Lawrence Oluyede's blog

Blog has moved

2005-04-23T11:29:00.000+02:00

My blog has moved here: http://www.oluyede.org/blog/, please update the bookmarks. :)

Why Your Code Sucks

2004-09-27T22:52:00.000+02:00

Your code sucks if it doesn't work.

Your code sucks if it isn't testable.

Your code sucks if it's hard to read.

Your code sucks if it's not understandable.

Your code sucks if it dogmatically conforms to a trendy framework at the cost of following good design/implimentation practices.

Your code sucks if it has duplication.

must read: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=71730

nevow pastebin, the final episode

2004-09-05T16:47:00.000+02:00

Yeah, I added a global cache to speed up pasting rendering (it speeds up the whole thing a lot, see the rendering times at the bottom of each page). Now also the whole web app validates (it was a nevow's fault, but with a literally one line patch that I've written the problem is fixed). What more? I've fixed the CSS a bit to make the pastebin look less ugly under IE (sorry but I don't use IE except for windows update) so if you want a perfect-looking page under an uncompliant browser, pay me to fix the CSS further, do it yourself or change browser ;)

As usual the online demo is here: http://rhymes.dyndns.org:8083

I think it's finished, maybe one of those days you will see the source code, hold on ;)

update: the patch now is in the nevow svn tree, so you don't need to apply it manually

I love Twisted Matrix

2004-08-31T02:19:00.000+02:00

<disclaimer>
Men, this is pure love, I'm a geek and if you aren't too, don't read further.
</disclaimer>

In those days in my spare time I'm working on Matt Goodall's Twisted¹ Pastebin² to learn using the framework and Nevow³. The original version is very good but needed some enhancements so I put my hands on it and start working around. I knew nothing about Nevow and very little but with the help of the #twisted.web guys on IRC and with some tips given me by my friend Valentino "dialtone" Volonghi I coded a better pastebin featuring persistent cookies, syntax highlighting for about 30 languages, navigation UI (needs to be improved, it's on my TODO list), export as text of pastings, ~~a yet-to-be-coded archives interface (and perhaps a very simple backend to allow deletion and something like that)~~. Ah! I forgot the main change (the real reason why I started the improving process): Atop⁴, the Python OODB (based on Twisted obviously) developed by the Divmod team. So in a couple of hours I replaced the pickle⁵ based backend to use it.

But what excited me most is the thing that I've done two minutes ago. I replaced this bad bad code (I was too lazy to read again the manual, shame on me):


def _get_process_output(text, language):

    lang = languagesmap.get(language)

    if not lang:

        return text

    params = ARGS % lang

    cmd = "%s %s" % (PATH, params)

    stdin, stdout_err = os.popen2(cmd, params)

    stdin.write(text)

    stdin.close()

    return stdout_err.read()



def colouriser(text, language):

    text = "\n".join(text.splitlines())

    d = threads.deferToThread(_get_process_output, text, language)

    d.addCallbacks(lambda data: data, lambda data: data)

    return d

with this wonderful piece of code enclosing all the Twisted Matrix Power:


def colouriser(text, language):

    text = "\n".join(text.splitlines())

    lang = languagesmap.get(language)

    if not lang:

        lang = "txt"

    params = ARGS % lang

    params = params.split()

    params.insert(0, PROCESS_NAME)

    d = defer.Deferred()

    hlpp = HLProcessProtocol(text, d)

    reactor.spawnProcess(hlpp, PATH, params)

    return d



class HLProcessProtocol(protocol.ProcessProtocol):

    def __init__(self, text, d):

        self.text = text

        self.d = d

        self.buffer = []



    def connectionMade(self):

        self.transport.write(self.text)

        self.transport.closeStdin()



    def outReceived(self, data):

        self.buffer.append(data)



    def outConnectionLost(self):

        data = "".join(self.buffer)

        self.receiveColourisedText(data)

        

    def receiveColourisedText(self, data):

        self.d.callback(data)

again... shame on me, shame on me :)

1 - Twisted Matrix is an event driven framework developed in Python with tons of ready to use protocols; if you want to do networking use Twisted, drop everything else ;)
2 - a pastebin is a web application used to share code, more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastebin
3 - Nevow is a web application templating system built upon Twisted Matrix
4 - Atop is a OODB mainly used as a backend for Quotient, the Divmod's messaging oriented application server
5 - Pickle is the Python builtin serialization mechanism.

The online demo is here http://rhymes.dyndns.org:8083.

I will not guarantee that it will be up 24hours a day because it's my 1Ghz laptop, so please, don't flood it and since I'm still working on the codebase it will be shutted down on my own needs.

Bye, share the love.

update: the archives interface is there, needs only better colors. The backend is useless so I'll not waste my time coding an interface used only to delete pastings. I noticed that (as usual) the site with IE sucks so I gotta take some time tweaking the css files (perhaps I could go without css at all for IE users <g>).

think about the problem to solve, not about the language

2004-08-26T13:15:00.000+02:00

When I approached the same problem recently, I kept putting it off, thinking that Python would be too slow and that this level of collision detection would have to be written in C++. Yet, when I finally came to think about it, I started writing some pseudocode (in Python) and to my surprise came up with a new solution to the problem after about 30 minutes. How did Python help? Well, quite simply, by using Python, I didn't need to worry about types, classes, brain damaged idioms, memory management, or any of that other rubbish which doesn't help you solve the problem. All of a sudden, I found myself using a language which allowed me to think about the problem I wanted to solve and nothing else. As an added bonus, the algorithm I came up with turned out to be fast enough in Python.

Would I have come up with the same solution had I not been using Python? Perhaps. I can't help but think that I'd have also got there in Java, only not as quickly.

Does the choice of programming language affect the way I think? I don't know, but next time I approach any programming problem, I'm going to use Python to do my thinking.

[from: perverted by the language]

Change clothes

2004-08-23T21:56:00.000+02:00

As the rapper Jay-Z sings, I'm changing clothes and go, go where? You'll see.

In the meanwhile I remembered a year old post written by the eclectic Mark Pilgrim and I changed the blog description accordingly ;)

Bye!

Google and programming languages

2004-08-16T22:59:00.000+02:00

Just type in google this three keywords and press "I'm feeling lucky button" :)

best programming language

agile programming language

programming language

worst programming language

hint: they are Ruby, Python, Python, C++ in this order

very funny :)

Getting ridicolous

2004-08-16T19:21:00.000+02:00

While I was surfing the web I've found this two bits:

Some programs seem to stop working after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=842242

...seems that quite every application on the planet will have issues with SP2
(hint: release early, release often)

...also seems that OSNews readers do have a lot of problems (but they aren't alone)

Ehy IBM sysadmins: good luck!

Yet another reason to keep my Windows2K installed (but I'm in now way a normal PC user...)

Second bit (the most ridicolous one):
Windows XP Starter Edition

No more than 3 application running together, no more than 800x600, bandwith limited, no security... So, no more XP versions please!

They are poor not stupid!

The daily WTF

2004-08-13T00:49:00.000+02:00

http://thedailywtf.com/

Only a word: cool!

Subscribed!

IE in WinXP SP2

2004-08-11T10:48:00.000+02:00

Anne van Kesteren came through well known (but invalid) IE blog mantained by the Microsoft Internet Explorer Team, seems all good except for a couple of sentences that made him (Anne is a male) laugh:

"We also came up with a very original idea – popup blocking"
Everyone but them knows that they are the last ones implementing popup blocking in a browser :)

and the second one:

"so it's a heck of a lot more secure than pretty much any other browser"
That's made laugh also myself but... let's wait, we shall see if it's really true ;)

ps. don't name "web standards support" (what the heck IE is made for if not for the web??) because they will ignore you :)

Crap sites

2004-07-24T20:57:00.000+02:00

Suppose that I'd like to buy a PDA, suppose the PDA I've chosen is the XDA, suppose that I use the best browser out there (no not Internet Explorer, I'm not used to surf with security holes). I cannot do it... why? Because "This website has been optimised for Internet Explorer 5+ and Netscape 6+. We have detected that you have an older browser installed. Please update to the latest version browser to view this website.".. So IE is older than mine (Firefox 0.9.1)... what's the point? Learn the fuc**ng web standards...or lose customers.

The site: http://www.my-xda.com/

Shame on you, shame on you.

No I'll go buy another PDA ;)

Atom.NET 0.4.3

2004-07-15T15:56:00.000+02:00

Atom.NET 0.4.3 is out, here are the major changes:

added xml:base support
merged XPathNavigatorReader.cs and XmlNamespaces.cs from mvp-xml library
Utils.cs: added a public GetVersion() method to obtain the version of the assembly at runtime
fixed a bug in AtomPersonConstruct parsing
AtomFeed.cs: added a Uri property for an easy identification of the uri of the feed
AtomEntry.cs: added a Uri property for an easy identification of the uri of the entry
added Load(System.Uri) for both feed and entry element
updated nant build file
various bugfixes (see the cvs changelog)

You can find the detailed changelog here.
As usual: homepage, project page, download.

Adding support for Xml Base to Atom.NET

2004-07-13T13:19:00.000+02:00

Before making a new release of the library I wanna try to add the support for Xml Base. The problems are described in the final part of the recommendation:

The XPath [XPath] data model preserves neither base URI information nor the boundaries of external entities and thus is insufficient to support resolution of relative URI references within these entities to be resolved correctly. This includes relative URI references in xml:base attributes.

So, since I heavily use XPath I have to think a way to handle it... maybe I could track xml base attributes manually and add their values to compose the absolute uri... I'll think :)

UPDATE: xml:base support has been committed into cvs with a lot of bugfixes :) Refer to the changelog for the news.

Debugging and .NET

2004-07-13T11:38:00.000+02:00

Everybody is happy about new cool debugging features of VS2005, but as I'm used to do, I don't think only about features coolness but I ask myself "why" and "what". So let's think about this debugger mania. I think that the reason that everybody in .NET won't live without an upper first class debugger is the "static and strong typing" that quite every .NET language has, but this is not the main reason. The big problem are behaviors, if someone in his development processes heavily relies on debugger introspection to find bugs, errors or simply to "introspect" things... so he will keep on forever... but I (and not only me, also Robert Martin thinks that) think that the less debugging you do the better you feel. So which is the alternative? Repeat with me: TDD, TDD, TDD, TDD, TDD, TDD (and so on).
Please read here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TestDrivenDevelopment

Partial Types

2004-07-09T18:54:00.000+02:00

In the local .NET UserGroup the founder of AgileMovement.it asked what's the general opinion about .NET2.0 partial types, so I've posted mine, but since the post is in italian I'm going to translate it in english for my blog:

IMHO partial classes have to be taken with the dropper (and with the magnifying glass too...). I'm not agree when they are defined a "revolution" because in my opinion are a "workaround" to the problems of code generators (or useful in those contexts). Let's the scenarios:

- cvs: nowadays there are problems to handle cvs with a team who work on the same class, problems that IMHO wouldn't be solved with partial types because if (as the good Murphy teachs us) something could go wrong, it will with partial types too, I explain myself: suppose that John and I are working on the same class (I keep on asking myself why someone else and I should work on the same class but ignore it and go on...); if something goes working the integrity of a single file is underminded, that thing doubles (or worse) with partial types. After all it's not a big problem... ;)

- inheritance and OOP: maybe I'm a traditionalist but I don't see how partial types could fit (here in the italian version there's a pun but it's impossible to translate it) in the OOP architecture... inheritance? No because I don't inherit, code reuse? No because there's no need to play Lego with a software... admit that I've mis-intepreted the big plan behind partial types and that they are a revolution... revolution of what? To avoid using Façade? Mmm IMHO the problem has to be resolved at the root (that's what I meant with "workaround" at the beginning of the post)

- code generators: likely the only purpose of this "revolution", maybe tools like LLBGen, datalayers generators or something else could benefit :)

- VS.NET, WindowsForms and other stuff: in my opinion with this point of view are more than an error because they step over things like MVC and so on; I didn't see how VS generates the code with partial types but I have the idea that we could end with "meltin pot" partial types to throw in all the source code that a developer should not see. Much better approaches like XUL, Glade, XAML (if my mind don't play tricks on me they use partial types under the hood, but they don't expose them to classes users) and so on.

So... partial types? Yes but the lesser the better. I'm in favour for XAML and for code generators, a little less for Windows Forms and to the direct exposure to programmers.

Bye

Atom.NET grows with Mvp-Xml

2004-07-04T12:09:00.000+02:00

Atom.NET (the cvs version, but the new release will be here soon) grows with the integration of part of the Mvp-Xml library, an effort made by various Microsoft's MVPs to enhance .NET System.Xml support. Thanks to Daniel Cazzulino (XML MVP) for the support.

I've also added an example made in VB.NET by Russell Lindell. See the examples page.

Mono 1.0 is out

2004-06-30T23:17:00.000+02:00

Here are the release notes: http://www.mono-project.com/using/relnotes/1.0.html

Generics are cool, but Python is cooler

2004-06-28T14:23:00.000+02:00

My friend Valentino has posted on his blog about a sample of code with C# and generics and he rewrote the sample in Python ;)

Here the samples:

C# 2.0:
List integers = new List();
for(int i=1; i<=10; i++) integers.Add(i);
int sum;
integers.ForEach(delegate(int i){ sum+=i; });

vs

Python (basically any version):
sum([x for x in xrange(11)])

Limits of XPath in .NET

2004-06-28T12:29:00.000+02:00

In those days I was trying to enhance parsing capabilities of Atom .NET and since I based all the API around XPath I tried to gain more advantages from .NET implementation. The only limit I recognized is the lack of the capability to "serialize" the content of a visiting node (something like InnerXml or OuterXml properties in the DOM classes or ReadInnerXml(), ReadOuterXml() in the pull parser classes). So I asked around and Oleg Tkachenko (MS MVP) pointed me out the MVP-Xml library, a MVP's collaborative project to enhance XML support in .NET. Cool!

gmail invitations

2004-06-26T17:59:00.000+02:00

I have 3 accounts to give away, let me know if you want them

Atom.NET mailing list

2004-06-19T12:43:00.000+02:00

After some requests and suggestions I decided to open a mailing list about the Atom.NET project.
The main page is: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/atomnet-discuss

Soap Server 2004? Simple and powerful!

2004-06-12T23:18:00.000+02:00

Here it is, the real Microsoft SOAP Server 2004:

[via Corrado Cavalli]

To My or not to My?

2004-06-12T17:17:00.000+02:00

I'm not mad, I'm talking about the custom My namespace that will be here with the .Net next shipment. Before getting into deep I want to spend two or three words about what My is and what it's all about. First, I'm not a VB developer (I've basically never wrote more than 10 lines of code of VB one to six or .NET in my own life); second: My seems a toy idea but it's only RADness. Take a bunch of "common functionalities" and collapse them under a single namespace (with a stupid name to be honest :P), what do you get? My, of course ;)

The point is not if My is useful or not, the point is: My should be only for VBers or for every inhabitant of the .NET framework? My opinion is that I could use it if they allow me to port it on Mono too (to be read: cross platform and not in unportable dlls), it makes no sense to develop a simple application gaining benefits from My and the day I try to recompile it on my Linux box have to rewrap all the code in My in a custom class or namespace or what is...

I had a discussion with Corrado Cavalli (a .NET MVP here in Italy) about a post he made and I think that mine point of view is not so wrong...

ps. please change that ugly and possessive My :)

NUnit 2.2b1 is out

2004-05-22T10:00:00.000+02:00

From the agiledotnet mailing list:

From the announcement:
This is the fourth major release of NUnit and the third since it was
rewritten to take advantage of .NET custom attributes. Highlights of
this release include support for Mono, multiple-test selection in the
GUI interface, a built-in lightweight mock object facility, new command
line switches for both GUI and Console runners, and new Category
and Explicit attributes.

Read more at http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=377077

Downloads at http://tinyurl.com/29zjj

Cool! I can't wait to try it!

The Don has met the Python

2004-05-17T17:05:00.000+02:00

What a wonderful news! Don Box talks about Python, in its .NET implementation, IronPython.

See also Andrew Stopford's post.

Atom.NET 0.4.1

2004-05-13T18:59:00.000+02:00

Nothing new since the lasta change in the cvs tree (but there are few changes since the last release), only a service release.
homepage, project page, download 0.4.1

Google Groups is going 2.0

2004-05-13T17:44:00.000+02:00

I noticed that Google Groups has a new beta version of the website, with statistics, preferences, bookmarks and... last but not least... atom feeds ;-)

Even Microsoft MVPs like FreeBSD ;-)

2004-05-05T12:42:00.000+02:00

<disclaimer>
don't flame me :)
</disclaimer>

It seems that the unofficial mvp's website is running one of the best OS out there. check it. Cool!

A big big hole in Gmail

2004-04-25T20:54:00.000+02:00

A friend of mine (after changing my password in gmail account) has told me the way to do it... here is a detailed explanation. Bad Google, very bad!

Google has invited me to test the new Gmail service :)

2004-04-25T19:28:00.000+02:00

Very cool! 1 Gb of space, snippets a-la-google-search, easy handling of contacts and something more :)

Atom.NET and downloads

2004-04-24T10:48:00.000+02:00

The number of downloads slowly grows day by day and only few have told me for what (s)he uses the lib. It could be nice to have more feedback so I can add a page for the "projects" in the Atom .NET website. In this way the various projects can gain some visibility and I can keep up to date that page. Bye!

Mono slides

2004-03-31T19:08:00.000+02:00

Miguel de Icaza points at some mono presentations... nice stuff!

Temporary (or not?) new feed

2004-03-25T15:12:00.000+01:00

As someone told me, the RSS feed is broken - it seems that I'm so unlucky with RSS publishing :( - so I'm using a new external service (Blogger.com provides Atom 0.3 only).
Here is the link: subscribe

Windows is definitely more secure than Linux

2004-03-21T14:24:00.000+01:00

So... nobody after reading this could deny that Microsoft Windows is less secure than (everybody's) Linux. Very funny ;-)

Generics Aren't

2004-03-11T15:07:00.000+01:00

It's the title of the last post of Bruce Eckel on his weblog. He talks about latent typing, Sun idiosyncrasies and other stuff. The funniest passage is:
" Aside: note the use of extends rather than implements in the generic type constraint. implements won't work. Java is precise and consistent because Sun says it is "

update:
I forgot the link: http://mindview.net/WebLog/log-0050

ps. this is my 100th post on this blog ;-)

QueryBuilder is out

2004-03-08T20:50:00.000+01:00

The long awaited QueryBuilder tool is out. The QueryBuilder is a GUI tool to visually build SQL statements. Nice job Gianluca!
Homepage: QueryBuilder HP
Sample screenshot: Select query with auto join

Thinking about the future (and mine too)

2004-03-06T17:28:00.000+01:00

I'm not in love with any corporation at all. I love technologies. This is the reason why I like Python, Haskell, C# and .NET and so on. I like programming but I don't want to tie myself with one language, one technology and worse... one corporation... so I'm thinking... I'm thinking about my future as a developer, as a player of the IT world. The truth is that the perfect technology does not exist... I do like and dislike Java, love and hate .NET, esteem Python but still waiting for its worldwide support and so on. I'm looking at the facts... today is the sixth day of March, 2004 and .NET is two years old and If I erase my .NET related blog feeds and websites, I don't see any .NET at all. No desktop apps, no starting up projects, few stuff on sourceforge, two or three job offers... the horizon is distressing if you look through the hype. I don't know the reason why but it's not a good thing. I know, I know, we'll have to wait for Longhorn to see a large .NET adoption but: Longhorn today counts less than zero; we'll don't see it until the end of time (3/4 four years in IT are ages). Look at now: Java, with its problems, with its advantages and drawbacks is wide spread; Python is the best language I've ever used and works pretty everywhere. Haskell is cool technology in the pure form. C# is a nice language but I could live with the drawbacks of Java (cause it's not far different from it).
So... how will be the future? I don't know. Nobody knows... and I'm still thinking.

Windows vs. Linux

2004-03-06T17:01:00.000+01:00

In the endless religious war against who's better between the MS proprietary operating system and the open source Linux world raises up the war of prices. And so people move from sentences like "Windows is bad for abc reason" and "Linux sucks because xyz doesn't work as I'm used to" to stuff like "Windows licences costs too much" or "Linux is free and so you'll pay nothing of nothing"... in this crowd of phrases I've found an article, a simple and clear one: Enterprise Linux vs. Server 2003: Smackdown!. It's old but not too much.

Media types list

2004-03-01T22:59:00.000+01:00

Last thursday I've checked into the cvs tree of Atom.NET a comprehensive list that I've assembled containing quite every media type out there. It's plain text divided into two columns separated with space (easily parseable). The first column is the mime type (eg. text/plain) and the second one is the url of the specification of the mime type (eg. http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt). So, here you are: mediatypes.txt

A brand new blog (not mine)

2004-02-28T14:41:00.000+01:00

My friend Tomas Jogin has a brand new blog (a very cool redesign): jogin.com. In the google cache you will find the old version. Good job Tomas, good job!

Mozilla Firefox Official Wallpaper

2004-02-26T00:19:00.000+01:00

The Mozilla Visual Designed has created a wallpaper for their last browser ;-) http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/downloads/firefox/

Atom.NET 0.4 release

2004-02-24T21:02:00.000+01:00

I've released the 0.4 version of the library. It's a big rework against the past version.
See the website for more infos: http://atomnet.sourceforge.net

Mozilla Thunderbird is the best IMAP client out there.

2004-02-23T18:43:00.000+01:00

Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you.. That's the opinion of a MS employee ;-)

[via Omar Shahine]

Don Box joined Atom spec project

2004-02-22T00:48:00.000+01:00

Very good news.
[via Dare Obasanjo]

Choosing a RDBMS

2004-02-22T00:31:00.000+01:00

In these two days I was looking forward to a Relational DBMS with the following features for my own stuff and also to study it more into deep. The DBMS that I took into consideration are: MySQL, PostgreSQL, FirebirdSQL and MSDE. I admit that is not the whole plethora of RDBMS outta there (the list lacks of "big" names such as Oracle, DB2, SAP DB) but for one reason or another i left them behind (Oracle and DB2 are too big for my own stuff and SAP DB is now part of MySQL suite). I'm not an expert in none of the DBs in the list but I've used all of them in the past. The two main features for my own purposes are: cross-platform and C#/Java/Python/other language bindings. So I discarded the MS product, cause, yes, it could be accessed from those languages but it's definitely not cross platform (I don't want N DBs combined with the N languages and the N platforms I use; only one DB to rule them all ;-)). My second reject was MySQL cause it lacks of stored procedures, subqueries and some other stuff. Now the game was between PostgreSQL (very good DB, it's also an OORDBMS) and FirebirdSQL (born from the ashes of the free version of Borland Interbase) but the winner is... FirebirdSQL for some reasons: PostgreSQL is cross-platform (Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX and other OSes) but not "across" Windows (there isn't an official, stable port for Win machines); FirebirdSQL is free and open source, it does support Windows, stored procedues, triggers, UDF, SQL-92, has enterprise features (such as hot backup, replication and so on) and has an embeddable library too. So I think I've gone right... what do you think?

Yesterday (sysadmins version)

2004-02-21T22:41:00.000+01:00

While I was surfing the net I've found this modified version of the lyrics of the great song Yesterday:

YESTERDAY

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.

Now all my data's gone and
I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

Uptime advice

2004-02-19T11:39:00.000+01:00

I noticed that the snippet in the previous post doesn't work correctly on Mono, because their implementation of Environment.TickCount is erroneous. The MS .NET implementation says that Environment.TickCount returns A 32-bit signed integer containing the amount of time in milliseconds that has passed since the last time the computer was started. but in the Mono mailing list they told me that Mono's implementation returns basically the same thing as DateTime.Ticks so... not the thing I needed :(

Simple "uptime" snippet

2004-02-18T16:48:00.000+01:00

I've written a snippet of code to compute the uptime of my win2k machine (i don't have uptime like as in winxp).


// author: Lawrence Oluyede

// date: 18 Feb 2004

// license: throw away code

using System;

using System.Text;



public class Uptime

{

	public static int Main(string[] argv)

	{

		if(argv.Length == 0)

		{

			Console.WriteLine(getUptime());

			return 0;

		}

		else if(argv.Length == 1 && argv[0].ToLower() == "-v")

		{

			displayVersion();

			return 0;

		}

		

		Console.WriteLine("usage: uptime [-v]\n    -v    display version");

		return 1;

	}

	

	private static string getUptime()

	{

		StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();

		

		int ticks = Environment.TickCount;

		

		buffer.Append(DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:MM:ss",

			System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo));

		buffer.Append(" up");

		

		int days = ticks / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24);		

		if(days > 0)

		{

			buffer.AppendFormat(" {0} day{1}",

				days,

				days > 1 ? "s" : String.Empty);

		}

		

		int seconds = ticks / 1000;

		int minutes = ticks / (1000 * 60);

		int hours = minutes / 60;

		

		hours = hours % 24;

		minutes = minutes % 60;

		seconds = seconds % 60;

		

		buffer.AppendFormat(" {0,2:D2}:{1,2:D2}:{2,2:D2}", hours, minutes, seconds);

		

		return buffer.ToString();

	}

	

	private static void displayVersion()

	{

		Console.WriteLine("uptime v0.1");

		Console.WriteLine("  written by Lawrence Oluyede");

	}

}

RegexpLib.com has a RSS feed

2004-02-17T21:07:00.000+01:00

http://www.regexplib.com/Rss.aspx

subscribed ;-)

Windows free live CD

2004-02-16T20:03:00.000+01:00

Ever needed a free live CD of your favourite operating system? For linux based OS you have Knoppix, Suse Live, Gentoo Live, the new Mandrake Live CD and so on... but for Windows? No way til now... someone has done the job. Here you are what I've found on the net, BartPE:

Bart's PE Builder helps you build a "BartPE" (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks.

It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.
This will replace any Dos bootdisk in no time!

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

RSS feed changed

2004-02-13T09:30:00.000+01:00

I've changed the URL of my own RSS feed, so please update your aggregator. RSS 1.0 feed

Please stop the Longhorn hype

2004-02-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

It's been a considerable period since I heard about Longhorn from the developer view (and user too), but everyday Longhorn seems much far away. After the PDC in October 2003 my aggregator has begun to drown in a ton of hyper-enthusiastic posts about Avalon, Indigo, WinFX, WinFS and so on. I have nothing against Longhorn and less nothing against the MS guys (or not MS) who post about it but today is the twelfth day of Februrary 2004, and 2/3 years in IT are literally an era.
In addition in these days i came through posts such as Josh Heitman's and my opinion that it's too early get confirmed. Some other guys and girls have a similar opinion about the "new" bleeding edge technologies.

QueryDOM is out

2004-02-11T18:42:00.000+01:00

I'm pleased to announce you the first public version of the QueryDOM, a growing library whose aim is the generation of SQL queries and data layers at runtime. This version also contain a parser (in alpha state). Must see ;-)

Met Gush

2004-02-07T17:19:00.000+01:00

In the last 5 minutes I was busy trying Gush, a very interesting application that I've found on the net.

Gush makes instant messaging and news aggregation simple, functional, and attractive. Gush excels at the functionality it provides without including the kitchen sink. Everything has a purpose, from the unique Split Chat mode, to conversation management, to Group Announcements, and even tabbed news browsing.

The features are:
- Instant messing (using the Jabber Protocol)
- RSS Reader
- Instant messaging blog
- Very powerful interface

I guess that some screenshots speak better than a lot of words: http://www.2entwine.com/screenshots/

update:

Gush is mainly written in Python... wow!

Atom.NET homepage bugfixing

2004-02-05T11:39:00.000+01:00

I've fixed a couple of things in the Atom.NET homepage, not it validates against XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD and againt the W3C CSS validator. Someone told me that the page looks like a mess in IE5 for Win but... I don't care, it's too buggy as a browser... so let's upgrade to IE6 or (better) change browser (try Mozilla Firebird). Bye!

W3C new recommendations

2004-02-05T10:29:00.000+01:00

* XML 1.0 Third Edition: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/
* XML Infoset Second Edition: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-infoset-20040204/
* XML 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml11-20040204/ - http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-names11-20040204/

.... a lot of new stuff to learn ;-)

The mess with RSS

2004-02-05T10:26:00.000+01:00

Mark Pilgrim explains that there are too many versions of RSS, and he's right: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss.

Atom.NET 0.3 release

2004-02-03T21:50:00.000+01:00

I released the 0.3 version of my atom library. Now it contains also an atom parser to parse atom 0.3 feeds. Here are the changes:

* fixed AtomGenerator constructors
* added AtomReader to parse atom feeds
* fixed a bug in a private method that invalidated parsing if the first <link> hasn't "alternate" attribute
* added IsIso8601Date(), IsIso8601DateLocal(), IsIso8601DateTZ() to validate iso 8601 date/times
* fixed some bugs with date/time representation in <modified>, <created>, <issued> elements
* fixed a bug in the serialization of xml:lang attribute
* added application/x.atom+xml in media types
* Utils class is no longer istantiable or inheritable

Homepage: http://atomnet.sourceforge.net

Mozilla Firebird 0.8 is coming...

2004-01-31T10:58:00.000+01:00

...take a look at what's new.

Practical Eye newsletter has gone two

2004-01-26T19:11:00.000+01:00

I've received the second issue of the "Practical Eye for the .Net Guy newsletter", the topic is MSBuild. Let's read!

Hacker's Guide To Gaining Root On A Girl: Mysteries Revealed

2004-01-24T16:58:00.000+01:00

Very funny ;-) - http://kristi.erdves.lt/lcx/guy.txt

C# compiler testing framework

2004-01-24T16:35:00.000+01:00

Gus Perez (a C# compiler QA team member) blogged about the testing framework of the team. They currently have (and surely is an alway growing number) 18.697 tests. What I liked most is this paragraph:

We run all these tests several times a day on different OS' and platforms, etc. The results end up getting stored in a SQL Server database. We have an ASPX page that serves as the the front-end for us all to analyze test results through. It's part of a system we've developed within our team called Marathon that handles pretty much all of our test run automation tasks. It detects when a new build of the compiler is available, communicates with our lab machine software and tells it what kind of configuration we want, runs our tests, stores the results in the database, frees up the machines, and then it all starts again soon. I might talk about this a bit more in a future post if people are interested.

That's what it's called "automated testing". Great!

http://www.jixal.com/blog/archives/000085.html

Atom feed

2004-01-24T16:17:00.000+01:00

My blog by now also has an atom feed (produced by blogger.com): http://loluyede.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Indy on .NET

2004-01-21T21:37:00.000+01:00

Indy, the well known networking library (handle quite all the protocols) developed in and for Delphi has been ported to the .NET framework. Check it out: http://www.nevrona.com/Indy/download/DotNet.html.

ps. here you can find an introductive article.

2004-01-20T17:45:00.000+01:00

This is a test. I'm trying to post through the gaim blogger plugin of the Gaim instant messaging client, a multiplatform client that supports multiple protocols at once (mine supports ICQ, MSN, Jabber, Aim, Yahoo, IRC, Gadu-gadu and more). Bye

Avalon Imaging sample number two

2004-01-17T15:53:00.000+01:00

It's about ImageEffectGlow: http://www.longhornblogs.com/rwlodarc/archive/2004/01/16/2167.aspx

Hello World

2004-01-16T17:26:00.000+01:00

http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/HelloWorld.shtml

Avalon Imaging Samples series

2004-01-16T16:48:00.000+01:00

Robert Wlodarczyk has posted his first sample of the capabilities of the new imaging framework in Avalon. I don't have Longhorn to try it myself (It works on the PDC version) but it looks great. Good job Robert!
See the first sample

Books I'm reading

2004-01-13T11:34:00.000+01:00

I think that a few of you care about what kinda CS or IT books (I'm used to read more than one book at once) I'm reading... so nobody cares about the other kind of books. But here I am to tell you that ;-) I'm currently reading three books at the same time. The Silmarillion, it's a series of tales written by J. R. R. Tolkien and published by his son. Those tales talk about the genesis of the Middle Earth, everything before the Third Era and the creation of the Rings of Power. The second book is De Profundis the famous letter written by Oscar Wilde in charge of Lord Alfred Douglas; strange and hard book but if you, as me,like one of the fathers of aestheticism, it's definitely a must read. Last, but surely not least, I'm reading a book written about 2500 years ago (around the 5th century before Christ). I think that's a well-known book and it's title is The Art Of War by Sun Tzu, a marvellous text that's a handbook of strategy but most important it's a handbook of zen philosophy and a handbook...of life.

Project thoughts

2004-01-11T18:55:00.000+01:00

Today I was looking for the best way to write the feed reader and these are my thoughts:

* XmlTextReader seems to be the fastest xml reader and looks nice but I don't like the pull model very much and since the library isn't mission critical I'll consider to use it only if I don't get anything else working (maybe I could try to implement more than one reader... I don't know)
* XmlDocument is handier than XmlTextReader cause uses the DOM but it's slow (not very much to being honest, I can't imagine a 5+ MBytes Atom feed) and I don't need editing or inserting any data at all.
* XPathDocument + XPathNavigator is quite reasonably the right direction to go. Fast, readonly and exposes to me all the power of XPath.

So, after re-seeing MSDN-TV's Don Box episode called "Passing XML Data Inside the CLR" I decided to give XPath a try.

Stay tuned.

Robert Wlodarczyk joined Atom.NET project

2004-01-11T11:19:00.000+01:00

Now, I'm not alone... Robert joined the thing yesterday night (GMT +1)... He was a RSS.NET developer before starting to work at Microsoft in the Longhorn team. Hooray!

RSSBandit

2004-01-11T11:02:00.000+01:00

In these days, before my known Win problem, I was looking for another aggregator (I used many aggregators in Win and also on Linux but none of them suited my needs perfectly). My favourite aggregator, before yesterday, was SharpReader but having 250+ feeds is not a cool and handy thing within it; so a friend (Marco Trova) suggested me to use RSSBandit, the aggregator started by Dare Obasanjo. It definitely rocks! It features tabbed browsing, supports the Comment API, groups the exceptions in a separate feed, supports XSLT to style the feed pane, RSS autodiscovery and handles without problems 250+ feeds. Very cool :)

Back on track

2004-01-10T16:19:00.000+01:00

After a "I'm-too-angry-to-reinstall-windows" day, I'm trying to reinstall everything cause the recovery system of WinXP did succeed but some programs stop working (including, sadly, VS.NET). So, with a big smile on my face, let's start a total refresh of my Windows stuff.

Problems with windows

2004-01-09T16:31:00.000+01:00

Since my XP box has stopped to function (I really don't know why) and I don't want to reinstall everything now (cause I think is so stupid that an OS stops to work without any reason) I'll go on coding my own stuff on Mono on my Linux box in these days (Atom.NET works perfectly well on Mono). Long live to Mono!

Maybe in the future i will reinstall everything (in VMware ;-)) but since I'm a student and i don't have no "critical-or-must-have-to-work software" I can go on with my Gentoo Linux box. .NET and Python work well there.

See you when I'll finish Atom.NET parser.

Atom.NET

2004-01-06T19:27:00.000+01:00

Here I am with my new (now work in progress) toy. It's called Atom.NET and its purpose is to generate (and parse when it'll be done) valid Atom feeds.

Homepage: http://atomnet.sourceforge.net/.

Let me know what do you think about it, and If you wanna join it... send me an email ;-).

Comparator preview

2003-11-13T22:10:00.000+01:00

Do you instantly want to see how websites look in the two most used web browsers? I mean IE and Mozilla... Vasanth Dharmaraj has posted his new tool to do that: Comparator

Another language in da house

2003-11-03T23:32:00.000+01:00

Yeah, here it comes. The language that taught me the basis of OOP. Anders Hejlsberg's opera prima (not quite true, Turbo Pascal came before and something else I guess). Now and here the Delphi language (formerly known as Object Pascal) moves its first steps into the big family of the .NET Framework: hooray!

And now some nice new features:

VCL .NET, one of the most powerful and (IMHO) almost the "raddest" one completely rewritten to embrace the .NET Framework

Borland Data Providers for ADO.NET supporting Interbase, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server and more

ECO runtime platform and ECO OR/M

LiveSource for UML modeling (it ships also with Together - a tool for collaborative development)

and more...

Here is an online demo: http://www.borland.com/delphi/demos.html.

See the FAQ, Data Sheet and the Tech Overview.

More information on the Delphi 8 (aka Octane) on its homepage: http://www.borland.com/delphi_net/index.html.

As Borland say: "The Delphi evolution for .NET revolution".

The Demand for Software Quality

2003-10-28T21:14:00.000+01:00

Ladies and gentleman, the one and the only Bertrand Meyer on air....on artima.com. Enjoy.

C# 2.0 Language Specifications

2003-10-24T19:17:00.000+02:00

Do you want to know how will be one of the most awaited new languages version ever? On this page you can find the specifications of the C# 2.0 language. Get ready for .NET 2.0!

Generics in CLR (part two)

2003-10-17T10:19:00.000+02:00

Jason Clark continues his wonderful explanation of the amazing improvements that generics will bring to us in the next version of the .NET CLR.
Part two: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/10/NET/default.aspx
Part one (if you haven't read yet): http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/09/NET/

Screenshots of Whidbey

2003-10-17T10:15:00.000+02:00

Scott Gunnerson shows some screenshots of the keynote about Whidbey and ASP.NET 2.0 he did few days ago. Must see!

World Wide Web Consortium Published XForms 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation

2003-10-14T21:05:00.000+02:00

Today the W3C has published XForms 1.0 as a Recommendation. Hooray!

now playing: Aretha Franklin & Otis Redding collection

Longhorn preview is coming out..

2003-10-12T19:19:00.000+02:00

... I don't know so much but Robert Scoble said in his post's comments that we will see a developer preview in 15 days by now...

Microsoft .NET Framework Tool Developer's Samples

2003-10-12T14:58:00.000+02:00

Just discovered this section of the SDK. If you are involved or interested in .NET tools development (compilers, debuggers and so on) or if you are simply curious here a sample of what you can find:

CLisp compiler

Countdown ASM app - a large application written in MSIL

MyC compiler - a simple compiler for a subset of the C language.

You can find all the stuff in your Visual Studio .NET directory. (eg. c:\program files\visual studio .net 2003\sdk\v1.1\tool developers guide\samples\)

What's new in ASP.NET 2.0

2003-10-11T15:00:00.000+02:00

Edgar Sanchez give a quick summary on what Scott Guthrie said in his .NET Rocks! interview.

The Philosophy of Ruby

2003-10-02T22:11:00.000+02:00

The Philosophy of Ruby, a conversation with Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Must read.

pyM3U 0.2 releases

2003-09-07T16:11:00.000+02:00

pyM3U goes 0.2.
I added subdirs walking, sorting, and I decided to release a separate version with Ogg Vorbis support. Have fun.

pyM3U

2003-09-01T11:06:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I wrote a very simple script to generate M3U playlists (for Xmms, Winamp and so on). I'm too lazy to enhance it and hence it only supports mp3 files and it doesn't walk into subdirs. It's dumb but if you need it....: pyM3U

mod_python and others...

2003-08-30T01:31:00.000+02:00

Simon Willison speaks about mod_python. I'm getting lost in the plethora of modules/cms/templating system/web frameworks for Python. Here is a "must look at" list:

Webware: provides Python Server Pages, CGIs, Servlets and so on...

Cheetah: a complete and powerful templating system, it works and integrates with Webware.

Draco: a web framework that provides sessions, persistence via DBMS, events and more.

Twisted Matrix: the coolest and yet powerful "tool" that I've ever seen. If you are involved in network programming with Python you definitely must take a look at Twisted Matrix and if you don't know Python....then learn it and use Twisted!

Zope: Do you manage to write a web application like Amazon? Three clicks and you've got a working shopping cart. Zope is the word in this kinda things. Fast, powerful, lot of plugins, Plone (for CMS), ZODB (object oriented DB), an unlimited community...

For a detailed overview of the whole plethora of tools see Python.org Web Programming Wiki

Everything considered harmful

2003-08-21T23:33:00.000+02:00

Take a look at the harmfulness parade: Everything considered harmful

via [diveintomark]

PyAmazon plus PyGTK equals Amazon Client

2003-08-21T18:12:00.000+02:00

I started looking at Mark Pilgrim's PyAmazon, and since in these days I'm learning to use PyGTK I'm planning to develop a client for the Amazon Web Services...something like MAB but a stand-alone application. Stay tuned :-)

What Would You Ask Anders Hejlsberg?

2003-07-25T20:10:00.000+02:00

What Would You Ask Anders Hejlsberg? [via Bill Venners]

Hejlsberg is a well known programming languages architect. He was behind Delphi at Borland and now is the chief architect behind C#.

Will this ride get an end?

2003-07-23T22:30:00.000+02:00

Speaking more about Python...here is another Python lover coming out: Tomas Jogin.

On the ride again!

2003-07-23T20:18:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was a beautiful day but it was nothing compared to what happened to me today... I worked side by side with one of the greatest developers out there: Alex Martelli, a C++ master and a Python master too. I only say that he's one of the top contributor in the Python community, he wrote two books for O'Reilly: Python in a Nutshell and Python Cookbook. He's also involved in a plethora of Python-based projects like Anygui, Python itself and the amazing PyPy. He's also one of the board directors of Python Business Forum and last but not least he steadily works for Strakt, a Swedish company which gave (and give too) very much to the Python community. I'm very happy (also are the people who were there today like my friend Valentino Volonghi) and honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with a "big head" like him and...yeah not much to say now. I'm happy. Workin' with this kind of sotfware guys (he has a 25+ years experience on software development, he worked for IBM Research and Texas Instruments) is always a great thing for young developers like me.

On the ride!

2003-07-22T16:03:00.000+02:00

What a beautiful day! Today I joined RSS.NET project.

On designing good libraries, part 3

2003-07-20T10:48:00.000+02:00

Brad Adams comments the discussion on his third article on designing good libraries. Must Read.

PDC 2003 sessions

2003-07-20T10:46:00.000+02:00

Here is a list of sessions: http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/agenda.aspx#tracks

2003-07-20T10:41:00.000+02:00

MSDN Labs are coming... stay tuned!

Shopping day...

2003-07-16T19:31:00.000+02:00

...bought two new books: Patrick Robinson's USS Shark, Antrax (The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, Book 2) by Terry Brooks and...one of the greatest things I've ever bought: about 1 hour and 7 minutes of one of the best soul voices outta there: Luther Vandross with his last record: Dance With My Father.

We will not ship shit.

2003-07-15T20:55:00.000+02:00

We will not ship shit: words by Robert C. Martin.