SQLEditor 1.3b9 Released

Posted on 31 October 2006 by Angus Hardie

I just made the latest version of SQLEditor (1.3b9) available on the website for download [2.8MB dmg].

The new version has a collection of improvements. Particularly in stability. Chris submitted a test case which broke the parser and the save file functionality in really interesting ways, which are now fixed; SQLite support is a bit better, with a new user interface in the JDBC panel and there is better handling of the display preferences (including a new preference pane so you can set defaults).

I also fixed some user interface bugs, like a really stupid one involving import and progress bars. The progress bar would display if you used file->import, but not if you dragged an sql file directly to the application icon. The reason was that there were two different paths depending on which action you took. This got refactored, which means that they both now show progress bars.

I also have started to look at the file loading performance. Too much time is being taken up loading files. I’ve been working on some ideas for optimization and I’m hopeful for the next release.

Unfortunately this isn’t the final candidate that I was hoping to release. But I think the improvements are definitely worth delaying the final build.

Hopefully if there aren’t any reported bugs then the release version will be out within the next few weeks.

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MalcolmHardie Solutions Weblog

Posted on 31 October 2006 by Angus Hardie

About the new MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog.

The new weblog will contain posts about SQLEditor and other products.

If you already reading Angus Thinks you probably don’t need to read the MalcolmHardie weblog as well because all the posts on the MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog will appear on Angus Thinks.

This mirroring is done using the xmlrpc api and code from the blogger api plugin for wordpress

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static link library to replace dylib in mac os x

Posted on 26 October 2006 by Angus Hardie

This post on the xcode-users list explains a neat trick on how to get xcode to link a static library instead of a dynamic library.

Imagine the circumstance: you want to use a particular non-standard version of a native library which is already part of the system; perhaps you want to use an old version with better compatibility, or a newer version with more features. The obvious thing to do is to take a static build of the library and add it your xcode project.

However this typically won’t work. The linker will choose the system version instead because by default it looks in all possible locations for a dynamic library first before looking through the same list of locations for a static library. If there is a dynamic library in any of the search locations it will always get chosen. There are some good reasons for this, but what if you really want to include your own statically linked version?

The answer is to add the -Wl,-search_paths_first flag to the other link flags option (under linking in target settings).

When this is set each possible location for a library is inspected first for a dynamic library and then for a static library. This means that the static library will get linked correctly.

It’s not exactly something that will be needed frequently though.

Edit: Apple have a technical Q&A article (1393) on this very subject which appeared a couple of days back and which I somehow missed.
It offers this exact method. [Link]

Posted in Macintosh, SQLEditor | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

New Bujold book

Posted on 09 October 2006 by Angus Hardie

The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold [Amazon] is coming out this week hopefully. (My order’s already in with Amazon)

The good news is that there are now some sample chapters up.

Bujold of course is better known for the Vorkosigan series of booksand the Chalion series.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Cocaine Production

Posted on 22 September 2006 by Angus Hardie

Interesting video that I found via [Magistrate’s Blog] showing cocaine processing in Columbia.

The quantity of different (mostly toxic) chemicals going into the product was the most interesting thing, although I was also interested by the running chemistry lesson from the people doing the processing.

It would probably be worth showing this as a anti-drug film in schools, it would probably do more to discourage people than many other strategies. 🙂

[How Cocaine is Made (YouTube)]

[Edit:to add the actual link I was talking about]

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Weighing electronics at airports?

Posted on 29 August 2006 by Angus Hardie

I was looking at a BBC news article about the recent security alerts at airports when a thought occurred to me. One of the big challenges with electronic items is to ensure that they have not been modified to contain explosives. My thought is that explosives must add weight to a unit. If a list of known weights for particular devices could be published then equipment presented at airports could be weighed and the weight matched against a list provided by manufacturers.

If the weight didn’t match a known weight (within some margin of error) the device could be selected for further screening. Proof that the unit was operational would also be required obviously to prevent hollowing out the insides and replacing with explosives. However assuming a device worked and the weight hadn’t increased noticably above the standard set, then it would go some way to suggesting the item wasn’t harmful.

There are obviously some issues that this doesn’t cover, but it might be a useful and simple tool as part of a security screening procedure.

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Britain, America and WW2

Posted on 25 August 2006 by Angus Hardie

The Guardian has an interesting article detailing apparent attempts by the British government to get America to join WW2.

These apparently included an astrologer who made dire predictions about Hitler, a fake radio station and a campaign against Nazi groups in the US.

[link]

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Abolish the “Three Rs”

Posted on 25 August 2006 by Angus Hardie

Why is it that whenever anyone seems to talk about education they always seem to use the phrase “Three Rs”. This particuarly stupid phrase seems to appear in every article about basic education.

I think the very stupidity of this phrase affects education as a whole. If commentary and discussion on the topic of literacy is illiterate, what hope do those trying to achieve literacy have?

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Sony Batteries

Posted on 16 August 2006 by Angus Hardie

It looks like at least 4 million Dell notebook batteries are being recalled, all of which appear to be made by Sony. Worse news though, Sony also supply batteries to other companies thought to include Apple, Lenovo and HP.

If all of these batteries end up being recalled too, then the cost to Sony would be enormous, their reputation for batteries might never recover. More seriously could this affect Sony as a company? Given the increasing development costs of the PS3, probably a long fight for dominance in the Blue Ray Vs HD-DVD mess and problems in other areas, how much more can Sony as a company take?

I don’t think a financial collapse is very likely, the company is, after all, huge and has substantial revenues from its different divisions. Instead think about a loss of confidence in the company as a single unit. Normally companies should form a grouping that is most financially efficient, this holds as long as investors are confident of the efficiency of the structure of the company. If they loose confidence or people start crunching numbers and find that the parts are worth more than the whole, then questions start getting asked. I think Sony is getting to that point, there seem to be increasing problems with internal disagreements and communication seems to be an issue. This suggests that the company may be too large and too diverse. If it had not been a Japanese company I would have expected a de-merger long since, but Japanese investors behave in different ways so this cannot be certain to happen.

However the advantages are clear. For example, there appears to be substantial tension between the media side of the company (Sony Pictures, Sony BMG) and the electronics side. On the one hand offering devices to play and share music, on the other selling music but discouraging this sharing. This tension is probably one of the reasons that Apple was able to win in the portable music player market. There were other reasons too of course, but the fact that you could easily copy music to the ipod and it was really hard with the Sony device cannot have helped Sony to sell players. In this case it appears that the supposed advantages of integration are actually disadvantages.

Markets reward efficiently run enterprises, in this case it appears that the company is less than efficient, so I expect something will happen. What form this takes is difficult to say, but I intend to watch carefully; It will be interesting to see what happens.

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Customer Service in reverse?

Posted on 23 July 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

Link

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Online Shopping customer service

Posted on 05 July 2006 by Angus Hardie

We contacted online retailers asking why they don’t respond to queries, but they didn’t respond to our queries.

[The Register Article]

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SF publisher Jim Baen passed away

Posted on 29 June 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

[David Drake on Jim Baen]
[Baen Books]

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O2 buys the Link?

Posted on 27 June 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

[Link]

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Running Oracle – The Solution

Posted on 10 May 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

Posted in Linux, Macintosh | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Change console keyboard layout in debian

Posted on 02 May 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

[link]

Update

Djamu posted a comment suggesting that the following command might work better for server installations:

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Posted in Linux, Macintosh | 44 Comments

Finding and fixing StackOverFlowError in java

Posted on 16 March 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

Posted in General, Macintosh | 2 Comments

SQLEditor, Intel and No January Posts

Posted on 22 February 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

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The Name Game

Posted on 22 February 2006 by Angus Hardie

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!


Salon: The Name Game

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More on Disney DVD releases

Posted on 22 February 2006 by Angus Hardie

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)

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Searching for an Oracle

Posted on 22 February 2006 by Angus Hardie

Recently I’ve been trying to set up a box to run Oracle again. There are enough SQLEditor users that Oracle support is important.

Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.

So the next step was to download and install a copy.

First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.

Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).

My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.

Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.

Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.

Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).

Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).

Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.

The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.

Posted in Internet Stuff, Linux, Macintosh, SQLEditor, Windows | 3 Comments