Practical DWR 2 projects

Practical DWR 2 Projects

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 1-540

  Zammetti, Frank W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84892055678     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4302-0556-2     Document Type: Book

References (29)

1. Bill Lumbergh is the iconic boss character in the cult classic Office Space. This is one of the few times you'll see me tell you, the reader, that there is something better you could be doing with your time than reading my book, but this is one great movie-go watch it now!
2. Interwebs is a slang term used in place of the Internet, most usually the World Wide Web specifically. This term (or its close cousin, Internets) can be heard frequently on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. (The term Internets is usually attributed to George W Bush, a "Bushism" as it's usually called; although I can't vouch for the voracity of that attribution, it certainly isn't hard to believe!)
3. Apache Tomcat 6.0.13: This can be downloaded from http://tomcat.apache. org/download-60.cgi. I suggest getting the ZIP version of the Core distribution, which can simply be unzipped, no need to install anything. To start the server, simply navigate to the
4. Apache Ant 1.7.0: Grab it at http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. This will only be required if you want to build the projects from source, which you don't have to, but then again that kind of is the point of the book!
5. Two environment variables set: JAVA-HOME, which should point to the directory your SDK was installed to, and ANTHOME, which should point to the directory Ant was installed to. In addition, you'll want to add /bin and /bin to your path. Lastly, as a recommendation, I highly suggest having no CLASSPATH environment variable set. This will greatly reduce the chance of any kind of classpath issues biting you.
6. In 480 B. C., the Battle of Thermopylae took place. This military engagement pitted King Leonidas of Sparta, a city in Greece, with 300 of his finest soldiers (and 700 Thespian volunteers, which many people forget... Thespian here does not refer to actors, but to the Greek city Thespiae) in a last-stand battle against the invading Persian Empire, lead by King Xerxes, at the pass of Thermopylae, a very narrow valley pass. Leonidas and his troops held off the Persian army, which reportedly numbered upwards of 80, 000 eventually (in three waves of attack actually: 10, 000 the first day, 20, 000 the second day, and 50, 000 the final day). Xerxes' troops were finally victorious, but not without heavy losses. This battle is often cited as the best example of how well-trained, disciplined troops using natural resources to their fullest can overcome seemingly unbeatable odds (the fact that they lost notwithstanding). Oh yeah, the recent movie 300 was based on this battle. Pretty good flick if you don't mind lots of violence and men with abs you and I will never have!
7. The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a law in the United States that criminalizes activities such as creating software or devices whose purpose is to circumvent access control technologies (commonly referred to as DRM, or Digital Rights Management). It also expands penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. The DMCA is one of the most reviled pieces of legislature in the whole of human history because many see it as being too far reaching, unfair, and even a form of censorship (owing to the ease with which copyright holders can have content removed from web sites, for example, even when infringement is legally questionable). Some even believe it to be an illegal measure itself. Unfortunately, no court case to date has successfully challenged it in any meaningful way.
8. "Weird Al" Yankovic released a song called "Virus Alert" on his 2006 album Straight Outta Lynwood. It's a song about discovering a virus on your computer and, shall we say, blowing it way out of proportion! For your pleasure and diversion: www.answers.com/topic/virus-alert.
9. If you are unfamiliar with Dilbert, I highly suggest you kick off that rock you've obviously been living under and check it out: www.dilbert.com. Dilbertis an American comic strip with a collection of hysterical characters all inhabiting a corporate IT department (well, it seems to be an IT department, although I'm not sure that's ever stated one way or another). Either way, you yourself likely work in IT if you're reading this book, and I suspect you'll identify and get a great deal of enjoyment out of creator Scott Adams' comic creation.
10. Piers Morgan is one of three judges on the NBC show America's Got Talent. Many people say he's the Simon Cowell rip-off judge (Simon being the acerbic, yet seemingly always right, judge on American Idol). Yeah, OK, I admit, this particular pop-culture reference is a bit of a stretch!
11. This is a line spoken by the character Ash in the movie Army of Darkness. By the way, you can tell whether you're a true geek if when the old man tells Ash the magic words to make the Necronomicon safe ("Klaatu Barada Nikto"), you laugh your butt off and know exactly where they're from (the 1955 sci-fi classic This Island Earth... bonus points if you know the robot's name).
12. The HTTP form-based file upload spec, more properly called RFC 1867, can be seen here: www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1867.txt. When you've completed wiping away the cold sweat reading that is likely to give you, come on back and forget you ever looked at it!
13. In the United States, the NSA is the National Security Agency, one of the seemingly endless intelligence agencies we have here. The KGB, which is the Russian-language abbreviation for Committee for State Security, is (roughly) the Soviet-era equivalent (the KGB has now been superseded by the FSB, Federal Security Service, and don't ask me where the B came from!). MI-5, the Security Service, is Britain's equivalent (there is an MI-6 as well, which may or may not be a closer equivalent... the difference wasn't quite clear to me reading Wikipedia, which I suppose is how you'd want your spooks: a little mysterious and difficult to comprehend).
14. Haxx0r is Leetspeak (1337) for hacker. Leetspeak is a way of speaking, or more precisely, writing, words, usually associated with the computer "underground" (software pirates, hackers, crackers, hardcore gamers, and so on).
15. Kevin Smith is the well-known, famously self-deprecating director of such cinema classics as Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Mall Rats, and sarcasm Jersey Girls sarcasm. He's also done a number of speaking engagements and released them on DVD (more evidence of his ability to do anything for money!) that are highly entertaining. See http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q= kevin+smith for all the details you could want.
16. Netflix (www.netflix.com) is a web site that offers movie rentals for a monthly fee. You can have DVDs shipped to your home, or recently, you can even download movies to watch instantly. The price is quite good on most of their various plans, and the convenience of never having to go to a video store again is well worth it.
17. If you like Star Trek, you'll likely love this chapter as it's my way of paying homage to something that I've loved my whole life... of course, if you're not a Trekker or Trekkie, whichever term you prefer, you're probably not a carbon-based life form from the planet Earth anyway. I do realize that not everyone is a fan though, so I'll try and explain all the obscure references as best I can. That's not to say there won't be some inside jokes that only fans will likely get, but hey, how can you be a programmer if you're not a Star Trek fan anyway?!?
18. The atavachron was the time portal that appeared in the original Star Trek series' episode "All Our Yesterdays." This is, of course, only one of many time (and/or space) portals discovered in various Star Trek series. One would think any civilization with a grasp of fire could build one! "City on the Edge of Forever" is another famous episode that features such a portal, perhaps the most remembered one of all actually.
19. In the original Star Trek series episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion", the first provider bid 300 quatloos for the newcomers, meaning the Enterprise crew. This episode featured three glowing disembodied brains (I'm not making this up!), sitting on a domed table, who basically spend all their time making wagers about the outcome of battles between various alien species, our intrepid band of explorers among them. Hey, what else are you going to do with your time when you no longer have a body and have solved all the really interesting scientific problems?!? Star Trek always did seem to have a fondness for disembodied something-or-others... Spock's brain, anyone?!?
20. OK, I know it's not Star Trek, but still... in the Futurama (one of the best cartoons ever made) episode "The Luck of The Fryrish", Professor Farnsworth exclaims, "No fair! You changed the output by measuring it!" as a horse race he was watching ended in a "quantum finish." If you got the reference, kudos! If you got the joke, even more kudos!
21. A quad is a fictional unit of data storage measurement from the Star Trek universe. As with byte, a quad can come in various extended units such as kiloquad and gigaquad. How big is a quad, you ask? No one knows, and in fact the term was created by the Star Trek: The Next Generation writers specifically to be anachronistic so that new technologies in the real world would never render the advanced Star Trek technology too small. Some have reasoned out, from various references on the show, that a quad is equal to 10-15 units, whatever a "unit" might be. Some say that a unit must be along the lines of a "word" today, in that its size is fixed only by the underlying system architecture. Given that, and given a word size of 1 bit, that roughly equates a quad to a modern-day petabit. In this author's humble (yeah, right!) opinion, that makes a quad too small, but hey, when you're making stuff up, you can do whatever you want!
22. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the V'Ger cloud measured 82AUs in diameter... well, it did depending on which cut of the movie you saw! In the original 1979 theatrical release, 82AUs is the size given, but it was later realized that 7.626 billion miles was way too large for the Enterprise to be able to travel to the heart of it at impulse speeds in the time frame depicted in the movie. So for the later director's cut, the dialog is changed to state the cloud's size as 2AUs (which is still a huge number: 186 million miles-but that's a comparative walk around the block!).
23. In Star Trek: Voyager, the starship Voyager is equipped with bio-neural gel packs, a partly biological computer system that supplements the isolinear chip system found in all other federation starship computers. These gel packs are meant to increase processing speed and better organize data. They have the unfortunate tendency to literally get sick from time to time, as happened in at least one Voyager episode, "Learning Curve"
24. In the Next Generation episode "Relics" (the episode in which Montgomery Scott from the original series is discovered suspended in the transporter system of a derelict starship), the Enterprise discovers a Dyson Sphere, which is basically a giant metallic shell around a star that is used to capture and utilize the entire energy output of said star, plus give a tremendous amount of living space to those who built it, since a planet is no longer necessary. This is similar to the Halo structure from the game of the same name on the Xbox systems, but Halo is considerably smaller than a Dyson Sphere. As is usually the case, the Dyson Sphere seen in Star Trek takes some creative license with the real concept: scientist Freeman Dyson describes a Dyson Sphere as a series of satellites orbiting a star, a large number of satellites that is, which in a sense forms a shell, but not a solid one as seen in this episode. The satellites would capture the energy output of the star and transfer it to their creators.
25. In the Next Generation episode "Coming of Age", we get to see the boy wonder himself, Wesley Crusher, taking the exam. The question about the matter-to-antimatter ratio is a trick question asked on the exam. The correct answer, of course, is 1:1, and in fact no other ratio makes sense in such a reaction (hence the reason it's a trick question) because if either matter or antimatter is present in greater quantity than the other, there will always be some matter that isn't annihilated, releasing energy. The 1:1 ratio is the most optimal since all reactant is converted to energy with no waste (and just to prove how big a nerd I actually am, I actually knew that answer as I watched the episode the first time before they stated it... any self-respecting science geek would!).
26. In The Simpsons "Treehouse of Terror V" episode, in the parody of The Shining, Homer goes crazy, just like the original Jack Nicholson character, and tries to murder Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, but winds up freezing outside with the rest of the family.
27. The Great Space Coaster (http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/The-Great-Space- Coaster) was a children's television show from the early'80s that many of us in our mid 30s grew up with. Most people tend to remember two things: Knock-Knock the bird, who naturally enough told knock-knock jokes, and Gary Gnu, who did the fake news reports ("No gnews is good gnews with Gary Gnu"). Of course, the theme song tends to stick in our heads too: "... get onboard, step inside, slowly for a magic ride... roaring towards the other side where only rainbows hide..." Ah, the memories!
28. Guitar Hero, in case you've been living in Bora Bora for a few years, is a game for various game consoles where you, what else, play guitar! It comes with an actual plastic guitar controller that hooks up to your console and it has a number of buttons on the neck and a strum switch on the body. Scrolling colored circles flow down the screen and you need to hit these on the guitar controller in rhythm with the music. I mention Dream Theater and Queensryche, two popular progressive rock bands, because they have never appeared in any of the four existing Guitar Hero bands. This is a bit crazy because John Petrucci from Dream Theater is acknowledged as one of the top guitar players alive today, possibly even the best, and Queensryche is known for impressive lead/rhythm guitar parts mixed together (the Guitar Hero games allow you to have multiple guitar controllers hooked up so one player can play lead and another can play rhythm or even bass parts).
29. Suicide booths are something that have been seen in the great show Futurama a number of times. Simply put: you step in, you put your quarter in the slot, you select your method of demise, and the booth dispatches you with great enthusiasm. Even gets rid of the leftovers, so no mess, and no fuss! Eh, call me crazy, but institutionalized suicide at the touch of a button just doesn't strike me as quite the best idea (but it's funny as can be on the show!).