Microsoft to offer free cybersecurity courses to US community colleges

In a new Microsoft Cybersecurity Scholarship Program, the company will offer free cybersecurity courses to US community colleges, to help solve the shortage of security engineers in the US. The program is not available outside the US.

The program builds on the Microsoft Skills for Jobs global initiative. The initiative offers free access to a set of LinkedIn courses and reduced cost Microsoft Certifications. It also offers grants to non profit organisations, but none of the organisations mentioned are in Europe.

MS Teams 9/2021 update highlights

Present from powerpoint to teams

IF you store your presentation on MS OneDrive or sharepoint, powerpoint will show a [Present in Teams] button in the upper right corner (next to [Comments]). You will then have a presenter view in your teams meeting while attendees see the real slides.

Presenter mode

When sharing the screen, you can now have your camera a(i.e. your face) as an inset in the shared screen

Breakout rooms assignment enhanced

You can now easily find which person is in which breakout room.

Chat

Live reactions

Users can now highlight icons to communicate their state of mind. These are the same icons as the ones you use as a short reaction to a chat message. 

Chat bubbles

Chat messages can now appear as callouts for the corresponding person in the participant gallery.

Pin messages

You can pin important chat messsages to make them standout from a long chat flow. The option is in the ... menu you have on your own chat messages (same place as Edit, Remove...)

more...

Java 17 LTS released

 Oracle released Java 17 today.

While there are some technical goodies, the most important news is that Oracle stops the licensing nonsense it entered in with the previous LTS release (Java 11).

Updates will remain available from Oracle for three years, which is one year after the next LTS (Java 23).

Oracle Java is again free for production use as well.

It remains to be seen if this will lure back devs from the AdoptOpenJdk/Adoptium distributions.

From a technical point of view Sealed classes are introduced, giving a more fine grained (if cumbersome) control over which classes may inherit from a class/interface.

Some deprectations for removal of some old friends as well: Security Manager and the applet API, stars of the original Java buzz.

SequenceDiagram IntelliJ plugin

One of our KdG students pointed us to the SequenceDiagram plugin for the IntelliJ IDE. The plugin reverse engineers a method into a UML sequence diagram. You click on a method and get a graphical view of its inner workings and interaction with other objects.

 

It also has a nice solution for representing lambda's, something the UML standard does not have specific support for.

That's not all

• from each method in the sequence diagram you can navigate back to your code. 
• the method  numbers (which are more useful in a commuication diagrams) can be turned off in the preferences
• exports to plantUML
  

The author is very responsive to issues submitted. I asked to make the return arrows optional and lo! in the the latest release there is an option to do so.

Only remark I have is that control flow frames (loop, alt) are not supported and everything is shown as one big, well, sequence. There is an issue related to this that is marked solved, but no milestone associated.

But this is a nice effort, and way better respecting UML conventions than IntelliJ's own class diagram generator.

UML links (updated)

• UML specification
• UML overviews
• UML diagrams
• Agile modeling
• UML tools
• UMLet UML tool
•  My modified palettes
• I made some diagrams more consistent with UML 2 and modified some elements to make them resize automatically
• unpack into the palettes folder of Umlet (you may want to make a backup first)
• UMLetino browser based versio
• text UML tools
  
• Astah
• Visual Paradigm
• Enterprise Architect ($)
• Online Drawing tools
• draw.io
• Lucidchart
• Use Cases 2.0

Java SE version history (updated)

Version	Name	Release	Major new features
17 (LTS)		9/2021	sealed class
16		3/2021	record
15		9/2020	Text blocks
14		3/2020	Switch expressions
11 (LTS)		9/2018	HTTP Client and WebSocket APIs Run (single file) source code
9		2016	JSR 294: modular JDK (Jigsaw) Searchable javadoc JAXB 2.3
8 (LTS)	Spider	3/2014	JSR 335: lambda expressions Collections Stream Framework JSR 310: Date and Time API Compact profiles JSR 308: annotations outside declarations (on usage)
7	Dolphin	7/2011	language (project coin): switch on strings, multi catch, try with autoclosing resources, empty generics (diamond operator), binary literal, underscores in numbers NIO.2 file handling Fork/Join concurrency JAX-WS 2.2 (SOAP 1.2, WS-I 2.0, metro 2.0)
6	Mustang	12/2006	JSR 223: scripting language support JSR 224: JAX-WS2.0 (metro 1.x) JSR 221: JDBC 4 (driver autoloading)) Perfomance enhancements in synchronisation and garbage collection
5	Tiger	9/2004	language (JSR 201): Enumerations, autoboxing, enhanced for loop, static import, vararg JSR 175: Annotations JSR 14: Generics java.util.concurrent java.util.Scanner RMI automatic stub generation
1.4	Merlin	2/2002	language: assert regular expressions JSR 51: NIO JSR 47: java.util.logging JSR 54: JDBC 3 (metadata API, autogenerated keys, transaction savepoints, multiple || resultsets/statement) security and cryptography
1.3	Kestrel	5/2000	HotSpot JVM RMI/CORBA support JNDI
1.2	Playground	12/1998	Collections Swing JIT compiler Browser plugin JDBC 2.1 (datasources, distributed transactions, connection pooling,RowSet, ResultSet backscrolling and updating )
1.1		2/1997	AWT events reorganisation inner classes JavaBeans JDBC RMI reflection
1.0		1/1996

Here's an overview of Java EE versions

Google Drive: HOWTO copy a folder (containing Google docs)

For unclear reasons Google Drive does not support copying folders.

Workaround 1: copy the folders in your local Google Drive desktop environment and everything will be synced to your drive.

This does however not work for folders containing Google docs. Your desktop only has a link to the real thing that resides in the cloud. Local copying does not work on those links.

Workaround 2:

1. From Google drive, download the folder to your local system. Google drive will convert all your google docs to their MS Office counterpart in the process. 
2. Unpack the downloaded zip to a desktop folder that is synced to your Google Drive.
   

Cloudflare internet monitoring correlates internet shutdown and exam schedule in Sudan and Syria

No need for tools to prevent exam cheating in Sudan and Syria.

Send your exam schedule to the government and they shut down the internet!

MS Teams integrates PowerPoint

When sharing content in Microsoft Teams, the pane to choose the screen/window to share has now moved to the right (was bottom), on my version (1.4.00.1116). 

In the pane a new option PowerPoint Live has been added. 

It opens slides directly in presenter view in teams, while attendees see the presentation itself. Attendees can even (individually) browse to other pages, if you allow them to.

Great addition, and more features are coming. Here's a Microsoft article on this, but take care: all features discussed have not been rolled out yet at the time of this writing.

Most annoying problem is that it does not remember which presentations you loaded from your local machine, so you have to reload them every time you leave the presentation to share your screen.

Vue devtools plugin V5 not working with Vue 3: install plugin V6 (beta)

Even though Vue 3 was relased in september 2020 the current vue devtools plugin v5.x does not work with this version (the devtools panel does not show up when debugging a vue application).

You can install the beta for the v6 version to get some browser debugging support:

1. Remove the old devtools plugin from your browser if present
   
2. Go to the beta release channel
3. In the assets at the bottom of the latest beta, click the vuejs_devtools_beta-6.0.0.xx-an+fx.xpi link

Good bug hunting with Vue 3!

Windows: software to add (updated)

Current list of software I'm running:

• MS Office
• Firefox, with extensions
• AdBlock Plus
• JSONView
• Javascript Switcher
• User Agent Switcher 
• Vue.js Devtools
• FreeCommander XE: multi pane tabbed file manager
• better search than explorer
• but explorer will search in office files without any configuration (I'm mostly using Google Drive to search in office files)
• easy filtering of folder contents 
• easy bulk renaming of files
• browse in sync to similar folder hierarchies to compare their contents
• favourites opening multiple pane
• I had to adapt my windows 10 system for this bug with build  730a
• GreenShot screencapture tool
• IntelliJ IDEA and WebStorm (€), Eclipse (and Memory Analyzer Tool), Visual Studio Code
• Oracle  SQL Developer
• Google Drive File Steam, Dropbox , MS OneDrive
• UMLet UML modeling
• 7-zip archiver
• notepad++
• markdownViewerPlusPlus plugin 
• windows terminal
  
• winscp, putty
• Paint.Net 
• Toggl time tracker
• WinHTTrack offline browser
• Cygwin Unix tools
• Postman webservice tester
• SoapUI SOAP tester
• WireShark network sniffer 
• VirtualBox virtual machine
• a password manager 
• Active Presenter screen recorder
• Balsamiq wireframes

Corona contact tracing apps expose private data on Android

Data logged by Android contact tracing apps, which are to remain private on the local device, can be read by privileged pre-installed apps (from google, your phone manufacturer or its partners).

A stock Xiaomi Redmi Note 9, for example, has 54 preinstalled apps with elevated permissions.

More...

 Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.

programming is terrible - lessons learned from a life wasted

Java SE 16: some goodies

Record

Records are a simple form of classes intended for value objects. Example:

public record Expert (String name, String domain) {} 

Records are like classes for immutable data with default boilerplate code added

• all attributes are private
  
• Constructor with arguments for all attributes
• getters
•  equals and hashCode methods
• toString()

This is similar to the conventions used in Lombok and Kotlin data classes.

Methods can be added to the class and default methods can be overridden.

Limitations

• no inheritance: records cannot extend classes and are implicitly final
  
• extra attributes must be static

instanceof instanciation

Classic code

if (car instanceof F1) {
    F1 redBull = (F1) car;
    redBull.race();
}

Java 16

if (car instanceof F1 redBull) {
  redBull.race();  

}

jpackage

jpackage is a command to generate an installer package for you project. It can

•     generate a classical jar for you, but adds a  startup scrip including all necessary classpaths
•     include the JRE (or just the modules you need) to have a n installer without dependencies
•     produce .exe, .msi, .rpm ... pacakges

Proof of Concept code for MicroSoft Exchange vulnerability dissapears from GitHub

Recently Microsoft got into open source code distribution by acquiring widely used open source distribution sites like github and npm. 

Its stance with respect to open software has changed remarkably over the last years. 

But the risks of Microsoft's influence in this market become clear now: it has removed proof of concept  code that showed weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange mail servers.

Although the code is still available from other Open Source repositories like GitLab, this shows the willingness and capability of Microsoft to control the distribution of Open Source Software.

More...

Adope Acrobat DC: disable "preparing document for reading" popup

Problem: Every time i open up a new document I get the popup below, in which Acrobat wants to assist me by reading the document for me. I can perfectly read the document myself, so how to disable this popup?

Solution: Preferences > Accessibility > uncheck Assistive technology support

2000 year old Greek automaton showed movement of starts and planets

 The Antikera mechanism was discovered in a ship wreck in 1901. It was split into 82 fragments, only a third of the original survings, including 30 corroded bronze gearwheels. Scientists have reconstructed the mechanism and published an article in Nature.

It calculated the ecliptic longi-tudes of the Moon, Sun and planets; the phase of the Moon; the Age of the Moon; the synodic phases of the planets; the excluded days of the Metonic Calendar; eclipses—possibilities, times, characteristics, years and the heliacal risings and settings of prominent stars and constellations; and the Olympiad cycle. It has a a ring system with nine outputs—Moon, Nodes, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Date—carried by nested tubes with arms supporting the rings.

The top picture shows the reconstruction, the bottom picture the original findings: