BMW 109-003 and Rolls Royce Merlin
I had a great day out at the SA National Museum of Military History with a bunch of people from a local photography club. I spotted this curious exhibit in one of the halls:
The sign reads:
BMW 109-003 Turbojet Engine
Developed for the Heinkel He 163
Germany, 1945This aircraft was designed in response to a last desperate attempt to produce quantities of simple jet-powered fighters in the closing months of World War II.
Intended to be flown in the final defence of Germany by the young glider pilots of the Hitler Jugend, the He 162 went from specification to maiden flight in the incredibly short period of the last three months of 1944.
A number of these aircraft were completed despite the very difficult conditions in Germany in 1945 but none saw actual combat.
More info. And just for balance: they have a beautiful example of a Rolls Royce Merlin engine there as well:
Effective Java Updated
Brush up on your Java 5 bag of tricks with this talk by Joshua Bloch based on his updated Effective Java book (can't recommend it highly enough).
A colleague of mine commented that this book has about the same information density as maths textbooks, so don't be mislead by the low number of pages - it is excellent value for money 
QCon Enterprise Service Bus Presentation
Jim Webber and Martin Fowler discuss ESBs, agile methods, and... ASCII man-boob p0rn. Must see!
Photographers = terrorists. Not!
Another excellent essay from famed security expert Bruce Schneier:
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
JetBrains’ Dmitry Jemerov on Scala
I can rave about JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA until the cows come home - it is simply a superbly executed and very well focused product. What I found especially interesting is the following quote on Scala becoming a dominant language for the JVM:
I don't believe that, however: Scala is very complicated, it's tricky, and has a lot of surprises and edge-cases. I would say that Scala is at least as complicated as C++, and with C++ you need a hundred-page style guide before you even start writing C++ code, otherwise you'll end up writing C++ code that nobody will understand.
Scala gives an impression of great elegance and simplicity at first glance but the same goes for Perl as well. The one feature of Scala I really like is the language-level support for traits which allow reusing multiple concrete implementations similarly to multiple inheritance, but with fewer gotchas.
Via Artima: JetBrains' Dmitry Jemerov on IntelliJ 8, Flex, and Scala.