Category: Uncategorized

And so… what did I get up to this weekend? Well. On Friday evening, Philippa and me went to Ipswich to see my parents, and we stayed overnight. On Saturday, we went into town, and had lunch there. In the evening we had a take-away curry from the Kismet Balti House. It was very nice, I don’t think it was quite as good as the Bengal Spice in Wivenhoe but still not bad! Afterwards, we watched “Robin Hood: Men In Tights”, a very silly (Mel Brooks) film. It was quite an enjoyable way to spend the evening!

Yesterday, we went to Fordham in the morning and heard the last of the “Two Ways to Live” series that they’ve been doing. I think I will try and get a copy of the series on CD – I’ve found a lot of the talks very helpful, there were a lot of very useful things in there. Afterwards we went back to Philippa’s for lunch. In the evening we went to Sunday @ 7, where the theme was “Quiet Time M.O.T.” I found it very helpful, there was a lot of good practical advice there!

After coming back, we had some dinner and watched “This is Spinal Tap.” I’d just like to finish with a quote from:

David St. Hubbins: Well, I don’t really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.

All for now!

Firstly, I read that a man attacked police with a digeridoo, and now I read that a nurse attacked a colleague with a frozen fish (a trout, actually, if you’re interested. I always thought frozen trout made better weapons than frozen salmon).

The last paragraph of the frozen fish story is fantastic:

Jamie Foster, for the Nursing and Midwifery Council, said Ms Jennings also lied about her training record, misled staff about the availability of beds on Ward 8, and bound a clerk’s head and mouth with bandages while he was on the phone.

Monty Python would be proud…

There have been a few articles on The Register recently, talking about Wikipedia. Basically, the argument boils down to this: Wikipedia “fanboys” (did you appreciate the irony of me linking to a Wikipedia article?) argue that Wikipedia is a good thing, because anyone on the internet can edit an entry, and make it better.

Wikipedia detractors think that it’s bad for the same reason, just that the internet is full of people for which anonymity gives them license to do anything in the name of being annoying. A lot of experts have become disenchanted with Wikipedia simply because although they know what they’re talking about, when they make an entry there it just gets edited by a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. It gets completely watered down.

And for an artist like Aphex Twin (who is apparently known to be a compulsive liar in interviews), it is difficult to keep the page clean from fans of his who believe absolutely everything he says in interviews 😉

Anyway, I’d find the original articles, but I can’t be bothered. There’s dedicated for you!

We’ve been having a few discussions on Crossring recently, and it’s caused me to think a bit about theology. I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern emerging (and this isn’t just on Crossring – it’s much more general, I just noticed it first there).

Theologian A: x must be true because it says y in the Bible here.
Theologian B: Ah, but that can’t be true, because of z (where z is usually a way the Greek / Hebrew work is used originally, but could be any number of things).

This strikes me as rather a negative way of doing things. Surely theology is about finding out what the Bible does say, rather than what it doesn’t? Ok, so (as is so often the case) there are multiple meanings to a word. But surely that gives license for being broadly positive rather than broadly negative?

There’s not really a point to this post, just random musings…

You may remember me talking about the FTP Client that I was writing in Java a couple of weeks ago. Well, I’ve done a bit more work on it… I have to say, as a way of learning SWT it seems to be a good little project! There are a couple of things about SWT which surprised me, not having done any GUI programming since my University days…

The main thing is, the thread model: in SWT, the GUI is all controlled through one thread. If you want to perform an action that is going to take some time (for example, uploading a large file…) then you need to start up a new thread to handle it (so that the GUI didn’t freeze). This isn’t anything unusual, you’d do the same thing in Swing. What is unusual is the fact that you can’t update the GUI from the thread that you started, it all has to be done from the GUI thread. This caused me a fair bit of frustration to start off with! I think it’s OK now, but just something to watch out for.

Anyway, I’ll probably post the source code up here at some point, when it’s a bit more complete (at the moment the ‘features’ include being able to browse a directory structure and upload a file — not download! Not yet ;-). It might help out a few other people, I don’t know. At least as an example of how NOT to code an application!

That’s all for now…

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!