Interesting article in the Observer today which finally manages to pin down what I’ve been noticing but couldn’t quite bring together into a clear idea.
Many companies are so bad at customer service that people are going around discouraging their friends from buying the products being sold.
This seems to be really common in many (possibly all) of the companies I seem to deal with and it’s really, really bad.
We contacted online retailers asking why they don’t respond to queries, but they didn’t respond to our queries.
I read today that Jim Baen of Baen books fame has passed away.
I think I have more Baen SF books on my shelf than any other single publisher and to a great extent Baen Books the publisher was always strongly connected to Jim Baen the man. Baen have published some of my all time favourite books (including Bujold and Weber) and their approach to electronic publishing is by far the most rational, sensible and intelligent of any publisher.
Although I never met him online or off; I feel, somehow, that reading the books that his company published changed the way that I think, and to a certain extent who I am.
My sympathies are with his family and friends and my hope is that the spirit he brought to Baen Books will continue long into the future.
This is a bit late, but I see that the mobile phone shops are starting to merge.
O2 has bought The Link.
I suspect very strongly that this will lead to substantial closures of stores. There seem to be any number of locations where the two companies have adjacent stores. My local shopping center has both and I think many other shopping centers have too.
I’m not really sure whether the mobile phone stores can keep up the density they currently have, especially given that things seem to be past the initial goldrush period of mobile phone buying.
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This follows on from my previous posting. Searching for an Oracle
This is kind of old news now, because it’s been in use since SQLEditor 1.2 was released. However I though I would explain how I solved the problem that I was having with installing Oracle.
The problem was that I didn’t have a linux machine with enough memory and at the time, qemu wasn’t really fast enough to run Oracle in a virtual machine.
The first strategy I used was to upgrade the memory in my linux box (Cetaganda) to 512 MB. This solved the memory problem and meant that the testing could continue.
Then Parallels Workstation was released, which was able to run Oracle XE in a virtual machine fast enough for regular use. It also uses a different IP address than the host machine, which is useful in itself for testing.
Parallels is definitely the answer to this problem, I don’t need to switch on another machine, there is no additional noise and the performance is excellent for my purposes. I’m even considering adding the loading of the VM to the unit test setup so it will load automatically before the test cycle starts.
I’ve also got MySQL and Postgres running inside virtual machines.
I’ve been using Parallels Workstation virtualization a lot recently for testing databases and it works amazingly well.
However I did come across a weird problem. I’d installed Debian linux and the console keyboard layout wasn’t correct for my Apple USB keyboard.
The solution was to use this command
dpkg-reconfigure console-data
Which walked me through selecting the right keyboard layout.
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Djamu posted a comment suggesting that the following command might work better for server installations:
dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
I was having a problem with some java one day, I’d made a change to some code and I kept getting a StackOverflowError. Unfortunately the stack trace didn’t help and some time inspecting the code didn’t offer any quick solutions. So I turned obviously to Google. The answer was simple, although it took some work to find it.
If you get a StackOverflowError in java it can sometimes be difficult to identify where the problem is occurring. This is because in some versions of the JVM the relevant stack trace isn’t automatically provided. This is the case in 1.4.2 when using the JIT compiler. (which I was)
One work around that worked for me was to add the -Xint option to the java call. This forces the JVM to use interpret the code rather than attempt to compile it. The interpreter will provide a stack trace and the problem can be easily found and fixed.
The bug report that gave the answer is at Sun:
Bug Report.
Unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a single post to this site during January. Then suddenly I made several posts today.
Why?
The main reason is that I’ve been hard at work producing a Universal Binary version of SQLEditor. Which offers not only performance improvements but is actually required to use SQLEditor on intel mac hardware at all. (This is because SQLEditor uses both Java and compiled Objective C).
The good news is that it’s pretty much ready so after the next round of beta testing version 1.2 should be released. Hopefully before the end of February, but possibly at the beginning of March.
When I first read this I genuinely thought it was a joke, but as far as I can tell it’s absolutely genuine, the companies involved really did change their names. Some of them had to have new names; obviously if you demerge from another company you need to be called something new, but others had perfectly good names that they changed. Much of it makes no sense at all!
Scottie (who knows far more about films than I will probably ever know) was kind enough to offer a carefully considered response to my post on Disney DVDs which due to some stupidity on my part was lost. Here it is:
It is quite simple really, by placing them on monotorium (or back “into the vault”) from time to time they can be repromoted after the 6-10 years.. with all new restorations and whatnot. They are usually on the market for a good 12 months prior to being discontinued. And about thirty major titles have made an appearance in some form on DVD before being put back.
You’re not missing too much wrt Disney Animation – The best are Dumbo (recently released on DVD), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – been back in the vault for nearly four years. Bambi, Pinocchio, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin – should be available if you look hard and Tarzan (which would be a modern classic, if it weren’t for Rosie O’Donnell and the pointless musical interlude halfway through) – have a rummage on online shops.
Fantasia is in another class, and unavailable for nearly five years. (as soon as it’s announced again, you can bet your ass I’ll have it.)
And of course the Pixar films, of which The Incredibles is by far the best and easiest to obtain.
eBay is your friend, but be warned about bootlegs – especially early DVD stuff like The Little Mermaid, due for re-release in 2006, along with The Jungle Book and Lady and the Tramp.
Best,
Scott
(Sorry for the inexcusable delay in uploading this)