Recently, some Canadian friends asked me how to apply for their citizenship in Canada. Here are the advices I gave them:

For one to apply for the Canadian citizenship, there are some basic requirements:

1) be a landed immigrant(permanent resident ) in Canada;
2) be 18 years of age or older at the time of application submission;
3) have resided in Canada for a total of three years out of the four years on the day before you apply. You may count half of the time for the time you resided in Canada before you became a PR. The time you resided in Canada after you became a permanent resident counts as full time;
4) know enough English or French for a simple conversation; and
5) know enough about Canada’s geography, politics, history, and the rights and responsibilities of a citizenship to pass a test.

If all the above requirements are meet, one can pay the citizenship fees which are $200.00 in total. The fees can be paid at most financial institutions such as a bank. After that, send the application to the CIC case processing center. Things to send in:

a) Receipt of payment of citizienship fees;
b) Completed application form;
c) Two photos taken within the last 12 months.
d) Supporting document such as Permanent Resident Card(Maple Card) and two personal IDs.

Canada Citizenship Test on iphone ipod
Free Online Canada Citizenship Test
Canadian Citizenship Application and Test
New Citizenship Test Questions of Australia
Life in the UK: British Citizenship Test
Online American Citizenship Test
US Citizenship Application

What does an earthquake have to do with JavaFX? It is not so obvious, eh?

After I published my post about a JavaFX Online Wish Tree Application, I received some emails from readers reporting there were some problems to start the JavaFX client of the wish tree demo. I double checked and found nothing wrong in my code and the deployment environment. So I provided some hints and started to work with those readers to troubleshoot the problem.

After a few rounds of emails back-and-forth, we finally determined that it was due to a recent earthquake occured near the Taiwan region. The earthquake caused serious damage to the communication cables underneath the Pacific ocean. These cables are backbones connecting the internet between Asia and North America. As a result, people in Asia could not visit almost 70% of web sites located in North America. Still, how was this related to my JavaFX app? Here is the fact: the JNLP file of JavaFX requires connecting to javafx.com every time the application gets launched. Due to the outage of network, users in Asia could not connect to javafx.com. This eventually caused the failure of launching my JavaFX demo.

Since Sun does not allow redistribution of the JavaFX binary code, a user must connect to javafx.com to get some necessary jar files in order to run a JavaFX application. I suppose JavaFX should provide an alternative approach to resolve this kind of issue. Right now, the workaround is to have the javafx jar/dll files uploaded to the web server and modify the JNLP file to include them for the application.

Other JavaFX Articles:
JavaFX Nodes Usded in Swing Apps       JavaFX API for Java
Building JavaFX Menu       How can Java Code Call JavaFX?

After a multi-year process, the USCIS has finally finished a redesign of the citizenship test, or the naturalization test. This test is usually taken by people who apply for the U.S. Citizenship. The redesigned test put more focus on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the fundamental understandings of American democracy. It encourages citizenship applicants to identify the basic values shared by Americans.

I took a look at those new sample questions of the test. I don’t think there is much change in the questions and the probably won’t make much difference for applicants.

Starting from Oct 1, 2008, the new test will be used. So applicants must get to know whether they are going to take the new or old test.

Every year, many people obtain their citizenship of United States through the naturalization application process. If you want to go through the process of Naturalization for US citizen, a good place to start naturalization is the US Citizenship Application web site.

Before you get approved for the US citizenship, you need to have an interview with the citizenship officer. To prepare for the USA citizenship test or interview is not a simple task, you need to get familiar with American Citizenship Test questions, mostly about US government, history, geography and culture. I recommend you use some free citizenship practice test software.