The first two weeks at my new job have passed very quickly. I am still very happy and confident that I have made the right choice. The people are smart and pretty easy to get along with, both on my team and in the rest of the company (at least as far as I can tell so far). I attended the first bi-weekly company meeting on Friday and was reminded of the fact that we are still a small startup, where the CEO updates the company every week or two, the entire company discusses new products, shares other news, etc....

This is a follow-up to my previous posting on several Eclipse shortcomings, mostly regarding JSP support. As I was confused by the relationship between the official M1 release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project and the various initial contributions, I did a little more research on this. It turns out that quite a few people on the Eclipse newsgroups had the same question… The initial contributions (IBM and Lomboz) are now obsolete and will be replaced by the WTP....

Today was my first day at my new job, and it looks very promising. The company has some great ideas and there are many interesting projects coming up. The environment is refreshingly different from my last two companies, partially due to the entirely different space (mobile entertainment and applications), as well as the fact that I am not working on a shrink-wrap product per-se, but on the server-side infrastructure for mobile applications....

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced plans to establish free Wi-Fi Internet access for everybody in San Francisco. Parts of the city, including Union Square, already offer this service. (via The Wireless Weblog)

Here is a nice tutorial for Hibernate, a Java-based ORM (object-relational mapping) tool. In the last couple of years, I’ve been fairly removed from the database layer, as the applications I have worked on all had some kind of proprietary database abstraction layer, and most of my work was on the application layer above. It’s likely that I will get closer to the database layer again, and while I am still confident enough in my SQL and JDBC skills, I feel that an ORM tool such as Hibernate can save a lot of time in many cases....