I've written a short article on the Cafes about comparing strings in a case insensitive fashion.
The Software Development 2005 Expo in Santa Clara next month (March 14-18) is looking for a few more volunteers to man doors, distribute notes, and similar tasks. For each day a you volunteer you get to attend the conference for a day free, and most volunteer days involve nothing more strenuous than sitting in the back of the room listening to the presentation, and collecting eval forms at the end; so really, it's a nice way to attend the show for free.
Sun has posted a revised public draft review of Java Specification Request 243: Java™ Data Objects 2.0 - An Extension to the JDO specification. The previous draft was voted down. It's not immediately apparent to me whether this draft satisfies the concerns of the naysayers on the last draft (mostly related to the relationship between JDO and EJB persistence).