Friday 5 – Inspiring coding, MongoDB hating and Kim Dotcom’s new venture

A busy week for the JAX editorial team. JAX London was a blast to cover and chatting to some industry luminaries such as Doug Cutting, Tim Berglund and Martijn Verburg was certainly a highlight for myself. You’ll see those videos soon but today we’re feeling a bit sad that it’s all over.
Not to worry, Friday 5 will hopefully cheer us all up!

1. Let There Be Code

Now this is inspiring. Hat tip to Geertjan Wielenga for notifying us of the work of the organisers behind the 2012 Blind and Visually Impaired Computer Programming (BVIP 2012) camp at the Washington State School for the Blind. The video highlight teachers and students learning to write computer software using the Sodbeans IDE, a derivative of NetBeans, and the Quorum programming language. A fantastic initiative that we think deserves extra visibility

2. Why you hating on MongoDB?

The NoSQL battlelines have been drawn. If recent surveys are to be believed, two NoSQL databases have risen to the top – 10gen’s MongoDB and Apache Cassandra (Datastax) yet they’re not really comparable. Both have their merits and use cases, yet we’re seeing a lot of negative blogposts about the former. Here’s yet another one from Todd Cullen in a sea of opinions about MongoDB’s frailties and why he’s sticking to SQL for now. Do you agree with him?

3. Megaupload over. Now just Mega

You apparently can’t keep Kim Dotcom and his band of partners down. 2012 has been a bit of a whirlwind for the controversial German-born entrepreneur. Still indicted by the US government and awaiting extradition, Dotcom then dreamt up a Spotify rival Megabox and bizarrely had time to release an album in that time. 

His next move, revealed to Wired, is Mega – described “as a unique tool that will solve the liability problems faced by cloud storage services, enhance the privacy rights of internet users, and provide themselves with a simple new business.” Despite deleting the word upload, comparisons to the notorious file-sharing company of old will be made, with many claiming it’s just a reboot to get round the lengthy list of legal issues that Megaupload fell foul of. We shall wait to see if that’s the case, but Megabox hasn’t appeared yet, so it could merely be a way of Dotcom staying in the public eye.

4. Google value plummets thanks to accidental email

Always be wary of clicking send. Google’s shares were suspended yesterday, after an unfinished email detailing their latest quarterly results found its way to the US stock market authorities. The email, showing Google’s poor financial performance even had PENDING LARRY QUOTE at the top (referring to Google’s chief executive Larry Page) showing it wasn’t ready for eyes outside of the company. 

The impact was felt quickly, as Google’s stock fell 9% before trading ended, knocking $20bn off the value of the search engine giant. They’re pointing the blame at financial printer PR Donnelly for the pre-emptive filing according to the Guardian’s Charles Arthur. The perils of flotation surface again, after Facebook’s tentative opening on the stock market. Have the tech behemoths lost their lustre or are we reading too much into it?

5. JSON Editor Online

And finally this tool is getting a lot of attention on Reddit, although mainly because people are discussing the merits of JSON and it existing in the first place. A neat experiment meaning you can view, edit and format the JSON data-interchange format. A really nice UI, plus it’s all open source. Check it out

That’s your lot for this week – have a good weekend!