Blog for a Cause

Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy is a E-Book (download as pdf) created by Mary Joyce.

Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy explains how activists can use blogs as part of campaigns against injustice around the world. Blogging can help activists in se veral ways. It is a quick and inexpensive way to create a presence on the Internet, to disseminate information about a cause, and to organize actions to lobby decision-makers.

The goal of Blog for a Cause!: is twofold: to inform and to inspire. The guide is designed to be accessible and practical, giving activists a number of easy-to-follow tips on how to use a blog to further their particular cause.

Source: Netzpolitik.org

Spring and OSGi

If you like spring and are interested in OSGi you may find this Spring Dynamic Modules Demos on the SpringFramework homepage interesting.

Part 1: Shows how to setup Spring Dynamic Modules with Maven and how to run some basic tests on various OSGi platforms.

Part 2: Continues the test from Part I and shows how to import and use an OSGi service inside the test relying on Spring DM for service retrieval and injection.

Wikimedia Picture of the Year

The wikimedia community has voted for the best pictures in the year 2007.

Winners of the last year:

Source: CreativeCommons.org

Apple restricts user rights… again

DefectiveByDesign.org reports that Apples Digital Restriction Management (DRM) is obstructing legal creativity.

People sometimes think of DRM as solely a means to prevent copying, but the fact is that it directly obstructs other legitimate work.
Apple’s recent update in … Mac OS X is … disables crucial features in video-editing software.
Attempts to export videos from many applications after the update results in a DRM permissions error.
Worse yet, it is not possible to roll back to a previous version of QuickTime without doing a full operating system reinstall. The supposed system upgrades are actually people from exporting their preventingown video.

More attacks on user rights from apple
Apple and Sony attack digital freedom
Screw you Apple iPhone

Source: DefectiveByDesign.org

Silence – Encre

I present you another jamendo album. It is a Heavy Metal album.
I have also decided to only present music which I have supported per paypal
on jamendo. This will secure that I will really show you music I like.

The album has a clear sound. It is not too hectic but rather chilly.

You can hear it for yourself of course.
Or you can visit the album page.
And of course, you can download the album too (with bittorrent or emule).

YES it is legal to hear this music because it is licensed under an ArtLibre License.

This means:

Detailed kde 4 review

Ars Technica has a detailed review of the current kde 4.0 release. They are covering the new technologies but also the user experience with the new user interface system plasma.
I think they are right with their resumee.

The level of incompleteness apparent in the 4.0 release has, unsurprisingly, drawn heavy criticism from end users here in our forums and elsewhere on the Internet. Several longtime KDE enthusiasts in Ars Technica’s Linux community are particularly disappointed with the extent to which KDE 4.0 falls short of the promised vision.

I’m excited about the possibilities created by Plasma, Solid, and other new features in the KDE architecture, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they help the desktop evolve. I submitted a handful of bug reports while writing this article; developers responded almost immediately. If their diligence and rapid bug resolution rate is any indication, then I think we can be confident that future releases will meet or exceed expectations.

So I share the opinion with them, that kde 4.0 is for enthusiasts and early adopters. Having solid and innovative technical infrastructure help creating great software. Which I’m sure kde 4 will evolve into.

Green architecture?

See architect and activist Edward Mazria’s compelling presentation, which calls on buildings to be carbon neutral by the year 2030. Mazriahas been speaking to leaders from the building industry and government on practical ways to reduce buildings’ carbon footprint.

This is a web episode from e2 | pbs. I’m a little suspicous because of the sponsoring of big firms like Shell and others. But nevertheless an interesting video.

You can add their videos to watch it comfortably in miro.

Using mocks in tests

Maybe you know the situation. Having a Foo java class which needs testing. But damn, it needs another class which gets data from the database,
does another complicated thing ™, … . So you create a DummyFooSupport class. Which is only used for tests to create default and defined values.

After trying easymock I think it is a better way to use mocks. Mocks are used to imitate classes. You take an interface and tell it how it should behave and
what it should return. This spares you to create dozens of DummyFoo, DummyBar, … classes.

An example?

package org.easymock.samples;

import junit.framework.TestCase;

public class ExampleTest extends TestCase {

    private ClassUnderTest classUnderTest;
    private Collaborator mock;

    protected void setUp() {
        mock = createMock(Collaborator.class);
        classUnderTest = new ClassUnderTest();
        classUnderTest.addListener(mock);
    }

    public void testRemoveNonExistingDocument() {
        replay(mock);
        classUnderTest.removeDocument("Does not exist");
    }
}

Looks complicated. The important thing to see is that Collaborator is an interface from which an object can be created without implementing a Dummy class.
In this case the mock object does nothing. But you can specify which returns methods are giving and lot more. Just look at the documentation (from where this example is also from).

H.P. Lovecraft for free

Some of you may know H.P. Lovecraft. Now his books are freely available thx to the concept of public domain.
You can download his books on manybooks.net.

Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviews from our visitors. Perhaps you’ll find something interesting in the special collections. There are 19,546 eBooks available here and they’re all free!

As CreativeCommons.org states it

With the advent of more ebook reading devices, sites like Manybooks.net are providing a useful service in transforming digital materials into a variety of electronic formats that can be read by several different ebook readers and mobile devices. All of the 19,000+ ebooks on Manybooks are available for free. Many works are originally sourced from Project Gutenberg, a longstanding project to release books in the public domain as digital texts.

Source: CreativeCommons.org

Participatory search engine: wikia search

Jimmy Wales, founder of the wikipedia project has launched his new project wikia search.
You can start using it under this link http://alpha.search.wikia.com/.

At the moment it is not nearly as good as google or other search engines. At they admitting themselves

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

But it is good to have other search engines to break the power of the almighty google.

Source: Prolinux.de