It’s better, even from a purely selfish point of view, to be constrained by principles than by stupidity.

Go have a look here and here

Dear Frank Field,

I read with some concern today that the DfES has given the green light for schools to fingerprint children without their parents’ permission, and in fact it has already happened many times.

I am disgusted by this. Is this going to be Mr Blair’s lasting legacy? In the days when I was a child fingerprinting was for criminals. I have no time for criminality but I do not see why my kids need to be guilty until proved innocent. How long will it be before these records are put into police databases and used as a matter of course?

There has been a horrendous attack on my rights over the last few years and, as far as I can remember, none of this was in your manifesto. I am tired of the government interfering and getting in the way of my relationship with my family. I don’t give a fig how worthy the arguments for this may be – please keep big government away from personal relationships and please keep it away from assuming a non-adult can give informed consent – this is totally disgusting. The people in the DfES should be ashamed of themselves, they really should.

Yours sincerely,

create table zz ( x integer, y integer ) ;

insert into zz values( 1, 2) ;
insert into zz values( 1, 2) ;
insert into zz values( 1, 2) ;
insert into zz values( 1, 3) ;
insert into zz values( 1, 4) ;

select * from zz ;

X    Y

1    2
1    2
1    2
1    3
1    4 

create table yy as select * from zz ;

update yy set y = 5 where x = 1 and y = 2;

select * from yy ;

X     Y

1    5
1    5
1    5
1    3
1    4 

update zz set ( x, y ) = ( select x, y from yy where x = zz.x and y = zz.y );

— Before you type in the next bit try and work out what you think will be in zz now

— and try and work out why

select * from zz ;

drop yy ;

drop zz ;

http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=WEEKLYCOLUM&ObjectType=&ObjectId=11270

Can’t fault the article – and the golden rule is straight out of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Excellent.

I am an old Unix hacker and know how to use tools like Awk/Sed and whatnot to do text processing. I have managed to carry on even in the Windoze days by installing Cygwin.

More recently I’ve been using Python because I wanted to get an understanding of the language. It has a lot of the same functionality and is more modern and has much cleaner syntax. I like the short hand ways of filtering arrays as well, plus lambda functions, the list goes on. Problem is: no-one out there in the real world is gainfully employed using it. Lots of open source stuff but I need to eat.

I’ve been looking for Java work recently and decided that I would start using Java for the pre-processing work because I want to keep my hand in with the language. I had decided against using it a long time ago because you had to do all sorts of nonsense loading 3rd party stuff in the class path if you wanted to split strings and use regular expressions. I steeled myself for a lot of pain after I made this decision and found I was wrong.

Java 2 has most of the things you need built into the String class these days and the process was remarkably painless.

The problem

I was trying to compress a file full of run time data down to look for long-running functions. It looked like this:

23/08/2006 16:07:47|58067|Entering|FUNC_1
23/08/2006 16:07:47|58068|Leaving|FUNC_1
23/08/2006 16:07:47|58067|Entering|FUNC_2
23/08/2006 16:07:47|58067|Entering|FUNC_1
23/08/2006 16:07:47|58067|Leaving|FUNC_1
23/08/2006 16:07:47|58067|Leaving|FUNC_2

This is the timestamp, the number of seconds in the day, the operation, and the function name. I have milliions of lines of this and want to remove the lines next to each other that have a 0 difference in the seconds. This is simply to give me somehwere to start in my hunt for long-running functions. I know that any real programming environment would have a profiler but we’re talking PL/SQL here so you have to roll your own.

I wrote a program in Awk that pulled the whole thing into memory and then looked at the fields in the records but it wouldn’t work. I realised later that I was calling split with the argument |, I think that this split the whole like up into single characters.

Lost patience with Awk and thought OK, try again in Java.

The Solution

I needed to be able to read a line and break it into its delimited components.

Had to do the usual Java nonsense to get the file open:

        BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader( new FileReader( args⁰ )) ;

Then get the current line with

                currLine = r.readLine() ;
                if ( currLine == null ) break ;

Ho hum. Next split the strings. First I tried:

            currBits = currLine.split(“|”);

(currBits is the pieces of the string). This wouldn’t work because | means split on everything. I had to use JDB (which is not that bad to use, actually) and worked out that the Bits elements were all one character each. Then we changed to

            currBits = currLine.split(“\|”);

This escaped the special character and it worked. The rest of the code was schoolperson stuff using the array of string pieces for comparison with some read ahead to look at the next record and work out if you want to print or not.

In essence I can do the simple text processing and line splitting in Java now. The regular expressions are also now part of the main library (Patterns) – it’s really moved on from Java 1.1; which was too painful so I stuck to Awk. Theres also a replace function on strings as well.

Only problem is, string are immutable and will get thrown away into the garbage collection void if you do a lot of string manipulation. I wonder if Sun have added the functionality to StringBuffer? I bet not.

Next!

OK – simple Java editor that lets me do debugging and so on WITHOUT having to create a project and spend half a day messing with it. Emacs is OK but I’d have liked code completion and built in debugging. I know you can get emacs to do this but it then takes a year to start up as it loads everything and I’m not a patient guy with my tools – start up quickly and start giving me what I need NOW. This is probably why I don’t like M$ windows, even though I use it every day.

I sit here late at night and watch old movies

I want to feel the life

Just being and doing what I want when I want

Watching those films

Writing crazy stuff late at night

Not getting up until I’m ready

But I am trapped by the life we are expected to lead

Its norms and funny faces

I’ve been a fool for so long

Not looking out for the real things

Playing with what little I had

Without realising that, with a little more effort, I could be free.

I could have been free a long time ago.

I have a no-longer friend who is a constant victim. Their helplessness makes me angry. I know it shouldn’t, but I’ve been on the receiving end of their agression for many years and was never able to sort it out properly until now.

I was chatting about this to one of my other friends, saying that I feel helpless and can’t help them. In fact, my attempts at interaction make me lose my temper and make things worse. I know, adults should be able to keep control of their tempers, but I didn’t manage to on this occasion.

He said a very telling thing: if you feel like a victim then you are a victim. This was a very penetrating thought. It isn’t anything to do with your environment, your victimhood penetrates everything you think and are. If you think everyone hates you then they will, and your mind will create the colours of their hatred.

This reminded me of what the one of my teachers talked about when I studied English Literature a long long time ago: the pathetic fallacy. In essence in Romantic literature as the hero dies the sun sets. It’s more obvious in paintings but is there in written literature as well.

The person I am talking about lives in a world totally dominated by this fallacy. I used to think like this a bit, I would see motivations that weren’t there in other people’s behaviour – in fact most people do not care what you say or do as long as you let them be. The inconsiderate behaviour of others isn’t a conspiracy; they’re just inconsiderate and selfish – neither of which is a crime or particularly premeditated. If you talk gently to most people and say you aren’t happy about something they will listen, and probably be a little surprised, usually their reasons are very good and you realise you were being a little silly. If you start from a position that they are out to get you and act in a dumb, agressive, hostile fashion they will not listen because your behavior cues their defenses and they will be out to get you.

But how do you tell someone this when you are one of their enemies, if not the most hateful of all?

I can’t, and of course the feelings and the pain are real. I can’t do anything about it, either, because I just lose it and add to the burden they think they are carrying.

I suppose I have learned something valuable, even if it does make me feel sad.

Our product contains views of networks and inventory that are date-tracked so that you can wind the clock backward and see what the network looked like at a particular time.

Some of the lookup metadata used for validation is also date tracked because we re-used some existing tables.

I had a strange experience:

Run your test script, error saying something isn’t there. Check by typing in the SQL – it isn’t – OK. Log back in again, it is…

The test script was setting the effective date so that, when it end-dated some existing data the end-date was the one is should have been, not the system date. When updates on other data were being done the lookups weren’t there because they fell outside this range.

Deep joy. The only way you can tie temporal data together that I know of on modern databases is to use triggers and application logic – I’d be very interested in a generic way of doing this that allowed you to express range dependencies properly. On our current system this often only comes up on update, usually trying to end-date a parent with un end-dated children.

I think that there is a book on this but I can’t afford it right now and the people I work for wouldn’t buy it for us because 50p on a book that could save us thousands just isn’t the way they think…

At least I’ll know where to look first next time.

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/07/12/java_ee_burton_group/

Nah …

The whole stack is very complicated but most people only use about 15-20% of it (as with virtually every piece of software anyone’s ever bought I might add).

For example, hardly anyone uses EJB’s because it’s too complicated, there’s a movement in the industry to use Plain Old Java Objects for most things because of this.

Most people use the Web Application stuff because it’s easy to use and well understood (Servlets and JSP’s) and pretty easy to do big projects with if you’re disciplined.

Sun have produced a huge document that no-one will read apart from application server and tools vendors: meanwhile in the real world we’ll just get on with using the bits that are useful and ignoring the rest, as usual.

SOA – only the big corps are into this – it’s using sledgehammers to crack nuts for most of us. Again – big boy’s toys that they probably don’t need if they’re honest, but it looks good on the old CV.