Hello all,

The lovely Straylings have been put forward to play the Green Man Festival, the organisers of the festival are holding a competition where by the band who gets the most votes gets to open the festival.

This would be a great opportunity for dem Straylings so they need as many votes as we can muster. If you can spare just 1 minute to register (only 4 boxes!) at the link below they would really appreciate it (the answer you'll need is Jarvis Cocker!).

http://www.thegreenmanfestival.co.uk/greenpoll/user/register?r=1

After you're done just search for Straylings and click on the vote button (votes can be made every day by the way!).

Cheers people!

EdD

I honestly don't know what to say other than thankyou to Cassetteboy for this brilliant video edit which sums up the utter fail cock that is 'the apprentice'. It is clear that there was a lot more talent coming from the making of this video than can be found in the abysmal contestants who all seem to think that doing well in business requires the ceremonial fucking over of ones colleagues.

EdD

Heard this for the first time today on the Radio whilst driving back from St Pancras, I'm absolutely captivated by it. The track gently pulses away building and again dimishing as it goes, the production is top notch too and gives the tune a subdued but purposeful feeling. Stick the smooth and slightly chilling vocal in to the mix and the result is an absolute beauty.

I just wish I knew what the synth they used was, it sounds incredible and clearly has a great filter in it.

Top video too:

EdD

This year there were approx 250 entries, this was up on last year's entries which were around the 180 mark apparently. Most entrants were quite sensibly on full suspension bikes, in addition to the full bouncers I counted about 10 hardtails and a single full rigid bike! I was one of the few hardtail riders so was expecting to be pretty slow and get a fairly comprehensive battering on the downhill stages. I rode with the guys and girls of Crookes Gentlemen's Cycling Club (CGCC) - a top bunch mostly based in Sheffield and Leeds.

Saturday was practice and qualifying (a.k.a. prologue) day, after a good cooked breakfast courtesy of CGCC Nick we rocked up at Kielder and rode each of the stages for the first time. After practising the first stage once I felt that some of the roots on the stage had it in for me so was pretty nervous, however as we rode more and I continued to keep the bike rubber side down the nerves relented somewhat. Prologue was a timed run of stage 4, by this point I was quite tired but had a good crack at it, I was a little disappointed with my 169th position after qualifying but in retrospect it seemed fairly reasonable considering my lack of fitness and bike handling finesse!

My start time on Sunday was 09:54am, the weather was largely pretty warm and sunny, with the exception of a few short spells of rain and cold at the top of a few stages. CGCC were pretty spread out across the qualifying rankings so I spent most of the day chatting to the guys who had qualified around me and the various CGCC peeps I saw through the day, there's a great level of camaraderie amongst the riders at these events with everyone spurring each other onwards!

CGCC did really well with several people finishing in top places amongst the pros, I finished in 149th place - 20 places up from where I started  which was quite pleasing, particularly as it meant I must have beaten people riding full suspension bikes on my hardtail! :-)

Thanks to all the CGCC folks for making me feel so welcome, in particular Nick for organising the accommodation and grub, Fuller for driving up from Sheffield and Alec for helping me get my puncture changed quickly enough to avoid a time penalty before the last stage!

Some photos have already surfaced from the event, here are some links so you can see what it was like for yourself:

Various Flickr Photos

CGCC John's Photos

Oliver Coat's Prologue Gallery

Oliver Coat's Stage 1 Gallery

Oliver Coat's Stage 3 Gallery

Oliver Coat's Stage 6 Gallery 

EdD

Thanks to Mick for sending this, really made me laugh!

21 Economic Models Explained

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing  them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
One is mad and the other has had to be put in storage because of the health and safety risks of milking it.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
Nobody believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive. 

I have found this quite useful, it lists a load of useful Maven properties which aren't obviously available in the Maven documentation:

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/MavenPropertiesGuide

EdD

Tash and I went riding round Richmond Park yesterday, being both in the south of England and so close to London the Park is incredibly flat, however there are some rather nice flowy sections in some of the wooded areas. We found this little kicker below and had a quick play on it.

My bike has been making a rather interesting creaking noises for the last few rides, beginning after the most recent uplift day at CwmDown; with the combination of the famous CwmCarn grit-mud, the dependable rain and my penchant for pressure washers I thought the cause was sure to be premature ball-bearing death, the noise got markedly worse yesterday so I stripped the chainset down when we got back only to find that the BB was fine, however a good few of the the splines on the driveside crank arm had completely crumbled away! Time to start looking for a new crank I think.

My current crankset is a strange beast, initially starting out life as a 2003 Shimano XT model, later coupled with an e-13 DRS and a 38 tooth middle ring. This weird combination results in a dual ring 22, 38 toothed monster, a chain guide and an unbreakable Macrolon bash ring, all mated to a Shimano ES71 hollowtech (old style) BB. Sure it weighs a bit more than the standard issue XT kit but it comes with added advantage that I no longer leave precious big ring teeth sticking in the tree trunks that I so often hit err... lightly brush over, plus I literally haven't lost my chain once since fitting the DRS, not a single time! The whole lot weighs in at 1.15kg, here's a pic of the disassembled constituent parts below:

I am now looking at replacement options, things have of course moved on since 2003 and pretty much everything decent seems to be based on the more modern Hollowtech II BBs so going for that upgrade widens the cranks available to me. I'm currently looking at the 2009 Saint M810-2 crankset which looks absolutely unbreakable and comes with an appropriately frightening pricetag. The saint kit looks great and I've heard mostly good things about it however I wonder if it's a little overkill for me... The fact that I managed to get a 2003 crank, which was aimed mostly at the XC market, to last 6 years by riding downhill, freeride, XC and dirtjumping makes me wonder if I need everything the Saint offers... will have to see. If anyone has any suggestions for replacements then please give me a shout.

EdD

I discovered today that in Oracle 10g (and I presume in earlier versions also) it is not possible to directly assign a sequence value in to a PLSQL variable, hence neither of the 2 following examples will compile in 10g:

1:

PROCEDURE set_up_test_data(no_of_days NUMBER)
IS
  -- Doesn't compile
  nice_unique_number NUMBER := mysequence.nextval;
BEGIN
  -- do stuff here...
END set_up_test_data;

2:

PROCEDURE set_up_test_data(no_of_days NUMBER)
IS
  nice_unique_number NUMBER;
BEGIN
  -- Doesn't compile.
  nice_unique_number := mysequence.nextval;
  -- do stuff here...
END set_up_test_data;

A bit of googling suggests that a common workaround to this is to be do a SELECT INTO using the dual table, as below:

PROCEDURE set_up_test_data(no_of_days NUMBER)
IS
  nice_unique_number NUMBER;
BEGIN
  --Works nicely
  SELECT mysequence.nextval INTO nice_unique_number FROM dual;
  -- do stuff here...
END set_up_test_data;

Note: This no appears to be an issue as of Oracle 11g (search for Straight Sequences).

EdD

I'm a little behind on my hospital podcast listening and have only just got around to podcast 79, it's a splendid edition and features Mistabishi throughout.

The second track on the podcast is 'Raw Organic' by Your Infamous Harp (incorrectly referenced in the podcast meta-data as 'The Infamous harp'). The album from which this track is taken is called 'prah suomafni ruoy', it is absolutely brilliant and is probably best described as a kind meld of electro folky glitch beats, it's well worth getting hold of.

The album is sold on a donation model so you can pay what you for it, you can get it from Your Infamous Harp's website. Get your copy now, you won't regret it!

EdD

This makes perfect sense, what better way to measure the quality of code than in WTFs per minute...

And because it's the right thing to do here's the link to the source of the image.

I recently started using Hudson as a Windows service, upon doing this I noticed that it completely ignores my Maven configuration file %HOMEPATH%\.m2\settings.xml. I couldn't initially figure out why this was happening until I remembered that Windows services run by default as the system account, not as a user account.  The system account doesn't have any concept of the same %HOMEPATH% environment variable which is used when I use Maven interactively which is why my settings.xml was being ignored under Hudson .

To overcome this problem make sure you use the settings.xml file under belonging to the actual Maven installation which Hudson uses to build your project, in my case this was:

 C:\Program_Files\Programming\Java\apache-maven-2.0.10\conf\settings.xml

A quick update to this file, adding in the settings I usually use (basically a Nexus mirror) sorted this right out.

Note: This should be obvious but by modifying the settings.xml belonging to the Maven installation you are essentially changing the system wide Maven defaults which will affect all users unless they have specified otherwise in their own settings.xml file.

EdD

IntelliJ has a wonderful feature which, during debugging, allows for the evaluation of code at runtime, this is one of my favourite debugging utilities and is accessed through ALT+F8.

I've been using Netbeans more and more recently and could not for the life of me figure out if there was an equivalent function... well there is, and it's CTRL + F9 which gives you this little wonder.

Once the window above appears you can just type in your expression (using CTRL + SPACE for code suggestion/ completion) and hit enter to see the results! I'm so pleased I've discovered this, I knew it had to be in there somewhere in NetBeans - it's just a shame it took me this long to find it!

EdD

Had to share this, it really made me laugh!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7702913.stm

EdD

It takes ages to re-install SJSAS so this should save some time when you need to test different appserver versions with different JDKs and don't have the time to reinstall or the resources to have multiple installs.

1. Stop your appserver domain(s), nodeagent(s) and instance(s).
2. Locate <SJSAS_HOME>\config\asenv.bat where SJSAS_HOME is yous SJSAS install dir e.g. C:\Sun\ApplicationServer.
3. Take a backup of the file.
4. Locate the 'AS_JAVA' variable. e.g. set AS_JAVA=C:/PROGRA~2/PROGRA~1/Java/JDK15~1.0_1
   
5. Figure out the DOS 8.1 path to the JDK you want to use and replace the existing path with this value.
6. Start up your application server.
7. Check the server.log output - it should contain the updated JDK path.

EdD