As a habitant of Munich and an advocacy of Linux this makes me really sad. I guess that many other German companies are now unsettled regarding their attitude towards Linux. Patents are a strong weapon against Linux and I doubt that Linux can survive in the commercial enviroment in the long term.

See here for more information: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/49735 (in German though)

Will be attending an advanced Tai Chi workshop with Master Chu (Yang style). I am really looking forward to it :-)

Updated my little weblog with a new snapshot build:

• Lucene based search is now working
• Comments are no longer displayed in a popup but in a page which combines both the weblog entry and its comments. This is useful for external sites linking to a weblog entry directly
• Minor tweaks

Some people ask why to put an abstraction layer above the database at all. Their typical argument is that a relational database is not object oriented at all. Selecting only certain fields of various tables combined in a join is a good example. So this argument seems to make sense at first. But let's assume a rather large project with lots of pages. Now what if you change the structure of a table in use? How do you find the affected pages? By centralizing the SQL code in DAO objects the solution is trivial. But if you spread the SQL code over multiple pages this task will become tricky. Of course you could write a bunch of scripts for checking every single page of your project but I think it's definitely easier to test only a handful of DAO objects :-)

Have you ever tried to upload large files with URLConnection? If so you may have faced the OutOfMemoryException as so many other developers. This bug was reported in 1999 but since then nothing has happend for Sun claims it is not a bug but a feature. They say that HTTP 1.0 requires Content-Length in the request header and therefore URLConnection must buffer the stream. Though many developers have reported reasonable solutions for this problem nothing has happend so far, however. I really would like to see an implementation in the JDK that works out-of-the-box. Why can't Sun simply fix this? This is really nasty!