Berlin here i come!

My flight is booked, i'll be in Berlin, ready for summer next Thursday :)

An interesting project

My friend Klara has made a video called wonder.

A scientific thought and artistic curiosity meet in wonder.

mega coding stint underway

i've been MIA to the world since last friday and the results are beginning to show.

been working on a mapguide 'workbench' using cfmx and mapguide open source via the java api. lots of oracle spatial, cfc's, some java, php, javascript, xml has been going on.

having jira and subversion makes life easy.

i've filed a lot of bugs with mapguide over the last week, now that it's an open source project it's nice to file bugs. before it became an open source project it was a very frustrating experience.

i have been enjoying a few programming journeys this week, hitting bugs in old data requiring SDO_MIGRATE.TO_CURRENT to be added under the hood inside the application, finding an memory issue with mapguide and the open source oracle fdo driver, niggling little things for developers and how mature the javascript world is :)

I find myself using cfabort a lot still with model glue. I am looking forward to the next (coldbox release 2.0.1) with the event tracing for requests. then i am going to migrate this code over to coldbox.

still i'm comfortable with model glue these days, i quite like it. even found wacking a bean in an enjoyable quick (as in the fastest way) solution.. finding i'm starting to enjoy software patterns and be really productive with them.

Pretty XML formatting using XSLT and Coldfusion

Code generated XML can be pretty ugly, i spent a little while googling trying to find an simple answer on how to pretty up xml with CFMX.

The answer? XSLT

Grab this XSLT script Pretty Print XML using XSLT, and load it into a variable like xlst_pretty_print.

Then using the xmltransform function #xmlTransform(xml_str,xlst_pretty_print)# you can get get nice formatted xml out.

hopefully this saves someone else a little time :)

Better feedback for long running tasks

I have been writing some data loading software at the moment which involves gigs and gigs of data. It can take hours to load. I spent time writing a progress monitor to allow monitoring.

I realised that what was much better than just saying 4 hours to go (and not the cute microsoft minutes remaining estimation either) it's really good to say,

5 Hours, 21 minutes remaining, Estimated finish time 4:32 PM

Giving a clock time is so much more human friendly.

Mapguide 1.20 beta 2 is showing promise

The new mapguide beta has been posted on the mapguide website.

A cool new feature in the latest beat is the schema report which allows you to preview a featuresource (aka datasource) via some php pages.

It works great with SHP but there is an issue with the FDO King.Oracle provider which uses tilda's in the FDO class name.. not so pretty and it doesn't work so well in XML land which is used a lot with Mapguide open source.

I did some digging and i have filed a bug report about the schema report xml conversion problem.

I have also filed a bug about trying to get the oracle fdo included in base release

Is separating organic rubbish out bad?

I just made a coffee and put the grounds into the box for the compost heap.

Is that bad for the environment?

Having organic rubbish in landfill is surely going to allow microbes to flourish and over a longer time accelerate the decomposition of all the rubbish.

I know some rubbish will takes 1,000s ++++ of years to breakdown, but I would imagine the process would be helped along if the mix of rubbish contained more organics than less...

interesting...

The Monthly is so refreshing!

I had heard about The Monthly a few times in the media over the last few months.

The fact they picked up an article by Eric Ellis which Fairfax had commissioned and then dumped profiling Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch's wife finally led me to purchase the May Edition.

I was on the way into RMIT for a photo shoot (I'll post more later on that) and I had a tram ride ahead of me and wanted some brain fodder.

The articles were long, well written and interesting.

Covering topics like the history of federal politics in Australia, the outrageous state of logging and political corruption in Tasmania with regards to Gunns Ltd and a background article on Raimond Gaita, subject of the film Romulus, My Father

$6.95 is a steal for such great writing, get into it!

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession

My dad put me onto this book, it's another one of my all time favourites.

Written by Irvin D. Yalom, M.D a psychotherapist, this is his first book. A work of fiction, it's places Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche together in Vienna in 1882.

This book like all his subsequent books is simply fantastic. Irvin draws upon his insights into therapy and constructs a journey into the mind of both patient and therapist.

I am loathe to talk too much about the content of this book as it simply has to be read. Towards the end of the book, there is a chapter that is simply the most insightful exploration of the male psyche and obsession that I have ever read.

Amazon link - When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession

The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

This is a great book which was given to me for my birthday a few years ago by Wolfgang Kundris.

It's a book by Jeremy Narby who is an anthropologist who was in South America and visited a Sharman and experienced what he described as Forest Television.

Being a scientist, he then undertook a 7 year journey through the history and cultures of the world to find a scientific explanation of what he experienced.

It's a fantastic read, good food for thought. Good for the scientifically minded and the not so scientifically minded alike.

The way Jeremy draws the link between the Australian Aboriginal's cave paintings of the Rainbow Serpent with chromosomes and the DNA's spiral helix of DNA was suprising.

As a white Australian who loves science, I had seen this image throughout my life and had never seen what is such an obvious connection.

Here's the amazon link - The Cosmic Serpent