundled language templates includes: C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, LaTeX, HTML, CSS and more.

Yasnippet system is inspired from TextMate’s template system. You can use a tool to import any TextMate template you have to YASnippet.

via yasnippet - Google Code.

At Gioorgi.com we have used plenty of web frameworks.

Giovanni Giorgi used Seaside,  a lot of PHP frameworks, Java Struts, RubyOnRails, and Python Django.

We have started to look for Web2Py, a compact,  easy to learn  python web framework.

From the most notable feature, it runs also on Google App Engine. Written by an Italian University professor for teaching web development, spots a very clean design, and a robust security infrastructure. We  suggest it because installation (and upgrading) is a snap.

Let’s take a look to it…

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Released on June 8, 2009  Jython 2.5RC4 is out!

We have followed Jython in the past months, and it seems promising looking at the jython newsletter.

PHing Is Not GNU make; it's a project build system based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework. Features include file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.

via Phing.

iMacros - Web Automation, Web Testing and Web Scraping

Record & replay all web surfing activities

Automatically fill out web forms from a database

Automate uploads, downloads, and data extraction

iMacros is the only solution that works with websites that use Flash, Flex, Java and Silverlight

via iOpus | Web Browser Scripting, Web Testing, Web Scraping and Website Monitoring.

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In late 1994, when I need to write a programming language it was a pain. You must start with flex, lex and so on, and the way will be very long.

Then I found GCC was able to compile in a pseudo-machine language, already optimized. Then a set of backend was able to emit mc68000, 80x86, power pc code…

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Bupmed from ArchiveTeam, we have a shocked news:

Geocities was a once very popular web hosting service founded in 1994 and purchased by Yahoo in 1999. On April 2009, Yahoo announced they would be closing Geocities "later this year". Apparently, Yahoo will offer a means to export user data sometime this summer.

The news is also reported by TechCrunch:

Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion.[...]

GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.[…]

Hands-on We loved the Xandros based OS the Asus put on the original Eee PC for its simplicity and direct access to applications. Likewise Acer's version of Linpus, installed on the Linux versions of its Aspire One netbook. For 90 per cent of the tasks anyone's likely to perform on a netbook, they're spot on and allow the machines to boot up in under 20 seconds.

via The best netbook-friendly Linux distros • Register Hardware.

Yahoo has been a vociferous Apache Hadoop user and supporter for several years now, and uses it extensively within its Search technologies. Hadoop has been gaining popularity in the Cloud Computing space, with companies like the NYTimes converting 4TB and 11 million articles to PDFs in under 24 hours using Hadoop and EC2 in late 2007. Hadoop has been made available in Amazon's cloud and Yahoo has now released its own Hadoop version.

from Slashdot | Yahoo Releases Open Source Hadoop Distribution.

As processors become faster and multiprocessor systems become cheaper, the need to take advantage of multithreading in order to achieve full hardware resource utilization only increases the importance of being able to incorporate concurrency in a wide variety of application categories.

In this article we are evaluting a new approach to the concurrency. In the last five years computers are becoming even more parallel. Intel is pushing multi-core achiteture also on commodity personal computers. Neverless the computing power is ofter not well used: one again, hardware is a step head of our day-by-day software development. Remember when the 80286 came into light. The 286 was able to provide a multi-programming architecture but without memory management protection. We had to wait 386 hardware to see software working on preemptive multi-tasking, because software cannot cope with unprotected memory. In one word, it costs too much to develop a operating system without the new features the 80386 bring to us. What about concurrent programming? Can we look similarities in the  concurrency field?

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WinRun4j is a java launcher for windows. It is an alternative to javaw.exe and provides the following benefits:

• Uses an INI file for specifying classpath, main class, vm args, program args.

• Custom executable name that appears in task manager.

• Additional JVM args for more flexible memory use.

• Built-in icon replacer for custom icon.

• Pre-JVM splash screen with auto-hide.

• DDE implementation for file assocations.

• Windows NT Service wrapper.

• Windows EventLog API

• Console version

• JNI library for INI access, splash screen, logger, registry, shell.

• Support for 64-bit JVM.

• Supports embedding (inside the executable) the INI file. See Embedded Resources section below.

• Supports embedding a splash image.

• Supports embedding JAR files. These will be included in the classpath (without extraction). This is currently BETA quality.

• NEW: There is now an Eclipse Plugin for WinRun4J.

WinRun4J is licensed under the Common Public License (CPL).

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Often Customers require a way of ordering columns of small html table. This JQuery plugin offer a fast, and nice solution:

jQuery plugin: Tablesorter 2.0.