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Yes, More Technology and Computer Science Related Contents Are Coming

During my research time back in the graduate school, I created presentations for papers I was reading. There were also some presentations I made for my own research purpose or classes where I assisted the teachings. Originally these resources were available at my personal webpage hosted by my research lab. However, somehow these resources have become inaccessible.

I believe that those resources will be helpful for computer science graduate students or those who are interested in the subjects elaborated through the presentations. I added new category, “Computer Science” that will primarily contain “serious reading materials” including the presentations I mentioned earlier or other articles related to computer science. Each post will be dedicated only for single presentation or article. This way, the discussion will be more focused and I can better respond the gleaning interests on the subject.

All presentations are provided in PDF format, if you want the original format in PPT, feel free to drop me a request through email.

You can expect that this will set the precedence for more technology related posts, either theoretical or practical to flow into this blog again.

What Is Your Java IDE?

After a long break in posting in this technology blog, I will start sharing things with you again. This time, I’ll start with a simple topic: Java IDE. Following this post, I hope I can share lots more useful and exciting stuff for you.

I have been a long fan of Eclipse IDE. For some Java developers, Eclipse can be a religion that is taken for granted. There are obviously some reasons behind this. Eclipse is free thus saving the souls of those who really count each penny they spend for their toys. Additionally, its richness in third party plugins, which is an equivalent expression for broad range of support from software/API vendors, oftentimes make Eclipse the first choice of Java IDE.

Nevertheless, you may agree with me that one aspect Eclipse is lacking is the usability. When talking about usability, I don’t necessarily mean the interface is horrible. Eclipse is intuitive enough and it can satisfy most of your development needs, until one point where you think you should find another alternative. I have found out that Eclipse can be cumbersome when it is used for multi-module big Java projects. To be more specific, big, multi-module Java projects that use Maven for the build management instead of ant do not really play satisfyingly well under Eclipse.

Recently, I started using IntelliJ IDEA, an IDE from JetBrains. I don’t want to excessively praise this IDE but there are some rooms where this IDE rocks and beats Eclipse, severely and predominantly. In Eclipse for example, it is not straightforward to create a hierarchical multi-module POM-based projects. In contrast, multi-module hierarchical POM-based projects are easy to create in IntelliJ IDEA. IntelliJ IDEA’s intellisense, or auto-complete feature, is also awesome. The breadth of languages and XML structure it supports is unexpected. Coding Groovy in Eclipse can be non-intuitive but IntelliJ IDEA provides seamless intellisense support for Groovy. Even the POM file structure can easily created, modified, and analyzed with the builtin intellisense. The presence of this feature will undoubtedly increase your productivity. There are some other nice features but I will let you find them by trying this IDE by yourself if you haven’t got your hands dirty with it before.

Now, back to the original question. What is your Java IDE? And let’s make this question more interesting: What is the best Java IDE that you ever knew?

How Fast Is Internet in South Korea?

In a country where being digital is an articulate part of the lifestyle, some talk about internet speed and accessibility can be fascinating. This time, it’s a short story about pervasiveness of the internet in South Korea, the home for Samsung, currently the world’s largest electronics company and a part of the conglomerate that contributes for more than 20% of South Korea GDP.

There have been some reports, including these two about the distribution of internet speed in the world. In both reports, South Korea was crowned as the country with the fastest internet speed, with average countrywide speed at 16.63Mbps and 13.7Mpbs respectively. Interestingly, the internet speed in South Korea itself is not dominated by a single region. When looking at the lower scope, the fast internet speed is distributed across the region. Taking the more recent report published by Akamai in one of the report samples, cities in South Korea sweep clean the top 10 and dominate the top 20 under the category “cities with the fastest internet speed”. The striking domination can be seen in the following figure. Continue reading

Quick Guide to Detecting Phishing and Avoiding Being A Victim

Having talked about spamming, in this post, I would like to shortly discuss about phishing, a technique for identity theft, which in my personal experience, has become more rampant these days.

If it is the first time for you to read this fancy term, phishing is an attempt to steal somebody else’s sensitive information such as username, password, credit card details, and other personal credentials usually done by sending an email containing a false claim to the target. The content can be a threat, warning, and other form of falsified truth carefully crafted to encourage the target to submit his personal credentials. As you may have predicted, phishing was derived from “fishing”. The “fisher” is the person who wants to steal the information and the target is the “fish”. The false claim is obviously the “bait” used to attract and hook the “fish”.

Identity theft is disadvantageous and can sometimes become disastrous to the victim. Let us take a case of a phishing attempt from a sender who falsely claims as your email account provider. The message contains warning to verify your email account by supplying your user account id and password. If you inadvertently submitted the requested information to this site, you might have never imagined how creative the phisher is in exploiting this private information they stole from you.
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Asian Countries Dominate Tweets on Twitter

A recent study from Semiocast, a Paris-based company, revealed Asia as the region where most tweets were originated. The region produced 37% of global tweets, a 6.5% increase compared to previous measure taken three months earlier. North America region trailed at the second position with 31% of global tweets, a 5% decrease compared to 36% share it took in the previous measure. Besides dominating the global tweets, the study also highlighted Asia as the region with the fastest growth of tweets.

The results were obtained by analyzing tweets over the period of 24 hours on June 22nd, 2010. By extracting the language in the tweet combined with processing geotag information in the tweet header, all tweets were then mapped to produce the country and region distribution. In the previous measure conducted in March 2010, one-week tweets gathered from March 21 to March 28, 2010 were used in the analysis.

At the country-wise, US still topped worldwide tweets with approximately 25% share. The percentage was a 5% decline from 30% share it gained in the previous measure. Asian countries like Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea steadily grew in number of tweets. Japan was accounted for 18% share while Indonesia and South Korea secured 12% and 2% of global tweets. The percentages for the three Asian countries had been a rise compared to their previous shares.
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