bits and bytes

I had built a small application using Postgresql as my database. I used the phpgpadmin to create my database schema (if I remember correctly). When I tried to issue SQL statement I always received errors that the tables didn’t exist, I figured out that if I used “TABLE”, then it worked.

Yesterday evening I had enough. I started googling why this was happening. After some time I found the answer and doing some testcases, it seems that this behaviour was pretty logical.

In short if you use Postgresql


create table TeSt(iD varchar(200));


Is not the same as

create table "TeSt"("iD" varchar(200));


If you do the first you can actually perform select id from test (or select Id from tEsT (reverse capitals). I get the feeling everything is converted to lowercase!

But if you issued the second statement the former selects won’t work. You really have to make it pinpoint accurate. So any people out there giving Postgresql a go. Take care how you generate your tables!!

The fix I did was pretty straightforward. Export my database to a sql file (using phppgadmin)(Also export data!). Then open with your favorite editor and replace all ” with nothing, save. Drop all your tables (but be sure you exported also the data ). After you schema is empty, perform the SQL and you should be up and running without the case sensitive stuff.

NOTE
I do agree that TeSt is not the same as test. I’m pro linux filesystem file conventions, but for sql it really is a pain in the ass when you use generator tools and they fuck up.

These days everybody in the web world is pushing RIA’s. We have the javascript frameworks like Scriptacilous,Dojo,GWT,… , we also have the browser plugin options like Silverlight,Flex,JavaFX. Probably I’m forgetting some here, but these are the ones I’m following.

As I worked with most of them (some more then others) my preference more and more leans to Flex for developing Web applications.

Why??

Well there are several reasons but probably one of the biggest reasons is the fact that Adobe has been releasing a lot of there core frameworks opensource. The Flex core is opensource, they recently released BlazeDS a Java framework for communicating in their own binary format with a Flash application.
For now the development platform (Flex Builder) still has to be bought, but if you want you can just use an Ant script to compile it.

Another big reason is the fact that Flash runs on Windows,Mac and Linux. Even the tool Flex Builder runs on those 3 OS’.

The fact that Flex can display a couple of thousand records in a Datagrid without crashing my browser is also nice. Try doing that with javascript (although I’ve seen a demo of a Dojo Datagrid displaying 100.000 records) but in most frameworks it just hangs your browser.

JavaFX is still in a early stage and IMHO is too little to late!

Microsoft offcourse is pushing their new Silverlight. I’ve seen some demo’s went to some workshops. And I have to admit it’s not bad but if you compare it to Flex, well hmm I’m not sure but they sure seem to be far behind. I just tried the tool Deep zoom (this was shown on mix 2008 as showcase for Silverlight 2) and I’m not really impressed. Compare it to this tool that was shown on Javapolis 2007 and you’ll see where I’m heading
On the other side Microsoft has the benefit that a Silverlight application can be written in the same language from Gui to backend. But I’m not sure if that’s really such a major advantage. If I look at friends and collegeaus they all seem to be doing some animation stuff with Flash for their customers. And most of them do it in Macromedia Flash MX. They also write code in there, the language is called ActionScript and is a real object oriented language. But these guys don’t know to much about building a large scale application. They do know however to write a nice Gui interface. So they can write components that can be used in Flex. So there Adobe also has a big advantage as they pretty much own the Graphics industry

One thing that most peeple however seem to overlook is the fact that with all these RIA applications the search engines will index much less of your page. If you for example have product catalog made with Flex,Silverlight or with one of the Javascript toolkits I’m not sure that they will be indexed by the spiders. But then again you can workaround this and always generate a Sitemap of your product catalog in plain Html. Hmm I wonder how many companies do that and how much money has been lost by companies who didn’t show up on top in a search engine because of this.
Another thing is that integration using links and parameters also gets a lot more complicated!

As I’m working with Flex at the moment you’ll here some more in the future.

PS I hope the upgrade of wordpress worked. Now I’m on 2.3.3 (currently latest stable release) If more SPAM should appear please notify me ASAP!!

My mythtv box died, or better said, it can’t detect my hauppage card anymore :(. I moved it to a new PCI slot but lspci didn’t show anything. My best bet it’s dead.

I’ve been looking around for a hauppage 500 card (the one with the dual tunner). But it seems nobody sells them anymore? Does somebody know a dealer who still sells them, or does hauppauge have a new version out with dual tuner?
I saw they now have some digital cards as well. Maybe interesting to use this in combination with TV vlaanderen ?? Anybody got experience with this ?

Lately a lot of my friends (who are not It people) send emails to our group of friends. Because they all use msn and hotmail, they sent it to my hotmail account. Because I have hotmail,gmail,jabber,… accounts I use Pidgin (formerly gaim) to do my chatting. This off course works perfectly. But I can’t see how many messages are in my email inbox (hmm, note feature to check if available). So today I quickly wanted to forward my hotmail mails to my own domain. Well really, you should try doing that … Really try it, I mean it!

In your webmail (hotmail live, piece of crap) you have options -> more options. There is an option forward to other email. If you read the comment, forward your email to other hotmail,msn or custom domains. So I inserted my own email address. Receiving the error that it wasn’t valid. So after reading the help, it stated that custom domains are not microsoft domains managed by microsoft (prolly something like you can do with google domain apps).

Hmm, no go. Then I started downloading some opensource tools (thunderbird extension,gotmail script,…) all couldn’t get the mail. Then I even tried getting it using gmail, still no go.

So in the end I have to say, what a piece of crap product is this. Compare this to google, google offers you pop3 imap to gmail, forwarding of emails even sms notification I believe (I only use this for my calendar and its free!!!! ) The webmail client of gmail is much better than the dog slow windows application. So tell me, if someone is asking you to make a new email address for him. Please consider before you lock yourself in like I did many many years ago. If only I had known

Any suggestions as how I can fix this ??? (And no I don’t want to delete my hotmail address, a lot of my friends have pictures from their events on it and prolly I can’t log in anymore) I’m even considering setting up a vmware with outlook express with a rule to forward to my imap box :s but thats really a big stupid work around imho. So … ??

Update
Thnx sch3lp (again)
But I found a feature in pidgin that displays how many messages are in my inbox. It works for Gmail and hotmail, you just got to love those developers

When I was checking my rss feeds, I came across the following post. This is really amazing. I’ve seen some cool things that people did with the Nintendo wii, but this beats everything. Everyone who is a bit of a technology freak should really see this.

Now I’m really sure I’m gonna buy a Nintendo wii. Maybe schools should investigate this as well as it probably is much cheaper than those smart boards.

Update
Thnx sch3lp
seems my link is timing he supplied me with the youtube vide over here

Like I posted a couple of weeks ago, I bought a Windows Vista laptop. The more I use it, the more I’m convinced it ain’t that great. Even friends of mine who are microsoft consultants don’t like it. So the things you read about it are really true

I have a customer who has a couple of Macs inhouse and they asked me to do something on it. I had never used it before and the first experience was kinda weird. Because you are used to using computers, you can everything rather quickly. But your feel stupid and slow. If somebody would ask me a support question I couldn’t answer it. So I bought myself a MacBook. The smallest cheapest version that’s available. And I have to say it’s actually really nice. It actually feals familiar to my Gnome desktop even thought it is a bit different.

The thing I like the most is the fact that underneath this system, there’s a BSD kernel running. And offcourse the hardware … well what can you say about it. I wish they would produce Linux prebuilt laptops like that. I would buy one immediately. (Although I miss my firefox spelling checker (default on my Ubuntu system) )

I found this entry in my rss aggregator. Anybody who has heared about the patent stuff should have read this imho.

I’m really curious as how this Armageddon will end. I get the feeling this will either just go away or it will become a battle between 1 bee and millions of ants.

A while ago a made a post on web standards saving money (ie for google). Today I was listening to another podcast, they had an interview with Chris Dibona He works over at google. He was talking about how google has its own team of kernel hackers. He explained how some small improvements in the linux kernel of this team could save google millions of dollars.
My first reaction was offcourse, your site will run faster you need a couple of computers less and that’s where your savings come from. Well he explained it somewhat different. Let’s say you have 100.000 computers (prolly google has much much more), your computers will stay a little bit cooler maybe even consume less power. So your airco could run a little bit slower. So a code optimization could result in a cut back in power usage. You would maybe even save some trees!

It shows how in each and every sector of the it you have to worry about different things. I have to admit, when I’m doing java development and I’m not sure if I should choose an int or a long, I’ll be choosing a long because memory is no problem for us and it’s only running on 2 or 3 severs. These guys will check,recheck and then check again if they instead of the int maybe even could use a smaller datatype.

My girlfriend is still attending college, she is studying to become a teacher in sports and informatics. She was asked to do a presentation at here school today. As we at home mostly use opensource she is familiar with the linux phenomenon. She is actually quit pleased with the results, ie she fully agrees that firefox is a better browser than internet exploder.

Yesterday she was poking my brain about opensource so she could do the presentation. She took our camcorder and started with recording our mythtv box. She really loves this piece of softwer, I don’t think she wants a normal vcr ever again :).
She also took my copy of an elephants dream the first opensource movie. She also recorded the fancy xgl stuff,just for letting her fellow students see that linux in some fields even surpassed windows already. (in my eyes they already did in almost every field )

So I wanted to give here a big kiss and hug for helping me spreading the word of opensource software. I hope the presentation goes well for here. Schools and computers mostly don’t go together that well, I hope the dvd and avi file work on the crappy material they have over there.

Well yesterday I told someone, I mostly use the eat your own dogfood rule. Well for most parts I really do that, but today I had to use our webinterface for sending mails. Well we are using roundcube and because I mostly use rich client appz, evolution and thunderbird I haven’t used roundcube that much. Well as I already mentioned today I had to and boy do I hate it now. At first it seems really nice and smooth, you have drag and drop, everything is ajax (buzzword alert!!) nice nice nice. I wrote a mail +60 lines, I hit the send button and I got the alert your session has timed out!!!! Okay hit the back button nothing, again back, still nothing. After hitting that back button like a maniak I realized I had to rewrite my email and believe me that sucks!!! I pulled up my scite editor wrote it in there and copy pasted it into roundcube.

So task for this evening, setup squirrel and imp mail. Maybe even try the new jboss callobaration stuff as the vidcast seemed nice. To bad you have to have the new flash 9 beta installed.

So all suggestions for other good webmail clients are welcome!!