Choy Sum, The Next Crossover Hit

It is amazing how crazy people are over kale. Yet, there is a very tasty, friendly and available vegetable that has over 3 times the usable calcium of kale and over twice the usable calcium of a cup of cow’s milk. It is called

Choy Sum

It cooks as quickly as spinach. It can be found in any Asian market. Googling on “choy sum seeds” quickly reveals a variety of sources for growing your own. Searching youtube on “choy sum” will find you a list of videos demonstrating how to cook it.

I think that with all of the interest I read about kale, eating it, making recipes for it, even growing it in pots for apartment dwellers  — that it is PAST the time that choy sum becomes the next “crossover hit” to make it into mainstream American markets.

There are a number of vegetables that are now in mainstream supermarkets that were not there when I was a kid. Most are not as deserving as choy sum, IMO. It is a nutritional powerhouse. Starting asking for it at your local farmer’s market, mainstream supermarkets, co-ops, Whole Foods, TJ’s, etc.

Remember, you read about it here first! 🙂

JEE not J2EE

A quick pointer for information technology recruiters and job seekers:

It isn’t called “J2EE” anymore.

“J2EE” meant Java Version 2 ( also called 1.2 ) Enterprise Edition

The term “J2EE” hasn’t been used since 2004 with the release of Java 5 ( 1.5 ).

The proper name is

Java EE <current version number of Java>

So, what is the “Java Enterprise Edition”?

Many recruiters as well as developers think it is a separate, advanced version of Java or a version of Java you have to pay for. Not true.

The Java language is not enough to build a server side application. You also need to use tools like a database, a database bridge, a transaction manager, a security system, a web server and/or directory services. A number of different vendors created “application servers”, software that integrates all of these services, the way Microsoft integrates all of their things into one platform. Very good idea, but each vendor created their own unique API that developers had to code. This made the resulting code useless and not portable without that application server.

“Java Enterprise Edition”(JEE) was created as a standard that application servers have to conform too. Compliant application servers must support specific APIs and a specific set of services & libraries which include, but are not limited to:

  • RMI
  • Servlets/JSP
  • JNDI
  • JTA ( transactions )
  • Java Messaging

So there you have it.  It isn’t called “J2EE” anymore.  It is “JEE” a set of standard APIs that Java compliant application servers must support.   It isn’t an advanced version of Java or a version of Java you have to pay for.

 

 

Kale: Cooked Versus Raw

In this video Dr. Michael Greger M.D., the director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States explains that eating kale may give a boost to human immune systems, but that cooked kale will help the human immune system much more than raw kale.. You can go to the original link at nutritionfacts.org for sources cited and more information about this video.