Monthly Archives: December 2016

Mapping nature’s recovery potential

I read an article in Spiegel about a study carried out by Pierre Ibish and his team at the German Institute for Sustainable Development (Hochschule für nachhaltige Entwicklung) Eberswalde. What they did was simply to collect data in order to produce a world view of regions not criss-crossed by roads. That gives us a fascinating but also worrying picture of the Earth. It has been long obvious: roads have a major impact on the environment and the more roads you build through nature, the more stress plants and animals have to go through and the less space we have to breathe clean air.

You can see a more specific map for Germany here.

The thing now would be to sistematically identify areas that could be optimized. We should be thinking now not just about where to prevent road encroachment in nature but actually about what roads can be eliminated for sustainable development.

A bit more of J2EE

I am reading Salvanos’ “Professionell entwickeln mit Java EE 7”. The book, like another one by Inden I commented earlier this year is useful for both beginners and experienced Java EE developers, although for these latter much less.


Even if the author wanted to do something for everyone working with Java Enterprise, there was some stuff that he should have taken for granted for someone starting to go into Java EE after having a good grasp of Java’s core. Salvanos spent a lot of space explaining basic stuff on encoding – even making sure you know how to use the right settings in the general Eclipse and Glassfish configurations – and he also bothered to explain very basic topics on relational databases and JDBC .

What I enjoyed was the wealth of details on JSFs and Web services and EJBs. The space and energy Salvanos used for the trivial sections could have been used for more advanced topics on enterprise JavaBeans or RESTFUL services. I suppose you cannot please everyone, even with as Schmöcker, a book of almost 1100 pages.

Russian future and Nigerian past

I haven’t read much fiction lately. Two books stand out: Метро 2033, a Russian science fiction book by Glukhovsky, and Half of a Yellow sun, by Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The first book was entertaining. The author has a good command of his language. Anyone who has been to the underground in Moscow or Saint Petersburg will see those places differently after reading this novel.  Still, I had some issues with the feasibility of the  demographics portrayed there. Even if it just a science fiction – or rather a fantastic fiction book, I kept thinking about how realistic it was they would keep such dynamics and that within the area of Moscow’s underground.

I like Adichie’s book much more. It was for me a revelation. There was romance but it was not kitsch. There was a lot of stuff I learnt about Nigeria’s XX century and about the main ethnic groups there. It is, of course, only one instance of an Igbo version. Still, I think Adichie tried to do justice to the different groups.

The book whetted my appetite for more Nigerian literature.