jfw.id.au

We’re just getting ready to watch one of the very few TV shows that we watch and I’ve just found the funniest thing. Our darling daughter has decided to feed some toast to the VCR. It looks like it was done some time today - judging by the state of the bread and the topping that was on it.

Thankfully, it was the old broken VCR that is still in the entertainment unit and not the working one that we use. We try not to let her watch much TV at all so for the shows that we watch we generally record them and watch them after she has gone to bed. Thankyou darling, that was most amusing :)

Yay for power failures. I really love them. Especially when it’s the first day of working from home and I can’t do anything because my internet connection is no longer functioning.

We lost power at about 11am and called energex pretty much straight away. The fault information line ‘did not know of any faults in our area’ so we reported one. After making us check the fuse box to ensure it wasn’t a blown fuse *lol*, they logged a job and said that someone would be here within 2 hours.

The first energex man turned up within 40 - 50 minutes. After quickly checking our fuse box he then started to check out the pillar. Fastforward to 12:30pm and another energex man turns up. The both work on the pillar for a little while and by 1pm we had power back. Apparently the fuse in the pillar for our house had burned out. It looked like it had been on the way out for a while, so that means that there was nothing that we did that had caused it.

Thankyou mister energex man. I can get back to work now.

This is just a quick rant to say:

The svn add command exists for a reason.
Learn it, use it, love it!

I went into work for a few hours today as we have a rather pressing deadline for the current project and it would be nice to get stuff finished on time to allow for some testing. After making a bunch of changes to the code that I was working on I was ready to compile and give it a test. I decided to do the prudent thing and update my local copy so that I coud test what I had done with the latest version of the project.

Unfortunately someone(s) else had incompletely checked in some work since my last update. I say incomplete because they had obviuosly created new files and the VS.NET project file had references to where they should be, but they didn’t exist in the repository.

After some carefully thought out exclusions in the solution and a quick informative email later I was able to get my changes to compile. Even though I have not completed what I was working on, and hence not checked it back in I emailed the other developers to let them know what I had done (the exclusions) and why I had done it. Obviously excluding someone elses work from a project solution is not the best thing to do when there are tight deadlines. I didn’t want the things that I had excluded to become overlooked simply because the original developer(s) thought that they were now complete.

If we were running test driven development that would not be a problem as it would be caught in the next build and test phase, however we have not yet reached that point of restructure of our methodologies.

Well, I’ve just gotten back from Dreamworld after attending an “audition” for Friday Night Games, the spin off of Big Brother’s Friday Night Live.

The audition process was a bit disappointing and I’m about 99% sure that I didn’t get through.  Something to do with not being asked to stay behind kinda gives that impression.  Any way, things to do at the moment, so I will put together a more detailed run down of the audition when I have time.

At work we run a Cisco PIX that is also a VPN Concentrator. For the last month or so I have been using the Cisco Windows client software for connceting into work to do any after hours tasks. A couple of recent events have forced me to re-evaluate the method I use to connect in. Primarily, the windows service that is installed with the client has been randomly refusing to startup correctly with no apparent reason. Secondly, I’ve recently purchased a laptop and with it dropping into hibernation or standby whenever I walk away for more then a couple of minutes (something that happens often with a small child) I keep getting disconnected.

I have a small LAN with 2 servers and 2 client machines. The 2 servers are Wallace, a Centos4 installation that basically runs the network, and Gromit, a windows 2003 server for basic development testing and the beginnings of my HTPC. The 2 clients are my norbert, the desktop in the office, and puddlejumper, my reently acquired laptop.

I got the official Cisco client installed and working on Wallace, with 1 small exception. I could not for the life of me manage to get the rest of the LAN able to make use of the connection. I started to google for options and quickly found an article on Linux Resources on the Dartmouth College math faculty website.

This page in turn lead me to the vpnc information for Dartmouth, and I eventually ended up find a couple more helpful articles on configuration of vpnc.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

At work we are all pretty busy with the project known as ‘Phase 2′. A project that the sales and marketing team had decided on a deadline before we even knew that it existed. This should be the last, or at the worst next to last time that something like this happens on such a massive project.

I have no illusions about it not happening again, however we can dream can we not?

Any way, the point of this post is simply to marvel at a lovely way to do some PL/SQL to build a bit of a data layer for the extensions that we are adding. I’ve not done a lot of PL/SQL in the past, and the stuff that I have done is fairly basic so I was quite impressed with the simplicity and functionality of this little block:

PROCEDURE getMenu
   (pDetails    OUT grcDetails,
    pMenuID   IN Menu.MENUID%TYPE DEFAULT NULL) IS
BEGIN
   OPEN pDetails FOR
   SELECT *
   FROM MENU
   WHERE MENUID = DECODE(pMenuID, 0, MENUID, NULL, MENUID, pMenuID);
END getMenu;

All the smarts of the statement are in the DECODE. For those that don’t recognise it, this is a small function written in PL/SQL for Oracle. Basically this function allows us to load all of the records in the MENU table, or the one specified by the pMenuID if it is supplied.

I was just impressed with it’s power and simplicity and had to share.