Month: June 2008

It's not very easy, this is the first phone that is sophisticated enough to support the editing page and easy enough to be usable for that purpose. Uploading does not work. Rich editing does not work. But typing is fast enough and easy enough.

First, what's my goal

I want to do an audit log. I read the http://www.hibernate.org/318.html and there two different approaches were mentioned.

The first is using a Listener.

The second is using the new eventing model in Hibernate3.

The author said that he couldn't make the eventing approach work for an unknown reason.

I'm using Hibernate via JPA. I'm using it in an EJB. So the problem
with the first approach is that it is difficult (if possilbe) to supply
the same transaction to the interceptor so that it can write an entry
in the audit log. There is a solution with a static field holding a
session or an EM, but that seems ugly.

So I chose the second approach. I created a class, inherited few
eventhandlers (PreInsertEventListener, PostUpdateEventListener ) and
tried to add the class as a listener.

Using the API, it worked (the callback methods in the listeners were called):

Using properties (as if using persistence.xml) failed(the callback methods in the listeners were NOT called):

Ideas why?

I have to keep it alive for 24 hours. It's gonna be hard

Update: It's done - I successfully returned the dog alive, unharmed and in good condition.

Today I passed the exam for category A (motorcycles above 50cc). Very happy.

There is a certain group of people (counting me too) that are used to working with strongly typed languages. It's really hard for that group of people to understand how technologies like php, html, javascript (..., rss, perl, ...) become so popular.

The answer is (in my humble opinion) the ease of use and rapidness. Everybody can learn to use them. Sacrificing the good style and the heavy approach (that comes from the heavy books) comes out be (in most cases) an acceptable loss.

Patents pending - don't steal my intellectual (he he) property.

Have you ever seen a screen that supports that big a resolution? This is (...calculating...) ~4.29 GigaPixels. Quite a lot, huh?

Check out how many options it gave for color depth.

P.S. This happened on a friend's machine after two years of no support and windows update.

A custom res:

Although it's short and incomplete it's really a cornerstone read. Every single Bulgarian must be forced to read it and memorize it:
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~manfear/lang_mistakes_bg.php

In a few days this adventure (having a blog) is going to have its first birthday. I remember the birthday because it is embedded in the admin password (yea, try me ;).

Today I was reading a few articles about having a blog (here and here) and the impression I got left with was that starting a blog is not always a good idea and to do that you have to have something to share and to follow some rules and most importantly have a goal.

F**k that. (Update: I don't know why I put asterisks, maybe I'm afraid of the moderators ?!)

I don't know if I have something to share. I don't know if I have a goal set for my blog. I didn't know about the rules until today. But I don't care.

What made me start the blog was an article from Joel (I can't find it right now) that simply said that a blog can help you express yourself better, can help you perfect the language you present your blog in, can help you understand yourself better. And one other thing - get more feedback for yourself - and that one is particularly precious for me.

So, do I follow the rules - no. Do I care - I guess not. (yea, sometimes I check the logs to see how 'famous' am I and the good results and some comments boost my ego, but that's pretty much it). Overall, I find it a good experience and the time spent on the blog wasn't completely waisted.

What am I going to do from now on - I guess pretty much the same thing.

P.S. Thank you my one reader for the continuing support and the few comments you left from different IPs (appreciate the effort). I would gladly buy you a beer.

'I'm shocked' is what Charlie Sheen playing Charlie from 'Two men and a half' always says with a beer in his hand when his brother does something stupid.
(Comment to me: I have a problem: cannot produce short sentences.)

Here I am playing the dumb thing Vasko and I gave as a present to one crazy dude:

Update: it's fu*king unpleasant.

Last night I fell into depression, and called "the telephone of
confidence".
My call is redirected to Pakistan.
I said that I'm
going to suicide.
They rejoiced and asked me if I can drive heavy trucks
...

What's missing is a hot girl bringing me stuff. The chair is awesome.

Seeing these posts first may help get the context of the talk:
What not to do when you're a bank
What to do when most e-banking interfaces suck?
First Investment Bank, the sequel
SG Expressbank

Being stuck with SG Expressbank made electronic transfers impossible, because they didn't work with epay.bg (prohibited) nor did they work with the e-banking software (every recepient has to be registered offline on-site (bank office), and for the ones that are registered the software does not work 🙂 ).

Almost by accident I tested a card I had in epay.bg for the balance (most banks have stopped this service, because of too many requests). And... I got it. It was working. Strange.

I remebered that I had registered the e-banking for that bank and had left the user/pass somewhere.

After a few days of searching I found it.  Keep in mind that getting the user/pass from the bank was quite an adventure and took more than 20 days and quite a few trips to the local office.

The login screen is right on the main page of the bank. I was amazed to see how easy the generation of the certificate was. While doing it I saw that they support smart cars (e-signatures). Well done.

The interface is really user friendly. Supports almost everything or at least it seems so. I haven't tried it yet, because the bankaccount is nearly emtpy.

From the interface notifications can be defined: SMS notifications, email notifications. Now I'm waiting to see whether it works.

A minor drawback was that I can't tranfer money to another bank account via epay.bg - I guess only FIB cards can (FIB is connected to epay).

And because I'm lazy to do it the old-fashion way - now I'm using the only possible way to transfer money electronically from SG Expressbank card to the new card I have - the epay's microbill (микросметка) - another thing I have to learn how to use. It was quite straight forward to start up and use, but it takes a few days (in my case 2 full days) to tranfer the money and the commissions are not going to be small.

If you have

and suppose you forgot to put Serializable to MyPictureClass, then guess what: there's no exception. You have to check the data in the DB.

Surprise no2:
Suppose MyPictureClassis a base abstract class and it is not Serializable. Suppose every inheriting class is Serializable. Then what happens? Well one thing's for sure: there wouldn't be an exception, but there wouldn't be any data in the DB (you'll get null). The runtime checks (in Hibernate) check the signature of the defining class I suppose, not the supplied class at runtime - and I would assume the opposite, because serialization works the opposite way. Maybe it's because Hibernate does some runtime bytecode modifications.

The JPA spec supports primitive types as @Columns. What they don't say (assuming Hibernate is the implementation (maybe TopLink does that too)) is that this column becomes nullable = false and the default value is the default for the primitive type. And that is so, even though the @Column(nullable by default is true.

So

actually means

So watch out.

The new firefox 3.0 (not final yet - rc1 for now) is awesome. Most plug-ins don't work yet, but that changes very rapidly.
The engine itself is unbelievably fast and looks pretty stable - for a few days it crashed only once - trying to start the updater.

Try it, definitely try it. Link.

Update: the RC2 is out. The link points to it.

Hudson is a continuous integration tool similar to CruiseControl. It has a very good web GUI for defining tasks unlike CruiseControl.
Inside it I have configured a call to an ant task.

Strangely enough in on of the projects that had to be build I got:

Strange.

I double checked the script in eclipse. It worked.
Manual call to ant on the eclipse machine also worked.

Then I went to the Hudson machine (a test environment). I ran the script manually. The same freaking error.
I copied the whole dir to another place on the test environment: no problem.

Maybe it's the credentials: added read/write to all. Still the same error.

Then I ran the script with: ant -verbose and see what I got:

Cannot create a process?!
That's weird.

So tired enough I did something desperate:

From

I went to

and it worked ..... 🙁

Keep in mind that in the same build project I was calling a few other build.xml doing <javac fork="true"
several times before this one.
But this one was the only one having a reference to junit.jar (somewhere on the net I saw an article saying something about junit but don't remember what).

So I left it like this.