Category Archives: General

All things general

Amusing paper article from Oz

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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PERTH – An SAS trooper collecting toys for children was stabbed when he helped stop a suspected shoplifter in east Perth . The ‘Toys-R-Us’ Store Manager told ‘The West Australian’ that a man was seen on surveillance cameras last Friday putting a laptop under his jacket at the store.

When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, pulled a knife and ran toward the door. Outside were four SAS Troopers collecting toys for the “Toys For Tots” program. Smith said the Troopers stopped the man, but he stabbed one of them in the back. Fortunately the cut did not appear to be severe.

The suspect however was transported by ambulance to the Royal Perth Hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, possible broken ribs, multiple contusions, and assorted lacerations including a broken nose and jaw … Injuries he apparently sustained when he tripped whilst trying to run away. One of the Troopers said, “He was a clumsy bastard.”

Review of Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g – Chapter 12

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

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This is the final chapter of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g, and unlike e rest of the book looks forward as to where Event Processing might go (and therefore Oracle) as well as a few observations on the Oracle solution itself. The obvious potential for Oracle is to bring the CEP tooling into JDeveloper rather than an Eclipse plugin as is presently the case.big JDeveloper gets the suggested changes (the book has no apparent link to Oracle product road map) would result in a more wizard centric approach to development.

In terms of technology approaches the only other major point made is the likely harmonization with SOA principles. What did surprise me is that the link to BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and BPM (Business Process Monitoring) wasn’t made despite the ever shrinking gap between business views onto data such that a business would be able to respond to to analysed events rather than BI reports well after the event. The most fascinating piece of this chapter is the relationship between CEP and Big Data (Hadoop etc) and the idea CEP could filter out data, or use Hadoop as a data source.

The rest of the chapter focuses more on possible directions for event processing in general, such as smart homes, cheaper devices feeding back more data allowing dynamic management and tracking of objects such as shipping containers and predictive analytics.

A well written chapter, but then by now you’d expect nothing less, but perhaps not as informative as the rest of the book, but then this chapter is far more speculative.

Overall Alexandre Alves, Robin J. Smith and Lloyd Williams should be very proud of the book and I hope that it sells well. As I said previously, this maybe geared to the Oracle product, but the way it has been written you could take the concepts and ideas and you could be confident of having some solid foundation understanding on any CEP solution.

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Review of Introduction to Oracle Event Processing – chapters 10 & 11

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

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The penultimate chapters don’t dive into the core Event Processing technology but look at some uses cases and the combination of CEP with Oracle’s spatial extensions and database capabilities. My initial reaction was that these chapters are perhaps more niche than I’d want, but when I thought a little longer it occurred to me that a lot of CEP use cases would include make use of spatial. Intact a system development I lead some years ago, if built today could be built using these features.

The book focuses on the idea of notifying people about a public transport service, but think about the great many mobile services evolving for smart phones given their push notification capability now you can see how e spatial features could offer a lot of value.

The chapters like everything else in this book are very well written, and worth reading.

If anything the questions left in my mind, are more commercial dimensions of such a technology – enterprise Oracle database which contains a number of the special feature is not cheap, and I’d imagine that the spatial cartridge isn’t cheap. This leads me to a natural next question, given the common application scenarios like e one described, has anyone stood up a SaaS service using this technology, and how cost effective/competitive/attractive would it be?

As you can see a thought provoking book.

Record Store–Wonderful Old Photos

17 Monday Jun 2013

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The RecordStore have been using some marvellous old photos as part of their newsletters. I went looking for them so I could share them …

As it happens a lot of these photos show up at http://aziomedia.wordpress.com

 

If only my collection looked as good as this.

WordPress and other blogging apps

01 Saturday Jun 2013

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It’s great having a little blogging and tweeting apps on a phone as it gives a great opportunities to exploit those odd moments to capture and idea and post them.

The tools can use predictive text and correct your keying and spelling errors. Bit why can’t they help by suggesting/predicting links for you???? Trying to jump in and out of editing on an iPhone to grab links is just a pain!

I inevitably end up fixing blog entries from a desktop sooner or later to add appropriate links etc.

Over to you app authors time to impress.

Pair Programming and Introversion

01 Saturday Jun 2013

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In the process of reading Susan Cain’s book Quiet I got to wondering about common traits of developers and the idea of pair programming.

Pair programming advocates the idea of 2 developers working on a single piece of code will produce better quality code with a lower big count on the basis that both developers catch each others mistakes and both will gravitate to the best ideas. To achieve this does need the subjection of egos.

Now, if the stereotype of developers being typically introverted individuals which I think holds water (certainly from my experience) then drawing from what Susan Cain has written about this development approach is going to be fatiguing and not sit easily with the personality of your average developer.

This would mean for pair programming to be effective then those involved must. Be able to bring Free Traits to bare (more in a moment). But those best able to bring such practices to effect must be truly motivated developers. Ironically I believe that those highly motivated and focused developers are the best out there. So how does this pact the value of such an. Approach?

As for Free Trait Theory this takes the view that when pursuing core values individuals can project (if not manifest) traits such as extroverted behaviour, albeit find it fatiguing.

All of this says to me is, don’t expect developers to live and breath the idea of pairing; and even expect reluctance (on the basis that not all developers see. Coding or the value of coding as a personal goal in life). But bursts of this approach may deliver value when working on a more challenging area of code or algorithm.

Java EE With Netbeans Review

13 Monday May 2013

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I recently completed a review for Packt Publishing of some course videos on Netbeans 7 with JavaEE, which concentrated particularly at JSF and related technologies such as JPQL. The videos are a natural follow on from the author’s book Java EE 6 Development With NetBeans 7.

I have to say that David Heffelfinger’s videos did a good job of walking through the basics of the technologies and would suggest that they’re worth checking out if you want to quickly get your head around this area of Java.

For more on this kind of thing checkout David’s blog – http://www.ensode.net/roller/dheffelfinger/

Only catch – I don’t know when the videos will get published officially at the moment.

Update:videos likely to be published mid June

JDeveloper & Copying Formatted Text

13 Monday May 2013

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I’ve started to use Oracle’s JDeveloper more and more, not just because I’m working with the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) Foundation Pack but also as an XSD Editor for designing interface definitions.

I’ve spent sometime trying to find a solution that can compete with XML Spy but without the huge price tag.  I’ve tried OxygenXML, Eclipse, Visual Studio among others and concluded that its very good for a free tool. Perhaps still not as good as XMLSpy – but thats the difference between an IDE and a dedicated XSD/XML tool.

image JDeveloper design view- with a lot of similarities to XMLSpy in presentation

You might think, that to use JDeveloper I have to commit to using the Oracle technology stack (and the big price tag that comes with), but this isn’t the case.

Not to mention Oracle have very much caught up with the Open Source World of Maven, there is a growing library of plugins both Official and Open Source covering a plethora of things from JUnit integration to Python & Groovy language  syntaxes.

One of the nice things with XMLSpy and VisualStudio is the ability to copy into other documents the pretty formatted text (colour coded syntax etc) – making schemas or code fragments easier to look at in a document.  However out of the box JDeveloper doesn’t do this out of the box. But it would seem that this capability wasn’t just wanted by me, so an extension has been written Chris Hughes that solves this problem called jdev-copyashtml.


<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><xs:schemaxmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><xs:elementname="shiporder"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="orderperson"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="shipto"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="name"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="address"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="city"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="country"type="xs:string"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element><xs:elementname="item"maxOccurs="unbounded"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="title"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="note"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0"/><xs:elementname="quantity"type="xs:positiveInteger"/><xs:elementname="price"type="xs:decimal"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:sequence><xs:attributename="orderid"type="xs:string"use="required"/></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:schema>

 

Once downloaded go to Help –> Check for Updates and step through so you can then choose your download – as shown.

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Once installed you’ll need to restart JDeveloper.  To then configure to plugin to work as you want go to Tools –> Preferences… Where you should be able to find Copy As HTML/RTF in the left menu tree to get the options to configure the plugin behaviour.

image

If you’re going from Windows application to another then you want the Rich Text Format setting.  After that rather than Ctrl+C its Ctrl+H to copy and carry the pretty formatting/colours etc.

Cars some observations on a Nissan Juke and Vauxhall Insignia

26 Thursday Jul 2012

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Unfortunately some one kindly scrapped the side of my Alfa Romeo. So whilst the cosmetic damage was being dealt with I had a couple of loan cars. Rather trying to write a review like a car magazine (carry capacity of a boot etc) I thought I’d share my observations that made me laugh, wince and smile.

The Nissan 1st ….
A car loaded with all the electrical toys from the sensible like Bluetooth to a G Force meter (in a 1.6 petrol powered car)!!

The MP3/music selection scored well on the geek-o-meter by being a central touch screen. But trying to change album (folder) whilst was just stupidly difficult and dangerous whilst driving.

Reversing and you got a reward looking camera – great to make sure no children’s toys to accidentally squash, but the truth is those old fashioned wing mirrors far more helpful.

I think the Juke is just a jacked up small car. But jacking it up ruined any handling there was. For all the electronics I still experienced understeer and traction loss at 20mph in the damp.

I Nalso do a lot of motorway driving, and the slab sided shape and ride height made the car suffer from cross winds.

Now for the Insignia ….
This time a diesel SRi. A lot less in the gadget department, and an odd mix in my opinion. So we had sat nav which couldn’t take post codes. But no Bluetooth hands free, I’d have happily swapped the 2 features.

The screen was a good size and could use it with a BMW Idrive style control (dial based control next to handbrake ). But the screen only changed background colours at night too bright still.

On the subject of handbrake rather than a traditional leaver it had a little electronic switch. To then disengage you had to do a learner like hill start release (try to power so car strains against the breaks). This can’t do much for your pads and disks.

We had electric windows at the front but at the back it was still manual. I didnt think anyone did that anymore.

Automatic headlights – nice. But no auto dimming review mirror.

It looks like Vauxhall haven’t learnt from Alfa’s mistake of 10 years ago – pretty shaped mirrors are useless. Accepted the side profile of the car wasn’t bad, but what an ugly rear.

Given the car had Vauxhall’s sport tag (SRi) the drivers seat was part electric but no lumber adjustment and the seat back angle was as clumsy leaver.

Finally I did find the car handling was a bit fidgety on the motorway which was tiring on the arms after a couple of hours driving. Probably the the price of a lighter car with good fuel economy.

And with the return of the Alfa…
Heavier Thant the Insignia and as a result not as efficient but so finessed for a driver experience. That midrange acceleration is deeply satisfying. My only grouch the MP3 info display is poor. But I can for give that.

Project Mag

30 Tuesday Aug 2011

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I was browsing through this month’s hot and popular apps in iTunes store and came across Project Magazine which claims to be the 1st magazine dedicated to be published only via the iPad.

The magazine has got some creditable names working on the magazine and backed by Virgin Digital Media – so far so good. So I thought I’d download the app see if I can see any of the magazines’ writing – the electronic equivalent of leafing through the magazine on the stand before buying. Sensibly the app offers an issue preview option before buying at £1.99 (not bad when you think Esquire, FHM etc cost best part of £5 per issue).

So I thought I’d preview the latest issue, what you get is a full screen view of the current issue’s cover, something you can read and see without asking for a preview. Talk about fall down on the final hurdle. Even the web offering of the major press allow you to see some of their writing before subscribing. A key buying incentive is seeing the magazine and getting the feel of what will be like.

Perhaps Project Mag will realise this quickly and soon, otherwise they’re going to be missing sales, and probably lots of them.