Perhaps I shouldn't be a developer, I seem to have much better future as a tester, I find so many bugs when I try to program.

My most recent experiment was with NHibernate. I'm not asking for much, all I want is a bug tracking database that I can put to use on my personal projects. Unfortantely, BugZilla and I didn't get along and I finally removed it.

I can't get Sql Server or MSDE to install on this computer, probably because I install/uninstalled so many times (including SQL Server Express betas) that now I get an install that seems to work, but leave me with a server (probably) but no way to access it (which is why I'm not sure that I've the server).

I couldn't find a bug tracking software that work with MySql/SqlLite/Access/Files that I would like. Meaning that it was free, easy to install (read: didn't require me to jump throught hops) and optionally offer smart client features (IE, windows application).

There are  all sorts  of  bug  tracking  software  that  I tested, but nearly all of them either require Ms Sql Server or were ports from linux that required me to install strange stuff on my computer just to test them. Considerring the amount of works that it takes, I wasn't willing to make the effort.

I'm reading a lot about O/R Mappers so I decided to try NHibernate due to the excellent review by Scott Bellware.

As I mentioned, I want a bug tracking software, so I decided to try a proof-of-concept bug tracking with NHibernate. I installed MySql and was very surprised by the quality of the tools (There is a reason why I insist on using only .Net tools when possible, the UI is usually better.) I wish that I'd something similar to use on Sql Server Express (and no, the Express Manaager doesn't come close.)

NHibernate is a port of Hibernate, so it's pretty mature design-wise (still learning it, can't comment on the quality of the code) but it has one big problem, and that is its documentation. I only now got it to work on my machine, and I've been trying for over a day to just pull a value from MySql Server and then print it to the screen. I'm happy to confirm that I finally managed it.

The second problem that NHibernate has is poor error reporting, the main problem was that I didn't reference MySql.Data.dll assembly, so it couldn't connect to MySql, but the error I got was "problem in find" with an inner exception complaining about NullArgumentException in Activator.CreateInstance().

Usually I'm very relucant to debug other people code, especially when it's such a big undertaking. You need to learn the code to debug it, and that usually take quite some time. But I was angry, it was at friday morning and it's raining outside, so I didn't care. Eventually I found out the problem, and right there in the comments it tells me that I need to reference MySql.Data.dll and then it silently fail if I don't.

This is a case where a single assertion would've saved a lot of trouble.

Anyway, it's working now, so I'm going to continue to experiment.

I'll post my results soon.

I found it through Slashdot, hilarious.

The part I like the most: " We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."

Frans Bouma talks about Peter Torr post regarding firefox security, his conclustion is that Peter is somehow in denial.

Personally, I find that Peter was right on the mark. Yes, Firefox is more secured than IE (for the time being) but what Peter was talking about were flaws in the way Firefox handle it security UI now. And saying that IE does worse (and in those spesific case, it doens't) help no one.

Those problems are real one, and they won't go away with finger pointing.

I've been a loyal Firefox user for quite a bit, but I completely agree with Peter Torr when he criticize Firefox secuirty problems.
He sums it up very nicely:

·Installing Firefox requires downloading an unsigned binary from a random web server

·Installing unsigned extensions is the default action in the Extensions dialog

·There is no way to check the signature on downloaded program files

·There is no obvious way to turn off plug-ins once they are installed

·There is an easy way to bypass the "This might be a virus" dialog

Scoble talks about trust and desktop search engines, but I don't like the way it's presented.

Scoble isn't an objective party, but even so, I think some of his points were directed too much toward other's flaws rather than their own strengths. Here are my answers:

1. Indexing cache or history - Reading the browser cache was a mistake, but why shouldn't I be able to search through my history? It's already built in into IE, so there are no privacy issues there. I often need to find some page that I visited, and the alternative to searching my history is searching Google :-)
2. Sending data back - MSN doesn't phone home if you're not part of customer experiance feedback, but that is the default for MSN DS and you can turn it off easily in both Google DS and MSN DS.
3. Sharing private data between users - It's nice that MSN DS doesn't do it, but a statement such as "Not sure about others." bring us back to the good ole days of MS FUD. As far as I know, GDS doesn't expose anything that you can't reach as your user, it just make it so much easier to find those things.
4. Index obfuscation - say what? I'm not sure how this is relevant, and I certainly didn't see an option in MSN DS to point it to another user index file and use that one, not even as admin. Even so, I can't think of many instances where this would be needed. And if so, simply running the software as that user would give me what I want.
5. Automatic downloads - I agree that GDS shoudln't auto install without asking, but can you really tell me that a security bug in MSN DS wouldn't be on Windows Update (In other words, it would auto-install on MS' recommended settings.) What GDS is doing wrong is that there should be an option (and yes, it should be on by default).

When all is said and done, I'm still using MSN DS rather than GDS because of the much slicker interface.

"There's no government like no government." -- Bumper sticker, seen in Berkeley, CA

"IBM: Impersonal Bellicose Magnate" -- Tech Support Slogan

Most of what I do with the computer this days is reading books / essays / blogs :-) / web / etc.

For those things, protraint mode is superb, as Scooble often tells us.

I don't have the dough to invest in a Tablet PC  - prices in Israel are outragous, the cheapest model I found costs over 9300 NIS ($2,152.28), while my laptop cost less then 8,000 NIS ($1,851.2) for much better performance.

But I'm digressing, I got myself a LCD monitor some time ago, and the one feature that it has that makes sure that I would never go back to CRT monitor is that it rotate to portait mode.

It's a LG L1800P, and while it may not be the prettiest thing out there, it's wonderful.

For the games, I play HL2 on it and I can't notice any degration in performance then a CRT monitor.

I'm 23 years old today :-D

A lot more people then I thought has called and congratulated me. I didn't know that my birthday was so wide known.

It's good to have friends.

"Everybody needs a little love sometime; stop hacking and fall in love!" -- Tech Support Slogan

Regarding yesterday's posts, I'm listening to Queen's collection and I suddenly heard this song, spooky:

"The gentile shall not see us cry, nor hear our mourn and moans,
With bodies sturk with despair and falling to our knees with a groan;
After their pleasure on the blood, they shall not thrive on the tears."

This is my attempt to translate a (part of a) poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg (full Hebrew version found here).
Far harder to do it then I thought it would be.

I've been searching up on the net about the Israel vs. Palestinians conflicts. Found quite a bit of opinions, a lot of hot heads some opinions that I've not seen before, both pro and against Israel. It has been an interesting, if sometimes infuriating read.

I've finally found a New York Times article from Feb 26 1990 that relates very strongly to current events in the Middle East, it's called "Judging Israel". I've been taught about it, but this was the first time that I actually read it. Very good read, even fourteen years after it was first published.

Here are some selective quotes:

"Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as "one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and knows it." Czechoslovakia is a small nation. Judea was.
Israel is.
THe U.S. is not."

"That is a double standard. What does a double standard mean? To call it a high standard is simply a euphemism. That makes it sound like a compliment. In fact, it is a weapon. If I hold you to a higher standard of morality than others, I am saying that I am prepared to denounce you for things I would never denounce anyone else for."

"The conscious deployment of a double standard directed at the Jewish state and at no other state in the world, the willingness systematically to condemn the Jewish state for things others are not condemned for - this is not a higher standard. It is a discriminatory standard. And discrimination against Jews has a name too. The word for it is anti-Semitism."

As a person who is constantly in touch with Palestinians terrorists (in the most literal sense of the word, several of them has blood on their hands) I cannot disagree with the sense of this double standard, and I acutely feel how much this double standard is harming Israel. I'm by no mean an objective on this subject, but it's just so frustrating sometimes.

I turned on the monitor a few moments ago and discovered a huge red warning dialog about viruses in MSN Search's directories. I couldn't understand what was happenning until I checked my junk mail, and then I saw several files that most propaply contain viruses. (You know, those email with a "re:" as a subject and a .cpl file).

I'm getting quite a bunch of those, but Outlook is very nice and just block them, and my filters automatically flag them and throw them in the junk. But MSN Search found it and copied the files to its temp directory, where my anti virus found it.

Any ideas how to solve it?

"Dreams are free, but you get soaked on the connect time." -- Tech Support Slogan

"You think Mercedes Lackey should be a cultural icon." -- Unknown