Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Ruby, Linux, Turing, and Windows 8 – Weekend must-read articles #18

Weekend reading

That’s quite a mix, isn’t it? Ruby, Linux, Turing, and Windows 8. But there’s even more: Jira, HyperCard, and Flamer, as well. We take a slightly different approach this week and bring you a wild mix of interesting reading on various topics from around the interwebs. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this eclectic mix while you enjoy your weekend.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

This week’s suggested reading

Ruby and the myth of developer productivity

Recently I was in a conference room with the CIO of a large corporation and representatives from a vendor that provides a somewhat unrelated product. The corporation’s software is mainly in Java. For some reason, in the middle of the discussion, one of the vendor’s 20-something presales engineers started pitching that the company rewrite all of its software in Ruby.

Delivering the Windows 8 Release Preview

Windows 8 Release Preview is available for download in 14 languages. This is our final pre-release, and includes Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, new Windows 8 apps for connecting to Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger (and many more), and hundreds of new and updated apps in the Windows Store. Since our first preview release last September, millions of people now use the pre-release product on a daily basis and millions more have been taking it through its paces, totaling hundreds of millions of hours of testing. We genuinely appreciate the effort that so many have put into pre-release testing, and of course, we appreciate the feedback too. Direct feedback and feedback through usage contributed to hundreds of visible changes in the product and tens of thousands of under-the-hood changes.

Flamer: Highly Sophisticated and Discreet Threat Targets the Middle East

Over the past few days, we have been analyzing a potential new threat that has been operating discreetly for at least two years. We were contacted about this threat by Crysys who have released their own analysis. (The threat is referred to by CrySys as ‘Skywiper’). There are indications that W32.Flamer is also the same threat as described recently by the Iranian national cert. Our analysis of the retrieved samples reveals complex code that utilizes several components. At first glance, the executable appears to be benign but further inspection reveals cleverly concealed malicious functionality.

Design excuses and how to beat them

Overcome negative thinking and you’ll achieve your dreams. Si Jobling covers the more common design excuses and how to combat them. Have you found yourself with a back log of ideas you want to build but constantly use excuses to avoid them? Here are the top five excuses getting in your way and how you can overcome them …

How Banjo is finding success with geo-social discovery

Geo-social discovery apps were the “it” category at SXSW in March but for the most part they’ve fizzled, failing to catch on with mainstream consumers. But Banjo has been one of the lone exceptions, hitting 1 million downloads last month after launching last July, putting it on a faster initial adoption pace than Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. The company, which helps people find friends and others nearby, has a new update and downloads are up to 1.5 million across iOS, Androidand the web.

Fedora Linux capitulates to Microsoft boot certificate

In order to get its Linux distribution to run on the next generation of secured desktop computing hardware, the Fedora Project will obtain a digital signature from Microsoft, a developer from the project announced Wednesday. “This isn’t an attractive solution, but it is a workable one,” wrote Matthew Garrett in a blog post on Wednesday. “We came to the conclusion that every other approach was unworkable.” The next release of the open-source distribution, Fedora 18, due in November, will be the first version able to run on computers that use UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which requires the operating system to furnish a digital key before it can be run by the machine.

Turing and the Test of Time

The centenary of Alan Turing’s birth is being greeted by an extraordinary response, not only in mathematical and scientific circles but in a much wider public arena. It marks the awareness that he was one of the 20th century’s seminal figures, whose brief life is better appreciated in the 21st century than in his own.

25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web

Sometime around 1988, my landlady and I cut a deal. She would purchase a Macintosh computer, I would buy an external hard drive, and we would leave the system in the living room to share. She used the device most, since I did my computing on an IBM 286 and just wanted to keep up with Apple developments. But after we set up the Mac, I sat down with it one evening and noticed a program on the applications menu. “HyperCard?” I wondered. “What’s that?”

Jira 5.1 will focus on scalability for enterprise clients

According to Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, Jira dominates in enterprises. “Nine out of 10 Fortune 10 companies use Jira,” he said Thursday at the Atlassian Summit conference in San Francisco. Responding to large enterprises, Atlassian recently began offering dedicated enterprise support and interactive user training, company officials noted. Enterprise administration certification has been added as well.

You can also subscribe to these articles

You can also subscribe to these weekly articles and receive them in your email inbox each week.

Sign up here!

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Powerful transaction monitoring now complements the availability and real user [...]

Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Which One You Should Improve and Why

Tracking your website’s exit and bounce rates will give you insight into how [...]

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free