Posts

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. ...

My favorite kinds of useful programming tips are those that make me say, “I can see how you would make that mistake,” but at the same time give me the satisfaction of knowing that I have never, ever made that mistake. (Via decafbad.)

I was going to write a bunch of generalizations about liberals and conservatives here that probably would completely fall apart under close scrutiny, so I’m just going to say this instead. Conservatives would be way, way better off if Eve Tushnet were famous instead of Ann Coulter. She’s the kind of conservative that I can read and appreciate, even though I don’t agree with her on all that many things. For example, her thoughts on same sex marriage are downright interesting and thought provoking. Your run of the mill conservative pundit seems to me to be more interested in provoking anything but thought. (Whoops, I had to let that generalization slip in.) ...

Congratulations, Mozilla. New site design, and more importantly, self rule.

There’s a piece by a group calling themselves “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” that must be read as a timeline and explanation of the entire Niger uranium debacle. It’s not until you put all the pieces together that you realize why this is so much bigger than one line from a speech. It’s emblematic of the way our intelligence capabilities were used and abused to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq and justify our decision to invade Iraq. ...

Tim Bray has posted a follow up to his piece on sharecropping in the software industry.

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo has an article about the economic impact of the national do not call list that was instituted recently. Some estimates claim that the new regulation will put two million people out of work. Granted, those two million people spent their time at work annoying the rest of us, but given our current high unemployment rate, adding in two million more people who probably can’t convert easily to other professions doesn’t sound like it will aid in our long awaited economic recovery. (Maybe we can conscript them and send them to Iraq to keep the peace.) The article is one of those that enables you to think about a complex problem in a different light. For what it’s worth, I signed up for the “do not call” list as soon as I could. ...

The Economist article on Microsoft’s decision to kill stock options has been posted. Unfortunately, it’s only available to subscribers.

Brent Simmons has a response to the assertion that developing for a captive platform is sharecropping. Needless to say, as an independent developer for a captive platform, he disagrees.