Doing what I do best · 2008-08-19 11:36
I got myself into a dilly of a pickle last week (read: fucked up big time and made a complete knob out of myself in front of cute girls).
Here's my confession: I'd just purchased a brand new Alpinestars leather jacket and gloves. Purr. I went to grab my bike from the distant parking lot (which is another story), ostensibly to make sure nobody nicked it after the sun went down. Really I just wanted to wear my new gear and ride. A couple of loud mouthed chicks were close by, yapping away on their phones. "I'll give em an earful" I thought, hitting the ignition and warming my beast up a bit. I had just installed a jet kit, and she was sounding much happier and louder.
Jumped on, took off, *bang* I go down on one side.
Shocked, I get up and just stare at my bike, unable to comprehend what had just happened. It was so fast, I was unable to process what had just occurred, never mind why it had happened.
Another rider came over while I was standing there gawking and picked my bike up for me.
I'd forgotten to take off the disc lock and just took off.
A few seconds of carelessness, and my weekend plans were ruined; my pride splattered onto the cold bitumen like oil leaking from a battered old Holden. My wallet took a severe beating. We all managed to survive, however scarred!
I should get my bike back this Friday, after they replace the bent disc and brake caliper, it should come in at around an even $1000. Spew.
Anyway.
Finally, I have some breathing space at work after finalising a SOAP interface for the document management system I'm writing at work. Basically, we wanted to prevent any users (and by users I mean other software) from having to do their own SQL queries, as it means more strong ties in with the system.
The whole idea of using SOAP (SOA if you like wanky sounding buzzwords) is that, in theory, one can move from using one system to another transparently. Even if it's one that I wrote :-) It's just another layer of abstraction.
I toyed with the idea of writing or using an expression language, but we might as well ask the user to supply their own SQL. In the end, I opted for 2 different interfaces: one allowing simple inner joins to be specified by having the user specify which field to match what value on, and what value(s) they want returned.
The other I used a similar interface to the old ioctl system calls - i.e. send a magic number (the operation) along with a blob of data (arguments to said operation - an array of Strings, in this case) and return a blob of data (in this case, a multi-dimensional array of Strings).
Pretty high level stuff - not much oxygen available when one's working at that altitude. If I had stayed up there any longer I might never have come back down to earth! I do like Java for one thing though: it's really easy to make high level design changes, and have the result quickly. It's good like that. Being a relatively simple language, there are plenty of refactoring tools out there, but even without them it's easy enough to make sweeping changes.
Time for me to STFU and GBTW
fuck. just read about the bike getting itself tweaked real bad. no bueno, man. at least you didn’t get yourself wrecked in the process…
— factory_peasant 2008-08-20 13:11 #
You should’ve commando rolled out of the stack, fixed your hair (using the comb you keep in the inside pocket of the Kill Bill-esque leather bike jacket), looked at the chicks and said, with rock star attitude and all earnestness … ”’ey” ! ...
They’d be putty in your hands I tells ya! lol
— shelluva 2008-08-21 05:03 #
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