I don’t know if anyone told you that you build pretty good hardware but your firmware SUCKS! It’s Nearly March 2010 and your customers still have to fight with an embarrassing Y2010 bug in your code, the UI is horrible and getting anything on or off the device is a pain. I am the not-so-proud owner of an eTrex HCx but I can’t remember the last time I actually used it. Why? Because a Nexus One with My Tracks is way better than anything you have to offer. No need to jump through hoops to get tracks off the device, no proprietary drivers that work with one and a half operating systems and I carry it anyway…

Do you want me back as a customer?

Build the eTrex Android.

Specs:

• rugged version of the Nexus One (same screen, processor, etc.)
• replaceable batteries (with a tiny battery in the device to let me switch batteries without shutting it down)
• better GPS antenna & chips
• tiny solar panel on the back

If you or any other company would build a device like that, you could ask ANY price and I would buy it. So please build it. Please…

First I read amazon.de Help but I found no phone number. Then I checked Imprint, where I found a link label Callback service. Less than a second after I entered my phone number, my phone rang. Less than 30sec later I was explaining my problem to a customer service person. I was really suprised as he told me something like “the card is in stock, you will have it tomorrow”. Me: “What?!?” Him: “Yes, I will send it by express. 99.9% of the packages are delivered the very next day.” Me: “Cool, that’s great. Thank you VERY MUCH!”. And for the happy ending the package did arrive today Thank you, Amazon!

WARN  [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] SQL Error: 1030, SQLState: HY000
ERROR [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] Got error 28 from storage engine

which is somehow related to

>perror 28
OS error code  28:  No space left on device

I checked my filesystem and no device was full. I expected to see at least one device with 90-something percent use but strangely “No space left on device” means “Hey, there is only 170mb left on /tmp and I need MORE!”. After I moved the MySQL tmpdir to another partition, everything worked like it should. So I guess this is another case of “Why should we provide useful errormessage when we want to sell consulting”^TM.

If you want to output a few attributes with little or not text in between, please refrain from

<xsl:value-of select="@type"/> <xsl:value-of select="@lfd"/> - <xsl:value-of select="@key"/>: <xsl:value-of select="@value"/>

and use concat instead

<xsl:value-of select="concat(@type, ' ', @lfd, ' - ', @key, ': ', @value, ' ')"/>

Why? Less code[1], easier to read, no problems with whitespaces in your result document.

For further reading I found XSLT Best practices fairly informative. Are there any other good compilations of XSL best practices?

[1] before anyone starts argueing that it’s not much of a difference, I just removed examples with 8 calls to xsl:value-of…

If you take a look at the code from this very interesting article

class DataRecord
[...]
      end
      data.close
      array
    end

    klass
  end

end

Why not use a additional return here:

class DataRecord
[...]
      end
      data.close
      array
    end

    return klass
  end

end

Leaving out the return saves you 7 characters but I think at the cost of clarity. But I’m wondering if I’m missing something here…

Addendum

I learn a lot and like Emmet said:

The really big win you get from implicit return isn’t in functions like the one you gave as an example, it’s in functions like this…

Thanks everybody for the great responses.

Bloated Exceptionhandling

Why do I have to write so much more code to get a reliable solution? Part of the blame is on Java, because of its verbose exception handling – there is no elegant way of catching 2 or more exceptions[1] without catching Exception or Throwable, which I try to avoid where possible. Ruby has this simple solution compared to the bloated solution in java, especially with EJB where you have to catch half a dozend different exceptions.

begin
  eval string
rescue SyntaxError, NameError => boom
  print "String doesn't compile: " + boom
rescue StandardError => bang
  print "Error running script: " + bang
end

Retry

Repeating whole blocks of code needs too much code, too. Ruby has the retry command, which restarts the current block:

c = 0
for i in 1..100
  tries = 0
  begin
    c = c + 1                 # dummy code
    if c % 4 != 0             # to create
      puts "failed for #{i}"  # a few
      raise "uups"            # exceptions
    end
    puts "action #{i}"
  rescue
    puts "rescue"
    tries = tries + 1
    retry if tries < 3
  end
end

This is just another name for goto, which might be harmful. Actually, I wouldn’t use this solution anyway because there is a better, more reusable way, to achieve the same.

closures

In ruby, it is possible (and very simple) to pass some code to a method. This allows me to create a method which excecutes my code multiple times, if an exceptions occurs:

def try(max_tries = 3)
  tries = 0
  begin
    yield
  rescue
    puts "rescue"
    tries = tries + 1
    retry if tries < max_tries
  end
end

c = 0
for i in 1..100
  try do
    c = c + 1                 # dummy code
    if c % 4 != 0             # to create
      puts "failed for #{i}"  # a few
      raise "uups"            # exceptions
    end
    puts "action #{i}"
  end
end

When I started this article, I just wanted to write a short rant about the missing features for errorhandling in java. While writing, I noticed that Ruby has them. Perhaps that’s the reason why I enjoy programming in ruby so much

[1]to clarify this point just for Jason: In general, there is no elegant way of catching two or more exceptions. If you look at the number of direct subclasses in java.lang.Exception, it is nearly impossible to catch the exceptions you want using a superclass without catching some ‘innocent bystanders’.
I would very much like to see a elegant solution which catches only java.sql.SQLException and java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException, you may use as much OOP and polymorphism as you like. This might not be the fault of the language but the plattform but as I cannot get one without the other, it doesn’t really matter to me. Don’t get me wrong, I think Java is pretty damn good, but there is still a lot of room to improve. And Ruby is showing some of the things which can be done better.

In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital
component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the
age of the book.

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and
get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar
atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will
be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast,
so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and
rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody
else checked all the details before it got this far. [...]

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over
a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no
matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with
your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is
doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

I don’t know how many times I had to endure pointless arguments in meetings. At least this explanation is less depressing than the one I had before about people just being plain stupid. People should be forced to read this mail before every single meeting.

• “Entschuldigt Euch nicht!”
• “Kotze kübelweise”
• “A little about drawings”
• Was nun, ferner Bärtiger? (thanks, Loxia)

A little bit older, but still very true “If You’re a Christian, Muslim or Jew – You are Wrong”. You can find these ‘offending’ images among a lot of other older images in the Mohammed Image Archive.

Spiegel: Aber es kann im Ernst in unserer demokratischen Kultur keine Frage sein, dass nicht Dänen den Islam angegriffen haben, nicht einmal eine dänische Zeitung, sondern umgekehrt Muslime tragende Grundlagen der europäischen Zivilisation attackieren. Das ist der Kern des Problems und wer das verständnisvoll durcheinander bringt oder gleichsetzt, liegt schief.

Spiegel: Die renommierte Wissenschaftsorganisation verwehrt sich gegen eine “deplatzierte Krisenrhetorik” und verweist auf Erhebungen, wonach 73 Prozent der geisteswissenschaftlichen Absolventen fünf Jahre nach ihrem Abschluss einen festen Job haben. Das liegt nicht allzu weit unter dem Mittelwert aller Studienfächer von 87 Prozent.

Orginal Seite 8: Fünf Jahre nach Studienabschluss nähert sich jedoch der Anteil regulär berufstätiger Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftler (73 %) dem Durchschnitt über alle Fächer (89 %) an.

Also nochmal, 5 Jahre nach Abschluss haben 27% der Geisteswissenschaftler immer noch keinen Job, und das ist ‘fast’ soviel wie die 11% des Durchschnitts. Zum Glück findet man auch noch den Anteil der Geisteswissenschaftler unter allen Studenten:

Orginal Seite 19: Auch der Anteil der Studierenden in den Geisteswissenschaften an allen Studierenden verzeichnet zwischen 1990 (rd. 19 %) und 2003 (rd. 26 %) einen deutlichen Anstieg.

Wenn die oben angegebenen Zahlen aktuell sind und ich mich nicht verrechnet habe, gilt 0.26 * 0.73 + (1 – 0.26) * x = 0.89, d.h. x = 0.946. Also sind 27% der Geisteswissenschaftler nach 5 Jahren noch immer ohne festen Job im Gegensatz zu 5% der restlichen Absolventen. Da kann man natürlich nachvollziehen, daß Geisteswissenschaftler gefördert werden sollten – vor allem mit der Anerkennung des Personenbeförderungsscheins als Praktikum.

Ubuntu uses sudo to allow a normal user administrative privileges. Thus the traditional UNIX ‘root’ account is disabled.

Yesterday I decided it was time for a new linux system on my desktop computer, and someone proposed to try ubuntu which should be easy to install and maintain (based on debian). Fine. I booted from the install CD and only had to answer some simple questions about my location, language, and time zone and whether I would like to erase my harddisk (the default) or rather edit the partition table manually. I managed to persuade the installer to use the existing partitions. The installation process continued without any further questioning and 20 minutes later it finished by installing GRUB (hey, I’m a lilo user!) and rebooting.

At least it tried. Then it said “Kernel Panic” and that was it. Fortunately a Knoppix bootable CD was available that allowed me to edit and apply my existing lilo configuration file and thus I could boot the new Ubuntu system. (that’s not what I’d call user-friendly installation, by the way). I mounted my old /home directory. Bad luck that the .xsession there contained instructions to start WindowMaker, which was not installed on Ubuntu yet. Since user-id and group-id on that directory (from the old system) didn’t match those of the new system, I couldn’t make changes to the .xsession file. And I couldn’t change the uid and gid of my user since I was not allowed to log in as root! (Only then did I notice that the installer hadn’t asked me for a root password). I didn’t know the thing about sudo yet, I had to boot from knoppix again and look at the ubuntu website. But it’s a very cool feature that when the X server can’t start because it’s miscofigured you get a nice little graphical message that says “Your session didn’t last longer than 10 seconds, I guess that’s because there’s a problem.”

I guess there’s a problem all right – but it will not be MY problem since I’ll kill Ubuntu as soon as possible.

But to be fair: If I had erased the harddisk, things would have been quite different.

Installation:
Installation took less than 10min, create a DB, import a sample DB, edit 2 files. As promised everything was working and the start page welcomed me with

To try and log on, you may want to log on as:
* Admin (password test)
* zebru (password hello)

This is nice, but after playing around as Admin I tried to change the password, but this seemed impossible via the web interface. The password is stored in plain text in the database, so it is possible to change it, but this should be easier.

Log out and click on the “create user” link. This left me with this error message:

Warning: Failed opening ‘skins/default.osk’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/share/pear’) in /var/www/ow2wiki/userManager.php on line 286

this change fixed the problem:

286c286
< include( “skins/$skin/template.osk” );
—
> include( “skins/$skin.osk” );

Wiki markup

The only documentation about possible markup is this short example in the sandbox:

La sandbox è lo spazio in cui fare le proprie prove….
prova
prova provata

<<<AAA>>>

<<bbb
cc>>

>>bbb
cc<<

>>bbb
cc<<

>>bbb
cc<<

This is where I stopped because I didn’t want to waste any more time on a tool which has IMHO a neat idea but still very far away from being easily usable.

via Julian and symlink.ch