I am a big fan of Robert Hensing’s blog, which details his dealings with security problems in the Windows world. He’s got strong opinions, but he reports really interesting details about fighting the good fight on the Microsoft side of the world.

So I was fairly surprised when his post about the new MySQL worm on Windows started with this sentence: “So it seems that there is a new MySQL bot that is spreading to Windows machines running MySQL with weak SA (or whatever MySQL’s equivalent is) passwords.” If the head of Microsoft’s incident response team can’t be bothered to even learn the name of the feature that is causing the problem, just because it isn’t a Microsoft product, that doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in their ability to work well with the community.

Robert probably didn’t mean to sound that way, but he should probably realize that, as a public face of Microsoft’s security team, it might be better to at least pretend to care what other people are doing and how they do it.

Being the good security citizen that I am, I thought I would give Apple’s FileVault a try. FileVault encrypts your home directory, which is useful for somebody whose laptop is often left unattended in a classroom during cookie breaks, like mine is. Turning FileVault on is a cinch, and performance-wise, I barely noticed a difference. The only problem I ever had was that when you delete files, the space isn’t reclaimed on disk until you allow FileVault to compress the space, but that only takes a few seconds whenever you log out, so I was happy.

Then, I decided to upgrade from 10.3.4 to 10.3.7. The update proceeded normally, without warnings or questions. But when I rebooted, it was as if I had installed OS X from scratch; no personal settings, no environment settings, nothing. The only things that survived were my username and password. Everything that eminated from my home directory was gone.

To date, I have no idea what really happened. My assumption is that the upgrade process saw a large, encrypted data block and decided “I don’t know what to do with that, and it is in my way, so I’ll get rid of it”. The saddest part of all this is that FileVault is intended to protect your data. Sigh.

I had a really eye-opening time taking part in a panel discussion at the end of the Javagruppen conference. Considering that in attendance were the guys who make Spring, a member of the Geronimo team, a member of the EJB 3.0 spec working group and several loud-mouthed interlopers (I consider myself firmly in that last camp), the panel discussion had a real potential to be a shouting match. Especially since there were some extremely declaratory statements made about the usefulness of EJB early in the weekend. It was a big pleasure, therefore, to see everyone really rise to the occasion and come to some agreement about the relative merits of the different approaches.

Most specifically, when one attendee brought up the question of simplicity vs. complexity, the discussion became really useful. It is just presupposed that lightweight containers are "simpler" and EJB is "more complex". But as Stuart pointed out to us all, sometimes it is pretty useful to be hit upfront with the complexity. EJB is more complex, but doesn’t pretend otherwise. It can be useful to confront that complexity all at once if, in fact, you need all that complexity to achieve your end goal. If, however, your end goal can be achieved without it, then a lightweight container which doesn’t pound you over the head with complexity up front can allow you to get your work done faster. If and when you need the complexity, you can lift the lid and look underneath.

The difference between the two approaches isn’t so much the relative complexity, but the modularity and plugability of the different approaches. The lighter frameworks put a premium on being able to ignore features you don’t need, and replace them if a better implementation comes along, while the "heavier" J2EE containers bake most of those choices into the framework and make you deal with the configuration complexity (at the very least) from the opening bell. But the truth is, sometimes that’s just what you need.

There’s this fantastic blog meme running around which goes “shuffle your iPod and list the first fifteen songs”. I’ve tracked it back this far before I ran out of energy. Regardless, I think it is everything a blog meme should be: self-centered, self-important, and mostly content-free. Its perfect. I’m in.

I’m in a castle in Denmark, its 1:31am, and here’s my list:

1. High Speed Train, R.E.M., Around the Sun 2. Final Straw, R.E.M., Around the Sun 3. Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’, The Reverend Horton Heat, Liquor in the Front – Poker in the Rear 4. Cornet Chop Suey, Louis Armstrong, The Hot Fives Vol. 1 5. That’s Why I’m Here, James Taylor, That’s Why I’m Here 6. Around the Sun, R.E.M., Around the Sun 7. Man on the Moon, R.E.M., Automatic for the People 8. Angels of the Silences, Counting Crows, Across a Wire 9. Hateful Hate, 10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man’s Zoo 10. Terrible Brain, Pressure Boys, The Complete Recordings 11. Frank Sinatra, Cake, Fashion Nugget 12. VooDoo Roller, Space, Spiders 13. Until I Met You, Duke Ellington, First Time 14. Drop Dead, Space, Spiders 15. Fire, Jimi Hendrix, The Ultimate Experience

What does this list tell us? Well, start from the fact that the iPod had 3416 songs to choose from, and the fact that three of them are from the same R.E.M. album (not to mention the most recent album added to the library) and the “randomness” of shuffle is really called into question. There are also four boxed sets or “greatest hits” albums on the list, and another repeat with two songs from Space.

Maybe if I shake the iPod a little, it will random-up a bit….

Thanks to Niels Nielson for inviting a bunch of us out to Denmark to present at the Javagruppen user’s conference. As my first trip to Denmark, I have to say that I’m very fond of the country so far and wish I could stay longer. More importantly, the attendees at the conference are enthusiastic and quite friendly, which always makes for a nice weekend.

Mostly, I’m glad to be spending a weekend trapped with some of the finest minds in the Java space—Patrick Linskey of the JDO movement, Rod Johnson of the Spring Framework team, Ted Neward of Effective Enterprise Java fame, my business partner Stuart Halloway, my coauthor Bruce Tate, Jules Gosnell from the Geronimo group, and Jurgen Holler (also of Spring). That’s august company to be in, and its already been a great weekend of learning what’s out there pushing the limits.