Google strangeness

Years ago I wrote a page about Baggerseen um Karlsruhe and put it online. The page gets quite some hits (around 30 a day). When you now google after Baggerseen, Google (DE) lists it on the first page (first ten of about 18000 entries).
Now, common knowledge says, that Google ranks pages higher that many links point to.
But when I enter 'link:www.pilhuhn.de/hwr/baggersee.html', Google says that no other page links to this page (which at least is not completely true).

So this entry is also a test if Google will in future list the contained link or not.

Java is slow? No!

Mike Hostetler writes in this weblog entry that Java does not need to be slow when you use the -server jvm switch.
I once wrote an article for iX magazine about benchmarking Xslt processors. Here, the fastest one also was written in Java -- and I did not even experiment with the server jvm. My results are also backed by the results on the Java is faster than C benchmark page.

Also popular belief is that if you want to do fast database access, you have to do this in embedded sql (esql) within C. This might be true, if you have to go to the database for every record anyway, but if you are iterating over a known (sub)set of the data over and over again, it might be better to let your infrastructure (e.g application server or O/R manager cache the data).

And then last, but not least: Remeber that everything that can be done in O(n) can also be done in O(n²).

Source code hint

From the source code of one of our projects (anonymized):

// TODO: IF YOU CAN SEE THIS IT MEANS THAT <name> DID SOMETHING STUPID AGAIN

:-)

Maven - I am not the only one

In this blog entry, Hani Suleiman expresses about maven, what I was always thinking.

I don't grok guys like Konstantin P., who constantly is bashing a working ant based compilation of a tool, while his maven based one "only needs a little more hand tuning".

Did you ever try maven over a modem line? You pull the 6 MB archive just to find out that if you type maven --foo, it starts downloading tons of jars and you just wait for an hour. Then you think "ok, now everything is set up". Yes, there is an offline option, but then half of the commands don't work.

I completely understand Hani...

A little step for mankind, but a big step for Orlando

My little nine month old son Orlando today did his first steps on his own. He pulled him self up at a chair and did some little steps holding and pushing the chair. Wow.

E100

I recently bought a new mobile, a Samsung SGH-E 100, as my old one more or less broke down.
I am really happy with its speech quality.

Interestingly, it was really hard to get a mobile phone in clam shell design without camera.

JBoss J2EE 1.4 compatible

According to this press release (PDF), is JBoss the first open source J2EE application server that passed the Sun certification.

Congratulations, JBoss!

Some more links wrt this.:

Heise Newsticker
Computerwoche online

Bug or feature?

Today, we got a very interesting behaviour with building a larger application at work. We have an ant task at one place like this:

<javac debug="on" 

   classpath="${external.lib.dir}/foo.jar">

	<src path="."/>

 	<src path="../common"/> 

 	<src path="${java.dir}"/>

[... includes ...]

</javac>

You see, no destdir set.

Now when running this with a file modified in . ant reports:

compile:

    [javac] Compiling 1 source file

After this we end up with a lot of .class files in ${java.dir}.
So javac seems to not only compile this one file, but also the
files that this one imports.

At the end, this led to different versions of the .class files
with our autobuild system running wild.

Does Lego make you a geek?

I recently read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. One of the big players in the book are Lego stones.
In the story they postulate, that all geeks did play with Lego when they were childs. Now, I did play with Lego, a co-worker and geek still plays with Lego. So at the moment it is 2:0 in favour of the book's theory.

Question: do you also see this coincidence?

Bye Java 1.5 -- hello Java 5.0

In this this press release, Sun renames what should have been Java 1.5 into Java 5.0 to emphasize that this is the most advanced release of the last five years.

I had to look at my calendar to convince myself that it is not april 1st today ...

Recent trip to Bilbao

We have been for a week in Bilbao, Espania. Very nice city. One of the hightlights is definitvely the Guggenheim Museum.
We took a flight with Happag-Llloyd Express directly from Stuttgart to Bilbao. This went without complications. Handling basically was as with all other flights. As we had our little son Orlando with us, we had concerns if he could handle the flight, but he slept through.
To limit luggage, we left his nappies at home, being sure, that it would be easy to find some in Bilbao, but it proved harder to be than we thought. We were looking for a supermarket, but had no luck. We finally bought a fairly expensive pack of nappies at a department store.
Supermarkets like Eroski are all a bit hidden.

The Guggenheim really is a good show and a great architectural piece.

We also spent three days on the beach. Getting there is easy with the Metro (the stations were designed by Sir Norman Foster), which is cheap (3 Euros for a day ticket per adult). They also have complete GSM coverage in all tunnels.

Bilbao seems to have changed a lot in the recent years. There are new buildings all around and a good walk along the Nervion River.

Life in Bilbao is really different from what it is in Stuttgart (or Germany in total). There are bars and cafes all around, while we only saw one Burger King and as many Mac Donalds and Pizza Huts. In the evening, virtually everyone is standing in front of a bar, eating some Tapas (fingerfood) and having a drink. For lunch, the restaurants offer "menu de dia" with starter, main course, desert, water and wine and an esspresso for as much as 8 Euros with big portions at good quality.
Also shops tend to be open less than eight hours a day with a big break ("siesta") in between 1pm and 4pm.

Pictures are available at the picture page.