Databases & Life

From the autodie manual: It is better to die() than to return() in failure. — Klingon programming proverb.

I use JUnit, PHPUnit and Perl’s Test::Unit.

A while back I had to make a decision, as the most senior developer on a team, if we should stick with the Git version control system.

There is often a misunderstanding about primary keys in database tables.

It’s amazing that the following all works: Using my terminal program (PuTTY on Windows, set to UTF-8) connected to a Linux computer (terminal settings set to UTF-8), created a file whose name had various Unicode characters The shell allowed me to type tho…

Naming is extremely important in software development.

I have just spent an hour debugging the following problem.

Yesterday I spent the entire day getting the following amazing state-of-the-art not-ever-done-before feature to work: Executing a SQL statement from my program Because, as everyone knows, I don’t suffer from NIHS, I used standard object-relational mapping…

Recently I programmed the following screen in PHP: The user logs in The user has a subscription The subscription has a number of states ("terminate", "auto-extend", ..)

Today I sold my car to a guy from France.

So everyone in the “blogosphere” is going on about Google Chrome.

Sometimes I am accused of suffering from the “Not Invented Here Syndrome”.

A reader wrote to me with the following question.

Anyone who has written any graphics or text manipulation software will know the following problem: Each character or object has a particular style, for example the size of the writing, the thickness of the stroke, etc.

The only way to enforce unique constraints on a database table is by asking the database to do it.

If you’re writing software using a database system such as MySQL, your code doesn’t have access to all the data at any point in time, you SELECT just the data you need to operate on.

Oracle has an unusual feature, which attracts it a lot of criticism.

I’m sure that Joel on Software is well read: his views on user interfaces are certainly well worth reading.

Recently I was asked to put a webpage online which contained some navigation and some content.

I was reading this article about how certain data gets messed up when one imports it into Excel (certain data looks like a date and thus gets converted into one), and it reminded me of a problem I had when transferring data over an XML protocol from Perl…

Let me respond to some of the comments left at Programming Languages: Is newer always better?

I constantly hear the belief that modern programming languages and environment are better than older programming languages.

I have always found this an extremely interesting computer science problem, and have written various polygon scanline conversion routines in my life.

Looking around my hard disk, I found a program I wrote in December 1997 to demonstrate the capabilities of IFS (Iterated Function Series) using Affine maps.

Two great comments from people about their experiences with Windows.

As I do a lot of programming using open source databases, I couldn’t help but notice that inclusion of XML in the database seems to be a hot topic.

I am probably one of the rare type of Mac owners who did neither of the following: Bought Mac OS X 10.5 (including Safari 3) Upgraded to Safari 3 by downloading it for free from Apple’s website Therefore I was still using Safari 2 on my Mac.

The monitor I am using at work suddenly went white.

I suddenly got an email out of the blue today: Dear Sir / Madam: We have received your application, an interview will be arranged for shortlisted candidates.

Every Java object has a hashCode() and an equals(..) method.

There was a discussion on Slashdot about corporate ethics and system administrators reading other people’s emails.

The Java Iterator interface requires one implements a hasNext method, to determine if the current item is the last to be iterated over, or not.

Trying to read a large amount of data from MySQL using Java using one query is not as easy as one might think.

I’m sure there are a lot of opinions in the world about which logger levels to use for which errors.

Not even the simplest things work with computers these days.

Before I left Vienna, the Internet stopped working in my flat.

I just tried to start Tomcat and it refused to start because of the following error: log4j:ERROR Error occured while converting date. java.lang.NullPointerException at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method) at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.getCha…

I was talking to my father over Christmas and he said that in his career, job titles of bosses had been various things, such as “leader of”, “head of”, etc.

Recently I was working on a website which was developed in PHP without a web framework.

The following cycle never ceases to amaze me: People learning programming find “real” languages such as C++ or Java filled with too many “complex” constructs.

I shall be blogging here henceforth.

Installing this into Firefox (takes < 1 minute and doesn’t require a download) allows you to check for the availability of domain names straight from the browser.

If one defines a class with the member variable: protected static $bytes = 12582912; then that’s fine.

I’ve taken a look at the state of vector graphics in the browser.

A while back I was doing some performance tuning on MySQL 5 for a customer.

I realized I never finished the story about Sony laptop Support.

On my stereo at home it plays fine (although it doesn’t work on my Windows computer) but put it into my girlfriend’s DVD player and it reports itself to have 17 tracks even though the cover says it only has 15.

I’m using Windows, and it seems that in one new aspect, I discover that Windows just doesn’t work.

I used to think of a function as something which would convert some input value into some output value (potentially with some side-effects).

Java Enum instances are singletons.