Crappy weather is the best time to run

Personally I love it when the weather is a bit crappy and I go out running. It's because most people look out and go "Ugg, no, I'm not going out today". This means that there is hardly anyone that gets in my way, and you know the people out there are the "regulars" because only the mad run in the rain or crappy weather.

And for the most part, when it looks crappy, it's really not that bad. Everyone missed out on a great day to be outside. But Shhhh! Don't let the secret out or I'll have to run around people more.

Listening to: Prodigy - Poison

Artificial deadlines

Something that has put me into a bad (well, at least not great) mood all day is artificial deadlines. Like being at work for 0830. Why the hell would I have to be there at that time? Does it make any difference to anyone? I'm not even interacting with other people about work today, or tomorrow or even the next day. So does it matter when I work, or only that I put in the hours? But that's SO hard to explain to other people. It drives me mad sometimes (if you had not noticed).

And this got me to thinking that just about all deadlines we have in life are just made up. Being at work (for people with flex hours), handing in co-op reports, ... For the most part, they are just deadlines for the sake of deadlines in an effort to ensure that they actually get done. What will happen if we don't meet those deadlines? Not much. But it can be hard sometimes for me to distinguish what are "real" deadlines, and what ones can be safely ignored / bent, so I end up treating all deadlines equally. And it's driving me mad. *sigh*

I just have to keep focused... Hopefully I'll get a kayak this weekend, so it's all good... *focus*

Listening to: Dave Weckl Band - High Life

Star Wars Day!!!

I write about this every year, but I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Star Wars Day! You'll have to notice the date... May the Fourth.... be with you. ;-)

Listening to: Godsmack - Voodoo

hotmail spam

Damn. It looks like I have started to get spam to my hotmail account. I had my email address published in my resumé. So I changed that now... dammit. I had been able to keep my hotmail no spam for so long... *sigh* I guess I just wasn't smart enough about it.

Listening to: The Civilian Project - Shadow On The Sun

Pensive while it rains

I don't know why I feel so pensive today, but maybe it has something to do with spending all day in bed to avoid my headache (damn weather change). I keep on wondering about the future, and what shape it will take, and how futile it can be to try and guess.

I've heard before to try and plan like you are going to live forever, but live like this is your last day on earth. Well, it would be a lot easier if I actually knew, but I think that would be horrible too. What would you do if you knew? If someone told you that you would die when you are 100, does that mean you are going to be more reckless now? Save more? Not live every day to the last, nor tell people how special they are? I don't know how I would deal with something like that, and I guess it doesn't matter one way or another. I think that I'll go back to bed... I'm not good at this philosophy thing, especially when my head is not 100 %... man, I need to go for a run tomorrow.

Listening to: System of a Down - Deer Dance

Faster, better, stronger testing

One of the things that I have been working on for the first time has been testing my application that connects to a database. I know, it's silly that this is the first time this has happened, but that's the way things are.

First, when we run the test suite, we want it nice and clean, so we tear down and rebuild the structure. This means that every time we run the tests, we should get the same results. We had to make sure that we were not stepping on each other's feet, so we are just using different schemas. This is configured in the web server setup, so it's not in the application code itself. So far, so good.

One problem has been when the server that does hosts the oracle db had to shutdown. That stopped testing -> development. A problem that just occurred to me is also if you share tables across schemas. That would be a problem too. And the third problem: we don't actually need persistence writing to the disk. We just need something to simulate it. And I think that the additional I/O just slows down testing too, but that could just be a case of thinking that I know where the bottle neck is, but I don't for sure.

I've asked Andrew about this before and he wrote about using a in memory database as another option. This was part of "the doing the simplest thing first" part of XP. Something that I didn't really figure out before. Ah well. Well, we just jumped right into having a database, so no in memory persistence mech. was made.

What I would like to do is have a "in memory" database. Something that I could

• run the queries against
• something that I wouldn't have to worry about connecting to a "real" database without installing one on each workstation
• where the developers would not be stepping on each other's toes
• where it would be as fast as possible

HSQL looks like it would almost be perfect for this since it seems to have a "in memory" mode. I would think that this means that it will behave the same in both cases, and I wouldn't have to worry about maintaining 2 different persistence types. I know that I don't have time to play around with that now, but I'll see if I can do that in the future.

Listening to: John Williams - Star Wars Soundtrack - Imperial March

Blogs as letters to the editor?

While I was reading a copy of popular science I checked out the letters to the editor. Nothing special so far, okay. But they had a section for blogs where they said how many blogs had written entries about last months stories and had some comments from them. I thought that was just so cool that using the web they are showing what people are writing about them, and not just what people have written to them.

TV at first was very similar to live performances, and over time has changed into a completely different medium. The web at first was very similar to magazines and papers, it's changing into something completely different. I just don't know into what. ;-)

Listening to: Harry Simeone Chorale - What Child Is This