Chillisoft Blog
 

10 PRINT "HELLO"
RUN
HELLO
READY.

It’s hard to deny: that is beautiful simplicity. No wonder I got hooked on BASIC when I was 14 years old. I had recently bought my very own Commodore64 for R300, complete with a full set of games on … wait for it … tapes, and two joysticks. Never mind peripherals, because the C64 was a complete unit itself, except for the tape player and the TV of course, which served as the monitor.
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Once you reach the final year of university, the question is mumbled in hushed tones: what will you do when you finish university?  Where will you work and on what type of technology?  But another interesting question is: would you prefer a small IT firm or a larger firm with more reach?
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The ORM discussion seems to be a heated one in many circles, and in my attempts to market our new Habanero ORM product, I’ve run into the dialogue many times.

For those of you who don’t know about ORM - object relational mapping tools basically map relational database tables onto objects in code and vice versa. ORM tools are definitely on the up, because they automate a lot of work done to persist the data.

The full .Net Rocks interview can be found here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=240. The discussion involves the inventor of the term “ORM is the Vietnam of computer science” (Ted) and one of the lead developers of Hibernate (Ayende), another ORM tool. Hmmm, interesting.
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Habanero and NHibernate are rival products that both carry out object-relational mapping (ORM), meaning they map your database tables to your objects in code, and then persist data back and forth between them. They essentially can save you a lot of coding and fussing about boring details.

But how to choose between them? Well, have a look at this:

Doing the official NHibernate tutorial using Habanero instead…
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The search engine wars began in the mid-90’s with trench warfare between MSN Search, Altavista, WebCrawler and the like, and I remember typing search phrases and getting pages and pages of identical content from one website (with minor variations, like page date).

Google was a late arriver around 2000 with airborne napalm attacks and took the search engine world by storm. If you want some numbers and charts, see here. Come 2007 and Google is firmly entrenched as the number one search engine, with Live Search and Yahoo singing background vocals.
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My two hour desert walkabout to convert a Visio ERD into a MySQL database was illuminating. To save you travel time should you want to walk the same journey, here are a few pointers:

First, establish an ODBC connection. Download and install the MySQL ODBC driver from here.
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I’ve been looking at this year’s South African Tech-Ed schedule, and wondering whether it would be worthwhile going. I’ve been to a few Microsoft DevDays and to a few conferences before with Microsoft speakers, and my overriding impression of them was that they were not aimed at me, a developer that writes business software and happens to sometimes use Microsoft products to do so. They always seemed to be aimed at people who think tools are “cool”, I mean the guy giving the talk would sort of hook up his laptop, load up some code and show us this awesome thing called IntelliSense, or how easy it was to make a Web Service in Visual Studio.
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Recently I was looking into generics and how to cast one generic type to another generic type of the same class. Just to make sure that you know what I’m saying, I’ll use an example:

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This is a great list my brother sent me the other day. Obviously take it with a pinch of salt, although a lot of the observations ring true.

http://www.codesqueeze.com/101-ways-to-know-your-software-project-is-doomed/

“You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building”. I liked this one, I think it’s true of a lot of us developers.

“The client will only talk about the requirements after they receive a fixed estimation”. This one happens from time to time in our fixed price projects.

“Developers use the excuse of ’self documenting code’ for no comment”.

But my code is self-documenting!

After 15 years in front of a square computer screen, I am now a conditioned operator. My eyes operate in a 30cm x 20cm rectangle, with my neck barely moving all day. My fingers have developed a close working relationship in order to spit words out at, wait for it, 60 words a minute, using a touch-typing mechanism adapted to a “Qwerty” keyboard that should probably have been relaid ten years ago. I crack up a blog post with a clever combination of HTML editing and WYSIWYG wizardry, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V, coupled with row highlighting using Ctrl-Shift-Home. I know exactly where to change my IP settings in this “internet browser”, and how to copy this article so my Dad can see it on his non-connected home PC (for the uninformed, I would go to Save As, hunt down a directory, specify the file name, plug in a flash stick, press Windows-E for explorer, hunt down the directory, zip the files, copy and past into the F drive, click stop device in the icon tray, pull out flash, take home, plug in, press Windows-E, find the file, paste, unzip, delete the zip, double-click to open in IE and instruct my Dad to use up and down keys to read it). And the best part of all that? We regard that as significant progress! No wonder the old folk are freaking out!
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