Archivos diarios: 17 de noviembre de 2003

Mañana, en la Coruña, hablaré de Hibernate, una herramienta de persistencia relacional para Java. Pero por muy bueno que sea Hibernate y por mucho código abierto que sea, seguimos hablando de un API propietario. Parece que el futuro se orientará más hacia unas especificaciones estándar como JDO. Es decir, que es hora de empezar a mirárselo, y Core Java Data Objects de Sameer Tyagi, Keiron McCammon, Michael Vorburger y Heiko Bobzin.

The experienced Java developer’s guide to persistence with JDO!

Master JDO, the breakthrough technology for persistenting Java objects!

Java Data Objects (JDO) streamlines development by providing Java-centric mechanisms for making objects persistent, and standard APIs for connecting application code with underlying persistent datastores. Core Java Data Objects is the definitive, comprehensive guide to JDO persistence for every experienced Java developer.

Using realistic code examples, this book’s expert authors cover creating, reading, updating, and deleting persistent objects; object lifecycles and state transitions; JDO classes and APIs; queries, architecture, security, and much more. They show how to integrate JDO with EJB, JTA, JCA, and other J2EE technologies; and introduce best practices for using JDO in both standalone programs and J2EE components.

If you want to spend more time solving business problems and less time worrying about persistence, you need JDO. And you need the one book that’ll help you make the most of JDO: Core Java Data Objects.

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Me interesa muchísimo la programación orientada a aspectos. Al principio, la idea suena un poco rara, pero cuando la entiendes, empiezas a verle muchas posibilidades. Luego, claro, está el problema de las distintas formas de llevarla a la práctica en un lenguaje que, como Java, no tiene soporte natural para aspectos. AspectJ in Action. Practical Aspect-Oriented Programming de Ramnivas Laddad introduce la que posiblemente la alternativa más popular:

Modularizing code into objects cannot be fully achieved in pure OOP. In practice some objects must deal with aspects that are not their main business. A method to modularize aspects-and benefit from a clean maintainable result-is called aspect-oriented programming. AspectJ is an open-source Java extension and compiler designed for AOP development. Now integrated with Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilder, and other IDEs, AspectJ v1.1 is ready for the real world.

It is time to move from AOP theory and toy examples to AOP practice and real applications. With this unique book you can make that move. It teaches you AOP concepts, the AspectJ language, and how to develop industrial-strength systems. It shows you examples which you can reuse. It unleashes the true power of AOP through unique patterns of AOP design. When you are done, you will be eager-and able-to build new systems, and enhance your existing ones, with the help of AOP.

What’s Inside:
···What is aspect-oriented programming?
···How AspectJ works with JAAS, Jess, log4j, Ant, JTA, POJOs
···Best practices and design patterns
···How to implement policy enforcement resource pooling and caching thread-safety authentication and authorization transaction management business rules

[Estoy escuchando: «Blue Train» de John Coltrane en el disco Blue Train]

Hablaba hace un tiempo de novelas científicas, es decir, las que usan la ciencia dentro de la propia estructura de la narración ficticia. No se trata de novelas de ciencia ficción, que como género tiende a unas coordenadas diferentes, sino de una especie de cruce entre el ensayo y la ficción. Todo a propósito de un artículo publicado en The International Herald Tribune.

Pues nada, que nos compramos varias de las que se comentaba. Son:

Faster Than the Speed of Light. The Story of a Scientific Speculation
Radiant Cool. A Novel Theory of Consciousness
Properties of Light: a Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics

Properties of Light. Variables ocultas. Me encantan las variables ocultas. Pobre David Bohm. En cualquier caso, esta novela parece estar basada en su vida. Y con un poco de suerte, Rebecca Goldstein sabrá lo suficiente de mecánica cuántica como para que sea interesante: el subtítulo es «A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics».

De la contraportada:

A grand gothic novel of the outer reaches of passion — of the body and of the mind – Properties of Light is a mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy that carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion are three physicists: Samuel Mallach is a brilliant theoretician unhinged by the professional glory he feels has been stolen from him; Dana is his intriguing and gifted daughter, whose desperate devotion to her father contributes to the tragic undoing of Justin Childs, her lover and her father’s protege. All three are working together to solve some of the deepest and most controversial problems in quantum mechanics, problems that challenge our understanding of the «real world» and of the nature of time.

The book grapples with these elusive mysteries, but at its heart is a fiery love story of startling urgency. Insights into quantum mechanics and relativity theory are attached to the nerve fibers of human emotions, and these connections are alive with poignancy and pathos.

For these characters, the passion to know and understand, like the desire for love, is full of terrible risk, holding out possibilities for heartbreak as well as for ecstasy. The true subject of Properties of Light is the ecstatic response to reality, perhaps the only response that can embrace the erotic and the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual. Written with, and about, a rare form of passion, this incandescent novel is fiction at its most daring and utterly original.

[Estoy escuchando: «96 To Stafford» de Jose Antonio Ramos en el disco Los Cuatro Gigantes]

Radiant Cool. Vale. Esto es ciertamente curioso. El hombre se inventa una teoría sobre la consciencia. Hasta aquí nada raro. ¡Pero lo curioso es que decide que la mejor forma de presentarla es escribir una novela! Y supongo que la posibilidad de hacer un juego de palabras en el subtítulo, «A Novel Theory of Consciousness», también pesaría algo.

Eso sí, para los que prefieran el tratamiento académico, la novela viene acompañada de un apéndice de más de 100 páginas conteniendo una detallada descripción.

De la contraportada:

Professor Grue is dead (or is he?). When graduate student/sleuth Miranda Sharpe discovers him slumped over his keyboard, she does the sensible thing–she grabs her dissertation and runs. Little does she suspect that soon she will be probing the heart of two mysteries, trying to discover what happened to Max Grue, and trying to solve the profound neurophilosophical problem of consciousness. Radiant Cool may be the first novel of ideas that actually breaks new theoretical ground, as Dan Lloyd uses a neo-noir (neuro-noir?), hard-boiled framework to propose a new theory of consciousness.

In the course of her sleuthing, Miranda encounters characters who share her urgency to get to the bottom of the mystery of consciousness, although not always with the most innocent motives. Who holds the key to Max Grue’s ultimate vision? Is it the computer-inspired pop psychologist talk-show host? The video-gaming geek with a passion for artificial neural networks? The Russian multi-dimensional data detective, or the sophisticated neuroscientist with the big book contract? Ultimately Miranda teams up with the author’s fictional alter ego, «Dan Lloyd,» and together they build on the phenomenological theories of philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to construct testable hypotheses about the implementation of consciousness in the brain. Will the clues of phenomenology and neuroscience converge in time to avert a catastrophe? (The dramatic ending cannot be revealed here.) Outside the fictional world of the novel, Dan Lloyd (the author) appends a lengthy afterword, explaining the proposed theory of consciousness in more scholarly form.

Radiant Cool is a real metaphysical thriller–based in current philosophy of mind–and a genuine scientific detective story–revealing a new interpretation of functional brain imagining. With its ingenious plot and its novel theory, Radiant Cool will be enjoyed in the classroom and the study for its entertaining presentation of phenomenology, neural networks, and brain imaging; but, most importantly, it will find its place as a groundbreaking theory of consciousness.

Faster Than the Speed of Light. La constancia de la velocidad de la luz es una de los principios más fundamentales de la física, que ha resistido una y otra vez la comprobación experimental. Por tanto, ¿por qué un joven físico en la treintena iba a arriesgar toda su carrera proponiendo la idea de que la luz ha ido reduciendo su velocidad con la expansión del universo. ¿Se equivocaba Einstein?

En este caso, no parece tratarse de una novela sino un cruce entre libro de divulgación, de una idea ciertamente especulativa, y el libro de memorias. Especialmente interesante, la visión que ofrece del mecanismo de la ciencia y la vida académica.

De la contraportada:

Destined to be one of the most hotly debated books of the year-the fascinating story of how one brilliant young physicist’s heretical idea may dethrone Einstein and forever change the way we see the universe.

Say the word «light» in the context of physics, and most of us repeat the mantra: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Indeed, nothing does. But light is thought to have another amazing property, which Einstein enshrined in his Theory of Special Relativity: light travels at one speed and one speed only-it is one of nature’s constants. This idea is considered sacred. It’s one of the foundations of modern physics. But what if it’s wrong?

In Faster Than the Speed of Light, Cambridge University-trained theoretical physicist João Magueijo puts forth an extraordinary speculation: light traveled faster in the early universe than it does today.

Why would anyone in his early thirties, with every sign of a golden career ahead of him, risk his reputation and scientific standing on a seemingly crazy idea that contradicts Albert Einstein? As Magueijo shows in this masterful book, his theory of the varying speed of light (VSL) solves some of the most intractable problems in cosmology-specifically the flatness problem, the horizon problem, and the energy of space itself. In addition, the VSL theory could have truly marvelous implications for faster space travel, black holes, time dilation, and string theory.

The story of one man’s quest to decipher the true nature of the universe, Faster Than the Speed of Light provides the first real glimpse of twenty-first-century physics-and promises stranger things to come.

Disfruté mucho traduciendo La luna y el sol. No sólo la historia me pareció entretenidísima, sino que además aprendí mucho sobre la época y sobre la distribución del palacio de Versalles. Eso de tener que irse a las enciclopedias a ver cómo se llamaba tal o cual sala tiene su no se qué.

Se trata de una historia secreta del mundo. Las sirenas, toda una especie, existen y una de ellas viva acaba en la corte del rey sol. En el resto de la historia se mezclan una reflexión sobre la ética de la ciencia, el feminismo y las maldades de una monarquía absoluta. Ahora la acaban de publicar en bolsillo:

De la contraportada:

A finales del siglo XVII, el padre Yves de la Croix, jesuita y filósofo natural, dirige una expedición científica que logra capturar en océanos remotos dos misterioso seres marinos, uno muerto y otro vivo. De ellos esperan obtener un prodigioso elixir que proporcione la inmortalidad.

La joven Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, hermana del sacerdote, recibe el encargo de colaborar con sus dibujos en la investigación de esas criaturas. A partir de aquí, Marie-Josèphe establecerá una relación con la criatura superviviente que supondrá un inesperado desafío.

La fastuosidad de la corte del Rey Sol (Luis XIV), la complejidad de la vida palaciega y el tímido despertar de la ciencia natural se dan cita en esta fascinante obra.

[Estoy escuchando: «Mujeres Del Hierro» de Jose Antonio Ramos en el disco Los Cuatro Gigantes]

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