Month: March 2010

Earthlink sucks, film at 11.

Earthlink is blocking email from my colo box (which is on a static IP, has never sent spam, and isn’t on any known block list in the world). I jumped through their hoops to report this fact, and got two emails within a few seconds of each other:

  • One claiming that I’m not blocked, so why am I claiming I am?
  • One claiming that they’re removed the block that they just finished claiming wasn’t there.

And of course, email is still bouncing. Of course they did caution that removing the non-existant block will take 2-24 hours.

Don’t you just love consistency?

In the last hour, I’ve been told

  • Don’t use SYSDATE in inserts/updates because although it’s bog standard SQL (I’m not sure if it’s ANSI standard, but it’s pretty common), it’s not supported by all Microsoft databases (even though we only use Oracle in this project)
  • Do use VARCHAR2 instead of VARCHAR, because although VARCHAR2 is only supported by Oracle, and in the current release it’s just a synonym for VARCHAR, some day it’s going to have different comparison semantics than VARCHAR and Oracle says to use it, so we have to use it.

I’ve also been told that these two tables, which I have to populate by hand using manually taking the rows and columns of a spreadsheet and writing “INSERT…VALUES(‘row’,’column’,’value’)” statements several hundred times, can’t use semantic primary keys because they want to use UUIDs. So instead of looking at the spreadsheet and seeing that in the row labelled “Insurance” and the column labelled “Security” that the value is “V” and converting that to “INSERT … VALUES(‘insurance’,’security’,’V’)”, I’ve got too look up the uuid for the Insurance row and the uuid for the Security column, and change that to “INSERT … VALUES(‘6BAC51EC-C636-4C31-9E95-367062AC23F7′,’C78BF79B-3178-4F07-ACD3-92DF2742C932′,’V’)”. And I’ve got to do that several hundred times. Yes, that seems *much* less error prone that using keys I can actually tell what they mean and easily tell if I’ve got the wrong one. Oh, and even better, the code that uses the information in this table will have to hit the database to look up these uuids so that they can find the value of the “insurance” versus “security” instead of just coding those values directly.

First Official Team Practice of the season

Almost the whole team met at Baycreek today, and it was so great to see everybody again (we missed you, Mike). I’d seen most of them here and there over the winter, but this is the first time we paddled as a huge group since last fall. I was in my Thunderbolt, and several other people were in surf skis, but Dan and Jim were in downriver boats. Dan’s especially was a bit of a barge and threw out a beautifully huge wake to ride.

The weather has started to cool off a bit since Thursday, and it was pretty windy as well, so I was back in the straight jacket (farmer john and hydroskin shirt). I’ve been paddling a lot, and this is my fourth time paddling this week, but the traffic and the boat wakes added a new challenge.

Because of the wind, we didn’t go out on the bay and just paddled up and down the creek while Dan went around yelling out advice and correction to everybody. We didn’t do any formal drills, but being us, we of course had times when we paddled hard and times when we paddled not so hard, some paddling along chatting and catching up, and sometimes head to head rivalry. On our second last time up the river Frank took the lead and started hammering, and Dan and I tried very hard to keep up with him. I was doing ok until Dan purposely cut me off (don’t worry, I’d tried to do the same thing to him the time before, so it was legitimate payback) and I lost his wake, and once I lost his wake I was done for and ended up several boat lengths behind the two of them. Dan confessed afterwards that he’d been almost at his limit at that point. Frank is considerably older than us, but he’d just come back from a couple of weeks paddling in Florida, so maybe he was a little more at his in-season prime that us.

But once again I was reminded about the best part of paddling as a team isn’t the races or the matching jerseys and the big Bay Creek Racing stickers on our boats, it’s just being with a bunch of fun guys messing around in boats.