VALERIE: The lady in red

Took Valerie over to see Pants. She was wearing red and I am sure he wanted her. I don't know what got into him. It could have been the heady mix of reggae music and Fray Bentos or perhaps because he had been woodworking all afternoon. She is a hot chick-a-hoola tho, so you can't blame him.

UKULELE: Been out gigging

So I went to see the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain at the Barbican the other week. They were brilliant. A seven piece Ukulele band who do covers of things like J'taime, Teenage Kicks and Wuthering Heights. Highly reccomended.

To hear for your self have a listen to this Radio 4 report.

Four strings and the truth baby.

JAVASCRIPT: I'd really rather not if you don't mind.

Scripting languages are just dandy if you use them for what they were intended for; to do quick little simple things. For instance:

if(youHavn'tFilledTheFieldIn()) then print "yoo hoo look the field, I think you forgot something"

Occasionally you have to break this rule and find youself, as I have this week, writing lots of object oriented javascript. No type validation, weirdo objects and Monty Python's debugger. As Englebert Humperdink said "Please release me let me go".

To ease the pain I downloaded this Javascript Editor. This has made life considerably easier by at least letting me jump up and down functions, the full version does a lot more. The evaluation runs out in 29 days, if I am still doing a lot of javascript then I may well buy it. There again, if I am still doing javascript in 29 days I will be lying at the bottom of the river thames being eaten by fish.

FEBRUARY: You can shove it mate

February, what a pain in the arse. Cold, dark and everyone is coughing like sailors. If I had my way I would avoid winter all together. Infact I would like to be put in a box of straw with holes in just like the Blue Peter tortoise. They could get me out in March. Moan moan moan.

Test Driven Development

I am reading Test Driven Development by Kent Beck and I can honestly say I haven't a bloody clue what he is on about.

"Now that was honest Richard, thicky boy"

CAMPERVAN: Sit tight, take hold, thunder road!

So, as I promised, I have done gone and bought me a groovy Westfalia Campervan. It's a Club Joker with a 396 Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor. In the back there are shovels and rakes and implements of destruction.

Her name is Valerie or Val for short. Here she is:



Oh and this is what she would look like with a Starsky and Hutch stripe <coughs>:



Aint she purdy?

MONKEY PROGRAMMER BOY EPISODE 8: Sandra Bullocks

Authors Note: Please be aware this is NOT a cartoon. I actually DO work for the people in the Microsoft clip art collection.

DB2: Exam-a-Rama

I passed IBM DB2 UBD 8.1 Family Fundementals this morning. This makes me an IBM Certified Database Associate. From now on I will be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and hold my breath for ages.

How did I do this?
Well I read this book: DB2 Universal Data Base: V8.1 Certification Test 700 Exam CRAM and mucked about with a trial version of DB2 for a while. Easy.

What did I learn?
The exam is mainly DML commands with bits about the DB2 family of products, security and constraints. If you are up to speed with simple SQL then you should pass this exam fairly easily without much preparation. It was worth it tho, as it has filled in quite a few gaps on my general relational database knowledge and I am now familiar with the main DB2 tools: Command Centre, Control Centre etc.

Hey anything else we should know smartypants?
Well one thing I liked about the book was the example table they used:

EMPNO      NAME                 WORKDEPT
---------- -------------------- --------------------
001        jagger               A01
002        watts                A01
003        richards             B01
004        jones                C01
001        wyman                -

It's the Rolling Stones! This is much better than the sales values for the US states or lots of cobblers about foo() and bar().

He could of taken this a bit further of course, for instance create a table for the Albums:

CREATE TABLE albums ( name char(30) NOT NULL, year INTEGER NOT NULL,
Constraint NOCRAPALBUMS  check (year <= 1978))

Notice the constraint in the table definition? This is handy as if the table looks like this:

NAME                     YEAR       
------------------------ ----------
Beggars Banquet          1968
Let it Bleed             1969
Get Your Ya Yas Out      1970
Sticky Fingers           1971
Exile On Main Street     1972
Goats Head Soup          1973
It's Only Rock and Roll  1974
Black and Blue           1975
Love You Live            1976
Some Girls               1978

And you try and add

INSERT INTO Albums('Emotional Rescue' , 1980) 

you will get the error:

SQL0545N  The requested operation is not allowed because a row 
does not satisfy the check constraint "NOCRAPALBUMS"  
                                             ".
Explanation: 

Check constraint violations can occur on either INSERT or UPDATE 
operations.  The resulting row violated the check constraint 
definition on that table.  

The statement cannot be processed.  

and rightly so dontcha think ;-).

SPAM: SPAMTY SPAM

Occasionally a chap has a quick look at some of the Spam he receives. This is not a good idea as often the messages contain dangerous links to sordid pornography and spyware. Now and then though, as a father of three children under eight years old, one feels it necessary to check on the dangerous world that is only a click away <coughs>. In one of my recent forays, I happen to notice a set of almost identical messages that varied only slightly in their odd use of English; I thought I would share one with you:

I walked on twilight alley late at the night.
Ominous boors seized me.
They torn asunder my pants and bra.
I was pure before...

This made laugh out loud. I imagine there is some Serbo-Croat to English translation software out there some where.

Anyhow, I am sick of all this cheap tasteless stuff, I'm off for some classy birds with big bristols over at vowe.net ;-).

DB2: When Irish eyes are smiling

The man said:

With any standard SQL database, you insert a ' by doubling it, e.g. 'Here''s how you do it.'

This is very handy for our Irish friends like Mr O'Reily.

"We all knew this Richard, you lightweight"

Yeah Yeah ... go poke it smartypants

LOTUSSCRIPT: We're having a party! C'mon everybody!

DB2: Sequences

Unique numbers, love 'em hate 'em, just got a have 'em some time. I have been experimenting with DB2 over the last few weeks and it supports a construct that I was unaware of: sequences.

To create a sequence do this:

CREATE SEQUENCE DB2ADMIN.EREPORTNO START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1 NOMAXVALUE
NOCYCLE CACHE 24

To use the sequence do this:

INSERT INTO DB2ADMIN.EREPORTS(NAME, ADD1, SEQ) VALUES ("Cheesey","peas",NEXTVAL FOR DB2ADMIN.EREPORTNO);

This will stick the record in the table with the SEQ field equal to the next EREPORTNO value. Lovely.

Dosn't work in partitioned databases tho. No suprise there, same as all those unique value attempts we domino charlies made.

Beep Beep.

LOTUSFEAR: A report

One of the more unusual sessions at the 'fear was of course the showing of Hitchcock's lost masterpiece.

UKELELE: The Sound of the Underground

Yes I am offically cool. People may have chuckled when I took up the ukulele but boy are they going to have to eat their words, because I am part of the underground baby, oh yes. Think the Hacienda '87, Height Ashbury in '67, think living in a squat with Joe Stummer in 1976, that's right sonny, ukuleles are cool; now and happening; what's more, so am I.

Check out the Ukuele Freedom Front and the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

To quote the UFF:

We're so great and we're the place on the internet where ukulele freaks meet each other and ukuleles as the instrument of unspoke rage and blah, blah, blah. Punk Rock and we are punker than you and all that.

Yeah..... ok what are the chords to London's Burning? 1,2,3,4 ......

G              F     C              F
ALL ACROSS THE TOWN, ALL ACROSS THE NIGHT 
G           F            C        F
EVERYBODY'S DRIVING WITH FULL HEADLIGHTS 
G              F           C              F
BLACK OR WHITE TURN IT ON, FACE THE NEW RELIGION
G 
EVERYBODY’S SITTING ’ROUND WATCHING TELEVISION!

G        F            C       D
LONDON'S BURNING WITH BOREDOM NOW 
G        F            C   D
LONDON'S BURNING DIAL 99999

Still can't resist the temptation to shout: "Turned out nice again!", in a cheery Lancashire accent tho. Damn.