Australian University Dashboard Copetition details

Just learned a thing yesterday: When using a Fritzbox on a analogue telephone line, you should use unshielded twisted pair cabling for all connections to other network devices. Failing to do so will yield humming on the line when making a telephone call.

I was looking at some code today and it reminded me of a very common performance issue - reloading data around calls. Suppose I have some code like:

int variable;

void function(int *array)
{
  for (i=0; i<1000; i++)
  {
     if (variable==1) 
     { 
       func1(a[i]); 
     } 
     else 
     { 
       func2(array[i]); 
     }
  }
}

You might be surprised to find that "variable" is reloaded very iteration of the loop. The reason for this is that the loop calls another function - either func1() or func2() and the compiler knows that the function might change the value of "variable" - so to be correct it needs to be reloaded.

This problem can be fixed by caching a local copy of the variable. The compiler "knows" that local (or stack based) variables don't get modified by function calls.

However, the problem is more general than this, in C++ you might observe a reloading of variables that are members of objects - for similar reasons. The general rule for avoiding this is to examine every load or store in the hot region of code to check whether it is necessary, or whether it has been introduced because of a function call.

Stop by the message board today for bunches of scrappy fun. Tona #4437 and NanaBeth #2906 are hosting a crop while we’re out at National Scrapbook Day events. They’ve come up with a wonderful group of chats and challenges for you to play along in: Challenge #1-To Be Announced Soon Challenge #2-Chat Challenge #3-I’m a Tool! Challenge [...]

• Introduction to IPS for developers - Solaris - wikis.sun.com
• Ryanair.con - The no cares airline | i-florence

An interesting benchmark was published yesterday - SPARC T3-Based Systems Deliver Top-Notch Cryptographic Performance:

The SPARC T3 processor running the IPsec AES-256-CCM can operate at near-line speed over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network and demonstrates more than 2x the throughput of the latest generation Intel Xeon processor. Moreover, with dedicated hardware support for encryption/decryption for AES and eleven other ciphers, the SPARC T3 processor is 12 times faster than the Intel Xeon processor for in-memory RSA decryption.

Some key takeaways from this benchmark:

• The SPARC T3 was able to decrypt AES with 9,900 Mb/s at 36% CPU utilisation and encrypt the same amount with 39% utilisation
• The Xeon 5670 was able to decrypt AES with 4,400 Mb/s at 85% CPU utilisation and encrypt 4200 Mb/s at 77%
• For RSA decrypt operations T3 was able to execute 79536 ops per second whereas the Xeon 5670 was just able to execute 6472 (six thousand four hundred seventy two - no typo) operations per second
• The benchmark run with a single processor T3-1 against a dual XEON 5760 system. However the benchmark was executed on a processor set just consisting out of a single proc to have a fair comparison

I think this benchmark is a good example why a dedicated crypto accelerator has it's advantages over a command set extension over crypto. The T3 can encrypt and decrypt a 10 GBit/s at almost line speed and after sinking and sourcing traffic at this speed and encrypting it, it has still 64 respectively 61 percent of the CPU left for other tasks. With an Intel CPU you have 15 respectively 23 percent CPU left when doing the same tasks for half the bandwidth of the T3. This difference doesn't surprise me: With T3 the whole encryption process is offloaded, whereas the encryption process is just supported by special commands on Xeon which are part of the normal pipeline flow. Of course everything that happens in-pipline is utilizing the pipeline.

Welcome to the other side. In the unlikely event that you have this blog in your bookmarks or RSS feeds, please now point them at http://blogs.oracle.com/calum (RSS - Atom).

Május 31.-én 9:00-13:30(!) fejlesztői konferencia a Web-en. A téma: ADF

Ajánlom azoknak is akik saját fejlesztői keretrendszerrel dolgoznak, de használnak valamilyen UI függő Oracle technológiát.

Ugyanis az ADF már jó ideje nem csak egy alternatív keretrendszer JEE platformon, hanem magja (lesz) minden felhasználói felülettel rendelkező Oracle technológiai (WebCenter, BPM,  Mobile, stb.) és kész alkalmazásnak (Fusion Applications) is. Mindez lehetővé teszi a jövőben a még könnyebb és nagyobb integrációs lehetőségeket az egyes funkciók között.

Apache Derby 10.8.1.2 was released earlier this week. Read the full announcement here.

Derby 10.8.1.2 is a new feature release, the first one in the 10.8 series. The highlights include:

• Automatic calculation of index statistics: In earlier releases, index cardinality statistics had to be updated manually (for example by calling the SYSCS_UTIL.SYSCS_UPDATE_STATISTICS system procedure) if they got out of date. Otherwise, the optimizer might choose suboptimal, poorly performing query execution plans because of the outdated information. This typically happened if one of the tables accessed in the query had grown or shrunk significantly after the index cardinality statistics were calculated initially. As of this release, Derby will recalculate the statistics if it detects that the size of the table has changed so much that the statistics are no longer usable.
• JDBC 4.1: The early access builds of Java SE 7 (available for download here) have added new methods to many of the interfaces in the java.sql and javax.sql packages. This Derby release implements all of these methods so that you can try them out.
• Improved interrupt handling: Earlier releases of Derby didn't handle interrupts very well. If a user thread was interrupted while performing a database operation, it could often end up crashing the database engine and require a reboot of the database. Starting with this release, interrupting a user thread shouldn't take down the entire database. The documentation has also been improved by clarifying which behaviour to expect if a thread is interrupted.
• XML operators out of the box: Older releases of Derby required some work setting up your environment before you could use the XML operators (XMLEXISTS, XMLPARSE, XMLQUERY, XMLSERIALIZE). In Derby 10.8, the implementation of these operators has been made more portable and should work out of the box on most implementations of Java SE 6 and newer.

The release also contains many bug fixes and documentation fixes, as well as some performance improvements. As always, make sure that you read the release notes before upgrading to see if any of the changes could affect your application.

Just published, is my recent interview with a well known face in the ADF community and OTN ACE Director, Sten Vesterli of the aptly named Scott/Tiger. Sten's been busy working away on his second book Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development  - Made Simple. So the podcast is available now on OTN - download and listen.

To address an issue in the specification, the JSR 334 expert group has decided to ban the combination of diamond together with explicit constructor type arguments. For background, a constructor can have two sets of type arguments. In a parameterized class, constructors can have type arguments corresponding to the class's type parameters. This is the common case and the type arguments appear to the right of the class name and "new" as in "new ArrayList<String>()". In addition, if a constructor declares its very own type parameters (which can be done whether or not the enclosing class is parameterized), then those type arguments appear between the "new" token and the class name as in "new <Integer> ConstructorWithTypeParameter(Integer.valueOf(42))".

As with generic methods, the type arguments of generic constructors are usually inferred and not explicitly passed. However, generic constructors are much less common than generic methods.

After the specification change, using diamond to infer the class type parameters but explicitly passing the constructor type parameters is forbidden. However, the other three combinations of explicitly passing type arguments versus inferring them are supported, as shown in the table below.

class Foo<T extends Number> {
      <S extends T> Foo(S s) {super();}
}

Class	Constructor	Supported	Example
Explicit	Explicit	Yes	new <Integer> Foo<Number>(null);
Explicit	Inferred	Yes	new Foo<Integer>(null);
Inferred	Explicit	No	new <Integer> Foo<>(null); // compile error
Inferred	Inferred	Yes	new Foo<>(null);

The substitution that was used to formally describe the semantics of diamond did not fully propagate constraints if there was a typing relationship between the type parameters of the constructor and the type parameters of the class. Lifting the imposed restriction on the banned combination of explicit and inferred type arguments can be revisited in future work in the context of broader type inference getting added to the Java language.

Since generic constructors are so uncommon, adding this restriction about combining them with diamond should have little effect to most programs. For example, none of the uses of diamond in the JDK had to be updated as a result of this change. A changeset implementing this specification change has been pushed and will appear in subsequent promoted builds of JDK 7.

We're back! Now that we've migrated to blogs.oracle.com we have a new shiny look and don't intend to change the content from what you have been used to. Check out the few entries posted while we were not publicly visible. Other companion blogs such as the GlassFish Stories, The GlassFish Podcast or GlassFish for Business have also been migrated.

As for individual blogs, you should not only be able to continue reading content from the GlassFish engineers but we've spent time making sure that the valuable content from now retired bloggers is still accessible.

Let us know if anything doesn't work for you, chances are we haven't caught everything in the migration process. Thanks!

And now for some serious blogging to catch up with what happened during the migration period.

In a prior entry we introduced the objectives for the GlassFish 3.1.1 release. With a goal to be highly compatible with 3.1 we can only fix a small number of critical bugs and we'd like you to help us identify the most important ones using the voting mechanism built into JIRA.

With four promoted builds of GlassFish 3.1.1 accounting for already well over 100 bug fixes we'd like to ask you to vote for what you consider to be the most important bugs by 9 am PT Wednesday, May 11th, 2011. And if you want to send fixes we'll take that too, thanks!

Confession: I don’t usually like film festivals. I like the idea, much like I enjoy seeing live music – at least when it’s good, because then it’s great. Sure, you can listen to a Rolling Stones album, but seeing them...

Please welcome our Friday Fiskateer Focus…. TammyG #7591!   How long have you been a Fiskateer? Since January 2011 Tell us a little bit about yourself: Well I am mom of 3, sometimes 4 if you count the husband!  LOL  Work for a major TV network during the day and at night transform into CraftyWoman! I love Law and [...]

Mitch Glazer and Mickey Rourke. Courtesy of Lorey Sebastian/Image Entertainment.Hollywood just hasn’t been the same since Mitch Glazer moved back to Miami. The screenwriter and his wife, Kelly Lynch, usually keep benevolent watch over the movie crowd’s social scene from their breathtaking Lautner house up in the hills, but they are currently sweating away in the Sunshine State on Magic City, a new series for Chris Albrecht’s Starz network. West Coast editor Krista Smith caught up with Glazer to talk about the new show and his directorial debut, Passion Play, which opens in limited release today.

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week, you can get live stock quote updates, check out the top 40 doodles designed by incredibly creative students around the U.S. and visualize what one day of searches on Google looks like around the world.

Live streaming updates for stock quotes
When you search for a ticker symbol on google.com, you’ll immediately see financial information right on the results page, but you used to have to refresh the page to get updated stock quotes. Now, you no longer have to refresh the entire page to see the latest price; instead you’ll see live streaming updates of that stock quote. For some markets, including the NASDAQ and NYSE, these quotes represent the latest real-time market data (be sure to read our disclaimer about real-time data).


U.S. Doodle 4 Google top 40 finalists announced
The judging results are in! The 40 student finalists in this year's Doodle 4 Google competition were announced this week and online voting opened to the public. With more than 107,000 submissions, the creativity of the K-12 students that participated was remarkable. Be sure to vote for your favorite doodle between now and May 13 at 11:59pm PDT. The student that wins will receive a $15,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for their school, and see their artwork appear on the Google.com homepage on May 20.

Search Globe visualizes searches around the world
When you’re searching on Google, people all over the globe are searching at the same time, in hundreds of different languages. With the new Search Globe, you can see what one day of Google searches around the world looks like. The height of the bars depicts search volume in that region, and each different color represents the language of the majority of queries in an area. Because of the 3D graphics, you need a WebGL-enabled browser, like Google Chrome, to see the Search Globe.


Enjoy your weekend, and remember to keep your search skills sharp by trying to solve today’s A Google a Day question at www.agoogleaday.com:


Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

WXYZ’s Detroit 2020 recently featured Quicken Loans Chairman Dan Gilbert, discussing his take on downtown Detroit’s future. Here’s some info from their website: “Dan Gilbert wants to help Detroit become prosperous again.  And he’s putting his money where his mouth is. The Chairman of Quicken Loans is moving 2,000 more workers from the suburbs to [...]

Let's start calling the new low-end tablet the "FeatureTablet" because of its strong similarities to the Featurephone. And soon - since they are already here.

Couldn't attend SAP Virtualization and Cloud Week 2011 in person? Don't miss out on the session replays now available.

After American commandos killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Monday and flew away with his body, they left behind at least two surviving family members of the Qaeda leader: a wife and a daughter.

Cloud Computing Bootcamp which is now held regularly around the world, is being held in conjunction with the 8th Cloud Expo, June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Oracle will participate with two talks in the boot camp. 

 

Wednesday, June 8th
8:15 - 9:00 am
Roadmap to Enterprise Private PaaS
Speaker Rex Wang, Vice President of Product Marketing

Thursday, June 9th
9:55 - 10:40 am
Enterprise Cloud Management
Speaker: Dan Koloski, Director of Product Management and Business Development

For registration for this BootCamp event, go to http://cloudcomputingbootcamp.com/.

What better way to start your morning than with the day’s top headlines and a cup of delicious coffee? For the launch of the social news product LinkedIn Today, we hit the streets to deliver hot industry news along with free premium coffee from the LinkedIn news trucks. For those of you who missed the [...]

Garmin-sponsored triathlete Luke Bell from Australia gives some color to his experience at the St. Croix ½ Ironman, the fabled “beauty and the beast” in the triathlon world. Luke, who trains and races with the multisport Forerunner 310XT, had a...

Since selling out at Boston and London marathon expos, the Forerunner 610 has been a hot topic in running clubs and on starting lines around the world. We're thrilled to announce that it's now shipping and filling your favorite running...

After initial elation, disillusion has set in at Fox News: O'Reilly is angry that Obama, not waterboarding, is getting all the credit

The euphoria surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden is quickly fading as Fox news hosts realise that it may not be the game-changer they wished for.

Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly, a longtime advocate of harsh interrogation methods, is growing increasingly frustrated with the Obama administration's reluctance to acknowledge what he has decided was the vital role that "coerced interrogation" played in locating Osama bin Laden (view clip). Even worse, he believes this reluctance stems from the left's inability to separate ideology from truth, so he vows to "stick to the facts" to make his case for the need to use techniques like waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation measures.

Last night, on the [O'Reilly] Factor, we told you the truth that coerced interrogation – most likely, waterboarding – gave the CIA the first clue that led to Osama bin Laden's death. That is the truth. Yet, many on the left in America will not acknowledge it.

He was alluding to an argument he had the previous evening with left-leaning commentator Alan Colmes, who pointed out that even former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the courier source was not waterboarded or subjected to harsh treatment. The exact text of Rumsfeld's statement, according to Newsmax.tv, was as follows:

"The United States department of defence did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantánamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding."

But O'Reilly insisted that he was unprepared to accept any secondhand account of what the former defence secretary may or may not have said, and would question Rumsfeld himself before deciding what to believe. Before talking to Rumsfeld, O'Reilly pointed out that even CIA chief Leon Panetta has said that some valuable information may have been derived using harsh interrogation methods, but Panetta also upset the beleaguered host by adding that the question remains open as to whether or not those approaches were necessary. O'Reilly cut Panetta some slack, however, as he understands that he has to pander to his boss.

Because Mr Panetta works for President Obama, he has to say that. He has to hedge a bit. We don't know exactly how much information we might have got, could have, maybe, had we not dunked the guys in the water, the three guys. OK, I understand the game. I understand Mr Panetta's position, but again the truth is that enhanced interrogation does lead to life-saving information, despite what has been said!

To prove this "truth" that O'Reilly is already sure of, he interviewed Donald Rumsfeld and asked him to explain what he meant when he said that harsh treatment and waterboarding did not lead to beneficial information. Rumsfeld did his best to clarify his position by saying that his remarks had been taken out of context and that all he meant was that no one had been waterboarded at Guantánamo Bay, and that the three people who had been waterboarded (elsewhere presumably) were waterboarded by the CIA and not the military.

Although this response doesn't seem to shed much light on his prior statement, or offer unequivocal proof that waterboarding and so on works, it seemed to suffice for O'Reilly. Rumsfeld took a little detour, then, to make the much-debated point that waterboarding was not torture anyway, but O'Reilly, who was apparently satisfied that the truth had now been established, soon ended the segment.

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity is growing increasingly disenchanted with the Obama administration for their reluctance to release Bin Laden's death pictures and their seeming inability to get their story straight (view clip). He discusses these issues with political commentator and former marine, Colonel Oliver North.

Look, I don't know how much, I don't care … we got Bin Laden – that, to me, is important. But they did say he was hiding behind a woman. They did say he was reaching for weapons. They did say they were being fired upon. All these things now have shifted and changed and I'm having a hard time understanding.

The colonel understood Hannity's frustration but explained that there are a "lot of filters" between the people who carry out these operations and the people who end up talking about them And as someone who has actually participated in these sorts of missions, North was able to sympathise with those involved. The Navy Seals were naturally more focused on getting their man and getting out alive than making an accurate transcription of the events as they unfolded in order to satisfy the relentless demands of the 24-hour news cycle. He also made the point that in these high-pressure situations, different people see things differently, which might account for some of the subsequent confusion over details. Hannity didn't seem inclined to disagree with a Marine over this and turned to the photo dilemma instead.

We're looking at these photos that Reuters had tonight. Yes, they're gruesome. We warned children not to watch them. A lot of blood, it's gory. I know he was shot in the head, but the rationale is what bothers me the most, Colonel, and the rationale seems to be that by releasing this photo, we will incite people that already hate us – and we put a bullet in the guy's brain. I think they already hate us!

Once again, North surprised Hannity by taking the administration's part in the argument. He explained that while the administration has a penchant for political correctness, they were wise to try to avoid inflaming al-Qaida extremists by flaunting gruesome pictures of their slain leader. Also, he didn't think it wise to release anything to the public that could possibly some day be used as evidence against one of the Navy Seals in an international criminal court. Hannity took his point, but still insisted that the world needed to see those photos and that the administration had gone overboard with their hyper-sensitivity. 

When you look at the burial on a warship, where they say he's not a Muslim but he gets, you know, Islamic custom – buried within 24 hours – dumped at sea after his body is washed; he's put in a shroud; 45-minute funeral, translated into Arabic … seems overboard to me.

These politically correct gestures seemed overboard to North also, and finally the two men found some common ground.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck had exhausted his celebratory mood over the death of Bin Laden by Wednesday, probably after overdoing it earlier in the week with marching bands and cookie parties (view clip and transcript). He didn't want to hear any more about death photos or about what he termed President Obama's "victory lap" of Ground Zero. Not for the first time, Beck felt himself to be the lone voice of reason, who recognised that there are far more important things to be talking about, such as America having lost her way in the world and, by now, most of her friends.

He went through a list of countries like Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and Israel that he feels were once our friends, but have now fallen into the undecided camp, at best. Japan would probably still be our friend, but since the nuclear thing, there's really nothing left of them. Brazil looks at us like a client. Canada can probably still be counted on, particularly now that they have elected a conservative government, but they're not exactly known for their "fighting prowess". Even England, with whom we have enjoyed such a "special relationship" in the past, may be reconsidering us.

England: things have been a little strained, you know, since we sent the bust of Winston Churchill back and gave the queen an iPod of his best speeches, but they're basically toast. They're still our ally, but, I mean, anybody who watched the royal wedding of – I don't know, Kate and Leopold – they were, they were walking down and somebody on TV said that could be the next king, and I thought, "yes, if there is another king."

Worst of all, the only person who can make the public aware of our impending doom is being slowly driven off the airwaves.

Time for TechED Talk? Yes, as the ASUG Call for Speakers for SAP TechEd Las Vegas is now open! Submissions are due by May 22nd. Share your story...everyone has one.

Crude oil is a commodity, like coffee or wheat, with prices set on global markets. Just as a poor coffee bean harvest can increase the price of your morning coffee, when something significant happens to the supply of crude oil...

When I graduated from high school, my mom bought me a book of poems about a mother’s love for her daughter. She told me that before she gave it to me, she sat in her car, read through it and cried. I loved the book, but I’m not sure I fully appreciated it at the [...]

I wanted to share a photograph of a series of new paintings we commissioned artist Steve Penley to paint to celebrate our 125th anniversary. You may recall Steve's work was on display at the Pop Culture Gallery of the World...

I’ve heard time and again from you (our partners) that we need to simplify, and make it easier to do business with us. Yesterday, we took a leap forward in streamlining Cisco.

Many members of the tribe of the auto-obsessed can trace their compulsion back to parental indoctrination—a sort of vehicular Munchausen-by-proxy, in which the implanted toxin is a father’s fascination with a rusty Austin-Healy 3000 or a mother’s preening affection for all things motorized and Italian. Not so for me—or not exactly. Though my father took me to the Detroit Auto Show every year and patiently indulged my fetish for things be-wheeled, tacky, and baroque, his own vehicles were (and remain) unerringly quotidian. My mother, on the other hand, while never making an objectively groovy automotive choice, more than made up for it by selecting an array only matched in its eclecticism by the course of her actual life. In celebration of Mother’s Day, I offer up this annotated slideshow of my mother’s amazing existence, via her cars.

After an unexpected 30 Rock hiatus, we’re back for the season finale!

Every Friday, Vanity Fair digital design editor Hamish Robertson and VF Daily blogger Juli Weiner will duel to determine whose wordplay is of the highest order. Each will take turns crafting puns relating to a pre-assigned topic. This week, VF.com associate editor Sarah Ball will judge their bons mots and select a winner. Her comments appear in red italics after each dueler’s offering. The pun is mightier than the sword, ladies and gentlemen—what follows is not for the faint of heart. The topic: former Beatle Paul McCartney is engaged to Nancy Shevell, a member of the board of New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the hapless, widely hated public agency responsible for running the city’s subway system, among other things. Duelers, at two swords’ length ...

For your edification, a look back at the phrases, nouns, and neologisms that have, for better or for worse, shaped the week’s national discourse.

From Mike Michalowicz:

We live in a world of questions. In business, we are inundated with them. Think about all the questions you ask in a day—this may be exactly where you are going wrong.

Whether or not your questions will actually do anything to help you over a hurdle or take your business to the next level depends a lot of the questions you are asking yourself. You can’t just say whatever crosses your mind and expect that the universe is going to bring you a good answer.

Go

Are you maximizing your online marketing efforts for your business model? What sets you apart from your competitors? What have you done for them to easily locate your business? We live in a digital world with a prominence in technology. One thing that is crucial for any business whether brick and mortar or virtual is a website. A website is key to your target audience and provides viability for your company.

There are several new loan programs for businesses under Small Business Administration (SBA) The Small Business Administration (SBA) has launched a new toolkit for those lenders (http://www.sba.gov/for-lenders">www.sba.gov/for-lenders) that specialize in servicing small businesses. The kit is designed to streamline the lender’s procedure in helping small businesses in the loan process

Prompted by Barry Moltz's recent OPEN Forum article -- "10 Business Books to Read this Summer in 140 Characters or Less" http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/lifestyle/article/get-smart-10-business-books-to-read-this-summer-in-140-characters-or-less-1">

As a Googler I often take my work home with me—in a good way. With two young boys at home, life is always busy, so my husband and I are always looking for ways to save time, get organized and enrich our lives in simple ways. Because the products I beta test and use in the office have become an integral part of my own family life, for Mother’s Day this weekend I’d like to share some favorite tips, including a few from other Googler parents.

Capturing and sharing memories

• Instead of keeping 500 crayon masterpieces, store digital photos of all your kids’ artwork in Picasa Web Albums
• Collect trip or party photos in one place by letting all of your paparazzi upload their snapshots to a collaborative online album
• Tag friends and family in Picasa photos so you can easily create and share personalized collages, gift CDs/DVDs or movie slideshows
• Use Picnik to edit your Picasa Web Albums photos. Use the “Create” tab to add text, stickers, frames and other effects to your photos—your kids can help, and you can email them as digital cards to distant relatives
• Safely share home videos with family by inviting them to view a private YouTube video
• Keep a running family history by encouraging relatives around the world to contribute stories and biographies in a shared Google doc or blog

Communicating and entertaining

• Video chat through Gmail for free with long-distance grandparents and friends—this is also great for connecting kids with their parents when traveling
• Entertain kids on the run with kid-friendly YouTube channels—like Sesame Street and School House Rock—Android apps or your own photos and videos on your mobile phone (kids love watching themselves!)
• Have your kids help you create a video card or a cartoon on YouTube
• Explore the world from the couch—fly around Google Earth on your mobile phone or tablet
• On camping trips, use Sky Map to explore and name constellations. You can even travel back in time to show your kids what the sky looked like on the day they were born
• Read the classics—like Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows and Grimm’s Fairy Tales—for free from Google eBooks; for older kids, many books that are required reading for school are also free. Google eBooks are accessible and readable on devices your family probably already has—like laptops or smartphones

Organizing and planning

• Plan a group trip by creating a shared Google document or site with proposed dates and activities. Navigate around traffic and find the nearest pit stop with Google Maps for mobile
• Using My Maps, get family and friends to help you collect ideas for activities in your area that are family-friendly
• Schedule family events, playdates and birthdays on a shared Google Calendar
• Track everything from infant feeding schedules, holiday gifts and thank-you notes to travel packing lists and family budgets with Google spreadsheets; look at the Template Gallery to customize yours
• Use forms in Google spreadsheets to send invitations to birthday parties and collect RSVPs (there are templates for these, too)
• Use the ingredient filter in Recipe View to find recipes that exclude ingredients your kids won’t eat—like [meatballs without onions]—or use the time filter to find easy recipes your children can help prepare like chocolate chip cookies that take under 30 minutes
• Share a shopping list on Google Docs—whomever goes to the store can easily access it from the new Google Docs app on Android

I hope these tips inspire moms (and dads) to celebrate your family this weekend. Here’s hoping you can save time and energy to focus on having fun with your kids!

Posted by Cathy Cheng, Webmaster Manager and proud mom of Kai (3 years) and Jin (10 months)

Well, it is day four of the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C. What a busy four days it's already been and the tournament has barely begun! I am happy to report that so far both the Championship and History...

We have a new Enterprise Information Management Use Case wiki and we need your feedback and input!

Two words I never thought I'd see in the same sentence: fusion and startup.

With Syrian government restrictions on independent reporting still firmly in place, activists have worked to document protests across the country by posting videos online.

Happy Editing Month, everyone. Didn’t know May was Editing Month? Well it is, because Lulu says it is! And we all have our virtual red pens poised and ready to edit some great books! “I was an English major, so I don’t need editing.” “My professor already edited it.” “My mother was a teacher for [...]

Yesterday we were called to testify on Capitol Hill about how the social web is changing disaster response. The Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery and Intergovernmental Affairs (phew – big name!) held the hearing, which you can now watch online if you missed the live version. Our own Suzy DeFrancis gave testimony along [...]

An EU plan to pay fishermen to catch plastic will help save our waters from waste while providing fleets with alternative income

Rarely has a TV campaign been won so convincingly. In January this year, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish Fight programme persuaded over 600,000 of us to support a ban on the wasteful practice of throwing dead fish back into the sea. The European commission listened and has announced it intends to ban discarding fish.

For some peculiar reason, the fishing industry's reaction to the commission's announcement was not as warm as you might have expected. A discard ban will put many out of business, we now hear, presumably because many of the fish caught as bycatch are smaller and less valuable than the ones fishermen land today. So in announcing the plan, Maria Damanaki, the European fisheries commissioner, sought to soften the blow. Under her proposal, fishermen may be paid to fish for plastic instead.

Plastic fisheries sound daft, but the idea is far from silly. Our seas are awash with plastic bottles, bags, nappies, discarded fishing nets, ropes and thousands of other bits and pieces – the flotsam of modern life. By 2008, the latest year for which I have a figure, 260m tonnes of plastics were made using 8% of global oil production in raw materials and energy. The curve of production over time bends upwards like a cliff face, increasing by 9% per year. The stark reality of this ever-steepening upward climb is that more plastic was made in the first 10 years of this century than all of the plastic ever created up to the year 2000.

Deliberate dumping of plastic at sea has been banned since 1998, but the law is hard to police. The amount of rubbish picked from British beaches in cleanups sponsored by the Marine Conservation Society increased 77% between 1994 and 2009, much of it chucked from ships. Rivers add mindboggling amounts of plastic into the sea daily; much of it soon comes back to a coast near you. Every year, about 2,000 items of rubbish (most of it plastic) washes ashore for each kilometre of beach in Europe. The Mediterranean is worst affected with up to 18,000 pieces per kilometre per year, so it isn't surprising that the European commission plan to test their plastic fishing proposal there first. Even the deep sea is not beyond reach. About half of plastics sink, and submarine pilots regularly see bags float past 1,000 metres down.

Plastic at sea isn't just unsightly. Many seabirds, turtles, fish and others mistake plastic for food: 19 out of every 20 fulmars that wash up dead onto European beaches have a belly full of plastic. Adult birds pick up floating plastics at sea and feed them to their chicks. If plastic was just harmless roughage it would be bad enough. Instead, many plastics come loaded with chemicals like flame retardants, which get passed up the food chain and so can come back to us in the fish we eat. Worse still, plastics accumulate toxic chemicals (such as pesticides found in water) and concentrate them to thousands of times background levels. Over the years, floating plastics break into ever smaller fragments, making it easier to transfer their chemical burden to anything that eats it. In some places, there is more plastic than plankton.

Fishing for plastic is a great idea. It won't rid the sea of the microscopic soup already adrift, but it could stop things getting worse. There is already a voluntary scheme, Fishing for Litter, which provides collection facilities at ports where rubbish caught can be disposed of rather than thrown back over the side. All of Scotland's major ports already participate. Given that fishing nets sweep the majority of European waters every year, a dedicated cleanup could clear much of the accumulated trash within a few years. But ultimately, the plastic problem will only be solved if we all use less and make sure none of it reaches the sea.

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A flimsy item of 'evidence' not only distracts from Sony's security lapse but attempts to smear activist hackers as mere criminals

This week, Sony Corporation claimed to Congress that its investigation of the breach by which millions of customers had their credit card numbers compromised had turned up a document left on the server in question entitled "Anonymous" and containing the phrase "We are Legion", itself a fragment of our longtime slogan. Some have taken this as proof that Anonymous was responsible for the most significant online heists in memory. After all, the online activist movement has lately been engaged in a battle with Sony over its treatment of two individuals who taught others how to alter the PlayStation 3 in such a way as to install Linux OS on the gaming console, making Anonymous a natural suspect.

But those observers who are most familiar with who Anonymous is – such as the dozens of journalists who have been free to watch us at work in our operational venues – tend to agree with us that the circumstances of this incident are highly suspicious, and that any investigation into the crime in question must take into account the natural question of who might benefit from such an act – in other words, a party or parties who would have an interest in smearing Anonymous.

The perpetration of a crime for the purpose of framing another party and thereby damaging its reputation is hardly unusual. The FBI spent two decades operating a programme called COINTELPRO, by which agents would infiltrate "dangerous" groups, such as those advocating civil rights, and then promote violence by its members in order to discredit their cause in the eyes of the public and justify police crackdowns. A congressional committee that investigated the issue concluded that "the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association."

Such practices continue today. It was only a few months ago that Anonymous's counter-investigation into a group of federal contractors including HBGary Federal, Palantir and Belrico revealed that the three companies – collectively known then as "Team Themis" – had prepared a plan to attack WikiLeaks to submit to law firm Hunton & Williams (retained by Bank of America, panicked over the prospect of a leak concerning its executives). The scheme was to consist of such things as disinformation, placement of fake documents, clandestine operations against WikiLeaks supporter Glenn Greenwald, and "cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters".

Of course, Anonymous itself engages in attacks of that latter sort. On the other hand, Anonymous does so against dictatorships and corrupt institutions that engage in corruption alongside the state – and when we do, the FBI raids the homes of our alleged participants. Not being as respectable as our corporate counterparts, we are not permitted to act with seeming impunity.

Now, having made enemies of the dozens of other firms whose wrongdoing we have exposed in the months since, by way of Operation Metal Gear and other crowdsourced investigations, Anonymous is accused of having committed a major crime entirely different from the campaigns of civil disobedience for which we are rightfully known. The evidence is a single document that helpfully names us as the perpetrators. Sony has thus managed to shift attention away from its own failure to protect client data, while federal agencies have been diverted into a pursuit of us, this time for a massive theft rather than popular acts of revolt. Presently, I have no proof that this action was taken by any of the powerful and sophisticated enemies we have made in the world of intelligence-contracting or law enforcement; but neither can they prove that Anonymous was responsible for this heist.

At any rate, an investigation is being conducted by the usual people. Congress is now on the job. Even more heartening, Attorney General Eric Holder says that the justice department is taking this "very seriously". It is good to see those two entities adopting a healthier work ethic: when, a few months ago, Representative Hank Johson called for Congress to look into the activities of Team Themis in coordination with Hunton & Williams, Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, declined, asserting that this was the responsibility of the justice department. He did not seem to think it problematic that, as shown by the HBGary emails, it was the justice department itself that recommended Hunton & Williams to Bank of America.

Eric Holder having presumably been too busy to investigate that particular matter, Anonymous is, of course, flattered to learn that criminal activity that allegedly involves us is a higher priority than dubious activity that definitely involved his own department. Or perhaps, there is some other explanation.