Does not sound possible right? I’m afraid the news are not that good though; not only it is possible, but we are just about to do this. Yes it is not about healthcare informatics or development or anything like that, but some things just get to me. Check out this independent article for details. I’ve personally witnessed death of a great piece of sea. Gemlik bay, where I spent all summers of my childhood turned from a virgin piece of heaven into a pit of industrial waste and the fish I used to catch is just a memory of the past, just like my childhood. Somehow, this worries me too much, I’d love to go back to that little house near the bay and go to fishing again, but the fish is simply not there anymore. ...

After pulling my hair off for hours, I was rescued. Yavuz found a way to start Tomcat automatically on Jaunty. The problem turned out to be about the default use of dash, instead of bash. Following the well known setup one is supposed to do sudo ln -sf /bin/bash /bin/sh To get it working. Spent hours for this!!!

More of a note to myself. Just working on the JSF bindings of the soon to be announced openEHR framework, and due to nature of my persistence model, once bad data finds its way into db, it messes the whole form entry. It is possible to modify the persistence mechanism for immunity to bad data, but is that something I should do? I guess not. When bad data appears in the system, it should stop the execution. You (I) should find why that happens, and fix it. I’ll keep the persistence a little bit fragile intentionally. Better to discover potential problems now, then trying to find them in production system.

More of a note to myself. Just working on the JSF bindings of the soon to be announced openEHR framework, and due to nature of my persistence model, once bad data finds its way into db, it messes the whole form entry. It is possible to modify the persistence mechanism for immunity to bad data, but is that something I should do? I guess not. When bad data appears in the system, it should stop the execution. You (I) should find why that happens, and fix it. I’ll keep the persistence a little bit fragile intentionally. Better to discover potential problems now, then trying to find them in production system.

Sounds like an extreme statement, right? Well, not according to some people in some undisclosed US hospitals. Their machines running Windows OSs were infected with Cornficker . I can understand how they felt. Patching systems which are running critical software is always trouble. I’ve been in this situation so many times. A web server running an electronic claim server software, another one running an inventory management software, or a machine controlling an MRI device.. You name it. People in charge of these machines know that in case something goes wrong due to upgrade process, they are in big, big trouble. So they say: “don’t fix it if it is not broken”. ...

I can still remember a seminar I’ve been to during my master’s studies. It was about project management, and the speaker was a very experienced project manager from defence industry. When you are building a submarine, or a fighter jet, you don’t get to do many iterations! We are quite used to engineering projects in defence industry that takes billions of dollars, and years to complete. When you speak to engineers, project managers and other people in these projects, you see that they all have the same approach: “of course this is the way to do it!”. How else can you run something as big as this? In theory, as time and billions of dollars go by, these engineering practices should have become perfect, with all the lessons learned. ...

Because Oracle has just bought Sun Microsystems. Worst mergers news I’ve heard in the last 5 years. If it had been IBM, I would be dancing around the CHIME, since that would put all Sun’s assets in to hands of a capable company that knows what they are doing. But Oracle? I mean Oracle???? Come on! Now let’s see Java become a headless chicken, while MS eats Oracle’s DB shares every day. Back to depression now.

Like many of you out there, I’ve been involved in distributed, multi layer software development for some time. Starting with the first ever asp based web site I’ve developed in 96 or 97, I’ve built a lot of multilayer applications. In the process, I’ve gotten used to switching to new tools and approaches as long as they were tested and approved by the industry, and the developers I trust and respect. As a result, I’ve developed habits, I’ve become used to reaching for my trusted tools in many of the projects. I’ve made some friends like llblgen and hibernate for db access, and they’ve been with me for a long time now. However, a group of friends of mine, did not switch to these widely accepted solutions, and I’ve been giving them a lot of critisim for not doing so. Especially Ufuk, an old friend of mine, who has been developing his product for over 10 years now, has been a proponent of db level optimization. Where I defended the idea of portability of databases, he defended performance, and choosing a platform for db and sticking with it. ...

Ok, This is probably a weird title, but when you face the same situation that I am facing at the moment, it will make sense. That situation is, when you are working an a web based application with a decent web tier technology, and you are trying to bind the UI layer to a back end layer. Almost all of the recent web stacks give you a declerative UI layer with some sort of markup language that allows you to refer to backing objects for bindings. In my case these objects are AOM instances (what a big surprise …). ...

Now that’s a large topic. A very, very large topic. In case you are into Java web development, you are going to have to decide between millions of frameworks for similar tasks, and sometimes for the simplest and most obvious thing to do, you’ll have to introduce a whole framework into your project. The learning curve for all these frameworks is also another problem. You start with GWT, and realise that it does not feel right always. There are times when it is nice to have Java code compiled into JavaScript, but there are times when it does not feel right. So you want a more server side approach, and that’s where things start to get crazy. ...