The crafters of the Declaration of Independence for the United States believed that all men had certain unalienable rights, that of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Happiness is something that may not be unique to humanity, for as far as we can understand empirically, it seems that animals experience similar emotions of happiness and sadness. Nevertheless, humans are unique in that we have built a social construct around happiness and we can synthesize happiness no matter what our present situation.

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Death (n.) — the permanent end of all life functions in an organism or part of an organism

When human beings experiences death, all our functions of life end permanently. We can no longer think, act or make decisions that will affect the world. Everything that we were becomes a part of the past. We can discuss the contributions of those who have died, we can even write books about them and build monuments if we consider their lives sufficiently noteworthy, but their ability to contribute to the here and present now is at an end. All humans die eventually. You and I will one day cease to have the ability to use our minds, in conjunction with our bodies, to interact with this world.

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One of the great unanswered questions in physics is that of how we progress through time. When we talk about space, our location in this physical reality, we can travel in any direction. An astronaut or cosmonaut in an orbiting ship or station can move in any combination of six directions in our three dimensional universe. But when it comes to the fourth dimension, time, we can only move at a constant rate and in one direction: forward. If we travel fast enough, we can slow down our progression through time, but only relative to others who are not traveling at the same speed. We can not move in the opposite direction. It’s a principal physicists agree upon, but we still don’t fully understand why this is so.

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In the old testament Bible in the book of Genesis, Chapter 20, Abraham was told by God to take his son to a mountain in Moriah and sacrifice his child. He travels to the mountain with his son, builds an alter and then binds his son and prepares to sacrifice him, but God sends an angle to stop the sacrifice and provides an animal to be slaughtered instead, telling Abraham that this was a test to see if he feared God by not withholding his only son.

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Often you may hear devout followers in a afterlife based religion saying something to the effect of, “Though tough times may come, they will only last for a little while, heaven is our home.”

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Recently I’ve seen unsolicited SPAM e-mails coming directly from other peoples’ e-mail and social networking accounts. They’ll often post messages afterwords claiming that their accounts had been hacked. I’ll usually ask these friends, “Do you use the same password on multiple websites?” and the ensuing “Yes” response from them is followed by, “Change your e-mail password, and also, you need to learn something about password security.”

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When writing J2EE web applications, web services, enterprise Java beans (EJBs) or other pieces of code that run on a Java application server such as RedHat’s JBoss, IBM WebSphere or Apache Tomcat, a developer typically doesn’t load database drivers or connect to the database directly. Instead, a context lookup must be made in order to get a DataSource, and from there a Connection. However what if one needs to run existing code locally, outside of the web server? This guide shows developers how to setup a local context so application server code can be run in a stand-alone application without modification.

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When creating new Java web applications within an IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans, the IDE creates a directory structure and uses its own internal builder to create WAR and EAR files. While these build tools may be convenient when starting to develop J2EE applications, when working on production grade projects, it’s important to create your own directory structure and build scripts to automate the building and deployment process. This tutorial will take you through automating the build process of a web application using Apache Ant as well as giving you a better understanding of exactly how web applications are laid-out and built within the EAR file.

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Anyone who has programmed with Java should be familiar with the concept of Checked Exceptions. Although C++ and OCaml have optional support for exception checking, Java seems to be the only major programing language where it is a built-in and required part of the language. Enforcing at compile time that certain exceptions need to be caught may have seemed like a good idea at the time Java was developed, however no major languages developed since have adapted the concept. Many view Checked Exceptions as a design flaw. In this article, I attempt to show how this flaw can be overcome using a base exception class to encapsulate exception handling.

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I’ve never been a huge fan of certification. Although I understand it is supposed to help gauge an industry benchmark in a given field, I often feel like it’s given the IT world a generation of good test takers who are not necessarily good designers. Still, I’ve programmed with PHP on my own for years and want to eventually move my career path towards that direction. I decided to get a one up and try for my Zend PHP5 certification. What I came away with was a massive sense in disappointment in Zend’s entire certification process.

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