A gori flipping through Raghu Rai’s coffee table book on Taj Mahal (Rs 3,000). She places the book back on the shelf and exits. Past the magazine stall, past the doggie shop, past Blanco, past the kebab corner, up the stairs, past Anokhi and into Market Café. More goras inside. One reading The Economist (Rs 150). The other working on his Apple notebook (Rs 50,000). No empty table.

7pm in Khan Market.

No one writes about Delhi like my friend Mayank, so I have to plug his blog once again. The occasion is two recent articles I consider to be among his best.

I have been to Garstin Bastion Road, the city’s red-light district, just next to New Delhi railway station (Ajmeri Gate), more than once.  [...]

However, one evening, I gathered up courage, climbed the stairs, knocked at the door and walked into a kotha — and into a living room.

Feature – Talking Life in GB Road.

Interestingly enough, I can’t find any mention of this at Tehelka or the Times of India.

Update 2008-07-03: Still not much news coverage. The Guardian has an article, and newindpress.com has an interesting interview with movie director Deepa Mehta. She shocked India in 1996 with “Fire“, the story of a Lesbian couple, at a time when many believed homosexuality didn’t exist in India. (It’s a great movie, btw!) Years later, the movie still wasn’t shown in most cinemas. When I was in Delhi, I saw it in an open-air screening in the German embassy – behind closed doors.

Last weekend, I took a break from hiking and spent some quality time in the city – it was the weekend of Geneva’s biggest festival, the Fête de la Musique (Festival of Music).  It’s one weekend packed with concerts of all kinds, some open-air, some in classic concert halls, some with orchestras, some by street musicians.  The weather was fabulous, a little too hot even (now it’s really too hot!).

I spent only Saturday evening and a little of Sunday evening on the festival, which is a shame. I managed to pretty much waste my Saturday until the evening with shopping and laundry, by being lazy and unorganized and not feeling too well.  At least Saturday night made up for it.

I slowly wandered through Parc de la Bastion, my favorite park, towards the Old City, stopping all the time to watch people and listen to music. I met an English fellow from a previous Sunday hike there, and we spent the sunset down at the lakeside, then made our way back to Bastion to listen to one of the best sets of electronic music I ever heard.  The two young DJanes, Kyssia and Myssi Sensi, seriously rocked the park.  They covered a pretty broad range from House to Techno with some Drum’n'Bass influences, and were not afraid of adding quite some noise here and there, which made me especially happy :-) They are Geneva locals, and have their own independent label o’xensa, and that’s a site I’ll definitely keep checking for events.

Following up on that with a couple of refreshing beers made sure that this Sunday’s hike wasn’t going to happen for me. Which was fine, because my coworker Jerven had organized a picnic at the lakeside, where we happily spent the whole afternoon doing nothing.

As you can see, I had, of course, my new camera with me.  Some shots turned out pretty nice, but most of them have problems with sharpness, focus, or lighting.  I still have a lot to learn, and the SLR doesn’t do as much hand-holding as the compact one.  But it’s great fun.

Starting next Tuesday and ending the following weekend, there’s the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival. “The Swiss event for fantastic films, Asian cinema and future images”? – I’m sold. And I’ve never been to Neuchâtel, about an hour from here, anyway, so that should make a nice weekend trip.

During the whole of July and August, Geneva hosts the Musiques En Été (summer music) festival. In various venues, among them the old courtyard of the town hall in the Old City, jazz and classical concerts are hosted.

Also in July and August, OrangeCinema brings open-air cinema directly at the lake. Just look at the photos on the site! Amazing.

Since the Love Parade, every city must have a similar event, contrived or not. In Geneva, it’s, unsurprisingly, called Lake Parade and will be on July 12th this year. Well, there might be some good electronic music, making me have a look although it’s not exactly my kind of event.

No, I’m not finished yet! Two more to go!

From July 31st to August 10th 2008, Geneva hosts the Geneva Festival 2008. It’s an official event organized by the City’s institutions, and seems to offer a broad range of events. August 1st is the Swiss national holiday, so at least on this day there should be some interesting happenings.

Finally, August 29th to September 13th will see a festival called La Bâtie. From looking at the website, I honestly am not sure what that’s about, but it sure looks interesting. Music, dance, modern art, and lots of chicken and roosters running around. Look at the video on the page if that sounds weird to you :-)

As usual, it was quite cloudy and the view suffered, but we still managed to get a few breathtaking glimpses. In fact, concerning the panorama, this was the most impressive hike so far. The Sous-Dine has no clearly defined summit, but is a stretched range with a steep dropoff on one side. Along the whole range, you can see Lac Léman on one side and the giants of the French Alps on the other! The Sous-Dine itself consists to a large part of rocks that have been splintered, perforated and bleached white over time, which gives the scenery a feel of being more exotic or high up than it actually is.

The starting point is easy to find. Drive towards Thorens, and turn left at the sign “Col des Fleuries”, which is easy to overlook!, and drive until the end of the road. The path up is sign-posted all the way through.

We said that we definitely want to repeat this one on a day with clear view. There is a route circling the mountain, so we still have some variety to look forward to.

Last week, the lake Lac de Gers [fr] in the mountains around the curiously named, but really beautiful village Sixt Fer à Cheval in the French Haute-Savoie region was our destination. To be honest, the hike isn’t that spectacular. It starts with a steep ascent, then follows some idyllic meadows with grazing cows towards the lake at the end of the high valley. There’s a cheese dairy, restaurant, and mountain hut all in one. It’s probably due to the again very obscured view that I didn’t find it that exciting, although I must say that it has everything a classic relaxed hike must have. It follows a beautiful river with some waterfalls, there are cows, a mountain lake with the characteristic stillness and mirror-like reflection, and a cool beer at the end.

These cameras give better results all round due to the higher quality of their electronics and lenses, but especially in low light conditions and with moving subjects. In addition, they allow completely or partially manual operation, for experimentation or simply when the automatic mode doesn’t get a particular situation.

I opted for a Nikon D60 with an 18-55 mm lens. Lacking experience of my own, I could only judge by reviews and personal recommendations, and the Nikon entry level series does very well there.

Now there’s a lot to learn. Aperture, focal length, sensor size, ISO: you name it, photography has it. My favorite so far is “circle of confusion”, however. That’s something I can relate to.

I’ll need to get a decent book on this. Of course, being the web nerd I am, I googled and clicked around longer than what’s sensible and found Cambridge In Colour by far the best introductory site to photography.

Now, on to trying the thing out!

The glocals group was great. We were an impressive 17 or so people, and I didn’ t even count the different nationalities. It was great to meet so many nice people as I’m new in Geneva. That plus great hikes means I’ll join again next Sunday!

If someone finds this when researching practical hiking information: the French page I linked above has all the information. If you can’t read French, the gist is, drive to the tiny village l’Ermont, near Belleveaux; it’s on Google Maps. From there, the paths are signposted. It’s an ascent of 850 meters, and the round trip should take four to five hours. Some of the paths are narrow and steep, and while it’s not dangerous, it can be difficult to walk when it’s wet and muddy.

Starting with a short and pleasant hike at Lac Léman (Lake Geneva/Genfer See), I did a round trip starting in Morges, between Genève and Lausanne. Clocking in at around 2.5 hours, it leads through a lovely scenery where vineyards, pastures, and little villages alternate. There’s no need to describe the route in detail here, as it’s recommended by the Morges tourist office and thus marked and signposted pretty well. You can get a copy of a map with the route and a short description there. The hike starts at the train station, which is just five minutes from the lake, and leads to the villages of Joulens and Monnaz (lovely!), with great views over the lakes. From Monnaz, it crosses the valley to reach the castle of Vufflens (not open to the public). From there, it leads back in a similar fashion via the village Denes. Alternatively, follow the valley between Monnaz and Vufflen for a straight route back to Morges. It’s a pleasant footpath along the creek, and shady.

Today I faced the problem of checking whether a given JDBC Connection is valid. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that “valid” means “it works” – you can successfully issue queries with it.

Java 6 introduced the isValid() method for just that. We’re on Java 5, however. There is isClosed(), which probably does two thirds of the job. But one can think of several more or less obscure cases where a Connection that was not formally closed would stop working.

Discussing with a coworker, we quickly came up with a promising approach: After ensuring the connection is not closed, issue a SQL statement and if no exceptions result, it apparently works. Now, ideally, we’d like the SQL statement to not depend on a particular database, and neither on specific database and table names. What we need is a generic query, that works on every SQL-compliant engine and doesn’t make any assumptions about the schema. The problem is that it’s hard to find out, for a given query, whether it’s pure SQL. And not only that: even if it is, that doesn’t mean that all vendors implemented this part of the standard!

For example, I browsed through the PostgreSQL documentation as I remembered it to be well-written and clearly laid out. I found a promising candidate for our generic query, the values statement:

VALUES computes a row value or set of row values specified by value expressions. It is most commonly used to generate a “constant table” within a larger command, but it can be used on its own. [...]

A bare VALUES command: VALUES (1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three');

[...] VALUES conforms to the SQL standard, except that LIMIT and OFFSET are PostgreSQL extensions.

Nice! But, being suspicious, I tried it out on MySQL:

mysql> VALUES (1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three');
ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax

Oops. (Oracle doesn’t do it either.) On the other hand, the Postgres docs shatter my hopes concerning a simple SELECT 1, or any arithmetic query:

PostgreSQL allows one to omit the FROM clause. [...] Some other SQL databases cannot do this except by introducing a dummy one-row table from which to do the SELECT.

In fact, Oracle doesn’t accept such queries.

I couldn’t come up with a statement satisfying both criteria. For not depending on table names, you could issue a meta query like show tables. But these are not part of the SQL standard – show tables, for instance, is MySQL-specific.

As I didn’t manage to come up with such a query, I tried some pretty desperate things. Let’s explore some of the joys of SQL+JDBC.

What we want to test is not the database itself, but the connection to it. So, can’t we just send any bogus to the server, which will throw an exception in any case, and then distinguish between a SQL exception and a JDBC exception? Well, I was a bit mislead here initially by my Hibernate experience: JDBCException comes from Hibernate. In JDBC, everything that goes wrong throws a SQLException. Still, according to the API, we can distinguish the cases. Any exception related to the database is a SQLException, and it has

a “SQLstate” string, which follows either the XOPEN SQLstate conventions or the SQL:2003 conventions.

Ouch, two different standards for SQLState. And a look into one of them shows that the states go into the hundreds. JDBC to the rescue: SQLSyntaxErrorException.

The subclass of SQLException thrown when the SQLState class value is ‘42‘. This indicates that the in-progress query has violated SQL syntax rules.

42 sounds awesome. Let’s check this on our Oracle database by sending the SQL statement “bogus”. Eh, what? SQLState is null. According to Oracle, that shouldn’t be the case. Table 1 in this article, for instance, lists some errors with example queries that should all lead to SQLState 42. However, it happened here using ojdbc14.jar.

OK, that was promising, but didn’t work out. Desperation led me to the next idea: if Java 6 provides this nice isValid(), someone must implement it, right? Let’s look at the source. However, the implementation is not provided by the Java SE, but by the JDBC vendors. And a quick look in the MySQL JDBC driver (Oracle’s is obviously closed source) revealed that they indeed use their own low-level interface to the database. Obviously, given the above mess.

After a couple hours, some of which some were in my free time as I got hooked and it really wasn’t that important for the project (remember, there’s isClosed()), I still don’t know how to check a JDBC connection in a database vendor- and schema-independent way. But it was a fun ride. For a very weird and nerdy definition of fun.

• selbstmordrate studenten karlsruhe
• tibetische schlampe
• i don’t know what my thesis is about

:-)

My India photos have always been available via the custom thumbnail page I made for them on this blog, but now they are all back on flickr, and I can see their statistics. A rather bland photo of a shopping center has almost three times as many hits as the one ranked second. Funny. The second ranked also shows an area of Delhi known mainly for shopping (although the picture wouldn’t suggest it; the visitors come mostly from search engines, however). There seems to be a lack of Delhi shopping resources on the net!

My introduction at Swiss-Prot has been a very pleasant and painless experience. The people were so welcoming and helpful, and let me explore the large number of ongoing projects with all the documentation etc. before loading my task list. So, now I’ll spend my days sitting at my desk in the Swiss-Prot office, which manages to be a really nice place despite being an open-plan office. Actually, I suspect I’m the kind of person being prone to like that more than the seclusion of a private office anyway, seeing as I always preferred to live in colocation, too. Still, it’s bright, spacious, and reasonably quiet.

I won’t get into technical details here, that’s planned for a couple of posts in the tech category, suffice it to say that I’ll work on editors and their web front ends for database curators. The curators are biologists who review scientific publications and experimental data and enter the results in a concise form into our Swiss-Prot database (and related ones). The user interface is not the problem here, as it’s pretty straightforward; the challenge is the complex data model needed to describe the gazillion of entities involved in even simple biological processes, and their relations.

This weekend, I enjoyed the awesome weather and strolled throughout the city, with some leisurely reading and sightseeing breaks at the fabulous lake side. It’s a really, really beautiful place. Tomorrow I hope to get a longish hike done on the Salève, Genève’s landmark mountain. Yay, mountains!

I even met with two former fellow students from Karlsruhe, Qiangqiang and Ting. Qiangqiang works here since a few months, and it’s nice to have a contact you already know.

Ahem, didn’t I announce recently that there would be no diary-like entries? Well, perhaps it was good for me to recap the week, with all the new impressions. I hope I didn’t bore anyone. Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading or hearing from you (you’ll find me on Skype, btw). Cheers from Switzerland.

Also, I haven’t yet announced the photos from our recent trip to Vienna.

As usual, clicking leads to my photo page, where you can browse through the other photos.

Starting May 5, I’ll be a software developer in the Swiss-Prot group, which develops and annotates the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot protein sequence database, the most widely used protein information resource in the world. Also, the group develops or co-develops other databases such as PROSITE, ENZYME, and ExPASy.

Obviously, there’s a lot of software development and maintenance involved, throughout the stack from databases to web frontends, along with the integration of analysis tools and data export in different formats.

The domain the SIB deals with brings some challenges that will certainly keep the job interesting (and me busy ;-): the huge volumes of data with complex interrelations, the mix of different technologies, and the rapid pace of progress in the Life Sciences. Add to that the research-oriented nature of the institute and the international collaborations the SIB is part of, and I guess I have an awesome job. Also, Genève is certainly a very beautiful (if expensive) city, with the best surroundings a mountain-lover like me could dream of. And learning proper French has always been a pet project of mine, now it will evolve into a must-do project – certainly a good thing. Yes, as you might have noticed, I’m really looking forward to the new job!

I don’t have a permanent flat yet, the SIB provided me with temporary accomodation until I find something. Also, I don’t have a local phone connection yet. So if you’d like to contact me, and I hope many of you will, please do it via e-mail or via this blog.

The main categories will be, for a start:

• life: about me.  Expect more practical news rather than introspective diary-like entries. RSS news feed.
• geneva: logging my explorations of my new city and its surroundings. RSS news feed.
• tech: all things software development. RSS news feed.
• india: From February to August 2007 I wrote my Master’s thesis as an exchange student at IIT Delhi, India. While I was in India, I blogged mainly about my “India experience” here. During that time, I wrote in German, as most of my friends and relatives are German and not all speak English well enough to read an English language blog. Since I returned, I blog about India once in a while in English. RSS news feed.

When you click on a category, you will notice that it reflects in the URL in the browser’s address field.  So, if you’re only interested in one or two categories, bookmark the categorized address and go straight there.

I hope this is not too complicated, and you will continue to drop by. Please leave a comment once in a while, I’m always happy to find one!

Hi Thomas,

Augustus Adolf hitler (augustushitler@yahoo.co.in) has requested to be your friend on orkut.

To confirm or reject this request click [...]

Wow.  So he still lives, and is in India, eh?  According to his profile, he looks for friends, activity partners and business networking.

The two hitler groups on Orkut apparently have 1300 members combined.  Ouch.

Man, that’s something that had me stunned a couple of times in India, the veneration or at least frequent praise for Hitler.  This Orkut “profile”, prank or not, is not an isolated phenomenon.  The first reaction of several Indians I met when hearing that I’m German was something like “Oh, Hitler, great man!”.  Usually along with some mention of the Aryan race.  Other, more moderate and educated people argued that Hitler at least wasn’t all bad, and that the blame for WWII should be equally distributed due to the injustice of the Versailles treaty.  Just for the record, I believe the notion that even the most injust treaty or ruling could justify a world war with 60+ million victims is ridiculous, and that should go without saying, but I digress.

I can’t figure out where this widespread opinion in India comes from.  The term Aryan is actually still in use in science, for instance in linguistics, but this has nothing at all to do with the infamous “Aryan Race” concept that was invented in the 19th century and is nowadays known to be invalid, hate-inspiring bogus.  Also, the Germans were always rather India-friendly, especially of course during the Third Reich when Britain was a common enemy, but the pragmatic political reasons for this are obvious.

You could say that it’s simply the lack of education of the general Indian public, but shouldn’t then Hitler rather not exist at all in their world view?  He seemed to be the first association with Germany for some people, however.

Even Indian politics are not free from Nazi-adoring tendencies.  In 2006, there was a public outcry over school books which contained praise, but little criticism with regard to the Führer in the state of Gujarat, known for its right-wing voting behavior.

At least Hitler’s Cross restaurant in Mumbai was just a publicity stunt and has quickly been renamed.

The solution: do a flush(), then a merge(), then a commit().  Looks quite strange to me, and I can’t wrap my head around why that works and all my other approaches didn’t.  But work it does.

Your objects acting as tree nodes must implement an interface, but it’s really a minimal tree interface, so you should have those methods anyway:

public interface DataTreeObject<T> {
    public Collection<T> getChildren();
    public void addChild(T child);
    public T getParent();
}

[Added 2008-04-10] A live demo is up on the databinder site.

An additional tiny addition to the 1.1.1 release from me is that the RemoveRepeaterItemButton can now be configured with a minimum of elements which must remain in the collection. For instance, if you want to let users remove addresses in their profile while one must always be present, you instantiate the button with a minimum of one and when only one address remains, the button disables itself.