I really don't approve of SATs, particularly for children as young as seven. So it's really rather hypocritical of me to be as pleased as punch at Freja's results, isn't it? Still, what can I do? I'm a parent, I can't be expected to be rational.
Freja was top of her year by a long way. She has a reading age of ten, and a similar level of attainment in maths. :-)
Irrational I may be, but I'm not going to get carried away. Freja is good at reading and maths mainly because she likes reading and maths. We have not pushed and will not push her or her sister along. I don't want Freja or Ella to stop having fun - and I don't want them to feel that their SATs scores affect how we feel about them.
Dad took a turn for the worse this weekend. It wasn't a serious problem, but quite uncomfortable; a side effect of the pain-killers that he's been taking. A real shame - he's been making very good progress otherwise.
Nothing to worry about, but not very nice for Dad. Things are a little better today, too.
I bought him a 2nd DVD player on Sunday, to go in the bedroom. He has been and will be spending a lot of time there, so it seemed a good idea. Besides, you can pick up a cheap-'n'-cheerfull player for fourty quid these days. Amazing. I also took over a pile of my discs for him to watch.
Oh, and don't forget - it's his birthday tomorrow.
Pragmatic Programmers Interview: "To get job security, developers need to position themselves as highly effective business-value generators, working with the rest of the company to solve common goals. If you sit in your cube waiting for a spec to be thrown over the wall, then you may be in for a wait -- that spec might be in an envelope on its way to Bangalore."
London Java Meetup - 12 July 2004. This meetup's topic is Groovy, James Strachan's dynamic language for the JVM. I've had my say on this before - what does it have that Jython doesn't have? The main answer seems to be that Groovy has a Java-like syntax. Since I prefer Python's syntax, this isn't a big win for me. ;-)
Groovy's other big plus points are either shared with Jython (transparent access to the Java API, ability to create real Java classes) or pretty minor (Groovy has closures).
Python offers me the advantage that I can use (pretty much) the same language for COM scripting, Windows API madness, you name it. Can't do these with Groovy!
Anyway, as I said last time, I like the people, and we never manage to stay on-topic anyway, so I'll be there.
Oh, and a big thanks to Jez for organising these.
I watched Muse's set at Glastonbury last night. They were fantastic. They really can do it live.
I wasn't actually there, I'm afraid; I watched it on (mainly) BBC3. Cath took my girls to Glastonbury yesterday, but they would have been in bed by the time Muse came on. Shame - the girls quite like them.
Muse are the find of the decade as far as I'm concerned. I have all three studio albums now; Showbiz, Origin of Symmetry and Absolution, plus their b-sides-plus-live-set effort, Hullabaloo. They are all good, but what's more, the later albums are better than the earlier. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with next.
Andy will leave a comment in a minute, calling them Radiohead rip-offs, or some such. You'll see. I think he's wrong, though; cetainly, Radiohead are an influence, but they have a voice of thier own, I think. Besides, I don't intend to start taking guidance in musical taste from a man who raves about Marillion. ;-)
BTW, I've been getting some odd comments on an earlier Muse related post of mine. This is why: www.google.com/search?q=Free+CD+Muse.
All quiet on the Dad front at the moment. He's a little better every day, but it's going to take a long time 'till he's back to 90%, and that's as far as he's likely to get - but that's good enough. We were worried that we wouldn't have him around at all, so 90% is all that we can ask.
I got him a couple of Dad's Army DVDs for his birthday - that'll keep him occupied.
Now we only have to wait for Henman to get knocked out of Wimbledon, and sport will be back on the back pages where it belongs.
I mean, current affairs doesn't push sport off the back page when something important happens, so why does sport get the front page after a big match?
Mutter mutter.
Ah, Total Annihilation, RTS of kings. Matt Croydon points out a nice K5 article about TA: Total Annihilation Redux. Lots of links to resources there, but I've always been satisfied with TA, The Core Contingency and ÜberHack.
Python development with Eclipse and Ant.
Python is my all time favorite tool, and Eclipse isn't far behind, so this has got to be good.
Via Erik.
Get 'em before the copywrite police get to 'em: Themed fonts.
Via Boing Boing.
Also via Boing Boing: Roll-your-own Zelda.
Woohoo! I love Generator expressions, and they are in!
ONJava is running a nice series of articles on JSP 2.0 (as supported by Tomcat 5.x): JSP 2.0: The New Deal, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
We are still on Tomcat 4.1.x at my shop, and hence on JSP 1.2. But there's a new project coming up soon. I fancy adding AppFuse, Spring, Hibernate, XDoclet and JSP 2.0 to our toolkit this time around....
Also: get shot of your web.xml taglib directives.
Update: Oh yes, I'd like to use the display tag library, too.
A suspension? Bring back the birch, I say.
Tony Blackburn suspended for playing Cliff Richard.
We are using Microsoft's own JDBC Driver for SQL Server. It seemed like the natural thing to do. It's not given us any trouble so far.
If it does, I'll bear jTDS in mind: jTDS is 100% JDBC 2.1 compatible, supporting forward-only and scrollable/updateable ResultSets, multiple concurrent (completely independent) Statements per Connection and implementing all of the DatabaseMetaData and ResultSetMetaData methods. A number of JDBC 3.0 features (such as retrieval of generated keys) are also implemented. It also claims to be the most stable and fastest available complete JDBC driver for SQL Server.
(About using SQL Server in the first place; yes, yes, I know. Not my decision. I registered my dissent, but it was out of my hands.)
The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh.
Via Andy Gimblett.
Dad went for a little walk yesterday, 30 yards down the road to his old friends Les & Eva's house. My brother Daniel and I were along, but our support was mostly moral rather than physical. Mostly.
He was absolutely shattered when we got home. He's on the road to recovery, but it'll be a long road.
Dad's back home. He flew in to Gatwick yesterday, and was brought back to the house by ambulance, arriving yesterday afternoon. I wasn't able to be there when he arrived - I was delivering the girls back to their mother - but I managed to get back not long afterwards.
Dad's fine mentally, but very frail physically. He's been almost totally immobile for two weeks, and eating no solid foods, so what muscle tone he had is now totally gone. He can't do stairs unassisted at the moment, and I can't see him making it out of the house for some time to come. The GP will be visiting later, so hopefully he'll be getting some good dietary and exercise advice, and some good drugs - he's still in a lot of pain.
He was advised at one point that he shouldn't drink tea! That's a cruel blow to an Englishman, but thankfully he's now been told that tea is fine as long as it's not too hot.
One surprise was that he's got two badly broken fingers on his left hand. Compared to the other problems that he's been having, this is pretty trivial stuff, but Dad will be upset if he's no longer able to play the bass. :-(
I own three items of foot-ware; a pair of sensible smart black leather work shoes, which I never wear, a pair of blue plimsolls, and a pair of tan leather boots. All three of these are Cats. This may be a coincidence, or perhaps I just like their style. Hmmm, that last one sounds unlikely - I don't do style. Whatever.
Thing is, now I find that we should be boycotting Caterpillar Inc. Bugger!
It's OK to keep wearing what I already have, isn't it, just so long as I don't buy any more?
I'm not what the general populace calls a hacker (and what we nerds call a cracker). I don't have the skills, and I've never had the inclination.
(I am also not what I'd call a hacker - but I'd like to be.)
I've never had the inclination before, but oh boy, I'd love to take these guys out...
He's sounding a million times better. Soon after he was taken ill, he was slurring badly; now he just sounds tired. He's still pretty fragile physically, but we hope to get him back soon.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckety fuck fuck bollocks.
I'm a bit pissed off.
Someone who shall remain nameless pulled my network cable out this morning, while sorting my phone out. Outlook went down in a trail of smoke, so I rebooted.
Ever since which, Outlook can't open the pst file in which I've been archiving my mail. For four years.
No problem, right? It's on the network, so I'll just get it restored.
Err, no - pst files don't get backed up on from our network, and nor do our home drives on the network. So that's two reasons why the file wasn't backed up.
Had I known this, I'd have kept the pst file on my local drive, and put zips of it onto the network weekly or so, somewhere where the backup will find them. Besides, it turns out that I shouldn't be keeping pst files on the network anyway. Sigh.
OK, let's see if the Inbox Repair Tool will do any good. I'm not optimistic.
Walking home from work through The City at sixish last night, and on the Tube home, it was bloody quiet. It was like being in 28 Days Later. Was somthing happening?
Dad's very much better now, I'm glad to say. He's totally fine mentally, thank goodness, but he's still a bit fragile physically; he gets tired extremely quickly. He should be coming back to the UK some time early next week, hopefully.
I certainly hope not; the odeous Robert Kilroy-Silk.
Via mad musings of me.
What do you put in your CSS font-familys? I know what fonts are available on Windows, and I know about the lowest common denominator generic-families - sans-serif and the like, but what I'd really like to know is what more attractive fonts might be found on other systems. The Web Style Guide, Typeography, Cross-platform issues is a good start, but it doesn't cover Linux.
It's occured to me that we really need to be able to do a bit of cross platform testing here. I've volenteered to take on the burden of using a top-end PowerBook, but the management has yet to get back to me on that one...
Well, near the river, at any rate. I'll be meeting Steve and Michael this evening at Studio Six, Gabriel's Wharf. All welcome.
OK, so, it looks like everybody lost this round of European elections; It's Labour's worst result since 1910, the Tories were down by 10%, and the Lib Dems were pushed into 4th place. And a good result for the UKIP is a loss for all of us.
Still, we have some new MEPs, so now is the time to write to them about Software Patents, so that we don't get this sort of farce going on.
Evil stuff! RunDLL32 allows you to do all sorts of nasty things from the Windows shell, or from batch files; here's a reference guide.
Via Joe Grossberg.
Well I never! I've lived somwhere along the Northern Line's southern stretch for over thirty years, and I never knew it was called Cock Pond. I was there only this Saturday - it's a very nice paddling pool, and I took the girls.
What rude place-names do you live near?
Via Boing Boing.
My Dad's pretty poorly. He was on a Med cruise last week, and on Tuesday he fell over and banged his head. This triggered an epileptic fit of some kind, which triggered what seems to have been a TIA - his second. He was taken to hospital in Corsica, the next landfall.
As if this wasn't bad enough, in the small hours of Thursday morning he started coughing and throwing up blood from his lungs and stomach, and was rushed to the ICU. Thank God, this turned out to be relativly minor - esophageal bleeding due to Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease exacerbated by total immobility. I didn't get much sleep that night, I can tell you.
He's stable, out of the ICU, and very much more comfortable now, but we still don't know when he'll be well enough to travel back to the UK. Thankfully, he's not on his own.
It's been a fraught few days...
Six Sides To A Box - BeanUtils, Digester, and Type Conversion. Useful stuff.
There's a new kid on the Java/Python integration block - JPype.
What can you do with this that you can't do with Jython? Well, for some reason I seem to spend a lot of my Python time poking at the Windows API, and Jython doesn't have win32all or ctypes!
Via Erik.
"KING RICHARD. OlazZtssi0cwX?QDjqkP9r]xfaBmlVU]e..."
Well, not all of them, anyway. ;-)
One of our biggest recent projects was a new Java front end to an old 5250 green screen application of ours. The majority of users were more than happy with the pretty new front end, but some were not. These users were finding that the GUI slowed them down.
Mouse considered harmful: "Have you ever watched an experineced heads down data entry clerk do thier job? With a green screen system they rarely look at the keyboard and in most cases ignore the screen. They are responding to audible feed back (key press clicks, console beeps, etc) with thier eyes focused on the data to be input. They remember key sequences (press 1, A, down arrow 2 times, F2 to save) to navigate. A mental model of the screens become engrained in thier head. They "SEE" the application in thier head and that vision is updated realtime. They know the system because it's predictable."
What's more, if the 5250 user gets ahead of the system, it doesn't matter - the 'dumb' terminal will just buffer their keystrokes, and play them back when the application is ready for them. So, they can enter data as fast as they can hit the keys.
I heard a story, probably apocryphal, about a salesman trying to sell what IBM calls a 'refacing' tool, and what the rest of the industry calls either a screen-scraper or a 'lipstick-on-a-pig' tool. He demonstrated how easy it was to slap a new front end on the 5250 app. The head of the data entry department then snipped off his mouse with a pair of scissors, and asked him to enter some data. "It costs us a penny every time one of our data entry people takes their hand off the keyboard," he explained.
Anyway, I've implemented a keystroke buffer for a Java app once before, and I know it's pretty much top of our to-do list for our pretty new front end. Perhaps then we can wean the last of our 5250 users onto it...
Via James Robertson.
Johann Hari: What next? Being called a minger by the Pope? Being told I have crap shoes by the Chief Rabbi?
Laughing Boy: You should have gobbed the baldy four-eyed get. It's the only language these spiritual leaders understand.
OK; let's see if I can nurse my poor, crippled blog through making a new post.
Via Andy, and just about everyone else who was at NotCon '04 on Sunday, I discover the wonderfull new TheyWorkForYou.com - basically Hansard in accessable form. You can even get an RSS feed to keep you up to date with what your MP is up to!
Tomorrow is election day. You must vote - the mainstream parties aren't all the same, and even if they were, you need to vote to keep the Nazis out. Many of our elders gave their lives to keep the Nazis at bay; all we have to do is to vote, so there's no excuse for not doing so.
And let's kick the the UKIP into touch too, for that matter.
Ever since I upgraded SVoC, the comment system has been completely shagged. The problem seems to lie not with MT 2.661 as such, but rather with my host, 1&1. I always got the occasional 500, but now I get them all the time, and it seems I'm not alone. Upgrading MT has exacerbated the problem, since it seems a little more resource-hungry now, but the ultimate issue is with 1&1's low resource thresholds.
This is just the straw which breaks the camel's back, frankly, since they've been pissing me off for a while. Their support, well, doesn't, and I can't find anything on the admin screens, even when they don't hang. So, a new host.
I hear good things about 34SP. Any other suggestions? Who do you use?
Oh, and if you comment, don't be surprised if you get a 500 - in fact, you almost certainly will. I'll be able to rebuild the HTML to show your comments manually.
And thanks to Aaron for his kind offer, but I run a few sub-sites, so I'll probably go for a paid-for host. I split the cost with other family members.
Update: With Dad being ill and all, I'll not be able to get around to this for a while. But the move will happen eventually...
I was back in the office on Friday, and I got to fix a Java bug! (Someone who should have known better had put a bunch of logging code into the application, and he used toString() all over the place, so we were getting superflous NullPointerExceptions.
I'm back on site wading through RPG again today. :-(
Those spamming bastards were at it again - there were over a thousand vile spams on SVoC this morning. What was more, new ones were being added as fast as I could clear them out.
So, I disabled commenting altogether, backed everything up, and upgraded to MT 2.661 and installed MT-Blacklist.
All is not rosy. Comments seem to be given 500s rather a lot. This happened occasionally before, but it's even more frequent now. I'll have to take this up with my hosts, 1&1.
The Royal Bank of Canada seems to have lost several days worth of transactions. It did have to do with computer software and at this point I understand it did have something to do with sequencing.
The have 155 people working on fixing the problem during the day, and 90 overnight. This is, of course, stupid - you can't possibly have more than three or four people working on a single problem at a time. So, you have four people trying to fix the problem, and over a hundred running around like decapitated chickens, making a lot of noise and getting in the way.
Unless, that is, they are manually typing the in the transactions - in which case 155 isn't close to enough.
Anyway, someone's getting the tee shirt again.
Via AMK.
It could happen to anyone, but I'm glad that this is not down to me, I must say: Massive air disruption across UK.
Someone's going to get the tee shirt...
"The tee shirt" is our broken-build ritual, also applicable to general fuck-wittery around the office.
Right, I'm off down the pub.
London Underground staff have voted "overwhelmingly" for strike action in a dispute over pay. Never mind the bloody Olympics - how am I going to get to work? And indeed, how am I going to get back in time to vote?
Hmmm, could be worse, I suppose. If I'm back in The City (I'd be lucky), I can get the 133 bus. If I'm still in Hammersmith, there's the 93 and 220. It'll be brutal, though.
Update: Hmmm. I'd forgotten that I'm not in work that day - I'm off to Reading to help my ex move. Getting to Paddington might be interesting...
London Java Meetup - 14 June 2004.
Since I seem to be turning into a full time RPG programmer these days, I wonder if they'll stop letting me come?
The notional subject for discussion this time is J2EE meets .NET. This isn't especially interesting to me, but since I like the people, and we never manage to stay on-topic for more than a few minutes anyway, I'll not let this put me off. ;-)
Update: Sam might be demoing Naked Objects. Naked Objects looks fairly interesting; it's in its early days, but it might just turn into a Synon/2 for the 21st century.
Update June 14th: It looks like Sam's objects will be remaining fully clothed, unfortunately.
Omniscient Debugging. I find it hard to believe that you can do this - it's just plain black magic so far as I'm concerned. Cool beyond words, though.
Via Moazam.
Moazam Raja provides a nice simple step by step guide to using jvmstat: Visualizing Garbage Collection.
I left a comment on one of Moazam's posts (about programming fonts), pointing him at my post about programming fonts. Now it's gone. Hmmph.
Anyway, I've got some other Java related links that I'd better put somewhere, so here goes:
St John's Wood is the only station on the Underground network that shares no letters with the word 'mackerel'. Diamond Geezer gets rather worryingly obsessive about the Jubilee Line.
Sigh. Extended again. I look like I'm never getting out of here.
I need a pint. Badly.
This morning, I came in to find that 1437 comments had been left on SVoC. Of which two were real comments, and 1435 were comment spam of the vilest order. It's taken me an hour to get rid of it all.
I don't think 'bastards' is too strong a word, frankly.