The wait is finally over...

When I first heard the news about that the new MacBook will ship in February, my first reaction was, “I'm have to have one as soon as possible!

But maybe I should wait until the first update comes? Will it have an 8x SuperDrive as the old PowerBooks? What about the missing FireWire 800? It honestly doesn’t worry me that much as the reportedly problem with the heat.

Technorati Tags: MacBook

Congratulations, Fernando Alonso!

The youngest formula one champion in the history is Fernando Alonso. That’s clear after he finished third at Interlagos, Brasil today. Montoya won the race just before my personal favorite, Kimi Räikkönen.

You’ll be back next year Kimi!!!

Eclipse, take five…

As the few of you that actually reads my blog already know, I have quit my job in Telenor and started as a consultant again. My new employer is Net Professionals, and my first assignment is for a company that both use IntelliJ, Eclipse or whatever you want to use. But in this project all developers uses Eclipse, but I was free to use IntelliJ. I felt that this could be a good chance to learn to use and like Eclipse, even though that I have tried four times earlier without being convinced. But this time the version is 3.1 and it looks even better that the last time, so I am (trying) to be optimistic and starting up Eclipse and getting ready to do some real work.

One week later...
I am back using IntelliJ.

What is that makes Eclipse so popular. It’s free and that’s nice, but if you are a professional developer using your IDE or Editor many hours a day, $499 is not that much. The main advantage Eclipse has over IntelliJ is the wealth of good plugin’s. While IntelliJ have some nice ones, my favorite being TestDox, it is still far behind Eclipse. But as coders IDE IntelliJ shines, except for the ugly look and feel used by the 5 version. I wonder when I will try Eclipse for the sixth time…

Damn you Ruby on Rails

After discovering Ruby on Rails this spring :-) my interest in Java and Java related technology has dropped to the bottom. I’m thinking “why the hell should I want to do it in Java when I’m so much more productive in RoR?” Yes I know, Rails and Ruby is not the best choice for a lot of problems and systems, but it have made me often think that “this must be able to be solved an easer way using some other technology”. But that’s a good thing.

Spring Rich Client Project

Yesterday I was attending a Spring Framework seminar arranged by Objectware. They had invited Keith Donald from Interface21 to do a full day presentation. I have been using Spring for quite some time now, so I didn't learn anything new, except for one thing: The Spring Rich Client subproject, founded by Keith.

It has been a while since the last time I wrote a Swing application but after this presentation I would not mind getting my hands dirty again. What it provides is a nice abstraction layer above the Swing API, the same as the "Core" Spring Framework does for the J2EE API's. Nice :-)

Hibernate, PostgreSQL and Spring

Puh.. After couple of hours swearing at this problem, I finally found what caused the error. The problem was that when trying to insert data in a PostgreSQL table I kept getting errors for some of the rows I was trying to insert. The error message returned from Hibernate was something like "data integrity violated by SQL 'null'…" blah blah blah "… Call getNextException() to see the cause". The Spring Framework data access exception was reporting a DataIntegrityViolationException.

I therefore assumed that the problem had to do with the quality of the data I was attempting to insert, such as null values. The suspicion did not get any less by the fact that the source of the data was read from an Excel spreadsheet using POI.

When I finally got to my senses and traced the Hibernate code, I was able to see the "next exception", which did NOT have anything to do with null values. The problem was that once in a while the value of one cell contained a string of six characters instead of five as defined in the database schema :-( It would be nice if Hibernate could include this information in the returned error message. Please Gavin!

I have recently converted from MySQL to PostgreSQL, after been lobbied by Thomas Roka-Aardal and have found that PostgreSQL is much more intolerant and strict than MySQL, but after all I think that is OK.

Static hell!

Where does it say that factories classes only should have static methods? Nowhere, but somehow it seems to be the rule. Why am I complaining about this, you may ask? After one week trying to reuse some of the legacy code at work (written one month ago :-) I am getting quite frustrated trying to write tests for the new functionality I am adding. But now, after a half day of refactoring the code, I have managed to get rid of the problem. For now…

At last, I have a blog as well

Since my friend, Trond already has a blog, I guess I should get one also :-)