Keep your Windows machines updated

For all of you Windows users out there (and yes I still occasionally use Windows) if you think Windows Update and self updating programs like Firefox, Adobe Reader and Sun JRE are enough to keep your machine safe, think again. You should try out the browser based "The H" Update Check which uses Secunia's Online Software Inspector or download and install the Secunia Personal Software Inspector application.

Create your own calendar images

Stumbled across this great entry on the dryicons blog which shows how to create calendar images in Photoshop.

Open Source and Cloud Computing

Article on CNet worth reading - "The intersection of open source and cloud computing"

Parted Magic 4.11

Parted Magic is a free disk partitioning tool based on Linux which can be booted as a LiveCD or LiveUSB image and can handle FAT32, NTFS, or normal Linux filesystems.

Membase - Interesting hybrid for NoSQL?

Membase.org is an interesting new project which claims to be an elastic key-value database based on memcached to provide quasi-deterministic latency and throughput to "NoSQL" users. The site is still a work in-progress and no prebuilt binaries for Linux have been posted yet, but this might be a good fit for OpenJPA users in the future....

OpenJPA OpenBooks Sample

OpenBooks is a sample application that highlights many of the new features of JPA 2.0. The sample can be built from source obtained from the Apache's OpenJPA svn repository and can be deployed as a Swing based Java SE application or as a Java EE WAR file to applications servers that support JPA 2.0.

Apache Bean Validation performance

Thanks to Carlos Vara, we have started a project in our sandbox to help test performance of the Apache implementation versus the RI (Hibernate Validator.) The code can generate a JSR-303 annotated bean graph with groups, inheritance and complex constraints, so it can simulate realistic scenarios. Checkout Carlos' Blog entry for more details on the performance results, which currently show the Apache code is faster than the RI.