Author: francis

Well, I suppose I am, given that my parents are both deceased.

But the main thing is that bluesey weariness. Not sure where it comes from. I ‘ve been spending a hell of a lot of energy over the past few weeks getting some software ready for my own company. I feel I now have something to show to people. Next problem is how to market it and turn it into a source of income.

I contacted an old acquaintance who I used to work with when I had the idea for the software. He’s well placed to help me find some people who might be interested in taking the software further into some kind of product. I can’t take it much further on my own efforts at the moment.

I’m working on the “elavator pitch” for the business behind the software so I can show it to him and see if he things it’ll be a runner.

Gotta run – need a reasonably early night for once. Watched “Darkma” late into the night on Friday and wish I hadn’t bothered. A real waste of time being awake. I fast forwarded quite a bit of it because I knew what was coming next.

In response to this:

Very dubious about that management dashboard. Many years ago I worked for large company and they had this thing about drawing graphs of tests completed versus tests to be done. The managment, all ISO9001’d to the hilt, seemed to think that this gave them a metric of how complete the software was.

It didn’t. It gave them a measure of how many tests the developers thought necessary and had done. There was no neutral 3rd party testing department doing systems integeration testing from the specs. You need to make sure you’re measuring the right thing.

If you are writing formal unit test doco’s and so on, you may as well measure it, but you need to make sure you’re doing “proper” testing as well.

Having a sad time at the moment. A whole heap of crap from over 30 years ago, most of which I don’t remember, was thrown in my face by someone close to me.

At least, I thought they were close.

Then they proceeded to insult my house, the way I bring up my kids and a whole pile of other things. Just vindictive, nasty and unnecessary. Also with an ever-so-slight application of a selective memory that puts them in a better light than they deserve, this is only human and makes me smile a little, to be honest.

In case you don’t know, the waters of Lethe (or maybe it’s the Lethe – a river) are what the ancient Greeks believed the dead would drink in the underworld so that they could forget their lives because the memories of living and losing it all were too painful. This is also why we don’t remember our past lives, at least most of us don’t. I don’t want to forget any more. I used to have fantasies about some wonderous drug going into my arm and taking away all of the pain forever. But then I would also forget all of the good things and I don’t want to do that. Not even slightly. However I can’t remeber the details of what I am accused of, so I apologised for any slight, real or imagined and said goodbye. Now I am returning all of the gifts that weren’t gifts, they are wanted back by some cheesy manipulative ploy, some poxy emotional hook I’m supposed to have bitten on. It’s very silly and selfish.

Anyway, now I am faced with probably never speaking to this person again, other than in some kind of clipped code at weddings and funerals. They only ever spoke to me when it suited them, a loan or someone with a car to ferry them about on some errand or other. And they always treated my like a dickhead. I’m not sure what I’m gonna miss, to be honest. I’d like to sort out these memories they carry around that are causing them such pain and bitterness – but I can’t remember that much. I was mired in misery myself from the age of about 10 to 23 or so. Then I moved on, and recovered from the damage that was my childhood and teenage years.

Move on, and keep the precious things close. Forget the rest of it, it only brings pain.

Grow up. But no-one ever listens to that one.

I was out with Rob, a die-hard Genesis fan. We both used to listen to them a lot, but I was always loaned the vinyl – usually from Rob, I think.

Anyway we were wandering around the Trafford centre (another essay needed on this edifice on another day). Bless him, he bought me Selling England by the Pound and Trick of the Tale. It’s very odd listening to Selling 20 (at least) years later and hearing it digitally remastered and really clear. It’s a different animal from what I remember. I’m really struck by the musicality (jargon, sigh) and the fact that the music is arranged, rather than thrown together. Also, it still works really well after all these years. I think the remastered version must be very close to what the guys heard in in the studio, before it got pressed into vinyl and lost some fidelity. People say that CD’s and digital music in general are better at the mid range (because of the samping rate), of course this works perfectly for Genesis. This is why some classical records sound very thin on CD, and also why you get bass boost on some CD players, I think.

I really like the guitar solos that arent 300 mile an hour dashes across the keyboard, I can hear some melody and thought. Interestingly I have a problem doing this when I play and always end up playing way too fast. Probably I don’t play enough – lack of time, not inclination.

I’ve not really listened to Trick before. Weirdly the vocals are really muddy, I think comparing it with Selling. Collins isn’t Gabriel, Gabriel’s vocals are much clearer, but I also think there’s a difference in the production. A lot of echo muddying them compared with Selling. I’d love to hear trick with less echo on the vocals. They must’ve bought a new echo unit and had to use it. Or Collins likes echo …

Goal setting

I’ve been doing some exercises on goal setting. Helps you understand why you want to do things and what you need to do to get the things you want. It’s quite a scary exercise in that I’ve remembered a lot of things I haven’t had time for, like creative writing and playing my guitar. I also have a serious burn to do them when I let myself think about them. It’s funny how you let your horizons shrink through lack of looking up.

Later…

I’ve just finished reading this and I’m thinking that it explains some of the malaise in the open source community:

Simply put – suits think that using LAMP (look it up if you don’t know what it is) is cheap. You don’t have to pay the megabucks to IBM or Oracle for the database and the middleware and it’ll run quite happily on second-hand tin from eBay. In their pointy heads this equates to spending less money on the programmers and designers as well.

So, all of the LAMP jobs out there (at least in the UK) are junior roles paying junior cash. The suits haven’t grasped that good software is primarily about recruiting and motiviating good, intelligent people (the whole ruck of them, including project managers and experienced designers). That’s why all of the innovation is in small companies owned by people who pay themselves decent salaries. The bigger salaries still cluster around the old client-server tools (OK, web-enabled like Oracle Forms, but you know what I mean) and the big-corps who need whatever IBM/Oracle/etc. can offer.

Finding work as a designer, which I’m good at and have done well for years, is hard. I’ve found myself in a hybrid roles and doing grunt work again and again, unable to help others improve and improve myself by doing so.

Maybe I should apply for an enterprise loan … I have product, just no time to finish it properly.

(yeah, I know, marketing plan, budget freebies, partners yada yada bing bong)

This has been a productive if frustrating month. I’ve got a lot done with my PHP project, I’ve had a 2 week holiday (now over a week), I’ve spent a lot of time with the family having a life.

Then it’s back to work and my boredom threshold has been hit well past the buffers pretty quickly. I don’t want to say too much here because I know that some of my employer’s customers read this site and I they didn’t do me any favours when I said I was thinking of moving on a few months ago. In fact, the problem resolved itself.

When you are an employee you sometimes just have to take your medicine. That’s why I don’t like being one. Nothing personal – I’d rather own my own company. It’s said that those who know how to work end up working for those who know why. I think this is true. I have my own company but it isn’t generating any income yet.

When it does, brothers and sisters  …

I watched The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other day and really enjoyed it. I really liked the end, but one of my friends said he thought it was quite depressing. It made me think of the times things go badly wrong, like the end of my first marriage, and then you have to really try to remember the good things. There were some. I know there were, there were times I was even happy. Ah me, reality, what a gyp.

Spent my holiday based at home. We went out for days and I took the kids to see some films. Revenge of the Sith was not quite as disappointing as I thought it might be – I think the lack of any real conflict as Anakin decends into evil made it far too cartoony. In fact, if you look at a lot of graphic novels calling it cartooney (whatever the spelling is) isn’t correct either. Just 2 dimensional. I loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but thought putting a back story in for Wonka was ridiculous. I’m not sure how well it will do, simply because the audience had to think a little. Rumour has it that Burton was forced to put the cheesy stuff in by the money people, I hate suits. Madagascar was OK, harmless fun but trying a bit too hard. I’m really looking forward to Burton’s next one: The Corpse Bride, as well as the new Wallace and Gromit.

Hurt my shoulder climbing about 4 weeks ago. I’ve been having some physiotherapy but it’s still very painful. Apparently I’ve damaged a very small muscle at the back of the shoulder that keeps it up and back and it’s dropped. There’s another joint (I think) at the top of the shoulder and it’s very sore when you touch it, as the physio demonstrated to me today. Got lots of exercises to strengthen it and get my shoulder back into the proper position. The tingling fingers are a total pain in the sense of inconvenience and pain itself, and the shoulder itself has had me clenching my teeth and smiling a lot.

Had a frenzy on eBay and got rid of a load of old stuff. Having a problem shipping kayaks. Parcelforce say 3 metres, but they mean 3 metres when you add the length and the width so  it’ll fit through their sorting machines. Trying to send one down to Devon, really beginning to irritate me because I’ve banked the cheque and I want to send the guy his goods. However, I can’t find the address – I must have binned the letter after I booked Parcelforce. Sigh. I’ll have a hunt on their website and see if I can get his address back. Lovely bloke as well, don’t want to mess him about.

I installed Mandriva Linux on an extra drive I put into my big server machine. Could not get the US Robotics wireless card to fly at all. Found some stuff on source forge but it didn’t work for me (needed kernel source to build it – way too hard).

Went through the list of supported devices and bought an 11a one from ebay. Failed the idiot test, it was a mini PCI card for a laptop. Went through the list of supported devices on the Mandriva website. All bar the USB ones were laptop gear.

Looked at getting a Siemens thingy but the only people on ebay that had ‘em were in Germany and they don’t seem to use paypal. I like paypal because I can get my credit card company to refund me if there are any problems. Bank transfers to a German bank? No thanks.

Got bored with this card stuff and bought a D-Link 11g access point with switch. Nice piece of kit with a web-based interface to control it.

Several hours later I found the right combination of things for the USR Access Point (which has been demoted to a client) and everything works. I am typing this blog on Mozzila on the linux environment. Allegedly I can make this 11g with a firmware upgrade according to their website.

All I need to do now is get the games installed and Jonathan will be happy and so will I.

Then sell off the USR stuff (which works very well indeed on XP).

This will then put me in a position where I can get Oracle Portal working on a supported platform (as in the LDAP and everything else). I can then offer my services to people who want portlets writing, Java or PL/SQL, I don’t care.

PHP

I’m on holiday for a couple of weeks and we have decided not to go away as part of an economy drive. Been working on my PHP project and it’s coming on pretty well. It amazes me how much faster this is than Oracle or any of the million Java frameworks. I think it’s a function of Java being general-purpose, whereas PHP is designed for building web-based stuff from the beginning.

I’m using the object model a lot, mainly to promote reuse. However you can then put a page together that just uses the objects without having to create a class, then go through a steaming pile of XML config files to make sure it all works, then deploy it. I can develop from the command line and only use the browser when I need to check look and feel. I recon it’s 10 times faster and the learning curve is very shallow, at least if you know Java reasonably well.

I will need to create some kind of error message management system so that translation is easy. But I mean, that’s very trivial and then write some python to do a bulk edit (or just a VIM macro).

Have a look at fyracle. This is an Oracle-compatible version of Firebird, which seems to have come of age. The tools to compile PL/SQL etc. cost about €80 a desk and the run-time is free. Reports are good.

I’ve not had a lot of time to look at this but I think it’s definitely a viable alternative if Oracle licences are going to eat your profit. I don’t know if it has an equivalent of mod/plsql but if it did I’d be very interested in it for highly scalable projects that need big servers, for which Oracle like to charge you through the nose. That said; for the moment MySQL will do for my personal projects.

Fyracle doesn’t have the spatial or context extensions, but these could possibly be supported by some other tools and a bridge. Needs looking at; face it – if you’re a small company developing software or running a website that doesn’t make a fortune but needs big iron (which is very cheap if you use eBay) and have to pay Oracle licences it may be a good bludgeon to get Oracle to give you a better discount.

Where I work we are Oracle partners and the price is reasonably sane. Big corporations get good discounts, as do applications users. It’s the small-to-medium independent guys that get it.

Ah well, back to something else.

Saturday 30 July 2005

We went over to Holland via Hull to Rotterdam. I had the mistaken impression that it was going to take 5 or so hours to get to Hull and was completely wrong; 3 with a break. The checking in and so on was fairly painless, but we did get some funny looks because we had a 14 foot open boat on the top of the car.

We were on the Pride of Rotterdam. We elected to stay in the continental bar and have a snack, rather than fight our way down to the restaurant. Jon went and played with the other kids in the ball pool and Deb decided to sit and read a book. We thought there were only 2 beds in the cabin but then discovered that another pair come down from the ceiling.

We met up with the others from the Canoe Camping Club and had a couple of beers, exchanging war stories and talking about what we would do when we got there.

Got to bed around midnight.

Sunday 31st July

Were woken up at a ridiculously early hour (lost an hour going to the continent). We grabbed a bite in the bar and then disembarked. After some confusion we all met up at the small car park on the way out of the ferry terminal. The tunnel under the river was closed and, after some mix ups, we ended up going through Rotterdam, which was spooky because everyone was still in bed (it looked like anyway).

Got to Amsterdam about lunch time and set up our new tent. This was amazingly easy and the tent worked really well. We were staying at a place owned by the local canoe club called Slaughterplass, which was about 20 minutes from the centre of Amsterdam by tram. Had a paddle around the lake (we were on an island) and then, in the evening, went into Amsterdam and had some food and a wander around. I don’t know why but I really like the place. Very peaceful for a capital city.

The local club were really good to us, even setting up a sink where we could wash our plates etc. Really nice people.

Monday 1st June

Rained a lot so we decided to check out the climbing walls we had looked up on the internet before we left. We were going to go with one of the other families but we managed to lose each other in heavy traffic and, of course, hadn’t swapped mobile numbers or given them the address (stupid stupid). Had an interesting near-miss turning left when I just didn’t look properly for oncoming traffic – not funny. The climbing wall was officially closed but they let us in and we had a mess about in the dry for a couple of hours. It was a purpose built building on an industrial estate, looked like a big A frame that was maybe 20 metres high and 30 by 20 square. I never managed to get to the top. Too scary.

I’m beginning to master things like bouldering. You have to prepare and swing your weight to get up things. In addition you sometimes have to switch which side of your body is closest to the wall, which I still haven’t quite understood.

The evening was much better and if memory serves Rosie and Deb went round the lake again. Plus some of the guys from the club came and we did some canoe polo, which consisted of splashing the other guys as much as possible with the ball. Jon joined in and enjoyed himself hugely. He agreed to come paddling the next day.

Tuesday 2nd June

Decided to publish this because I never had time to finish it so in it goes.

Nulls have been the bane of my life as a database programmer and they got me again today. I was getting a constraint violation on an optional foreign key from MySQL.

My PHP data entry system was returning the empty string when the user hadn’t entered anything, which is fine. In Oracle (as I’ve discussed many times here) ‘’ is null. Not in MySQL. In MySQL it is an empty string – which is probably right.

I had to add the following scan in my processing:

  foreach ($values as $key => $val)
  {
    if( $val == ’’) $values[$key] = null ;
  }

Now it works.