Surprise #1 – SATA drive happiness

The new SATA drives I got were smaller physically than the old ones but had more capacity. Also, the SSD's were the tiny 2.5" ones. The surprise is better air flow around the drives and everything running cooler. Cable management also improved a bit because I had a chance to put the drives in the holders in order with the ports. The one true happy surprise was how easy it was to go back to my old OS by just swapping out the cables and power connectors. These new SATA connectors are great but you have to make sure they lock in properly. More than once I had cables coming loose causing a boot to fail.

Surprise # 2 – The Internet Rocks

Normally when I rebuild a computer I spent a huge amount of time installing software, configuring it, getting settings right, and all that mess. This time I just brought up Chrome, installed a few choice extensions such as Xmarks, session manager, and a couple developer tools. Then I was up and running with most of the tools I use all the time. Using these Internet sites instead of installing software and dealing with all the management of it saved a bunch of time. Any more our computers are becoming access points to services on the Internet. That is good in many ways and bad in some, but it sure helped eliminate a huge time waster for me this time around.

Surprise #3 – I was able to access everything

I use a password database called KeePass which is a Password Safe program. I find it impossible to live without. I keep a lot more than just passwords in it. I keep server addresses, configuration settings, logins and passwords of course, and any other kind of information I need to remember but will obviously forget. I keep the database file for it in Dropbox so that it is available to me on any computer I use and my Android. A couple of times I had to go to my phone to look up some information I needed to provide for a login, configuration key, subscription id, etc. I also learned of a couple things I forgot to put in. But overall I had 95% of the information I needed and so the rebuild process went much smoother than normal.

Surprise #4 – Always ask for hardware help

During the process of installing Windows 7, I had a problem that was causing the install to be very slow. Incredibly slow. Slower than watching grass grow in Siberia. After finally reaching a high level of exasperation, I called up my brother-in-law. He thought it was bad memory and had me try a few things including running memtest86+ which didn't find an error, but stalled while testing the 4th ram stick. Pulling it resolved the problem which wasn't apparent before because Windows XP never made use of that stick. I had 8 GB installed and just kept putting off the rebuild. It is my main computer after all and my livelihood so having it down for 2-3 days is a real problem. Getting his help put everything on the fast track so the idea here is to enlist the help of someone else who has a broader view of the situation and can probably see something you won't. I would rather have my machine running properly than to feel stupid for asking someone a dumb question.

Surprise #5 – Seeing the world through cleaned windows

I have enjoyed Windows XP for a VERY LONG TIME. It has been a very stable platform on which to do software development. It has its quirks of course, but over the years I have grown quite adept at dealing with it and being productive with the OS. Now that I have Windows 7 installed its as if I have emerged from a tunnel. Many of the problems my machine had are now working properly. The machine goes to sleep and wakes up properly. It boots extremely fast and doesn't spend 5 minutes after boot loading drivers, startup programs, and all kinds of other junk. And having a clean machine free of 100's of test installed, trial programs, and clean drives as well feels very liberating. I have drive space again, a small list of programs installed, and browsers that don't stall or need restarting all the time. It is amazing how much cruft can accumulate over the years and its affect on the OS.

So if you are postponing a rebuild my vote would be to go for it and just take the pain. Once you come out the other side it will all feel worth it. Just make sure you allow lots of extra time to deal with the problems that will pop up. I had a number of them but in the end I was able to get past them. Now I just have to tell myself not to try out every program I see or better, I should take the old drives and setup a machine where I can try out all kinds of things and not mess up my freshly build development machine.

What I learned recently though is that using functions such as YEAR(), MONTH(), and DAY() defeat the use of indexes and primary keys most of the time. Because these functions have to be performed on the date value, each record in the table is usually processed. This slows the query down greatly and causes a lot of needless computation to result.

What I found was the BETWEEN option in MySQL. Using this allows the query optimizer to utilize indexes fully, and eliminates the need for many date computations which can be expensive.

An added benefit I found was how to handle the beginning and end dates for my queries. Instead of calculating what the end date was, I could use the INTERVAL term and let MySQL figure it out for me. This also allowed me to use the same query for my monthly, quarterly, and yearly time ranges very simply. All I had to do was take the date and the interval such as the 3 examples below.

    BETWEEN '2011-10-01' AND '2011-10-01' + INTERVAL 1 MONTH
    BETWEEN '2011-10-01' AND '2011-10-01' + INTERVAL 3 MONTH
    BETWEEN '2011-10-01' AND '2011-10-01' + INTERVAL 1 YEAR

In this way I didn't have to do any extra work in my application, and I was assured that MySQL would choose records in the correct date range and take advantage of my indexes and primary keys. In this case, trying to do some performance improvements taught me a better way to write my SQL and resulted in less code which was easier to understand.

As you can see, modifying the query with the right amount of time is quite trivial. I have dropdown values in the SELECT on my web pages and all I have to do is append "-01" and then append the interval the user has chosen. Its great when code can be made simpler and more powerful at the same time.

The problem though is what to do once the table gets this data. I want to modify some of the cells to add color, links, and other features based on the data there. Unfortunately the normal sAjaxSource value doesn't provide a hook where I can do these things after the data is retrieved. That is where fnServerData comes into play. I learned that by proving a function to this attribute, I can do just about anything after the JSON is returned. An example looks something like the following.

"fnServerData": function(sSource, aoData, fnCallback) {
    $.getJSON( sSource, aoData, function (json) {
        fnCallback(json);
        oTable.fnAdjustColumnSizing();
        hideWaiting();
     } );
}

The code above will be called when ever JSON data is being retrieved for the table. In this case I call the fnCallback function to process the JSON data that was returned. Then I am fixing the header and table column alignment on the table, and then I am hiding the DIV that is being used as a waiting graphic while the data is being retrieved. I could just as easily called a method to update the table cells, calculate a sum or average, or any other task once the data has been loaded and put into the table.

In my case being able to hide the DIV being shown while waiting was my main reason for learning about fnServerData. But now I use it just about everywhere since I always have some cleanup or post processing I want to do to the table. This is much easier than trying to do that work and pass it back through the JSON data. I also appreciate that the work is done using the browser instead of my server so performance for my system is enhanced by having less work to do.

I emailed them to ask a number of questions. I got answers to all of them from a person there who wasn't pushy or eager to make a sale. I wasn't ready to start the project right then and he didn't pressure me to do so. About 3 weeks later I created a contest and waited for things to happen. I got a few designs initially and provided a little feedback. Things didn't take off until around the middle of the week and then near the end a few really good designers jumped in. I ended up liking 2 of the designs so much I bought both of them. I can use one for a mobile phone button while the other one is being used for the website logo.

I highly recommend choosing a company to work with based on their support, feedback, and ability to deliver. There were other options, a number of them cheaper, but I feel like I got my money's worth and then some. It was a good experience and has opened me up to outsourcing more work. There are only so many hours and when there is a ton to do, and getting good help now seems like a definite possibility.

<h:outputText value=”#{empty obj.name ? obj.other : obj.name}”>

Using empty will check for both null and empty string values. Then it can choose which value using the ternary operator ? inside the value itself. Keeps the code clean, easy to read, and fewer tags to parse. I could have swapped the values and put the word not in front by then that is yet another thing to maintain and parse.

<h:outputText value=" &nbsp; " escape="false" />

That is all. You don’t really need the spaces around the html entity for a non-breaking space, but I needed more room. Don’t forget to set escape to false. Otherwise it will show the text on the screen instead of allowing the browser to show the fixed space you were hoping for.

http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/?q=node/15

You need to go into your eclipse directory and remove the following so that it is completely gone. It is not enough to just remove the jar file.

• plugins/com.mbartl.eclipse.viplugin.statusbar_1.0.4.jar
• plugins/com.mbartl.viplugin.eclipse.layer_1.19.0/
• plugins/com.mbartl.viplugin.eclipse.help_1.19.0/

Look in the features directory to make sure there is no mbartl jar files there as well.

Restart eclipse and you should no longer be bothered with the popup asking you to pay for a license.

The fields that Amazon includes in the Fulfilled Shipments Data report of concern are:

• order_id – This is a unique id for each customer order
• amazon_order_item_id – Refers to an item in the customer order
• shipment_id – A unique identifier for shipments. An order can be split into multiple shipments.
• shipment_item_id – An id for the items in an order. Quantities can be changed so this refers to the items in a particular shipment.
• merchant_order_id – Specified by the seller when requesting a shipment through FBA for a sale not on Amazon.com.
• merchant_order_item_id – An id referring to an item in the merchant order

When attempting to merge the data back together, dealing with merchant orders is fairly straight forward. There are just the two values and normally the order doesn’t get split. For an Amazon order though, it can get split up, and there can be multiple item_id’s that have the same ASIN, price, quantity, and more. Initially this caused my 6 calendar order to be reported as 1 calendar because every one of the rows in the report looked the same. Another order I had was split into a quantity of 2, and another line with quantity 6, and that sale was being reported as having sold 2 instead of 8.

All 4 values for the order and shipment need to be pulled together to ensure an accurate accounting for everything in the order. To ensure this, I created a unique key across all 6 of these columns in the database table. That let me more easily sum up the quantities, shipping costs, prices, and calculate what the total order cost me, what fees there were, and how much I made. If care is not given to dealing with these 4 different values, then your calculations will be way off for orders that have multiple items.

Readability posted an open letter to Apple explaining their thoughts on the matter which I think are true for many companies. Apple has made it difficult or virtually impossible to target iOS as a platform with their new rules. Companies want to create a native apps in order to improve the user experience. If they are not able to do that, they will do their best with what they have and if they make fantastic web applications, that will drive web technology further and make it the platform of choice. It is open, no one controls it, and is everywhere. The comments on the open letter suggest that Apple will have to change their tune since so many are mad and the rule change. We will have to wait and see. But if it pushed open software, open platforms, and open business models; I hope they hold out long enough for it to take hold as I think most companies benefit when they are free to innovate and not have to cater to the whims of a platform owner.