Crinket.com

I found this little gem via Omar Shahine (http://www.shahine.com/omar/BrowserChooser.aspx).

It takes a couple of seconds on my computer to popup, so I am not sure if I will stick with it or not. However, if you routinely need to open links via email in different browsers you will find this to be very useful.

MonoTouch features a software development kit and a suite of compilers, libraries, and tools to integrate with the Apple iPhone SDK. Developers can take advantage of native iPhone APIs. A cross-compiler is included to turn .Net executable files and libraries into native applications for distribution on the Apple App Store or for deployment by enterprise iPhone users. Ahead-of-time compilation is used instead of a Just In Time compiler, enabling distribution in the Apps Store.

I am really looking forward to trying out MonoTouch. Even if it just enables simple LOB type applications it could be a game changer.

Database denormalization is the process of optimizing your database for reads by creating redundant data.

Dare Obasanjo has a good overview of why you would Denormalize your database and some of the tools available if you decide to go that route.

Interesting news today from Microsoft, which has created the CodePlex Foundation, and independent legal entity designed to facilitate contributions to open source projects, both from Microsoft and other software vendors and users.

Interesting times. Part of me wishes they would have used their resources and clout to help shape more of the existing OSS landscape, but having just a glimpse of what they would be up against, funding something new makes sense. Either way, for developers (especially in the .NET world) this is good news.

Today, we are open sourcing the non-blocking web server and the tools that power FriendFeed under the name Tornado Web Server. We are really excited to open source this project as a part of Facebook's open source initiative, and we hope it will be useful to others building real-time web services. Check out the announcement on the Facebook Developer Blog. You can download Tornado at tornadoweb.org.

Another interesting option in the world of python web dev.

The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind.  There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work.  Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web.  While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption.

The article is a bit biased since it was written by a contributor (Josh Fraser - http://www.onlineaspect.com/) to PubSubhubbub...but in the end I agree that PubSubHubbub is the better of the two.

If you create and consume feeds, I definitely recommend spending some time understanding these concepts since they are gaining a lot of traction.

Since it was already necessary to abandon data normalization and consistency to make these approaches work, we felt comfortable looking at more exotic, non-relational data stores. After considering HBase, Hypertable, Cassandra, Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant, Voldemort, and Dynomite, we settled on Cassandra.

This is a very interesting example of how Digg is experimenting with a NOSQL solution. Before Cassandra the functionality they are referencing required two queries which could take 15 seconds to execute. Now with Cassandra the results are returned almost instantly (however, as the post states with a much higher cost in disk space).

As an FYI, here is another link from someone at Digg with some more useful Cassandra info: http://arin.me/code/wtf-is-a-supercolumn-cassandra-data-model

With Google Voice, you receive SMS messages on your phones AND in your Google Voice inbox, which means you can send SMS replies from either from your mobile phone or your computer. Today, we're going one step further by allowing you to get text messages by email. After enabling SMS-to-email forwarding, every time you receive a new SMS on your Google Voice number, we will send you an email notification.

I have been using Google Voice for about a month now and I really like the service. Today they added bidirectional SMS support via email which is a very nice touch.