Interesting Snippets from 2012-07-16

• Slide Show: 10 Free Database Security Tools

  While expensive products such as database activity monitoring suites and database encryption tools may be the only option for highly regulated organizations required to comply with security mandates, some organizations with no database security in place may find that free tools can be a great way to reduce security risks. Dark Reading takes a look at a wide range of free security tools that can help organizations discover, scan, assess, and protect their databases from attack.

• Small Linux PCs overview - Raymii.org

  You might have heard of the Raspberry Pi, or the Cotton Candy, or the Snowball. Those are, besides nice pi, candy and snow, also small Linux pc’s. Most of them have an ARM chip, a small amount of memory and run some for of Linux.

  This page will provide an overview of what is on the market, specs, an image, and links to the boards. It is probably not complete, and if I forgot one, please leave a comment. I think I’ll be doing another overview at the end of the year. Prices are in US dollar unless otherwise stated. It is the starting price for the cheapest model where applicable.

• ‘To Forgive Design,’ by Henry Petroski - NYTimes.com

  Disaster has long been grist for Dr. Petroski. His first book, in 1985, was “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design.” Since then he has written widely on failure, in other books and in a regular column in the magazine American Scientist. He has also produced book-length discussions of design successes, like the pencil (point breakage notwithstanding) and the toothpick.

  Like all of us, engineers hope their designs will succeed, solving old problems in new ways or making things faster, cheaper, more efficient or more pleasant. But, as Dr. Petroski writes, “no matter what the technology is, our best estimates of its success tend to be overly optimistic.”

  Failure is what drives the field forward.

• From software to toilet paper: filmmaker to live open source for a year | Ars Technica

  From software to toilet paper: filmmaker to live open source for a year Wants to find out just how far the "open source idea can go in real life."

  by Liat Clark, Wired UK - Jul 14, 2012 4:50 pm UTC

  Social Media

  59 Year of Open Source

  A filmmaker is planning to spend a year living an open source life—with everything from his clothes to his toilet paper strictly adhering to the philosophy.

  Sam Muirhead, a New Zealander living in Berlin, will begin his challenge on August 1, 2012 and is raising money on crowdfunding site IndieGoGo to support the ambitious project. Muirhead, who admits he cannot code or solder and is permanently synced to his Mac, will need all the help he can get to answer some of his most pressing open source related questions: "Can I 3D print jeans, can robots cook me breakfast?"

• A look at Java 7's new features - O'Reilly Radar

  There are a number of features in Java 7 that will please developers. Things such as strings in switch statements, multi-catch exception handling, try-with-resource statements, the new File System API, extensions of the JVM, support for dynamically-typed languages, the fork and join framework for task parallelism, and a few others will certainly be embraced by the community.

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