Daniel E. Markle's Blog

There has been much talk recently about the most recent Microsoft-funded anti-Linux study. Most recently, an analysis of the study shows critical flaws in the methodology used. Basically they installed over 150 superfluous packages which inflated the number of "security problems." Most interesting to me however is the clear lack of understanding of proper administration by those who ran the study.

I noticed this rather interesting pair of billboards while eating yesterday evening. They must mean one of three things.

• This is an advertisement for something other than a hospital, otherwise if they are in this area they are contradicting themselves. What are they, a midwife service?
• The advertised hospital isn't in this area, which begs the question why are they advertising here.
• They left out the word "other" as in "any other hospital," in which case this is a rather embarassing grammar mistake to have on such public display.

Whenever using struts html:text tags, be careful with the 'disabled' flag. It may appear that it just disables the field for input, and indeed it shows the value in the form in the grayed-out field. In reality though, it is going to send a null value when you submit the form regardless of what seems to be the case.

Use the 'readonly' flag instead if you want a non-null value to be submitted.

In the course of working on more J2EE web applications, I am starting to run into things that annoy me about Java. One of the biggest annoyances I run into when developing web applications in Java is the lack of support for String in case constructs. Apparently I am not alone.