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• The 90th percentile: MyFaces: The emperor has no clothes - My last project is going into production in a couple of weeks, and it has been implemented using JSF. I started with JSF in good faith: it should be stable by now, it is blessed by Sun and included as the de facto web framework in JEE 5.
• James Ward’s Blog ? Blog Archive ? My Recent Flex & Apollo Adventures - A while back Bruce Eckel and I recorded a screencast of us building a Flex application with Hibernate and XFire on the backend. I finally got around to packaging the code for that demo. You can get it from SourceForge.
• rakaz - Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files - Thanks to a small PHP script and some clever URL rewriting I now have an easy to maintain method to speed up the loading of pages that use many or large css and javascript files.
• Vitamin Features ? Serving JavaScript Fast - The next generation of web apps make heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. We?ll show you how to make those apps responsive and quick.
• lightWindow - Another decent lightbox Javascript library (via Ajaxian) - After researching every single modal window, lightbox, slimbox, etc out there nothing fit the bill. Granted some of them were very nice but only fit a specific purpose
• Dynamic languages: More than just a quick fix | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2007-04-16 | By Andrew Binstock - IT’s rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of software development projects it must complete
• Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Rails Developer David Heinemeier Hansson?s Response to Alex Payne?s Interview [dive into mark] - LAUGH OUT LOUD funny take from Mark Pilgrim, John Gruber style.
• Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours by Elliott Back - There?s no good reason for Wordpress or your site to be slow, except your own negligence. Cache everything. Monitor performance
• Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight - Silverlight (previously codenamed “WPF/E”) is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web.
• Java Community News - BEA Releases JRockit R27.2 with Java 6 Support - BEA’s latest JVM release, JRockit R27.2, is the first implementation of the Java 6 VM. In addition to providing full Java 6 support, the latest JRockit VM includes many-fold performance improvements, especially for applications with short-lived objects.
• Enomalism : XEN Virtualized Server Management Console: Amazon EC2 Migration - The Enomalism Elastic migration module is a migration tool kit for the management and migration of virtual images between your local xen based enomalism environment and the remote Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Environment.
• Everybody Hates Don Imus - Frank Rich’s brilliant column - Even in that short span, there?s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate
• Dev2Dev Online: Open Source and BEA - BEA believes in open source. We believe a blended strategy for application development and deployment?combining the best of open source and commercial software?provides important freedom and flexibility not available through all-or-nothing approaches
• Web Worker Daily ? Blog Archive Web Worker Emergency Survival Kit ? - Over the years, I?ve accumulated a variety of tools that don?t take up much space but that come in handy when an emergency comes along. On the average day, I don?t need any of these - but when I do, I?m happy to have them. Here are my suggestions

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Recent news coverage of the Greek cell phone wiretapping scandal should put to rest some of the fears that people have over illegal wiretapping. Renewed interest in this story was sparked by an extensive analysis in the IEEE’s online magazine Spectrum (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul07/5280 ). The article describes in detail how an illegal wiretapping operation existed in Greece, at cell phone carrier Vodaphone, for over nine months. In reading the news coverage and the IEEE article “The Athens Affair “ by Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis, one can’t help but be amazed at the significant effort it took to illegally take advantage of the lawful intercept capabilities that existed on the phone switches.

For a long time now, skeptics have claimed that having an automated, centralized, standardized platform for performing lawful intercept, at carrier locations, actually creates a security risk rather than reducing it. The argument concludes that if a lawful intercept system is easy to use by the phone carriers, then surely the bad guys out there will be able to easily defeat the system and manipulate it to their own ends. On first glance the Greek incident seems to support this concern.

In fact, a report last year from the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) raised that very issue: “Designing wiretapping into the communication system raises a fundamental security issue: can the capability be controlled so that only authorized parties can employ it?” However, the report concluded that for traditional wired and wireless telephony, such as the Greek Vodaphone system, it wasn’t a problem. The ITAA study even referenced the Greek incident and concluded that information available at the time pointed to an inside job instead of a malicious outside hacker.

The IEEE report carefully and fully reveals the lengths taken to achieve this feat, and justifies the assertion that this was not a trivial or easy thing to do. Through this revelation it becomes obvious just how much time, commitment, expertise and undetected access had to be garnered in order to defeat a system like this.

The experts will tell you there is no such thing as an absolutely impregnable system; rather, security is really a matter of making a system sufficiently difficult to breach. Hacking the Vodaphone system was certainly no cakewalk and it would be very difficult to replicate. Consider these four factors:

Time – significant time planning, designing and writing software went into this effort. This wasn’t an afternoon or weekend project someone thought they would throw together.

Commitment – since the software development work had to have gone on for weeks, if not months, surely this was a very committed effort and not an amateur’s hobby or prank

Expertise – the software used in the Ericsson switches is not a common programming language that the average software developer off the street can be successful with. In fact very few people know the language or the design of the system well enough to write code that will work, never mind secret code that is undetectable.

Undetected Access – again this is not something readily available to the public, it took the right person in the right position to gain access to the systems.

Even just looking at these factors quickly, the argument about how secure these solutions are becomes self-evident. Clearly this is not the stuff that the average bad guy or even organized crime could pull off. Based on this evidence the general public in Greece, the rest of Europe, North America, Asia or any where else in the world where these systems are used, should be reassured that they are secure and when used properly, can certainly benefit them.

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It comes as a surprise to most people that only 2600 Title III intercepts are done per year (as reported in 2005) in the United States. I’ll blame most of the surprise on all the police dramas on TV that, I think, lead most people to believe two things: 1 – it is very easy to get a warrant for an intercept and 2 – it happens all the time. But as the numbers attest, for a country with about 300 million citizens, 2600 is a very small number. Which country wins the prize for the most? Italy.

But I digress, lets take a quick look at the reasons that the number is so low. First of all you can thank the strong personal rights and freedoms that are enjoyed by US citizens. The court system is very reluctant to impede on those rights even for the sake of national security. In order for a Law Enforcement agency to receive approval (a warrant) to intercept someone’s communications they have to pass a very high bar and demonstrate significant need. This hurdle not only protects the intended target from undue invasion but also protects all of the potential people that target will be communicating with.

In addition to the significant legal barrier, law enforcement needs to be ready to allocate the necessary resources in terms of manpower. In the U.S. law enforcement can not “turn on the recorder” and record whatever happens and review it at some later point. In order to further protect the rights and privacy of U.S. citizens, when an intercept (wiretap) is being performed the call must be listened to live by a sworn law enforcement agent. This means 24 hours a day, seven days a week an agent needs to be ready to listen to the calls. In addition the agent has to be dedicated to that case, meaning they can’t listen to more than one call at a time. The reason they are dedicated is that if the content of the call is not relevant to the case, then the call is “minimized”. This means that portion of the call is not recorded and not made available for future review.

So at the highest level both the due process of the US judicial system and the required resources to operate an intercept prevent the number of intercepts from getting very large and restrict their use to the most significant cases.

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There is an ever increasing demand for more and more hard disk drive storage space and general performance and the Hitachi company has just released a product that should address the high-end need of storage solutions with the competing Samsung and Seagate offerings soon to follow.

Since the competing products from Samsung and Seagate will only be available from the late August and
September, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 has a few months to steal the limelight. The Hitachi desktop hard disk drive is what is called a second-generation of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) hard drive.

Coming with four platters with ten heads, the Hitachi hard disk drive has fewer in-motion parts than its yet to be released competitors, so the risk of a mechanical defect is lower. But there is the argument that the more platters there are inside a drive, the less high density surfaces are needed, so less chance of a read or write error, which would lead to increased performance. As always with the hardware components, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The Deskstar 7K1000 is of a 3.5-inch form factor, 7200 RPM, 32MB Buffer, S-ATA based 3.0 Gb/s (also known as SATA 2) since the ATA standard is pretty much an obsolete one these days.

According to its documentation cited by the Web based news site The Inquirer, the Deskstar hard disk drive is capable of some impressive feats like reduced seek times to 8.5 ms read and 9.2 ms write, while the patented Silent-seek time is just 14 ms read and 15 ms write. The disk heads come with a special “ramp load/unload” design, that in the idle states shift the heads outside the disk to conserve energy and protect the data surface. This design should save as much as 50 percent more energy as opposed to classical disk power saving technologies. Another power saving technology implemented into the Deskstar drive is the use of three low power modes that are designed to extend the drive life by using non-operational modes.

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