December 2002

Ziemann has put together statistics published by the RIAA, with interesting results.

So the record industry cut their inventory (and artist investment) by 25 percent and sales only dropped 4.1 percent, even though the economy is at rock bottom. There were almost 12,000 fewer new releases for the consumer to choose from in 2001 than 1999. The record companies are making more money per release than ever.

Read the whole article. It says it all.

I should have written WebObjects 4.5, Sybase and real as the title of my last post. I don't think WebObjects has any problems handling BigDecimals. Sorry for that.

Anyway, the solution to the problem was simply to avoid real. For some reason reals aren't handled very well by EOF, at least not in our WebObjects 4.5 setup.

I got help setting up a proxy between the WO application and the database logging every single byte sent over the network, and the reals sent back to the application in response to a SQL query appeared to be ok. This has got to be some strangeness in the EOF Sybase adaptor.

After this finding we changed the reals to floats and the problem was gone.

Having a big problem with BigDecimals in a WebObjects application talking to Sybase. There's a few columns with the type real. WebObjects thinks real should be mapped to BigDecimal.

The problem occurrs at first when an object is fetched. Methods that should return instances of BigDecimal always return null. Browsing the table in EOModeler is a bit weird; selecting the entity - i.e. fetching all attributes - the real attributes are showing up empty; select specific attributes and the values show up. Very strange but could perhaps be dismissed as a bug in EOModeler.

The second problem occurrs when trying to save data (I've tried this from within the WebObjects application as well as from an application created from scratch with the EOF Application wizard in ProjectBuilder). The following exception is raised...thrown...whatever:

Note: the skeleton application created with the wizard doesn't fetch the values either. The text fields are empty just like with EOModeler.

If you have any ideas you know where to reach me.

Oh, and have a nice weekend! I'll certainly try to, but leaving for the weekend with this stuff in the back of my head can't be a good start.

I can agree to some degree (hey, a rhyme!) with what Jon says about whitelists. The loss of spontaneous associations is bad. At the same time whitelisting is probably the only solution that can really stop the spam. All spam.

For this very reason my plan is setting up a whitelist scheme myself using qconfirm. It'll probably work flawlessly.

Until spammers begin replying to my confirmation requests...

When I arrived at the office today - a bit late - I was met by Kjell and Svante in cleaning mode. They forced me to clean my desk and Urban to do the dishes. Great! I can actually see my desk now. Christmas is nice, isn't it?

I'm writing a Cocoa application for performing DNS lookups, just for the fun of it of course. And, because of my recent rants on helper programs (see here), I thought I'd write something up to see how easy (or difficult!) this would actually be.

The application will be a front-end to the tools dnsqr and dnsq from djbdns. These tools handle all sorts of DNS queries, but I'll start with simple address and pointer lookups just to get a basic design in place.

I thought about a minimal user interface to get started: a text field where you enter the name or address to lookup, and a table view (or something similar) where the results are displayed. I then thought a bit about how I use the these tools from the command line and came to the conclusion that this minimal interface wasn't enough. Using the application instead of using the tools directly would give few benefits.

I have to come up with an interface that makes it easy to specify a range of lookups to be performed. What about the user interface in Blizzard's original game WarCraft? It takes very few key strokes to order the construction of a farm. Can something similar be done in a DNS query app? How about serializing commands? The user could construct a command chain or tree where consecutive commands use the output of the former as input?

I'll have to give this some more thought. But first, back to that minimal interface.