Been having a lot of trouble sleeping properly. Suspect I’m a bit stressed, IBS flared up.

Got my generated J2EE code to compile with no problem, now I need to devise some kind of test harness and then move on to (finally) generating the JSPs for the data entry. JDev won’t display the file directories correctly. Need to av a fink abaht why.

Then it’ll only be a case of rolling it out onto the main site, and sorting out the hosting. Trivial. (I wish)

This week I’ve been playing with Oracle Advanced Queueing, which seemed easy enough to set up if you only want to work within the same database. I decided to change my implementation so that it sends a structured object with some surrounding data as well as the XML, decided to send the XML in a CLOB as the xmldom package has a parseclob method and I didn’t need to send a ready parsed doc so that was OK. I didn’t use sys.xmltype in the end. I like the way that the xmltype queues can have filters based on xpath expressions but don’t really need it at the moment.

That said I need a worked example that shows how to get queues to replicate across databases. I will put one up here if I ever find one that goes beyond vague hints with no examples in the manual.

Diary

Rosie and the kids came up to Nottingham Wed pm and stayed at the B&B with me. They had fun playing in Sherwood forest and the Robin Hood centre (which is on Maid Marion Way – nuff said). They had a good time and we celebrated Jon’s birthday. We had a bit of a mare finding somewhere to eat ‘cos the local pub were having a 45 minute wait so we drove to Mansfield and went to Pizza Hut, which was OK. It looks like Thursday is going out day in Nottingham, the pubs near Blidworth where we were staying were packed to the rafters. Got him a pretty cool Scooby Doo cake. He used his money to get one of those Tyco stunt bikes at TRU, wouldn’t buy the heavy parental thing about inventors really needing to get into Meccano.

Discovered that I will be paid for some of last month but still suffering from agency and umbrella company timeline mismatch. Never mind, bank co-operative and payday at the end of November should sort it aht.

My incompetent former employer still haven’t managed to send me my P45, it’s only been what, 5 weeks? If I didn’t know they were totally useless and lazy I’d think that there was something dodgy going on. On the other hand one of the guys who was made redundant in the first wave never got his P45 so maybe there is something there? It just doesn’t feel likely, it would require imagination and wit and they ain’t got none. When I emailed I got the usual bullshit. Of course, having been paid now, the P45 is a bit irrelevant except it stops me going on an emergency tax code and why should they worry that their idle bollocks costs me money? I’m only a human being and they are a suit-infested buncha nobodies who don’t deserve the intelligence and goodwill of their very able underpaid staff. Apparently a certain person is coming in clean shaven. Not sure what he can do about the ineffectual geek bit, though. I mean, it was like being made redundant by Wurzel Gummidge, (ah the scent of burning bridges: FYTP). Buddhists should be feeling compassion rather than contempt and I think I’ve crossed that bridge, but it was funny, shoulda slipped him a quid for a cup of tea. I make no pretense at my own sartorial splendour, but then again I do wear a suit for interviews and appraisals.

Sofa

Apparently I’ve been replaced with a second hand sofa. Good to know your true value, I say. (Missed out the MD’s brand new Jag as well for ironic purposes).

Music

Enjoying the new Starsailor in the car. I like the Stereophonics new one too, except that a couple of tracks are king irritating (Madame Helga springs to mind). I want the REM best of but not yet.

Spiritual stuff

Trying to get up at 6 am so’s I can get half an hour’s meditation in. Very hard when sleep is eluding you.

Routes

Went north and then across country today. Avoided the M6 but found the windy road from Buxton down to Macclesfield a bit of a trial. 2.5 hours, which is about .5 quicker than the M6 route. I think the A50 route is probably still the best for Mondays ‘cos I’ll be hitting Macc and so on around 7 going the other way and it will be getting busy.

Blessings all.</p