Slashdot Mirror

Foldarn writes "Recently on Slashdot, Utah's Governor was honored with the Blackhole Award. Governor Herbert has now released a statement and a meeting with a concrete date to repeal the opaque law from the books in an effort to stay in offi... err, restore confidence in the public. The law added time for lawmakers to respond to information requests, removed the number of items that can be requested, and increased the prices of those same items. It's currently scheduled to become law this summer."

RickJWagner writes "So you want to be an Android developer? If you're like me, you've probably been wanting to learn how to program a mobile device, but just haven't found the time to master Objective-C. So now that Android is here, all of us garden-variety Java coders can jump on the bandwagon and start slinging apps out, right? Well, it turns out there's a little more to it than that. This book can make the trail from everyday Java code slinger to best-selling Android app writer a little more plausible." Read below for the rest of Rick's review. Android User Interface Development author Jason Morris pages Packt Publishing publisher 304 rating RickJWagner reviewer 1849514488 ISBN A good resource for Android developers who aren't already UI experts. summary 7/10 The book does not teach Android development. For that, there are other books and the Android SDK documentation, which I found adequate for my uses so far. This book emphasizes teaching Android User Interface development, which is something I would not have had much of a clue about without the book. (The Java and XML-based configuration of Android is easy enough for a back-end Java coder like myself, but I've never been a web-design and layout guy. Or fat-client layout and design guy for that matter, either.) That's the sweet spot for this book.

Android newbies do get an introductory chapter that guides the reader through setting up the SDK and writing a quick first app. After that, the book starts to take a serious UI bent, and that's o.k. because that's where the book's intended to go. The earliest chapters cover UI-centric matters like asking the user a question and processing the answer that is returned. List selections are explained (i.e. single-select button choices versus multi-select). Functional features like adding a header or a footer are explained.

The middle chapters cover pragmatic issues like producing an image gallery, handling date/time inputs, and validating user inputs. Layouts in Android are explained, which will be somewhat familiar to Java Swing developers. I had an interest in learning how animation works (don't we all dream of writing the next viral-selling game?), this is explained as well.

The final chapters deal with styling (i.e. how to change the way a button looks) and themes. It's very important that your application 'feels' like it should, and this is given adequate coverage in the book. I'm sure a back-end coder like myself would botch this part horribly without guidance, so I can appreciate the reason the book emphasizes these things.

The book is written in Packt's 'Cookbook' style. If you haven't seen one of these before, the book is largely cut up into sections covering some general idea. Within the section you'll find headings for the topics "Time for Action", "What Just Happened" and "Have a Go, Hero". "Time for Action" is a series of instructions that spell out exactly what to do for a sample scenario. "What Just Happened" follows up with an explanation of why the reader was asked to execute the instructions. "Have a Go, Hero" is a section challenging the reader to extend the spoon-fed instructions by implementing a next-step challenge. This style of writing emphasizes hands-on knowledge transfer without a lot of verbose theory, so it'll be good for readers who like to learn as they code. Contrast this to books that have a lengthy section of text explaining all the details of some topic, followed by a monolithic code blob towards the end of the chapter-- this book is not written that way.

The sample code that's available on Packt's site is clean and easy to understand. It follows the same structure as the sample code you'd find in the SDK, so if you're brand new to Android development you might start with the SDK teachings and then extend it with the book as soon as you're ready. I thought the examples the book presented were almost all reasonably relevant. The author did a good job of keeping the exercises presented throughout the book well contained, so you're never asked to code too much stuff at one time. I like that, as it lets you read the book without having to set aside a huge block of time at once to see the results of your coding efforts.

So who is this book good for? I'd say it's a good resource for Android developers who aren't already UI experts. I'm not saying it's good for Android newbies who need to learn the basics of Android programming, because there's just too little introductory material for that. But if you can already hack something together, and want it to be appealing to someone besides yourself, this book can help.

You can purchase Android User Interface Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

RickJWagner writes "So you want to be an Android developer? If you're like me, you've probably been wanting to learn how to program a mobile device, but just haven't found the time to master Objective-C. So now that Android is here, all of us garden-variety Java coders can jump on the bandwagon and start slinging apps out, right? Well, it turns out there's a little more to it than that. This book can make the trail from everyday Java code slinger to best-selling Android app writer a little more plausible." Read below for the rest of Rick's review. Android User Interface Development author Jason Morris pages Packt Publishing publisher 304 rating RickJWagner reviewer 1849514488 ISBN A good resource for Android developers who aren't already UI experts. summary 7/10 The book does not teach Android development. For that, there are other books and the Android SDK documentation, which I found adequate for my uses so far. This book emphasizes teaching Android User Interface development, which is something I would not have had much of a clue about without the book. (The Java and XML-based configuration of Android is easy enough for a back-end Java coder like myself, but I've never been a web-design and layout guy. Or fat-client layout and design guy for that matter, either.) That's the sweet spot for this book.

Android newbies do get an introductory chapter that guides the reader through setting up the SDK and writing a quick first app. After that, the book starts to take a serious UI bent, and that's o.k. because that's where the book's intended to go. The earliest chapters cover UI-centric matters like asking the user a question and processing the answer that is returned. List selections are explained (i.e. single-select button choices versus multi-select). Functional features like adding a header or a footer are explained.

The middle chapters cover pragmatic issues like producing an image gallery, handling date/time inputs, and validating user inputs. Layouts in Android are explained, which will be somewhat familiar to Java Swing developers. I had an interest in learning how animation works (don't we all dream of writing the next viral-selling game?), this is explained as well.

The final chapters deal with styling (i.e. how to change the way a button looks) and themes. It's very important that your application 'feels' like it should, and this is given adequate coverage in the book. I'm sure a back-end coder like myself would botch this part horribly without guidance, so I can appreciate the reason the book emphasizes these things.

The book is written in Packt's 'Cookbook' style. If you haven't seen one of these before, the book is largely cut up into sections covering some general idea. Within the section you'll find headings for the topics "Time for Action", "What Just Happened" and "Have a Go, Hero". "Time for Action" is a series of instructions that spell out exactly what to do for a sample scenario. "What Just Happened" follows up with an explanation of why the reader was asked to execute the instructions. "Have a Go, Hero" is a section challenging the reader to extend the spoon-fed instructions by implementing a next-step challenge. This style of writing emphasizes hands-on knowledge transfer without a lot of verbose theory, so it'll be good for readers who like to learn as they code. Contrast this to books that have a lengthy section of text explaining all the details of some topic, followed by a monolithic code blob towards the end of the chapter-- this book is not written that way.

The sample code that's available on Packt's site is clean and easy to understand. It follows the same structure as the sample code you'd find in the SDK, so if you're brand new to Android development you might start with the SDK teachings and then extend it with the book as soon as you're ready. I thought the examples the book presented were almost all reasonably relevant. The author did a good job of keeping the exercises presented throughout the book well contained, so you're never asked to code too much stuff at one time. I like that, as it lets you read the book without having to set aside a huge block of time at once to see the results of your coding efforts.

So who is this book good for? I'd say it's a good resource for Android developers who aren't already UI experts. I'm not saying it's good for Android newbies who need to learn the basics of Android programming, because there's just too little introductory material for that. But if you can already hack something together, and want it to be appealing to someone besides yourself, this book can help.

You can purchase Android User Interface Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "37 lawsuits have been filed against Android in a little more than a year, the latest one of them being Microsoft's lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. ReadWriteWeb says 'the number of patent lawsuits related to the Android operating system is unprecedented' and shows an infographic that is also available on Twitpic and as a PDF file, on Scribd. The first two suits were filed in March 2010 by Apple and MobileMedia against HTC. The original source of the chart, the FOSS Patents blog, says that Android's market share is only one factor, other reasons being that Google's patent portfolio is 'far too weak for what's undertaken in connection with Android'; that Google doesn't do 'inbound licensing' from trolls; and that Google tends to ignore patent issues because Google itself is rarely sued: in most of these cases, Android device makers are under attack."

Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die.

recoiledsnake writes "Apple has removed the Gay Cure app after the pressure on Apple to remove the app started to snowball, culminating in an online petition initiated by Change.org which collected over 140,000 online signatures from people who wanted the app removed. Searching for the app now yields zero search results and Exodus International President Alan Chambers tweeted the following on Tuesday night. 'It's official, the @ExodusInl App is no longer in the @AppStore. Incredibly disappointing. Watch out, it could happen to you. #freedom' Gay Cure isn't the first app Apple has removed for touting an anti-homosexual philosophy. Apple back in November removed an app called the Manhattan Declaration which advocated the dignity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman." I don't think Apple should have banned it: they should have just packaged it with an app to cure bigotry.

recoiledsnake writes "Apple has removed the Gay Cure app after the pressure on Apple to remove the app started to snowball, culminating in an online petition initiated by Change.org which collected over 140,000 online signatures from people who wanted the app removed. Searching for the app now yields zero search results and Exodus International President Alan Chambers tweeted the following on Tuesday night. 'It's official, the @ExodusInl App is no longer in the @AppStore. Incredibly disappointing. Watch out, it could happen to you. #freedom' Gay Cure isn't the first app Apple has removed for touting an anti-homosexual philosophy. Apple back in November removed an app called the Manhattan Declaration which advocated the dignity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman." I don't think Apple should have banned it: they should have just packaged it with an app to cure bigotry.

14erCleaner writes "US Circuit Judge Denny Chin has rejected a $125 million settlement between Google Books and the author's guild that would have allowed Google to publish all out-of-work fiction online. Chin has previously ruled more favorably on this case."

jhernik writes "A 29-year-old gambler from Paignton, Devon, has been sentenced to two years in jail after hacking into an online gambling site and stealing billions of poker chips. Ashley Mitchell admitted to hacking into the servers of American gaming company Zynga Corporation in 2009 and making off with $12 million (£7.5 million) worth of gambling chips."

Last week we discussed an IT book author's adventures in trying to self-publish. Now, an anonymous reader points out an article examining another perspective: "Barry Eisler, a NY Times best-selling author of various thriller novels, has just turned down a $500,000 book contract in order to self-publish his latest work. In a conversation with self-publishing aficionado Joe Konrath, Eisler talks about why this makes sense and how the publishing industry is responding in all the wrong ways to the rise of ebooks. He also explains the math by which it makes a lot more sense to retain 70% of your earnings on ebooks priced cheaply, rather than 14.9% on expensive books put out by publishers."

adeelarshad82 writes "AT&T recently announced that it will buy T-Mobile for $39 billion. If the transaction gets approved by the government and closes in a year as planned, it will create the nation's largest wireless carrier by far. While this is great news for both companies, analysts believe that it's an awful idea for end consumers for a number of different reasons — from obvious ones, like a rise in rates due to lower competition, to subtler ones, like more selective phone choices for consumers."

Tiger4 writes "Warner Bros. has announced that production has officially begun on Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of The Hobbit. Jackson even posted a couple of pictures of himself on one of the sets. This despite the strikes, bankruptcies, contract disputes, and legal actions that have swarmed Jackson and the project since his Lord of the Rings days. Admit it, secretly you've been dying to see this happen."

Tiger4 writes "Warner Bros. has announced that production has officially begun on Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of The Hobbit. Jackson even posted a couple of pictures of himself on one of the sets. This despite the strikes, bankruptcies, contract disputes, and legal actions that have swarmed Jackson and the project since his Lord of the Rings days. Admit it, secretly you've been dying to see this happen."

Tiger4 writes "Warner Bros. has announced that production has officially begun on Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of The Hobbit. Jackson even posted a couple of pictures of himself on one of the sets. This despite the strikes, bankruptcies, contract disputes, and legal actions that have swarmed Jackson and the project since his Lord of the Rings days. Admit it, secretly you've been dying to see this happen."

teh31337one writes "Motorola's locked bootloader for their Sholes-family devices (Droid OG, Milestone, DroidX, Droid 2 etc, not Atrix 4G) has finally been cracked. @nenolod explains on his website: The Motorola Sholes platform uses a trusted bootloader environment. Signatures are stored as part of the CDT stored on the NAND flash. mbmloader verifies the signature on mbm before passing control. mbm verifies all other signatures before allowing the device to boot. There is a vulnerability in the way that Motorola generated the signatures on the sections stored in the CDT. This vulnerability is very simple. Like on the PlayStation 3, Motorola forgot to add a random value to the signature in order to mask the private key. This allowed the private key and initialization vector to be cracked. This comes at the time when HTC are also stepping up their attempts at locking down their phones . The recently released LTE flagship — ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date ... They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They also locked the memory."

teh31337one writes "Motorola's locked bootloader for their Sholes-family devices (Droid OG, Milestone, DroidX, Droid 2 etc, not Atrix 4G) has finally been cracked. @nenolod explains on his website: The Motorola Sholes platform uses a trusted bootloader environment. Signatures are stored as part of the CDT stored on the NAND flash. mbmloader verifies the signature on mbm before passing control. mbm verifies all other signatures before allowing the device to boot. There is a vulnerability in the way that Motorola generated the signatures on the sections stored in the CDT. This vulnerability is very simple. Like on the PlayStation 3, Motorola forgot to add a random value to the signature in order to mask the private key. This allowed the private key and initialization vector to be cracked. This comes at the time when HTC are also stepping up their attempts at locking down their phones . The recently released LTE flagship — ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date ... They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They also locked the memory."

nightcats writes "An excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book appears at salon.com, in which he sees a dark economic future within the next 20 years as Moore's law is brought to an end when single-atom transistors give way to quantum states. Kaku predicts: 'Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.'" Exactly the way the collapse of the vacuum tube industry killed the economy, I hope.

Late last year, we mentioned the idea floated by to Michael J. Ravnitzky, a chief counsel at the Postal Regulatory Commission, that the US Postal Service use its wide-ranging fleet to gather and upload useful data of all kinds — everything from weather conditions to RF coverage. Now, an anonymous reader writes "A workshop on this topic is scheduled for April 12th in Washington, DC. This month, the Postmaster General sent a letter to Senator Thomas Carper, Chairman of the US Senate Subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, expressing interest in exploring this concept."

stevegee58 writes "Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov was sentenced to 97 months in prison for stealing source code used in Goldman's high-frequency trading algorithms. Aleynikov was convicted late last year in Manhattan federal court."

stevegee58 writes "Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov was sentenced to 97 months in prison for stealing source code used in Goldman's high-frequency trading algorithms. Aleynikov was convicted late last year in Manhattan federal court."

The northern US has been buried under snow several times this winter, and flooding has struck quite a few places in the southwest. Those pale, though, beside the recent disasters in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, and the seemingly inevitable arrival of a serious earthquake on the West Coast of the US. All of which has me thinking about my (meager) preparedness for a major disaster. Despite plans to stock up in case of a major storm or other emergency, right now I'd be down mostly to canned beans, sardines and Nutella. How prepared are you to do deal with a disaster affecting your region? Is your data safe? What about your family? Do you have escape, regrouping, or survival plans in the event of an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, industrial accident, or whatever hazards are most relevant where you live? It would be helpful if in comments you disclose your region and environment (urban? rural? exurbs?) and the emergencies you consider worth preparing for, as well as talking about any steps you've taken or plan to take.

The northern US has been buried under snow several times this winter, and flooding has struck quite a few places in the southwest. Those pale, though, beside the recent disasters in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, and the seemingly inevitable arrival of a serious earthquake on the West Coast of the US. All of which has me thinking about my (meager) preparedness for a major disaster. Despite plans to stock up in case of a major storm or other emergency, right now I'd be down mostly to canned beans, sardines and Nutella. How prepared are you to do deal with a disaster affecting your region? Is your data safe? What about your family? Do you have escape, regrouping, or survival plans in the event of an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, industrial accident, or whatever hazards are most relevant where you live? It would be helpful if in comments you disclose your region and environment (urban? rural? exurbs?) and the emergencies you consider worth preparing for, as well as talking about any steps you've taken or plan to take.

The northern US has been buried under snow several times this winter, and flooding has struck quite a few places in the southwest. Those pale, though, beside the recent disasters in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, and the seemingly inevitable arrival of a serious earthquake on the West Coast of the US. All of which has me thinking about my (meager) preparedness for a major disaster. Despite plans to stock up in case of a major storm or other emergency, right now I'd be down mostly to canned beans, sardines and Nutella. How prepared are you to do deal with a disaster affecting your region? Is your data safe? What about your family? Do you have escape, regrouping, or survival plans in the event of an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, industrial accident, or whatever hazards are most relevant where you live? It would be helpful if in comments you disclose your region and environment (urban? rural? exurbs?) and the emergencies you consider worth preparing for, as well as talking about any steps you've taken or plan to take.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has hit back over claims that the browser shipped with its iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices is significantly slower than Android's equivalent, calling the independent testing 'flawed.' 'They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone,' Apple's Kerris argues. 'Instead they only tested their own proprietary app, which uses an embedded Web viewer that doesn't actually take advantage of Safari's Web performance optimisations.' This, claims testing firm Blaze.io, is news to the world. 'Embedded browsers are expected to behave, for the most part, the same as the regular browser,' the company stated, defending its methodology. 'However, Apple is now stating that their embedded browser, called UIWebView, does not share the same optimisations MobileSafari does.'"

jfruhlinger writes "Yesterday, news broke that Android might have a Linux copyright problem, which would be big trouble for Google, already locked in an IP struggle with Oracle over the mobile platform. Blogger Brian Proffitt looks deeper into the alleged violations. He notes that, while it's possible that Google's on shaky ground, the motivations behind the news release are murky: the lawyer who outlined the violation is an ex-Microsoft hand, and the news was widely propagated by gadfly Florian Mueller, who's tangled with Google over patent issues in the past. Moreover, the alleged violations are in header files, and it's not clear that those are copyrightable; if they are, no actual copyright holders have come forward to complain."

An anonymous reader writes "Ars is reporting that the CCIA, a trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, is calling the copyright wiretaps requested by the IP Czar 'Hollywood's PATRIOT Act.' For those who don't remember, IP Czar Victoria Espinel recently wrote a report calling for more charges of felony copyright infringement under the NET Act, as well as felony charges for illegal web streaming, authorization for the use of wiretaps in going after copyright infringement cases, and several other measures. In short, this means that the copyright cops are coming online."

bongey writes "In a series of measured real-world web load tests, the Android-based Nexus S phone spanked the iPhone 4. The Android phone and iPhone 4 median load times were 2.144s and 3.254s respectively. The sample size was 45,000 page loads, across 1000 web sites. It also follows rumors that Apple is intentionally slowing down web apps to make their native apps more favorable."

FrankNFurter writes "Remember the video of Andrew Tait upgrading Windows from 1.0 to 7. He did another one — this time installing all major versions of IE from 1.0 to 9.0." He actually does some interesting packet sniffing to see why sites aren't rendering, and amusingly shows MSIE 1.0 getting a 93/100 on the acid test... pretty impressive considering it lacks JS and CSS.

mangu writes "Intelsat has signed a contract with Canadian MDA to refuel satellites in geostationary orbit. The $280 million contract will buy half of the 2000kg fuel carried by the space servicing vehicle. Besides refueling aging satellites, the vehicle will also be able to tow failed satellites away from the geostationary orbit."

Despite recent troubles in the music game market, Ubisoft thinks the genre still has room for innovation. They have announced Rocksmith, a rhythm game designed for use with real electric guitars. The guitars will connect to a console or PC through the standard output jack. "... the 'note highway' is actually a virtual guitar fretboard, complete with numbers which correspond to the different frets, and the 'target zone' consists of six horizontal strings. Wherever each note appears on the virtual fret board, that’s where your finger(s) go on the physical fretboard. Once the note reaches the target area you strum the string it comes into contact with. Simple. The camera zooms dynamically to highlight where on the fret board you should be looking at, in much the same way that a musician’s eyes would scan up and down the neck of the instrument during a performance."

Despite recent troubles in the music game market, Ubisoft thinks the genre still has room for innovation. They have announced Rocksmith, a rhythm game designed for use with real electric guitars. The guitars will connect to a console or PC through the standard output jack. "... the 'note highway' is actually a virtual guitar fretboard, complete with numbers which correspond to the different frets, and the 'target zone' consists of six horizontal strings. Wherever each note appears on the virtual fret board, that’s where your finger(s) go on the physical fretboard. Once the note reaches the target area you strum the string it comes into contact with. Simple. The camera zooms dynamically to highlight where on the fret board you should be looking at, in much the same way that a musician’s eyes would scan up and down the neck of the instrument during a performance."

Toe, The writes "Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students' lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed to be harassment of some students. Under the new interpretation of civil rights laws, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb 'harassment' of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation. When children are concerned, where is the line between protection and censorship?"

Ian Lamont writes "MIT Media Lab and the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab have just released Improviso, an online game that is part of a research project to create a more realistic game AI. Improviso requires two players, a Lead Actor and Director, who pretend to shoot a low-budget science fiction movie about a government cover-up of aliens at Area 51. The goal of the project is to gather recorded improv from thousands of games, which can be used to train an AI system that will be able to play the role of NPCs. Jeff Orkin, the MIT researcher who led game development, says that the best time to play Improviso is between 7 pm and 10 pm. Orkin is also the creator of a game AI called goal oriented action programming, first used in F.E.A.R. in 2005 and later employed in F.E.A.R. 2 and Fallout 3."

dulepov writes "An extensive set of features makes ExtJS a very popular framework. But a rich set of features comes with a cost: the framework is complex. While many frameworks can be learned from source, with ExtJS this is not the case. Syntax of object-oriented programming in JavaScript can be very difficult to understand and ExtJS sources demonstrate that. As a practical programmer, I think that the best way to learn ExtJS is to read a good book and follow examples inside.The ExtJS book I got was published by Packt Publishing. It is called Learning ExtJS 3.2. I consider myself an experienced ExtJS developer but there are always more experienced developers and this book was written by several of them." Read below for the rest of dulepov's review. Learning Ext JS 3.2 author Shea Frederick, Colin Ramsa, Steve 'Cutter' Blades, Nigel White pages 432 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer dulepov ISBN 1849511209 summary A good learning resource about ExtJS When I looked through the table of contents, I realized that it is one of those rare books that suits all kind of readers: from beginners to advanced. The book starts from "Getting ExtJS" chapter. It discusses why ExtJS is different, how to get it, where to put it, etc. While this may seem like a chapter for beginners, I read it with interest and found several tips I will use in my next project. The opening chapter also tells what to do if the developer sees error messages. This is another advantage of the book: it is highly practical.

Further chapters describe how to use ExtJS. Here is what is covered: getting elements, creating and using forms, working with menus and toolbars, displaying and editing data with grids, using layouts for components (you can quickly rearrange objects by just applying another layout), creating tree controls, using windows and dialogs. There are also chapters about charts, effects and drag-and-drop. In addition there is a chapter about extending ExtJS. This area is probably one of the most difficult for programmers because this is not what the developer can find in the ExtJS package. The topic about extending ExtJS takes 38 pages, so it is really well covered.

Another interesting topic discussed in the book is data transfer between the browser and the server. There are traditional ways (such as AJAX) but ExtJS and the book go further discussing remote method invocation from the client on the server using ExtDirect. ExtDirect is a hot topic in the ExtJS community because it greatly simplifies communication between the client and the server. Thus the developer can save development time.

The final chapter in the book talks about useful additions to ExtJS such as HTML editor, state management on the browser side, using AIR, etc. It also describes several community extensions to ExtJS (such as TinyMCE and SwfUploadPanel) and how to use them.

The book contains a lot of examples, so the reader can learn through them. One side note here (and a recommendation to Packt editors): I found that spacing in the examples could be smaller to avoid line wraps. Reading examples would be easier if the spacing was reduced. Truly speaking, this is the only bad thing I can tell about the book.

Despite being experienced in ExtJS and using it since version 1.x, I found a lot of good tips in this book. It is really useful and now lives on the shelf among good programming books. So if you need a good learning resource about ExtJS, I can definitely recommend Learning ExtJS 3.2 .

P.S. Current version of ExtJS at the time of writing of this review is 3.3.1. That does not make the book obsolete at all.

You can purchase Learning Ext JS 3.2 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

dulepov writes "An extensive set of features makes ExtJS a very popular framework. But a rich set of features comes with a cost: the framework is complex. While many frameworks can be learned from source, with ExtJS this is not the case. Syntax of object-oriented programming in JavaScript can be very difficult to understand and ExtJS sources demonstrate that. As a practical programmer, I think that the best way to learn ExtJS is to read a good book and follow examples inside.The ExtJS book I got was published by Packt Publishing. It is called Learning ExtJS 3.2. I consider myself an experienced ExtJS developer but there are always more experienced developers and this book was written by several of them." Read below for the rest of dulepov's review. Learning Ext JS 3.2 author Shea Frederick, Colin Ramsa, Steve 'Cutter' Blades, Nigel White pages 432 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer dulepov ISBN 1849511209 summary A good learning resource about ExtJS When I looked through the table of contents, I realized that it is one of those rare books that suits all kind of readers: from beginners to advanced. The book starts from "Getting ExtJS" chapter. It discusses why ExtJS is different, how to get it, where to put it, etc. While this may seem like a chapter for beginners, I read it with interest and found several tips I will use in my next project. The opening chapter also tells what to do if the developer sees error messages. This is another advantage of the book: it is highly practical.

Further chapters describe how to use ExtJS. Here is what is covered: getting elements, creating and using forms, working with menus and toolbars, displaying and editing data with grids, using layouts for components (you can quickly rearrange objects by just applying another layout), creating tree controls, using windows and dialogs. There are also chapters about charts, effects and drag-and-drop. In addition there is a chapter about extending ExtJS. This area is probably one of the most difficult for programmers because this is not what the developer can find in the ExtJS package. The topic about extending ExtJS takes 38 pages, so it is really well covered.

Another interesting topic discussed in the book is data transfer between the browser and the server. There are traditional ways (such as AJAX) but ExtJS and the book go further discussing remote method invocation from the client on the server using ExtDirect. ExtDirect is a hot topic in the ExtJS community because it greatly simplifies communication between the client and the server. Thus the developer can save development time.

The final chapter in the book talks about useful additions to ExtJS such as HTML editor, state management on the browser side, using AIR, etc. It also describes several community extensions to ExtJS (such as TinyMCE and SwfUploadPanel) and how to use them.

The book contains a lot of examples, so the reader can learn through them. One side note here (and a recommendation to Packt editors): I found that spacing in the examples could be smaller to avoid line wraps. Reading examples would be easier if the spacing was reduced. Truly speaking, this is the only bad thing I can tell about the book.

Despite being experienced in ExtJS and using it since version 1.x, I found a lot of good tips in this book. It is really useful and now lives on the shelf among good programming books. So if you need a good learning resource about ExtJS, I can definitely recommend Learning ExtJS 3.2 .

P.S. Current version of ExtJS at the time of writing of this review is 3.3.1. That does not make the book obsolete at all.

You can purchase Learning Ext JS 3.2 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "After being told it can no longer sell its Apple CEO Steve Jobs action figure, M.I.C. Gadget has been ordered to kill off its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg action figure as well. The lifelike Zuckerberg doll was available for $70 online, but now Facebook has had it banned, just like Apple did for the Jobs doll." Still waiting for a lifelike 'CmdrTaco' doll with Carpal Tunnel Grip.

LoLobey writes "On the other end of the spectrum from Richard Stallman, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) speculates upon the advantages of living in a town with no privacy whatsoever. Everyone gets chipped and tracked online. 'Although you would never live in a city without privacy, I think that if one could save 30% on basic living expenses, and live in a relatively crime-free area, plenty of volunteers would come forward.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Today the first ID cards that include iris and fingerprint biometric information were registered and issued in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. (Original article in Spanish.) The juicier part of the story is that for now, only children will be enrolled in this national biometric database. It is intended that by December 2012 all children in the country will be registered. The alleged purpose of the new ID card is to hinder the abduction of children and prevent child exploitation. The first ID cards are being issued in the same city that last year started implementing a mandatory iris scan for convicted felons and voluntary members of the public in a Minority Reportesque plan to combat delinquency that features iris readers in public transport and ATMs. This comes from the country that last year attempted and failed to create a national database of mobile phone users, again with the purported intention to tackle extortion and kidnappings."

An anonymous reader writes "'Red Hat paid $US4.2 million to settle a patent infringement suit brought against it by FireStar Software, an intellectual property activist claims. Florian Mueller, who made a name for himself during the campaign to prevent the adoption of software patents in Europe some years ago, said he had dug up a court filing that showed the payment had been made.' Mueller says the payment made by Red Hat was kept secret but news about it surfaced in another suit."

An anonymous reader writes "'Red Hat paid $US4.2 million to settle a patent infringement suit brought against it by FireStar Software, an intellectual property activist claims. Florian Mueller, who made a name for himself during the campaign to prevent the adoption of software patents in Europe some years ago, said he had dug up a court filing that showed the payment had been made.' Mueller says the payment made by Red Hat was kept secret but news about it surfaced in another suit."

crookedvulture writes "Last week, Western Digital announced its intention to buy rival drive maker Hitachi. Interestingly, those are the only two companies with 3TB hard drives available for sale. The Tech Report takes a closer look at how the two models compare with each other and over 30 different hard drives and SSDs. The resulting data paints a detailed picture of the storage landscape and is worth skimming for anyone curious about how spindle speeds and flash memory impact performance, power consumption, and noise."

adeelarshad82 writes "Turns out that AT&T may be lying about 4G. The company's two '4G' phones and its '4G' modem don't deliver 4G even by AT&T's own standards. In fact, test results show that the company is delivering '4G' devices that are actually slower than the carrier's own 3G devices. So how can they get away with this? Well, initially the International Telecommunications Union defined 4G as a bunch of super-fast technologies nobody used yet, but the ITU crumbled under pressure from various cell phone companies and now defines 4G as any cellular Internet network that's faster than what was considered the fastest technology in 2009. Between the revised 4G standards and a little fine print in its ads, AT&T is able to legally indemnify itself against the fact that its current 4G claim is totally worthless. While other carriers also claim that they have 4G networks, Verizon's LTE is the only technology which comes close to real 4G."

MassDosage writes "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh provides in-depth coverage of the open source Solr search server. In some ways this book reads like the missing reference manual for the advanced usage of Solr. It is aimed at readers already familiar with Solr and related search concepts as well as those having some knowledge of programming (specifically Java). The book covers a lot of ground, some of it fairly challenging, and gives those working with Solr a lot of hands-on technical advice on how to use and fine-tune many parts of this powerful application." Keep reading for the rest of MassDosage's review. Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server author David Smiley and Eric Pugh pages 317 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Mass Dosage ISBN 978-1-847195-88-3 summary Enhance your search with faceted navigation, result highlighting, fuzzy queries, ranked scoring, and more. Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server starts off with a brief description of what Solr is, how it is related to the Lucene libraries (which it is built around) and how it compares to other technologies such as databases. This book is not an introduction to search and this chapter covers only the basics and assumes the reader already knows what they are getting into or that they will read up on search concepts themselves before reading further. Solr is free, open-source technology licensed under the Apache license and is available here. This book covers the 1.4 version of Solr and was published before this version was actually released so it is a bit patchy in areas which were still undergoing change but the authors point this out very clearly in the text where applicable.

The book provides details on downloading and installing Solr, building it from source and the manifold options available for configuring and tweaking it. A freely available data set from Music Brainz is provided for download along with various code examples and a bundled version of Solr 1.4 which is used as the basis for many of the examples referred to throughout the text. In some ways this dataset is limited as it only allows for fairly simple usages compared with the challenges of indexing and searching large bodies of text. Again, the authors clearly mention these limits and briefly describe how certain concepts would be better applied to other data sources.

The basics of schema design, text analysis, indexing and searching are covered over the next three chapters and these include a wide-range of essential search concepts such as tokenizers, stemming, stop-words, synonyms, data import handlers, field qualifiers, filters, scoring, sorting etc. The reader is taken through the process of setting up Solr so it can be used to index data that is to be searched and then how this data can be imported into Solr from a variety of sources like XML and HTML documents, PDF's, databases, CSV files and many others. Using Solr to build search queries is covered with examples that the reader can run via the Solr web interface and provided sample data.

More advanced search techniques are covered next and at this point I felt a lot of what was being discussed went over my head. Perhaps this was because my own search experience hasn't extended very far and the behind-the-scenes algorithms powering search aren't something I've had to directly work with. There were sections here that definitely felt aimed at people with a much more thorough understanding of the theory underpinning search and how a knowledge of mathematics and the data being searched are essential for search algorithm design. Having said this, these chapters felt like they would be really useful to come back to at some point in the future and I'm sure that people working with search on a daily basis would find some useful advice here for how to get the best out of Solr.

Solr provides much more than just indexing and search and the fact that various components are available to do many other common search-related functions is one of its main benefits. These components provide things like the highlighting of search terms in returned results, spell-checking, related documents and so on. The authors cover components which ship with Solr to provide this functionality as well as a mentioning a few that are currently separate software projects. One can easily see how all of this would be directly applicable if one was adding search capability to one's own product or web site as there are a lot of wheels that Solr saves you from having to re-invent. The book also mentions the various parts of Solr that can be extended to modify or add new behaviours, which of course if one of the many advantages of its open source nature.

The final three chapters move on to the more practical side of actually using Solr in the "real world" and discuss various deployment options, how it can be monitored using JMX, security, integration and scaling. In addition to Java (which is the probably the most powerful and straightforward way of integrating with Solr) support for languages like JavaScript, PHP and Ruby is described. I felt the Ruby section was way too long, maybe one of the authors has a soft spot for the Ruby language? The sections on writing a web crawler and doing autocomplete were far more interesting and probably also more generally applicable. The book wraps up with a thorough discussion on how to scale Solr from scaling high (optimising a single server through techniques like caching, shingling and clever schema design and indexing strategies), scaling wide (using multiple Solr servers and replicating or sharding data between them) and scaling deep (a combination of the former two approaches).

On the whole this is a very thorough, detailed book and it is clear that the authors have a lot of experience with Solr and how it is used in practice. This book does not cover a lot of theory and assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge and is definitely aimed at those who need to get their hands dirty and get up and running with Solr in a production environment. The authors have a straightforward, open and honest writing style and aren't afraid of clearly stating where Solr has limitations or imperfections. While the book may have a somewhat steep learning curve, this is isolated to certain chapters which can be skipped and returned to later if necessary. The fact that the writing is concise and to the point means one doesn't have to wade through pages of flowery text before getting to the good bits. If you're seriously thinking about using Solr or are already using it and want to know more so you can take full advantage of it, I would definitely recommend this book.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion.

You can purchase Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

MassDosage writes "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh provides in-depth coverage of the open source Solr search server. In some ways this book reads like the missing reference manual for the advanced usage of Solr. It is aimed at readers already familiar with Solr and related search concepts as well as those having some knowledge of programming (specifically Java). The book covers a lot of ground, some of it fairly challenging, and gives those working with Solr a lot of hands-on technical advice on how to use and fine-tune many parts of this powerful application." Keep reading for the rest of MassDosage's review. Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server author David Smiley and Eric Pugh pages 317 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer Mass Dosage ISBN 978-1-847195-88-3 summary Enhance your search with faceted navigation, result highlighting, fuzzy queries, ranked scoring, and more. Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server starts off with a brief description of what Solr is, how it is related to the Lucene libraries (which it is built around) and how it compares to other technologies such as databases. This book is not an introduction to search and this chapter covers only the basics and assumes the reader already knows what they are getting into or that they will read up on search concepts themselves before reading further. Solr is free, open-source technology licensed under the Apache license and is available here. This book covers the 1.4 version of Solr and was published before this version was actually released so it is a bit patchy in areas which were still undergoing change but the authors point this out very clearly in the text where applicable.

The book provides details on downloading and installing Solr, building it from source and the manifold options available for configuring and tweaking it. A freely available data set from Music Brainz is provided for download along with various code examples and a bundled version of Solr 1.4 which is used as the basis for many of the examples referred to throughout the text. In some ways this dataset is limited as it only allows for fairly simple usages compared with the challenges of indexing and searching large bodies of text. Again, the authors clearly mention these limits and briefly describe how certain concepts would be better applied to other data sources.

The basics of schema design, text analysis, indexing and searching are covered over the next three chapters and these include a wide-range of essential search concepts such as tokenizers, stemming, stop-words, synonyms, data import handlers, field qualifiers, filters, scoring, sorting etc. The reader is taken through the process of setting up Solr so it can be used to index data that is to be searched and then how this data can be imported into Solr from a variety of sources like XML and HTML documents, PDF's, databases, CSV files and many others. Using Solr to build search queries is covered with examples that the reader can run via the Solr web interface and provided sample data.

More advanced search techniques are covered next and at this point I felt a lot of what was being discussed went over my head. Perhaps this was because my own search experience hasn't extended very far and the behind-the-scenes algorithms powering search aren't something I've had to directly work with. There were sections here that definitely felt aimed at people with a much more thorough understanding of the theory underpinning search and how a knowledge of mathematics and the data being searched are essential for search algorithm design. Having said this, these chapters felt like they would be really useful to come back to at some point in the future and I'm sure that people working with search on a daily basis would find some useful advice here for how to get the best out of Solr.

Solr provides much more than just indexing and search and the fact that various components are available to do many other common search-related functions is one of its main benefits. These components provide things like the highlighting of search terms in returned results, spell-checking, related documents and so on. The authors cover components which ship with Solr to provide this functionality as well as a mentioning a few that are currently separate software projects. One can easily see how all of this would be directly applicable if one was adding search capability to one's own product or web site as there are a lot of wheels that Solr saves you from having to re-invent. The book also mentions the various parts of Solr that can be extended to modify or add new behaviours, which of course if one of the many advantages of its open source nature.

The final three chapters move on to the more practical side of actually using Solr in the "real world" and discuss various deployment options, how it can be monitored using JMX, security, integration and scaling. In addition to Java (which is the probably the most powerful and straightforward way of integrating with Solr) support for languages like JavaScript, PHP and Ruby is described. I felt the Ruby section was way too long, maybe one of the authors has a soft spot for the Ruby language? The sections on writing a web crawler and doing autocomplete were far more interesting and probably also more generally applicable. The book wraps up with a thorough discussion on how to scale Solr from scaling high (optimising a single server through techniques like caching, shingling and clever schema design and indexing strategies), scaling wide (using multiple Solr servers and replicating or sharding data between them) and scaling deep (a combination of the former two approaches).

On the whole this is a very thorough, detailed book and it is clear that the authors have a lot of experience with Solr and how it is used in practice. This book does not cover a lot of theory and assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge and is definitely aimed at those who need to get their hands dirty and get up and running with Solr in a production environment. The authors have a straightforward, open and honest writing style and aren't afraid of clearly stating where Solr has limitations or imperfections. While the book may have a somewhat steep learning curve, this is isolated to certain chapters which can be skipped and returned to later if necessary. The fact that the writing is concise and to the point means one doesn't have to wade through pages of flowery text before getting to the good bits. If you're seriously thinking about using Solr or are already using it and want to know more so you can take full advantage of it, I would definitely recommend this book.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion.

You can purchase Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "As discussed previously on slashdot, the Old Man Murray article was deleted from Wikipedia. After much controversy, the article has been restored. However, the debate to delete the article continues, with both deletionists and Old Man Murray fans swarming to the article."

An anonymous reader writes "The recent European import ban against the PlayStation 3 has been lifted. Reportedly, LG had already succeeded in seizing about 300,000 PlayStations, but a court in the Dutch city of The Hague overturned the prejudgment seizure order and told LG to return all PS3s to Sony. Sony uses the Netherlands as its main entry point for all European PlayStation sales, and can now return to normal. While the temporary ban has been lifted, LG can still assert its Blu-ray patents against Sony in a regular proceeding, which will go to trial on November 18. LG asks for patent royalties of $2.50 per Blu-ray device and believes Sony already owes it $150-180 million."

supersloshy writes this followup to our Thursday discussion of friction between Canonical and GNOME: "I've seen a lot of GNOME bashing for various reasons here on Slashdot as well as several other websites. The problem with all of this is that you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical. Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.' The points covered in the blog post include, among others, how Freedesktop.org is broken as a standards body, that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't understand how GNOME works, that GNOME is not easy to understand, and that open discussions from the very beginning are important for specification development and adoption. Another blog post by 'Sankar' also covers similar points while defending GNOME."

An anonymous reader writes "We recently discussed a new Chrome extension that was introduced to block specified websites from appearing in search results. Now, Google has introduced a new feature that hide results from unwanted domains right from the search page. This is yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don't want to see at all in search result. The so-called 'experts exchange' or 'online eHow to guide' would be first on my blocked list." Another neat recent addition was the introduction of Recipe View, which adds depth to food preparation searches.

wiredmikey sends this quote from Security Week: "Today's tragic events of the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami, as sad as it is, is a dream for scammers and fraudsters around the world. Tragic events are always something scammers use to their advantage, helping them prey on and exploit innocent victims. Scams are already spreading across Facebook, which started in a matter of minutes after the news broke of the earthquake in Japan. As I write this, scammers are hard at work, registering new domains and cranking out templates for their fake donation sites. This will be followed with massive volumes of email spam, Tweets through Twitter, and Facebook posts, as scammers gear up to solicit donations from around the world." As coverage of the earthquake and resulting tsunami has proceeded, collections of videos and pictures are showing the extent of the devastation. The NY Times makes the excellent point that things could have been much worse if not for building codes and quake-resistant engineering. A state of emergency was declared at one of Japan's nuclear plants, after the earthquake caused cooling problems at one of the reactors. No radiation leakage has been reported, and the US Air Force has helped by delivering coolant by air.

itwbennett writes "Rumor has it that the man who while CEO of Google was, at best, blithe about user privacy, is on a short list to replace Gary Locke as Commerce Secretary. Schmidt has competition, though, including former Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, according to Bloomberg."