Blogs

Although bash is a powerful scripting environment it is a bit deficient, compare to other scripting languages, when it comes to date/time calculations. There are no convenient, generally available, date functions such as datediff or overloaded operators for mathematically manipulating dates and time.

This weekend I dived back into JavaFX again. JavaFX 1.2 has been out for a while now, and I have wanted to try out JavaFX again, ever since I took 1.0 for a spin about a year ago. At that time there was no support for JavaFX on Linux. This, combined with the fact that it JavaFX had no UI controls for data input, meant that I had no practical use for it since I am not really a visual designer but more of an application developer. Luckily now ,JavaFX runs officially on Linux, and whats more 1.2 introduced the first version of the charting API, somethings that worth looking at!

Postgrey is a great little utility to help eliminate spam from your mails server, and our setup has been running just fine for over three, or more, years now. But the other day I noticed that some of our email accounts were not getting any external mail anymore. These accounts were some of the little used email accounts on the various domains we use.

Yes, I own an IPOD. The reason I own one is because, at the time, the IPOD, with a whopping 60 gigs of storage plus an MP3 player, hands down beat any other offer in the market in terms of price/megabyte for mobile storage. Flash disks cost/megabyte was way more than for the IPOD, and other MP3 players only came with 4 gigs of storage. So, as I was using my IPOD as a backup devices and a way to transfer files at clients, the IPOD was a compelling offer.

Although there is a sql ansi standard each database vendor has its own proprietary extensions and MySQL is no different. These changes, although small, are frustrating enough to cost hours of lost time and productivity. One of the issues I lost some time on was how to do an "if exists ... then ...else" statement in a stored procedure, basically to have some dynamic sql execute an update or an insert query depending on whether the record already existed or not.