Month: February 2006

So… what did I get up to this weekend? Well… on Friday evening, Philippa came round and we had dinner, and then watched “Be Cool“, which is one of the films I bought on DVD the other week. It was pretty good actually! Quite light-hearted and funny.

On Saturday morning we went into town for a few bits and pieces and had lunch in Starbucks (the paninis there are quite nice, and I like their attitude to Fair Trade). In the evening, we went to St Botolph’s to hear Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and ‘Emperor’ concerto. It was a very enjoyable evening – the orchestra (St Botolph’s Music Society orchestra) were very good, and the soloists were wonderful.

Yesterday, in the morning we went to the chaplaincy service as Phil P was speaking! He was very good, and it was good to catch up with him and a few other people in The Flag afterwards over lunch. In the evening, we went round to Anne-Marie / Esther / Matthew’s house, and watched “The Wedding Singer” together, as well as eating hot dogs.

In random, unrelated news, I found a page today which was about the lack of IT understanding in… you guessed it, publications designed to help people understand IT! This next quote comes from this page:

“The four major uses of a DBMS package are database development, database interrogation, database maintenance, and application development.”

Whoah! So, the primary uses of a database management system include database development, database interrogation, database maintenance… way to go for writing a self-fulfilling prophecy! Or, just something really, really, stupid.

You see what happens when you let business types write IT books? 😉

I would rant off into the sunset, but as it’s not sunset yet (and if it was there wouldn’t be much of one), I’ll just rant off into the grey sky…

I’ve been reading The Daily WTF? recently. This is basically a weblog of programming stupidities which make the people reading them go, “What the… uh… flea?” Some of them are worse than others. There’s a forum where people can discuss other related stuff. One thing I came across today is the HTML to PHP convertor. If you’re into web development at all, an alarm bell should have started ringing at that statement. Convert static HTML to server-side PHP code. Automatically.

Is there not a tiny little flaw in that logic somewhere? Well, apparently not to the makers of this software. Although it’s not very specific on the website, apparently what it does (someone downloaded it to try it) is take web page HTML, and output the exact same HTML, except wrapped with PHP “echo” statements. WTF????!!!!!!!11111one

There’s just, well, nothing I can add to that really. They are charging for that … ridiculous.

*ahem* Anyway. I heard a new programmer joke today (although it’s actually quite an old one):

Q: Why do programmers always get Christmas and Halloween mixed up?
A: Because DEC 25 = OCT 31

And, in other news, today I wrote my first custom JSP tag!

Ok…. I’ll get me coat!

If you write Java programs, you may often have to make decisions about exception handling. After reading this post on “The Daily WTF”, I don’t think I’ll ever think of exception handling in the same way again…

There was, however, some wisdom to spring forth from it. From Yoda, in fact. What does Yoda have to teach us about exceptions?

Do, or do not. There is no try {}…

Of course, some people would counter that by saying there is a catch {} to everything, but still…

I’ll get me coat!

It’s been a while since I made a “The Weekend” post, so here we go! What have I been up to this weekend? Well, on Friday evening Philippa came round for dinner. I made a curry, it was actually rather nice! On Saturday, we met up in town. I went to Moss Brothers and I managed to buy a suit for our wedding, along with a waistcoat! It’s very nice (Yves Saint Lauren, apparently. Not that I know anything about clothes!), and I managed to get it on offer so it was a lot cheaper than it would have been! I was quite pleased 🙂 I also managed to buy three DVDs on special offer — “Batman Begins”, “Be Cool” and “The Wedding Singer”.

In the evening we went to “Pizza Express” for dinner, and pigged ourselves on pasta and a toffee fudge desert (as it was Phil’s birthday ;-), and then we went to the “What?” bar for a couple of drinks.

Yesterday, in the morning we went to Fordham, where Andy Saville was taking a Family Service which was looking at the Lord’s Prayer. They’re starting off a series about the Lord’s Prayer in the family (or should I say ‘All-Age’) services, going through it line by line. Quite a good idea, I thought!

Anyway. In the afternoon, Phil came round and we went for a walk, and then went on to campus to meet up with Sarah and Alex where we watched “Batman Begins”. It was the first time I’d seen the film since watching it at the cinema, and it’s still a fantastic film! I’d highly recommend it — again!

And, that’s all from me…

I’ve been messing around recently with Eclipse and SWT. Eclipse is an IDE for Java (well, mainly Java, I think) and SWT is a toolkit for Java GUIs, similar to Swing. The difference with SWT is that it hooks in to the operating system, meaning that your applications look like programs compiled for that operating system (as opposed to Swing, which is … well, it’s not that great).

Anyway, I decided to write an FTP Client in Java. Although gFtp is pretty good, I just wanted to see if I could write my own one… just because! So, I decided to. Here’s a screenshot of it so far:

[cpg_imagethumb:3,ftpclient.png]

Anyway. If anyone feels like contributing to a Java FTP Client, drop me a line! I will probably release the code as open-source if it ever gets to the stage where I think it’s got enough features to release it. Currently you can’t even upload and download files (just browse), so not massively feature-full 😉

I promise I’ll make a non-techy post soon!

Microsoft has released a preview of Internet Explorer 7. I don’t know about anyone else, but the functionality that it has seems to “borrow” rather a lot from the excellent Mozilla Firefox.

I haven’t downloaded the beta version because I don’t want to install a beta version on my work PC, and I don’t have the option of installing it at home because I don’t use Windows!

One thing which I think makes Firefox the best browser around is the extensions – they definitely improve the browsing experience a lot! I think if IE isn’t going to support extensions (I don’t think it will but don’t quote me on that) then I think I already know which one will win out, for me at least…