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Privacy

Submission + - Publicly available voter registration data

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "I went to my local Ohio county website to find out when the polls open tomorrow and was presented with a link to a page to search for voter registration data — http://www.wcoil.com/vote2008/ of course, I searched for myself and found my home address. What surprised me was that it was searchable. For example, putting in 'w' as the last name lists all voter registered in my county who's last name begins with the letter 'w,' and their home addresses. I have a few friends and family members in law enforcement that were pretty upset to find out how easily someone can find their home address using this tool. I thought for sure that it was a terrible oversight in privacy (it happens when you live in BFE). But, I did a search and found another — http://www.tax.co.harris.tx.us/voter/pctdatadownload/ . This was only the second link on google. Did I miss something somewhere along the line? I know that certain exposures of home address data are unavoidable (such as when you mortgage a home), but this seems to make it too easy. Does registering to vote mean that my home address becomes a matter of public record?"
Java

Submission + - Struts 2 In Action from Manning (wantii.com)

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "One of my favorite recurring topics on /. is the debate over Java. So many hard-core geeks hate it, and before I started getting paid to use it, I was very apprehensive. Although many /.'ers and even some editors aren't Java fans, there are a few items that provide a good argument for Java —
  1. Java is a popular language.
  2. Java has good commercial support from big players (IBM, Oracle, Sun)
  3. I've made a good living since I picked it up as a skill.


Even if you aren't a Java developer, if you are a web developer, you have at least heard of the Struts framework. It seems like a new Java framework is born as often as a topic gets rejected on /. Despite that, Struts has remained extremely popular. The 1.x series of Struts was a difficult framework to learn and heavily constrained developers to following it's notion of MVC. Even with its drawbacks, Struts has remained the most popular framework. Since the inception of Struts, programming web-apps has changed quite a bit. Many of the drawbacks of Struts have led to the creation of many competing open source MVC implementations. One of the competitors was a little project called WebWork from opensymphony. Anyone who has used WebWork/XWork can tell you that it is architecturally solid and quite easy to pick up. At some point, the Struts devs hooked up with the WebWork devs and they decided to merge for the next iteration of Struts. This led to Struts 2 being released. Struts 2 has moved along quite nicely and gained some popularity, but a lack of documentation and the expectation that it would be similar to Struts 1 has led to quite a bit of confusion for developers.

Struts 2 In Action from Manning attempts to fill in the blanks as both an introduction to Struts 2 and a partial reference. Struts 2 is a comprehensive framework that provides a lot of functionality, so it would be impossible for a single volume to thoroughly cover all aspects of Struts 2 development. If you are looking for a reference on Struts 2 AJAX tags, this book will not work. If you are working with Struts 2 on a regular basis or are curious about adopting it for a future project this book is definitely a good fit.

Struts 2 In Action walks developers through many common use-cases where Struts 2 will help. The example content and easy-to-read text make the book readable from cover-to-cover. This book will work for many levels of reader. Due to the lack of online documentation on certain topics, experienced Struts 2 developers will likely find clarification on topics like OGNL, new developers will find a thorough introduction that will lead to productive development. The authors did a very good job of creating creating examples that covered the material. This is a bit of a difficult task considering the size of the framework, but I was very impressed with each chapter. Each chapter could nearly stand alone because the authors were able to cover the topic without delving too far into side topics.

All-in-all, this is a good book, and likely to be the only book necessary if your goal is to learn to use Struts 2 or hone your skills on Struts 2. Although I hate book reviews that fill space by telling you what's in the book, Amazon doesn't have a Table of Contents, so I feel a bit obligated to say what's covered. The book is broken into 5 main parts — Part 1 is a quick introduction into JSP development and a small Struts 2 example. Part 2 covers core components, writing actions, using and configuring interceptors, type conversion and OGNL. Part 3 moves into the View of the MVC, it covers results and tags. Part 4 covers more advanced topics — Spring/Hibernate integration, input validation and i18n. Part 5 wraps it up with struts 2 plugins, best practices, and migration from Struts 1.

There are many topics the authors chose not to cover (AJAX, Sitemesh, and JSF to name a few). I was a bit disappointed not to find some of these topics at first, but to create a book covering everything that Struts 2 can do and all the ways to integrate it with popular technology is not a reasonable expectation. I would expect that if Struts 2 continues gaining popularity, more volumes will be released covering these topics. This book concentrates on the fundamentals and delivers a thorough explanation which will serve it's readers much better than a light intro into everything.

For the sake of full-disclosure, I will say that I am one of the Struts developers, and I want people to read the book because it does a great job of answering many questions that would otherwise make their way to the mailing lists."
Security

Ohio Official Docked Vacation Time For Stolen Tape 218

Posted by samzenpus from the no-beach-for-you dept.
Lucas123 writes "The missing tape, stolen from an intern's car, contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million. So after four months of deliberation, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services announced today that they decided to take a week's vacation away from Jerry Miller, their payroll team leader and the guy in charge of the missing data."
Books

Submission + - What to do with old tech books 1

Submitted by zandini
zandini writes: I have lots of old tech books. Java 1 & 2, HTML 4, Using Debian 2.1, just to name a few. My bookshelf is full of these books, but now they are either obsolete (like HTML 4), or same or better information is available on the internet (e.g. perl, python). I called local libraries, but they do not want any computer books older than 2 years. Some of my books on C/C++ and old Computer Science text books are still valid, but it seems that they won't take them since they are too old. Ebay could be an option, but selling over 50 books on ebay individually could be really time consuming, especially since I am looking to make money from these anyways. What did you guys to with your old computer books? Did you just throw them in the recycle bin? Or were you able to find someone somewhere who could take these books and make use of them?
AMD

Submission + - AMD Linux Driver Interview Opportunity

Submitted by
Sarah Vella
Sarah Vella writes: "AMD would like to set up an interview with Slashdot.org for September 4th or 5th to discuss a major development on their open source drivers. AMD would like to share this news first with the Slashdot community.

Let me know if Slashdot is open to having an interview with Chris Schlaeger our resident Linux guru and Pat Moorhead, VP, Marketing.

Cheers,
Sarah Vella
High Road Communications
416 644-2270"
Media

Submission + - Journalist attempts to hack, gets caught (valleywag.com)

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "I know that fark is not likely considered the serious news institution that slashdot is... In fact, I've heard of it referred to as slashdot's immature, mentally handicapped, younger stepbrother. Whatever it is, it appears that it drew some attention from a Fox news affiliate. Enough attention that it seems a reporter may have tried to hack into their servers.
FTA — Curtis believes that Phillips, or someone working with Phillips, sent him and several other Fark employees deceptive emails in an attempt to get them to download a trojan, a form of computer virus. The Trojan was designed to capture their passwords and give the author access to Fark's servers. In one case, it succeeded, giving a hacker passwords to a file server and one Fark employee's email account; he tried, but failed, to break into Fark's Web servers and email.
The article goes into some other speculation about the reporter's intentions, but I would imagine that the title of journalist should not exempt him from punishment in this case."
Power

Submission + - Singing Tesla Coil (youtube.com)

Submitted by
wawannem
wawannem writes: "So, who said that Tesla Coils weren't practical? Well, add MIDI player to the list of practical applications. Watch this amazing video of a Tesla Coil built by a few college kids that plays music. FTA —

This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear ... it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics."
Editorial

Submission + - Car-2-Car technologies to help make driving safer 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Car manufacturers around the world are working on vehicle-to-vehicle technologies to help make driving safer. The Car-2-Car Consortium's system, which includes GM's Vehicle-to-Vehicle project, combines three technologies — a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) antenna, a wireless data system and a computer that interprets the information it receives. GPS tracks the position of the car while sensor data from the car — such as speed, direction, road conditions and if the windscreen wipers are on and if the brakes have been stamped on — is monitored by the on-board computer. A wireless system similar to existing wi-fi technology — based on the 802.11p protocol — transmits and receives data to and from nearby cars, creating an ad-hoc network. Data hops from car to car and the on-board computers can build a picture of road and traffic conditions based on information from multiple vehicles across a great distance. Cars travelling in opposite directions can share information about where they have been and so informing each other about where they are going. Vehicle to vehicle technology Traffic information about roadworks and speed limits can be displayed "The wireless system has a range of 500m outside the city and 100m in the city," said Prof Wieker. He said the consortium had opted for wireless rather than a mobile network because it was faster. "The data moves between cars in milliseconds," he said. Drivers receive warnings through messages on an in-car display, audio alerts and even seat vibrations. The system works through "data fusion and logical combination of information", said Prof Wieker. For example, if one driver switches on his fog lamp and slows down, the computer could interpret it as an anomaly. But if three or four cars follow suit, the computer could reasonably assume that there is a fog problem. The system stores this information and passes it on to cars several kilometres down the road which are travelling in the opposite direction, heading towards the fog problem. "It is useful not only as a safety system but could also be used to improve traffic efficiency," said Prof Wieker. The backers envisage the technology being embedded into traffic lights and road signs so that real-time traffic information can be passed to cars, potentially funnelling motorists to alternative routes.
Programming

Submission + - New Developers in an Agile Team (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Ian
Ian writes: "Having new developers join the team this week has made me wonder about the best ways of introducing them to the code they will be working with. As a team we're pretty agile, which means we only really have basic high-level documentation about the system, and for a new recruit straight from university that might be a little too overwhelming.

The system we have is a relatively high-level .Net (C#) distributed system. The new guys do know C#, but are probably unfamiliar with at least some of the enterprise design patterns that we use.

With previous new starters we've paired with them and got them looking at production code as soon as possible. This seems to work quite well, but I was wondering what other people did to get the new guys up and productive in the shortest possible time.

What's the best way you've found for inducting new developers into an agile team?"

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