Bytes of Wisdom

Awesome response to an interview question...

2008-08-27T17:34:00Z

Just a quicky here. I've been reading "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel (great book by the way) and came across a really funny footnote. I think I'll use the interviewing engineer's response if given the chance in the future. Here it is: "A friend of mine was once interviewing an engineer for a programming job and asked him a typical interview question: how do you know when a function or method is too big? Well, said the candidate, I don't like any method to be...(read more)

Note on sets in hibernate/nHibernate

2008-06-05T21:23:00Z

I just wanted to share this with anyone who is not aware... Caveat: After reviewing my original post and the comments that follow I had initially elected to change the container tag in the example below from set to list. After thinking about it further I've returned the tag to 'set', since this is after all what I was trying to illustrate in the first place (although understanding the risk of using set should be understood). Granted, a list probably should have been used, but this was...(read more)

Virtual Joy

2008-06-01T18:23:00Z

At home I have only my Linux box to work with. I'm quite content with it, but I do have some DOS and older Windows apps that I like to use. Unfortunately, by DOS floppy's are now dead (as is my floppy drive) and the MSDN DOS download is for making DOS floppies. What I really wanted was an ISO for DOS that I could use to install on a VM. Fortunately, I came across FreeDOS ( http://www.freedos.org/ )! FreeDOS is an open source DOS implementation. It has been around for some time, but I was...(read more)

Nested classes with JUnit

2008-04-28T14:56:00Z

Recently I was playing with JUnit 4.X. I wanted to be able to define tests in nested classes as I had before with NUnit. This was to facilitate BDD-ish test definitions, where I break up unit tests by test context. My first attempt failed (of course) because JUnit was unable to see the nested classes and the failed to run. After a bit of digging, I ran across a sparsely documented feature that allowed me to do what I wanted. Namely by using: @RunWith(Enclosed.class) Below is an example, hope it's...(read more)

Using SSL Websphere MQSeries and .Net

2008-03-25T16:44:00Z

Hi all, I've haven't posted anything since my last contract...sorry about that (what can I say, I've been busy...Ma, AgileJoe's been abusing me!). In any case, this is as much for my benefit (and documentation for the current team) as it is for the community at large (I never remember this stuff so I want to be able to google it). I did see some other blogs that tackle this subject...but alas...the web *** have blocked most technical blogs here. I was recently tasked with getting...(read more)

Metaphors and Mathematics

2007-11-09T15:59:09Z

I haven't posted myself in a bit and decided to go ahead and drop a few lines...albeit a little off topic. I've been looking for supplemental maths books for both my children. As you Computer Science types know, texts for elementary Maths (and more advanced maths for that matter) can be painfully dully and often confusing. In searching for texts for my two kids, daughter 13 and son 10, I wanted to find materials that were more interesting than their usual fare. This while addressing their...(read more)

Calling .Net Web Services from Oracle PL/SQL

2007-09-14T23:04:00Z

I'm working relatively closely these days with an Oracle DBA on this super-cool mainframe integration project (anyone want to join me? LOL). The old batch ops were managed through cron'd jobs in Oracle and I was asked to take a different approach. I haven't found anything like Control-M here and was toying with the idea of rolling my own scheduling services. The management wanted the integration pieces written in VB.Net, not PL/SQL scripts as had been done in the past, fair enough. In...(read more)

Subversion Tip of the Day - Moving Files

2007-09-12T16:18:34Z

Many of you are beginning to use Subversion for your source control repository these days. I am also sure that you have found SVNTortoise to be a welcome addition to Subversion and use it also. Moving files and directories at the command line is a pretty straight-forward affair, but doing so with Tortoise is a little counterintuitive (but never-the-less simple). Here's the easiest way that I've found to move a file or subdirectory around using Tortoise... Before I begin, here is folder/file...(read more)

VB.Net oddity of the day - Array Declarations

2007-09-11T20:05:59Z

I ran into a recent issue today relating to array declarations in VB.Net. I looked up array declarations on the net and found something that gave me hope, but alas... " Arrays In VB6 declaring an array Dim Items(5) As String gives you 6 items from index 0 to index 5. In VB.NET, this same declaration will yield 5 elements from index 0 through index 4. Be on the look out for "out of bounds" type errors. Also, all arrays in .NET must now be zero-based ." My personal favorite is the...(read more)

Things I hate...

2007-09-01T02:47:52Z

BTW, sorry I've been out of the loop for a while. Whatever. Things I hate...Windows Vista. Just kidding (well, not really). Anyway, I hate Web Services that do little more than allow inefficient remote access to a databases. As you may know, I'm working on a new contract these days for boring details see my blog on the matter . In any case, I was excited to see the 3rd party vender's published web services that at first glance offered a nice interface to a complex system. They developed...(read more)

Quick Background on my current CICS integration project

2007-09-01T02:00:00Z

I'm currently working on a stop-gap legacy integration project that is geared toward data integration between a legacy CICS system and a new 3rd party product. I have 2 major tasks in this project, the first being a web application for bulk data entry into both systems simultaneously and the second being cross-system data transformation and transfer. The integration points between the two systems are expected to support operations for the next 12 months. Past integration projects have been handled...(read more)

VB.Net oddity of the day - Assignment/Comparison operator

2007-08-29T15:56:00Z

On my current project I'm forced to code in VB.Net. Normally I'm pretty open to other languages, but VB.Net is irritating (more so than VB6 in my opinion). The language syntax is riddled with ambiguity (at least for a c-type guy like myself) and moving from c# to VB can be confusing. Here's my latest beef with VB.Net. There's only one operator for assignment and comparisons. As a result, the compiler handles evaluation of the the language syntax in a subtle, but irritating way. Here's...(read more)

CLOBbered again!

2007-08-28T23:47:00Z

Hey all, I'm currently working on an NHibernate on Oracle project and ran into the first problem with CLOBs that I've had in some time. I was trying to use a property that mapped to a CLOB in a Example instance for a session Criteria object. No dice. Oracle complained saying this: System.Data.OracleClient.OracleException: ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected - got CLOB Well, I guess sometimes you get lucky...and sometimes you just get CLOBbered. Guess now I have to dig into the NHibernate...(read more)

How to enlist ADO commands into an NHibernate transaction

2007-04-10T21:27:00Z

Adoption of NHibernate in a legacy environment can be daunting for a number of reasons. Aside from the overhead of becoming proficient with the framework itself, developers are also faced with thousands of lines of working (it's assumed) code that is already conversing with the system's data store(s). If complete migration to NHibernate is a prerequisite, then such systems would never make the move. That being said, NHibernate does afford a way to make calls using the plain old ADO.Net API. To be...(read more)

Reflectionesque behavior in JavaScript

2007-04-06T23:53:00Z

Here's a little something in my continued investigation of JavaScript and its many wonders (man, that sounds strange!)... Okay, so for today's topic I'll look at some 'reflectionesque' behavior of JavaScript. As many know, the class Object can be used as an associative array. For instance: var myvar = new Object(); myvar["value1"] = 42; assert(42, myvar["value1"]); //would be true What many may not know is that objects will behave as associative array whether we like it or not. Properties (fields...(read more)