Came across a simple how-to on inter portlet communication. I’ve dealt only with portlet (1.x) briefly so I didn’t know that there was not a standard way to ‘communicate’ between portlets. Because portlets are like tiny programs running on (Java) web servers, without a standard way of sending data to each other, functionality is limited or you’ll need workarounds, which would lead to 101 ways to send data, non of which is compatible. Portlet 2.0 it seems are standardizing on JAXB (Java XML binding) to send data. It’s a publisher-subscriber model, which means you declare events (they’re ‘published’ when the events fire) and portlets can ’subscribe’ to the events. It seems pretty straight forward so it seems this is a Good Thing.

Read the article: The Portlet Packet: Inter-portlet communication in Portlet 2.0 - JavaWorld

Went to my friend’s wedding last weekend. I brought all my gear back home this time around. Don’t know why though. But as it turns out, it was lucky I did, because my friend didn’t hire a wedding photog and was relying on his (new) wife’s brother with a D40x, kit lens and 55-200VR to shoot the entire thing. No flash. The photog within just cringed.

As fate would have it, my SB600’s batteries are fresh, and I had borrowed my girlfriend’s 17-50 f2.8 before returning to Sungai Petani. Throw in 3 more lenses - 30mm f1.4, 10-20 f4-5.6 and 85mm f1.4 - I was prepared. Well, maybe I’m short of another body and an assistant but what the hell.

After a day of shooting and deleting a lot of junk photos, I was quite happy with the result. Wished I had a little more time to use my 85mm and 30mm to get more creative shots but I didn’t have the time. Boy things move fast in weddings. I had to choose between the essential & creative shots later. No brainer of course that I had to get the essentials nailed first.

Amateurish as it may be (hey, 2nd time shooting a wedding, and I wasn’t even trying on the first time), I hope I manage to provide my friend with memories of his big day.

And yes, I still dislike shooting weddings.

Finally, Malaysian’s get the option of ordering straight from Apple Inc.! Along with that comes the ability to customize iPods with engravings and wrapping them as gifts. Way cool.

Welcome to the Apple Store - Apple Store (Malaysia)

ArsTechnica has a write-up on the recent WPA exploit that’s been going on. It seems that a mathematical breakthrough has allowed the TKIP portion of WPA to be broken in less than 15 minutes. This is coming from Erik Tews, a guy that proved WEP to be practically useless so far as securing your 802.11x networks. This potentially allows DNS poisoning or spoofing, a dangerous and advanced form of phishing. The article is a little bit hard to digest, but ultimately the fix is not to use TKIP in your WPA(2) network, only AES encryption.

Read more - Battered, but not broken: understanding the WPA crack

Managed to escape from the hectic life to Phuket last weekend. Yes, the same Phuket that was devastated when the killer tsunami struck years ago. The beach and its surrounding areas are very much alive now. I didn’t even remember this place was totally flattened before until one of the guides mentioned this when another tourist asked.

The trip was enjoyable. In fact, I rank it better than Bali. There’s none of the hordes of people trying to sell you things. There are the taxi drivers and suit makers that will pitch something to you but nothing as bad as Bali. Food is much better as well. Had seafood and tom yam that was very good. The foot and thai body massage is enjoyable as well. Last but not least, the island hopping was awesome.

A recommended getaway.

Looks like while I was away for the weekend, things got exciting in the general computing space. Intel’s big*ss CPU just got released! Damn these people don’t rest. The Core 2 family is still selling like hot cakes and as far as I know, AMD has offered nothing to challenge Intel as far as performance goes, though they did slash prices quite dramatically. But Intel being Intel, launched a new microarchitecture, the Nahelem, along with 3 CPUs.

Yays:

• On-die memory controller,
• shared L3 cache,
• HyperThreading,
• quad-cores,
• 1066MHz triple-channel DDR3,
• individual core & component clock multipliers

Nays:

• new CPU sockets,
• new chipsets, (though this ones understandable, on-die controllers and all…)
• more new CPU sockets in the pipeline
• price
• relatively slow clockspeeds (but good performance nevertheless)

Reviews galore:

• AnandTech: Nehalem - Everything You Need to Know about Intel’s New Architecture,
• AnandTech: The Dark Knight: Intel’s Core i7,
• Core i7 Dissected and Benchmarked! Maximum PC,
• Intel Core i7 920, 940 and 965 Extreme Edition review - TechSpot,
• Intel Core i7 Processors: Nehalem and X58 Have Arrived - HotHardware