The Overview Effect

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

References On Security Technology

http://www.schneier.com/
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a "security guru," he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

http://www.seguranca-informatica.net/
A Portuguese blog by university professors on IT security with references to interesting articles and several links and feeds of other related sites, such as Schneier's blog.

Eclipse Fix for Broken Open Type Hierarchy

http://mschrag.blogspot.pt/2009/01/open-type-cant-find-your-class.html
Quit Eclipse, go to workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core and remove *.index and savedIndexNames.txt. When you restart Eclipse it will rebuild the entire type cache and life should be happy again.

Javamex

http://www.javamex.com/
A great set of tutorials, including advanced ones, on a broad set of Java topics such as threads, math, collections, regex and servlets. Although the design seems to be a bit outdated it nevertheless seems to provide a quality source for the beginner and the seasoned Java programmer.

Free Online Courses

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
OpenCulture has a wealth of free online courses links from top universities, 650 at the moment. Not only that, it also references free multimedia work such as books and movies.

https://www.coursera.org/
On a slightly different note, Coursera has partnered with universities in order to provide specific courses on its website.

www.khanacademy.org
One of the great free educational sites out there, Khan Academy provides their own free online courses and it also helps teachers manage their courses and students through their website.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

plato.stanford.edu
From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research.

Interaction Design Foundation

http://www.interaction-design.org/
A great resource for the field of interaction design, with contributors from top universities and companies such as Stanford, MIT, Google, Yahoo and IBM. Some of its mission objectives are to provide free and open access to top-grade educational materials on how to design technology and to educate technology designers on how to make more people-oriented and easy-to-use technology - like websites, household appliances, software applications, and mobile devices.

Pirate Bay Documentary Film Now Available On TPB

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/02/09/031250/pirate-bay-documentary-film-now-available-on-tpb
The documentary TPB AFK follows the creators of The Pirate Bay — Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm — through their technical and logistical trials of keeping TPB online as well as their court appearances in Sweden. After its premiere at Berlin International Film Festival, TechCrunch is reporting that TPB AFK is now available under a Creative Commons license for purchase, download on TPB, or viewing on YouTube. The budget for the film was raised on Kickstarter, where the makers achieved twice the funding goal in the allotted month-long funding campaign. The film already has 40,000 YouTube views, 19,000 torrent seeders, and over 2,000 paid downloads. There are public screenings happening world-wide.

UBS Prices and earnings 2012: Highest net wages in Zurich, Geneva and Luxembourg

http://www.ubs.com/global/en/about_ubs/about_us/news/news.html/en/2012/09/14/20120914a.html
An interesting comparison of salaries and living costs across 72 cities around the world. From the summary:

- Oslo, Tokyo and Zurich are the most expensive cities in the world
- Highest purchasing power in Zurich, Sydney and Luxembourg
- Food costs five times as much in Tokyo as in Mumbai
- Paris, Lyon and Copenhagen have the shortest working hours

IBM developerWorks Java Page

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/
A great resource for both the novice and the seasoned Java developer. It seems to be really well written, gently introducing the reader into the several Java technologies.

A Quick JavaServer Faces Tutorial

http://balusc.blogspot.pt/2011/01/jsf-20-tutorial-with-eclipse-and.html
BalusC, a knowledgeable Java user at Stack Overflow, has a great JavaServer Faces development tutorial using Eclipse and Glassfish. In the end, he adds several other sources to continue on learning.

The Human Brain Project

http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/index.html
An ambitious, European-lead effort to revolutionize the study of the brain. Among other goals, it aims to provide a way of testing new drugs in a computer-simulated brain and to develop new electronics that mimic the way the brain works.

The A to Z of Social Media for Academia

http://www.andymiah.net/2012/12/30/the-a-to-z-of-social-media-for-academics/
An interesting list of resources not only for research work in itself but also for the media and social aspects related to academic research and knowledge dissemination. Although I have not tried it yet, I would add to the list Prezi, http://prezi.com/, a new way of building presentations that make them more like an animation. Some of these resources may seem a bit unnecessary or overkill but they nevertheless seem to point the way academic research will be done in the near future.

Java List Remove Method is Optional

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/List.html#remove(int)
Removes the element at the specified position in this list (optional operation)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4243786/how-to-remove-element-from-java-util-list
The top answer to this question provides an interesting solution:

public void removeImage(int index) { 
    if (images != null) {
         try { 
            images.remove(index); 
         } catch (UnsupportedOperationException uoe) { 
            images = new ArrayList(images); 
            images.remove(index); 
         }
    }
}

Topics on Java EE 7

http://jdevelopment.nl/open-source/java-ee-7-progress-page/
Some interesting topics and links to articles related to the forthcoming Java EE 7.

Here are the main links, according to this source (blog url corrected):

Main JSR: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=342
Public project home: http://java.net/projects/javaee-spec
The Aquarium Java EE 7 Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/

European Transport Research and Innovation Portal

http://www.transport-research.info/web/index.cfm
The Transport Research & Innovation Portal (TRIP) gives you an overview of research activities at European and national level.

Drunk Rats Could Overturn Neurological Orthodoxy

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.pt/2013/01/drunk-rats-could-overturn-neurological.html
A form of brain abnormality long regarded as permanent is, in fact, sometimes reversible, according to an unassuming little paper with big implications.

Here's the key data: some rats were given a lot of alcohol for four days (the "binge"), and then allowed to sober up for a week. Before, during and after their rodent Spring Break, they had brain scans. And these revealed something remarkable - the size of the rats' lateral ventricles increased during the binge, but later returned to normal.

This is really pretty surprising. The ventricles are simply fluid-filled holes in the brain. Increased ventricular size is generally regarded as a sign that the brain is shrinking - less brain, bigger holes - and if the brain is shrinking that must be because cells are dying or at least getting smaller. So bigger ventricles is bad. Or so we thought... but this study shows that it might not always be true: alcohol reversibly increases ventricular volume over a timescale of days. It does so, the authors say, essentially by drying brain tissue out; like most things, if you dry the brain out, it gets smaller (and the ventricles get bigger) but when the water comes back to the tissues, it expands again.

125 Years of National Geographic

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/01/125_years_of_national_geograph.html

Spring Data JPA Tutorials

http://www.petrikainulainen.net/spring-data-jpa-tutorial/
The goal of the Spring Data JPA is to make the implementation of data access layer easier and faster. (...) This tutorial is based on Spring Data JPA 1.0.2 (...)

Part One: Configuration describes how you can get the required dependencies with Maven and configure your application.
Part Two: CRUD helps you to implement a simple CRUD application by using Spring Data JPA.
Part Three: Custom Queries with Query Methods describes how you can create custom queries by adding query methods to your repository interfaces.
Part Four: JPA Criteria Queries teaches you to create dynamic queries by using the JPA Criteria API.
Part Five: Querydsl describes how you can create custom queries with Querydsl and Spring Data JPA.
Part Six: Sorting describes how you can sort your query results.
Part Seven: Pagination helps you to paginate your query results.
Part Eight: Adding Functionality to a Repository describes how you can add custom functions to a single repository.
Part Nine: Conclusions evaluates the usefulness of Spring Data JPA, gives recommendations about its usage and provides links to useful resources.

http://blog.springsource.org/2011/02/10/getting-started-with-spring-data-jpa/
In the course of this blog post we have reduced the amount of code to be written for repositories to two interfaces with 3 methods and a single line of XML. We have type safe CRUD methods, query execution and pagination built right in. The cool thing is that this is not only working for JPA based repositories but also for non-relational databases.


http://blog.jeroenreijn.com/2011/07/getting-started-with-mongodb-and-spring.html
MongoDB is as they describe it on their website: A scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database.

Spring Data makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data access technologies such as non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud based data services as well as provide improved support for relational database technologies. Spring Data is an umbrella open source project which contains many subprojects that are specific to a given database.

c:forEach vs ui:repeat in Facelets

http://www.ninthavenue.com.au/blog/c:foreach-vs-ui:repeat-in-facelets
The most important thing to understand about the jstl tags in Facelets is that they do not represent components and never become a part of the component tree once the view has been built. Rather, they are tags which are actually responsible for building the tree in the first place. Once they have done their job they expire, are no more, cease to be, etc etc.