How I Met the Girl Next Door

It's not every day you have to convince the very Drunk Girl next door it's not a good idea to climb a wobbly old lounge* onto her balcony. Especially when said lounge is almost falling apart, not stable, not tall enough, appallingly ugly, and leaning on a steel picket fence with enough spikes to do even the cutest girl serious damage.

Myself and what I assumed was her Friend tried to convince Drunk Girl to go home with the friend. Drunk Girl was very resistant to the idea. Anyways, turns out the Friend was wandering home herself and had never met Drunk Girl.

Anyways, after Drunk Girl nearly squashed herself with the lounge a few more times, I brought my ladder out and Drunk Girl wobbled up the ladder and proceeded to bash on the window and shout and scream a lot.

Simultaneously the Boyfriend stuck his head out the balcony window and the Flat Mate opened the door downstairs.

Ah, inner city living. Who says you never meet your neighbours?

* Something surbanites don't appreciate is how many inner city dwellings are furnished with hand-me-downs from the neighbours -- I've never seen any piece of furniture last longer than a day without being claimed. I've been here long enough to see the same pieces of furniture dumped on the street two or three times.

Wacky Designer Redux

They were back again today, Bright Young Coder and Sideways Notepad, discussing an upcoming enhancement to the website.

Lots of talk about the business side of things -- our Business Girl handled that side of things admirably -- I had nothing to say, if she wants green, then it's fine with me; if the contract covers privacy, then I assume Business Girl has chatted to Legal Legal Fairy Land and the t's crossed and the i's dotted. But the Geek Domain is another story, that's a tiny iota of existence where I can add a modicum of Something Beneficial. In this case, me, the Bitter Twisted One, wanted a test system so I can see The Brand New Thing working before Bright Young Coder and Sideways Notepad let it loose on the world.

"Now this test environment we've been talking about. Since we have a specification, we don't need that Test Environment anymore do we? Setting up another server is a lot of work," said Sideways Notepad.

Arrrgggh! I don't know what you think, but 60,000 a week, even in the crazy antipodean escudo barter-equivalents that form the currency system here, is a lot of tinned biscuits. Business Girl, Bright Young Coder, The Boss Who Was (more about her later) and myself manage to get Sideways Notepad to stop talking. I don't know whether he understood, but he did pique-out and draw some rather impressive doodles.

The dude can draw.

Then it was Bright Young Coder's turn, and it sounded sweet. They do their stuff and there's no change to what we provide them... or is there? Well, says Bright Young Coder, we'll let you know if there is when we get to it.

Arggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

If there's one thing you (should have) learnt in Computing 101 besides never looking for potential partners in the class, or trying to build a better bong than the hardware engineering students, is when there is communcation of any sort between two or more things you need to define The Interface before anything else.

Bright Young Thing, your apprenticeship is not yet complete. Everyone needs a massive fuck up before they learn.

And you will, you will...

i walked home in the rain
with shoes soaked, toes cold

i walked home in the dark
a plasma fairy wonder glare

i walked home in a war
umbrellas surrounded me

i walked home tonight
smiling, smiling.

free.

once more with feeling

Hello, I waited here for you, everlong.

The most versatile love song I can (sort of) play. Drop-D, bash it out with exuberance, rock it up, love's the new thing;

Tonight I throw myself into

Or sing it slow, a ballad, relive the bittersweet

And out of the red, out of her head she sang

Shouting, calling names while driving in the rain. That was one of us.

And I wonder when I sing along with you
If everything could ever feel this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again

It was good, but it couldn't go on. How do you know where that happily ever after is?

Come down, and waste away with me, down with me

You tell me I'm no good for you. I start to see your point of view.

Slow how you wanted it to be I'm over my head
out of her head she sang

Why go on? There were good times, lots of them, if we meet again I hope we laugh about those.

The only thing I'll ever ask of you
You've got to promise not to stop when I say when

I forgot to ask you to promise.

What do you do when you can't accept Firefly is dead?

"Take my love, take my land..." etc etc.

What do you do when you can't accept Firefly is dead? You write the scripts for the remainder of Season 1 and Season 2.

http://www.stillflying.net/default.htm

I haven't actually read a full one yet, but they seem okay. S1Ep22 "Those that remain behind" is based on the (Whedon scripted) comic book of the same name that details why Book and Inara left (Book's reason is pretty cool).

There's also a script lying around called "Dead or Alive" which is (apparently) an actual unshot script. http://www.fireflyfans.net/feature.asp?f=45 I gather a few bits and pieces were used elsewhere, but I haven't read it yet.

ACN Validation with SQL (Australian Company Number)

Carrying on from earlier, here's what you need to use to find invalid ACNs in your database.

Exciting stuff.

select replace(acn, ' ', ''), Name
from Copmany C
where acn <> ''
and (acn not like '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
or right(10-
(( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 1, 1 ) AS integer ) * 8 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 2, 1 ) AS integer ) * 7 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 3, 1 ) AS integer ) * 6 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 4, 1 ) AS integer ) * 5 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 5, 1 ) AS integer ) * 4 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 6, 1 ) AS integer ) * 3 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 7, 1 ) AS integer ) * 2 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( replace(acn, ' ', ''), 8, 1 ) AS integer ) * 1 ) ) % 10, 1)
<> substring(replace(acn, ' ', ''),9,1))

ABN validation with SQL (Australian Business Number)

I'm sure we've all wanted to use Sql to validate every ABN number you've got in your database?

I know I have.

Next time, ACN validation.

select abn, Name
from Company C
where abn <> ''
and ( ( ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 1, 1 ) AS integer ) - 1 ) * 10 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 2, 1 ) AS integer ) * 1 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 3, 1 ) AS integer ) * 3 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 4, 1 ) AS integer ) * 5 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 5, 1 ) AS integer ) * 7 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 6, 1 ) AS integer ) * 9 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 7, 1 ) AS integer ) * 11 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 8, 1 ) AS integer ) * 13 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 9, 1 ) AS integer ) * 15 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 10, 1 ) AS integer ) * 17 )
+ ( CAST( SUBSTRING( abn, 11, 1 ) AS integer ) * 19 ) ) % 89 <> 0

Renovations and engineers

Yesterday the structural engineer didn't turn up, so I spent the whole day working in the backyard on the laptop. Very pleasant autumn day.

Today the structural engineer did arrive on the day we'd agreed -- I'd remembered the wrong day. He was very efficient and organised and arrived at 10am precisely, clearly any mistakes dealing with him are going to be mine :-)

He takes a quick look at what I want to do (take out a wall), and says I'll need a such-and-such sort of beam and probably 3 supports and a new concrete pad, and would I be doing it myself?

Ha, ha, ha!

The materials are cheap, probably around AUD 500, but the know-how is priceless.

There's an analogy between business and my little bit of rennovation. Don't waste your time attempting something you've never done before and will never need to do again, especially when consequences of doing it wrong are large.

Such as upstairs moving downstairs.

Marketing + Advertising = Godzilla Part 2

Back to that meeting with the Advertising + Marketing dudes.

The main reason this meeting was happening was to nut out the nitty-gritty detail of a webservice interface between Them and Us.

It was a reasonably easy security thing:

1. Our site produces an iFrame with src=w.Them.com?Token=ABCDEF&ReplyTo=www.Us.com/Webservice.asmx
2. Their site calls w.Us.Com/WebService.asmx/GetStuff?Token=ABCDEF to retrieve some Stuff to integrate with Other Stuff they need to display.
3. They generate the page and serve it up inside the iFrame.

(BTW this is firewalled so theoretically no-one else can access Our webservice)

It was Their responsibility to write the spec document for this interface. I could see Mr Sideways Notepad was really struggling with the whole Token and webservice concept ("But we'll just display the Stuff in the iFrame"), but the Bright Young Coder was nodding enthusiastically and even asked some useful questions.

Meeting ends with a little frustration on my part, but Bright Young Coder and I - I thought, had an understanding. Mr Sideways Notepad was bipolar -- glum because he'd finished his latte, but happy because he'd drawn some really beautiful boxes and arrows with his 2B pencil.

I learned something that day. Bring crayons and butcher's paper for Marketing and Advertising to play with in the corner, while the real work can happen uninterrupted.

C++ STL, crap, but the best crap we've got*

[* I did a 10 year stint of C++, so I figure I'm vaguely qualified to have an opinion.]

The STL, you either hate it a lot or a little.

Sure there are some folks who think it's an adorable little beast, write books about it, attend conferences, think it's elegant, take it out to dinner and so forth, but to them I say "There are 3 types of people, those who like maths and those who don't".

It's efficient. Too efficient for its own good, frankly. Clearly designed by an academic who didn't think easily readable and easily maintainable were necessary design criteria.

As I get older and crankier I want to spend less time fighting the language syntax, dealing with esoteric class libraries and less time waiting for the compiler to finish doing its languid lap around the pool (GCC you are hopelessly slow, may Microsoft or Intel buy Linux and replace you with a decent compiler).

So there are 2 issues. The STL is uglier than those scrawny things were on Friends, and slower to compile than a book index. Templates you see. Fancy, cunning, clever, smart, ingenious, nifty but achingly slow.

I wondered on a job a few years ago whether the amount of time spent waiting for heavily STL and templatised code to compile and link (6-8 hours multiplied by 3 years) was actually less efficient than if we'd been using a non-template based solution.

Another thing to despise about the STL is the wacky "have at you DOS Liberal scumbags" decision to remove the ".h" from the filenames of headers. 20 years of .h/.hpp etc extensions on all files, and then suddenly "Ha! Things are getting too easy! Let's make this unwanted and inexplicable change just to make you thing we're clever."

It's a shame the shaggy-bearded, pot-smoking, tree-hugging hippy C++ community approved the STL as part of the C++ standard.

Marketing + Advertising = Godzilla

The website I'm involved with during the day recently had an enhancement go live. Looks very pretty, and is doing its thing nicely. But beneath the slick oh-so-cool exterior lies the incesteous unholy offspring of the twins Marketing and Advertising.

One day, in a flash of latte inspired, uh, inspiration M + A decide they know how to manage, if that's the word, a software development project. The warning bells should have gone off from the very first meeting I attended, there were 3 other companies involved. Or 4. Or maybe 2. Anyway, the chief guy from one of these places did something I've never seen before in an IT meeting:

He used a A4 spiral bound notebook with NO LINES, SIDEWAYS with a 2B PENCIL.

His head didn't spin 720. But I bet it can.

The "What do you do" conversation

"What do you do at work?" they ask.

"Computer stuff," I say. [Do you really want to know?]

"What sort of stuff?" they persist.

"Well, it varies." Pause. [You can still get out alive if you leave now. No? Well I warned you.] "My current role is varied. I get to do programming, QA, spec writing, BA, ad-hoc reports, play with being DBA, and generally random stuff.

"But I really want to be a rock and roll star."

Just another blog

So here I am, then.

Lots of space. So unnecessary for me to say anything, really. 12 kazillion blogs, so little time.

Actually, not enough space. There's too much clutter on my screen. Do I really need 35 applications in the taskbar?

Probably.

I imagine it's traditional to say I'm going to update this a lot and be profound or somesuch crud, but I won't. If I've anything interesting to say, I'll say it later.