One of the systems I’m working on uses LCDS Data Management and Hibernate to communicate between a database on the server and a Flex client. We’ve, uh, learned a lot. I don’t think I’d do it this way again, were I to choose (‘course, I didn’t really choose in this project, either).

We’ve had a lot of problems due to what is conceptually supposed to be a simple matter, that of lazy loading. Even overlooking the fact that lazy loading is not very transparent on the Flex side, there’s the question of how to distribute those lazy flags. And it’s my contention that in a complex data model with lots of interdependencies and lots of different data use-cases, it is very hard to answer that question. Too many lazy properties and you’re making all sorts of round trips across the internet (and lemme tell you, some of your customers may have ping times way worse than you do when you’re testing these things. Way, worse.). One too few and you’re sucking in the entire database in the midst of one property access.

Ah well, whatever.

The process of working well together to create some useful artifacts can be pretty beautiful. Converging on an understanding, refining the artifacts and passing them around for inspection, making a bit of progress then cementing it in place, growing a collaborative process that endures with or beyond the artifacts, accumulating individual experience, shaping stuff to the world and the world to stuff…

Since my blog occasionally gets responses to posts that I never thought would get responses, eh, why not try this:

If you know anything about error messages of the form:
[Flex] 10/12/2008 12:26:03.387 [ERROR] [Service.Data.General] Attempt to subscribe to out of range sequence: 5 clientId: 55481919-5415-BB76-E833-F2176FB1E566
Please help me figure out what it means.

🙂 Thanks.

you spell ‘chron job’ instead of ‘cron job’…

Though it’s interesting that the Google spelling test gives the results:
about 828,000 for “cron job”
about 4,730 for “chron job”
Does that mean you’re more elite for spelling it wrong?

I’m working out a new marketing strategy for my software consulting business. It’s so obvious that I don’t know why I haven’t done it before, but, y’know, you live and learn. Here’s an excerpt from a pre-sales meeting I just had:

Cust.: “We basically need a way to link our existing order database to our new software and not lose any continuity.”
Me: “Well, y’know, when I was a kid, I’d play my NES quite a bit, so I know my way around this sort of maze, with a Visual Basic, there’s probably a terabyte that you’d have to, and when you denormalize, some of those would be hard, but we’re ready, because it’s all about continuity, of.”
Cust.: “Great! Do you have a plan in mind of how you’d implement this?”
Me: “Y’know, I’m just like you, I don’t know a for loop from a read head…”
Cust. (laughing): “Yeah, yeah!”
Me: “… so, I’ve read all the manuals [winks] and there are a lot of ways to do this, like when our sons were playing each other in that soccer game, wasn’t that a hoot, you just have to keep scorin’ goals.”
Cust.: “OK.”

I read that “OK” as “I feel like we’re really connecting here, and by extension, I’m sure that you’re quite capable of executing the complex technical requirements of this job in a timely and efficient manner”. I’m pretty sure I’ll close the sale…

I like keyword search engines on the web. I find all sorts of interesting stuff when I look for some phrase that pops into my head. Like “software scar tissue” led me to The Goo. I can’t actually say it’s interesting, because it’s hard to know what it is, really, but from a quick poke around, it seems like it at least shares some common concepts with a crazy project I’ve had brewing in my head for a few years. Maybe there’s something I can steal from it, or maybe I can at least see what madness lies along that path…

Not that it’s any great discovery, but since I didn’t get a good hit when I was searching for this myself, I figure I’ll write this up a bit.

I wanted to use VNC over SSH to my headless OSX box (yes, I own an OSX box, no, I’m not a traitor to the Linux race) from outside my network. But when I tried to connect across the tunnel, I kept getting this “channel 3: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed” on the Mac side. There are lots of hits for that phrase out there, many of them giving what might be good advice in some situations, but what I ended up having to do was to change my ssh arguments.

(Let’s pretend the external IP of the Mac is foo.example.com, and the internal address is 10.55.55.55.)
I was doing this:
ssh foo.example.com -L 5901:localhost:5900
but what I needed to do was this:
ssh foo.example.com -L 5901:10.55.55.55:5900

(FYI, yes, there is a ‘Linux race’. The papers have been filed with and approved by the World Racial Administration, and your direct or indirect use of the Linux kernel makes you eligible for membership. Benefits include a free copy of the kernel and a sense of superiority over any other groups of people you choose.)

Hmmm, got to thinking today: I’ve been involved in developing a pretty wide variety of web apps. Let’s see, I’ve worked the following, in varying but significant ways:

• large-model 3D viewer
• phone call simulator to train salespeople
• elearning viewer in HTML
• pixel-perfect Flash reimplementation of the above elearning viewer
• training simulator for CNC machines
• learning management system
• 3D walkthrough for a sort of virtual environment builder
• system for tutoring about other web apps
• speaker-bureau management system
• bridges between the above management system and two non-web apps of the same ilk

Well, has it?

Here’s a way to make some quick cash. Create an online-friend-finder service, where people sign up, create a profile, and get matched up with friends. The secret is all in the matching up: instead of matching site members based on their profiles, you match site members with people trained to be friends.

The training is pretty simple and doesn’t require a lot of skill, so you can hire a large and cheap labor force, especially given the economies of online work. You simply train people to parrot back nearly everything their new friend says, with varying but generally excessive levels of agreement, and paraphrased and stylized and time-shifted in such a way as to thinly veil the mimicry.

Sure, you’ll have some percentage of potential members that will consider this to be a poor substitute for friendship, but just let them drop off, you don’t need ’em.

You could advertise this service with spam; I think there’s a really good correlation between people who pay attention to spam and those who would find this service to be a perfect fit for their personalities.

I have to admit, though, that I haven’t researched this market at all, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that there are certainly a number of services out there doing this already. That’s not to say that there’s no more room in the market for you, just that you’re going to have to spend a lot of your budget on marketing and branding in order to make your members feel like they’re elite compared to members of your competitors.