Strange Brew: The Blog of Warren Strange

Michi Henning's newsletter is a very thought provoking article (not to mention controversial) on the myth of loose coupling in Web Services.

Michi expresses really well something that has always bothered me, but I could never put my finger on. From the article:

...whether the data is encoded as binary or as XML is irrelevant because the interesting problems raised by versioning are at the semantic level, not the syntactic one.

Well worth a read.

So IBM's marketing wonks published this nice puff piece on some university migrating from "proprietary Sun Solaris Systems"

What part of OpenSolaris don't they get?

Maybe they are talking about the hardware? Except that that SPARC is an open architecture(and an IEEE standard to boot, if I recall). Tell me again how POWER is more open?

Great Java story that is also being covered on The Server Side.

These guys Came in 3rd place in RAD software competition using Spring and Hibernate. VS.Net came in seventh place (it was a very close race for the top 3 positions - with a 4GL tool coming in first and Oracle tools in second place).

Quote from the artice:

Java can be really productive right now. It can equal the productivity of 4GL tools that are specifically designed for rapid application development and outpace .NET which is regularly touted as being more productive than J2EE.

I got a new toy yesterday - a BlackBerry 7290 PDA. It's a pretty fun gizmo, and the fact that it runs J2ME is icing on the cake. It comes with desktop software (Windows only :-() that syncs your PDA data with other PIMS such Outlook, Lotus etc. For a company that does such a great job of supporting Java, it's a shame they don't use Java on the desktop to provide x-platform sync.

The Blackberry service also comes with a bundled online email (BlackBerry Web Client) that will gather up mail from several sources (POP and IMAP) and forward to your BlackBerry.

It's a neat service - but I can't help but think that RIM has missed a golden opportunity to enhance the "stickiness" of the BlackBerry. What I really want is the equivalent of Plaxo for the BlackBerry (or alternatively, I want Plaxo to support online wireless sync of my PDA). The thing is, I don't want to manage my contacts on my desktop - because my "desktop" moves around a lot (SunRay, laoptop, home PC, etc.). I want my contacts online all the time, accessible from everywhere, and safely backed up.

RIM and Plaxo would make great partners.

Just in case anyone else runs into this problem.....

I was getting a JDBC error (deadlock) when trying to import the initial sample/init.xml file into Identity Manager.

This was with MySQL 4.1.7.

The solution was to revert back to the old innodb table locking behavior.

Put this in your my.cnf file (or my.ini if you are on Windows):
innodb_table_locks=0

More information can be found here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Innodb_deadlocks.html