|
The Supreme Administrative Court has ruled that Lord Mayor Jussi Pajunen was disqualified to decide the fate of the historic Helsinki-Malmi airport . Helsingin Sanomat reports : Pajunen participated in the preparation of Helsinki’s general land use plan 2002 in the Helsinki city council. At the same time he was also the president of the Malmin Nova company. The company had business in the Malmi shopping center. In addition the comp..
|
|
Honking Cars in Egypt, especially Cairo honk all the time. Day and night. If we woke up at 4 am in the hotel room, there would be cars honking outside. The honk to wake up pedestrians or other cars, taxis honk to attract the attention of potential customers, and often, it seems like they honk just for the fun of it. Security There’s a ton of policemen in Cairo, easily recognizable by their white uniforms.
|
|
After a rather unsuccessful day, we decided to have a more aggressive program the last day in Cairo. We started out early with a subway trip to Coptic Cairo. It seems that very few tourists are using the subways, which is a pity because it is a pretty good system. If they only could have any information in English. We had to trust the ticket guy who said it was LE 2 for both of us.
|
|
We had a late start on Wednesday. We are going to take the train to Alexandria, and we want to make sure that we get the tickets, so we start with a trip to Ramsees railway station. I had expected the trains (which seem nice from the guidebook) to be much used by tourists, but as it turned out, all the information was in Arabic, with the platform numbers, and the word “platform” as the only thing in English.
|
|
In Cairo, we have noticed a recurring theme. Many places that are visited a lot by westerners are sectioned off from the rest of the city. When Egypt was a British colony, the colonialism was expressed by importing British culture into Egypt. With modern colonialism, a section of the western world is placed wholesale as a small colony inside the city. After a rather tiresome day, we didn’t feel like we had the energy to go egyptian style ag..
|
|
Letters from Cairo III: Abou el-Sid, traffic and ancient artifacts
-
jhannes.github.io
-
19 years ago
-
eng
Abou el-Sid is located in Zamalek along the Sharia 26th of July. The doorman for the hotel hailed a cab for us (and got a bit of baksheesh for that, I don’t know if that was right), and negotiated an overpriced fee. :-) The traffic is seeming more and more what people warn that Cairo traffic will be like. Previously, we’ve felt that despite the messiness of the picture, things have been managable.
|
|
Today’s trip was like taken directly out of the lonely planet guidebook. Our guide Said Azawi (todo: double check last name) picked us up at the hotel at the appointed time. Driving over Gezira, past the Cairo Opera house and into Giza we arrived at the pyramids at the Giza Plateau early. We were a bit suspicious about the whole deal, but the guide recommended we get horses or camels to take us across the plateau.
|
|
The “kobyuutr” on which I am writing this has an arab/english keyboard, so I will write in english) We arrived late at night at Cairo international airport, and got a first impression of Egyptian bureaucracy that has remained. We ended up standing in lines for a long time, and when we finally were through, it was 2 am, and we did not feel like dealing with Cairo’s infamous taxis. So we took a “limosin service” to the hotel.
|
|
I am happy to see others express positive opinions about universal DAO interfaces in Java. Per Mellqvist writes in developerWorks: “Don’t Repeat the DAO” about creating a GenericDao interface: public interface GenericDao
|
|
Due to popular demand, I will post a very short version of my Lazy Loading article: Why? Because this is bad: Category category = dao.get(1); Category parent = dao.get(category.parentId); int sumChildValue = 0; for (Long childId : parent.subcategoryIds) { sumChildValue += dao.get(childId).getValue(); } System.out.println(sumChildValue); This is good: Category category = dao.get(1); int sumChildValue = 0; for (Category sibling : category.get..
|
|
Status: This article is currently pretty dry. I’d like feedback on how to make it more eloquent. In my previous blog post, I promised to write more about using databases as the main integration strategy. In the current post, I plan to cover maybe the most important question: “Why?” Imagine an application where every time it wants to communicate with another system, it reads or writes to the database. For now, let’s ignore how this would wor..
|
The Intermedium of Tissue A variable represents a set of words in a particular order. For example, x might equal the word-set {the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog}. Note that the bracket represents the boundary of the word-set and is not included in the set itself. A piece of writing, whether it […]
|
|
Before Web Services, there was CORBA. Before CORBA, there was DCOM. Before DCOM, there was RPC. Before RPC, there was BSD sockets. Before sockets, there were databases. And as it was in the beginning, so shall it too be in the end. The only systematically successful strategy in the history of computing is databases. I have discovered more and more lately that integration using a database is well-defined (DDLs - a WSDL that works!
|
|
I really wish you’d stop using that word - I don’t think it means what you think it means.” (The Princess Bride - of course) When my wife asked “are you a feminist,” I realized I don’t like words very much. To some people, “feminism” means women who dress like men, think pornography is destroying society and that all men are inherently evil. You know the type I’m talking about. To many others, including my wife, a “feminism” is “the radical..
|
|
La verdad es que ni yo mismo lo sé. Si por lógica fuera, ya haría un tiempo que estaría trabajando con otra distribución más simple y en la que la configuración de los dispositivos no ocupase varios días, realizando cientos de búsquedas por Internet y leyendo varios foros. Pero la realidad es que aquí sigo, peleando con el apt-get y actualizando contra la versión unstable de esta distribución. Y tampoco será por falta de alt..
|
|
Here are some of my favorite words. Signs of danger ‘Just’: bad word, as in “can’t we just develop the greatest application ever”, “can’t we just replace the database with JavaSpaces”, “can’t we just expose the functionality to the world as a web service”. ‘Should’: bad word, as in “it _should_n’t take more than a few days to do that, should it,” “integrating two systems should be easy.” Listen for use of this word from people who … should ..
|
|
I’ve again gotten quite backlogged with publishing photos from various adventures. Today I fortunately had time to push tree sets on Flickr : Midgard developer meeting in Komorniki, Poland GUADEC 2006 in Vilanova i Geltru, Catalonia Death Monkey 2006 rally from Helsinki to Gibraltar Enjoy!
|
|
Update: Rewrote several sections “Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it.” - Alan Perlis This article contains some things I have learned that has made me into a better developer than I was before I learned them. There are nine tips. These are not necessarily the only, or the best things I have learned, but I like the number nine. Becoming a better developer is a complex path.
|
|
Updated for republication in Mr Bool In my experience, the most serious bugs in programs in production are in error handling routines. Inventive programmers often try fancy things when dealing with errors, but error situations are often omitted during testing. This article examines the fundamental questions of exceptions: What causes exceptions, and what can be done with them? Bad User, Bad Server, or Bad Programmer Practices of an Agile De..
|
|
What happens when a customer asks for a simple new bit of functionality? Do you have to execute changes on four different systems, test each in isolation and in combination, involve a separate testing, infrastructure and operations team? If so, your architecture is probably not service oriented. In this post, I will examine the real meaning of coupling, and how it relates to SOA. I will, like others taking about SOA, try to define what I me..
|
|
After I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress as my blogging software, the comment spam problem has returned from the grave. So I’ve looked for good solutions for WordPress: I ended on a verbal CAPTCHA with a math question (which may also keep stupid commenters out - not that I have any of those, of course). I am considering some of the “fight-back” solutions out there too: Maybe returning a really big response really slowly when spam is ..
|
|
What is the next letter in this sequence: A E I. And this sequence: A B G D? How about this one: B C D G J? A boy and his mother are in a horrible car accident. They are rushed to the hospital, but on the way, the mother dies. When they arrive at the hospital, the nurse exclaims: “But that is my son!”. How can that be? You’re in the basement of a house.
|
|
My article series on Lazy Loading will be published on java.net tomorrow. In relationship to the publication, I am taking down the original articles from my blog. Please go to Java.net for to read about lazy loading. Update: The article was just posted last Tuesday. I have updated the links in this post.
|
|
Myopia: the inability to see distant objects as clearly as near objects. PreferredConsumer.com What makes a good statement? In my experience, a good statement is one that people will disagree with frequently. One of the internal quality auditors at my company has an excellent plaque in her office: “If you and I agreed all the time, one of us would be superfluous”. So, in the spirit of disharmony: Agile development is all about being myopic,..
|
|
We just got back from vacation this week! No computers, no telephones, no IM, no text messages, no stress (just the occasional deer, moose or bear). Several years ago, I didn’t take any vacation at all during the year and promptly vowed never to do that again. In just one week of vacation, you can reduce all of the stress that you worked so hard to build up all year long. Remember that Canadian companies are famous worldwide for overworki..
|
|
We just got back from vacation this week! No computers, no telephones, no IM, no text messages, no stress (just the occasional deer, moose or bear). Several years ago, I didn’t take any vacation at all during the year and promptly vowed never to do that again. In just one week of vacation, you can reduce all of the stress that you worked so hard to build up all year long. Remember that Canadian companies are famous worldwide for overworki..
|
|
When I see people after they have read about SOA or attended a conference with SOA, there are a few ideas that seem to pop up repeatedly. I have even been guilty of using these ideas myself. These ideas were proven to be bad before SOA came around, and (some) SOA evangelists seem to think that SOA solved these problems. It did not. It just refused to learn from history. Some of these ideas work under some circumstances, but recent SOA-itis ..
|
|
Barcelona I just returned from The ServerSide JavaSymposium Europe. Great conference, with interesting tracks and good opportunities to get to know people. The conference was in Barcelona, which was interesting, because hardly anyone (taxi drivers and waiters included) understand English here. It’s the first time where I’ve been a place where I am totally unable to communicate verbally with people around me. So it as a bit of an adventure. ..
|
|
Ésto me lo acabo de encontrar navegando por internet. La verdad es que es muy impresionante: Se trata de un sistema semejante a un escritorio físico, de los de verdad. Tendremos una especie de mesa con los documentos, los archivos sobre ella. Con el ratón podremos moverlos de un lado a otro de nuestra mesa virtual, y gracias a diversos gestos, podremos agruparlos, apilarlos, ordenarlos, moverlos, y multitud de opciones de la Vida Real,..
|
|
Roger Sessions has just published “A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures”. His main point is that large, centralized, big-bang enterprise architecture efforts fail. I could not agree more. Sessions gives some good arguments for why you would want to deliver incrementally. He calls this approach SOA. This is a fairly common way of defining SOA - basically SOA is another name for incremental deliveries. If this is SOA, I don’t hate SOA at..
|
|
Blessed synchronizity: From Jason Yip’s blog: Vendor’s Law: Organise people into roles corresponding to the tools that you want to sell to them. And today’s Dilbert:
|
|
In my previous post, I talked about how I feel SOA encourages rigid design. Of course, in some situations, you may not really have a choice. When creating Business-to-Business (B2B) integration, interfaces will naturally be much more rigid. There is no way around it, SOA or SOA-not. Ian Robinson recently published an article on Martin Fowler’s webpage titled Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern. The article gives some very..
|
|
On JavaZone 2005, I talked about “Why I hate SOA”. I found it hard then, and I’ve still found it hard for a while to express this sentiment concisely. I think I’ve finally got it! One of the most common inefficiencies I discover in organizations is poorly designed boundaries. I find that people suffer when a boundary is too ridig, not when it is too loosely defined. Contractual interfaces create a “mine versus yours” mentality, where every ..
|
|
Suomenlinna island fortress Kerttu had her entry exams to the Biological faculty of University of Helsinki yesterday, and therefore she is now free to enjoy the summer. To mark that, we decided to go flying a bit around Espoo and Porvoo. The runway 27 was in use so we took the plane out through Nokka and returned later through Deger. The wind was a bit bumpy, but otherwise it was nice to fly again after the long winter bre..
|
|
Desde hace cosa de unas semanas, el mundo Java está cambiando notablemente. Por un lado, Sun publicó Java EE 5.0, junto con Sun Application Server 9.0, primera versión estable del proyecto Glassfish, que pretende implementar un Application Server libre para la especificación de JEE 5. En esta nueva versión se ha incluido, a parte de un cambio de la nomeclatura para las versiones, la especificación de EJB 3.0, Java Persistence API, una mejor....
|