Not difficult if you happened to be a Russian. Yesterday I was waiting in line in a pharmacy, and there was a woman before me who walked carefully, leaning heavily on her walker. Something was strange in her posture, and then I figured what it was: she was wearing shoes with high heels. Even before she started to talk to her husband I knew: she was a Russian.
A recent article in the Economist talks about various ads Apple has used over time to position itself, e.g. Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 video, and the current “Get a Mac” campaign that targets Microsoft Windows. Now that Microsoft has a marketing problem of its own (in the shape of the much-maligned Windows Vista), it has come up with “The Mojave Experiment“, which is supposed to show that Vista isn‘t as bad as people think it to be. The premise of the experiment is rather flawed, which has been widely discussed. Now the Economist -which is not generally concerned with operating systems- joins in: “You could be forgiven for wondering whether Apple had commissioned the advertisement. It was Microsoft at its worst.” Ouch. The article goes on to mention that Microsoft has also started to work with another ad agency…
To me, one of the more useful pieces of the WS-* stack is WS-Security. Web services are out in the open and need proper security. Unfortunately, there isn‘t yet a standard on how to apply WS-Security to a SOAP service, so each SOAP stack does its own thing. The Metro stack -the reference implementation of JAX-WS and a slew of related APIs- is no exception. Recently I was trying to figure out how to apply WS-Security to a JAX-WS service. Without using NetBeans or GlassFish, neither of which I use. Go ahead, try to find an example of how to do that. The closest I found is this article, which talks about the web service features of Java 6 SE, not JAX-WS per se.
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Last week one of the famous rock arches of Arches National Park in Utah -called Wall Arch- collapsed from erosion under its own weight. These are before/after pictures of it:
“If we have more NATO troops in Afghanistan, then that’s potentially fewer American troops over the long term, which means we’re spending fewer billions of dollars, which means we can invest those billions of dollars in making sure we’re providing tax cuts to middle class families who are struggling with higher gas prices that will have an impact on our economy.”
Way to go, Mr Obama. He said this (in a CNN interview) while still being in one of the countries he’s asking to contribute more, no less. As the WSJ notes, this is not the way to keep up a flowering romance. The rebuke was short and swift: “Under no circumstances will [ taxpayers ] pay with more money and more troops for Afghanistan for tax cuts in the U.S.”
I’m not sure if this Middle-Eastern/European trip achieved its aim of convincing voters in the USA that Mr Obama is not the foreign-policy lightweight he’s made out to be, but by this remark alone he undid all the good will he might have accrued over here. Maybe foreign politics isn’t so simple after all.
Ulf blogged about Barack Obama’s visit to Berlin, and we have something going here, in San Francisco, too. I just learned that last Christmas a tiger escaped from SF Zoo and killed a visitor. Now, I live about ten blocks from the SF Zoo, and I can’t say that a thought of tigers roaming the neighborhood thrills me. San Francisco is located in an earthquake-ridden zone, and when I moved here I decided it would be a good idea to get some “Surviving SF” classes. I was taught how to assess whether a building is safe to enter a damaged building, or how to pull dead bodies from under debris. (The woman who taught “corpses excavation” course had an awesome sense of black humor. I still shudder when I remember her jokes.) Best of all, I was given a free helmet upon graduating, so I think I am pretty well prepared now. But tigers… I certainly need to learn some tiger fighting techniques and probably get some anti-tiger ammunition.
A couple of hitmen need to hide out for a while and are sent to Bruges. While one enjoys the sights of the medieval city, the other is looking for less exalted pleasures. Eventually, things become … more complicated, involving their boss, a dwarf, a couple of Canadian tourists, a couple of locals preying on tourists, romance, beer, a weapons dealer, a pregnant landlady and much else, not least beautiful pictures of the city. In the end, a surprising amount of humanity is on display, considering the profession of the protagonists. Not that all of them survive, mind you. Having seen images of the city for the first time, I’ve resolved to go there myself some day, so it’s a cinematic ad for the city as well.
More info at imdb.com
San Francisco Chronicle announced that currently the majority of Californians oppose the proposition to forever define a “Californian marriage” as a holy or unholy union between a man and a woman. (Likely voters oppose marriage initiative) Is inevitable going to happen in our time? It came as a surprise to me, because up to now I thought that the majority considers it their moral duty to throw their unarmed bodies in front of marching progress — in hope to stumble it, I think.
The number is not-so-impressive-but-still-promising 51%, even though in the Bay Area the supporters of our rights to marry whomever we are damn pleased to marry outnumber defenders of a marriage as we know it by 3 to 1. We didn’t get that “Sodom by the Bay” title for nothing. 
Quote: «Fifty-one percent of likely voters in the state oppose Proposition 8 on the November ballot, a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage by defining marriage as only between a man and woman, according to a Field Poll released today. The poll shows voters are divided by where they live, their age, gender and political party.»
John O’Conner -a Sun employee until recently- blogged about his Java experiences outside of Sun. He lists three things in particular that were news to him:
Frankly, I’m shocked that this is news to anyone, much less to a Sun employee who’s actively using Java.
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Much ado about Senator Obama in Berlin
Today Mr Obama is visiting Berlin, and as part of the visit he gives a public speech on … something. We don’t know yet what it’s about. All we know is that there has been a two-week-long brouhaha about where he could give the speech.