Less rubbish than usual online quiz. Here's mine:
 | You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.
What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com |
3D-SFCave. Click to go up, release to go down, don't crash. It's that simple.
Well, as I said, El Presidente is away. ;-)
Via Boing Boing.
Charles Arthur points out The Worst Web Application Ever. It looks exactly like a screen scraped 5250 iSeries green-screen application to me. Anyone want to try PWRDWNSYS *IMMED?
(It could be a 3270 mainframe system though, I suppose.)
My first break away from pure green-screen code grinding came with a Java applet based screen scraping conversion using Jacada. We made a much better job of it than these guys did, though, I must say. Not only did ours look a lot better, but we plugged in a lot of new functionality; prompting, documents attached to major business entities, data import and export, and we even managed to give the user multiple sessions in the same window, allowing then to with between up to sixteen windows each.
Update: Phil tells me that this is a 3270 mainframe system, and it's converted using ResQNet.
Somebody seems to have kidnapped all the ugly birds from South London, overnight, and replaced them with pretty ones. Always seems to happen at this time of year.
By the way, if you are thinking that this post isn't very enlightened, not very post-new-man, then don't worry. It's ironic, so that's OK. You can get away with anything as long as you are ironic.
"The whole country is very proud of you", says Tony Blair. Err, no it isn't. I for one couldn't give a stuff either way.
When does the bloody football season end again?
El Presidente is away on holiday. We are all playing. Tulna's brought in her Barbies, Dan has his Action Man, Phil has a hoop and a stick, and Tracey is just burning stuff.
Scientists find a gene that leads to male baldness, and you get it from your Mum. So thanks, Mum, cos we all know that women find it very attractive.
Hmmm. Funny thing is, I'm sure I've know this for years. Is this really new?
I take it all back. Hibernate support isn't as great as all that after all. After a very good start, I've had no help whatsoever on several issues. One I managed to work out for myself - One-to-many relations with composite natural keys.
I'm still having problems with a couple of issues, though. Firstly, I can't work out how to do data cleansing with Hibernate. It falls over on the first dodgy data it sees. I want to get a list of all the problematic data, and I can't work out how to do it.
The other problem that I'm having or with a complex relationship between a couple of entities; both one to many and one to one. I've got company definitions and currency definitions with a bog standard parent-child relationship - one company has a number of currencies defined for it. But the company also has a reporting currency - a foreign key back to the currency file. I can see that this relationship is slightly problematical in relational terms, but it makes perfect sense in business terms. Anyone have any idea how to write this relationship in Hibernate? (In fact, I can think of two workarounds. I could make the reporting currency code available as a property rather than relating back to the current table directly. Retrieving the currency object would then be the client code's job. Or, perhaps I could try building the company to currency link as a one to many. I'm not even sure that that would work. Besides, I really want to fix this problem properly, for one and for all. I'll probably come across a lot of this kind of relationship as I map more of my legacy database.)
I wonder if the problem is that Hibernate uses a forum rather than a mailing list? It's much easier to ignore forum threads that it is to ignore emails in your inbox.
Whatever the issue, I do know that questions like mine do get some kind of answer on c.l.py, Just about any inquiry gets some kind of response, even if it's just a request for more info, or a URL to follow up.
It was a bit of a shock tuning in to Radio 4 yesterday morning, and hearing Charles Mingus in full flight. Not a nasty shock - I'm a fan of Mingus - but I was looking for Today. I fiddled about with the tuning, looking for it, but it wasn't there.
There was a picket line at the front on my building last week. As a one-time man of the left, you might think that I'd be unhappy to cross the line. But the dispute had nothing to do with my company whatsoever, and besides, I never saw a single person on the picket line, ever. They came late, and left early. If they can't be bothered to man the picket line, why should anyone take any notice?
Meme of the day via Aurblog.
Total volume of music files on my computer: 15.5 GB.
The last CD I bought was: Bloc Party, Silent Alarm.
Song playing right now: Knocking on Heavens Door, Bob Dylan.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
1. Hysteria, Muse
2. The Song Is You, Jimmy Giuffre
3. Looking For Somebody, Fleetwood Mac
4. Sonata No.1 in G minor, Johann Sebastian Bach
5. Ball and Biscuit, The White Stripes
(That's not totally representative - some of these are relatively recent acquisitions, so naturally I'm listening to them a lot recently, according to iTunes. Old favorites are under represented. But there's no way I can pick five favorites, so it's as good a five as any.)
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
1. Andy
2. Darren
3. El Presidente
4. Mum
5. Michael
In Making Wrong Code Look Wrong, Joel explains the difference between Systems Hungarian Notation (which is what most people think of when they think of Hungarian Notation, and which is utterly pointless these days, Mark) and Apps Hungarian (which isn't anything like so crap, and might still have some utility from time to time). In fact, I find that I use something similar to Apps Hungarian, though I use suffixes rather than prefixes, and I don't tend to abbreviate.
He's still wrong about exceptions, though, Raymond Chen or no Raymond Chen.
The floating dog is the funniest thing I've seen in ages. Via Funjunkie.
Before I start, a big thank you to Max over at the Hibernate User forum for helping me out. The quality of the code is only ever half the reason why open source tools are the best way to go. The other half of the reason is Max, and people like him, ready to help out a complete stranger. Thanks, Max. ;-)
Anyway, what I've been busy with over the last few days is building some mappings from Hibernate to an existing legacy, err, sorry, I mean a vintage database. Hibernate is lovely. Lovely lovely lovely. But I think it's fair to say that there's a lot more work involved in mapping to an existing database than there is if you are able to just let Hibernate get on with its thing and create its own schema.
The, err, vintage database is a quarter of a century old, most of it. It's not in bad shape - I've worked with a whole lot worse - but obviously it's not put together with modern best practices in mind. Loads of natural composite keys. Sigh. Also, the data types available at the time the system was first build were quite limited. There were no booleans or datetimes available, for instance, so these are stored as CHAR(1) and DECIMAL(7,0) columns respectively, so I've had to put together my own custom user types for these. Just to make life that little bit more painful, not are the only are the dates stored as seven digit numbers (in CYYMMDD format, where a C value of 0 is for last century, 1 for this - common practice on a '400), but they can also hold all zeros or all nines!
It's an iSeries (a.k.a AS/400) DB2 database, which Hibernate supports up to a point, but what I'm going to do when I come up against platform specific things like multi-member files I don't know. I'm sure I'll think of something.
There are also a few tables with no unique keys. That's really no unique keys - it's valid for there to be multiple identical records. I'm pretty sure I'll have to go back to plain old JDBC for those tables. Thankfully, this isn't common. Even twenty five years ago it was obvious that that was a bad idea!
I'm off to work out how to do a one-to-many relation where both sides have composite keys...
Congratulations to my brother Dan on passing his driving test. First time, no less!
What with my sister having passed a couple of years ago, that only leaves my Dad and I as non-drivers.
Not that I'm going to weaken. Cars are rubbish.
Sorry it's been so quiet around here. Nothing wrong, just very busy.
I'll blog the sorry tale of the company do at the weekend when Jenny gets around to bringing her camera in and there are photos to show.
It was a disappointing night, though not a surprising one. I was hoping that the Lib Dems would get 24% to 25% nationally, and get at least an extra 20 seats or so. They managed 23% and 16 seats. They are, unfortunately, in a bit of a Catch-22 - people don't vote for them because they can't win, and they can't win because people won't vote for them. Sigh.
Still, there must be some tipping point where their share of the vote goes high enough that they are seen as realistic contenders.
Anyway, I didn't stay up to see the inevitable result, so I missed the fabulous Galloway Paxman brawl, now viewable here (via Wherever). Class.
Don't forget to vote tomorrow, compatriots. Let's see if we can't give the good guys a boost, and stuff the liars and the bigots. And even if you don't like any of the big three, you should vote for one of them as a vote against the paranoid flakes, the narcissistic megalomaniacs and the truly evil.
On a lighter note, this is very satisfying, in a childish sort of a way. ;-)
Target your virus at soccer fans, 'cos they are all stupid. Might just work.
It's my company do this Saturday evening. We are all off to watch The Producers, followed by dinner and drinks at The Hilton, Park Lane.
The question is, what to wear? The invite requests "smart casual", but what does that mean? My idea of casual is far from smart...
I would ask Michael, but every time I go to him for fashion advice, he just puts his head in his hands, shakes his head and sighs.
Well, anyway, I think I'll just go for a suit. It's that or jeans; I don't own anything in between. I've only worn my suit once, at Tulna's wedding, so it will be nice to get some use out of it, and it will feel like dressing up. Notes to self; dry cleaning, and a new shirt and tie.
Any advice from any of my less fashion-blind readers would be appreciated. What kind of ties are people wearing this century?
Trains are better than cars. They just are.
I had a lovely weekend, on the whole, but travel-wise, everything I touched turned to dust.
On Saturday, I pitched up at Paddington on my way to Reading to pick up the girls, only to find that the line was closed. Much of the trip was by bus. :-( My usual two hour trip turned into a three and a half hour trek. (On the way back, I came via Clapham Junction, which was marginally faster.)
On Sunday, Michael, the girls and I drove down to Brighton in the A4 he's borrowed from his boss. (The verdict? A hairdressers car.) What a mistake. Google reckoned on a little over an hour for the trip, but we factored in the bank holiday, and doubled it. We weren't even close; it took us four and a quarter hours. Nightmare.
We had a really nice time once we were there, though - beach, picnic, paddling, pier, funfair, ice cream, you know the kind of thing. Half-naked women are always a bonus, too. The trip back was much easier - about two and a half hours.
On Monday, the girls and I left for Reading early. Cath wanted to take them to Mapledurham for a civil war reenactment, and there were still no trains out of Paddington. It turned out to be more of a skirmish than a battle. A brawl, even. Still, the girls were suitably impressed by the guns. Their new little brother Ruben wasn't so keen.
By the time I'd trekked back home again, I'd clocked up over eighteen hours in transit over the three day weekend. No wonder I'm so knackered.
Oh, and trains are better than cars 'cos even if they are horribly delayed, you can entertain your children and let them go to the loo, cutting down on the strop count considerably.
Anyway, pictures here.