Things happened very quickly after I posted this and tweeted about it. I got followed by the proactive folks at British Gas customer relations department. They took up the matter and ensured that an investigation was indeed carried out.
Turns out that, as I suspected, there was a systemic error that meant I was billed when I shouldn't have been. So where telephone calls and emails failed to get me a foot in the door, blogging (macro and micro) kicked the door in. In the end, I got the bill rescinded and also an apology for my troubles. All is well again in the world.
It is an encouraging trend that folks at British Gas are listening to and talking with the groundswell. I think more companies need to be doing so. They also need to ensure that conventional customer service channels are a lot less of a pain to use. A happy customer is a repeat customer.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, November 06, 2010
British Gas nightmare
For weeks now I have been doing battle with British Gas Home Care regarding an engineer visit. Here's my story.
We moved into our current home just before autumn kicked in and it was still warm. As the days started getting colder we discovered that we didn't know how to work the heating. After a few botched attempts at looking into ourselves we decided it was best to get folks whose job it was. So we called British Gas and explained the problem. They told us we there was a home care agreement under the previous occupant's name and if we wanted to take out a similar one, we said yes and asked them to close the other account to which they responded that only the owner could do so. We were informed that an engineer would look into the issue and carry out tests on our boiler and heating system to ensure that they could still find parts for them.
Engineer shows up and much to our shame, as it turns out, the thermostat was off. He turned it back on, did his tests and went on his way.
Fast forward a few weeks and I get a pay-now-or-else letter saying I owe £210 for services rendered by British Gas. I call them up and try to ascertain what the bill was in relation to. The operative informs me that it is with regard to the engineer's visit. I inform him that we have a care agreement in place. He says it has been cancelled. I say by whom? He says he needs to get back to me. But he demands that I pay. That irks me and I tell him to find out why my account has been cancelled and that I think £210 is a lot to pay for someone turning on a thermostat. We have a stalemate and he says I might have court proceedings brought against me to which I respond: bring it!
A few weeks after that I get the second letter demanding payment. This is after I had reinstated the care agreement on being told by another operative that it was closed due to an error by British Gas.
On getting this letter, I decide that this is bullying. Corporate Goliath trying to trample on average David. It cannot be anything else, as had they taken time to look into the issue maybe they'd have found that I don't owe them. In the event that they needed to charge for the engineer's visit, as some companies do, £210 for an hour's work, if that, is no where near fair.
I have also received further communication relating to this dispute in form of a solicitor's letter urging me to pay or face a county court judgement and all the evil that brings. In response to this I have mailed the complaints department at British Gas and will be hoping that British Gas does what it should have done weeks ago and looks into this issue. I will be posting updates in the coming days and weeks.
All I can say is that from my experience, so far, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to hold service providers accountable and easier for their rights to get trampled upon. I am one customer but on this occasion I have decided that on principle I will follow this to a logical conclusion and take on the giant that is British Gas. Hopefully, the values entrenched in British society will mean that there is a victory for common sense and the little guy.
We moved into our current home just before autumn kicked in and it was still warm. As the days started getting colder we discovered that we didn't know how to work the heating. After a few botched attempts at looking into ourselves we decided it was best to get folks whose job it was. So we called British Gas and explained the problem. They told us we there was a home care agreement under the previous occupant's name and if we wanted to take out a similar one, we said yes and asked them to close the other account to which they responded that only the owner could do so. We were informed that an engineer would look into the issue and carry out tests on our boiler and heating system to ensure that they could still find parts for them.
Engineer shows up and much to our shame, as it turns out, the thermostat was off. He turned it back on, did his tests and went on his way.
Fast forward a few weeks and I get a pay-now-or-else letter saying I owe £210 for services rendered by British Gas. I call them up and try to ascertain what the bill was in relation to. The operative informs me that it is with regard to the engineer's visit. I inform him that we have a care agreement in place. He says it has been cancelled. I say by whom? He says he needs to get back to me. But he demands that I pay. That irks me and I tell him to find out why my account has been cancelled and that I think £210 is a lot to pay for someone turning on a thermostat. We have a stalemate and he says I might have court proceedings brought against me to which I respond: bring it!
A few weeks after that I get the second letter demanding payment. This is after I had reinstated the care agreement on being told by another operative that it was closed due to an error by British Gas.
On getting this letter, I decide that this is bullying. Corporate Goliath trying to trample on average David. It cannot be anything else, as had they taken time to look into the issue maybe they'd have found that I don't owe them. In the event that they needed to charge for the engineer's visit, as some companies do, £210 for an hour's work, if that, is no where near fair.
I have also received further communication relating to this dispute in form of a solicitor's letter urging me to pay or face a county court judgement and all the evil that brings. In response to this I have mailed the complaints department at British Gas and will be hoping that British Gas does what it should have done weeks ago and looks into this issue. I will be posting updates in the coming days and weeks.
All I can say is that from my experience, so far, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to hold service providers accountable and easier for their rights to get trampled upon. I am one customer but on this occasion I have decided that on principle I will follow this to a logical conclusion and take on the giant that is British Gas. Hopefully, the values entrenched in British society will mean that there is a victory for common sense and the little guy.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Customer care rant
I was just thinking today about how sweet it would be to have self-service on things like booking a home installation or engineer visit.
You might ask why this is important but today a gas engineer was scheduled to take a look at the boiler (winter is in the winds) and our plans changed.
No one was going to be home. I had only one choice: get on the dog and bone and ask the company (one of Britain's corporate titans) to reschedule the appointment.
For anyone who has ever called to speak to customer care assistants for anything, it is dead time and you are paying for it.
And depending on the time of day and the load it could cost you an awful lot of time AND money.
My ideal scenario? How about if I was given the option to re-schedule the appointment online and not need to talk to anyone? I know some will say that there are folks who the online thing doesn't come naturally to. But I think those who can should be given the option to do things that way. I also think it would have saved me and the service provider time AND money, as the customer care assistant I spoke to could have spent his time trying to sign a new customer.
End of moan.
PS: Given that folks working within the day is almost now the norm, would it be so bad for service providers to have products that appealed to the market? Another rant. Another day.
You might ask why this is important but today a gas engineer was scheduled to take a look at the boiler (winter is in the winds) and our plans changed.
No one was going to be home. I had only one choice: get on the dog and bone and ask the company (one of Britain's corporate titans) to reschedule the appointment.
For anyone who has ever called to speak to customer care assistants for anything, it is dead time and you are paying for it.
And depending on the time of day and the load it could cost you an awful lot of time AND money.
My ideal scenario? How about if I was given the option to re-schedule the appointment online and not need to talk to anyone? I know some will say that there are folks who the online thing doesn't come naturally to. But I think those who can should be given the option to do things that way. I also think it would have saved me and the service provider time AND money, as the customer care assistant I spoke to could have spent his time trying to sign a new customer.
End of moan.
PS: Given that folks working within the day is almost now the norm, would it be so bad for service providers to have products that appealed to the market? Another rant. Another day.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Thoughts on EyeQL
Today we had a small challenge at work which revolved around taking certain changes from one of our code branches and merging them into another branch. Now the keyword here is certain.
One of the conventions we use at work is to have Atlassian JIRA ticket numbers as part of the commit comments. They came in handy today because all the changes that needed to be merged had ticket numbers associated with them.
The problem? An easy way to retrieve all the SVN revision numbers associated with those tickets so that we find it easy merge said revisions to the target branch. Luckily we have Atlassian Fisheye at work and with it comes an interesting DSL (EyeQL) for querying your codebase. I had know about it for sometime but didn't know where it could be used. This was such a case.
The following EyeQL query when run will return the revision numbers I was looking for:
The query goes through all revisions currently indexed by Fisheye and retrieves the revision(s) grouped by changeset that have either or all of JIRA-1, JIRA-2 and JIRA-3 in their commit comments.
Armed with this list of revisions it was easy to go through and merge them from the source branch to the target branch.
We would like to hear your thoughts on whether you have been in similar shoes and how you have gone about solving your problem.
One of the conventions we use at work is to have Atlassian JIRA ticket numbers as part of the commit comments. They came in handy today because all the changes that needed to be merged had ticket numbers associated with them.
The problem? An easy way to retrieve all the SVN revision numbers associated with those tickets so that we find it easy merge said revisions to the target branch. Luckily we have Atlassian Fisheye at work and with it comes an interesting DSL (EyeQL) for querying your codebase. I had know about it for sometime but didn't know where it could be used. This was such a case.
The following EyeQL query when run will return the revision numbers I was looking for:
select revisions
from dir /svn/directory/path
where comment =~ "^.*(JIRA-1|JIRA-2|JIRA-3).*$"
group by changeset
return revision
The query goes through all revisions currently indexed by Fisheye and retrieves the revision(s) grouped by changeset that have either or all of JIRA-1, JIRA-2 and JIRA-3 in their commit comments.
Armed with this list of revisions it was easy to go through and merge them from the source branch to the target branch.
We would like to hear your thoughts on whether you have been in similar shoes and how you have gone about solving your problem.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Loving Spock Framework
I have been following the progress of the Spock Framework for sometime and today decided to take the plunge.
As a JUnit user and having used mocking frameworks like EasyMock and Mockito, I set to work trying to convert a test I had written earlier.
One of the things I found hard to get past was the need to inherit from a given class, namely the Specification. Once I had looked around the code and found that it was built to work in that way, I got down to it. I like the way in which tests are expressed.
I found the interactions/mocking slightly different, especially the syntax. I like the way in which you can use wild card matchers for parameters and number of calls but returning values from a mocked object's interactions was less than intuitive.
Where in the EasyMock world you would say something like
In Spock it would look something like the following
I am hoping that at some point there might be a different way to express that expectation as it currently looks a bit cryptic.
All in all I like that beyond your feature/test name you can self document tests to the extent that it becomes readable for non developers, so a heavy plus there. I also like the fact that IntelliJ and Maven all understand and can run Spock Specifications without any trouble.
In the coming days I will be using the Spock Framework a bit more, especially as I would love to discover other features like Unroll. Will let you know how I get on.
Peace and Love.
As a JUnit user and having used mocking frameworks like EasyMock and Mockito, I set to work trying to convert a test I had written earlier.
One of the things I found hard to get past was the need to inherit from a given class, namely the Specification. Once I had looked around the code and found that it was built to work in that way, I got down to it. I like the way in which tests are expressed.
I found the interactions/mocking slightly different, especially the syntax. I like the way in which you can use wild card matchers for parameters and number of calls but returning values from a mocked object's interactions was less than intuitive.
Where in the EasyMock world you would say something like
expect(mockedObject.calledMethod()).andReturn(value);
In Spock it would look something like the following
mockedObject.calledMethod() >> {value}
I am hoping that at some point there might be a different way to express that expectation as it currently looks a bit cryptic.
All in all I like that beyond your feature/test name you can self document tests to the extent that it becomes readable for non developers, so a heavy plus there. I also like the fact that IntelliJ and Maven all understand and can run Spock Specifications without any trouble.
In the coming days I will be using the Spock Framework a bit more, especially as I would love to discover other features like Unroll. Will let you know how I get on.
Peace and Love.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Installing couchdb on CentOS 5
Installing on CentOS 5 i386
(Note: COUCHDB-315 has an attached patch for the CouchDB README which adds instructions for RHEL 5.)
1. Install prerequisites. You will need EPEL for js and erlang (or build those from source).
You also require curl (7.19.7 worked for me).I had to build it locally though because of some weird libcomm_err.so missing dependency.
2. Install CouchDB
The configure line below is for 64-bit, adjust for your arch (or leave out --with-erlang if configure can find out for itself). You can use a release tarball instead of a checkout, in that case skip right to the ./confgure line.
3. Edit config file to suit
4. Create user, modify ownership and permissions
Create the couchdb user:
See the README for additional chown and chmod commands to run.
5. Launch! In console:
or as daemon:
6. Run as daemon on start-up:
(Note: COUCHDB-315 has an attached patch for the CouchDB README which adds instructions for RHEL 5.)
1. Install prerequisites. You will need EPEL for js and erlang (or build those from source).
yum install ncurses-devel openssl-devel icu libicu-devel js js-devel curl-devel erlang libtool gcc
You also require curl (7.19.7 worked for me).I had to build it locally though because of some weird libcomm_err.so missing dependency.
2. Install CouchDB
The configure line below is for 64-bit, adjust for your arch (or leave out --with-erlang if configure can find out for itself). You can use a release tarball instead of a checkout, in that case skip right to the ./confgure line.
svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/trunk couchdb
cd couchdb
./bootstrap
./configure --with-erlang=/usr/lib/erlang/usr/include && make && make install
3. Edit config file to suit
vi /usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini
4. Create user, modify ownership and permissions
Create the couchdb user:
adduser -r --home /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb -M --shell /bin/bash --comment "CouchDB Administrator" couchdb
See the README for additional chown and chmod commands to run.
5. Launch! In console:
sudo -u couchdb couchdb
or as daemon:
sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb start
6. Run as daemon on start-up:
sudo ln -s /usr/local/etc/rc.d/couchdb /etc/init.d/couchdb
sudo chkconfig --add couchdb
Sunday, March 01, 2009
JQuery AutoComplete - Lessons Learnt
I can actually go to bed tonight after resolving my bugbear of the past few days: jquery.autocomplete. I usually stay away from JavaScript development in my day job but the past few days has seen me trying to do some work that requires autocomplete functionality. Never knowingly backing away from a challenge, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
It wasn't very difficult finding resources to get me started on this very useful plugin to the jquery framework library. Where I met my challenge was the use case which I sought to implement. I was going to be populating the lookup elements dynamically and this data would be supplied by the server-side in JSON at that. JSON being a subset of JavaScript made sense and I figured this would work out of the box....untrue. Thanks to Firebug I found that the JSON data coming back from the server side wasn't understood.
After a few days of sulking, I found some succour in the form of a jquery autocomplete implementation which actually speaks JSON. I had to tweak it to do my bidding in the end of the day but this was a better match for my problem and I am grateful to the codeassembly guy(s).
A few points to note:
It would be nice if the JSON functionality is brought into the main jquery.autocomplete.
It would also be nice to have a user defined formatItem function like the main jquery.autocomplete that is called after the JSON data is returned(this is the part of the codeassembly implementation I had to tweak to do my own thing).
All in all an interesting experience. I have a few more things to do in JavaScript land and will let you know how I get on.
It wasn't very difficult finding resources to get me started on this very useful plugin to the jquery framework library. Where I met my challenge was the use case which I sought to implement. I was going to be populating the lookup elements dynamically and this data would be supplied by the server-side in JSON at that. JSON being a subset of JavaScript made sense and I figured this would work out of the box....untrue. Thanks to Firebug I found that the JSON data coming back from the server side wasn't understood.
After a few days of sulking, I found some succour in the form of a jquery autocomplete implementation which actually speaks JSON. I had to tweak it to do my bidding in the end of the day but this was a better match for my problem and I am grateful to the codeassembly guy(s).
A few points to note:
It would be nice if the JSON functionality is brought into the main jquery.autocomplete.
It would also be nice to have a user defined formatItem function like the main jquery.autocomplete that is called after the JSON data is returned(this is the part of the codeassembly implementation I had to tweak to do my own thing).
All in all an interesting experience. I have a few more things to do in JavaScript land and will let you know how I get on.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Source code in blogger posts.
UPDATE: I am pleased to tell you that I have just installed the Groovy syntaxhighlighter from the trunk of that project.
I am glad I finally found a solution to my problem. I think the guys at blogger need to write up something in their FAQs about having source code in blog posts. Most of the Google searches I undertook came out with nothing until I found this gem.
I am hoping to find some form of blogger plugin that does this in the future, like what the WordPress guys have done. I will also be hoping that the syntaxhighlighter guys will provide Groovy support soon ;)
More later.
I am glad I finally found a solution to my problem. I think the guys at blogger need to write up something in their FAQs about having source code in blog posts. Most of the Google searches I undertook came out with nothing until I found this gem.
I am hoping to find some form of blogger plugin that does this in the future, like what the WordPress guys have done. I will also be hoping that the syntaxhighlighter guys will provide Groovy support soon ;)
More later.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Oracle XMLParser and Grails - Lessons learnt
A few days ago I was trying to integrate the work of a colleague into a light Grails application I am currently maintaining but experienced classpath hell with Oracle's XMLParser V2. A better description of the problem can be found in the JIRA for the Grails project here.
The steps prescribed didn't seem to work so I thought I'd do some digging again. I'll disappoint you by telling you that the JIRA issue remains unresolved and I was only able to come up with a work around. I looked into the script for RunWar and it would appear that for some reason, Grails defaults to a non-validating parser before kicking off Jetty.
The following lines in the RunWar.groovy script for Grails-1.0.3 is telling:
System.setProperty('org.mortbay.xml.XmlParser.NotValidating','true')
This single line of code ensures that you use a non-validating parser to start up Jetty and parse your application's web.xml. Maybe if there was another means for configuring your xml parsing for Jetty in Grails it would solve the problem.
I also tried other hacky things like replacing the SAXParserFactory as suggested here but that didn't work. In the meantime I have had to make do with refactoring my classes so that they don't exchange data of xmlType directly with the database. For now Strings/Clobs will suffice until I can find an unobtrusive way of starting Jetty from Grails that will condone Oracle's XmlParser on the classpath.
Your suggestions are very welcome.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Grails Testing Tip
I had always wondered how to run individual types of tests in Grails. In order words I wanted to be able to run unit tests only or integration tests only. I did some digging in the TestApp.groovy script that ships with Grails and found that all you needed to do was specify it as an option on the command line.
grails test-app -unit
or
grails test-app -integration
This works as far as I know with Grails 1.0.3 not sure of 1.0.4 and 1.1-betas but I assume they won't be decommissioning this feature in a while since it is important.
Never really got individual tests working though, as I have been unable to find anywhere that says how to run an individual test class.
Pointers to this will be appreciated.
In the coming days, I'll say something about mocking in Groovy using the 'as' feature.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Be Open
I usually am the kind of guy that is easy going and is willing to bend my principles for good reason. But I was greatly annoyed today at instances around the internet where content providers still put content out there in closed formats.
In this day and age of open systems, collaboration and standards, I wonder why this is so. There I was trying to go through my mailbox and sort the chaff from the important stuff. I stumbled upon an email from SpringSource and I was interested in seeing a past webinar about their tweaks to the Tomcat application server that we all know and love. Err wrong! I couldn't or lost the appetite to continue, as they had decided in their infinite wisdom that we all had to be Windows users or that our playback kit on our computers had to understand Windows Media Video.
Why they couldn't support a format like MPEG-4 beats me. They had in making this decision put up a hurdle to my use of the webinar content, along with any sales they may or may not have made as a result of my accessing it.
My advice to them would be, to become a bit more open and aware of the content they put out there, especially seeing that they play in a market that prides itself on open, collaborative standards. I will be assuming this is an oversight, unlike a similar oddity from Yahoo! with their launchCAST offering (rebranded as Yahoo! Music), which one would expect they would have redesigned as well to support Flash and standard JavaScript.
They lost the chance to turn me into a user of the past webinars part of their site. To turn 1st time users of your application (web site and other content included) into return/repeat users, take Joshua Porter's advice in Designing for the Social Web - get out of their way! In this specific case getting out of their way is being open.
'Nuff said.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
BLIP
Just to say that after the uncomfortable loss to Liverpool FC @The Bridge over the weekend, we are back to winning ways. There were a few wasted chances but all in all...great result!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
The depth of human greed
I read with disgust, incredulity and complete confusion the guardian article about the securities firm exec whom awarded himself £1.3m from a £1.4m pot and still had the effrontery to sue his firm for deducting/not paying £92,000.
I am not sure if I am upset because 92,000 pales in comparison to £1.3m or the fact that the court is being dragged in to settle issues like these, given other pressing needs.
Whatever happens, I think he has just shown how mean and crass we can be as humans once our greed is in full gear.
I shall be commenting on the outcome of the judgement.
Monday, June 23, 2008
TSSJS Prague - Days 2 & 3
Days 2 and 3 have been a breeze. There have been all sorts of interesting things that have been spoken about from Groovy and Grails to JPA 2.0 new features to really cool testing in JRuby. A lot of buzz is being generated in the community by DSLs and I also think Behaviour Driven Development as epitomised by JTestr, JBehave and easyB are all things to look into. Some interesting catch phrases are that XML is deprecated (in favour of DSLs of course). All slides for the presentations are available @ the JavaSymposium Wiki.
A few more things caught my attention and I will be looking at them in more detail in the coming weeks. I will hope to share my joys or...tears as I try them out.
Scala
ServiceMix + Camel
Mule 2
etc.
I thought the JavaRebel class re-loading agent thing was quite cool and can be a productivity booster but seeing that its not free...(the freeloader that I am), I'll be giving it a miss for now.
All in all I'd say that my time in Prague was extremely interesting, especially with the chance I got to catch up with old colleagues and meet new friends that one can rub minds with. Its been well worth it and I will be headed off to the next European even next year.
A few more things caught my attention and I will be looking at them in more detail in the coming weeks. I will hope to share my joys or...tears as I try them out.
Scala
ServiceMix + Camel
Mule 2
etc.
I thought the JavaRebel class re-loading agent thing was quite cool and can be a productivity booster but seeing that its not free...(the freeloader that I am), I'll be giving it a miss for now.
All in all I'd say that my time in Prague was extremely interesting, especially with the chance I got to catch up with old colleagues and meet new friends that one can rub minds with. Its been well worth it and I will be headed off to the next European even next year.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
TSSJS Prague - Day 1
The TSSJS Europe conference has begun in earnest in the lovely city of Prague. Between swinging alfresco dining and lovely continental beer I have regarded the 1st day of the conference as intellectually rewarding. There were quite a few talks that stood out for me.
First of all the introductory but well thought out talk by Nati Shalom of GigaSpaces on Cloud computing. There was informative eye candy on his slides and his talk brought to the fore-front of my consciousness the fact that capacity planning and scalability are thorny issues in general. I will be investigating the GigaSpaces stack, as before now it has been on my radar but hasn't been high priority enough.
There was the double whammy of Spring talks one of which was by Costin Leau. It raised important questions in my mind on things I could be doing better. The fact that SpringSource is re-aligning, re-inventing and re-positioning itself with offerings like Spring DM (which plays quite well with OSGi), Spring Batch and Spring Integration has not gone unnoticed and personally from the capabilities demoed today, I'd advise anyone to give the new Spring stack a look in. I have already started to look into some OSGi bundling tools like aQute and will be sharing my thoughts in a while.
The SCA talk by Mike Keith of Oracle to my mind raised more question than answers. Not the least the fact that some of the issues it addresses like assembly, overlap with other product sets in the market like ESBs and even the JBI spec. I have resolved to go away from that talk and
undertake more research to see if there's more to this shining new spec.
The Grails talk was well articulated but gave very little in terms of TDD support in Grails. Issues of this nature are close to my heart and I hope improvements will be made for future talks.
With regards to organisation, I'd like to see a conference where the video content of presentation is available to attendees by close of play everyday, even if in a raw/unedited form (a-la Parleys.com and JavaPolis). This can help if you are torn between two sessions you desperately want to attend.
All in all 8 out of 10 for Day 1. Bring on day 2.
First of all the introductory but well thought out talk by Nati Shalom of GigaSpaces on Cloud computing. There was informative eye candy on his slides and his talk brought to the fore-front of my consciousness the fact that capacity planning and scalability are thorny issues in general. I will be investigating the GigaSpaces stack, as before now it has been on my radar but hasn't been high priority enough.
There was the double whammy of Spring talks one of which was by Costin Leau. It raised important questions in my mind on things I could be doing better. The fact that SpringSource is re-aligning, re-inventing and re-positioning itself with offerings like Spring DM (which plays quite well with OSGi), Spring Batch and Spring Integration has not gone unnoticed and personally from the capabilities demoed today, I'd advise anyone to give the new Spring stack a look in. I have already started to look into some OSGi bundling tools like aQute and will be sharing my thoughts in a while.
The SCA talk by Mike Keith of Oracle to my mind raised more question than answers. Not the least the fact that some of the issues it addresses like assembly, overlap with other product sets in the market like ESBs and even the JBI spec. I have resolved to go away from that talk and
undertake more research to see if there's more to this shining new spec.
The Grails talk was well articulated but gave very little in terms of TDD support in Grails. Issues of this nature are close to my heart and I hope improvements will be made for future talks.
With regards to organisation, I'd like to see a conference where the video content of presentation is available to attendees by close of play everyday, even if in a raw/unedited form (a-la Parleys.com and JavaPolis). This can help if you are torn between two sessions you desperately want to attend.
All in all 8 out of 10 for Day 1. Bring on day 2.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Affirmative action
It is with some glee and a bit of confusion that I read this morning about France breathalysing citizen at pubs. The idea is to preempt accidents which are caused by drink-and-drive patrons. Noble. It beats hiking the prices as has been done on the other side of the Channel.
But I have a few questions:
Will this apply to all punters?
How will this be funded: as in will the test equipment be provided in partnership with vendors?
What happens to a punter whose breath is deemed un-Kosher?
Will there be some enforcement to ensure that they won't drive...in fact how do you determine punters who have driven to the pub?
Nice concept though. This is the kind of creative thinking that is required of politicians. Is it ready for prime time? Not quite sure but we'll see.
Enjoy the week ahead!
But I have a few questions:
Will this apply to all punters?
How will this be funded: as in will the test equipment be provided in partnership with vendors?
What happens to a punter whose breath is deemed un-Kosher?
Will there be some enforcement to ensure that they won't drive...in fact how do you determine punters who have driven to the pub?
Nice concept though. This is the kind of creative thinking that is required of politicians. Is it ready for prime time? Not quite sure but we'll see.
Enjoy the week ahead!
Thursday, March 27, 2008
GTalk rant
I upgraded my IM client lately. I had been using Pidgin 2.2.2 for a few months and decided to move up to 2.4.0. I had a number of work mates and just friends on Gtalk but Pidgin just wouldn't work with my previous settings.
Finally I found some blog entry which inspired me. Notice how I have qualified its effect...it didn't really solve my problem but changed the way I thought about it.
The solution? Click on the images on the below.
Finally I found some blog entry which inspired me. Notice how I have qualified its effect...it didn't really solve my problem but changed the way I thought about it.
The solution? Click on the images on the below.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Environment specific properties - the spring way.
This problem is easily solved via the use of 2 Spring IoC bean post-processor classes viz:
org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer
org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyOverrideConfigurer
To use this functionality you would need to have them declared in your app-context config files
as follows:
<bean id="ppConfigurer"
class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
<property name="order" value="1" />
<property name="locations">
<list>
<value>classpath:ppc-sample.properties</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="poConfigurer"
class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyOverrideConfigurer">
<property name="location"
value="classpath:poc-sample-${my.env}.properties" />
<property name="order" value="10" />
<property name="ignoreResourceNotFound" value="true" />
</bean>
They are like any other bean definitions but there are few properties in their definitions that need special attention
as they are responsible for the magic. They are order, location and ignoreResourceNotFound.
order - determines how these post processors are loaded or applied to beans via Spring IoC.
location - (atleast in the case of the PropertyOverrideConfigurer bean) matters because of the use of an ant/JSTL/groovy property.
This is where the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer comes in. It is used to define the default value for the my.env environment variable. Without this the PropertyOverrideConfigurer will have problems when Spring tries to load it.
ignoreResourceNotFound - makes sure there are no complaints by Spring when initialising the PropertyOverrideConfigurer bean.
Any bean where you want to use environment specific values can now be defined in your poc-sample-${my.env}.properties file.
Given the following bean configurations where you wish to use this functionality
lazy-init="true">
<property name="prop1" value="${prop1}" />
</bean>
<bean id="myBean" class="com.lhfville.sample.POC"
lazy-init="true">
<property name="prop1" value="hi" />
</bean>
you can have poc-sample-dev.properties poc-sample-test.properties poc-sample-prod.properties files in your classpath with varying values for myBean.prop1.
Thats pretty much it.
org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer
org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyOverrideConfigurer
To use this functionality you would need to have them declared in your app-context config files
as follows:
<bean id="ppConfigurer"
class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
<property name="order" value="1" />
<property name="locations">
<list>
<value>classpath:ppc-sample.properties</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="poConfigurer"
class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyOverrideConfigurer">
<property name="location"
value="classpath:poc-sample-${my.env}.properties" />
<property name="order" value="10" />
<property name="ignoreResourceNotFound" value="true" />
</bean>
They are like any other bean definitions but there are few properties in their definitions that need special attention
as they are responsible for the magic. They are order, location and ignoreResourceNotFound.
order - determines how these post processors are loaded or applied to beans via Spring IoC.
location - (atleast in the case of the PropertyOverrideConfigurer bean) matters because of the use of an ant/JSTL/groovy property.
This is where the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer comes in. It is used to define the default value for the my.env environment variable. Without this the PropertyOverrideConfigurer will have problems when Spring tries to load it.
ignoreResourceNotFound - makes sure there are no complaints by Spring when initialising the PropertyOverrideConfigurer bean.
Any bean where you want to use environment specific values can now be defined in your poc-sample-${my.env}.properties file.
Given the following bean configurations where you wish to use this functionality
lazy-init="true">
<property name="prop1" value="${prop1}" />
</bean>
<bean id="myBean" class="com.lhfville.sample.POC"
lazy-init="true">
<property name="prop1" value="hi" />
</bean>
you can have poc-sample-dev.properties poc-sample-test.properties poc-sample-prod.properties files in your classpath with varying values for myBean.prop1.
Thats pretty much it.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Facebook Foray - dead in the water
Like any fairy tale this one has come to a screeching halt looking more like a nightmare. Well my facebook app will be dying a natural death as a consequence of the woeful display by my team in the Africa nations cup. I thought they'd have the balls to march all the way to the finals after surviving the scare of a horrid first round. Even after the lifeline of a penalty and a sending off for their opponents...they still lost.
Well at the very least this dilettant has enjoyed working with the Facebook API. Who knows I might do something with it again in the near future.
Have a swell week!
Well at the very least this dilettant has enjoyed working with the Facebook API. Who knows I might do something with it again in the near future.
Have a swell week!
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Facebook foray - extended
As promised, I am happy to tell you that my team DID progress to the next stages of the competition. This means that the motivation to keep @ my facebook application has been rekindled. The coming days will see me trying to implement the features as promised.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
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