Month: June 2006

procedure dump_clob( c in out nocopy clob ) is
chunk_size integer := 254 ;
n_chunks integer := ceil( length© / chunk_size ) ;
begin
  for i in 0 .. n_chunks -1
  loop
    dbms_output.put_line(substr(c,i*chunk_size+1,chunk_size));
  end loop;
end;

I came across this brilliant article while reading about the big ball of mud design pattern. This design pattern is what you end up with if you don’t do any architecture and the system just grows. It’s not a design pattern so much as what happens when you just keep pushing to get something that works. It’s actually a very popular pattern. I found myself nodding all the way throught the article. I will not comment about what projects I’ve worked on which match these criteria!

http://www.laputan.org/gabriel/worse-is-better.html

It talks about why Lisp is in such a mess even though it has been finally standardised and is such an excellent language. Again very interesting. Higly recommended.

See here

You said “plug-ins such as Flash that allow graphics and drag-and-drop in the browser”

Been there with JavaScript and dynamic HTML forever, just a bit hard to do from scratch – but there are plenty of resources on the web. There’s also the whole chromeless thing (www.chromeless.org) for IE as well, which predates a lot of this allegedly new technology by four or five years. The only really new thing on the block is AJAX.

Personally I can’t stand Flash because it’s too hard (and expensive) and the documentation is rubbish. It claims to integrate with databases and XML but doesn’t say how. It’s a tool for graphic designers that forces the rest of us to care about their tiny fonts, and before ubiquitous broadband it made a lot of sites (where you just want the information, not the cleverness) unusable. It’s also impossible to spider and index sites properly.

Just my two cents

Quote from here

Consumers aren’t stupid. They know that the quality of content has been spiralling downward for years, and the price rising. You can’t blame piracy for everything. The truth is, what’s out there right now is crap. It’s an uncomfortable truth we all need to acknowledge, whether we agree with it or not – the perception is all that matters. Industry execs will dispute it until they are blue in the face, but only with other people in their industry, which speaks volumes. Content owners are wildly out of touch with their customers, and should expect to drift further as long as they continue to persecute them or rip them off with ever-rising prices.

How true – read the article, it’s very good.