A thread on a mailing list reminded me of this.

So far, in the last 12 hours, I’ve discovered that my payslips from this time last year bear no resemblence to reality, my pension company has failed to recieve approximately 1900GBP of money that should have been paid into it and O2 have managed to transfer my mobile number to completely the wrong SIM. I’m still waiting for April so I can call the Inland Revenue to find out what happened to all the student loan repayments I made at my previous company (Approx 700GBP).

Have spoken with O2, who are going to transfer my number ot the right SIM, hopefully in the next 2 hours. Need to speak to the guy that does payroll in the office, when he comes in next.

Sucks to be me.

Update: Phone now works.

I don’t think a card says “I love you” so much as “Society expects me to buy you a piece of paper, so I felt obligated to get you this.”

Discuss.

Which of these two fragments is more readable?

$self->{catalina_base} = $ENV{'CATALINA_BASE'};
if (!defined $self->{catalina_base}) {
    $self->{catalina_base} = $self->getTomcatHome() ;
}
if (!defined $self->{catalina_base}) {
    CCM::Util::error ("CATALINA_BASE unset and TOMCAT_HOME undefined", 3);
}

or

$self->{catalina_base} = $ENV{'CATALINA_BASE'} || $self->getTomcatHome()
   || CCM::Util::error ("CATALINA_BASE unset and TOMCAT_HOME undefined", 3);

Update: or

$self->{catalina_base} = (
   $ENV{'CATALINA_BASE'}
   or $self->getTomcatHome()
   or CCM::Util::error ("CATALINA_BASE unset and TOMCAT_HOME undefined", 3)
);

MJ Ray, I think you’re distorting what is going on. Google are, rightly, protective of their search results and work actively against people that try to manipulate the search results. This is what BMW.de had done by giving a spam page to google and using javascript to redirect users to the right page. As an aside, this would have broken for text browsers or anyone without javascript. It’s not the pinicle of accessibility is it? Google were protecting their index, not using it as a vendetta against people it doesn’t like as you were suggesting. Stop being so paranoid and stop distorting the story, or you’re no better than the devil you’re trying to paint Google as.

Today, I discovered SQL::Translator, which seems to have some very interesting use cases. Basically, it is a perl module for translating a database schema from one of a number of formats and turning it into another format. Parsers include:

• Live querying of DB2, MySQL, DBI-PostgreSQL, SQLite and Sybase databases
• Access
• Excel
• SQL for DB2, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Sybase
• Storable
• XML
• YAML

Output formats include:

• Class::DBI
• SQL for MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLServer, SQLite and Sybase
• Storable, XML and YAML
• POD, Diagram, GraphViz and HTML

Several things spring to mind with this:

1. Defining your Schema in XML and using SQL::Translator to convert it into SQL for several databases and a set of classes for Class::DBI, which would make your application immediately target any of the supported databases.
2. Documenting an existing database for which you’ve lost existing documentation by pointing it at a running database instance and outputting HTML page and, thanks to the Diagram output module, visual representation of the structure.
3. Convert one database from product to another. Point it at a MySQL database and generate SQL for postgresql. If you generated some Class::DBI stuff you could possibly quickly write a script to copy data too.
4. Using the sqlt-diff script, compare you current SQL to what is running on the database and generate a SQL script to upgrade the database structure using ALTER TABLE etc. Presumably you’d need to convert any data yourself, but is still a time saver for large databases.

I’m sure other people could think of some interesting uses for this. Having looked at the Class::DBI stuff, I think it could do with some improvements. I can’t see a way to set the class names, although I haven’t spent that much time looking and it insists on having all the classes in one file. Also the XML and YAML formats generated are rather verbose and I haven’t looked to see how much I could cut them down to use as the source definition. I suspect that I can make it a lot shorter and rely on sensible defaults.

My initial reason for wanting to use SQL::Translator is that Class::DBI::Pg has a large start up time and isn’t really suitable for CGI use if you have a complex database. This might be mitigated by using mod_perl, but in the mean time I was hoping I could speed up startup by telling Class::DBI my column names, rather than it querying the database. SQL::Translator should allow me to save duplicating the database structure, whilst allowing me to support multiple backend databases. If I get this working, I’ll write up a short HOWTO.

I can’t believe in this day and age that OPSI (formerly HMSO) still don’t have copies of UK acts of parliament before 1988 online. According to their website:

Q. Why do you only display legislation back to 1988?

A. The website was launched in 1996. Initially, legislation was only available from that year. In 2000 we took the decision to include older legislation for which we had electronic files. These files only dated back to 1988. Prior to this, legislation is only available in its original print format.

I don’t think it’s acceptable to say “Oh it’s a bit of work to make them available.” If Project Gutenberg can make 17,000 out of copyright works available, I fail to see why the government, who have resources at their disposal, can’t make the text of approximately 3000 acts from the last 100 years available. This makes several key acts which govern us today unavailable to the UK public, including the Telecommunications Act 1984, Sale of Goods Act 1979, Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 and Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.

On a similar note, they have only just started making PDF files avilable for download (since October 2005). They don’t appear to be planning on making existing documents available in PDF. Again, I don’t think it would be too hard to make all their content availble in alternative formats.

Found out that I’d been libelled by an old school friend last night. Apparently I was mentioned as part of LugRadio’s highly amusing Look Queer for the New Year competition. Listen to the stream here (about 2 minutes in). I mean how insulting is it to be told you look queer by a guy who looks like this:

I don’t know if I’m more insulted about only coming third or by the fact that I don’t get a prize. Wish I’d slept with his girlfriend now (or at least her sister).

You can run Jono, but you can’t hide.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I’ve been working on a new layout for my website, which is mostly completed. Still need to do some work on some of the styling, but I’m mostly happy with the layout of the site. It’s not exactly an original design, but it’s a significant improvement on the half style I used to have.

The next step is to improve the style so I don’t have to repeat the style and html on every page and I’m hoping to do it without php. I have some cunning plans involving python and xslt, but we’ll see how that goes.

Also, after several months, I fixed my blog comments to not give a 500 Server Error, so people can now freely spam my comments. Turns out that the comments plugin didn’t have write permission to the comments directory, but pyblosxom kindly didn’t prove any hints beyond “Premature end of script headers”. Cheers.

Yesterday I posted about some bad shell code I had found and posted an improved version. Part of the reason for posting it was that I hoping someone could point out any errors in the version I posted. Fortunately Neil Moore emailed me some improvements.

1. If the script returns more than one line they will be removed by the $(…) expansion when it is split into words. The solution there is to surround it in double quotes.

2. The next problem Neil pointed out was that $@ should be surrounded by quotes in pretty much every case, otherwise parameters with spaces in will get split into separate parameters.

3. The final problem is that if the script includes a return statement, it will stop the inner most function or sourced script, but not during eval.The solution is to enclose it in a function:

dummy() { eval “$(perl “$CONF_DIR/project.pl” “$@”)“; } dummy “$@”

Since making the post, I discovered that Solaris' /bin/sh
doesn't like $(...), so it's probably better to use backticks
instead if you want to be portable. As I know the output from the script
I'm not worried about return statements, so I've ended up with:

eval “perl "$CONF_DIR/project.pl" "$@"”