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I tried to escape the overwhelming tv/radio coverage on French presidential election, ( IMHO once you know the result there isn’t much to learn ), by taking refuge on geek/technical web sites when I stumbed upon Slashdot…

As one of the comment state ( after the obligatory French bashing ) : Slashdot is about “News for nerds, stuff that matters”. I can see the latter, but not the former…

I found this on a cartoon web site, and yes they have a rss feed, and maybe this answer partly Laurent’s question, at least I’ve followed this vendor advice and I’m happy as ever.

I was upgrading a Java application which must call some native code at some point.
Our application is targeted to run on Windows platform and MacOSX. The company I’m working with has bought Excelsior xFunction. This library aims to ease calling native libraries from java application, and it succeed pretty well. It comes as a standard Java jar archive and a native library for each platform ( xFunction.dll, or dylib or .so depending of the target operating system to run the application on).

The developers on the project knows already how to use the library, they’re even pretty familiar with it.
Besides this, on this specific project, we only have to call a pair of native functions which returns pretty classic arguments. Nothing hard to do.

A perfect and easy job for xFunction. Or so I thought…
We wrote our code, built the various distribution thanks to our maven 2 build with the use of profiles and then… we discovered the xFunction library on macOSX is only available compiled for powerPC platform. Running it on a intel based Macintosh seems not possible, the JVM running the java code is x86 code. Macintosh comes with some kind of emulator called Rosetta which seamlessly execute ppc code on a x86 machine, but it seems you can’t load a powerpc library from x86 code.

I’m far from being an expert, but it sounds easy to me, to make the xFunction library available on intel platform maybe just to … recompile it, and that’s all. So we send an email to the company making xFunction… and here’s what they reply to us :

…/…

Unfortunately, we have not version of xFunction for Mac OS X that runs on Mac-Intel box.

However, it is possible to hasten the development on the basis of custom projects, with some sharing of costs. If you’re interested, please contact our Sales Dept. at mailto:sales@excelsior-usa.com

Regards,

…/…

Here I did have but two choice, either argue by email with their sales dept :p or … drop XFunction out of the project and replace it by our own code.

Well, we dropped xFunction out because at least we won’t get stuck in the future being force to call a sales dept… :p
This is interesting also, from the open source point of view. I mean, If I did have the source of xFunction, it was a matter of a couple of hours to rebuild and perform some tests on it.

IE is one of the most blatant demonstration of “I don’t care of my users”, transforming it in “we heard you”, is one of the good old marketing bs which microsoft have accustomed us to.

I just don’t see a chance of installing this software myself, partly because today I spend most of my time on another OS, and also because the lastest vista release just completly put my PC out of order but mostly because I don’t see one feature demonstrated by IE which firefox or opera is not already doing today (We can also add safely Safari to the list btw).

If you are not running MacOS nor Linux, that you still don’t have a decent browser, that you’re ready to accept another wave of vulnerabilities (some of them are already out) and finally you don’t mind installing a system updated disguised into an internet browser. Go ahead, bloat your system a little bit more

Firestar Software has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent covering O/R mapping.

Patent extract :

A method for interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database, comprising the steps of:

selecting an object model; generating a map of at least some relationships between schema in the database and the selected object model++; employing the map to create at least one interface object associated with an object corresponding to a class associated with the object oriented software application; and utilizing a runtime engine which invokes said at least one interface …/…

Fill a patent, close your source, sell software, be completetly out of business by continuing embracing close source rather than integrate and participate to concurent OpenSource software, wait a little bit for a company who has money to support the said Open Source Software, try to win big bucks by playing the patent game.

I’ve never heard of FireStar O/R mapping software, but I bet if it was close to usable I would not be using Hibernate today.

Be warned If you have wrote a line of code today, you have probably infringed some US software patents, this system is just too damned stupid. Hopefully Europe is not concerned… for now…

source InfoQ

Huh, it did it again, today I needed the latest version of velocity ( a java software library used to generate files ).

I direct my much beloved firefox to the Velocity download page, choose the latest 1.4 version.

Firefox kindly proposes me to download it, but once finished, I got a brand new version ! So new, actually no ones has it besides me !

The trick is if you download always to the same location you’ll got :
1st download, file name : velocity-1.4.zip
2nd download, file name : velocity-2.4.zip
3rd download, file name : velocity-3.4.zip
…/…

This is actually reported as bug 231048 in the firefox bug database

Update : This bug is corrected in upcoming Firefox version Deer Park 2 :