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Caldera

Submission + - Dan Lyons Repents Over SCO Reporting

Submitted by
Groklaw Reader
Groklaw Reader writes: "Dan Lyons, long known for his stories claiming that SCO's cases had merit, has finally repented. With SCO in bankruptcy, he's finally admitted that "the geeks were right" and it's time for him to "eat crow." While it might just be a cynical ploy to troll for more page views, he could just as easily do that without admitting error—Maureen O'Gara, for example, still believes in SCO, even after all this. Besides, why pass up an opportunity to say "I told you so!"?"
Biotech

Submission + - Northwest Passage Open for Shipping

Submitted by
tekiegreg
tekiegreg writes: "It's official, whether by Global Warming or natural effect, one can now get to Asia from Europe via the Arctic. The commercial implications are high of course, but are the environmentalists finally going to be vindicated on the amount of damage global warming has caused?"
Wii

Submission + - Wii uses elliptic curve cryptography

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for?
Software

Submission + - Pidgin 2.2.0 Released (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by tulcod
tulcod writes: Pidgin 2.2.0 contains the results of several major Google Summer of Code branches bringing some new, extraordinary features. We have a new protocol, MySpaceIM, a bunch of new features for an existing protocol, XMPP, and nifty new certificate management to make sure your IM server is who it says it is.
Bug

Submission + - When Is A Kilogram Not A Kilogram? (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
Billosaur
Billosaur writes: "In what can only be a boon for those fighting weight gain, Yahoo! News is reporting that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France (southwest of Paris) has discovered that the 118-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder used as the international standard for the kilogram is losing weight. So far, only about 50 micrograms, but physicists are baffled as to why. It is used to verify the weight of other standard kilogram weights used by other countries, and this could mean problems if kilogram has actually gotten lighter, but mainly for scientists and engineers. This is spurring discussions of replacing the current weight with something new which might be more stable, like a sphere made out of a Silicon-28 isotope crystal."
Security

Submission + - Bastille linux hijacked

Submitted by fathertedgrinch
fathertedgrinch writes: The Bastille-linux project's registration has apparently been hijacked by a cyber-squatter. See http://isc.sans.org/ for information. note that there are two articles there — one describes the discovery, and the second shows the new url for bastille.
Security

Submission + - Rush to deploy virtualisation leaves security gaps (zdnet.com.au)

Submitted by ramboando
ramboando writes: Server virtualisation is a no-brainer — it's quick to deploy and easy to justify in terms of cost-savings but too many companies are deploying the technology without considering the security implications. In the past, industry analysts such as Gartner have made warnings about virtualisation security lapses.

In this report, ZDNet Australia looks at some of the pitfalls and promises of virtualisation security.
Space

Submission + - Borexino, the Sun neutrino hunter

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "An international team of more than 100 researchers has used the huge Borexino detector to detect low-energy solar neutrinos for the first time. These results confirm recent 'theories about the nature of neutrinos and the inner workings of the sun and other stars.' In particular, it's now almost certain that neutrinos oscillate between three types, namely electron, muon and tau neutrinos. The Borexino detector used for these discoveries is located near L'Aquila, Italy. It is a 18-meter-diameter dome shielded by 2,400 tonnes of purified water and lying more than a kilometer underground to block interferences with cosmic rays. Read more for additional references and a diagram showing the various components of the Borexino detector, one of the deepest laboratories in the world."
Supercomputing

Submission + - Heat vs. fiction: how to run a cool data center

Submitted by pacopico
pacopico writes: Data center efficiency has turned into the most-favored topic of the big chip and server vendors, despite the fact that they were happy to sell flaming hot gear a couple years ago. The Register has taken a look at which companies have truly helpful, power-friendly gear and which companies are just marketeers. They also interview people at Rumsey Engineers — some dudes that build data centers — about cooling techniques and weird water-filled systems.
Java

Submission + - GWT in Action

Submitted by
Michael J. Ross
Michael J. Ross writes: "Server-side computer languages, such as Java, possess numerous advantages over their client-side counterparts — including more robust integrated development environments (IDEs). In contrast, Web-focused languages, such as JavaScript, benefit from the global accessibility of the Internet. Bridging this gap, and leveraging the strengths of both sides, has long been an objective of the software development community — though not all attempts have been successful, e.g., Java applets. The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is the latest attempt, and shows considerable promise, as illustrated in a new book intended to help programmers learn this new technology: GWT in Action.

Written by Robert Hanson and Adam Tacy, this book was published by Manning Publications on 5 June 2007, under the ISBNs 1933988231 and 978-1933988238. For any prospective reader who would like to learn more about the book, they can first try the book's Web page, where they will find online versions of the "about this book" section, table of contents, preface, and index. The publisher offers two freely downloadable chapters, "Creating the Default Application" and "Communicating with GWT-RPC," in PDF format. In addition, there is a link to purchase the book's electronic version, and a link to the author's forum, where readers can post questions about the book or GWT, and likely receive a response — perhaps even by one of the authors.

The book's 17 chapters are organized into four parts, and cover a generous number of topics: introduction to GWT; creating the default GWT application; building your own application based upon the default one; creating widgets and panels, including composite panels; processing user events; creating JSNI components; modularizing your code; communicating using GWT-RPC; client-side RPC; classic Ajax and HTML forms; using JSON for interoperability; automatically generating code; GWT's native properties; testing and deploying GWT applications; more on the inner workings of GWT itself. The book has no appendices, but a substantial index, which is essential for such a technically detailed subject area.

GWT in Action is clearly intended to be a practical and fairly comprehensive coverage of Google's new toolkit. Almost all of the GWT concepts are explained within the context of developing a substantial sample application, the Dashboard, created by the authors. The reader is encouraged to follow along as the authors build the application, thereby learning from doing — almost always an effective approach. At 600 pages, with almost none of the formatting padding found in far too many technical books nowadays, the authors have not skimped on providing the reader with a lot of information. Furthermore, their treatment of application deployment is far better than any other I have encountered.

Unfortunately, the book has many weaknesses. On an overall basis, the order of presentation is at times disjointed — seemingly dictated more by the Dashboard and less by the most logical order for someone new to GWT. Compounding the problem, the authors frequently refer to advanced topics, covered in greater detail later, and also repeat earlier information, occasionally several times. Despite promises to provide a gentle exposition, it can be difficult at times for the reader to determine if any critical steps were skipped, as a consequence of key instructions for building the sample application being spread out, and interspersed with too many references to general comments covered earlier. In turn, readers will likely find it frustrating to try to get the sample application working at each step of the development process — and not just at the end, with the complete code.

One source of these difficulties, is that in the first few chapters, the authors try to introduce too many topics all at once, and as a result do not thoroughly discuss each one in its own section. Instead, they break up the information over multiple sections, scattered throughout the book. An example of this is internationalization. Section 2.2.4 is titled "Implementing Internationalization," and yet provides almost no details, and is essentially unusable by itself. At the very least, it should mention that later sections 3.2.1 and 15.3 provide a lot more information. Furthermore, internationalization was introduced far too early in the book, and greatly complicates the process. Instead, the authors should have created a simple application using only English for the user interface, and introduce internationalization later, after fully explaining the basics of turning Java code into JavaScript functionality.

Part I of the book is the weakest of all of them, which may, sadly, turn off readers who would otherwise get to the better material later. The authors are clearly enthusiastic about the topics at hand, and the number of moving parts associated with Java/JavaScript/GWT development is certainly not trivial. Nonetheless, those initial chapters would greatly benefit from a rewrite; this would make the material more comprehensible and easier to follow, step-by-step.

We can mention some specific flaws: A book like this that is introducing a new technology, must take care to not leave the unwarned reader wondering if they have been left behind in the steps. People reading some of the earlier material may conclude that those steps have already been assumed by the authors, and will not be covered. The authors do not mention how to obtain and install GWT until page 30; that should be right up front. The authors do not appear to mention which version of GWT they used for the book. (I chose 1.3, not 1.4RC, available as of this writing). Any reader trying to follow along and implement their example application (the Dashboard) will probably find several hurdles. First of all, make sure that you have version 1.4 of GWT installed, and not 1.3.3, which does not include some of the panels and widgets used in their sample code.

In Chapter 1, they modify a "Hello world" application to create another application that shows a tic-tac-toe board that has clickable squares, but does not play the game. Chapter 2 describes this as "a fully functioning Tic-Tac-Toe application," which is like claiming a program works because it compiles. Also in Chapter 2, their discussion of development alternatives is slowed down by repetition of the same information. The sample code in the book has minor inconsistencies. For example, naming a password String "oldPass" in one method, then "old" in another, related method. There are other instances, but these give one an idea of some of the inconsistencies.

The coverage of topics is generally quite thorough, though at times verbose and redundant — particularly in Chapter 2, though it is certainly not limited to that chapter. The second and third paragraphs in Chapter 3, for instance, continue the repetitious style which is found in many places throughout the book, and likely has made it longer than necessary. In Chapter 4, the first two pages explain what widgets are, several times, and conclude with a picture of a button — as if any reader who has made it that far into the book doesn't know what a button is. The book could certainly use some trimming.

The downloadable source code is not complete. For starters, it is missing the code from Chapters 1 and 2, though admittedly none of that is too long. The code provided for Chapter 4 is just a portion of what is displayed in the book. Moreover, the directory paths in the sample code archive files, are not consistently named, and some may even be incorrect. For example, the code for Chapter 5 has a folder named "Dashboard — Chapter 4." That sort of thing does not instill confidence in the typical reader. The authors should revisit the sample code — making it complete and consistently named.

The publisher's page for the book does not appear to have a link for errata; perhaps none have been reported yet. Here are some: On page 75, in Table 3.1, in the left-hand column, "gwt-onLoadErrorFn" should instead read ""gwt:onLoadErrorFn." On page 77, in the second paragraph, the file name extension should be all lowercase, not all uppercase. On page 78, in Listing 3.6, the String parameter in the first label.setText() call should be delimited with straight quotes, not curly quotes. (Microsoft Word strikes again?!) On page 81, in the third paragraph, "comply to" should read "comply with." On pages 87 and 88, the -whitelist and -blacklist option values each contain an extraneous space before the "^." There are undoubtedly more such errata throughout the book, and can be corrected in the next edition; but these are enough to at least get an errata file started. Fortunately, none of them would lead an alert reader astray.

Even though the book could use significant reorganization and streamlining in the next edition, GWT in Action is packed with practical information on a wide range of GWT topics.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter."

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