Run.To.The.Hills

I think i’m seeing the benefit. I’ve looked at the other eBook readers and up to now stuck with the paper on shelves. However, handling the iPad, reading the sample pdf’s and seeing how much it looks , well, just ‘right’ Im beginning to like it more than i should for an overgrown iPhone.

help. I’m being assimilated!

I think we need a bit of a refresh & a new start. New theme & updates, coming very shortly.

I’m a big fan of automating anything that can be automated. Those of you that may know me, might even call me a bit of a fanatic. That’s the reason I got married, automatic dishwasher on the cheap. There’s a reason for my fanaticism, I believe that the more of me you remove from the loop, the less problems will occur. Well, not me in particular, I don’t think I’m that crap. Well, ok, I’d prefer it if you didn’t ask anyone’s opinion on that Especially the wife.

The largest source of problems in a project is us bumbling humans, and we’re not just talking about the bugs that we introduce!. Damn those pesky humans.

Automate Everything

Ok, so how do we help obsolete ourselves? Build automation is a really good start. As Steve McConnell once said “The build is the heartbeat of the project. If the hearts not beating the project is dead.” If that metaphor’s good enough for Steve, its good enough for me. Automated building is one of the best tools to keep that heart beating.

So, one of the keys to having a project run as smoothly as possible is automating the builds. There are many reasons for wanting to automate the build :

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Well, not a big one, but one of my blogless friends has pointed out that I probably mean the Real Time scanner – but I’m 99% sure its called the On Demand scanner.

Here’s the courtesy link to his website

Either way, its the one that checks files as they’re accessed.

McAfee.. helping keep files clean, and product deadlines away.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll never understand how some people in IT departments don’t grasp the value of a developers time. Its a false economy to provide anything but the absolute fastest PC for a developer. I’m not really sure where the real problem lies. Is it that non-techie people rise to management positions without realising what precisely their reports are doing?

Take the current client. We’re working on incredibly old PC’s – P4’s with 2gb of ram and 40gb.  DevStudio is simply un-useable. I don’t care what the minimum supported spec says, it’s painful. We’ve managed to get some new PC’s ordered, but in most other places its simply not that easy. We still have to justify why we’d like large monitors for example.

Who creates those kinds of obstacles? How they *know* what size monitor I’ll need?

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Ok, not really part three but a quick post about how the last two posts arrived at the blog in the wrong order. I can’t be bothered swapping them round so just read from the top down

This stuff really does tire me out. I’ve spent yet another day battling with Oracle’s data provider instead of doing anything meaningful. I’m calling a stored procedure with an out parameter of a varchar2. I assign an OracleParameter in exactly the same way as the stored procedures , same order and same sizes. everything matches, and I keep getting a ORA-06502 saying that there’s a size mis-match. What gives. I’ve never had this much trouble with SQL server, everything just seems to *work*. Pick up oracle and you seem to spend days battling with crap SDKs, connection problems, and weird things like TNS names junk – after all it would just be TOO complicated to specify this as an IP address in the connection string. <sigh>

Oracle isn’t my Friend.

Ok, after spending another 1/2 day battling with the oracle tools for devstudio, i took the plunge and reflected the whole Oracle Data access component. I’m not sure I should be publicly admitting to reverse engineering Larry’s baby but if its the only way I can find out what broken, so be it. They should learn to write working code.

So I dig out reflector and run the ODP.Net assemblies through one of the reflector add-ins that brings it back to something more readable.

On inspection it seems that they’re mixing the domain values for db nulls. the OracleString performs a conversion when the column is null and actual returns the string “null”! Poor? Well I think so.

So, the next step is to look through the designer code that the ODT spits out when you drag a stored procedure onto a data set design surface. It appears to work ok, until you try using any procedure that involves varcar2 out parameters. Then it chokes. Nice.

The problem is it looks like their generated null checks aren’t working correctly. They’re testing the returned objects against NULL, and then if the object isn’t null they’re comparing the objects Value with System:DBNull. This obviously wont work since an they always return an Oracle type and the value throws an exception if the Oracle type is null. Not only that, but their implicit casting in the generated code is broken too, although that seems to be a symptom of their checks for null failing and going on the read the Value in order to cast it to a real .Net type.

The fixes are pretty simple, but it does involve editing the Table Adapters designer .CS file and fixing their ropey code.

I encountered these problems a couple of years ago, and swore never to trust them again, but heh, this is 3 years later, surely they’ve fixed the casting bugs?

Apparently not.

So, if you have the choice stick with SQLServer. For all MS’s flaws they seem to emit bug free code, and they do fix stuff.

<rant over/>

Apart from not understanding how to catch trains properly for the first 2days, everything’s going pretty well. The team is switched on, and the work is interesting so its all good

What I do find a bit puzzling is that other than Sheffield station there’s no way to find out which trains stop at your station, or what time it will arrive. Where there’s more than one train stopping at your destination you have no way of knowing which one will be quicker other than to ask. Even Sheffield’s fancy display board doesn’t show you the arrival times, but it does, however, show you which stations the trains will stop at.

So for instance, although there are trains that go direct from Sheffield to Leeds these can take up to an hour and 40 minutes. However, the cross country trains that start at Plymouth and end in Edinburgh also stop at both Sheffield and Leeds and yet only take 50 minutes. The trouble is you have no way of finding that out other than asking, or being a regular and already knowing!

It all seems a bit odd to me. Anyway, its no longer taking me 3.5 hours to commute! Yay!

As for the work, it does seem there’s more ASP.NET that I expected, but the data that’s driving the site is pretty interesting to work with, and because we’ve got a pretty switched on Oracle developer it’s making my life really easy! He has complete control over the organisation of the data, and if we need something that he hasn’t thought of it’s a simple task to ask him to add it, no politics involved which is a great relief.

T-Mobile Internet

For the T-Mobile internet dongle, apart from the  slightly patchy connections whilst on the train I’ve actually used less than 80mb, which is pretty good really. I was thinking that I’d be going over my tariff limit but on reflection i doubt I’ll even come close.

That 80mb consists of email, some web research and a bit of online development  i.e. uploading files to a couple of my sites. I have noticed that as soon as the connection is made, the tmobile connection manager’s transfer count starts climbing and reaches 160K of transfers, without me actually doing anything. my daughter has borrowed it too, so I was expecting the whole allowance to be used but she only ended up using 28mb for a whole night of the usual facebook/bebo/tagged rubbish !

So, Good news I dont think I’ll end up going over the limit at all!

Image by Neil T via Flickr

Ok, so after after a short break over Christmas, I though I’d better pull my socks up and start looking for a new contract. As everyone returned to work on the 5th of Jan, I wasn’t expecting anywhere near the response I got after posting my CV online! Either my C.V. is absolutely amazing or the IT market is ridiculously understaffed! I’d like to think it was the former, but I suspect it’s the latter! Just over 3 days into the first week and I was getting over 25 calls a day. by Thursday I’m signed up for a 6 month contract in Bradford!

Since trying to get to Bradford by car would be a real PITA , I’ve opted for a more comfortable commute and gone by train. So not only can I get a good hour and half of work done I can actually blog more often too Finally might get a chance to write as many articles as I keep promising!

I did buy a nice little T-Mobile internet dongle too, so I can be connected whilst travelling – T-Mobile seemed like to best deal because of their usage policy. If you happen to go over their limits, there’s no real penalty. Unlike all the other operators which charge over £1 a megabyte! £1 a megabyte! That’s totally ridiculous! If I accidentally went over my limit and watched a day of youtube videos (well ok, you’d have to be pretty brain dead to watch *anything* on youtube) I could end up with a bill of over £1000! . Anyway. after a few days of email / blogging and googling, I’ll post an update on how long my usage cap is likely to last!