Bluemini.com

Take back the tap

posted: 22 Mar 2010

Today is World Water Day and for many this is a chance to challenge societies dependence on bottled water. Providing usually lower quality and more expensive water by bottle has been an ongoing campaign by the large beverage companies over the past few years. However, now it looks like the public are catching on. Bottled water sales have started to drop and sales for those guys who make reusable bottles are going up, but let's keep the trend going 'take back the tap'.

The guys and gals over at 'Story of Stuff' have a great new film 'The Story of Bottled Water storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/' which shows just how damaging this manufactured demand has and continues to be on the planet. The US alone consumes half a billion plastic bottled a week, most of which end up in land fill or circulating in the north pacific, that's just crazy. So get yourself a reusable bottle (BPA free if I were you), say no to the big corps telling you tap water's no good, and take back the tap.

Names changed..

posted: 12 Feb 2010

...to protect the guilty, from some recent minutes that I viewed!

AB felt it would be helpful; HN agreed that there should be some form of notification; PB agreed but only if it doesn't interfere with the user; JS agreed with PB; KS agreed and GY agreed.

cfRhino on RIAForge

posted: 03 Jan 2010

I took the decision today to lauch cfRhino onto RIAForge, to try and give it a larger pressence in the CF community. I'm not really that interested in gandering followers but I work hard on often on the framework for work and personal purposes and so I thought I might as well put it out there, in case someone is interested! I've linked to it in the sidebar, cfRhino.riaforge.org/ so drop on over and take a look.

I am working on the documentation a little, over a Sourceforge, but I find that stuff really hard and I'm not having a great time of it so far!

Anyway, if you're interested go check it out on RIAForge (or Sourceforge)

Nick

Nancy Snyderman Interview

posted: 18 Dec 2009

I've just listened to an interview with Nancy Snyderman, medical doctor and broadcaster for NBC. She spoke about a number of issues from Healthcare Reform in the Us to being honest with yourself about life's lessons and that it's ok to falter on the way. But she rounded off with a number of points that I thought made so much sense I wanted to pass them on.

• Eat a little chocolate and drink a little red wine - your day will be a little bit better
• Get out of bed and put your pants on one leg at a time - have a passion for what you do each day
• Use what you need and leave the rest - that's true for food, water, in fact anything
• Don't ever smoke - it's the only product that when used as intended will kill you
• Drink in moderation
• Surround yourself with good friends
• And give back

You can hear the interview here: med.stanford.edu/121/2009/snyderman.html

keywords: random life

Oracle database links without TNS

posted: 04 Dec 2009

Today I needed to establish a link between my dev Oracle instance and my live instance, so that I could update the tables in my development instance with a fresh copy of the live data. This db link used to exist but a few weeks back, the live database moved server and the legacy links were now broken. The usual syntax for creating such a link is:

   CREATE DATABASE LINK "new_link_name"

   CONNECT TO "remote_user_name" IDENTIFIED BY "remote_user_password"

   USING 'service_name';

The 'service_name' value is taken from an entry in the tnsnames.ora file on the local server, however, I was working remotely and regardless, don't have file system access to the remote server to check out the tns file. So what to do. Well, it seems that any 'proper' descriptor can be used in the USING clause, so I figured, what if I copy the full test of the descriptor out of my local tns file and insert it, something like:

   CREATE DATABASE LINK "new_link_name"

   CONNECT TO "remote_user_name" IDENTIFIED BY "remote_user_password"

   USING '(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=host)(PORT=1521 )))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVER=DEDICATED)(SID=sid_of_remote)))';

And sure enough it worked. The only hiccup I had was that our new live db is a 10g instance and no longer accepted the older service name style argument, instead insisting on a SID. My original attempt had the end of the descriptor as ...(SERVICE_NAME=service_name_of_remote))); changing that to using 'SID' as shown previously made it all work.

Seattle Mayer-elect uses Google docs to capture in

posted: 17 Nov 2009

"Seattle Mayor-elect Mike McGinn seeks the input of committed thinkers on urbanism, land use and sustainability. View his explanation of the project here rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102826196373&s=575&e=001sXXujJ_dUz9q1JP27A6x3uqknhiAwnny5SylIZNZlVkbCkdl595vLR3PQIlib_en5pVODPcrMUNhrBMhtteeRXW_zgc5WWAFfC1a8KfHEcs2LlU4Qmn3bmH9gvO5l66Vn4cPeGPat1M= and contribute your thoughts at the link below by 6:00 pm on Sunday, November 22. All comments will be compiled by Great City and provided to the Mayor-elect for his consideration as he sets the direction for Seattle under his administration."

spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDVMRWJfbnF3VThQYmVOWnFxcVBkaVE6MA

keywords: seattle

Some RSS play

posted: 25 Sep 2009

I've always been interested in how RSS is replacing the 'standard' paradigm of news delivery, allowing us to pick and choose those topics that we're interested in rather than relying on the opinions (and I admit expertise) of a professional editor. This can have both positive and negative impacts on the way we receive information. The knock on effects of such freedom is also interesting, that print is falling away as the primary delivery mechanism and electronic aggregation and delivery are taking over.

Feeling somewhat nostalgic for the old days of black 'n' white columns, I set about a project to render my daily news into a 'newspaper' format, albeit online. It's a work in progress and whilst the HTML cleanup is working pretty well, there are still plenty of remnants of unwanted markup in the output. However, if you feel so inclined, please take a look at my WIP the BM Times!

www.bluemini.com/devstuff/bm_times/

Once I get that pesky HTML under control, I'll start looking at ways to lay it out nice and proper like. Let me know your thoughts, ideas.

keywords: projects

Functional programming

posted: 25 Aug 2009

I'm not one to go jumping on programming band wagons, I've not downloaded Python or Ruby but since doing some private study using the Berkeley University webcasts on Computer Science webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-26263 I've started to think more about functional programming and wanting to know more. Now, functional programming is not something that makes the most sense to me, particularly as far as syntax. But as I get more into understanding it, it seems to make a lot of sense.

Indeed, while I am still fumbling around at the prompt, trying to make my functions work, I find myself looking back at more imperative code thinking that it's very ugly and verbose. The idea that in order to iterate over an array I need to create a loop with a index variable, define its bounds and then access each element and do it every time, does seem somewhat bizarre once you've seen the functional programming approach.

The language I am using at present to investigate and discover functional programming is Clojure clojure.org/, built atop the JVM and therefore with direct access to the power and multi-platform abilities of Java, but with the terse syntax of a Lisp-like language. I'll keep you posted on how I get on, once I figure out an application that I can build with it..!

IBM using parts of Apache Harmony

posted: 16 Jun 2009

This is a great step forward for the Apache Harmony project. IBM, who are apparently a major contributor to the Harmony codebase, have now adopted some of its core libraries for their websphere product. This is a tremendous endorsement of the Harmony JVM and indicates that while Sun continues to refuse Apache access to their Test Compatibility Kit (TCK), effectively consigning Harmony to uncertified status, they (IBM) are more than happy to employ the software in a production environment.

Apache Harmony: harmony.apache.org/ SD Times article: www.sdtimes.com/link/33547

Railo running on Linux (Fedora)

posted: 16 Jun 2009

Finally, I have got Railo 3.0.3 running on my linux based server. The J2EE app server I am using is Resin, which seems to be doing a great job. I am still in the process of learning Linux, so progress has been a little slow, but it's there.

I have kept rudimentary notes as I went along so I may post them here, if only as a way to keep a permanent record of them.

Next up, getting CFRhino to work with it.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre