Comments on Beginning serverless computing, by M.Stiegler, APress

On the bright side the book is well organized, written in American English and presents a neat introduction to the three most popular cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud. Although Heroku is not presented, but only mentioned once,  neither IBM nor Oracle cloud is even mentioned at all, as if they did not exist... Rainy days for both Oracle cloud and IBM? I only hope that the experts of Sun  can develop a solution which is capable of weather (or even  climate) modification of  the cloud business landscape, or  better cloudscape. After all their motto has always been "the network is the computer", or not?

 Coming back to the book, the language used to create the sample apps is exclusively Typescript, a stricter version of JavaScript, Visual studio code is the IDE used, along with Kudu, Node, the Serverless Framework for deployment, Mongo DB as NoSQL Database, Postman for testing and GitHub for versioning among others. Prior knowledge of all Rest & Json technologies is assumed, since there is almost no introduction to any, but short descriptions.

On the dark side, the use cases of the applications presented are so simple, that the code of the book is scarcely reusable. The code is at the moment oddly not available online on the publisher's site, but on Github.

All in all, the author develops a hotel room service order app in each cloud provider, comparing the different terminologies, data stores and costs, warning about possible traps, which might strip your bank account some hefty amounts of money. By the way always keep in mind that opening a personal, not a company, account for learning cloud development sometimes requires giving access to your personal banking  details such as your debit  or credit card number. At the last chapter an agnostic method of development  is  presented.  The text addresses several issues, such as vendor lock in, but the security issues i.e. of guarding online database data is in my opinion not addressed widely enough.

Netbeans 8: Setting up the current java development kit

This new post addresses another repetitive task which draws the attention of a Java developer, as the time goes by and newer versions of the jdk become available for the public. That is updating the Netbeans IDE with the most current version by editing the file:

 "C:\PathtoProgramFiles\NetBeans 8.1\etc\netbeans.conf"

Although the IDE is smart enough to locate an existing jdk, every time it starts, it stalls and shows this message.

A sample netbeans.conf file follows below  for  your reference.

# Default locations of userdir and cachedir:

# (http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqWhatIsUserdir)

#

# On Windows ${DEFAULT_USERDIR_ROOT} will be replaced by the launcher

# with "<AppData>\NetBeans" where <AppData> is user's

# value of "AppData" key in Windows Registry under

# "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders"

# and ${DEFAULT_CACHEDIR_ROOT} will be replaced by the launcher

# with "<Local AppData>\NetBeans\Cache" where <Local AppData> is user's

# value of "Local AppData" key in Windows Registry under

# "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders"

#

# On Mac ${DEFAULT_USERDIR_ROOT} will be replaced by the launcher

# with "~/Library/Application Support/NetBeans" and

# ${DEFAULT_CACHEDIR_ROOT} with "~/Library/Caches/NetBeans"

#

# On other systems ${DEFAULT_USERDIR_ROOT} will be replaced by the launcher

# with "~/.netbeans" and ${DEFAULT_CACHEDIR_ROOT} with "~/.cache/netbeans"

#

# You can also use ${HOME} variable which will be replaced with

# user.home JVM system property value. This variable is valid only in

# netbeans_default_userdir and netbeans_default_cachedir properties.

#

# NOTE: If you specify a non-default userdir path on command line

# (--userdir option) and don't specify a cachedir path (--cachedir option),

# cachedir will be in "<userdir>/var/cache".

#

# Cachedir must be different from userdir. The same cachedir and userdir

# would cause problems.

#

netbeans_default_userdir="${DEFAULT_USERDIR_ROOT}/8.1"

netbeans_default_cachedir="${DEFAULT_CACHEDIR_ROOT}/8.1"

# Options used by NetBeans launcher by default:

# (can be overridden by explicit command line switches)

#

# Note that default -Xmx is selected for you automatically.

# You can find these values in var/log/messages.log file in your userdir.

# The automatically selected value can be overridden by specifying -J-Xmx

# here or on the command line.

#

# If you specify the heap size explicitly, you may also want to enable

# Concurrent Mark & Sweep garbage collector.

# (see http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqGCPauses)

#

netbeans_default_options="-J-client -J-Xss2m -J-Xms32m

 -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true -J-Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true

 -J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -J-Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=true 

-J-Dsun.zip.disableMemoryMapping=true"

# Default location of JDK:

# (set by installer or commented out if launcher should decide)

#

# It can be overridden on command line by using --jdkhome <dir>

# Be careful when changing jdkhome.

# There are two NetBeans launchers for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and

# installer points to one of those in the NetBeans application shortcut

# based on the Java version selected at installation time.

#

netbeans_jdkhome="C:\PathToJava\jdk1.8.0_131"

# Additional module clusters:

# using ${path.separator} (';' on Windows or ':' on Unix):

#

#netbeans_extraclusters="/absolute/path/to/cluster1:/absolute/path/to/cluster2"

A technical review of LG 32LF650V smart tv 3d series

This new post describes my experiences regarding the use of the 32 inch  LG 32LF650V smart tv. More or less the contents of the other post concerning the LG 32 LB 650 still apply, but there are some news as well.
On the bright side, the refresh rate has been increased to 900 Hz offering a clearer high definition view then the predecessor, especially during satellite reception.  The initial assembly is also simplified and that might explain the brevity of the printed owner's manual. By the way, the manual authors have spent almost two pages describing the functions of the magic remote which is to be purchased separately for around 50€. Although Adobe flash player is still missing, one could experiment starting up some third party  software, such as the nova player, and attempt to update it. Hopefully the built in internet browser will be able to play online streaming content full screen, as provided by internet broadcasting services such as filmon.    Regular manual updating of the WebOS might also help, please bear in mind that auto updating does not always work!
On the dark side, the menu structure, browser,  the tv operation via the remote control remain as good, or bad, as before. A convenient and cheaper alternative to buying the magic remote, is connecting a wheel mouse to the usb port of the tv. Sadly connecting a microsoft natural keyboard for entering text, did not work for me! Moreover, some people claimed that the plastic stands are of moderate to low quality and that the tv does not allow to switch off entirely.  However, one can disable the standby led light by changing the settings in order to save energy. Another regular complaint is the so often "Out of memory error" appearing while browsing the internet. Hopefully the updates will solve that problem too. After several updates the situation worsened: some streaming providers such as dw.com, which functioned well, just ceased to work!
All in all, the software quality of the linux open source based WebOS remains disputable, I 'd rather have android installed instead. For a price of 369€ it seems to be worth the money, only for people having access to a satellite dish. Watching online streaming is still troublesome, since the broadband lines are still too slow and unreliable.The smart tv browser is so bad, that streaming is almost out of question, some web sites can not display correctly either. What is worse is the memory errors thrown often when a web page is big. Allowing to install another open source browser such as Tor, firefox or opera might help. Only the standard tv functions well, but if one has paid a high price for a smart tv, not only a plain one, that is purely a waste of money!