CertPal

‘Acquire a certification in technology X‘ | ‘Earn a Domain Y certification‘

Do one of those statements list in your yearly goals ? It is almost certainly a bad idea. Let me explain why. I knew a company that required its employees to be acquire at least one certification on a technology per year. Its employees would work hard throughout the year and during appraisal time it is not uncommon to hear this converation

Foo:  ‘Dude did you take that certification you were supposed to ?’
Bar:  ‘Rats ! I didnt realize it was a part of our goals’
Foo:  ‘hmm… what do we do ? John has already passed it and that puts him ahead of us’

Foo and Bar will probably end up reading real exam questions (also referred to as brain dumps) and passing the exam with only a day’s worth of preparation. That another way of saying ‘They cheated’.  This hurts everyone.

Java’s side that is not too well known would be its interface with external devices. Java can read bar codes interface with serial / parallel ports , and communicate with a web cam (JMF)

Speaking of webcams, the following snippet in the Java media framework (JMF) should list your webcam as a device

Vector info = CaptureDeviceManager.getDeviceList(null);

The problem is that this piece of code does not work all the time. Your webcam should be compatible with JMF to be listed by this call. The gstreamer API can come to your rescue should the JMF call fail. Here is how the gstreamer API describes itself

GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.