Author: francis

I got my Java 1.4 Certification at the end of January. Now I can move on and look at the more interesting certifications. I think the next one will be the Business Components one. I need to write off to Sun to get the logo.

I thought maybe I could do some J2EE stuff through Oracle because we get a discount but all I could find was the usual Oracle tools stuff which I’ve been doing for nearly 20 years.

Paddled the river Crake on Saturday. Not bad when it has some water in it. My forward paddling is rubbish. Because I shepherd groups down rivers I’ve got into the habit of sitting on a low brace and watching other people. If I want to improve I’m going to have to do a lot more me paddling on grade 3+ water. To that end I went to the Tryweryn on Wednesday (we were going to do the Conwy but no water). Colin helped me a lot and I’m now doing much better. I need to keep it up if I want to get anywhere though. Was paddling my Dagger Redline which is quite a bit longer than the playboat and will actually get up waves and things. I enjoyed paddling it a lot more than I thought, which is interesting.

Oracle Portal/9iAs is a pain in the proveribial

I’m really struggling with 904. It keeps locking up. I think it’s something to do with using session variables in PL/SQL. It’s very hard to keep up a sustained development effort when you have to reboot the server every 20 minutes.

Rosie’s Birthday Party

Festivities started on Saturday when Rosie’s mum took us to an excellent meal at Oriental Delight where several beers were drunk. On Sunday the party was muppet themed and we got into the swing of things quite well, with me as the swedish chef (hat and rubber chicken), Rosie was Animal, Katherine was Beaker, Deb Miss Piggy. We now have enought chocs to stock a small shop and we’re both trying to lose weight.

Old Friends

Met an old school friend with whom I hadn’t parted company on the best of terms a couple of weeks ago. It was nice to see him and talk through old times and people. It’s interesting how we both hate a lot of the same things and at least some of my enemies (who he still keeps in contact with) have mellowed into reasonable folk. Nice to catch up, it’s a shame he didn’t make Rosie’s party but I suppose he might have felt a little out of it.

Buddhism

Going back to this again. Unfortunately Lama Jampa has moved to London so it’ll be difficult to get to him to ask for advice. I will write him a letter. One of my relatives was quite sarcastic about my beliefs which made me quite angry. Maybe if they had ever seen something worthwhile through to the end I could take it seriously. I have come to the belief that any connection with this tiny foolish life and an enlightened being somewhere downstream of me is very tenuous. This doesn’t mean one should give up, more that what you have now is even more precious.

I came up with a personal mission statement the other day:

Spend the rest of my days helping other people to succeed in between having lots of fun!

Blessings all

In response to this:

Hi John

While I’m sure a lot of people would feel very angry at the way this idiot behaved, and I agree with them, I think that his sentence is very harsh. Drink drivers who kill people often get less than this – it’s on a par with the billions of dollars fines and lengthy prison sentences for spamming el Reg reported some weeks ago. I think there needs to be more of a sense of proportion. If taking a human life has a lower penalty than playing a nasty malicious prank then there’s something wrong.

Regards

Francis Fish

Catchy title, eh? Back to the boring work stuff:

To block generation of a table you need to set the Complete attribute to N. This attribute is not accessible from the Server Model tab in the editor.

To get to it you need to go to Distribution tab, select the application, then open up the database then schemas and finally thedefault user in the hierarchy.

When you click on a table implementation this parameter will be visible. Set it as appropriate.

If you want to generate; generate from the Distribution tab and it won’t ignore the attribute, it does in the Server Model tab. However sequences aren’t visible so you’ll have to do them separately from here, or generate from the DB admin tab.

The UI for the tool is pants. Needs a rethink.

Gotchas

There may be no implementation created for the tables. Select the tables in the distribution tab and then click the add button. This will allow you to select any that are missing.

If posting this means the next mug in line doesn’t waste half a day then it was worth it …

I was talking about solving problems at a meal today and said that some may not be soluble (to be fair I pronounced it solu-able). Someone corrected me and said that the word was solvable. In fact, soluble is the primary word in my dictionary and solvable is the derivative. I was a good boy and didn’t rip her head off. I think all the self-improvement books I have been reading have helped a lot. The thing is: she has read them too but you wouldn’t notice. Correcting someone at table is not the way anyone who has read Dale Carnegie should behave, neither is it common courtesy. If someone is wrong let them be wrong.

I have no idea why I am so angry about this. Perhaps because I have a maths-based degree and I know what the word that means a problem can be solved is? Anyway, I suppose a Christmas diary entry is in order.

Very quiet. Didn’t do a lot, but we did make a point of going out for walks and even had a paddle on the Dee one day. Rosie walked back up with Jon because he didn’t want to go back in the canoe. I paddled the thing a good mile against the current. Also, because I was chatting, I didn’t notice that I took the long way around one of the bends in the river where the current flows faster. Ho hum.

Went for a nice walk at a country park near J7 of the M56 (Daresbury rings a bell). It was a deer park reserve and we had a very pleasant walk. Went back to a pub called the Old One Hundred and had a meal. Food good but service a bit variable.

Very average new year with the family. I got a bit bored and wanted to go to bed. We had a bagatelle (sic) competition that whiled away some time. I have had a bit of a head cold and my sinuses have been giving me serious gyp so I wasn’t that keen on all this staying up being grown up stuff. Jon stayed up and saw it in with us. Deb had taken herself off to bed. We did have a laugh at times, Jon laughing so hard he cried.

Spent today painting Deb’s room and having another meal as mentioned earlier.

I’m getting a bit fed up and bad tempered now, would like to see people off home and get some time with just the family.

My problem with my feet and ankles has come back. Very sore. Think I need to get rid of the weight I have put on in the last month and start doing my exercises again. Maybe get a stepper machine from ebay or some such.

Forgot. Bought a freeview box. More choice but still a lot of crap. Still tend to be watching CSI, some stuff on BBC2 and C4 and not a lot else. Nice to see Channel 5 in the clear without the snow. Quite like the UKTV History channel. I’d like BBC 3 more if they showed something other than Little Britain which keeps taking funny ideas and overcooking them. I could write that stuff if I had no shame, but I do. I hated the thing about breast feeding the groom at a wedding, just a gross-out pubrescent fantasy with all of the comedy of a broken limb in traction.

Love to all and a happy and prosperous new year. Back to work soon

For those of you who don’t know, my father killed himself when I was 8 years old. All I have left of him are his silver cufflinks and the vague echoes of his genes. Nothing else.

I was giving Jon a hug today before leaving for work and it hit me that I don’t remember my dad ever doing this. Also, how precious these slight, transient moments are: without them life would be so empty.

Jon had pulled a mattress from the bed and bent it into a “tent”. Then he put a blanket over it and slept on the floor underneath it. Bless. He has no idea how precious he is to me, just as well really.

I wished him a happy unbirthday and then had to explain what an unbirthday was.

Every day I come to love Rosie and the kids even more than I did the day before. I cannot understand how my father managed to do what he did. Ultimately depression is intensely selfish, and his letter said he felt it was for the best. What an idiot. If you are thinking like he was get help! Do it now, this life is so precious and you only have this one.

As a Buddhist I beleive in reincarnation. However, the teachings imply that what is reincarnated is very subtle. The analogy is that the lives have dependencies like one brick upon another, or a flame at one time of day and another. It sounds almost like a point of view is what keeps going, subject to the karma it accumulated in the life it led. This makes fleeting moments of happiness and caring even more precious and the human existence even more fragile.

Buddha said: the end of all gathering is dispersion; the end of all building is ruin; the end of all meeting is parting; the end of all birth is death.

This makes this little life, this litte flash in the void, even more precious. So hold onto it! Not to mention the numerous hells that you end up in if you suicide – you feel bad now, just wait! There are dozens of them, apparently.

Blessings all

I’ve redone my novel and change things a little, have a look if your interested

Should have gone to bed early and done all kinds of useful things but who the hell can be bothered with that kind of stuff? Off to bed now, 11:30 pm. Got a big day tomorrow.

Gaudete

NOTE: This link won’t work any more, sorry (Oct 2010)

This is a weird one. If you have a free-format project and add to the class path using the class path wizard beware that you add either directories or .jar files. I was picking up all of the files in the JBOSS tomcat directory and also, inadvertently, picked up a couple of XML config files.

It let me add them to the class path and then choked on restarting the IDE and sat there trying to treat the files with the .XML extension as directories, getting an error and going into an infinite loop. I will report this to the netbeans development team.

The only way to fix it is to edit the project.xml file by hand.

In response to this:

Hi Philip,

I’ve just been working with Oracle’s XML DB for 10g. It does functionally exactly what you say IBM are thinking about. You appear to be ill-informed and have bought the IBM FUD. You should be more careful about what you say if you want to put yourself up as an opinion former. Maybe you should qualify your comments better?

Also IBM’s database certainly used to be 3 (or more?) different code bases depending upon which platform it was running on. Each had a different set of bugs and features. I think the whole thing was branded to appear to be one product, but it wasn’t. Which one of their multiple code bases are they talking about? All of them? In which decade?

Have a look at http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/xml/xmldb/index.html. I suggest you get a 10g database installed and work through the examples. Unless you’re too posh to actually use something before you form an opinion?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an Oracle fan, but what you describe is what I’ve been working with for a while and not news. Not even that big a deal.

Regards

Francis Fish

I’ve been using Java for about 5 years, but not heavily. I know the language reasonably well and have decided that I will get certified in the next few weeks. I took a test (for 1.2) from a training book I bought and got around 60% without a lot of study. The pass is something like 51%. With some study I should get there reasonably comfortably. I think this would be good for my CV and open some doors, although people want to talk to me anyway.

I’m much more interested in doing the Certified Developer exam, because it’s a proper project, but they insist on doing the Certified Programmer first. I am really interested in the System Architect but it looks like a hell of a lot of work and I’ve got other things to keep me busy at the moment. One of the guys from Adis had this qualification and now only works about half the year and is better off than when he was working for them, so I think it’s worth pursuing, just not right now.

Using my Safari Account (detailed in last blog) I’ve got access some 1.4 certification books that I can give back when I’ve finished with them.

Of course, I’m still working on my struts project as well because I have to keep the boredom at bay somehow. Making good progress with it.

Only problem is: tonight I need to fill in my tax return on-line so I’ll have to hold back on the exitement, no, I’m not being sarcastic, I enjoy what I do when I’m allowed to do it.

Current Short-term Life Goals:

1. Build my internet marketing business.
2. Get struts project finished
3. Get Certified
4. Look at Oracle Certification as well (not so bothered, if Oracle themselves wouldn’t fund it when I was an employee how much use is it?)

All of this has to happen within the next month or so. If you don’t put a date on things they won’t happen.

Back to the exitement of another day writing technical specs – I just can’t wait.

Safari

Struts

Decided to use struts to do my project because it works and I like the architecture.

I’ve spent the last week or so getting my head round how it works, how to use Ant (like it), and how to get Netbeans to work with it.

Not that hard, any of it, but I’m basically using Netbeans as a glorified editor and not using any of the advanced features (like the in-line J2EE container, for example).

Netbeans 4 beta is a little flakey when you try and create new Java classes and doesn’t seem to want to save them. If you press save all it will, though.

Books

If you want to get started with struts try:

Struts Kick Start
ByJames Turner, Kevin Bedell

Also has the best potted explanation of how HTTP, JSP. JSTL tags etc. I’ve seen. Wish I’d read this a couple of years ago.

I’ve got a lot from

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition
ByPeter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

Ignore the first 3 chapters unless you are a total newbie. Useful content there.