Tonight it's snowing quite heavily. If it goes on like this, tomorrow morning it's going to be hard getting to the office. Oh well…
Archive for January, 2005
Just finisehd reading Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures with Your Digital Camera by Mikkel Aaland.
Nice book, full of very interesting tips for taking the best digital shots. I should really start to put them to good use by going around more with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20.
The problem is that this time of the year, in this part of the world, the weather is either foggy or completely overcast and it’s not easy finding a good subject. Well, at least not along the road from home to office and back.
Here's a couple of the first images sent by the Huygens probe from Titan.
Amazing, isn't it? What's even more amazing is the fact that the main Italian TV channels tonight gave just a brief mention of the landing of the Huygens probe — which was built by the European Space Agency — preferring instead to devote most of the evening news to the usual drivel.
Hibernate in Action by Christian Bauer and Gavin King, Manning Publications.
Hibernate is arguably one of the most interesting and useful Open Source projects around. If you develop enterprise Java applications that have to do with a relational database (and which one doesn’t?), then you should seriously consider using an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM for short) tool as an alternative to straight JDBC, in particular if you have a rich domain model and you’d like to exploit the object-oriented features of the language, like polymorphism, and core libraries like the Collections API.
This book comes straight from the source. Gavin is actually the founder of the project and Christian is one of the most prominent developers. It is not surprising, therefore, that the book explains some of the design decisions that have shaped Hibernate into what it is now, like using runtime bytecode generation in preference to source code generation or post-compilation bytecode manipulation.
Hibernate is not easy to learn and use proficiently if you’re not prepared to study it thouroughly and this book does a good job of explaining tricky subjects like the persistent objects’ lifecycle, exotic mappings, transactions and so on. However, it would be quite hard to use it as a single reference source while working with Hibernate. You should be prepared to refer constantly to the reference documentation, the API docs and the huge knowledge base available through the online forums.
At a little more than 400 pages, it is not a particularly thin book, yet I would have appreciated a more systematic treatment of the APIs and the different types of mappings, with more code samples. As it is, you’ll find it a very useful and interesting book if you’re about to start a new project and want to know whether Hibernate is the right solution to your persistence problems. If you’re a developer interested in using Hibernate, I suggest giving it as a present to your technical mamanger or team leader. In this case, I’d give it five stars
On the other hand, if you’re already experienced with Hibernate, it is much less useful but nonetheless very iteresting and well-written, so I’d give it four stars.
Average evaluation: 4.5 out of 5.
According to Matthew, Today's meme is "Post the date of and link to your oldest Usenet post." I played this game before, but anyway, here is mine:
From: newsuser@oliver.SUBLINK.ORG (Ugo Cei) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: print % in c Message-ID: <875@oliver.SUBLINK.ORG> Date: 2 Mar 91 09:55:41 GMT
Making fun of Microsoft on a Monday morning is always a good way to start a work week.
- Go to http://mappoint.msn.com/DirectionsFind.aspx
- Select Norway for the start country, haugesund for the start city.
- Select Norway for the end country, trondheim for the end city.
- Click the Get Directions button.
Just in case they fix it before you have a chance to see it live, here is a screenshot:
I’m currently reading Hibernate in Action by Christian Bauer and Gavin King. Having read the first five chapter so far, I’m pretty much impressed by the thourough treatment that is given to the rationale behind using an ORM tool and Hibernate in particular. The chapter on transactions is very illuminating.
I hope to post a comprehensive review once I have finished reading it.
Here’s another resolution for the new year: now that the baby has learned skiing and seems to like it very much, find more time to go skiing.
Looks like I'm not the only one resuming blogging in 2005: Gianugo made the same resolution. We'll see who is going to break the promise earlier ;).
Other new year's resolutions include writing a Cocoon based blog engine (Linotype is cool as a starting point, but I really could use more stuff), so be prepared to change your subscriptions…
Now that's interesting. I'm using blojsom, which is mostly fine, but much more complicated than it needs to be, IMHO. On the other hand, I already tried this no less than three times, and gave up each time, but maybe with someone else to share the load…
OK, so I am using blojsom and so far everything seems to be fine, except that even though I have enabled comment and trackback moderation in the blog.properties file, I am able to post comments and have them appear immediately. I was expecting the blog owner to be notified and having to accept or reject the comment, but this isn't the case, apparently.
Update: there were some more steps involved, but now everything seems to work as expected :).
