It made me wonder if we do similar things in software development. Are we getting better at doing the wrong things? Something like the XML RPC specification that was improved to make the Simple Object Access Protocol specifications, known as SOAP under auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This lead to the need to have tools to write and validate XML Schemas, leading to 1000+ line WSDL files that describe the SOAP end points.
This blog started back in 2006 running under Typo, it had a long run but in 2017 after upgrading the version of ruby it stopped working properly.
Finally got around to fixing it, by upgrading to Publify, the successor to Typo. Remarkably easy just to set it up and them migrate over the data to the new database schema.
One thing I have noticed now that it is running under Rails 5.2.x is that it is much slower to restart and to serve new content than the original version that ran under Rails 2.3.x. Yes, Publify has a lot more features, but since I do not support comments/trackback/ping/twitter etc. on this blog, most of the extra stuff is not used, so what I really notice is that it is much, much slower. Could also be that I have been working with Elixir/Phoenix recently and have got used to the speed of that for development and page rendering, so moving back to Rails just feels slow now.
We are social animals, and we are wired to want to connect, want approval, want to share, and want to organize on the platform where everyone else is, and this, for now, is in Facebook’s advantage. Additionally, it’s hard to say that Facebook is all bad: it does connect people, it has helped organize meetups and events, and it does make the world more interconnected.
But, as Facebook’s users, we and our data are its product. And, as we understand more about how this data is being used, we can still play on Facebook’s playground, by its rules, but be a little smarter about it.
One amusing part of this article is that it is hosted on github, another social sharing platform. It is as if even tech people find it too much trouble to host their own data.
Primary keys are sorted to the top of the table symbols
Lines are thicker on hover to make it easier to select the relevant symbol
Query does not filter out empty tables.
This completes the set of databases that I have made this work for, might include DB2 at some point in the future if I ever work on an IBM system.
For this interactive version, hovering over the lines makes them larger so that you can click to highlight the line. This makes it easy to plan out a query by following the links between the relevant tables, regardless of where they are on the screen. A good example of this would be tracing out which language DVDs are rented out in a specified city? This needs seven tables and six relationships to determine this, and it is much easier to have the path highlighted while writing the query than having to remember the path as you write the query.
The experimental section of the paper is worth a read, and again, you can tell that Matzger’s group has good technique because everyone made it intact to the writing of the manuscript. There are pictures of the crystals themselves, which are very nice, until you realize that they’re plotting to blow you into the ceiling crawl space at the first opportunity. It says that “no unplanned detonations were encountered” during the work, which is a nice distinction.
An intriguing presentation on the effects on sea level rise from ice sheet melting, primarily due to the gravitational pull of the large mass of the existing ice sheets
Spoiler Alert! Next to the ice sheets the sea level can actually fall as a result of the ice melting due to the loss of the gravitational pull from the mass of the ice sheet. It will fall even further over geological times due to the rebound of the crust when the weight of the ice is removed. Canada is rebounding approx. 1mm/yr in response to the removal of the ice sheets from the last ice age.
In every iteration, have a few bugs that do not get fixed. After five or six iterations you can build up a reasonable size bug backlog without even trying, and the best bit is that you can hide them in the previous iterations so nobody important sees them.
Obvious fixes:
If there is anything left over in the current iteration, move it into the next and increase the priority of that item.
Review all items that overflow into the next iteration to make sure that the team understands what is needed.
Publish the failure up the management chain if a defect survives to iterations.
Only problem I’ve identified is that the databases that most need a generated ERD often are lacking in foreign keys that this query uses to identify the relationships…
Recently as part of an archaeology task of understanding how some SQL queries were working, I needed to draw an ERD to help with my understanding of the database. After contemplating drawing the diagram by hand for a few seconds, I decided to leverage GraphViz and just draw a diagram of all of the foreign key relationships between the tables.
Since it was an Oracle database, the queries to read the relationships were not that complex ErdCrearion-specific.sql is designed to run in SQLDeveloper and prompt for the :OWNER tablespace name to pick the tables from, and limit the selection to the names mentioned in the tablelist CTE (unfortunately duplicated as I have not rewritten this to make it simpler).
gives us a nice image of the relationship. The table name is prefixed with the schema to make sure that you can identify the table correctly for those cases where the same table exists in multiple schemas, and the columns involved in the relationships are highlighted in their own box. The non-relationship columns appear at the bottom of the symbol (column ordering is maintained and hidden columns are not shown).
For a more interactive experience run the SVG file through this converter, svgconverter.rb which converts the SVG file to a HTML file with some D3JS JavaScript that highlights relationships and tables as you click on them - I found that this made it easier to trace through a model when there are 80+ tables.
The resulting file when uploaded to a webserver that has d3.js in the right place is interactive - see scottsimple.html unlike the image above it can be clicked on to highlight the symbols or relationships - only the outer line of the table is clickable - the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Delving into the archives, Leslie Lamport wrote about the Future of Computing back in 2003. There are still too many programs that are not understood fully by their developers or maintainers.
Somehow or other the Firefox community has convinced itself that scanning add-ons for vulnerabilities and malware is a good idea. Luckily Dan Stillman the developer of Zotero called them out on it pointing out that it is just Security Theater.
Firefox has always had lots of really large extensions, but by deciding that they must be signed and reviewed, the Firefox community has just committed itself to a LOT of extra work reviewing the extensions. Hence the dumb idea of scanning to see if there is anything malicious in it. Now that is an arms race that is going to be lost. The guys in the AdBlock game know that, a continual game of whack a mole. Actively developed extensions like Zotero really lose out because a manual review of a large codebase takes a long time, and scanning is insufficient (as the above link describes, it is easy to create an add-on that passes scanning and does nasty things).
Sorry to break it to them, but this has been a topic of conversation long before I wrote the book Software Craftsmanship, which was published nearly 15 years ago.
QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.
I sure wish more programmers would focus a lot of attention on testing their own code before passing it on to QA/Test. That way the QA/Test team can focus on finding the requirements and interaction defects, rather than the simple coding mistakes that are often the bane of their existence
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.
It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.
There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.
YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.
I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.
Kevlin Henney - of Curly Bracket Languages fame has a good video of his presentation at a recent NDC conference Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers. As usual a very entertaining talk, but Kevlin is also spot on in identifying ways in which we are lead to make incorrect decisions about the code we are writing.
In it he references a paper from Rob Pike Notes on Programming in C. Although Rob Pike wrote that paper back in 1989 it is still relevant, as can be seen by his words about variable names:
Length is not a virtue in a name; clarity of expression is.
The one skill that separates bad programmers from good programmers is attention to detail. In fact, it’s what separates the good from the bad in any profession. Without paying attention to the tiniest details of your work, you will miss key elements of what you create. In programming, this is how you end up with bugs and difficult-to-use systems.
