Some time ago I did a small review of the changes in the Firefox 4 beta. If you go to download Firefox right now you will be downloading Firefox 13. I’m sure you have noted that the releases of Firefox and other browsers have been increasing. You can go a step farther and download pre-released versions of most browsers. For Firefox you have Firefox Beta, Aurora, and Nightly, which at the time of this posting is version 16.

One of the things that really gets me excited about my new job is being able to use new technology. Sure, sometimes new technology is risky but I see groups befitting more then failing due to using newer technology. As always when talking about new technology, NoSQL seems to come up because there are a good number of people switching parts (or all) of their application to use NoSQL databases to get by limits or to help with scalability issues.

If you look around the news you will always hear about some big name that has been hacked and had their password database compromised. In recent news, this has happened to many people like these guys and them, but if you keep looking you’ll find tons more. The topic of security and how you are storing passwords always comes up, but this is not the point of this posting. I wanted to take this time to point out a Mozilla based project which helps in this area.

Last week was a busy week for me, I’m just getting time right now to sit down and write about my take a ways from No Fluff Just Stuff. For the people that are not familiar with No Fluff Just Stuff it’s a conference based around Java technologies. It takes place allover and happens on the weekend which makes it an easier sell to your managers or higher ups. I’ve been lucky enough to have gone to 3 of them and I always learn about great new things.

I haven’t done too much publishing of web applications for my own stuff. At work we have an Ops team that deals with setup and deployment of our code. I have used Rackspace cloud and AWS for setting up servers before but mostly just for testing and nothing for production. As a developer I want to focus on the code and not fine tune an application server. I want to be able to write code, push it out and scale without putting much thought in to it.

This has been a posting that I been putting off for some time now. noSQL is a great topic but the more you look in to it the more there is. noSQL covers a lot of technologies and ideas, some very new, and some that been around for a bit. I’m hoping this posting wets your appetite for knowing more about noSQL. One thing I will say to start off with, noSQL is a buzzword, plain and simple.

I really don’t like writing about games because I don’t play that many of them. When a game comes along that is good AND free, it makes it very easy to get into. Recently Team Fortress 2 has become free to play through Steam. This is a first person shooter (FPS) in the play style of Unreal Tournament and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory but with a very cartoony feeling to it. For me, this feature makes the game more enjoyable than just playing UT or W:ET.

One of the things I forgot to talk about in my “A look in to nodeJS” posting was what originally got me looking at nodejs. I had been seeing nodejs pop up here and there and I kind of wanted to learn more about it, but it wasn’t really on the top of my list. I always check www.thriftebook.com to see if there are any new deals for ebooks. Sometimes, O’Reilly has deals that you can get videos too.

NodeJS is a new take on a way to build scalable network services. Note that I didn’t say web applications as nodeJS can do far more then just web apps. I’ve heard of people making IRC chats servers and DNS servers. So the capabilities of nodeJS go beyond just making web apps, but for myself this is my primary interests in nodeJS, but more precisely being able to make real time web apps.

I have always heard good things about Git, how its solves a lot of problem other version control system have along with being very fast. Sadly, at my past jobs, we only used SVN and never really had good workflow as the developers would all work on separate projects. I started looking into Git on and off, it’s hard to fully learn something you know that you are not going to be able to use in your group.