stillhacking

Thinkle I wonder why more of us (including me on some days) don't think more for ourselves. Has this age of information and automation actually coaxed us into thinking less? I am not so sure. As I write this (of course inspired by something I'll get to in a bit) I recall my own father complaining about the same thing over twenty years ago. But then he was one who naturally picked up on human behavior. This topic has become a common theme of sorts with me as well. I came across the Blackle site (sorry, no link here I am writing about it, not encouraging it) the other day. Now here's a piece of marketing. I'm not saying I don't care about the environment by any means. I just don't see how feeling good about something by itself does any good. Common sense and/or research should tell you that LCD monitors use much less energy than the old tubes. If you're still using a CRT and googling with the rest of us, Blackle may be for you. Google for it usin...

We've been using NetBeans 6.0 (M9) since getting back from JavaOne and aside from some minor annoyances one might expect in "pre-release" stuff...it's NICE. I have grown to like the support for the early versions of JSR-295 and JSR-296. If you have not had time to play with it, check it out. You can see where NB and these two JSRs are headed and there's more to like than not.

Long time...no post. Working on an application that makes heavy use of Web Services we have come across a Delphi SOAP issue. It seems Delphi does not like to see a nil returned as the value for an integer. This client code written in Java ( JAX - WS ) that calls this same Web Service works OK. In this case the null data is coming from the database and (last time I checked) it was OK to have null data in a database. To be fair to Delphi I understand null (nil) is not supported as a value. However the (generated) code that calls the web service should do something besides raise an EConvertError exception and return nothing to the called. I don't really like the idea of arbitrarily returning zero (-1 or some other value) but if a language does not support something, we have to make some type of a logical decision and move on. IMHO EConvertError is not a good choice.