Here in North Carolina, TechEngage is offering extremely cheap one week courses in a number of IT-related topics to unemployed (and underemployed) tech workers.

There’s an interesting article in this month’s Washington Monthly about the anti-science bent of the White House.

Tim Bray is rallying the troops for a new browser war. I’m already one of the shock troops!

I used to think that Judicial Watch, the organization that hounded the Clintons throughout his Presidency, was an evil, partisan organization. Now I’m begining to think they’re an evil nonpartisan organization. Anyway, their specialty is paying for legal action to drag out information that the government would just as soon not disclose, and one if their latest finds is some of the documentation from the top secret energy task force that the administration has fought tooth and nail to keep under wraps. Who’d guess that they include maps of Iraqi oil fields, and a document called “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” all dated March, 2001. I said all along that I didn’t believe our motivation for invading Iraq was about oil, but I’ve been wrong before.

Addenda: Josh Marshall posted a funny bit of the White House media briefing yesterday in which the new Press Secretary repeatedly declined to say that the President is, in fact, responsible for the things he says. Also, a British weapons expert apparently killed himself after being accused of telling the BBC that the British government had “sexed up” an intelligence dossier about Iraq’s weapons. And as long as I’m expanding this beyond all rational bounds, what to say about the White House leaking “dirt” to the Drudge Report on journalists that air reports unfavorable to the administration? Finally, here’s an easy laugh.

I wound up fixing my CLOB problem by making some compromises and doing a bit of RTFM. I’m still bitter about the way CLOBs work (although as a reader points out, they really aren’t worse than LONGs), but at least I’ve been able to move past that by solving the problem. And, in fairness to Oracle, CLOBs may very well be the way they are because of some technical issue on one of the myriad platforms that Oracle runs on. Somebody working there is probably cursing about the compromises they had to make to implement large database fields in their database.

The Microsoft Monitor has a nice piece on Microsoft’s XML strategy for Office 2003.

Keep an eye on this Google News search.

Andy Oliver discovered (or perhaps just reported) that the LGPL is, in essence, the same as the GPL when it comes to applications written in Java. In other words, if you use a library licensed under the LGPL in a Java application, you bear all the requirements of the GPL — releasing not only any changes to the library as free software but also any code that uses the library as well. Needless to say, this means that anybody using free libraries as part of a commercial product has to go back and make sure that they remove them in order to remain in compliance with the license, and if they’ve already released code that uses LGPL libraries, they’re probably in violation unless they go back and release the source code for those releases. Of course, I’m not a lawyer so I’m not sure if that’s true. In any case, this brings about a major point of confusion, and I imagine what it will lead to is a mass relicensing of LGPL libraries. I sympathize with the GPL, but this is why I find BSD-style licenses so much more practical. The viral nature of the GPL, for all the good it has wrought, is incompatible with many types and styles of development.

One popular library that I use that’s distributed under the LGPL is Hibernate. The Hibernate home page says, “The LGPL license is sufficiently flexible to allow the use of Hibernate in both open source and commercial projects (see the License FAQ for details).” Since that’s really not the case, I hope that Hibernate will change its licensing terms.

Someone needs to explain to me the stupidity of Oracle’s data types. For long strings you have the option of VARCHAR2 (too small), CLOB (too stupid), and LONG (even stupider). Then there’s the added problem of Oracle’s JDBC drivers having a lousy bug that prevents them from handling strings larger than 4000 bytes. In the age of the Web, it seems like having a decent string data type isn’t too much to ask, is it? Maybe this problem is rectified in versions of Oracle subsequent to Oracle 8, but in my world, dealing with this problem brings on an avalanche of lousy hacks and utter stupidity. (The thing that’s compounding my problem is a leaky abstraction problem involving Hibernate.)

Update: I am only now coming to appreciate the depths of stupidity associated with CLOBs. They are evil and malicious. Hey, Oracle, how about a data type that lets us work with something between 4k and 2 gigs that doesn’t require the most obnoxious shenanigans I’ve ever seen? Seriously.

Bruce Schneier opens up this month’s Crypto-Gram with an interesting essay about security in general and our inability to control how it is applied to us. The most interesting thing to me about security is the paradoxical nature of it — things that seem like they’re important often aren’t, and vice versa. Furthermore, almost nobody is equipped to judge what security really is. So politicians end up passing measures that provide the illusion of security whether or not they really make us any more secure. It’s frustrating.