Today's Blog of the Day is "The Reader".
Everything about ebooks and readers - all the stuff I like. See at http://wowio.wordpress.com/
Here I discovered that Sony is assumably preparing new version of reader - PRS 505. From the changes that should be included, none is IMHO really so important. The memory capacity of the reader with SD cards (which are reaching 8GB these days) is much bigger than you ever will need. If I should pick some enhancements hat would make a huge difference, it would be:
Few nuggets from recent surfing and reading newsfeeds:
A very nice explanation of differences between Ruby Gem and Rails plugin in Arun Gupta's blog
The community seems to be still fairly divided on the "Is Vista good or bad" ? For the laters, read the story from the corporate IT point of view. I still have not found any good reason to upgrade :-).
Good story of how the experience of joining a project should not look like
If you try to deploy one of the Spring 2 samples included in the Spring framework source distribution - Petclinic on Tomcat 6 (6.0.14), the web application does not get loaded and fails with errror. The cause is the ClassNotFound exception for the class org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader, more precisely:
SEVERE: LifecycleException
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
After returning from holidays with completely drained PRS 500 (see field test blog entry), I have decided to test what is the battery life of the fully charged reader without any usage at all. It was easy as I was pretty busy after being away 3 weeks.
The reader was fully charged on 29th of August (24 hrs with wall charger). After that, I did not use it at all, only checked every 2-3 days the status (the reader was switched off except this brief check). As of Wednesday morning, September 19th the battery was drained and the reader switched itself off right away (it is being charged as I type this). This gives us about 3 weeks of available standby time, without any use from page turning, until the fully charged battery is completely drained.
Part of the technology upgrade in the three Java based projects is also tool update. We have started with Eclipse version 1 and gradually moved up to the currently used Eclipse 3.0. The build and deployment process was based on custom written Ant build script, which compiled, created WAR, deployed, undeployed, run the tests, created source snapshot - you name it. The Eclipse was used mostly as editor and debugger - using JPDA talking to Tomcat started in debug mode.
One of the many gadgets I have packed for the summer vacation was of course Sony Reader and SD card with nice selection of texts. It was fresh and fully charged, so I assumed that I will be well prepared for the gaps in program during the following three weeks ahead of us and for the long flights over Atlantic.
Obviously, the flight was first moment where Reader was used. During the 7 hours, I spent about 3-4 hours reading. We flew through the night, but the overhead spotlight in airplane was more than sufficient and the letters were very well readable. I also enjoyed the almost non-reflexive surface of the screen.
The combination of software allowing anonymous access to the Net, not too competent police officers and laws not quite 21st century ready can be a very dangerous combination. According this story, the operator of the Tor node was arrested by German police ...
I am quite curious how be would situation like this handled in Canada. First of all, would it happen ? Would the RCMP be more technically up to date than Deutsche Polizei ? What defines the responsibility of an operator of server, that moves encrypted content ? I am not crazy enough to try it out just to find out :-) - so no, I will not setup a TOR node (even if I do admire this cleverly designed piece of software).
Today's BOTD (Blog of the Day) is "Good Math, Bad math".
What it is about is summarized in its subtitle:
Finding the fun in good math. Squashing the bad math and the fools who promote it. There is no need to add anything to this.
Only maybe an URL: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/
For those of you who asked: I started to put up some images from Europe 2007 trip on Smugmug. Small subset of course (total amount with NEFs is almost 20 GB).
I will upload more as I get to weeding them out :-).