Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
DevX have a good article by Puneet Sungal introducing Anti-Patterns in Java.
Anti-patterns are commonly made mistakes in application design and programming – what not to do. It’s easier to learn from others mistakes than make the same mistakes yourself, so its worth being aware of some of these if they apply to the technologies you are using.
Bitter Java by Bruce Tate I think was one of the first Anti-Pattern books for Java and is well worth a read.
The Register yesterday had a story about the claims of a company called Atom Chip who claim to have developed a non-volatile storage mechanism using ‘Quantum-Optical’ technology.
This is all fine so far, as researchers have been investigating the use of quantum mechanics for computing for a number of years, and optical storage mechanisms have also been talked about for a while now. What is causing the fuss is that they have a laptop supposedly for sale ‘soon’ on their website that boasts the following specs:
If those specs don’t turn some heads I don’t know what. Firstly, why anyone would need or want 1TB RAM in a laptop is beyond me. A portable super-computer perhaps? The second point is that even the 64bit version of XP is limited to addressing only 128GB of RAM, so to suggest that XP running on this machine can use 1TB of RAM maybe an impossibility, unless they are working with Microsoft to produce a special version of XP to run on this machine.
2TB of non-volatile, disk-less storage – wow, now that is impressive. Problem is, how do I backup 2TB of storage, and to what medium? Thousands of backup tapes?
There has been a huge thread over at Slashdot ripping this claim apart as bogus, but if it is a hoax then they have gone to some great lengths to put together the story. The most curious thing is that the company has a booth at CES 2006 to show off their new hardware – could this be bogus too?
Steve Jobs yesterday announced what a new gadget that people have been speculating about for some time now – an iTunes phone. How this will sell is anyones guess, but I bet it will do well. This isn’t the first digital music phone to the market, as Samsung have had an mp3 player phone available for some time now.
Also announced were new versions of the iPod mini, now called the iPod nano as they have reduced it in size, and will come in 2GB and 4GB versions.
I just recently completed the search functionality for BBWeblog v2, and have almost completed all the migration from JDBC based DAO to using Hibernate 3.0.
There is still a lot of code cleanup to do (the JDBC migration to Hibernate 3.0 reduced the code in the DAO by about two thirds!), but the current code is currently running on my site for my weblog and online tech notes (you’re looking at it right now!), and so it seems stable enough to run in production. I’ll continue the cleanup and then release the final v2 version when its cleaned up.
You can download the source and or WAR from the project site on SourceForge.