⇨ "Understanding ISO/F-Stop/Depth of Field" Videos

Three videos with simple explanation to photography concepts: ISO, F-Stop and Depth of Field

(via snapsort)

⇨ Zack Arias Reviews The Fuji X-Pro 1

The X was growing on me. I was walking the streets of a new place with two cameras and three lenses and never once tired of carrying this gear. It was hanging on my side or in a pocket. The weight of all of it was distributed around my person and I never felt it. No tired neck. No sore shoulder. Kick ass image quality. Lens choices. As long as I was methodical in my shooting the camera, and all of its quirks and laggy issues, were beginning to fade away.

I am searching for a camera with good image quality that I can bring with me anywhere (my DSLR is too big for that). I like the X-Pro 1's retro look, its size seems adequate and the IQ is outstanding:

The Fuji X-Pro 1 is a tempting camera...

⇨ Redis Persistence Demystified

And my feeling is that there is no Redis feature that is as misunderstood as its persistence.
— antirez

Talking about Redis, this is a very interesting article dissecting Redis persistence (with a light comparison to PostgreSQL).

⇨ Redis Storage Strategies Benchmark

An analysis of using Redis to store data by my former colleague Brice Laurencin:

Do not over think your data schema when storing to Redis, it is faster than you may think, and a simple software compression may help you contain your data growth.

I have used a little Redis for a pet project and it is a great key/value store. Its sorted set data structure is invaluable to store time-based data.

⇨ Arquillian 1.0 Is Released

Integration testing is hard but essential. It is hard to track down integration issues (due to a misunderstanding between the callee and the caller's contract/API/service) but that's where most of bugs are located from my own experience.
Unit tests with mocking does not help. Who cares about my expectations about what a contrat/API/service provides if it does not match the actual implementation. Testing in situ is the best way to check the actual behavior.

Arquillian is a fantastic tool to help write, execute and maintain integration tests.

Congratulations to the Arquillian team!

Joe McNally's "Sketching Light"

I received Joe McNally's Sketching Light. It is a gorgeous book full of nuggets to learn more about lighting a scene.

I prefer to take pictures with available light as I find the flash too intrusive. However this book makes me eager to experiment more: the possibilities offered by flashes open a whole new world of images.

⇨ Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion

This is a huge shift for Web startups: their exit strategy changes from being bought by Google to being bought by Facebook.

"Free-to-play is a Scam"

Notch (of Minecraft fame) talking about its next game Ox10c:

@KiiLLBOT f2p is a scam.

— Markus Persson (@notch) April 3, 2012

I don't understand the economics behind Free-to-play. I don't want to play games that cost even more through in-app purchases or which display ads.

I have not warmed up to Minecraft but I am looking forward to this game. Hard science fiction and duct tape: what's not to love!

⇨ Example of a JMS Queue Hosted in JBoss AS7

To familiarize myself with running tests in JBoss AS7, I have created the smallest Maven project which uses Arquillian to manage an instance of JBoss AS7 with HornetQ enabled, deploy a JMS queue in it and run a test.

Works from the shell or Eclipse.

⇨ WebSockets in IE10

Talking about WebSockets, it is nice to see that Internet Explorer will support them. This post provides a good and up-to-date explanation of WebSocket protocol.