... and here we are :-). Happy new year, everybody.

2009 was a good year. I finally graduated after I finished taking courses in 2007 but then had to manage two big projects all through 2008, which didn't leave me the time to put all the paperwork in until last year. But I got a lot of new projects on the road and a lot of things done.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do much for maurus.net. However, right over the last few days, I finally found the time to start bringing my notes on Sun Java Calendar Server 7 online.

"Microsoft's .Net Framework Assistant" is installed in your Firefox Browser without your consent as part of Microsoft's .Net framework. It's installed via Windows Update, so its installation can't be easily blocked. It can't be uninstalled (they made it intentionally very hard) and looking at Microsoft's track record, there's absolutely no reason to trust that it's secure. Also, it transfers information about software on your computer to third party servers, again without your consent.

That I think, fits the definition of spyware.

Fortunately, there's a way to uninstall it from your machine as long as you have administrative privileges. I found a good recipe here. Basically you have to edit the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions

and delete the key named {20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}. At which point, after a browser restart, the extension will be gone.

Unfortunately, Microsoft also takes the liberty to modify your preferences to add the .NET framwork's version to your browser's referrer. To fix this, type about:config into your browser's URL bar, then type "microsoft" into the search box, right-click on the key "general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet" and click "reset". That's it, you're done.

I blinked and it was 2009.

So first of all: Happy New Year to everybody reading this. I have a whole bunch of posts that didn't make it last year because I was wrapped up in a lot of projects, but I'm planning on updating the weblog again as the stress level goes down :-).

Well, after reading the polls again, I predict that Barack Obama will today become the first African-American President of the United States. He'll get at least 52% of the popular vote, but I would wish for it being more than that. Of course, this isn't a very bold projection as 538.com has Obama already at a 98% chance of winning this election. Still, I'm feeling very good about this :-).

When I went to Egypt a few weeks ago for two weeks of diving, beaches and general fun in the Lahami Bay Resort, me and my friend had to leave two bottles of rather expensive, but very tasty, Whiskey behind at the Munich airport. Idiots that we were, we believed that, as we were on our way to one of these "Arab terrorist countries", we could keep two obviously unopened bottles of liquid. Germany's secretary of the interior would certainly have been very proud of us if we had blown up something over there using a "magic port-barrel-aged alcohol vapor bomb".

We were wrong. I guess that duty-free shops in Germany are just as fine with the new stupid regulations as their American counter-parts are and thus these regulations are enforced regardless of the country you go to. As a western tourist you can have alcohol with you in Egypt, it's just very hard to buy some there, so we bought another two bottles of whiskey in the local duty-free store. The only difference between the new bottles and the old bottles was that the new bottles were placed in a plastic bag with huge red lettering that said "DO NOT OPEN". A MacGyver-esque terrorist that can build a bomb out of whiskey would have been clearly defeated by that security.

So this article on airport security by "The Atlantic" resonated a lot with me: "The Things He Carried". Especially, since it features Bruce Schneier, who helped the journalist print his own fake boarding passes.

As seen on jwz's.

Well, Obama/Biden it is!

I'm glad, because Joe Biden took a great position on Iran in the democratic debates. He will truly make up for Obama's lack of foreign policy experience and from what I read about him, be an informed voice of reason in international relations.

What a great team to kick Bush and the Republicans out of the White House.

For some reason, I get some search traffic for the string "Django Java". I don't know why. Still, I want to address what I think these people are searching for a bit here.

First of all, Jython-compatibility is in Django 1.0.

Still, there is no framework like Django being written in Java. There's not. There are hundreds of web frameworks for Java, though. On a very high level, some focus on abstracting the web away (Echo2 and 3, Eclipse RAP, Google GWT), some focus on abstracting Java away (Grails, Tapestry), some find a way in the middle (Spring MVC, Struts2).

The one thing that comes close to Django in my opinion is Tapestry 5.0. However, Tapestry does bring with it a lot of very advanced web development architecture that is not necessarily what you're after. Working with Tapestry requires you to subscribe to component-oriented development and the usage of a dependency injection container and if you want to realize its full potential, you'll need a couple of additional technologies like ORM in the form of JPA or at least plain-old Hibernate.

It is important for me that I make the point that many of the current scripting language-based web frameworks seem to be going through much of the learning curve that led to all these Java technologies, but some, like the Java AOP stacks can be avoided completely by using a language that has functional aspects to it, like Python or Ruby. Not PHP. Never use PHP for anthing serious anyway.

So, by all means, if you're developing in Java, either because you have to, or because you've made a conscious decision based on legacy code, for example, or the availability of a mature library of some kind, go ahead and check out Tapestry, which also allows you to develop big parts of your application in Groovy anyway, if you shy away from compiled languages.

But if you're searching for light-weight, quick, easy and architecturally sound web development and prefer to develop in Python, go for Django itself. Since version 1.0alpha2, Django is compatible to the next Jython release (2.5). That means that you can use all the fancy Java libraries you want from your Python code (it will not feel pythonic at all times, though) and still use Django's excellent infrastructure. This will also allow you to run Django on a full-fledged JEE application server.

I, myself, am a bit undecided on what framework to use with Java as there's also Grails to consider and if I had to choose between Django ORM and Hibernate/JPA and I'm using Java anyway, I'd probably go for Hibernate as it has a lot more mature features (like full Lucene integration in Hibernate-Search, "sharding" and most of all: aggregation support, a basic feature that Django ORM still lacks).

So there you go... it again comes down to the question of what tool is the best one for the job at hand :-). I hope this post helps those people who come here searching for an answer. If you need more information, just email me.

This means that GeoDjango will be part of Django 1.0! This is another great addition to this fabulous framework. It changes and extends Django's ORM so that it supports GIS types in multiple databases. Of course, that primarily means support for OpenGIS types in MySQL and PostgreSQL and querying them via Django's ORM.

Now, if they'd finally land aggregation support, I'd be totally happy with Django 1.0!

I've been using 64-bit systems exclusively for a while now (Windows XP x64 for daily work and Windows Vista x64 as my gaming system), but Apple made the braindead decision to let iTunes v7.7's iPhone 64-bit support only run on Windows Vista. Well, unfortunately, all my business data is on Windows XP and there's no way that I'll downgrade to 32-bit and loose support for my 4GB RAM.

Turns out, there's really no technical reason for not having iPhone support on Windows XP 64, unless you have a phobia of editing MSI files with Orca. Here's an excellent write-up.