First four tables up and running!

4:15 and I have my first 4 tables going
took me a while because my tables are not at all named the way Ruby On Rails wants them to be. So I had to find out a little more about the inside of the DB classes before I could get them going - the scaffolding and controllers was all easy though.
And I also had 45 minutes of lunch :) so that would really only be 1:45 hours, and the rest of the tables should be a lot quicker.

Of course I haven't put in any business logic yet, and I am going climbing all day tomorrow and thanksgiving tonight, so I don't know how much more I'm going to manage, but I am happy I've gotten this far. Will try fro some more tomorrow night, continue through the week.
Only complaint at the moment is how bloody slow it is, of course this will be fixed by FastCGI and a faster computer (this is less than a Gig I'm pretty sure), but at the moment it's quite painful...

Tables In...

That took longer than I would have liked - trying to be a bit ambitout with unique keys etc in a DB that I don't really have much experience with - and not the nicest XML structure...
1:45

Starting Programming Challenge

First stop, get the database into MySQL (love admin stuff)
11 :30 am

PEOPLE : Remeber Aaron Peapell? Rebecca (Bobbi) McKennariey?

Mark? Course you do :)
Anyhoo, I sometimes look around for people from my past, and it seems that Aaron has actually turned up - check out these google links. He has, of course, gone missing again; the last report I can find is him looking for work OS.
He has kept up his graphics/imaging stuff, managed to finish his degree (how did he manage that and still be completly invisible?) and made an interesting proposal to Google.

As for Rebecca, I have totally lost contact with her... Ever since I was dominated by Tamzin into not seeing any other women (five years ago?) we have lost touch - doesn't help that she moved to Orange, and I moved to NZ then UK. I am very dissapointed with myself for allowing us to lose contact. I feel a little 'god father' like to her son, who shares my name (Tiest :). If any one knows where she is I'd love to get back in contact.
Geez I can't even remember nick name (I didn't find out her real name for years), and I could never spell her daughter's name (Kita, Kida?). Yes I can - just added it above. I am guessing that the girls version of Bobby is Bobbi

USER INTERFACE : Some nice little articles

Just so you know, most of the posts like this one are a sort of bookmarking for myself, so don't feel particularly like you should find them interesting - only I do really.

• This one is a good summary of most of my interface pets, the only stuff missing is
• Undo everything
• zoomable interfaces
• spatial interfaces
• User Instinct is a webzine for user interfaces - where the above article came from
  
• don't forget asktog and his friends - the definitive usability boys!

I dream of using a computer as easy to use as my old Mac Plus. Can't see it happening though.

MOVIES : Alita Battle Angel

Oh My GOD!!
One of my favorite japanese comics is coming to a cinema near you and directed by none other than James Cameron. And the bad news? We have to wait until 2007 for its release.
I don't know if I can salivate for that long.
It's going to be live action, with the main character completely CGI. And it's going to be released in both 2D and 3D formats - Cameron reckons that by 2007 there will be 3D digital theatres to show this in.
Why won't that damn fast forward button work?

OPERATING SYSTEMS : Java

My dream is a VM operating system - no pointer errors, no array overruns. My other dream is a Zoomable user-interface. Well, maybe we can manage both

• Jnode
  Is a Java OS
• JDistro
  Is a desktop for running other peoples java programs in... they've done all the hard work, just add zooming!

Just need some spare time, and a ruby2java compiler (that works!)

PROGRAMMING : Ruby convert already?

I've only done one tutorial (RoR), read one book (pickaxe) and written two programs (started on the Mars Mission programming challenge, wrote an SQL 2XML2HTML thing for work), and I seem already to be hooked.
There are some things I'm not used to (why are local variables sometimes out of scope when calling methods?) but things like RubyGems, Rake and Ruby on Rails (RoR!) all turn me on ;-P
The only concerns I have are

• Everyone keeps saying 'if this is too slow, use this native version of the library'; is ruby slow?
• It is possible to change the implementation of a method in any class at any time. This is not terribly safe, but it is one of the things that makes Ruby cool. How does one reconcile these opposing desires - has it already been fixed?

Hey Mark, I think you should give this a go, if you still like to program you'll find this fun and it's only 11 MB big... let us know and I'll give you some pointers

PROGRAMMING : Challenge to Self

I have decided to learn ruby by doing. Having read the first half of the non-library bit of PickAxe, and having done the ruby on rails tutorial, I feel I am ready, and so :
This weekend I am going to develop the website for my work in Ruby On Rails.
Or at least see how far I get. I am going to do this for a few reasons

• To learn ruby better
• To learn rails better
• To extend my knowledge of the problem I am trying to solve (by prototyping)
• To demonstrate to both my boss and my client that I know what I am doing

And what's really great about ROR in development is that it's really slow because the CGI module reloads the ruby project every time it gets a request. This can easily be fixed by using fastCGI, but maybe I want to leave it slow so it remains a prototype - no temptation to not throw it away.
(I'll get fastCGI working anyway to see how much faster it is, but not mention it)
Hope this makes you happy David :-) BTW David, if you do read this, I tried to reply to your comment but found it difficult. Having reread my post I can understand your annoyance with me - I would like to apologize. Most of it was written sarcasticly because there are so many web frameworks out there, but I haven't mentioned them in my blog, have I? And ROR comes with the Pragmatic Programmer's approval. And it has a great abbreviation, I feel like a lion every time I say it
ROR

PROGRAMMING : Next FAD on the horizon

Remeber I was complaining about there being no decent Fads in the computer world at the moment? Anyhoo, I have found them
a) Ruby - well I've already fallen into this trap, and have the PickAxe to prove it :-)
b) LOP - Language Oriented Programming
Here is an interesting introduction to LOP, by the co-founder of IntelliJIDEA. The basic idea is to make compiler compilers so unbelievably easy that you are more inclined to write a DSL (domain specific language) than you are to try and hack your way through your normal implementation language. Takes the DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle to the extreme!
How to make it easy? The right editors and the right format. Don't be constrained by text (something I've always dreamed of... why not have an explanatory diagram in the source code, but this goes even further, eg GUI builders), and store code as ASTs (Abstract Syntax Trees).
He shows nicely how you can define a language as a pattern language for nodes in an AST, and that an editor (kind of text) can automatically allow sophisticated, and always correct, editing. how? Because each node of the AST is a little box to type in/select options from - and it looks just like code!
The only thing I don't like about the article are the examples - they are really hard to follow, and these DSLs are supposed to make life easier! Maybe I'm just not knowledgable about the domain of the examples...
Something to watch

Have Your Say

Here is a site full of manifestos - combating the perception that people aren't idealists anymore. I will look more carefully at home :)

BOOKS : Effective Java

Been reading this on the train to work - it's a work book after all
This is a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's been programming Java seriously for more than a year. It covers everything from the pitfalls of serialization to the pitfalls of inheritance. In fact it is mainly pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Some places are truely eye-opening, and applicable to all OO languages. In fact I would love to see M$ put out the equivilent book for c#, but I don't think their marketeers would like it.
Inheritance is basically bad. Now I typically do everything by Types anyway, but I didn't realise it was quite as evil as it appears.
Immutable types are good, but I didn't realise how good they were. In fact they end up being very, very good.
Serialization is very hard, and extremely hackable. And here are the ways to address the hacks...etc
Bloch has an effective style, hardly every boring one, and truely explains, from a conceptual to a practical level, all the problems he is highlighting. You understand why there's a problem, and what root cause lead to it.
The only thing I would complain about is that every now and then he drops a remark which I think is very important as a little paragraph right at the end of a section. Maybe this is because of my own priorities, or maybe he is baiting us with more - think for ourselves and so on - but it is somewhat frustrating - what if I miss that point when next I skim?
If you are not a Java person I would still, hesitantly, recommend it to you. The advice about the highlevel, non-Java specific stuff is invaluable, and is the reason I made the comments about security in my Ruby On Rails post.

COMMENT : Priorities

First Sudan. Now the West Coast of Africa is being ravaged by locusts, no doubt food will be in short supply.
In the US 33% of people are obese, 33% are fat and everyone else is OK.
The US spent how many Billions to save the people of Iraq? (fewer every day) Lets pretend that it was 100Billion in the first year. So that's 50 Million dollars per Iraqi (and increasing every day).
Well, if the US spent that retiring other country's debt or saving people from starving (which must surely cost less than 50M a year per person) I am sure they would have more friends. As it is they throw their hands up in wonder at the reaction of the Iraqis to an invading force of a different religion.
(BTW I realise that this isn't all americans, I am obviously only talking about Bush and co. Oh yeah, and my own government that I also didn't vote for)
I know that in the Hindu religion, and I believe in Islam as well, it is a 'requirement' to give 10% of your income to the poor. I think I'll start with that, then I can at least say this stuff without quite as much hypocrisy.

BOOKS : Foundation Trilogy

I read this when I was little, and thought I'd read it again a few years on.
It is still pretty darn good, Asimov's writing style is terse but enjoyable. In fact the series is broken down into a number of smaller sections - essentially a number of short stories (maybe medium stories...) strung in a row. This takes advantage of Asimov's style, rather than trying to get the man to spin it out.
And I like the way, especially at the beginning, he doesn't actually finish the stories off, he just gets to the 'sting' and then lets you assume that the rest worked out... Sometimes referring to the successful events in the next story.
Strangely it doesn't feel particularly dated, even though I've read some great modern stuff by Greg Egan and Neil Stephenson which takes Tech in a very different (and at this stage more plausible) direction. I guess this is probably because it seems to be more about psychology and economics than anything else. In fact I would guess that economists reading it would get really worked up as they dis/agree with the hypothosis' he is making.
All in all an alright series, I can see why it was so popular, but these days I am looking for a little more character in my stories :)

PROGRAMMING : Natural Programming Languages

Slashdot referenced an IBM article about research in to Natural Language Programming. Quite an interesting project, especially their examples of debugging Alice with 'why didn't' and 'why did' questions. They also have a novice (read 10 year old) programmer's environment called HANDS which looks kind of interesting, though it's hard to imagine it scalling particularly...
My fascination with Zoomable interfaces makes these kind of ideas more interesting for me - I can imagine a Zoomable interface that provides some scalability to the aforementioned programming environments - and if you built it into the actual interface then you have natural scripting that everyone can use without a second thought while editing documents as they normally do.
A ubiquitous scripting language if you like - hopefully dissapearing into the background like the rest of the interface.

Save the World

IBM and others are setting up a world wide 'grid' of spare computers to be used for 'doing good'. Basically, whenever your computer is sitting idle, this program will do some work to solve a problem. By having huge numbers of PCs hooked into this grid you can solve some large problems.
World Community Grid want to do this to solve problems such as Human Proteome Folding, which can be used to fight diseases (viruses I guess).
Currenlty it's only available for Windows, but I would encourage people to give it a go - can't hurt now can it?

MOVIES : Bridget Jones' Diary

Well the latest one has been released, so I thought I'd see the original. Watched it with Grandma, which was interesting given how much swearing there is!
I really enjoyed it, a nice bit of fluff. If all 'romantic comedies' could be that much fun I would watch them a lot more often. A nice story of a 30 something realising she is lonely (and running out of kid time, though I don't think that was so much a consideration) and then having two fantastic dishes fall in her lap - how does she choose?
I thought Hugh Grant did a really good job - certainly the best thing other than 4 weddings and a funeral.
Lots of fun and enjoyment

CDs : Nick, Donna and Sahara

Well, 3 of my favorite bands have released albums in the last month, so I had to get them, and here is a little review of each
Orpheus... by Nick Cave et al
Hmmmm. This is Nick + gospel singers, and has some powerful tracks on it, as well as a lot of mediocre ones. The CD itself is nice - two CDs in a felt covered box. The songs seem to center around Nick's growing relationship with God and the crappy things happening in the world ('There is a war coming' and he's not just talking about Iraq). Anyway I found it about as ho hum as the last couple (though the boatman's call was the worst)
And then I saw him in concert last Thursday. Blew me away. Sudenly the tunes were brought to life as he (and the band and the singers) twisted and bent their souls on stage, feeling every note as if it were a shard of glass extracted from their hearts. Now I love the album - just wish it could be as voracious as his live performance.

Gold Medal by the Donnas
Yeah the Donnas! I went to their concert too, which I think I mentioned in my other blog, which was Ok but a little short. This was before their album was released.
I bought the limited edition (I hope) release of this album with an extra DVD with the single on it as a bit of a movie.
Don't know what to say. Ho humm again. Nothing relly grabbed me like their last 3 albums have. Brett seemed to be straining her voice, which was dissappointing. It wasn't as cheeky, or as fun as their other stuff. I feel a bit Regurgitator - I like their old stuff better than their new stuff :)

Kiss and Tell by Sahara Hot Nights
Just listened to this album, and is definitely the strongest showing of these three. The SH are my least favorite of the three, so I am not as expectant when I listen to their stuff. This was a good progression for them. Retained a lot of their attack and drive and style of their last album (first?) but with a little more maturity and so on. It went down well, and I think will sit nicely mixed in with the first album (whereas mixing the latest Donnas or NC with their earlier stuff won't)
If you liked Jenny Bomb then I think you'll like this one.

PROGRAMMING : Ruby on Rails

Or is that off the rails?
This is yet another framework (though I don't know how many there are for Ruby) for doing websites. It is very Struts like (in that it is MVC) but that's the only comparison you can make.
It seems quite nice for doing quick, not very secure websites. The framework for database access is fantastic (though I wonder about the transaction model). All in all it looks like something I am going to give a try.

DVD : Giant Robo

GIANTA rrROBO!!!!
Finally, after some 12 years of waiting, I have got my hands on the final episode of the Giant Robo Series. This was one of Astroboy's creator's original creations (along with Kimba) and has a distinct 50's feel. As with Astroboy (or is that Atom boy?) the themes are heavily based around the father/son relationship, questioning the wisdom of technology for technology's sake, the danger of atomic power, the importance of friends and that happiness requires sacrifice (I think). Gee, those must be my favorite themes!
While nothing could live up to a 12 year wait, the final episode was pretty dang good. It tied up all the loose ends and made you realise that either there were some shortcomings in the story telling or in the translation, because suddenly people were doing very odd things but you came to realise that it was totally logical if you understood their point of view a little better.
The way I managed to get the final episode was to get the whole series on DVD - and it's a very nice box it comes in too. Unfortunately the extras DVD is all in Japanese.
If you liked astroboy, and don't mind watching Manga that only has one fight every 40 minutes (and no it doesn't last 40 minutes like in Dragon Ball Z), I would encourage you to come and watch this 340 min epic with me.

PROGRAMMING : EJB done right?

I've just read an extremely exciting (!) article about the new EJB 3.0 Spec. It sounds great.
It's main aim is to get rid of all the guff that EJB suffers from - and it seems to succeed. It looks like a really 'usable' framework.
Little examples... All classes are now annotated POJOs so they can be tested easily, but this is especially useful with Entity Beans which you can now send across the network instead of Value Objects - so it looks like you are just accessing the entity bean directly! Also, the EQL which was very broken now seems to implement most of the decent SQL stuff, and also has a great feature where you can create objects within the EQL so you get a list of objects back instead of resultset rows.
I have to say I want to have a good look at this, I think it is potentially great (mind you, the .Net guys are probably laughing at me)

RPG : FUDGE system

Yay. Ash pointed this out the other day, the 'open-source' FUDGE roleplaying system. Works how I've dreamt, but these guys had the tenacity to sit down and type it up. Lots of excellent examples; basically an open ended system you can do with what you want. They suggest a method of die rolling that seems ok, but that is about all that is 'concrete' in the system.
I love it, find it here

TV : British TV

OK, been here a while, seen lots of TV (esp. at Grandma's) so I thought I do a little summary.
Stuff I have really enjoyed (and that's all I'm going to tell you about because I refuse to remember the other stuff)

• Scrapheap Challenge

  Introduced to this in NZ, it's a bunch of boffins making stuff from what they can find on a scrapheap within 10 hours (plus a little time to get it actually working :). Great show - I just love people making stuff!



• Top Gear

  Also introduced to this in NZ. Not sure why someone who doesn't like to drive, doesn't like the gases or the traffic or the inefficencies produced by cars would like this show, but I do! Maybe I like the vicarious nature of it - I don't need to do the stupid stuff because they did it for me :) And it's kinda funny



• The Power of Nightmares

  Amazing lefty show about Orwell's society run on fear - that we happen to live in at the moment. Talking about the history of the various movers and shakers. Really interesting, and trying hard to be balanced (though it is written by people as tree hugging as myself:)



• Should I worry about....

  Fun little show with Richard from Top Gear going and finding out if we should worry about things like - suasages (no, but fat is bad), mobile phones (probably not, but maybe don't talk for longer than 10 mins at once), antibiotic resistant bugs (abso-f*ing-lutely, please people, if you are sick only take antibiotics _if_you're_going_to_die_ otherwise you are just making the bug stronger!! simple evolution)



• Channel 5 Property programs

  They've started another one, and it's just as fun. The last one they had two totally hopeless wannabes trying to make money on 250K in the property market. They eventually did, but more by luck than skill, and I think the rules were bent a little so they could (as in I think they were given however long it took to sell the property rather than staying fixed to 11 months)



• Rosemary and Thyme

  Great little 'murder, she wrote' with Felicity Kendall in it. A bit up and down, I'd say half so far were fun, the other a little boring. But it's nice and simple and easy - the easy listening of murder mystery. And they're gardeners to, so people can enjoy that aspect!



• QI

  Hilarious comedy show hosted by Stephen Fry. Basically Stephen relates some 'Quite Interesting' facts which we all laugh at, then the guests make some jokes and we laugh some more, and then I start to cry I am laughing so hard :)

BOOKS : Good Omens

This is a book that Pratchet and some other guy wrote back in the v. early 90's. I have just finished it, even though I started it back in August.
I think if I'd read it at the time of its printing that I would have enjoyed it more: this book contains many of the jokes, themes and concepts that Pratchet uses in many of his following books. In fact, reading this book is like a summary of a lot of his work over the last 10 years, condensed into the one book.
The story is about Armagedon, with the four horsemen, the beast, his dog, and all the angels and demons trying to swing the war one way or the other. And right in the middle are two characters, an angel and a demon, who don't want things to change particularly at all. They make the case for moral relativism and point out that humans do a much better job of evil and good than any angel or demon has (in any combination of the preceding attributes).
But reading it 10+ years on, having read all TP's books in the interim, and it all seems a little staid, old, been done before. Oh well. If you haven't read any TP I suggest you read this one so you can catch up, otherwise don't worry about it.

MOVIES : Invisible Man, WolfMan, Third Man

I went black and white movie crazy on the weekend, watching three films on TV, video and in the cinema.
The Invisible Man. This was really cool, especially since I remember a send up I saw of it that was almost shot perfect. The ambiance was great - really chilling as you didn't know how far, how mad the invisible man was.
WolfMan. This was made at the same time and isn't as good, but still quite fun. The suspense is built up more effectively, but the movie is ruined by some aweful stereo typed gypsies and a terrible werewolf costume. Truely terrible.
The Third Man. This is supposed to be the best Film Noir made by British Producers, and it was excellent. Even though Marlon Brando is only in it for a short while, he is superb, and most of the other actors (especially the lead) are pretty dang good too. The most surprising thing about this film is that it has quite a bit of humour in it! It is also about real problems in real places with real people, rather than some stupid statue of a falcon :)
All three are worth seeing for various reasons.