Bagel Belly Blog

Growing to love Eclipse

Uh, wow.

I've been working with Eclipse over the last few days as I seem to be writing quite a lot more Java, and hacking on other people's Java.

It's an absolute pig to get working right, compared to the joy and simplicity of a text editor. But once you're over that initial culture shock (what, you mean only half of my screen is actual editing space?!), it really starts to pay off.

I've been trying to track down an annoying problem with Ant not liking JUnit, and it turns out there's a better way to do unit testing in Eclipse:

You should be able to run any of the JUnit tests in Eclipse by right-clicking on them and going to Run → JUnit Test.

Yeah, that's really nice. And works fantastically well.

And while we're at it, how about this?

Another useful Eclipse trick is to use abbreviated package names. [...] its nice on projects where you're inflicted with super.long.package.name.syndrome. Go to Window → Preferences → Java → Appearance. Check the "Compress all package names" checkbox and type "1." (no quotes) in the text field.

o.a.c.c.treeprocessor is way easier to read than org.apache.cocoon.components.treeprocessor. Fantastic!

Both of these tips came from this excellent blog, specifically tihs article on setting up a project in Eclipse.

Broken Ecto

Now posting is broken from Ecto. Great.
Query:
{blogid = bar; numberOfPosts = 500; password = ******; username = foo; }
Response:
{
"/FaultCode" = 1;
"/FaultString" = "Invalid login";
"/WSDebugInBody" = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><methodResponse><fault><value><struct><member><name>faultString</name><value><string>Invalid login</string></value></member><member><name>faultCode</name><value><int>1</int></value></member></struct></value></fault></methodResponse>";
"/WSDebugInHeaders" = {
Connection = close;
"Content-Length" = 270;
"Content-Type" = "text/xml";
Date = "Sat, 17 Jul 2004 14:01:15 GMT";
Server = "Apache/2";
Soapserver = "SOAP::Lite/Perl";
};
"/WSDebugOutBody" = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>mt.getRecentPostTitles</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value>
<string>1</string>
</value>
</param>
<param>
<value>
<string>foo</string>
</value>
</param>
<param>
<value>
<string>******</string>
</value>
</param>
<param>
<value>
<i4>500</i4>
</value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>
";
"/WSDebugOutHeaders" = {
"Content-Type" = "text/xml";
Host = "www.andrewsavory.com";
"User-Agent" = "ecto (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X) WebServicesCore";
};
"/kWSHTTPResponseMessage" = <NSCFType: 0x4db57c0>;
"/kWSResultIsFault" = 1;
}

Beware of Vodafone

Cutting a very long story short: last month when I was out of the country, I ran into problems using GPRS. After many long phone calls to Vodafone, they finally agreed it simply wasn't working, and then agreed to refund the cost of international calls so I could dial up an ISP in the UK.

This week, they claim they have no record of the hours I spent on the phone to them, and will not refund the £250 of charges.

This matter is still ongoing - I'm at the corresponding with head office stage - but beware. Don't accept anything they tell you over the phone. Get it in writing. Vodafone? Vodaphoney, more like.

Any mobile phone network recommendations? Looks like I'll be switching.

Browser errata

Following on from yesterday's browser rant, Adrian popped up in iChat to offer this nugget of wisdom:
basically, Safari gets boge ddown with cache itesm. so purge them every so often:
find $HOME/Library/Safari/Icons -type f -atime +30 -name "*.cache" -delete
I think I'm too hooked on the raw speed of Firefox now, but I'll try that tip so I can at least use Safari when occasion warrants ... cheers!

Trains errata

Last thing on trains for a while, promise. Mark says:

Yes, the trains west from Norwich suck, but not quite that badly. Central offer big discounts for advance purchase (CV1, CV3 and CV7 tickets). Also, I think it's hard to reach Nottingham in 2h30 legally by car ;-)

By the way, your blog's cgi-bin seems fried. I expect you know that and it's to do with the spam attack.

Yes, advance purchase tickets are available, but I never have a chance to book much more than a day in advance. And it is possible to get to Nottingham legally in 2h30 - 126 miles at 60mph, no problem ... of course, you have to ram the other cars off the road to maintain that speed.

And yes, cgi-bin was fried. Comment CGI now 'enhanced' with truly evil TypePad registration. Which appears broken:
The site you're trying to comment on has not signed up for this feature. Please inform the site owner.
Bloody MovableType. Time for new blog software. :-(

Shh, Murphy is listening

I read somewhere "don't tell God your plans, he'll laugh in your face". Or put another way, watch out for Murphy.

I had plenty of opportunity today to curse my cockiness in berating trains. Having made fantastic time to the outskirts of Birmingham (about three hours), I then spent two hours fighting my way through the city's defences to the location of my meeting.

The RAC route finder casually said:

Leave the M6 at junction M6/J6 and straight ahead into A38(M) direction [A38(M)] BIRMINGHAM (CEN).

The signs on the motorway said:

J6 Closed

Average speed from J6 to the next exit: 10 miles an hour. Urgh.

Oh, and I left my door keys in my front door all day, too.

But I did get to see Spiderman 2 this evening. Which more than made up for the rest of the day.

MT Sucks and Rocks

Well, that could have gone better. Yesterday's upgrade to MovableType 3 ended in this:
**** WARNING: "my" variable $matched_string masks earlier declaration in same scope at Blacklist.pm line 1570.

Upgrading your databases:
Running 'alter table mt_author add author_type smallint'
Running 'alter table mt_author alter column author_type SET DEFAULT 1'
Running 'alter table mt_author drop constraint mt_author_author_name_key'

An error occurred while upgrading the schema:

ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "" on alter table mt_author drop constraint mt_author_author_name_key at mt-upgrade30.cgi line 354.

Upgrade was not successful, or you have no blogs.
Upgrade was not successful, or you have no authors.
Upgrade was not successful, or you have no entries.
Upgrade was not successful, or you have no comments.

Great.

Thankfully, I'd done an export of the existing blog data, so all was not lost. Except during the import, all the articles got new numbers. I was going to get upset about it - for example, the previous post had the permanent URL of http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/archives/000301.html before the upgrade. But I've just noticed that the new URL is http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/archives/2004/07/blog_spam.html - nice! Much more semantic.

Of course, Google will hate me. And I have broken the cardinal rule. But bugger it, at least the blog is working again. Now where did I put my bagel?

Blog spam

Just deleted the 20 or so spam comments that had infested my account over the last few days. Time to upgrade the blog software so I can track down and kill all the other junk comments.

This time last year

This time last year my brother-in-law died. We all miss him.

In many ways it feels like only yesterday.

Dumping Safari

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed Safari seems to get slower and slower. I had to use Firefox to test a couple of sites in development (and to try getting round mime-type problems with browsers ... don't get me started on that...), and found it to be ridiculously quick in comparison.

Add to that the fact that NatWest's online banking service now supports Firefox (finally!), and case closed: I've switched.

There were only a few catches. Firstly, figuring out how to make Firefox the default browser on OS X. This post pointed me to the Safari Preference Pane, problem solved.

The second problem is that I really like all my new browser windows to open as tabs. Unfortunately, there's no preference for this within Firefox. Mozilla update to the rescue - the Single Window extension sounds like it does exactly what I want....

Finally, my bookmarks. I've got quite a few in Safari (even though Safari's bookmark handling sucks), so I want those in Firefox. Safari Bookmark Exporter to the rescue! This handy utility did a perfect job of copying my bookmarks over to Firefox.

Let the train take the strain

So, tomorrow I have to be in Birmingham and on Monday I have to be in Nottingham. Two fairly simple journeys, and it would make sense to go by train so that I can do some work on the laptop while I travel.

But then, looking at the options for travelling by train, suddenly any other mode of transport seems more attractive.

Norwich to Birmingham takes between three and a half hours and four hours, depending on time of travel. It costs £55. It's just over three hours by car, and a tank of petrol would cost £30.

Norwich to Nottingham takes on average three and a half hours, and costs £43.60. It's about two and a half hours by car, and again, the petrol would cost £30.

Factor in two of us travelling, and suddenly the train is over £130 more expensive. This is just plain crazy!

Amusement

Last weekend I had the task of baby-sitting my two nephews Ben and Tom, and so I spent all day Saturday at Wicksteed Park. I've never really been a big fan of amusement parks (enduring rather than enjoying trips to the likes of Alton Towers), but seeing it through the eyes of the young certainly improves the experience. And my god, kids are fearless. You wouldn't get me on a roller coaster for love or money, but time after time Tom and Ben threw themselves onto the rides without a care in the world. Amazing.

I also captured a couple of videos using my phone while I was there. The first one is of the rather excellent water bomb game, where you get 5 water-filled balloons and an elastic launcher. First time round Tom's aim was off, so I got to do all the soaking. During his second game, Tom did a good job of soaking his granddad.

There's also some great water jump things, where the vehicle becomes a projectile flying through the air to a soggy end. Sadly only for the little people, so I got to stay relatively unsoaked.

New Phone

On Thursday last week, I got a Nokia 6600 as a free upgrade, thanks to the ludicrously high bills I've had recently on my Vodafone account.

First impressions: much the same as the 3650, but a little bit faster, a better screen, and a decent keyboard.

A step too far?

Really, there's a lot of things I like about the Apache Software Foundation, but I think this is a step too far: Apache Classic Thong.

I think I'll send them to everyone I know for Christmas. Great work, Ken! ;-)

Holy cow

Blogs! At! U! E! A!

University of East Anglia Law School showing the way to the 21st Century. I'm impressed.

I note with much amusement the third entry on google for uea blog points to yours truly ....

Depressing culture

I was in Amsterdam briefly on Wednesday for a meeting, and found it incredibly civilised that the default size of beer served was a flute. Elsewhere, Ben Hammersley talks about the spread of Irish pubs and bars in general:

The Irish Pub Company say they've installed over 400 Irish Pubs in over 40 countries. [...] It's a curious phenomenon, and it makes me want to go to Dublin to find out what the pubs are really like.

On my way back, I stopped in the airport pub to kill some time and to keep an eye on the Holland-Portugal football match. I was filled with dread to note it had an Irish pub theme, and experienced mild culture shock when the barmaid asked me if I wanted a pint. Wait a minute! I'm still in Holland! What happened to those civilised drinks?

I can confirm that this pub was nothing like the ones I spent time in whilst in Dublin last year. The Dublin pubs were pleasant dark smoky drinking holes with a lively atmosphere and great Guinness. The pub in Schiphol airport was a noisy, lacklustre place with unattractive furnishings and vomit all over the toilets. But then the pub was full of English football hooligans, so perhaps that explains it. I wonder if The Irish Pub Company installs them as part of the theme?

NewNetNewsWire

Brent has some more details about the forthcoming NetNewsWire 2.0. I've been testing it for a while, and I have to say, it rocks. Since some of the new features are mentioned, I feel safe in commenting on them now ;-)

The killer features for me are flagged items and smart lists. I usually catch up on my feeds whilst on the train, so I go through and flag news items that I want to read when I'm back online. I've got a smart feed for "flagged items", so I can see at a glance all the articles I need to re-read.

Search is also useful, to track down old items I want to blog about. And the ability to post to ecto straight from NNW is a thing of beauty. There are loads of incremental changes too, that make this a fantastically smooth application and a pleasure to use. And all this for a free upgrade from NNW 1 - now that is value for money!

Conspicuous Absence

I really like the radio feature of iTunes - despite having 6000 songs in my iTunes collection, sometimes it's nice to hear music selected and ordered by someone else. So I was extremely pleased and impressed to find that Virgin Radio are now listed as an iTunes radio stream.

It's not too surprising to find them there - after all, Virgin were playing around with Ogg format streams well over a year ago, and seem to be very much on the ball in this respect (perhaps because they broadcast with an AM licence, which few people listen to?). Just take a look at the formats they support: iTunes, MP3, Ogg, Quicktime, Windows Media, Real.

It's pretty disgusting that the publicly-funded BBC radio stations do not offer such great service. Not only do they not appear on iTunes, but they also only support proprietary streaming formats - predominantly Real at the moment, and some Windows Media.

Come on BBC - sort it out.

Things I have done

(via John):

Things I have done are in bold, things I haven't but would like to are underlined.

01. Buy everyone in the pub a drink
02. Swim with wild dolphins
03. Climb a mountain
04. Take a Ferrari for a test drive
05. See the Pyramids at night
06. Hold a tarantula
07. Take a candlelit bath with someone
08. Say 'I love you' and mean it
09. Hug a tree
10. Do a striptease
11. Do a bungee or parachute jump
12. Visit Paris
13. Watch a lightning storm at sea
14. Clean behind the fridge!
15. Stay up all night long and watch the sun rise
16. Ask the question you've always been too embarrassed to ask
17. See the Northern Lights
18. Go to a huge sports game
19. Create your own masterpiece
20. Grow and eat your own vegetables
21. Touch an iceberg
22. Have an office relationship
23. Sleep under the stars
24. Compromise
25. Change a baby's nappy
26. Take a trip in a hot air balloon
27. Watch a meteor shower
28. Get drunk on champagne
29. Take a luxury holiday
30. Give more than you can afford to charity
31. Look up at the night sky through a telescope
32. Have an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
33. Have a food fight
34. Bet on a winning horse
35. Take a sick day when you're not ill
36. Get a pet
37. Ask a stranger out
38. Have a snowball fight
39. Photocopy your bottom on the office photocopier
40. Scream as loudly as you possibly can
41. Hold a lamb and seen them being born...
42. Enact a favorite fantasy
43. Take a midnight skinny dip
44. Heard the words 'I love you'
45. Fly on Concorde
46. Take an ice cold bath
47. Have a meaningful conversation with a beggar
48. See a total eclipse
49. Ride a rollercoaster
50. Hit a home run

A more serious list of questions are in this life assessment quiz (via Mark). I get 38 out of a possible 100 - oh dear.

New blog in town

There's a new blog in town ... the Orixo Blog, which promises to bring the latest news from the Orixo world, and our views from the Orixo perspective. Expect lots of interesting and exciting stuff to emerge over the coming months!