I was still recovering from being sick when flu shots came round the first time where I work. Fortunately, they came around a second time. I got the shot today. I hear that the earlier shots were of the wrong strand anyway for the flu this year. Who knows. What I do know is that I didn’t get sick all year until flue season came round again a few months ago.
Archive for the ‘Employment’ Category
Got me the Flu Shot
Monday, December 18th, 2006Master Database Restoration
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006I’ve been learning quite a bit lately about restoring databases from a complete database failure. Although rite now, I’m am working with a test to verify we can restore from one. I’m not involved in all the steps such as tape restoration, but I am involved in one of the most critical parts. The restoration of the Master database.
It turns out that you can’t just restore a master database in SQL Servers normal operation mode (multi-user). I had to start the service in single-user mode from the command line. From there on out, you can go into enterprise manager and restore the master database.
Why is the master database so important that it needs single-user mode? Because it contains all the data that the server itself uses for its own operation. Everything from maintenance plans, other databases in the ssystem, user accounts, etcetera.
Just make sure if you restore a master database, that the version of SQL server is the same that it was backed up from. This includes having the same service pack installed as well. SQL Server SP3 master database can not be restored on SQL Server SP4.
Temporary Blindspots
Friday, August 4th, 2006In the middle of my working day, I ran into a problem. I was sort of going blind. Not completely. I could see parts, but it was like a ton of blind spots in my eye that I kept trying to, but just couldn’t see around. It was horrible. It wasn’t just looking at my computer screen, but just everything around me. I remember just looking at the screen and all of this white space on it. My eyes started to hurt and I looked up.
One thing that I did earlier in the weeky was change the resolution of my monitor to be much higher. Lucky for me, I made all my system fonts bigger too. I was able to make out enough parts to make the resolution smaller. I also turned the brightness down to the lowest setting and turned the contrast down a bit as well. Although it was easier on my eyes, I was still having this problem.
So many thoughts went rushing through my head. Maybe I should just go home. How the heck could I drive home? Would anyone be able to pick me up? What if this is perminent? What if this is a look into the near future? How am I going to be able to ever work on a computer again? Is it something I ate? Is it because I’m not eating enough? Is it from stress? Is it my medication? Is it going to get worse?
So many questions arrise with life changing events like these. Lots of coincidences and paranoia just come to light. I remember a co-worker commenting about how an LCD screen would be better on the eyes then the monitor I have. I thought about my posture, and perhaps a protective screen on the monitor.
The good news is that it gradually passed over 15 minutes. It just shocks the heck out of you. I left my monitor settings dark and in a low resolution for the remainder of the day.
Hero me three
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Sometimes, I surpass my own geneouse. Something got done today that was an amazing solution to a difficult problem regarding cyclic redundancy. The side effect of this solution has sereouse potential to solve some very aged and hard problems that have been left hidden away in a corner.
All of this has to do with the implementation of Http Modules within ASP.Net. With these special modules, you can catch the process of a web page before the web server processes it in its own normal way. The power of them is so strong once they are understood that you can make all kinds of tweaks that were never possible before.
So today, I solved an immediate problem, impressed the manager on how I solved it, and collaborated on how we could use the method to solve some past feature requests. When I left for home, I already had a working solution up and running on my local machine in the office. What a day.
Hero me not
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006I was doing my thing today, in the zone and programming with style. My co-worker says he’s gettng reports of people getting email. My heart just sank. I spent some time just trying to figure out who exactly got emailed. Over 300 people got the message. My manager was not too pleased when I told him the news.
By the end of the day, my manager was a little happy. I had completed some work for him that he seemed to be uncertain about in the morning. It’s like a television episode in a way. A problem in the beginning, catastrophie in the middle, and at the climax, the problem is figured out and quickly everything ends as it began.
I also found out that Macromedia offers a developer edition of ColdFusion 7 MX on there website. I feel like such a dunce. I went through all of this trouble to find a free server (BlueDragon), and here there was a developer version of the real thing. I also got a hold of a few ColdFusion samples (GuestBook, FileUpload, Portal) off of Planet Source Code and learned a few things.
Learning ColdFusion with BlueDragon
Saturday, May 13th, 2006I’ve been tasked to learn ColdFusion this weekend. If you see any web pages on the internet where the name ends with CFM, those are ColdFusion web pages. I don’t have any software, and a server wasn’t provided for me to work with. I was a bit confused on how I was supposed to learn the stuff. We have a new guy comming in on Tuesday and I need to know ColdFusion by then so I can help him get up to speed.
I did some searching on the internet. I found a product called BlueDragon that can run web pages with ColdFusion tags in them (ColdFusion Markup Language – CFML). It can run on its own on port 8080 by default, and you can also map it to Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS). The best part of the deal is that this server is free.
I found a few websites with ColdFusion tutorials. I also found that Macromedia has a website that I could use as a reference for everything CFML. I always looked down at ColdFusion as if it were almost a joke. When HomeSite started supporting ColdFusion tags, I was busy learning Active Server Pages (ASP). Thank goodness for that, as ASP has caught on greatly compared to ColdFusion.
It seems that ColdFusion has finally caught up with me. The good news is that I already know so many programming, scripting, and markup languages. This is making it easier to catch onto CFML.
Goslings and Road-Rage
Friday, May 5th, 2006Two geese had some goslings recently and were watching over them at the pond in front of where I work. The two geese took off with four of there goslings and left three behind since yesterday. The feathers of the remaining goslings are already starting to turn dark on there backs and they don’t seem to mind people walking up to them. I just found it a bit interesting to see what appeared to be yellow chicks with big black feet like ducks. Later in the day, someone else mentioned that the goslings were gone, but that four geese were around the pond now.
One of my coworkers sufferd some road rage. A woman speed past her and cut in front of her from the merge lane. Then slowed down and just laid on the horn. Then she stopped at the light (which was green), got out of her car and told my co-worker to roll down the window. The co-worker just drove around the womans car. So this woman chased followed her all the way in. The guy at the front desk was called to come meet her as she came in. This woman started yelling at him and a few other people around there. She started really getting into the face of this other person who was in a van asking her to calm down.
Well, that’s just wierd people for you. I hadn’t seen road-rage go that far before. That’s just harassment. My co-worker was concerned that the woman may even be stalking her until she left work for the day.
Goslings and Loose Change
Thursday, May 4th, 2006I went for a walk around the pond today at with a few coworkers during lunch. One invited me to come and see the new baby geese. We saw the father hissing a few feet from the mother with her six goslings. The father calmed down as we walked away.
Every summer we have about six to ten geese that come to the pond and hang out. There are only the two and there children, and a lonely duck that hang out there now. I’ve heard reports of people being chased by one of the geese, and now it is apparent why that was.
I also got some spare change fro a few countries. One of my coworkers knew that I liked foreign coins and handed me ten coins from different countries on Monday. They look pretty neat.
Visual Programming
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006So this past weekend I learned a thing or two about new technologies (ORM) for bridging the gap between programming data and database data. I figured out how to solve my problems I had yesterday with inheritance using subclasses within Hibernate.
Today, I spoke with my manager and we discussed that the ORM and MVC technologies that I was looking into was only a first generation approach. We went into a brief history of the second and third generation of this technology. The third generation tools that are available actually do most of the work for you. You visually setup your business objects, and the program creates/updates your database, sets up your data tier, and models your business objects for you. I was just a bit stunned.
My managers argument in support of this technology was that most of my time is spent going through the same process on the database and the business logic. Granted that I did make a ton of little utilities to help me out along the way, there are programs out there that walk through the whole process.
There were some tools that we talked about and I started looking into one called DeKlareit. It took a little getting used to, but by the end of the day, I got most of the main concepts of how it worked and the intelligence behind it. Each time I understood another feature, I was just impressed. Most of it is just visual. I don’t write much code at all except for a few formulas or rules.
It is amazing that my manager is suggesting these kind of tools. I feel like it is taking me out of the classical erra of programming, bypassing the industrial age, and going strait to the modern age (if I was comparing it to Civalization IV, of course). I can not say that I no longer need to worry about the database at all, but I feel that this is a huge step in increasing my productivity. The price of this tool can’t even compete with the number of hours I would be doing the same thing by hand.
Researching Patterns and Practices
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006Since Friday, I’ve been researching a bit here and there about Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) and Model-View-Controller (MVC) at work and at home. These are technologies that help with manageable programming.
ORM is used to help store objects within a relational database. A database stores data differently then an object. This technique is used to map data between objects and databases. A popular and open-source tool to assist in this mapping for programming in .Net is nHibernate. nHibernate is a port of Hibernate written in JAVA. I have figured out the basics of saving and retrieving objects to a relational database. Though I’m starting to have difficulty with polymorphism in inheritance. I’ll keep up the R&D until I get it rite. So far, the technologies involved are showing a lot of promise. On top of that, I have found many websites offering supporting documentation and techniques that apply to both platforms on JAVA and .Net.
Model-View-Controller (MVC) can work with or without ORM. ORM would only be used with the Model portion of MVC. MVC breaks your application (desktop or web applications) into three parts. Model represents your business elements, or data schemata. “View” represents the final web page, also known as your “presentation layer”. Last we have “Controller” wich is the business logic between your presentation and your data. Business logic can manipulate data, authorize that you do in fact have permission to access that data, and just about everything else. It can be thought of as the API undernieth the presentation itself. Some people claim that it is the glue between the data and the presentation.
I’ve worked with MVC often, but not to its full effect. The rules with MVC pretty much go something like this. If any one part of MVC changes (The model, view, or controller), then the other two parts should not break. That is the part where I am not successful. I usually develop 3 projects initially in my applications. The web or desktop application, a project for business logic, and another project for the data tier.
I believe most of my problems arrise from the stability of the model. As long as the model doesn’t change, the control and view should be able to change more easily without any impact. I’ve originally kept a virtual model in place and manually mapped it to an older model that was practically inherited from another project. This worked great in the first phase as there were very simple requirements and tight deadline.
In this second phase, requirements change every day and are still being gathered. After much research into ORM and MVC, I am wanting to just get a definition of the domain that I can rearchitect the model after. Currently, I am having to rearchitect the older model many times due to its current incompatabilities with the requirements. This still raises a problem though for future architecture. How can a database be architected properly to be able to grow not in data scalability, but in schemata scalability? I understand normalization as such, but the current model already has normalization and needs to be reworked often when changes to requirements occur.
