Geir Magnusson Jr. has written an open letter to Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems about a problem with the license of the Java SE Technology Compatipility Kit (JCK).

The problem of the ASF in this case is that they need the JCK to show that their implementation of the Java SE 5.0 (Apache Harmony) is compatible with the specification. This is required by Sun's specification license. The ASF would get the JCK from Sun, but only under a license agreement they can not accept, because it would limit the field of use of Harmony, and this is incompatible with open source licenses. The FAQ to the open letter gives an example of this "field of use restriction" and explains why it is incompatible with open source and free software.

The FAQ about this open letter can be found here. It explains the whole issue a lot better than I ever could. Geir has some links to other blog postings about this topic here.

I'll be on vacation in England for the next 2 weeks. There I'll have absolutely no access to the internet (at least I hope so ;) ). I'll post a link to the photos in this blog when I'm back.

We have been running presentmood.com for roughly 2 weeks now, and the site basically does the job (although we are still sorting out some bugs). Presentmood is a site where you can simply post an emoticon and a short description about how you feel at the moment. It can also render a button for you which you can place in your blog, like the one in the right block of my homepage. I want to invite everybody to participate in the "test drive" of presentmood, and to send feedback to us (there is a feedback link at the bottom of the presentmood page).

I guess every reader of this blog already reads WorseThanFailure (previously "The daily WTF"), but for those of you who dont'

Alex has written a really interesting article: What could possibly be worse than failure? It is about the fact that we software developers don't seem to learn from our own failures.

Today I had the following problem: I had a CSV file where the records were broken into multiple lines, and after each record an empty line was inserted. (Yep, Oracle produced that. I did exactly what the pl-sql tutorial about creating CSV files told me). So the task at hand basically comes down to: Chane a file which looks like

a
b

c
d

e
f

to something like:

ab
cd
ef

only that the source file has more than 26MB which makes the whole thing quite CPU hogging. First of all, I tried to use regular expression search and replace with TextMate. The regular expression to search for is \n([^\n]), and you replace it by $1. The search regular expression matches a newline character which is followed by a non-newline character, and "$1" matches only the non-newline character[*]. The problem here was that TextMate didn't finish this task in a reasonable time (I killed the app after just about 20 min).

Then I tried to perform the same thing with sed, but I didn't get it working. Somehow I wasn't able to convince sed to manage the new-lines.

I considered starting TextMate again, but I wanted to try Jedit first. And guess what: It was much faster than TextMate - It had the job done in under 10 min! The only thing I had to do was start it with more memory than the default 64MB (after opening the file it used 110MB java heap):

java -Xmx512M -jar /Applications/jEdit\ 4.2/jedit.jar

Update: I now found out how you can prevent SQL*Plus from breaking the lines: set linesize 2048 (or any sufficiently large value).

[*] $1 means the first sub-expression of the original regexp, in our case everything within the parenthesis "(" and ")".

Here is a nice article about usign Java as a teaching language: http://cafe.elharo.com/java/java-as-lingua-franca/. Quotes from the article:

When I travel I speak English. When I teach I speak Java, and for the same reason: it lets me be understood. [...] Everyone reads at least pidgin Java. Only C++ programmers can read C++. Only Ruby programmers can read Ruby. (Still better than Perl though. No one can read Perl, Perl programmers included.)

Because of the inherent danger of time travel I have joined Sam Hughes' campaign to ban time travel by placing a button in the right sidebar of my homepage ;)

Here is the full interview.

Quite interesting, but the greatest part is when the host asks him why it looks so much like Mac OS X. Bill Gates doesn't really answer this one, he only says that they are doing so much things so much better, like "Media Center", which has noone done before. A minute later he explains what media center is:

"You can have your computer display directly to the TV, and then you use a remote control, we call that "Media Center", and with one remote control, you can control the tuner, you can go to your photos, your music, your movies, you can record different shows, so you finally get down to that single remote control."

Ok, and how is this different from Front Row combined with eye-tv? Any hints? (Ok, maybe the second remote control you get with eye-tv?)

More about that topic on macdailynews.com

Update: And, of course, not to forget: Apple TV

No, the headline is not wrong. The problem here is, that in Oracle (and probably in some other RDBMS too) the sort order of the "ORDER BY" clause is locale - dependent. So if you have a VARCHAR column which contains the values

• 01
• a0
• ab

The sort order could as well be "ab a0 01" - we recently had exactly this problem. Even worse, it only occured on one client (the production machine), the same database returned the "correct" order when queried from my laptop using Squirrel. That caused a bug which was pretty hard to find (I guess some of you have noticed by reading my Mood Page ;) ).

BTW, I solved this problem by getting an unordered list from the DB and sorting it in java using Collections.sort(...). This is fast enough (somebody with more DB experience than I have told me it's probably even faster in our case), and here I have total control over the sort order.

I installed the new Release Candidate of the Parallels Virtual Machine on my MacBook Pro. It has some cool new features, like starting windows apps from the Mac OS system dock, the command+[cvxs] shortcuts are working, and windows from WinXP can be displayed just like mac windows (and not within the VM window).

I then downloaded a MacOS theme for WinXP and installed it in the VM, because it was a little bit disturbing to have WinXP decorated windows mixed with the normal OSX windows. BTW, the OSX theme for WinXP can be found here.

So here is the screenshot of WinXP and Mac apps running on my machine (click to enlarge). Pretty cool, ey?