Occasional Thoughts

Once again Wordpress has released a new update that fixes several security flaws in earlier version. Among the current fixes is a fix for a remote SQL injection. Attacker can get access to account data. I really like the functionality and extensibility of Wordpress. However this constant flow of critical security fixes does not help to raise the level of thrust into the quality of that product. Come on, developers. SQL injections are well known and easy to prevent in 99%. Where is your quality testing?

Some days ago I got a new TFT: 20" with a native display resolution of 1600x1200. Finally I can work with Eclipse and see the 80 character word wrap border with Navigator window on the left and Outline window on the right. However I faced some unexpected problems until I was able to enjoy the full resolution on the secondary screen of my Compaq NW8240 running SuSE Linux 10.2.

Unfortunately you have to understand some German to notice how silly it is to translate Java terms like it has been done by Dr. Welf Löwe and Markus Noga from the University of Karlsruhe. See the pages 22, 24 and 26 of this German presentation [de, PDF] about EJBs.

Frequently I receive emails from my colleagues that contain long emails to our defect tracking tool or to user stories in XPlanner. These URLs a longer than 80 characters. I am using Thunderbird, most of my colleagues are using Microsoft Outlook. The problem with these URLs, is that a line break is inserted within the URL. Therefore only the first part is clickable, the part in the next line not. When opening the URL, only the part in the first line is used. In Thunderbird I can easily workaround this problem with the URL Link plugin. However when replying my colleagues are also unable to click on the Link in their Outlooks. After some investigations with a friendly colleague, it turned out that once again the Problem is caused by a awkward Email handling of Outlook.

If you want to get a quick introduction to what SOA is and what the principles and the components are I recommend the excellent article What is service-oriented-architecture by Radhu Kodali. And as a follow-up there is another good article by Jon Brodkin that discusses SOA's 6 burning questions which might give you a real world perspective on the pro's and con's.