A few weeks ago I had to install an Oracle 11gR2 database on my local development machine. Unfortunately, the installer always crashed before starting the installation, causing an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION in the 64-Bit Server VM (1.5.0_17-b04 mixed mode) on Windows 7.

After a few hours of digging around it turned out that I had to remove my "Downloads.lnk"-link from the Windows desktop to get the installer to work. This is just crazy!

I included the stacktrace in the full article, just in case this might be useful for somebody.

During software development it's often tedious to map properties from one object to another. For example, if you have objects for your view on one side, and database objects on the other, and you have to get the values out of the database objects into the view objects.

This article shows you how you can simplify this task by using my self-written free and open source PHP AutoMapper library.

A minor update for PADEdit, which allows opening and editing of files which contain one or more special datasets of type 700. PADEdit now also remembers the last used file path in the file dialogs.

Here it is - Task Till Dawn 1.7. This version brings some important bugfixes and some useful new features as well.

Task Till Dawn was rated by Macworld as a Mac Gem, with four of five possible Macworld mices!

The complete review can be read online on the Macworld homepage.

With OS X 10.7 "Lion" the chess game now seems to be an integral part of the system. The screenshot says: The object "Chess" cannot be modified or deleted because it is required by Mac OS X.

It took a long time, but now here it is: version 1.6 of Task Till Dawn!

The new version brings more correction possibilities for some datasets. Also, a proxy-server can now be set in the network preferences.