Hey, you're always asking me where I find stuff...
Thursday, September 30, 2004
China Update
I'm now in Beijing, and tomorrow is the Chinese National Holiday. We're going to head over to Tiananmen Square tomorrow morning and watch the festivities. I'm kind of hoping there's a big army parade and we get to see their nukes.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Music - sad, promising and fun
Sad - Johnny Ramone has got prostate cancer. The guitarist for the band, he basically kept them on the road for over 20 years, he treated it like a job, he made sure they wore the leather jackets, got to the venues, made their money and then headed off to the next gig. He and Joey didn't speak to each other for most of their career because Johnny stole Joey's girlfriend. Reading some of the band biographies, Johnny comes off as a bit of a prick, but he's a great guitarist, and if he goes, there'll only be Tommy, Marky, Ritchie and CJ left.
Promising - Interpol are releasing their second album next week. I heard some of it in Gaslight Music yesterday - it sounded quite good, so I'm looking forward to hearing the whole thing.
Fun - Download the Scummer mix by Pojmasta.
Promising - Interpol are releasing their second album next week. I heard some of it in Gaslight Music yesterday - it sounded quite good, so I'm looking forward to hearing the whole thing.
Fun - Download the Scummer mix by Pojmasta.
China
I'm off to China in a couple of days, for 3 weeks. I'll be visiting Hong Kong, Xiamen (Amoy), Xian, Beijing and Shanghai. There will be plenty of photos.
Database spaghetti
Aha - it's been a while since the last entry, but I have an excuse. Having given up on the prospect of this job providing me with meaningful work, I've been helping out a friend with a couple of tasks (not for pay - just for something to do).
He asked me to look at the database for the software he's been working on - it's a mess. Just looking at it quickly revealed it was un-normalised, was lacking foreign keys (and often primary keys!) and the naming scheme was up the spout. At least 15 of the tables have a primary key called "RecordId"!!!
This all sounds like a lot of nerd-speak, but what it really means is the database is poorly designed and I'm trying to fix it up a bit. I had trouble getting to grips with it at first - the database is the biggest I've ever worked on. So in the end I did the smart thing and printed it out.
54 pages stuck together. Since that photo was taken I was able to ignore quite a few of the tables, so now:
28 pages stuck together when I took that photo. I've got it down to 14 now. Of course, the number of pages is kind of meaningless. But at least it gives an idea of progress.
I'm about to go and print out version 4 and stick it all together. What fun!
He asked me to look at the database for the software he's been working on - it's a mess. Just looking at it quickly revealed it was un-normalised, was lacking foreign keys (and often primary keys!) and the naming scheme was up the spout. At least 15 of the tables have a primary key called "RecordId"!!!
This all sounds like a lot of nerd-speak, but what it really means is the database is poorly designed and I'm trying to fix it up a bit. I had trouble getting to grips with it at first - the database is the biggest I've ever worked on. So in the end I did the smart thing and printed it out.
54 pages stuck together. Since that photo was taken I was able to ignore quite a few of the tables, so now:
28 pages stuck together when I took that photo. I've got it down to 14 now. Of course, the number of pages is kind of meaningless. But at least it gives an idea of progress.
I'm about to go and print out version 4 and stick it all together. What fun!
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Counting the downloads
Just a quick note - the BBC have launched a Top40 chart for downloaded music. Unfortunately they don't/can't count illegal downloads, which would be much more interesting.
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