Slashdot Mirror

meckdevil writes "Associated Press developer-journalist extraordinaire Jonathan Stray gives a brilliant explanation of the use of data-mining strategies to winnow and wring journalistic sense out of massive numbers of documents, using the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks as a case in point. The concepts for focusing on certain groups of documents and ignoring others are hardly new; they underlie the algorithms used by the major Web search engines. Their use in a journalistic context is on a cutting edge, though, and it raises a fascinating quandary: By choosing the parameters under which documents will be considered similar enough to pay attention to, journalist-programmers actually choose the frame in which a story will be told. This type of data mining holds great potential for investigative revelation — and great potential for journalistic abuse."

KWInt1601 writes "A man who believes he is Christ files a patent application — and the formal dance of responding to office actions from the USPTO begins. Invoking the 1998 State Street decision, the applicant argues, 'like software, godly powers is a method, and affects a machine. Like business methods, godly powers produces a useful, concrete, and tangible result, and that should be all that's needed for statutory material.'"

KingSkippus writes "According to a story at CNN, Apple has begun enforcing third party promotion guidelines (PDF) that, among other things, restricts organizations from giving away iPads, using the word 'free' to describe any Apple products in a prominent manner, or promoting giveaways of iPod Touches in lots of less than 250 and with Apple's explicit approval."

Esther Schindler writes "Feeling a little overwhelmed by changing web standards and new browser choices? You aren't the only one. Mozilla is launching development tracks for the next two editions of its Firefox Web browser immediately, with hopes to push both into general release before the end of the year. This while Microsoft previews Internet Explorer 10 on the heels of its IE9 release, and Google projects Chrome 13 just one year after Chrome 7. Meanwhile, HTML5, the next version of the Web's primary language, appears to have entered a permanent gestation phase. Writes Scott Fulton: All the confusion has prompted Web developers to ask this question: What do we develop our sites against now?"

Freggy writes "In Belgium, a group of activists calling themselves the Field Liberation Movement has destroyed a field which was being used for a scientific experiment with genetically modified potatoes. In spite of the presence of 60 police officers protecting the field, activists succeeded pulling out the plants and sprayed insecticides over them, ruining the experiment. The goal of the experiment was to test potato plants which are genetically modified to be resistant to potato blight. It's a sad day for the freedom of scientific research."

An anonymous reader writes "Synaesthesia — a condition where the brain has extra connections, causing numbers or days to have colors associated with them, or sounds to have particular tastes etc. — has always fascinated me. This interview with a man with lexical-gustatory synaesthesia shows how all-encompassing the condition is. I asked him when he first became aware of it and he replied that it's like asking someone what was the first thing they saw or smelled. Also, my name tastes salty and metallic. Yum."

meckdevil writes "If you're a cutting-edge geek with an interest in investigative journalism, there's a great job opening at the badly named Reporter's Lab, a project supported by Duke University's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. Headed up by former Washington Post editor and reporter Sarah Cohen, the Reporter's Lab is Duke's effort to extend what is known as 'computational journalism' into the realm of investigative reporting and thereby make investigative reporters more efficient and effective."

Laura K. Cowan writes "NASA is back in the future-tech space race with a new manned deep space craft called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which aims to take astronauts on longer missions to deep space, eventually to planets such as Mars where only unmanned crafts have previously traveled. The MPCV holds 4 astronauts, is currently capable of 3-week missions, and not only could take mankind to new frontiers but is billed as being '10 times safer... than the current space shuttle.' Maybe there is hope for space travel outside the X Prize."

generalepsilon writes "Researchers from the University of Washington have found a key reason why StarCraft is a popular spectator sport (PDF), especially in Korea. In a paper published last week, they theorize that StarCraft incorporates 'information asymmetry,' where the players and spectators each have different pieces of information, which transforms into entertainment. Sometimes spectators know something the players don't; they watch in suspense as players walk their armies into traps or a dropship sneaks behind the mineral line. Other times, players know something the spectators yearn to find out, such as 'cheese' (spectacular build orders that attempt to outplay an opponent early in the game). Rather than giving as much information as possible to spectators, it may be more crucial for game designers to decide which information to give to spectators, and when to reveal this information."

ecmguru writes "My first impression of the book was that the author did an excellent job in presenting records management (RM) concepts, describing how Alfresco implemented the RM features in Share, and how you could customize this features if necessary. I was somewhat excited about reading this book because I am currently working on an RM project." Read on for the rest of ecmguru's review. Alfresco 3 Records Management author Dick Weisinger pages 488 publisher Packt rating 8/10 reviewer ecmguru ISBN 1849514364 summary Provides a good mix of records management concepts and technical details for developers The author begins by introducing RM in layman's terms, then details how to install an RM module and describes the RM features built for 5015.2 DoD certification for Alfresco. One big thing to note – Alfresco RM module is FREE. This may not be a surprise to typical Alfresco users or developers, but having access to RM functionality without having to pay a fortune is very appealing. He then talks about the Alfresco Content Model. RM content model is generic; there is DoD content model that follows 5015.2 DoD spec. There is a good diagram on model-view-controller application process flow and affected RM files.

If you are not familiar with what a File Plan is, the author defines what a 5015.2 File Plan is: three-level folder structure that contains Series, Categories, and Folders. Each object type in the File Plan has to follow specific RM rules. Series can only contain Categories; it cannot contain Folders and Records. Categories can only contain Folders and has support for disposition schedule. Retention rules are inherited by all Folders underneath a Category. Folder may contain records and non-declared records.

The author mentions benefits of developing a formal file plan. It helps with consistency when filing & retrieving records, enables compliance, provides an audit trail, and supports predictable disposition of records. There are several means of creating a file plan: 1) follow company organizational chart, 2) develop a file plan that maps to functionality or activity of the organization, or 3) a hybrid of both. #1 is simpler to identify, but generally not recommended since records for a group or department may have different retention & disposition values. #2 allows modeling based on process, activities and transactions, and enables clustering of similar types of records. #3 is typically the best approach. Use organization structure to define series, use processes to define categories, and finally use entity or time periods to define folders.

He next talks about Disposition Schedules and how they work in an RM module. The author does a good job in describing the details without making it too dry. Disposition normally includes retention, transfer, and destruction phases. The lifecycle of a record before it gets disposed can be described in the following fashion:

- When a document is moved into a File Plan, it's still an undeclared record.
- When all mandatory fields are completed, only then can it be declared as a record.
- Declared records located in a File Plan are automatically associated with a disposition schedule, which is inherited indirectly from Category
- Once a record is declared, the content cannot be changed; only metadata can be changed.
- All changes in metadata values are audited.

There are some complexities about disposition that the author tries to explain, but if you are not a records person, the topics seem esoteric. For example, there are 5 types of disposition steps and three main disposition rules:

- 1st step must be Cutoff or Retain
- No two steps can be of the same type
- No steps can come after Destroy

Here is another rule about disposition — if disposition occurs at folder and folder contains no records or undeclared records, folder will not be Cutoff. There can only be Cutoff if and only if there is at least one record. Most of these statements seem logical, but they do not really help me understand more about disposition.

The best chapter in the book has to be Chapter 9. If you only have time to read one chapter, this is one that you need to read. The author reviews various RM concepts and then describes various scenarios and what-if situations that a record can be in. Other topics include: freeze/hold, unique record ID that Alfresco creates for each record, and the two cron jobs that the RM module uses to support RM functionality.

The author concludes with how Alfresco RM supports searching, auditing, security, and configuration settings. The author provided a list of all RM features as it maps to RM groups/roles that are pre-configured in RM module. You can disable/enable features per role using the role editing UI. This feature is not in Alfresco Share.

In summary, I really liked this book. It provides a good mix of records management concepts and technical details for developers. My only suggestion for the author is that it would have been nice if he provided a fictitious use case that could be referenced throughout the book. Other Alfresco books that I have reviewed include such samples and I feel that it can be very helpful to readers who are trying to pick up a new concept.

You can purchase Alfresco 3 Records Management from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Hugh Pickens writes "H. Gilbert Welch writes in the LA Times that the threshold for diagnosis has fallen too low, with physicians making diagnoses in individuals who wouldn't have been considered sick in the past, raising healthcare costs for everyone. Part of the explanation is technological: diagnostic tests able to detect biochemical and anatomic abnormalities that were undetectable in the past. 'But part of the explanation is behavioral: We look harder for things to be wrong. We test more often, we are more likely to test people who have no symptoms, and we have changed the rules about what degree of abnormality constitutes disease (a fasting blood sugar of 130 was not considered to be diabetes before 1997; now it is).' Welch says the problem is that low thresholds have a way of leading to treatments that are worse than the disease. 'We are trained to focus on the few we might be able to help, even if it's only 1 out of 100 (the benefit of lowering cholesterol in those with normal cholesterol but elevated C-reactive protein) or 1 out of 1,000 (the benefit of breast and prostate cancer screening),' writes Welch. 'But it's time for everyone to start caring about what happens to the other 999.'"

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes to point out some unfortunate holes in a judge's recent ruling that was largely welcomed 'round these parts: "A federal judge has ruled that a Canadian adult film producer cannot subpoena the identities of ISP users that were alleged to be sharing its copyrighted movies. Regardless of whether one supports the conclusion, the judge's reasoning was pretty weak. But the real hurdle is convincing people that a non-lawyer is entitled to call out a federal judge on their logic in the first place." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

A federal judge has ruled that a Canadian adult film producer cannot subpoena the identities en masse of over 1,000 "John Doe" defendants whom the producers accused of sharing their films and violating their copyright. Quebec-based VPR Internationale had obtained the IP addresses of 1,017 users that they suspected of sharing their copyrighted films over the Internet, and wanted a federal court to sign off on subpoenaing the subscribers' identities from their ISPs.

Judge Harold Baker's ruling denying VPR's request has been lauded as a victory of judicial common sense against abuses of the legal system. Even though this will probably put me in the minority among self-described civil libertarians, I beg to disagree. First, because I don't think that subpoenaing a defendant's identity from a service provider constitutes an abuse of the legal system in and of itself. But more importantly, whether or not one agrees with the judge's decision, I think it contained plenty of logical errors, including a paragraph near the end which literally averaged about one error per sentence.

But back up for a second. Some of you are already thinking: What is a math major doing making legal criticisms of a ruling of a federal judge? So here's what I mean in each instance where I say that the judge made a "logical error": I mean that if you were to take the point made by the judge, and take the opposite point made by someone who disagreed, and you asked a group of experts (certainly if you asked a group of mathematicians, but probably even if you asked a group of lawyers) to read the two points and vote on which one was right, and you didn't tell them which position was the one taken by the judge — that most of the respondents would vote that the judge's position was incorrect.

Conversely, I'm always interested in hearing why people think I might be mistaken, if they say exactly what I've said that they think is incorrect, and why. In my most recent article, I offered a cash prize split between readers who submitted arguments that I was wrong (or, really, that my idea needed more work), and I enjoyed the responses so much that I ended up paying out more than the originally stated prize total. But if someone tries pulling rank and saying that I should defer to them on a legal question because they are a lawyer, law student, Supreme Court justice etc., here's the question I want them to answer: If we rounded up 10 lawyers to act as expert "voters," and showed each of them my argument and the heckler's counter-argument, and didn't tell the voters which argument was made by the math major and which one was made by the law school graduate, for whose argument would the majority vote? If the heckler won't explicitly make that claim, then there's no reason to take them seriously — because, obviously, if only 5 out of any given 10 lawyers would agree with their point, then why should we listen to the 5 who agree, instead of the other 5 who don't? (This does not apply if someone is making a bona fide argument — then the argument can be analyzed on its own terms. But if it's a good argument, the person shouldn't have to invoke their credentials to make it.)

Back to Judge Baker. His argument in support of his ruling begins on the second page, by rejecting the plaintiff's analogy between ISPs and car rental agencies:

VPR compares the Doe defendants' IP addresses to "records of who rented which car at a busy car rental agency, in that IP addresses are like cars "leased by subscribers. If a plaintiff was injured by a rental car, the plaintiff can discover the information on who leased the car from the agency by specifying the license plate of the offending vehicle and the date and time when the injury occurred. Without access to the agency's records, all the plaintiff has is the identity of the rental agency, but not who was driving the rental car." The comparison is not apt. The rental agency owns the car and is a potential defendant, so the adversarial process would yield the driver's information.

Huh? If you're injured by a rental car, how is the rental agency a "potential defendant"? Well, technically, anybody in the world is a "potential defendant" — you can put anyone's name on a lawsuit until a court shoots you down — but since that would make the phrase meaningless, presumably Judge Baker meant that the rental agency would be a legitimate potential defendant, one whom the accident victim would be justified in suing. So again: Huh? Why is a rental car agency liable for an accident caused by one of its renters? Obviously if the rental car agency was negligent in the maintenance of one of its vehicles and that negligence led to the accident, they might be liable — but not simply if their customer did something reckless over which they had no control (which would be analogous to an ISP subscriber committing a copyright infringement that the ISP didn't know about).

So, to translate that into vote-off terms as discussed above. What I mean is that if you took these two points:

• "The analogy between an ISP and a rental car agency is inappropriate, because a plaintiff could sue the rental car agency in order to subpoena the identity of the renter that hit them, but a copyright owner could not do the same to an ISP." [Judge Baker's argument.]
• "The statement that the analogy is inappropriate, makes no sense. In either situation, the plaintiff wants to sue a customer of a third-party company, when the third-party company itself is probably not liable. So in either case, the plaintiff can sue a 'John Doe' defendant, and subpoena the company for the customer's identity. One could argue that this should be permitted in both cases, or prohibited in both cases, but no reason has been given as to why they should be treated differently." [My argument.]

and asked lawyers or mathematicians to vote on which was more correct, and you didn't tell them which argument was made by a judge and which argument was made by a math major, that the second point would get more votes. (I certainly think that if you fibbed and told your respondents that the first argument was made by a defendant, and the second argument was made by a judge in rejecting the defendant's line of reasoning, that most people would vote, "The judge is right." That would be cheating — playing on people's tendency to believe that a judge's reasoning is usually superior — but I could point out that if respondents are really evaluating the two arguments objectively, then it shouldn't matter!)

I'm not going to convert every such disagreement highlighted here into the point-counterpoint format; I think in each case it should be non-controversial how the conversion would go.

To proceed: in claiming that subpoenaing a rental car agency for the identity of their customer is not analogous to subpoenaing an ISP for the identity of their subscriber, Judge Baker adds: "And such information is not necessarily confidential; accident reports and police records may also identify the driver." True, but what does this have to do with anything? The question is: given a certain probability that a company's customer is guilty, is it appropriate to let a plaintiff subpoena the customer's identity from that company? If some customers in similar situations have had their identities made public by other circumstances, the judge's ruling gives no reason why that should be relevant at all, in a situation where the customer's identity is not public.

Judge Baker then raises the point that the customers to whom the IP addresses were assigned might not be the actual infringers:

Moreover, VPR ignores the fact that IP subscribers are not necessarily copyright infringers. Carolyn Thompson writes in an MSNBC article of a raid by federal agents on a home that was linked to downloaded child pornography. The identity and location of the subscriber were provided by the ISP. The desktop computer, iPhones, and iPads of the homeowner and his wife were seized in the raid. Federal agents returned the equipment after determining that no one at the home had downloaded the illegal material. Agents eventually traced the downloads to a neighbor who had used multiple IP subscribers' Wi-Fi connections.

Well, true — the assignee of the IP address might not be the actual copyright infringer. But, more generally, being named as a defendant in a lawsuit does not mean that you're at fault anyway — that's what the trial is for. For a court to take a plaintiff's case against a given defendant seriously, they just have to believe that there is a reasonable probability of the plaintiff winning. If the VPR has a list of IP addresses of users sharing out their copyrighted material, it may be true that not literally all of those infringers are living in the household that the IP address has been assigned to — but what percentage of them probably are? 90% or more? In any other scenario, wouldn't that have been considered quite a "reasonable" likelihood that the plaintiff had a legitimate case against a defendant, and that the case should go forward so that more facts can be brought to light, with the expectation that those facts would move you to a higher degree of certainty about whether the defendant was in fact at fault?

On the same note, Judge Baker goes on to say:

"The list of IP addresses attached to VPR's complaint suggests, in at least some instances, a similar disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer. The ISPs include a number of universities, such as Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, and the University of Minnesota, as well as corporations and utility companies."

But there is no reason to think that in the case of these entities, there would be any more "disconnect" between the actual infringer and the user on the network that the IP address had been assigned to. In fact, in the case of, say, a corporate network, it's more likely that an IP address would have been assigned by the IT department to a specific, trackable user, and not shared out on an unsecured Wi-Fi network where the IP could have been hi-jacked by a car parked on the street, a scenario that's probably more likely for a home network. I'm moderately confident that if you compared commercial home ISPs to corporations and looked at the percentage of times that the "user of record" for an IP address according to the logs was the same as the actual person using it, that percentage would be higher for a corporation than for an ISP serving home users. In any case, Judge Baker certainly gives no reason to expect that it would be lower.

Now here we get to the home stretch, the last paragraph on page 2, where I'm claiming almost one logical error or non sequitur per sentence:

• "As VPR points out, ex parte motions for expedited discovery have been granted in similar cases in other districts; among the thousands of Does in those cases, relatively few motions to quash have been filed."
  
  I'm not even sure what Judge Baker is saying here, but given the context, it seems to be: The innocent John Does' only defense against abuse of the discovery process is to quash the subpoenas (basically, file a motion saying "I'm not guilty, so the plaintiff can't have my identity"), but that's been relatively rare, so we can't rely on that as a defense against abuses of the system. Of course, there could be a simpler explanation as to why it's rare: Perhaps a lot of the John Doe defendants thus named are, in fact, guilty! I certainly don't want to take the position that anyone who doesn't deny their guilt is guilty — but we shouldn't assume that they're innocent, either. Come on — it's not that hard for a copyright holder to join a p2p network or find a Torrent tracker, and get a list of the IP address of a few users who are sharing or downloading their content illegally. Is it that hard to believe that most of the users on that list are probably doing what VPR said they were doing?
• "In at least one case, counsel has sought leave to amend the complaint to add more Doe defendants. See Lightspeed Media Corp. v. Does 1 - 100, Case No. 1:10-cv-05604, d/e 16 (N.D. Ill.) (seeking leave to add Does 101 - 1000 as defendants)."
  
  Uh, OK. Plaintiff started with a list of 100 defendants, and then expanded it to 1,000. What does this have to do with the legitimacy, generally, of suing John Doe defendants and subpoenaing their identities?
• "In Hard Drive Productions, Inc. v. Does 1 - 1000, counsel sought leave to dismiss more than 100 Doe defendants, stating that some of the Does had 'reached a mutually satisfactory resolution of their differences' with the plaintiff."
  
  Well, yeah, that's what you're supposed to do — try and settle out of court instead of bringing every single case before a judge. How does the fact that some plaintiffs settled make it less legitimate to sue John Doe defendants in the first place?
• "Could expedited discovery be used to wrest quick settlements, even from people who have done nothing wrong? The embarrassment of public exposure might be too great, the legal system too daunting and expensive, for some to ask whether VPR has competent evidence to prove its case."
  
  Now these are actually all fair points. The logical error is that they apply to any lawsuit — Judge Baker makes no argument why these problems would be more pronounced in a lawsuit against 1,000 John Does.
  
  In fact, some of these problems would probably be less severe in the case of a lawsuit against 1,000 John Doe defendants than in the case of a lawsuit against a single, named defendant. If you're one of 1,000 people who is accused of illegally downloading an adult movie, then even if the plaintiff learns your identity, it's unlikely that your name is going to appear in any articles about the case — far less likely than if you're the only defendant in the lawsuit. And if, out of over 1,000 defendants, there are at least several dozen who decide to fight the case, they'd be more likely to be able to split the costs of hiring a good lawyer than if only one defendant was named who had to pay all the costs on their own. Both embarrassment and legal fees are less of a burden when you can share them with hundreds of other people.

Now, I'd be happy to live under a legal regime that reached either conclusion — it's not an egregious miscarriage of justice if plaintiffs are able to subpoena the identities of ISP subscribers who show a high probability of being guilty, but it's not an egregious miscarriage of justice if they aren't, either. I think we need more healthy skepticism about the reasoning that judges use to reach those conclusions.

The practice of "judge-bashing" is unfortunately associated in most people's minds with extremists, usually on the right wing, but my reason for being skeptical is simple and non-partisan. Suppose that you were take, say, an economic argument published by a prominent economist, and asked the public to identify what they thought were "mistakes" and submit counter-points to those specific points in the argument. Then, suppose for each such disagreement, you asked an independent panel of economists to vote on who was right without saying which was the point made by the economist and which was the counter-point made by the layperson. (I'm not talking about errors that the author would voluntarily correct once they were pointed out; rather, points where they "dig their heels in" and refuse to back down.) I think it would be quite rare to find a disagreement where the experts were split 50/50 on whether the economist or the layperson was right, and extremely rare to find cases where 80% of the experts voted with the layperson. By contrast, polling my lawyer buddies about this or that part of a judge's reasoning, the 50/50 splits are extremely common, and there were quite a few cases where the vast majority agreed that a judge's reasoning was wrong — but always with the same shrug that there's not much you can do about it.

Davis Freeberg writes "The Department of Homeland Security is hard at work again, protecting the industry from websites that the big studios don't want you to see. This time they're targeting the Mafiaafire plugin by asking Mozilla to disable the addon at the root level. Instead of blindly complying with the government's request, Mozilla has decided to ask some tough questions instead. Unsurprisingly, when faced with legitimate concerns about the legality of their domain seizure program, the DHS has decided to clam up."

00_NOP writes "Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, has told New Scientist that one of the reasons the search engine launched Google Voice is that it needs more human voice data to perfect the sort of 'big data, simple algorithm' probabilistic approach to translating voices to text that drives Google Translate. Norvig says that no one is listening to your calls on Google Voice — it is simply their servers trying to get the translation right."

KuanH writes "Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide is billed as a complete guide to using Amazon's SimpleDB database API. It's most detailed for PHP. It's helpful for Python. But the Java code and explanations aren't up to the standard of the others. It includes a primer on using Amazon S3 with SimpleDB: files stored on S3, file metadata stored in SimpleDB — again, less good for Java. It also covers tuning to reduce usage costs, caching using memcached, and ways to batch-update and make serial or parallel requests to SimpleDB. However, it's missing some information that beginners might need, and it's perhaps not quite advanced enough for the more experienced. Downloadable example code is available only for PHP." Keep reading for the rest of Kuan's review. Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide author Prabhakar Chaganti, Rich Helms pages 252 publisher Packt Publishing rating 6 reviewer Kuan Hon ISBN 1847197345 summary "Getting started" guide to using Amazon's SimpleDB cloud database Say "cloud" to get the attention of CIOs seeking to cut costs in these recessionary times. One well known "database in the cloud" option is Amazon Web Services' SimpleDB, which Amazon describes as "a highly available, flexible, and scalable non-relational data store that offloads the work of database administration."

Those who prefer traditional relational databases could try eg Amazon RDS. This book only covers SimpleDB, a NoSQL or non-relational database. As is well known, NoSQL databases grew in popularity with the growth of large distributed systems and cloud computing, and their proponents tout their scalability and speed.

For anyone wanting a quick primer on NoSQL databases, this book includes a chapter on NoSQL which isn't limited to SimpleDB. It outlines some key conceptual differences between NoSQL and relational database management systems, with pros and cons, using the analogy of "a spreadsheet with some XML characteristics", and illustrating with some concrete examples. That chapter's been made available as a free sample chapter (SimpleDB versus RDBMS), so you can get a flavour of the book.

The contents list for this book is online, I won't recite it here. As well as an overview of SimpleDB, its terminology and advantages, the book goes through signing up with AWS and SimpleDB, and the account access keys. That chapter is also online, as a tutorial.

You may ask, how does this book differ from Amazon's free SimpleDB documentation, which includes a developer guide and a "getting started" guide? Amazon's own "getting started" is certainly helpful, and it's worth downloading and trying their web app scratchpad. But Amazon's detailed developer guide concentrates on REST and SOAP requests, which most people wouldn't want to deal with direct at that low level.

This book's focus is on using the SimpleDB web services API through certain specific languages and libraries — namely Java (JDK6 — using the typical 1.6 library plus several dependencies), Python (2.5 — you need boto), and PHP (with curl). It recommends the SDBtool Firefox extension (SDBizo), which is excellent for checking the results of running the code.

I've tried the book's Java and Python examples, on Windows. Not PHP, as I've not got round to learning PHP yet, though I skimmed the PHP explanations. Similarly, I've not had time to try it all over again on Linux. Generally, the book's coverage seems fuller and better for PHP than for Java or Python. Perhaps it was originally written for PHP, and the rest was bolted on — the stuff for Java more hurriedly than for Python?

The downloadable code samples, as mentioned, are PHP only. They really should have provided downloadable code for all 3 languages, plus some fake MP3 files (see later). If you get the e-book (available in PDF and epub), you can copy and paste the Java or Python code. But that's a tad tedious, especially when the code runs onto a new page, and there are stray end of lines etc that you have to delete manually. Furthermore, the Python code provided is for the interpreter in interactive mode (not for .py files, except a couple towards the end). So, for the Python, you also have to copy/paste each line one at a time. But that still beats having to re-type pages of code in full.

In other words, if you want this book and you're only interested in PHP, you can get away with just buying the hard copy and downloading the code from the Packt site. But if you prefer Python or Java, to save your fingers and blood pressure you should buy just the e-version, or get both paper and e books together. I really hope Packt will in future provide downloadable code samples for all the languages covered.

I have more issues with the sample code given in this book. The typical imports should have been spelled out in the example Java code. Eclipse offers more than one possible import in some cases. It was "try everything till it works", at least until I found this tutorial. I've included the initial required typical imports (though not the standard java.util etc ones) in my own list of points, which I'll say more about at the end of this review. Surely it wouldn't have been difficult to include just those few lines of imports, which could have saved readers a lot of time trying to work out the correct imports. There are also errors in the Python code, and on one page the code that should have been included is missing altogether.

Now, more on the book proper. After the overview described above, this book walks you through the basic SimpleDB operations: how to create a SimpleDB "domain" (equivalent to a worksheet in a spreadsheet), list domains, create/retrieve items (like spreadsheet rows), and delete domains.

Items have attributes (spreadsheet column headings), as key:value pairs — the key is the attribute name, the value is its value, eg address:1 Acacia Avenue. An attribute can have more than one value, eg the same item can have both address:1 Acacia Avenue and address:2 Broadway. The book also lists the SimpleDB constraints on domains, items and attributes — maximum number or size, etc — but it's best to check the AWS site for the latest info.

Code examples are given for each of the 3 languages mentioned. The examples are similar, but don't always cover the same ground. If they'd done that, where possible, it would have been more helpful to those of us trying examples in more than one language. One advantage of a book with associated website is that electronic updates can be published, and it would have been great if that had been done for this book. For instance, the book gave conditional put/delete code examples only for PHP. At the date of this review, boto now supports those features, but sample supplemental Python code for that still hadn't been made available.

SimpleDB stores attribute values as UTF-8 strings. This means that comparisons for sorting or searching are done lexicographically (character by character, left to right, numbers take precedence over uppercase over lowercase), and to handle numbers or dates you have to encode and decode them yourself. So, the book has a chapter explaining lexicographical comparison, data types, and how to encode and decode data to enable proper sorting and comparison of numbers, dates, Boolean values and XML-restricted characters. In the case of numbers this means zero padding and offsets, and there's example code for decoding and encoding numbers. Unlike with PHP and Python, oddly the Java code given was for the body of the typical method that carries out the encoding etc. This could have been omitted, and they should have given example code illustrating the method's usage instead. Similarly for the date formats code.

The SimpleDB query syntax is generally covered well, in a chapter which takes readers through first creating a sample database of song metadata to run queries against. It's not too painful copy/pasting the Java code (3+ pages), but with Python in interactive mode I drew the line at creating every song item and attributes using individual statements, even with pasting, so I just tried adding a couple of random ones to test that the code worked. I say again, full downloadable code please...!

That chapter then gives helpful examples of queries against the sample database and their results, including for more complex combined queries ("and", "or" type queries, "not" etc), and querying for multiple-value attributes. It also provides code examples for sorting and counting query results. But the Java code for retrieving an item's attributes wouldn't run, and I couldn't find the method used (getItemsAttributes()) detailed in the typical documentation; perhaps the book is out of date here?

The book starts going beyond the basics from Chapter 7 onwards, with a chapter on Amazon's S3 storage service — another well known component of Amazon Web Services, where "objects" (files) may be stored in "buckets" (directories), with "keys" used to retrieve objects.

For S3, the book uses JetS3t for Java. However, the Java code given for uploading files to S3 didn't demonstrate any integration with SimpleDB at all — the files were just uploaded with their filenames as the S3 keys, and the code didn't seem to deal with the creation of your own custom S3 keys for uploaded objects. In contrast, the Python code generated the S3 keys for the files from hashes previously produced and stored in the SimpleDB database, as well as dealing with their uploading. In addition, for me the Java code for downloading files from S3 just wouldn't run, and also it wasn't clear where the files were supposed to be downloaded to locally, unlike with the Python example. Inexplicably, there was no info on how to delete objects from S3 buckets, or indeed how to delete buckets. So, while the S3 chapter is of help, it could definitely do with being expanded, especially the Java sections.

Next, money money money. AWS charges are based on usage, so the chapter on tuning and usage costs has some practical value in explaining how SimpleDB is charged for, the "BoxUsage" value returned by requests to SimpleDB, using BoxUsage to optimize queries and compute costs, and how to get BoxUsage values back with your queries using Java, Python etc. There are code examples that, when run, illustrate the different BoxUsage values you get when you use different operators or expressions in queries (eg, using LIKE costs more).

However, partitioning your data into multiple domains is covered in only a few paragraphs, with no code given. I'd have liked to see more info on that, and some sample code for the partitioning process.

To further save money, you can use a cache to store data locally, trying your local cache first; and, only if the data is not there, would your app go out to SimpleDB and incur costs for querying it. This book accordingly has a chapter on how to install and use the popular open source caching system memcached to cache your query results locally. (CacheLite for PHP is also covered.) Again, the Java sections caused me some frustration. The Java test code showed that the memcached server was running properly on my machine, but the Java code for using the cache just didn't work; it ran, but continued to query SimpleDB direct. The Python code, however, worked perfectly — except that, if you're using memcached in Windows, you'll need to use port 11211 instead of what's shown in the book. (I didn't try it in Linux.)

Finally, the book deals with running parallel operations against SimpleDB, using its BatchPutAttributes. The section on updating SimpleDB in Python by making serial consecutive calls to SimpleDB is completely missing the code for the script, but the book does then cover inserting multiple items concurrently into SimpleDB using a threadpool in Java. It also gives sample Python code for alternative ways of parallelising requests: using Python's built-in threading module, threading and queues combined, then threading using the open source workerpool module.

To conclude, in substance the book has a fair amount of useful information on the basics of getting started with SimpleDB, particularly for Python (and probably PHP). But not providing downloadable code samples in Java and Python, or "fake" MP3 files to try S3 uploading/downloading, is a minus.

Some errors, inconsistencies and missing information from the department of "I-wish-they'd-included-this-even-if-they-thought-it-was-basic-as-it's-too-easily-missed-if-it's-not-spelled-out", mean that the book is not really "complete", and not as suitable as it should be for relative beginners — especially for Java and (in whatever language) Windows. It wouldn't take much extra work to get it up to scratch on that front. Perhaps the next edition, or better still an online update/supplement?

For the more experienced, the book doesn't take readers to as advanced a stage as it could have, in my view. In particular, it would have been good to have more info and example code on partitioning data between different domains, and also how to migrate data from an existing database to SimpleDB — their code for "importing" the sample database literally just adds each item and attribute individually.

Fix the errors, add the missing info for beginners, provide downloads of code in all relevant languages and "fake files", and I'd have given it a 7. Provide working sample Java code with more explanation, plus proper integration with S3, an 8. Add fuller info on partitioning, migration, and perhaps even integration with yet more AWS services, a 9.

All opinions are personal to me: half geek, half lawyer, mostly harmless. I'm researching legal issues in cloud computing.

You can purchase Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Several readers have sent in follow-up articles to Wednesday's news that iPhone location data was being tracked and stored. First, it seems Android shares a similar problem, though the file containing the location data is "only accessible on devices that have been rooted and opened up to installation of unsigned apps." Developer Magnus Eriksson has created an app to flush this data. Next: the iPhone tracking file is not new, just in a different place than it used to be. Reader overThruster then points out a CNet story indicating that law enforcement has been aware of this file for some time, and has used it in a forensics context. This story is a growing concern for Apple, particularly now that Senator Al Franken (PDF) and Rep. Ed Markey (PDF) have both written letters to Steve Jobs demanding details about the location tracking. Finally, PCMag explains how to view the location data present on your iPhone, should you so desire.

The International Game Developers Association has posted a warning to the game development community about the Amazon Appstore's distribution terms, detailing several unfavorable situations possible under the rules and saying, "Amazon has little incentive not to use a developer's content as a weapon with which to capture marketshare from competing app stores." "Amazon does not need the terms it has established for itself in order to give away a free app every day. Nor does it need the powers it has granted itself to execute a wide variety of price promotions. Other digital games platforms, such as Xbox LIVE Arcade and Steam, manage to run effective promotions very frequently without employing these terms. Amazon may further argue that its success depends on the success of its development partners, and therefore, that it would never abuse the terms of its distribution agreement. Given that Amazon can (and currently does) function perfectly well without these terms in other markets, it is unclear why game developers should take a leap of faith on Amazon’s behalf. Such leaps are rarely rewarded once a retailer achieves dominance."

An anonymous reader writes "A hacker has gained access to WordPress.com servers and site source code was exposed including passwords/API keys for Twitter and Facebook accounts. From the official blog post: 'Automattic had a low-level (root) break-in to several of our servers, and potentially anything on those servers could have been revealed. We presume our source code was exposed and copied. While much of our code is Open Source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partner's code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.'"

ConfusedVorlon writes "According to Christian Engström (Pirate MEP), 'Monday or Tuesday this upcoming week there will be another round in the fight against prolonging the copyright protection term for recorded music in the EU. Now is an opportunity to contact MEPs, Members of the European Parliament, and persuade them to vote against the term extension."

Hugh Pickens writes "Pastabagel writes that the actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote, 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,' he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?'"

ajensen201102 writes "A mere 20,000 Twitter users steal almost half of the spotlight on Twitter, which now ropes in a billion tweets every week. That means only 0.05% of the social network's user base attracts attention, according to a new Yahoo Research study. From the article: 'Like findings in previous studies, the researchers for this one conclude Twitter resembles an information-sharing hub rather than a social network, with the top generators garnering huge follower tallies but not following their content consumers in return.'"

fatherjoecode writes "According to this blog post from professor Robert Harper, the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science department is removing the required study of O-O from the Freshman curriculum: 'Object-oriented programming is eliminated entirely from the introductory curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature, and hence unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum.' It goes on to say that 'a proposed new course on object-oriented design methodology will be offered at the sophomore level for those students who wish to study this topic.'"

LarsKurth writes "The Xen.org open source community just released a new version of the Xen Hypervisor, Xen 4.1. Feature highlights include a new prototype scheduler for latency-sensitive workloads, better support for very large systems (>255 CPUs, 1GB/2MB super page sizes), new security features, and many others. During the development cycle of Xen 4.1, the Xen community worked closely with upstream Linux projects to ensure that Xen dom0 support and Xen guest support are available from unmodified Linux distributions. The release announcement contains a full list of changes."

Martin Hellman writes "George Shultz served as President Reagan's Secretary of State, and Bill Perry as President Clinton's Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to both President Nixon and Ford. Sam Nunn was Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years. Their key roles in the Cold War has led many to call them 'Cold Warriors.' That status makes their recent, repeated calls for fundamentally re-examining our nuclear posture all the more noteworthy. Their most recent attempt to awaken society to the unacceptable risk posed by nuclear weapons is an Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation. (That link requires a subscription to the Journal. There is also a subscription-free link (PDF) at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.) Key excerpts and links to other resources are available as well."

An anonymous reader writes "When GNOME 3 arrives in a month, users might be surprised to see old UI staples 'minimize' and 'maximize' buttons gone and replaced by... nothing, in the case of minimizing, and either drag-up or double-click-titlebar for maximizing. Says Allan Day, GNOME Marketing Contractor: 'Without minimize, the GNOME 3 desktop is a more focused UI, and it is a UI that has a consistent high level of quality. Yes, moving to a minimiseless world might take a little getting used to for some, but the change makes sense and has clear benefits.' Some users already welcome the change, while others are in an uproar, swearing to wait for GNOME 3.2, switch to KDE or even Windows. What do you think? A better, simpler interface for new times, or a case of making something simpler than it should be?" I like minimize and maximize buttons, but I'll admit to liking the look of GNOME 3 .

00_NOP writes "Internet commerce seems safe for now as Russian computer scientist Vladimir Romanov has conceded that his previously published solution to the '3 SAT' problem of boolean algebra does not work. If his solution did work it would have shown that many problems thought to be unsolvable with conventional computers — including decrypting your HTTPS encoded credit card number — would have been solvable in polynominal time. Romanov, who is very far from the sort of crank who normally claims to have proved P = NP or the opposite, is not giving up though..."

harrymcc writes "The Legend of Zelda originated 25 years ago today, when Nintendo released the original game for its Famicom console in Japan on February 21st, 1986. Benj Edwards is celebrating with a look at some of the franchise's odder sidelights, from a version broadcast by satellite to the unexpected true story of where the game got its name." If you're in the mood for more nostalgia, 1Up has a collection of articles delving into the past two and a half decades of Zelda. And since it's cool, here's a link (sorry) to a guy who hacked an oscilloscope to display Gameboy games, using 1993's Link's Awakening as a demonstration.

radioweather writes "For the first time since solar cycle 24 began, the sun produced a massive X-class solar flare, the strongest type of flare event. This comes from sunspot group 1158, which produced an M-class solar flare on Sunday. The EVE X-ray imager on the solar dynamics observatory shows a bright explosion on the sun, so bright it made a lens flare. The last X-class solar flare was on December 13th, 2006 and was part of solar cycle 23. Look for spectacular auroras in a couple days as the slower Coronal Mass Ejection hits earth. This will be a test of how well our newest technology handles stray energy from such solar disruptions."

eldavojohn writes "It's a lengthy read, but Lawrence Wright at The New Yorker has released a 26 page expose on Scientology. In a world where such innocuous sounding words as 'squirrels,' 'security-checked,' 'disconnection,' 'contra-survival,' 'suppressive persons,' 'clear' and 'open season' carry very serious and heavy baggage, director Paul Haggis has exited after thirty four years of membership and massive funding. Now he speaks at length of Scientology's controversies. From how celebrities were recruited with a 10% commission by a worker at Beverly Hills Playhouse to the current investigation by the FBI of physical abuse and human trafficking, Wright draws surrounding histories and accounts of the Church including Anonymous' crusade. The length of this article reflects the unusually large number of individuals (12 cases of physical abuse) cited as testimony of Scientology Leader David Miscavige's inurement and physical violence. The case remains open as the FBI collects data and testimony — especially in relation to Sea Org. Most disturbing are the disappearances of people that the New Yorker piece enumerates. The piece concludes with the author's interaction with the Church that results in several conflicting foundational statements from its stance on homosexuality (Haggis' original reason for publicly leaving it) to almost all details of L. Ron Hubbard's naval service and discharge. The article ends with Haggis' quote: 'I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't.' You can find summaries of the lengthy article and its suspected results along with corresponding reports listing politicians involved with the Church. Copyrighted work, leaked government documents, PS3 encryption keys and everything else has been posted on Slashdot but only the Church of Scientology has forced comments out of existence."

CWmike writes "It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when Finland was at the center of the cell phone universe. No more. Nokia is being killed by complexity. Along comes Microsoft with Windows Phone 7, delivering more complexity. My view is that Microsoft doesn't matter, writes Mike Elgan. Although Windows Phone 7 is a way better operating system than Symbian, Nokia's problem isn't Symbian, and the solution isn't Windows Phone 7. Nokia's problem is that it follows the losing strategies of the other losers in the market, and rejects the only two known winning strategies. There are way too many Nokia phones. This causes either choice paralysis, sending buyers screaming to Apple for relief, or buyer's remorse. Nokia should take the advice Steve Jobs gave to Nike CEO Mark Parker: 'Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.'" And maybe Nokia isn't toast at all: reader high_rolla points out an interesting bit of speculation that the Nokia-Microsoft pact is part of a grand plan "to become the exclusive manufacturer of hardware for MS phones and tablets."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla cranked out a new version of Firefox 4 (Beta 11-pre) that includes the proposed do-not-track feature. Both the nightly builds and latest trunk builds integrate the do-not-track feature. You could accuse Mozilla of wasting time with Firefox 4 beta-testing, but this feature certainly has surfaced fast."

hellkyng writes "The online dating site PlentyofFish was hacked, and purportedly 30 million customer records were stolen. The site's founder, Markus Frind, is blaming the security researcher who discovered the vulnerability and the journalist who confirmed the issue." The researcher who reported the vulnerability is Chris Russo, one of the guys who hacked The Pirate Bay last year. He explained his side of the story as well. Mr. Frind says he tracked down Russo's Facebook page and emailed his mom.

kriegs writes "'Historically speaking, the tech realm and beards have never been too far apart, at least for the men. As such, there are some in the FOSS realm who deserve special recognition for not only advancing free/open source software, but also for forsaking the razor and putting a hairy face forward.' Who's got the best facial hair in the open source community?"

techbeat writes "An ancient mathematical puzzle has found a new lease on life, reports New Scientist. The magic square is the basis for Sudoku, pops up on the back of a turtle in Chinese legend and provides a playful way to introduce children to arithmetic. But all this time it has been concealing a more complex geometrical form, says recreational mathematician Lee Sallows. He recently released dozens of examples of his 'geomagic squares' online. 'To come up with this after thousands of years of study of magic squares is pretty amazing,' blogged author Alex Bellos. Magic squares are used to help create codes for transmitting information and in the design of drug trials so geomagic ones may have real-world uses, says mathematician Peter Cameron. New Scientist has also put up a gallery of the geomagic squares."

Advocatus Diaboli writes "We no longer live in the era of 'plantation-type' movie studios or recording houses. However large private companies still have considerable power over content production, distribution and promotion. Technology has been slowly changing this state of affairs for almost 30-40 years, however certain new technological advances, enabling systems and cost considerations will change the entertainment industry as we know it within 5 years."

An anonymous reader writes "Vladimir Romanov has released what he claims is a polynomial-time algorithm for solving 3-SAT. Because 3-SAT is NP-complete, this would imply that P==NP. While there's still good reason to be skeptical that this is, in fact, true, he's made source code available and appears decidedly more serious than most of the people attempting to prove that P==NP or P!=NP. Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures, it seems more likely to lead to new discoveries than most. Note that there are already algorithms to solve 3-SAT, including one that runs in time (4/3)^n and succeeds with high probability. Incidentally, this wouldn't necessarily imply that encryption is worthless: it may still be too slow to be practical."

Hugh Pickens writes "The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week 'Boot Camp' training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to the live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. 'All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to,' writes yeegay. 'It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.' What is interesting for a company this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day."

gottabeme writes "Jim Gettys, one of the original X Window System developers and editor of the HTTP/1.1 spec, has posted a series of articles on his blog detailing his research on the relatively unknown problem of bufferbloat. Bufferbloat is affecting the entire Internet, slowly worsening as RAM prices drop and buffers enlarge, and is causing latency and jitter to spike, especially for home broadband users. Unchecked, this problem may continue to deteriorate the usability of interactive applications like VOIP and gaming, and being so widespread, will take years of engineering and education efforts to resolve. Being like 'frogs in heating water,' few people are even aware of the problem. Can bufferbloat be fixed before the Internet and 3G networks become nearly unusable for interactive apps?"

Relic of the Future writes "Seen on the blog 'Algorithmic Game Theory,' a report to congress and the president about past and future advances in information technology notes that, while improvements in hardware accounted for an approximate 1,000 fold increase in calculation speed over a 15-year time-span, improvements in algorithms accounted for an over 43,000 fold increase."

Relic of the Future writes "Seen on the blog 'Algorithmic Game Theory,' a report to congress and the president about past and future advances in information technology notes that, while improvements in hardware accounted for an approximate 1,000 fold increase in calculation speed over a 15-year time-span, improvements in algorithms accounted for an over 43,000 fold increase."

Modern Perl writes "Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, reflects on Perl's history of hacking its culture, from subverting the reductionist culture of Unix to reinventing the ideas of programming language and culture in Perl 6 and the verbal aikido used to encourage honest detractors to become valuable contributors. Perl turned 23 years old last week, and Perl 6 is available."

Csiko writes "The ingredients in this do-it-yourself Christmas project are a felt pen, a bunch of old CDs, an embedded microcontroller (MCU), some LEDs and a big portion of nerdism. While the gyroscope spins, the MCU controls the LEDs so that a writing appears in real-time. Nice project, but it definitely needs a nerd girlfriend to appreciate it."

Torino writes "SGU has finally been cancelled, with the remaining 10 episodes to air in Spring. Apparently, the cast wasn't told ahead of time, and some of them learned of the cancellation via Twitter. SGU has had its share of problems, even spawning a community of people who dislike the show. Can it be saved via fan support, given the steadily declining viewership numbers? Do you think the show had the potential to improve?"

parallel_prankster writes "I find this paper very amusing. From the abstract: 'To develop a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies.' Hint! If you replace phrases like 'curves from metabolic studies' with just 'curves,' then you'll note that Dr. Tai rediscovered the rectangle method of approximating an integral. (Actually, Dr. Tai rediscovered the trapezoidal rule.). Apparently this is called 'Tai's Model.'"

witthaus writes "Jeff Stanford's Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching is described in the preface as 'a recipe book' for creating communicative language teaching activities in Moodle. True to its description, the book contains over 500 pages of detailed, descriptive information on how to squeeze every last drop out of Moodle for language teaching purposes." Keep reading for the rest of Gabi's review. Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching author Jeff Stanford pages 420 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Gabi Witthaus ISBN 1847196241 summary A descriptive how-to approach with enthusiastic insights into the rich potential of Moodle for creating engaging, useful language learning activities In the first two chapters, the book gives an introduction to Moodle and advice on how to get started with the platform. It then goes on to consider vocabulary, speaking, grammar, reading, writing and listening activities in chapters three to eight. Chapter nine looks at assessment, giving many practical tips on the best and most efficient ways to exploit Moodle's powerful capacity to generate statistics. Chapter 10 gives suggestions on some extended activities you could use Moodle for (requiring more set-up time as well as more of students' time, but with correspondingly greater pay-off in terms of learning). The final chapter deals with formatting and enhancing the visual aspects of Moodle, and enabling stress-free navigation through the platform for your students.

Activity descriptions are framed in terms of language teaching goals rather than technical functionality, making it an easy read for language teachers who are new to online platforms. Detailed, step-by-step instructions are given, along with helpful screenshots, and a star system to differentiate the easier from the more technically advanced activities. A clear distinction is made between what the language teacher could reasonably be expected to do with Moodle and the issues that should be referred to a more experienced Moodle administrator. The book goes beyond basic Moodle features and functions, introducing the reader to many useful add-ons (such as the wonderfully named Nanogong, for incorporating audio files), and other Web tools such as Audacity for creating and editing podcasts, and Hot Potatoes for making quizzes.

The recipes are indeed delicious, ranging from simple rustic dishes – requiring little or no patience for the technical side of things; just a deep love of the classical ingredients needed for communicative language teaching, such as personalization and a focus on meaningful communication – to sophisticated gourmet platters that probably are best avoided by IT novices. There is even a section (in chapter 10 – my favorite) on creating a whole dinner menu by stringing together a sequence of activities in various ways.

My only lament about the book is that I would like to have seen some discussion on the difference between using Moodle to supplement your face-to-face teaching, as opposed to using it for wholly online courses. The most obvious difference is that students probably already know one another in a face-to-face environment, whereas in a purely online environment they come in 'cold', and this can have a significant impact on their confidence and their engagement levels. Some tips and guidelines on how to draw remote learners in, and then keep them engaged, would be really helpful, as would tips on how to find the balance between face-to-face interaction and online work for classroom-based students. But perhaps here I am talking about how to host the dinner party, which goes beyond the scope of a recipe book.

All things considered, Moodle 1.9 for Language Teaching will undoubtedly increase the language teacher's ability to cook up interesting and enjoyable activities for language students. Bon appétit!

Disclosure: The reviewer is a colleague of Jeff Stanford's at the University of Leicester, where they both tutor on the online MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

Gabi Witthaus has over 20 years' experience in EFL teaching and curriculum development. She is currently based at the University of Leicester, where she is involved in e-learning research and tutoring on the MA in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. (). This review was written in her personal capacity.

You can purchase Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Design company Architects Southwest is running a zombie safehouse design competition. Voting is still open and they have narrowed the field down to 4. My favorite being the SS Huckleberry, a flotilla designed to cruise out the end of civilization, but you can't discount any design with a spiked fortress and hot air balloon, either.

With a follow-up to Tuesday's story, Martin Hellman writes "Slashdot reported that a system failure at Warren AFB in Wyoming affected 50 ICBMs and that 'various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline.' Assuaging fears that America's nuclear deterrent might have been compromised during this failure, the source article notes that the missiles still could be launched from airborne command centers. Other reports cite an administration official offering assurances that 'at no time did the president's ability [to launch] decrease.' Given the difficulty of debugging software and hardware that is probably not a good thing. The history of nuclear command and control systems has too many examples of risky designs that favor the ability to launch over the danger of an accidental one."

The Contrarian writes "It looks like Oracle is not suiting former Sun staff well, nor community members in the Java and OpenOffice.org communities. This weekend saw an unusually large number of rather public departures, with (among many others listed in the article) the VP running Solaris development quitting, the token academic on the JCP walking out and top community leaders at OpenOffice.org nailing their resignations to the door after having the ex-Sun people slam it in their face. The best analysis comes from an unexpected place, with the marketing director of Eclipse — usually loyal defenders of their top-dollar-paying members — turning on Oracle and telling them to get a clue."

Martin Hellman writes "Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton, has dropped a nuclear bombshell, metaphorically speaking. Shelton's recently released memoir Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, asserts that an aide to President Clinton lost a card containing key phrases needed for ordering a nuclear strike, and that the codes were missing for months. This confirms a similar allegation, made in 2004 by Lt. Col. Robert Patterson, a military aide who frequently carried the 'nuclear football' during the Clinton presidency. Unfortunately, human error within the nuclear weapons complex is a frequent and dangerous occurrence."

sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project." The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.