if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.-- Karl Popper

as snatched from here.

.. isn't quite near, according to Java.

So I was looking for a useful constant that could be used as an end-Period marker that would mean 'not bound' (in other words: a period that lasts untill the end of time). In pure Java I would generally use null for this but I was assured that when jotting these in databases one would generally try to avoid the extra where-clause fuzz of needing to check for IS NULL and the like. Come to think of it, there is some extra testing in Java to avoid NPEs as well.

In cases like this I'm always looking for some absolute, universal (no discussion possible) value for such constant to avoid the pragmatic decision to just agree on some (arbitrary!, good heavens!) date like March 3rd, 3003. (Agreement is easily found as long as the date exceeds the life expectations of every member of the development team :-)) Yeah, vague memories of Y2K.

So what to think of this:

Date endOfTime = new java.util.Date(Long.MAX_VALUE);

FYI: Sun Aug 17 07:12:55 CET 292278994 -- 807 millis This is pretty much the time Java will surely die I guess, and if it's surviving untill then it will surely have been a huge success :-)

At the least it's quite an enteristing border case to test the validity of your date manipulation algorithms.

Anyways, sql databases seem to be generally cutting-off at 31-12-9999 23:59:59. so being driven from the database angle anyway I'm kinda setteling for less ambitious live spans of the software we're building :-)

Looking at the bulk of mail I received this morning from my Favourite Sun Employee it looks like Java's tiger release is getting it's official marks set...

Last week was in many ways quite surprising. Well, it actually had the potential to be quite confusing...

In the midsts of the whirlwind of happenings I had this strong association-flash-back to the small home-party after getting my engineering degree. I kinda confused everybody around the table then by reading out Robert Fulghum's classic 'All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten.' - While trying to be a tribute to the honest and straightforward values of my innocent childhood, it probably also raised some funny feeling of dissapointment with the family (being the only one with a university degree, they tend to look up to me all too often)

Any case the flashback made me look for it again. (thx google). The text is just midly funny and doesn't do a lot more then stop at observations most modern rush would just flash by. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong and in my perception also never tries to claim anything. To me it just helps put things in perspective and brings back some calm base...

Yeah, Relativising is probably the word by which a lot of people know me :-)

Boys and girls out there, our doors are open again. Please step in, be welcomed.

Wow, one day open and 8 countries present already...

1. To utterly get hooked on gettin' the stuff on the spot as you please when you need it; no fluff, just stuff : I just can't apt-get enough! (yeah, the depeche mode version!)

After my install 'n boot hazards most stuff just comes around nicely, and thanx to the initiating rite I've received I'm not to shy to pull out an extra kernel rebuild. This starts to become quite close to ZAAMM in practice :-)

So it took me some time, and I'm not even at the end yet, but up to now I've quite enjoyed the mind puzzle posed by the combination of

• a new bunch of hardware,
• debian sarge,
• building a 2.6.8 linux kernel and
• my greenhorn status in all of this...

The things this game offered me:

• first tricking round the watchdog (rmmod i810-tco),
• then straight on to apt-getting all kind of stuff required for kernel building,
• with the help of make menuconfig through the miriad of kernel-config options,
• combing through them once again, and again, and ...
• experiencing the sudden insight that compared to 2.4 the new kernel would take /dev/sda in stead of /dev/hda to talk about it's main drive,
• through the additional network-cable unmystifying the switching-between-kernel-versions-network-cards (eth0 <> eth1)
• and finally opening the gate to nirvana through installing the devfsd which is required if devfs support is in the kernel...

Yeah, never a dull moment! But I admit, I'm lucky to have found an excelent dynamically cooperating cheat-sheet. Thx again, mate!