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I have a little voice inside my head that oftentimes speaks up when I read something good about some new technology. For example, someone said that TopLink looked impressive, and my little voice told me that Hibernate was fine and that I shouldn’t bother myself with a commercial product that’s probably bloated, overengineered, and messily implemented. Before that, when people told me about other persistence layers, my little voice told me that there’s merit to hand coding all your JDBC calls and that using a persistence layer is for the weak. I could cite many more examples, but you get the idea. What I’ve learned is that I will get furthest in my career by doing exactly the opposite of what that little voice tells me. I think it’s a response to the rapidity of change in the IT industry and my fear of not being able to keep up. By arbitrarily reducing the number of things I need to know about, I can feel secure about the things that I do know. Unfortunately, listening to the little voice has often left me beind where I need to be in some cases. I was behind in learning how to use JUnit, behind in learning how to use persistence frameworks, and I’m still not where I want to be with EJB. The reason I bring this up is that if you have a similar little voice, I’d advice you to pay close attention to it and then do exactly the opposite as well. ...

New Eclipse features are arriving at a furious pace in the milestone builds of 3.0. My main Eclipse installation is using a plug in that won’t work with the 3.0 builds but maybe I’ll give 3.0 a try on a secondary machine.

Looks like all that prewar intelligence that were used to talk about Iraq’s weapons programs were just extrapolation from really old data.

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 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. ...