NetBeans 6.0 bug

Although I'm a fan of NetBeans because it's a simple IDE that runs with limited memory too, I must admit that it is quite buggy. One of the features of NetBeans is that it locks the GUI code so you can't accidentally break the GUI builder. I've tried Borland's JBuilder and breaking the GUI builder with custom code was one of the problems I came across. However, when NetBeans breaks itself, I can't get into the code to change it, which is one of the complaints that I have with the IDE. I wish it had a "hack-the-code" option where I could at least change the variable names - all I did was delete a menubar and add a new menubar... when I went into code view, it still had the old menubar and used the old menubar for the frame - the new one was an unused variable!

Anyway, I guess it's back to Wordpad for me.

Column-oriented vs Relational

Column-oriented databases are the next big thing for data warehouses, having passed through object databases for specialized applications. For a while, InterSystems Cache enjoyed the spotlight as a high performance object database. Now, Vertica is the hottest thing the database world has to offer as a column-oriented database.

Column-oriented databases store column-data as a contiguous sequence, as opposed to relational databases which store row-data in contiguous allocation units. This makes it simpler to make schema changes, and offered better performance for OLAP applications. Relational databases still are the best solution for general purpose OLTP applications so it isn't the end for them yet, although they were architected almost three decades ago.

VS2008 Express

The Visual Studio 2008 Express offline installer is a corrupt image being offered for download from the Microsoft website. A lot of people have complained about the "Program too big to fit in memory" error so it's yet another bug from infamous Microsoft. It's a free product so no one really cares at this stage, unless they are paying for bandwidth.

Regex for doesn't contain

^((?!my string).)*$ Is the regular expression for does not contain "my string". Wondering how someone can come up with that? Check out the reference at:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/refadv.html

There's a basic and advanced regular expression reference section so check out both!b

Sun Java on Fedora Core 8

There's been a successful install of Sun Java 1.6.0 on Fedora Core 8 with instructions posted at: http://vertito.blogspot.com/2007/11/sun-java-on-fedora-8-install-howto.html

I haven't been able to try it yet, but I'll do so soon.

Microsoft's 2008 Platform

Microsoft is releasing Microsoft Windows 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 at an event on February 27, 2008 7am. It's a pretty major event since it marks the next leap since the 2005 release.

The best feature of the new platform is LINQ, which enables developers to treat data as entities rather than relational tables. It's like taking NHibernate to the next level and integrating it with the programming language.

Sun pushing for NetBeans

Sun is bringing it's IDEs to an end and would be helping it's customers move to NetBeans for development. It's actually a pretty good idea since most of the Java world is pretty much standardizing on either Eclipse or NetBeans. With more of the community shifting to Eclipse, the only reason NetBeans would remain alive is if there are sufficient users working with it.