Crisatunity

Kevin is a Member of the Axis of Evil

2008-07-24T16:44:00.004-05:00

Kevin is a puppy I took home from the city animal shelter on Saturday. I just wanted a dog so bad, having waited on this decision for over a decade, secretly plotting to trick my wife at a moment of weakness on her part.

Having concentrated too hard on defeating my wife's good sense, I was vulnerable to Kevin's shenanigans. Right off, Kevin kicks my wallet in the privates by going lame and passing out from fever inside of twelve hours in my house. Two vet pit stops ensued, one of them a pricey after hours affair, essentially just to just to hear repetitions of, "Doesn't look good; I dunno what's wrong with him". The only meaningful outcome of the vet visits was that Kevin got some of Heath Ledger's leftovers and responded by an almost instant healing. Quite the little coke-head, apparently.

So, five days later the furry shitball looks to be completely on the mend, though the vet tells me he could keel over at any minute nonetheless, so I'm still doing this dance where I'm trying to wedge some reality in between the Kevin and the kids' love beams. Personally, I could take Kevin sailing away far better than watching my family turn into blubbering mounds of trembling wishy wash.

So Kevin you suck, and I can't wait to get home and get sloppy kisses from you then shower up and repeat with my wife.

Meme du Jour

2008-07-10T13:31:00.003-05:00

How old were you when you started programming?

8 years old, I think. My dad did Wang mainframe programming for Allis-Chalmers and dragged me into the office on weekends occasionally and sat me at a terminal with some manuals. Mostly I liked to make the noisy giant green bar printer go, as it were. However, I didn't get serious until around 9 or 10 when Santa brought my family a Commodore-64.

How did you get started in programming?

As a hobbyist pre-teen, I wrote all sorts of games and puzzles with the C-64. I even liked hacking existing commercial games. As a professional, it started for me when I was already doing Oracle DBA work, and it became obvious that somehow I was going to have to get my feet wet building things instead of just maintaining them.

What was the first real program you wrote?

It was called MamaJama. It was a Microsoft Access application that used a ODBC connections to glue an Oracle database on a Solaris machine and a RMS database on a VAX. The RMS database was very old, very cryptic and very hierarchic, tables with over ten thousand columns. The Oracle database structure was normalized, relational and useful. The VB developers of the company used the sanity of the Oracle database as the target of their coding, oblivious to existence of the VAX. Which was a good thing, because the VB developers couldn't spell VAX. The MamaJama's ran periodically to synchronize these two extremely different databases. To this day, I'm pretty sure there's no such similar software in existence, replicating a VAX's RMS database and a Solaris' Oracle database - but that could just be my own hubris assuming that.

Pretty much everything I've ever done since has been a variation in degree or another off this basic theme, connecting shit up.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In chronological order: ROSCOE, C-64 BASIC, QBASIC, Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C++, PL/SQL, Korn Shell, VBA, Java, Python, PHP, Oracle Forms, C#, JavaScript

This excludes the multitude of product-specific 4GLs (i.e., Bendata HEAT, SalesLogix, etc.) I've been forced to muddle through because of the short term job at hand.

What was your first professional programming gig?

On the help desk at a mortgage bank, I was required on a sporadic and infrequent basis to unstick the software system we used for trouble tickets. Unsticking required the execution of a single SQL update statement. I didn't know what it did, why it was required, or even a whisper of SQL.

The reason I did the unsticking in the first place was that the staff DBA didn't want to even be bothered to do this once a month six-second task, so he installed the Oracle client on my PC, gave me the SYSTEM password, a script file containing this one SQL statement, and the three bullet-point instructions on how to execute it with SQL*Plus.

After about a year of this arrangement, the DBA was quitting for greener pastures, or whatever. His version of pass-down was to write on a piece of paper two things and hand it to me on his way out the door. He had written down our Oracle support identifier I'd need if I used the other bit, the 800 phone number to Oracle Global Support Services. I already had the SYSTEM password. What else could I possibly need?

I think it took all of a week after his absence for something to go wrong in a part of the business that had nothing whatsoever to do with the help desk duties I performed. Possession of this piece of paper implicated me as the de facto DBA and that was that. After about a decade of belly fat accumulation and a million dollars earned and burnt to a crisp, here I am.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Almost certainly not. If I wasn't such a complete pain in the ass who had to have it his way all the time as a punk kid, I would have pursued being a professor of who the hell cares and gathered as much co-ed ass as I could have until it was time to be put out on the next ice flow.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Quit sucking so much. Quit crying so much. So many developers have zero clue what the alternative is, never having worked a truly miserable job their whole life.

When I Watch a Movie

2008-07-06T17:18:00.003-05:00

I don't go to the theater often, but when I do the thing I'm keenest to watch (other than the film) is the editing. Editing is incredibly under-appreciated, even though it can make a bad film good (Easy Rider), an awesome film even awesomer (The Shining) or a great film terrible (Dr Zhivago).

I ran across an excellent example of exactly how powerful film editing is in the equation of happiness (if the video below doesn't work, try it here) :

I Love It When Stupid Teens Get Burned

2008-07-05T15:58:00.003-05:00

Dear Max P. Sanders of Minneapolis, MN

I hope the several thousand dollars fine a few days in the klink, legal fees and public humilation for the rest of your life (thanks to the InterWeb) was a perfect way for you to learn just how stupid you are.

This veteran is spitting on you.

June's Unanswered Questions

2008-06-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

Why do people use RAR compression?

Strike Two Entity Framework

2008-06-27T10:41:00.004-05:00

This weekend will be my last try with trying to do something limited with the Entity Framework (EF) that is both reproducible and maintainable.

Working with the EF means a dependency on an Entity Data Model (EDM). No matter how nifty the EDM visual tool is, it seems to fall apart during evolutions of change in the underlying physical database schema during its incessant and overkill "updates" against said schema.

Posts like this from the ADO.NET Team give me the distinct impression that using the EF is going to be, over the long run, a heavy dose XML editing to get it to work productively. Honestly, I'm not interested in coding XML files in the least, which seems to be a trend in lots of areas of software frameworks these days, not just the EF.

As I try to apply the EF towards a practical purpose, I realize (again, for the umpteenth million time) why I have historically embraced the pattern of segregating the physical database schema and application code.

The only reason I haven't already abandoned the EF is because I'm keen to push myself to try something new. By Monday the proof will be in the pudding, or the pudding will be in the trash along with all the other ORM-like clap-trap I've previously suffered through.

Hmmmmm

2008-06-25T09:25:00.004-05:00

Even though I've soured almost entirely on the .NET Entity Framework as a comprehensive design and application component - I still see it useful as a highly focused and limited tool.

Eliminating the unworkable process of generating an application's all-inclusive entity model, has seemed to be useful so far. Although, I'm still stuck in SQL Server World with the EF. Or am I?

What Do You Think of the New Logo?

2008-06-20T17:54:00.004-05:00

And the spiffy favicon? One heck of a modern art effort! Back to business.

I love it it when poorly mannered children do the right thing after it becomes self-evident that they aren't going to get away with it. As if if the smelly toads of Buffalo already were unwilling to buy Bills tickets. Way to go, having the only star player run over one of the toads and jet the scene. Maybe they should start signing those agreements to move the rest of their home games to Toronto.

To Hell With Flying

2008-06-18T13:50:00.002-05:00

Not only screw the idea of flying, I'm not sure I want to drive near the damn airport.

Once upon a time, D/FW tower was considered a premier stop for an experienced controller. These days, however, D/FW is just as often a training ground, something that was more typical of control towers at much smaller airports. - Ric Loewen, D/FW tower’s facility representative for the union. Read more...

Why Is the Dread of Change Always Equated With Bigotry?

2008-06-18T12:23:00.005-05:00

Reading Andrew Sullivan is always a trip, but he falls into leading his readers into a self-loathing trap should they be predisposed to doing so. Can't wanting the neighbor's babies to resemble me physically, spiritually and culturally be considered just a natural and desirable extension of wanting my progeny to be along the same lines?

Conundrum: shortBet and Rally planning

2008-06-17T14:48:00.004-05:00

The Background
As many of you know I'm working on a new project, shortBet, which is an MMO credibility engine (still working out exactly what that means, but it sure does sound cool). With my partner on the project, Jamie, we've gradually shaped many of the architecture and design choices.

The project has been moving forward quite nicely in the current nascent stages. One of the conclusions we both agreed upon without much discussion was use of agile development methods. These methods have served us well in our day jobs so it seemed natural to put them to work for us on the construction of shortBet.

The Issue
Writing actual application code is imminent.

Well the time has come, and I'm sitting down as the customer to put in some stories for the first iteration. We've found an excellent (but closed source) free resource, Community Edition of the Rally Software Development. The Community Edition has essentially every feature any small team would need to implement planning with agile methods. However, before I go down the path of using Rally planning, I wanted to think aloud about the matter.

I'm coming to some stark realizations about the limitations of agile methods in our circumstances as this project moves forward. First off, let me stipulate that I think agile methods are great. I think planning software tools are essential for these methods. I think that Rally is very suitable planning software tool. However, I'm concerned that agile methods - specifically the planning methods - will fail us because:

we don't have a genuine customer
we don't have a genuine project manager
we don't have genuine quality control testers
we have an ultra small team of developers (and part-timers at that!)
there is no genuine external pressure of time
there is no genuine external pressure of money

Will the both of us switching customer, project manager, developer, investor and tester hats be feasible to pull off implementing the agile methods? The agile methods, in my mind, are about bringing these sorts of genuine people in a process cohesively, managing each roles' inherit point of view on a project's successful progression. Using the agile methods to artificially distill these roles out of a small (part-time) team doesn't seem philosophically sound.

Agile methods for planning do have a certain amount of bureaucratic overhead that though valuable and essential for the sanity of most development projects, may prove to be too costly to the limited resources involved in the project. What I fear is putting time towards making the agile methods work as if they were the ends and not the means.

The Alternatives
What I want to do, when I finally actually sit down to write the stories is just this:

Write a sentence or two on what feature I want to see
Assign it to a one of us

I don't really care what order the stories get done at this point and for the foreseeable future. I specifically don't care about estimates at this time. With our herky-jerky schedules, estimates no matter how accurate really have no meaning when the available pool of developer time to throw at stories is forever unknown.

Also, while the story is being worked by the developer, I want the planning software to be a centralized and historical place to document

what aspects of the Entity Framework and MVC were used and modified to fulfill the story, or
why the story will not be done, or
reassigning to another developer

The question I'm flat out asking myself right now is this: Is the Google Code Issues interface a suitable alternative for a small part-time team than the full blown Rally planning interface for our team's needs? It's a limited interface, but is that limited nature a good thing?

Ping.fm is the Right Stuff

2008-06-15T10:58:00.003-05:00

So my self-absorbed plea to ping.fm paid dividends. Not knowing exactly sure what ping.fm was even as I begged for them to let me in, I was eager to set it up and mash all the buttons to see what happened. Well, it is exactly what I wanted it to be. I can from a single web page or a single e-mail update my relevant social web services simultaneously. I can change my Facebook status and send a Tweet in one action. The folks running ping.fm are kooky like me (I should trademark that) with a sense of humor building something smart and simple. Smart and simple is how you impress me most.

Also, I admire their employment of the new web word of mouth technique for application growth. Tapping the brakes on willy nilly application distribution to everyone is definitely the way to go - especially if you are a smallish development shop. So, if you want to give ping.fm a roll in the hay I have been given a a beta code, tastyping, that you'll need to be ping.fm's next gentleman caller. I have no idea how long the code will function or for how many folks, so bang it as quickly as you can.

.NET 3.5 (SP1 Beta) Entity Framework Test Drive

2008-06-10T16:34:00.007-05:00

I'm giving the Entity Framework (EF) a test drive on the shortBet project. My primary reason for giving it a go was centered around the fact that I work primarily with Oracle database server on the backend and LINQ to SQL (L2S) is not a good fit for me. shortBet will be using SQL Server, so it serves as an excellent platform for this test drive.

Despite LINQ's greatness, I haven't been all that interested in L2S which has several nasty weaknesses. First, typical LINQ coding elegance falls down on its face when faced with joining more than a few queryables that are closely bound to relational views and tables. Second it generates SQL command text automagically, and I'm not intrinsically happy with that. Finally, and most significantly, use of L2S is bound to the SQL Server platform for the forseeable future.

The EF is an interesting tidbit I had heard was a better deal than the L2S way from a variety of .NET and Oracle resources I trust for leading edge information. After my test drive so far, my assertion is that it is and it isn't a better deal than L2S. It is, because queryables in the EF have a greater potential for expressing complexity and thus more elegant LINQ statements than using L2S queryables. It is, because the tools for expressing Entity Data Models (EDM) are fairly slick and effective. It isn't, because as far as I can fathom from my little dip in the pool, EF is utterly dependent upon L2S - unless you want to write your own custom Data Access Layer, which eliminating is one of the pillars of the EF. By using the EF, at best I'm out of the logical fire, but I'm still in the physical frying pan. It isn't, because even though I have a highly functional relational model for my Shortbet application - I can't seem to see how I would effectively express it with an EDM.

Part of that last failing is clearly because I'm a relational guy, and I'm not very good at OOP modeling. Partly it's because I believe (in my heart of hearts) that entity modeling is simply inferior.

So, at this point - although I'm still continuing with the EF test drive (thankfully I have some help) - I'm of the mindset right now that rich and meaningful entities are great - but a unified model of more than a child-sized handful of them is an irrational endeavor.

ping.fm begging

2008-06-06T14:42:00.002-05:00

I was interested in examining the ping.fm site features, especially tying this blog, my facebook and twitter together. Well, you need one of these beta codes to get in on the fun. The best part is that they encourage you to beg for one, which I thought was genius. So here is my begging effort:

I could write a long diatribe and divert all writing effort away from my overdue blog posting efforts, but I won't do that. I wouldn't waste your time with a long plea for a beta code. I mean, life is too short and we just don't know when the end will come, and I know I don't have time to sit around and wait for you to send me some sort of beta code like I'm a plebian and you are my centurion overlord. Who do you think you are, telling me that I can't use ping.fm? What makes you so special and me so pathetic? Listen, I'm the customer and the customer is always right, right? Give me a break already, this is going nowhere. I watch Adult Swim and I use Tweeter; isn't that enough basis to know that I'm part of the cool crowd? I'm going to The Cure concert tonight in Dallas, and if you need more proof than that to make you know how much I don't need or want one of your precious beta codes, then you just don't *get it*. Anyway, if you would send me one of those beta codes, I'll see what I can do to help you out.

I'll update with any results I acheive.

UPDATE 6/15/2008 Success!

I Get Tired of OOP Sometimes

2008-06-03T16:27:00.005-05:00

I'm learning the ADO.NET Entity Framework particulars and I found this highly instructional ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview document => http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(vs.80).aspx

In it I found a somewhat contentious paragraph describing the value of the client-views infrastructure required to stylize the consumption of the logical data model, using .NET code rather than database views.

An obvious question at this point would be why not just use traditional database views for this. While database views can abstract many of the mappings, often that solution won't work for several process and functional reasons: (a) many of the views are simply too complex to be generated and maintained by developers in a cost-effective way, even for some simple conceptual to logical mappings, (b) the classes of views that have the property of being automatically updatable at the store are limited, and (c) databases for core-systems in medium and large companies are used by many central and departmental applications, and having each individual application create several views in the database would pollute the database schema and create significant maintenance workload for the database administrators. In addition, database views are limited to the expressivity of the relational model, and typically lack some of the more real-world concepts of the Entity Data Model, such as inheritance and complex types.

I'd like to address this paragraph point by point since it is an obvious developer-helpless-against-the-database snippet of half truths that I think is troublesome too read, coming from my I-am-king-of-my-database point of view.

An obvious question at this point would be why not just use traditional database views for this.
This is a great question that was percolating in my mind the second I started reading about the client-view infrastructure. I love it when that happens.

While database views can abstract many of the mappings, often that solution won't work for several process and functional reasons: (a) many of the views are simply too complex to be generated and maintained by developers in a cost-effective way, even for some simple conceptual to logical mappings,
This has never happened to me even once. I've mapped dozens of domains to normalized database objects and all the necessary stylized views required from the nature of the conceptual model. Never once has it been too complicated or expensive to do. What I have experienced are conceptual models that radically change in structure because they never really represented whatever they were intended to represent in the first place. Such radical overhauls are problematic during development and possibly catastrophic post-production. However that is not a function of the shortcomings of the database tier to cooperate with whatever is asked from it. Also, I've seen conceptually illogical models that were overly complex and irrational to cover up the tracks of the modeling wing of the development team's incompetency - illogical irrational models are indeed too complex to be generated and maintained in a cost effective way. Perhaps, I've just never run into these simple conceptual models that can't be mapped to logical underpinnings in the database. My intuition says, show me such a model and my guess is that the model is ill-serving the application.

(b) the classes of views that have the property of being automatically updatable at the store are limited, and
This is true, sort of. A view can easily be constructed that provides an ambiguity on update, rendering this "automatic" feature unusable. However with Oracle, it's a simple matter to put an INSTEAD OF trigger to eliminate the ambiguity.

(c) databases for core-systems in medium and large companies are used by many central and departmental applications, and having each individual application create several views in the database would pollute the database schema
Huh? Every database platform has means to cleanly segregate database objects to eliminate this so-called "pollution". Calling something useful and perhaps necessary isn't really pollution, is it? It sounds like something the convenience store guy in Clerks would say, "You know the Customers are the only problem with this job." Also, when you have views in a database, the greatest asset of the database comes into play, physical integrity. For instance, if you have on of those core-systems, and the development team creates a new application that necessitates creating some views in the database there is no better means of knowing that changes to the core-systems physical structure have impacted this new application than when the view becomes invalid, obviously known from the data dictionary. This coupling is essential in my opinion.

and create significant maintenance workload for the database administrators,
If your database administrator is complaining about the maintenance workload for adding views into the database, please fire him immediately.

In addition, database views are limited to the expressivity of the relational model, and typically lack some of the more real-world concepts of the Entity Data Model, such as inheritance and complex types.
This is perhaps the most irritating statement. Listen up Mister and Missus Object Modeler: there isn't a single concept that you can model that the relational model can't persist. Period. If you believe otherwise, shed your belief immediately. Although you may not be able to express relationally your Masterpiece object model, that is reflection on you, not the massively stable and proven underpinnings of relational modeling. Just as a relational data guy like me struggles to create rich and useful conceptual object models realizes and admits where the rubber isn't meeting the road, me, so should you.

SyntaxHighlighter test

2008-06-02T13:11:00.022-05:00

I am tired of not having syntax highlighting on my blog, and it is probably one of the reasons I neglect posting code here more often. I'm trying out SyntaxHighlighter that I found on Yet Another Coding Blog.

Here's some C#


public class Foo
{
 public Foo()
 {
 }

    public void Bar()
    {
    }
}

Here's some SQL


select e.name, d.name
  from employee e
  join department on (e.dept = d.id)
 where e.title = 'Manager'

If it works, I'll update with the details on how I did it, because there were some twists and turns.

Update: It worked! Here are the steps, as concisely as I can write them.

Download the latest SyntaxHighlighter. The file release was a compressed RAR file. I hate the RAR, so I leave it to you to figure out how to decompress it.
Put the Scripts and Style files on a Internet accessible web server (I used the free Google Pages). Unfortunately, you cannot put these files on blogger.com itself. You must bring some external web resource to the table to implement these steps.

In your Blogger HTML template, find the </div> that closes <div id='outer-wrapper'>. This is likely the last </div> before the </body>. Your mileage may vary depending on what hacking you've done to your template. After that but before the </body> insert the following code:


<link href='http://YourWebserver/SyntaxHighlighter.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>

<script language='javascript' src='http://YourWebserver/shCore.js'/>

<script language='javascript' src='http://YourWebserver/shBrushCsharp.js'/>
<script language='javascript' src='http://YourWebserver/shBrushSql.js'/>


<script language='javascript'>
dp.SyntaxHighlighter.ClipboardSwf = 'http://YourWebserver/clipboard.swf' dp.SyntaxHighlighter.BloggerMode();
dp.SyntaxHighlighter.HighlightAll('code');
</script>

Replace YourWebserver appropriately, depending on where you choose to host the necessary files.

P.S. Blogger is a miserable platform to post HTML instructions, and I will never ever do it again.

Michael Michael Bicycle

2008-05-24T16:59:00.005-05:00

Thanks to the blood sucking NTTA, I finally have a bridge I can use to get to work by bicycle. Once I figured out a way to navigate the 7.5 mile (12km) trip with the least contact with traffic, I started bicycling to work as frequently as I've been able to will myself.

The first few days were hard on my body, very tired when I got to the office and subsequently depressed in the afternoon on the prospect of having to face about 40 minutes of effort to get home.

Two weeks later, I no longer even care about the effort - it's actually easy. And, now it's closer to 30 minutes because I'm hauling ass as best I can.

My goal is to use my bicycle to eliminate at least two commutes by car per week. Coupled with working 4x10 instead of 5x8 hours at the office, that's a 60% reduction in my gasoline consumption via commute. Screw you Exxon.

I'm logging my miles per day, and I think 50 miles (80km) per week - overall not just on commuting - is a great goal for me. Also, I've added my logging to my FriendFeed, to beat down all the idiots who think I'm interesting that follow me that way.

Giving Disqus a Try (redux)

2008-05-22T22:35:00.001-05:00

Giving Disqus a try (too). I think the only reason I've avoided a deluge of comment spam or stalkers is because my blog is utterly irrelevant and uninteresting. At least that's what my AdSense account tells me...

Random Album Review: Recovering the Satellites

2008-05-16T23:24:00.001-05:00

I'm fairly certain Counting Crows is the best band that's arrived on the scene in my adult life. As I listened to this album, fresh with my reviewer-ears, I realized that I'd no idea all these songs were from the same album. iPods tend to de-educate album detail as it goes about rendering songs as singularities to sort and configure at will. I'm not sure that is A Good Thing. This fact is yet another sound reason for the Random Album Review.

I had one concert experience with Counting Crows at the Texas Motor Speedway in 1997. Their performance was extraordinary and had the effect of locking me in for life. As usual, I've laid out the tracks best to worst with the first half dozen or so very difficult to decide between.

5-stars

Goodnight Elisabeth (4:33) - Romantic and sappy and all that.

Another Horsedreamer's Blues (5:20) - I remember this song as particularly soothing to my daughter as baby. To this day, she's still not allowed to sing along to the "Stupid Mothers" line, but allowed to shout the "Drunken Fathers" line with impunity. Go figure.

Catapult (3:35) - Pulsing and pushing, great on the headphones on the big hills.

A Long December (4:58) - As great as this is, there's a couple live versions in my collection that are even better. Counting Crows is one of those great bands that encourages trafficking of their live bootlegs.

Miller's Angels (6:34) - Hey Romeo indeed.

Children in Bloom (5:24) - Someone finally takes of the handcuffs of the lead guitar.

4-stars

Monkey (3:02) - If Horsedreamer is my daughter's domain, this belongs to my son. All monkey everywhere on that boy.

Angels of the Silences (3:39) - Angels picks up the pace, an excellent respite among all the brooding ballads.

Mercury (2:48) - Harmonica?

3-stars

Daylight Fading (3:50) - OK, I guess.

I'm Not Sleeping (4:58) - Good but radio overplay diminished this one for me.

Recovering the Satellites (5:25) - Why do title tracks let down so often?

2-stars

Have You Seen Me Lately? (4:11) - Yawn.

Walkaways (1:12) - I'm not sure why this ditty was ever included.

If you're interested in a listen, ~~my iLike library should have replicated snippets by the time you read this~~ grab the torrent off my facebook. Upcoming for RAR is The Cure's Disintegration.

Getting Right

2008-05-14T12:15:00.005-05:00

When I'm disorganized, lost, grumpy, surly and incomplete there always comes a moment when I can see the corner to turn to get me out of the mess. To a place a point over there, where I can shake loose and get right. The place the point is a redundant destination. The path to it well trodden, but I don't think I've ever looked down and examined where how it twists and turns.

I want to get right, now. Where is the place the point?

I know I have to get right with my lover, neglecting my favorite only piece of ass is too often an oversight.

I know I have to get right with my kids, not let this summer pass by as three more months knocked out on the way to them moving out.

I know I have to get right with my health, ending this farce where I'm fat and slow when I should be so fucking hot and and fast.

I know I have to get right with my code, writing shit that makes sense to other people, including myself 30 days later.

So I'm going to get right.

String in a Haystack

2008-05-06T16:16:00.014-05:00

This is for the data reverse-engineers out there. What do you do if you have a distinctive string value making an appearance in a form or report that's in a big application package, and you have no idea what table or column that value might be calling home? Here's some fancy dancy Oracle SQL to do the trick. I would double-check with your DBA before running against production systems. Your mileage may vary.


declare
   cur sys_refcursor;
   val varchar2(4000);
begin
   for i in (select 'select "' || atc.column_name || '"' ||
                    '  from "' || atc.owner ||
                    '"."' || atc.table_name || '"' ||
                    ' where "' || atc.column_name ||
                    '" like ''%' || :searchstring ||
                    '%''' as cmd
                   ,atc.owner
                   ,atc.table_name
                   ,atc.column_name
               from all_tab_columns atc
               join all_objects ao on (atc.owner =
                                      ao.owner and
                                      atc.table_name =
                                      ao.object_name)
              where ao.object_type = 'TABLE'
                and atc.data_type = 'VARCHAR2'
                and ao.owner = :schema
              order by 2
                      ,3
                      ,4)
   loop
      open cur for i.cmd;
      loop
         fetch cur
            into val;
         exit when cur%notfound;
         dbms_output.put_line(val || ' <= ' ||
                              i.owner || '.' ||
                              i.table_name || '.' ||
                              i.column_name);
      end loop;
   end loop;
end;

There are two variables, the :searchString and the :schema. Bind/substitue with your query tool of choice.

WTF UPS?

2008-05-06T08:19:00.004-05:00

I recently purchased a new monitor, having it shipped to me via UPS. I don't do a lot of UPS business, on either end of the equation, so perhaps I'm a bit behind the curve on this issue. To keep tabs on the deliver, I investigated using my tracking number and RSS with NewsGator.

Guess what? UPS, king of the cutting edge doesn't do RSS. My only choices are continually visiting an updated web page or e-mail. E-mail?

Jason Young (ytechie.com) has a SimpleTracking web service that has great RSS feed wrappers for many major US delivery services, UPS noticeably excluded. UPS is cockblocking him all the way on exposing this data for any service to build great things.

Jason has a petition on this issue for UPS to consider. I encourage my massive single-digit readership to affix their name to the petition; takes 10 seconds.

So Long DOT.TUNES

2008-05-04T19:02:00.008-05:00

I fired up DOT.TUNES Version 4 this morning to share some music with my daughter. I've written previously on the pros and cons of this software. It works well enough so I use it. Then today, I get this bullshit:

Which makes no sense to me because at no point during the original install was there any mention of "expiration". Since I'm firmly entrenched in the "don't fix it if it ain't broke" camp I'm irritated by this mystery arbitrary expiration. Regardless, I go to the indicated URL, because maybe there's some heartbreaking security problem and upgrading is something essential. Maybe I go there because I'm a sheep.

The page primarily references downloading an ostensibly new product called Hook Up, a Mac OSX product which is useless to me. Below the fold there's a banner for the DOT.TUNES v4 product that interests me. The odd lack of prominence for v4 doesn't give me hope they plan on continuing their free license for v4 over the long haul. They might as well have their hyperlink in the closet, buried under cleaning products, an old broom and a mop that's seen better days. I follow the link.

Right off, I'm irritated as all get out. The DOT.TUNES v4 page has music automatically playing like a shitty MySpace wasteland. Not even good music; I thought a rat was chewing on my woofer cables at first. So be it, I find the pause icon and end that nonsense.

The first thing I notice, and maybe most people don't notice these things, is that there's not a stitch of information about DOT.TUNES v4 being new in any sort of way. No new anything. I click on their blog to see what announcements might be relevant to why perfectly good software has suddenly threw up on its own shoes. The light bulb goes on.

Because it's free (as in beer), there's always been a hidden expiration as a marketing tool to force you back to the mother ship if you want to use the software. Very uncool. I could see doing this, but making it up front when you install it (so you can make an informed decision). I could see a expiration that forces an announcement to freebie users. I could see a nag screen that can only be removed by returning to their new product screen and subsequently upgrading.

But, I can't see using a hidden expiration to disable perfectly good software for marketing purposes. That's flat out sheisty. So, goodbye DOT.TUNES. I will not be upgrading. I will not be using or recommending your firm's software to anyone, ever. I know that I wasn't part of your revenue stream, nor was I going to be anytime soon - so you might say good riddance to me. But maybe if enough bloggers (who also aren't in your revenue stream) expose how devious your firm operates, your bottom line will be diminished.

Despite my already enduring love of open source software, it still takes an occasional kick in the groin to remember why.

What is the Random Album Review?

2008-05-04T10:24:00.007-05:00

Before I post my next review, I want to chat a bit about what the Random Album Review series means to me. I love my iPod. Over the years, combining my sizable digitized CD collection and downloads left me with about 10,000 songs. It was great that I was enjoying all my music in single compact magic box, but it was maddening how much crap was in there too.

So, I sat down and listened to it all. In a grand act of self-expression and personal liberty, I deleted all the crap. That left me with about 4000 songs, still quite a bevy of tunage. But that wasn't all. I found that I generally collected music via compilation releases which left me with an empty feeling in a weird way. Compilation albums are kind of seedy and coolness killers. They are an absolute expression of being a late adopter.

I went through my entire collection again. This time I endeavored to document in iTunes: the source album, original year of release and album art. My wife calls this couple of months the dreaded "headphone era". Demonstrating ADD superpowers, I think I even cleaned up iTunes at the dinner table, during dinner with my family. That effort was completed a couple of weeks ago.

So what's left after reaching the summit? Well for one thing I noticed that the quality of some of my favorite songs isn't quite as good as I'd like. When I first bought an iPod and ripped music (circa 2004), I was too ignorant about quality and obsessed with storage. Also, I think the algorithms that iTunes uses to rip music have improved. Several iPods later, storage isn't an issue with 60GB to work with and a more selective collection. Rather than implement an ADD approach, I'm re-ripping my music one album at a time and blogging about it, doing this at whatever pace happens no longer how long it takes.

One word about the "random" nature. It is only as random as iTunes is capable, which is quite suspect but good enough for this purpose. I have a smart playlist that looks for songs that 1) aren't singles, 2) have a five-star rating, 3) haven't been reviewed previously - and then limit that list to one song. That's how I determine which album is next. When I run out of albums that have at least one five-star song, I'll knock it down to four-stars - but that will be a while.

I'm also, trying out new social means to share my collection with family, friends and stalkers. I haven't found any yet that work just the way I want. I'll keep trying out a variety of them and linking or embedding them in Random Album Review posts. Don't expect any consistency on this aspect of the reviews, as I'll be all over the map as it pleases me.

What I like about the Internet

2008-04-30T17:56:00.001-05:00

You just don't have to spend much time explaining completely weird changes.