I finished my radio play off today and will be sending it to the BBC next week. Quite excited about it but not really holding out a huge amount of hope because there isn't a lot of point getting too worked up about stuff.I've been reading num

Comment left here  I am a Rails developer who uses a proper IDE (Netbeans for Ruby) and Windows. Installed Cygwin to give me the bash shell and the other tools I need to talk to our Linux server backbones. I started on Unix/Sun workstations, wen

Create an active record object, retrieve some stuff from a soap service and then get this:NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!The error occurred while evaluating nil.has_key?        fr

Comment left here.  XML - sighI read Oracle's early papers on XML DB - "we store the schema and the data separately, with pointers into the data"Codasyl in disguise. The same with the o-o databases, hierarchical databases - none of

Posted here. I've been using it for a while now, moved because of incompatibility issues.Perhaps the complete redesign of the interface? Try finding "save as" in Excel - the File menu no longer exists FFS! It is there, but now

Easy-ish in Java

Carry on, grasshopper

More recent writings on the history of programming languages

This is a reprint of something I wrote ages ago. Thought it might amuse.

In response to this:I don't quite get what you mean by the .Net "vision". As a techie using J2EE at the time all I could see was that they needed something to meet that challenge. 95% of the ideas (e.g. common runtime, remoting etc. etc.) w

What I'm reading and working through to prepare for my Java Business Componets Developer Certification

I installed Mandriva Linux on an extra drive I put into my big server machine. Could not get the US Robotics wireless card to fly at all. Found some stuff on source forge but it didn't work for me (needed kernel source to build it - way too hard).Wen

Have a look at fyracle

Part one of an article about how I managed to create a dynamic data entry system using PHP

http://www.it-director.com/article.php?id=12729I'm a bit curious about what the PL/SQL is being migrated to: you didn't say. If it's another proprietry format (albeit Ingres' and therefore "free") then who cares? Ok, less licence money but

MySQLDecided to move my project to MySQL because it seems to be more of a standard compared with Postgres. This is a pity because I like Postgres a lot, but you have to go with the flow and if I'm going to work on some non-Oracle skills I should at l

Say you are trying to validate that at least one element in a radio group has been selected.This hacking is because if a radio group only has one element you can't treat it as an array so if the length is === (points to the the same object) as an und

In response to this:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/24/ingres_and_open_source/Hi Philip,Speaking as someone who has jumped from Oracle to Postgres, mostly for cost reasons, I'm curious about what the relationship is between Ingres and Postgres.

I decided to try using Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice. After I got the Java and Flash plug-ins installed it works fine. I like it a lot, particularly the tabbed interface, where you aren't constantly going back to favorites over and over aga

We used workflow to manage creating documents and wanted to be able to create management reports on top of it. I remember having to create some horrible views to allow you to work out where you were in the workflow and what step was next so you could

Have a look at http://www.no2id.net/content/flash01.html, and indeed the rest of the site. I got to this site after reading an article about the Big Brother awards in the Register.I hate big government and I really hate them wasting my taxes. Once I

I installed a version of PC-Anywhere on my works laptop because I need to administer an old machine. It did warn me that I was installing a version that was incompatible with the version of Windows I was running (XP). I've seen this message before wi

Spent the day evaluating Oracle Repository. I quite like it, as far as it goes. I'm busy preparing a powerpoint so I can share my conclusions with the rest if the company. It isn't as good as some products (but is better than PVCS) but to be honest,

Hello, this document is produced by using a my brand-new ViaVoice software; I hope that it makes sense and doesn't come out complete rubbish. Today has been a very difficult day: I'm extremely tired and went to some training on a new piece of softwar

Crèche in West KensingtonOK OK lots of things have been going on here... I won a bottle of whisky in the charity raffle at work, which was amazing because I never win anything. Here I am feeling pretty good, my Karma is obviously working well. Then