techno.blog("Dion")

The Spring team keeps churning out the code. Spring 1.1 final release has been announced.

Now 1.1 is out of the way, it will be fun to see what comes into 1.2. I, for one, am hoping to see some of the Groovy integration code ;)

I wonder what is on the roadmap….

I heard a most bizarre story last night when out with some friends. It is so bizarre that for a sick reason, I thought I would share it with you all :)

A couple friend used to have ferrets as pets. The word “ferret” is comedic itself, let alone the strange looking animal. I am sure already the fact that this couple were in charge of ferrets says something about them.

Well, their last ferret had the misfortune to get cancer (which I hear is common for a ferret). This ferret fell out of where it was sleeping, and hit its back on a podium that it played on.

This caused a paralysis from the mid point of the creature down to its back legs. All poor Mr. Ferret could do was crawl, dragging itself around with its front paws. There was also a bad side effect. The bladder and intestines are in that lower half which wasn’t working at all. This is where the title of this entry comes into play: Juicing the Ferret.

Juicin’ is the phrase that our friends used to try to bring humour into a painful, and gross situation. They had to find the ferrets bladder and push out the urine. And, of course, it got worse. I don’t need to spell that out. Oh, what we do for our pets!

So now, if I am having a bad day I can think back, and be happy that I don’t have to juice anything, or anyone.

Dion

ps. The ferret got better again, and was pulling through the cancer, until “an accident in the home” made it all for nought :/

I had to watch the Bush speech tonight. I knew I would cringe, but you have to watch what everyone is saying.

It is amazing how little content we get on policies. Anyone can come out and say “I WILL GET MORE JOBS IN MY NEXT TERM”. What about this term? What have you done in your four years? Nothing good.

It is painful to hear him talk about items such as education and claim good things. “No Child Left Behind” is a fantastic slogan, but it has been a nightmare. It is a mandated program with NO funding. It is crippling schools. Just testing kids isn’t going to do jack.

What was most disgusting was hearing people cheer after Bush talked about detaining and killing people. These large speeches look and sound like Hitlers. Really scary stuff.

The sad part is that some people eat this stuff up. I hope there is enough time for real debates, and for us to get into real policy issues. When it gets to the meat, the president has no legs to stand out.

Let’s get him out. I can’t take four more years. I will have to move to Canada aye?

This week, The Middleware Company has announced the TORPEDO O-R Benchmarking Initiative.

The “initiative” is a spec, and a reference implementation. It currently allows you to run a client against an EJB container, which uses different persistence tools on the back-end: Kodo JDO, Hibernate, WLS CMP, and TOPLink.

Benchmarks are always hard, nay impossible. TORPEDO is actually quite different. It doesn’t try to measure performance based on the time that it takes to run a number of transactions. In fact, TORPEDO is designed in a way which means that you can grab it and run it on your laptop, and the results will be the same. The reason is, that the only metric CURRENTLY, is the SQL which comes out at the other end.

The assumption is that if the OR tool generates hundreds of SQL queries vs. ONE, then it isn’t as efficient as it could be. This is an interesting approach. It isn’t full proof, and more metrics will be added in the future I am sure. Some people want to measure the time that it takes to work out the queries, time more of the caching aspects, measure how many bytes are moving around etc. These are all good ideas, and TORPEDO has the ability to grow in the future to cover many different metrics, and together they will paint a great picture.

What would you like to see measured?

I have recently been in a few conversations regarding Transparent Persistence.

Is it possible to have 100% transparent persistence?

Not within Java. There is an impedence mismatch between objects and relational. You don’t “delete” an object in Java. You let it go out of scope, or you set it to null, or something else. What would it mean to delete the object?

How would you query for objects? We need some kind of API/QL to do this

Oh man, so we DON’T have transparent persistence. Woe is me. We are doomed

It isn’t bad that we don’t have fully transparent persistence. I think it is actually a GOOD thing. As soon as you go into the way of data and persistence the rules change, and you may want to do things differently. However, for many of the things that you do, you want to basically be working with objects and have persistence taken care of for you. What we DON’T want to do, is the manual mapping between objects and JDBC/SQL. Or manually working with connections, and statements, and all that garbage :)

So. With JDO (and Hibernate and Cayenne and …) we have a good level of transparency, but we are allowed to get in there when we need too.

However, maybe we are doing OR mapping all wrong

(NOTE: Google. How about hiring Brian and funding him to do this work?)

My wife wants to have a daughter. I would love a son.

However it has been proclaimed that you can predict the sex of your child based on computer usage:

Men who use Apple iBooks/Powerbooks with wireless cards have a very high probability [>85%] of having female offspring that is far greater than the statistical average.

I am trying to do the math based on the fact that I only use Perl a little now, and use both PC and Mac.

(Really, we would be happy with anything)