magpiebrain

Things that annoy me

That’s me that is

Normally a much longer list, but right now the things that annoy me most are:

• People who correct my punctuation. Like a 3 foot high Fox News presenter, it’s not big and it’s not clever. It’s not my fault english is so sodding inconsistent.
• People who correct my spelling while I’m half-way through writing the sodding word. Kiss my ass, smart boy.
• People who respond to stuff I write, but don’t let me know via email, or trackback, and provide no way of responding to their response because they don’t have comments, so I have to find out from other people (see? I’m pinging you with this post – just how hard is it?).

This has been a public information broadcast from the angry kitten party.

Ruby on Rails - bridging the gap?

When Java first arrived, the initial hype was all about “write once, run anywhere”. It’s language a mess of compromises born out of it’s heritage as a language for embedded machines and a desire to keep C++ programmers happy. Once people got over the novelty of inherently portable code, the attention then fell (initially favourably) on Applets, followed by protests against the non-portable nature of AWT. Penetration outside of the web was minor. Read the rest of this entry »

Barbers and Stylists

In the world of Those Who Cut Hair, there are Barbers, and there are Stylists. Barbers tend to be cheaper, and will be fairly limited in what they do. When you turn up at a barbers you tell him exactly what you want (which he may or may not be able to do) – if you ask for something he can’t do, chances are you’ll getting a short-back and sides. Stylists are more expensive. When you go to a stylist, you can say things like “Well, I’m not quite sure” or “Something more – funky!” or “Whatever haircut David Beckham’s got this week”, and the stylist can hopefully use their skills to give you the haircut you need. What’s the difference? Apart from price, barbers are only capable of giving you want if you tell them exactly what you need. Stylists can work out what you need – and believe me it won’t always be what you’d expect. Read the rest of this entry »

Individual entry RSS feeds

Since I lost the use of the subscribe to post plugin (for reasons known only to the Perl gods) I’ve wanted to add some other way for people to stay tuned to changes made to interesting posts – especially to see if replies are made to comments they’ve left. The obvious solution was staring me in the face – RSS feeds for each post. Using phil ringnalda’s similar template, I’ve updated the template to RSS 2.0, added a full HTML version of the post itself, and using MTSimpleComments include both trackbacks and comments. So now if you see a post that interests you, you can subscribe and get updated when the post changes, or someone leaves a comment or trackback. Read the rest of this entry »

In defence of object-relational mapping tools

Darren Hobbs ”

This is the primary reason I have mostly lost interest in tools such as Hibernate and Neo. Where the documentation says things like ‘Autogenerate your mapping layer and persist your domain objects’, I see ‘Tightly couple your code to your database’.

Which I don’t think really follows. Firstly, if you’re in the envious position of being able to have complete control over your schema, I don’t see why generating a schema from your domain objects is a problem, as long as your domain objects don’t become polluted by the underlying persistence mechanism. It’s not the tools fault if you end up with this tight coupling – it’s the fault of your architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

SpamLookup - fighting spam for Movable Type

SpamLookup’s DNSBL Configuration

I was about to roll me sleeves up and get busy with mod_security this weekend with a view to further tackling my trackback spam issues, but luckily (for my Apache install if nothing else) Movable Type hacker extraordinaire Brad Choate has released SpamLookup to save me the effort. Where Jay Allen’s well-known MT Blacklist plugin uses centralized URL filters to block spam, SpamLookup concentrates instead on looking at where the trackbacks/comments come from. First among its arsenal of spam fighting techniques is the ability to talk to DNS-based blackhole lists such as the default Blitzed list and the Blog Spam Blocklist. These services publish a regularly updated list of IP addresses – in the case of blitzed and the blog spam blacklist, these IP addresses are known open relays which spammers love to use to cover their tracks. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at Context IoC

It was with some interest I spotted a positive mention of something called Context IoC (a new type of IoC apparently) on Dion Hinchcliffe’s Blog. The while topic really bores me right now as IoC stopped being something fancy a long time ago, and to me it’s now nothing more than “calling a proper constructor”. I investigated further as Dion normally writes very sensibly, does some very nice diagrams and has impeccable taste. Read the rest of this entry »

Micro-IoC functionality to be in next Java version

Yes, you heard it here first folks, but Sun has finally woken up and decided to include a micro IoC container in the next version of Java! Using a special keyword, the container lets you create an object that can be used straight away, by passing all dependencies in. Read the rest of this entry »

Exception handling revisited

I like unchecked exceptions. Here’s why – I like to know something went wrong without having to explicitly handle every possible error. I like checked exceptions. Here’s why – when I decide that an error should be handled in my system, I want to force it to be handled as a defensive measure. We can argue back and forth about the merits of checked exceptions – Java chose it’s path, .NET another, some people don’t like exceptions at all – but that is a discussion for another place. What I want to look at is how these two types of exception get used on our current project. Read the rest of this entry »

JMS, transactions and exception handling

We’re currently working on a JMS-drived application, which is being used as an integration point between several systems. We’ve defined a standard exception handling process – checked exceptions for those errors that can be handled by the system, unchecked exceptions for those errors that cannot be handled. The unchecked exceptions are all allowed to bubble up, where they are caught at the top level (and the top level only). Read the rest of this entry »