davemclain.com

I just had a discussion with a colleague regarding java’s handling of data types and it reminded me of a strange problem I had building my phone records application.

When I started making the database schema I thought to myself “Phone numbers are really just integers, so I should store them as such.” So I ran the perl script I was using at the time to convert t-mobile’s CSV file of my call records into SQL statements. I ran the script and MySQL’s curious decision to just truncate data raised its ugly head.

The first query I ran against the database revealed I was making an awful lot of calls to some Dallas number — (214) 748-3647. I punched it into my phone to figure out who on earth that was, since I would have bet money that I called my parent’s home phone number more than any other number. It wasn’t in my phone.

The problem of course is that integers are normally 32 bits and half the numbers representable by an int are negative, giving a range of -2^31 -> 2^31-1, or -2147483648 -> 2147483647. So the next time you’re trying to remember how big an int is just remember that Integer.MAX is a valid Dallas phone number.

Dylan decided to end my professional career in software development by sending me a link to Crewseekers International, a website dedicated to finding crew for boats. It includes many postings like the following:

	caribbean / australia Reference: CS-2549-AD
	Boat Details: Hallberg rassy 42ft
	Location: Caribbean
	Destination: Australia
	Crew Requirements: I am currrently in the Caribbean and are seeking crew to sail to Tahiti and then onwards. sailing experience is highly regarded, but a good sense of humour and ability to learn just as important.

Sure, they misspelled humor there at the end, but I think I can get over it.

At some point in my future I will break my air conditioning in the middle of summer because I was trying to integrate it with presence information and the forecast of the national weather service. I say this because, despite ostensibly having a job working with technology all day, I spent most of the evening wrestling with Apache trying to get phpmyadmin, rtgui and my custom rolled phone record application (rails) all running simultaneously. I’ve now been wrestling for about 5 hours and I don’t think anything is working any better. Well I can hit phpmyadmin, but only by typing a different url than before.

If Linux Just Worked ™ I don’t think I would enjoy it. The endless tinkering is almost soothing. I’m honestly a little saddened that I was able to put Vista on my media box and the only tinkering I got to do was trying in vain to recover the 400 GiB of my former RAID array. If it were Linux, I surely could have been fiddling long past the point at which I just decided I really don’t need every episode of Scrubs, Arrested Development, 24, Family Guy, Battlestar Gallactica, and The Office available at all times.

One of the barristas at Summer Moon Coffee suggested orange as the flavor for an Italian soda and I really liked it. At Dominican Joe where you have the option of adding cream to Italian sodas, which is a very awesome feature.

However, it is not a good idea to get an orange italian cream soda. You might hope that you would get something like a creamsicle, you do not.

I work from coffee shops. It’s a whole heck of a lot more productive than working from home, and it provides a nice psychological divide “home = my time, coffee shops = their time”. Unfortunately coffee shops have their own little fun features, like college students who bring their laptops configured for UT’s fat pipes or their own cable modems at home and saturate the upload pipes of the coffee shops. Flightpath has a slightly older clientèle and it’s not too big a problem, but Dominican Joe and JP’s systems become almost unusable at times, and I am frustrated.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to find exploitable security holes in the shops routers and see if i can’t muck around and get some QoS queues in place. I am a sick and twisted human being