Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Windows Vista will include a data encryption service called ‘BitLocker Driver Encryption’, which is intended to protect personal data on a PC should be PC get stolen or fall into the wrong hands.
This is causing some concern from some governments, who are worried that this will make forensic access to PCs significantly harder. Microsoft has also stated that there are no ‘backdoors’ to get around the encryption, even for government access.
RIM have settled the patent infringement with patent owner NTP, for $612million. This is a one time payment to NTP, and the Blackberry service will now continue.
Josh Bloch has (in my opinion) one of the best Java books out there for improving your understanding of the Java Language – Effective Java
In the same vein Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter have been presenting ‘Java Puzzlers’ at JavaOne and other conferences, presenting an unusual snippet of code and challenging people to work out what the code does. JavaLobby have a recording of one of their sessions at JavaPolis.
Also, Bloch and Gafter released a book which is a collection of these code puzzles, which is well worth a look (it’s currently on my Amazon Wish List 🙂 – Java Puzzlers
OnJava.com have a sample chapter from the book ‘Maven: A Developer’s Notebook’, which gives a quick headstart into getting started with Maven for your build process.
I have just started to investigate the use of Maven for one of my own projects, and I am impressed so far – in particular with the fact that the same targets that I would write again and again in Ant for different projects are now just part of Maven by default – it already knows how to compile, run JUnits, generate Javadoc etc, you just configure where your source and target directories are (if they are non-standard and not following the suggested directory layout that Maven will use by default), and it gets on and does it thing. Very cool.
