Finally, the “real” thing is there: click.
Sep 092005
Sep 082005
In order to fight terrorism (so they say) the powers that be want ISP’s to retain all data, so when something happens they can browse the data to look for a possible suspect. Yeah right. Apart from being a plan that costs the ISP’s a lot of money (and that will raise your subscription fees), there is no way in the world they will find what they are looking for. Other than that: data retention violates human rights in terms of their privacy. Would you like the police to know who you’ve been emailing with, what websites you’ve been visiting and what cellular phonecalls you’ve made in the last 6 months (or even 4 years!)?! I guess not! So, sign this petition. It’s simple, and perhaps it will end this stupid discussion.
Sep 062005
On a lot of blogs and in forums, I see complaints about the recent increase in gas prices. People are talking about 2 or 3 US dollars per gallon of gas. Outrageous. Well, let me tell you, the last time I filled my tank, I payed 1.45 per LITER of gas (euro95). That’s 5.49 per gallon, which approximates to US$6.85 per gallon. So stop complaining! And start using the metric system. Ignorant fools.
Sep 022005
My domain-registrator DirectNIC has a live journal (pun intended) about Katrina and her devastating consequences. Reading it makes you keep your breath or skip a heartbeat. Read it here or here, and if you have anything to contribute, go here for a list of organisations helping out. It seems Wallmart donated a million dollars. Heartwarming.
Sep 012005
I just upgraded my LAME encoder to 3.96. To my surprise, the encoded MP3 files came out being in mono rather than (joint-)stereo. How come? As a frontend for LAME, I use the brilliant EAC. In EAC you can specify extra commandline option to pass to LAME, and in my case, that would be --r3mix. But this option is no longer recognised by LAME and the best it can make of it is -m. Hence a mono mp3 file. Obviously changing the commandline options to something more appropriate restored my joint-stereo and the quality settings.
Hope this will save someone from pulling hairs.
Aug 302005
If you’re an Oracle DBA or your companies Security Manager, you might want to check Pete’s blog about orabf. It’s a brute force attacker on Oracle password hashes. And it’s fast.
Aug 302005
Oracle is releasing a lot at the moment, and this time it is Release 2 (Phase 2, as they like to call it) of their 10g Application Server. The complete download is about 1.8GByte (3 CD’s), that you can find here. More platforms (Windows, Linux x86 and Sun Solaris are complete now) will follow in time.
Aug 302005
Oracle announced the availability of the Zend Core for Oracle. It still is a beta version, the production version being available later this year. This release is based on PHP5, and has native OCI8 Oracle connections, supporting connections to Oracle 9i and 10g databases. You can read the FAQ about it here, or just view the main page.
Please note: only Linux and AIX versions are available now.
Aug 262005
Oracle released a maintenance update of JDeveloper. Build 1913 as apposed to the previously release build 1811. Get it here.
Aug 162005
David Intersimone, by most known as “David I”, is a respectable employer of Borland (already 20 years, he claims). In the latest post on his weblog, he shows us a graphical presentation of the development of software-development itself. Of course one can not help but noticing the similarities in the way Borland/Inprise/Borland developped itselves over the years. Switching from lots of small fish (individual developers) to a couple of really big fish (the enterprises). To stay with the fishing-analogy: if you want to catch more fish to bring in more money, why not expand your fleet with some large ships to bring in the really large fish, and keep the smaller boats to supply the market with small fish too. No, Borland sees it differently: sell the smaller ships to buy a new big boat. As we all know, big fish are more difficult to find, harder to catch, and you can only handle a couple of them with one boat. I’m not sure if this is the winning strategy. I complained about it before (do a search): Borland is getting too expensive for the one-man-band companies out there.
Oh, and while looking at the graph, which side did you feel most comfortable with? Left or right? Another thing: what’s the difference between “2000 – Process Centric” and “2005+ – Role based”? Let me tell you: none. Processes are done by certain roles, if you have your organisation straight. There is more history-repeats-itselves in the graph, but that is up to the reader.
Note: The x-axis is used for the timescale, the y-axis is the price of the Borland products, with an exponentional-scale to allow (misleading) linear progression.