The Blit (originally named the Jerq!) was an early graphical user interface, connected to a UNIX computer. Inspired by the Xerox Alto from the early 1970s, creators Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi wanted to make a graphics machine for use at Bell Labs that would have the usability of the Xerox, but with the processing power of a 1981 computer. Created using a Motorola microprocessor instead of a Bell one, the machine would be retooled for the commercial market (business market, because it was still expensive) as the AT&T; 5620, which came out in 1984 — using a Western Electric WE32000 microprocessor. The Blit had a vertically-oriented display and an early mouse peripheral; this video explains how it worked.

WePay is a Y Combinator-backed startup originally formed mostly to make it easier for groups to collect money and make payments together. But it’s recently gone beyond just helping out groups, providing an ultra-simple platform for anyone to collect and manage payments online. It’s added support for event registration and ticketing, custom invoicing, donations, and e-commerce. A few weeks ago, it even rolled out a white-label payments API and lowered its prices to court third-party developers and better compete against PayPal and others.

Now the company is making it even easier for websites to collect money, sell goods, or receive donations, by offering up a way to accept payments right on a client’s website. For site owners, adding a WePay Payment Button is as easy as embedding a YouTube video — they merely add a small cut-and-paste piece of code to the site.

Many people who have managed projects with hours have a hard time understanding why story points are better. They have failed to understand some fundamental data that has been published for over 20 years in the industry literature as well as the latest research.

First, let's look at the latest data on project failures. Failure rates are increasing for IT projects during the current disruption of the global financial system. The latest Standish group analysis shows that agile projects have three times the success rate of traditional projects. Jim Johnson now recommends agile practice be used universally on all projects.

Here are a couple of quick tips for writing more robust shell scripts from my last 10 years of working with bash.

PROBLEM: You are a web programmer. You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of "score" to sort by.

...

CORRECT SOLUTION: Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter.

HTTP already has its own authentication system, and there are hundreds — perhaps thousands — of tools that know how to work with it. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to use that in our own scripts, but have something communicate with the services using OAuth behind the scenes? Thus, foauth.org was born.

Rather than try to build a bunch of bells and whistles and make everything really complicated, we focused on just one task: taking OAuth out of the equation when accessing your own data. So, unlike Apigee, we’re not monitoring your API usage or promising any statistics or anything like that. Our goal is to help you login with OAuth-compliant services using HTTP Basic authentication. That’s it.

Sikuli is a visual technology to automate and test graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). Sikuli includes Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API's support. You can programmatically control a web page, a Windows/Linux/Mac OS X desktop application, or even an iphone or android application running in a simulator or via VNC.

Nexus manages software “artifacts” required for development, deployment, and provisioning. If you develop software, Nexus can help you share those artifacts with other developers and end-users. Maven’s central repository has always served as a great convenience for users of Maven, but it has always been recommended to maintain your own repositories to ensure stability within your organization. Nexus greatly simplifies the maintenance of your own internal repositories and access to external repositories. With Nexus you can completely control access to, and deployment of, every artifact in your organization from a single location.

The Nexus book.

Rundeck is an open-source process automation and command orchestration tool with a web console.

Dispatch shell commands and scripts across all your physical or virtual nodes from a web-based or command-line interface. Automate ad-hoc and routine procedures. Use the API and plugins to integrate with other services. Use your LDAP/AD for authentication, and configure extensive access control.

Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a free open source neural network library, which implements multilayer artificial neural networks in C with support for both fully connected and sparsely connected networks. Cross-platform execution in both fixed and floating point are supported. It includes a framework for easy handling of training data sets. It is easy to use, versatile, well documented, and fast. Bindings to more than 15 programming languages are available. An easy to read introduction article and a reference manual accompanies the library with examples and recommendations on how to use the library. Several graphical user interfaces are also available for the library.