The hard slog...

Happy (3^3 - (2^0 + 0!)*cos(pi))!

2006-05-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

More Photos!

Saturday nights party was huge. About half of the invitees appeared but that was ok as I had factored that in and we still had a good turn out :) More photos are on flickr. Don't know how much I drank but Sunday was Bad! Froggy and I went to Maccas and gorged ourselves. I wore my uggboots :) Oh and I am continuing the tradition of only expressing my age either as a non base-10 number (see invitation) or as an obscure mathemetical expression. Stay tuned for obscure C functions :)

FlickR :)

2006-04-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

I finally have myself a flickr account! Includes this weeks NetFox launch party. Take a geezer.

11001 Birthday :)

2006-04-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

Saturday the 6th of May is my birthday shin-dig at Tequilarea at 155 Hindley St City at 8pm. All welcome - hope to see you there! (I couldn't resist the use of my favourite pic).

K'hap! Taekwondo...

2006-04-21T05:11:00.000-07:00

I've been instructing at Salisbury now for about a month and I'm really starting to enjoy it. Good students in both the kids and adults classes. I think this centre might be where I end up for a while which will be good. Here's some pics from tonights class though I've realised the phone camera just isn't gonna cut it!

Part of a growing community

2006-04-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

The rails community is growing rapidly with a swag of projects now adopting the framework. I, for one, am very impressed and will never go back to Java. I won't touch .Net with a 10' pole anyway! Take a look under N for our old pal NetFox :) http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RealWorldUsage

int foo = bar();

2006-04-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

Well I never! I new about the classic programmer nomenclature but I had no idea those military cats had so many damn acronyms! It puts the modern geek to shame :)

Holy Crap! I think its finished!

2006-04-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wondered if I would ever finish this thing, but well, now I have! NetFox 3.8 is officially finished. The Easter long weekend was spent, for the most part, in solitude. All sense of time and reality ceased as the final shreds of code oozed onto the screen. Tomorrow is the real test. There has been a fair amount of real world testing already but tomorrow marks the beginning of install week! We are doing 12 installs over the next two week s so it better bloody work! Fingers crossed :)

Code Machine!

2006-04-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

Ok so I haven't really been working on CoolTracker (April Fools! for those of you who missed the joke) but I have been coding like some kind of primate nonetheless. Consequently, I thought it appropriate to post this illustration Dad did a couple of years ago. I think it represents my obsessive nature quite well :)

Keep track of your cool

2006-04-01T01:19:00.000-08:00

Our latest product is almost ready! Its called CoolTracker and it does just that - tracks your cool. Everyday you record what you wear, what you eat and everything you say to CoolTrackers super intuitive, ergonomic, browser-based, AJAX, web 2.0 interface and it will calculate your cool factor for the day. Over time you can use its stastical trends menu to see if you are getting cooler or becoming more of a loser. We expect to sell 400 copies in April and overtake sales of NetFox in a very short period. I mean, really, who doesn't want to be cool? UPDATE: April Fools!

Go pedal power

2006-03-27T23:48:00.000-08:00

We now have a company bike! Its not a bad bike either. I have decided to start using it for getting around town and its so cool. Why did I not do this years ago? Its good for fitness and its quick and easy, no parking worries etc. There is something about riding a bike to a client in the city which just makes me feel so cultured! Of course, this is a delusion.

Mmmmm.....email

2006-03-15T03:47:00.000-08:00

Can't say too much now but there is a new kid on the block. An email plugin for NetFox which talks directly to Exchange. Real time mailstats for the Fox! Think I'll call it MailWorks :) Hopefully we will start beta testing in the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Serial types in postgresql views using INSERT INSTEAD rules

2006-03-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

Discovered a little trick last week in postgres. When you want to write to a table via its view instead of directly by using a rule it can be tricky to get the serial primary key values to set properly. What you want is for the view to behave in just the same way as a normal table. So when you provide a value for the serial it uses that, otherwise it just autoincrements.

First set up a backend table:


CREATE TABLE my_data (
  id serial primary key,
  somevalue text,
  --more data
);

Using a serial value will create the sequence my_data_id_seq which we can use later.
Next create the view:


CREATE VIEW my_view AS SELECT id,somevalue... FROM my_data;

Now here is the trick. I want to insert data into my_view instead of my_data directly but the data needs to actually be stored in my_data. We do this:


CREATE RULE my_view_insert AS ON INSERT TO my_view DO INSTEAD
INSERT INTO my_data (id,somevalue) VALUES (COALSECE(NEW.id, nextval('my_data_id_seq'::text)),NEW.somevalue);

The real kicker is the COALSECE(NEW.id, nextval('my_data_id_seq'::text)) bit. It says that if an id is explicitly set then use that otherwise use the next value in the sequence. Neat, huh?

The week of the 100's

2006-03-03T18:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I committed revision 100 of the NetFox Scope interface into svn. Although there is nothing special about this revision it marks a milestone of a lot of hard work for Tim and I. Thats 100 revisions of 3.8 already and we haven't even officially released yet! The other 100 we hit this week was 100 empty bottles of nudies and emma and toms health juices. Unlike the stereotypical software developers with their coke, pizza and potato chips, we have adpoted the staples of fruit juices, green tea and protein shakes. Just another thing that makes Boxen Systems different.

C is like reading a really old book

2006-02-15T20:06:00.000-08:00

I love C. Most people don't. Its like some folks prefer the old muscle cars and others like the new jap fizzbuckets. Don't get me wrong, I want to marry Ruby but C gives me a sense of oneness with the computer - I have ones and zeros in each hand :) A rarely used feature of C, where by you can embed methods within methods is a favourite of mine. A bit like ruby block/yields:

def user_active_count
count = 0
users.each { |e| count += 1 }
count
end

You can do this in C

void user_active_count() {
int count = 0;
void __inc_active_count(const void *nodep, const VISIT which, const int depth) {
if (which == postorder || which == leaf)
count ++;
}
twalk(_username_tree, __inc_active_count);
return count;
}

Beautiful, eh?

The Big Day Out!

2006-02-04T17:12:00.000-08:00

All of this hard work has been making me a little void. You know what they say - all work and no play makes Daniel something, something...So I decided to go to the big day out for some serious play time. Lots of big acts and some not so big acts many of which are faves of mine. Cog, Mudvayne, Wolf Mother and Shihad to name a few. All in all a great day and I certainly felt it the next day! I even managed to catch the stick of Cogs drummer as he flung it into the crowd of some thousand people - definitely a highlight. BDO is certainly not for the faint hearted but for music lovers of all ages its a treat. I even ran into some customers and a couple of well known adelaide sales people! I guess I wasn't the only one slacking off :) Now I've had my day off I'm refreshed and ready to write more glorious code.

Sexy 380

2006-01-25T16:05:00.000-08:00

As the fortunate friend of an Engineer at the Adelaide Mitsubishi plant I was able to borrow a brand new 380 VRX for a few days this week. I admit I didn't have huge expectations but after a couple of hours of driving it I was hooked. This is an AWESOME car! The model I had was an almost 180kw, 3.8L V6 manual with traction control, great suspension and brakes, full leather trim, sunroof and a six stack CD player. However, this car is certainly a case of being worth more than the sum of its parts. Its simply a very well rounded, easy to drive car with excellent handling, good pickup and an a touch of class. Apparently, even the VRX model is less than $40K (Aust) which in my opinion some of the best value around. I am very seriously considering some new wheels. Two thumbs up Tom!

The 11th hour....

2006-01-20T17:02:00.000-08:00

Well I'm nearing my 70th work hour for this week. My eyes are blurry, my head hurts and my sense of reality is diminished (it doesn't help that its 42 deg C outside!) but I am in the final stages of my software opus. NetFox 3.8 (http://www.netfox.com.au) is "almost there" and I have but a few tasks remaining on the list. This version has a whole new interface written in Ruby on Rails, has some new powerful reporting, a whole new policy manager, better searching and user management, a config Interface (thanks to Tim Riley) and is sitting atop Fedora Core 4 and postgresql 8.0. Too many more things to mention here but check out the screenshots! I'm off to curl up in the foetal position... UPDATE: The week blew out to over 100 hours but I have done 3 installs this weeks already - I was so tired last night that I couldn't drive home! Ughh!

Snappy ideas

2006-01-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

Well the music biz thing, SnapTrax has led Steve and I down a path I never thought I would follow - face-to-face market research. In other words, I have become one of those annoying morons who stands in rundle mall trying to get people to do surveys! In actual fact it wasn't that hard and we got almost 30 responses for less than an hours work. I suspect we probably need about 200 or so to be worthwhile so there's a few more Saturday afternoons gone :(

My first foray into the music biz!

2005-12-18T16:17:00.000-08:00

A good mate of mine got chatting over the weekend about a new business idea for the music industry. What started as a casual discussion suddenly turned out some top ideas. We are now thinking of making some of these ideas happen. Won't say too much yet but it looks promising :)

More soon!

NetFox nears next release...

2005-12-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

Well my baby - that which I have slaved over for three years is about to realise its true potential. We have only a few weeks left on the development schedule for NetFox 3.8. Yay! Hopefully I still have some hair left after all of this.

The data cube

2005-12-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

So I looked at one of my customers Netfox web logs the other day and there were over 22 million entries! This is one of my largest sites but there will be bigger. Now the problem is some of the queries that I run on that data are *c0mpl3x*. I started thinking about how to improve speed by "aggregating" some common reports. Ok, so say you've got hits and bytes grouped by website in a report for a certain date range. This takes a lot to compute so you pregenerate this report and add it to a table with an id column. The id column references a periods table which contains start and end dates for different report intervals. Ok, great! I've just reduced my query time by perhaps 100 times but what if I want to limit the results only to a particular user or group?

Well, I realised, when thinking about this that I was essentially building a data cube. To be able to filter a prebuilt report each "aggregate table" must have one or more conditions tables. For example for users each row in the aggregate table has a condition id. Then in a table called say condition_users, mapped against that condition id is a list of all the user ids which match the condition. Then when reporting I just join the aggregate to the condition table and filter by id - simple huh?! :)

I need a drink.

The next idea....

2005-11-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

On the way back from NZ I crashed at syngins place (Mel for you non-geek f0lk). For some reason every time we get together the ideas just get goin and we end up giving ourselves enough inspiration for about a years worth of code. The latest is Mel's super happy web based help system. Sounds like just the think we need for Boxen but also will look at on selling it to our resellers and customers. Mel seemed pretty keen!

Sunny New Zealand

2005-11-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

Well last week I spent a few days in Auckland spreading the NetFox word. I met with a company called OneSource who are a huge photocopy and print solutions vendor in NZ. I think they have like 700 staff and looking to get more into the IT solutions game.

So anyway I had two days worth of training with them and then dinner one night. I also met up with a dude from the Australian trade commission and he took me to meet another new reseller just out of Auckland. We went out and got pissy at a fancy bar on the wharf after that, too.

The place I stayed in Auckland R0ck0rD!!! It was a two bedroom apartment with two bathrooms, big screen TV, the works. Very nice :_)

My brain is really weird

2005-11-18T01:28:00.000-08:00

I just fell asleep on the couch. I started dreaming but after a while I realised I was having the same dream over and over. Like I was playing a game and I had to restart the level. Then I thought well screw this for a joke, I've better things to do, I'm going to try and wake up. In the dream I shut my eyes and started spinning around and in a few seconds I woke up. It was very strange.

I dream lucidly quite a lot. Its cool but I always seem to forget to dream about cool stuff like racing cars or flying. It always ends up being just normal everyday stuff even though I am in control. Sphhssttt....stupid psyche.

What a week!

2005-11-17T22:37:00.000-08:00

Well this week has been one of the most hectic weeks ever. I think I worked about 70 hours. But its not over yet. Got lots of work to do yet and Gaz wants to go out and piss it up a wall tonight. He's going back to Sydney to live next week so I dare say this will be big one :|

Finished up at Golden Grove Taekwondo last night and some of the senior belts got me a bottle of bourbon for taking the class for two months. That was kinda cool. Plus, it looks like several of them may come and train in my new class at Enfield!

First post....

2005-11-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

Well, I worked til 3am last night and ended up sleeping on the floor of the conference room! I really hate it when I do that - I have a terrible crick in my neck now :(

I'm trying to get a bunch of stuff ready for my NZ trip next week and as usual everything is being left to the last minute!

Oh well, back to work.