Do you really want to know?

Is there anybody in there?

 

So, it finally happened. It’s an epidemic but not all that dangerous. Essentially you need to reveal 5 secrets about yourself and then request 5 others to do the same. Jonas tagged me, so I guess it’s time to own up.

 

We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl

I have four fish tanks at home, totalling about 1 cubic meter. In the biggest, 500L, I have Malawi cichlids. The second largest, about 350L is not so full of the koi carp - only 7 actually - that I decided to give a reasonable chance to survive winter. Summer they spent in my garden pond. The last of "my" tanks, about 150L is very full of kois, about 100, but small ones. They are the spawn of the seven big ones. No, they can’t share tanks due to eating habbits of the big fish. Come summer and they’ll all go into the garden pond which easily hosts all of them. It’s about 4 cubic meters in size.

 

Since I threw the comb away

I’ve been sporting long hair since the mid 80s. Wanted dread locks since early 80s, but due to various impediments like parents and completely straight hair it never worked out that way. Late 2000 I was about to cut my hair short, but then I noticed it started to be really tangled where I always secured the pony tail. If there ever was a god, and that creature gives signs this was as good as any I figured. I threw the comb away (never liked combing anyway), knotted the hair and since then I have neither cut my hair nor combed it.

 

Living on a prayer

Not quite a prayer, but noodle soup. During my 4 year sejour in Thailand (1993-1997) I had instant noodles for breakfast for two years straight. For lunch I had mostly noodle soup too (when I didn’t go for the kao pat gong, or fried rice with shrimp). Always the shrimp taste. Not seldom I did some noodles for dinner too. Two years down the road I felt really queasy and lost the breakfast. That scene repeated itself for two more days. Then I realized it was my body’s way to say "thanks but no thanks" to more noodle soup. I couldn’t eat the stuff for several weeks. Now I eat more varied food, but I won’t turn down a quick noodle soup.

 

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

Like Jonas, I also take the bike to work all year round. I have a motorcycle (Yamaha ER5, 550cc), but I rarely ride it nowadays. Not because of winter - I have taken the motorbike to work for 2-3 winters. That’s a true test for the upper rank jedi warrior. You really really REALLY need to stay focused when you’re in heavy traffic on icy roads in -10 centrigrades. I participated in Vätternrundan with Jonas and two other colleages three years ago.

 

Incidentally I learned to drive motorcycles in Thailand. That’s another sport requiring focus and concentration. During my 4 year stay 2 of my best friends died in car accidents.

 

Swimming in the swimming pool

My personal record for swimming under water is about 50 meters (done in a 33m pool). While that was some time ago, I can easily do 30m now (in a 25m pool) and I did 40m last summer (in a 10 meter pool). I always fancied the sub-surface world and I always wanted to do scuba diving. I watched all the underwater movies on TV when I was younger, and read the books by Jaques Cousteau and the likes - but due to circumstances partially outside of my control I still haven’t done it.

 

So. Now all I need to do is try to find five friends to tag. Not that I don’t have that many friends, but this is spreading like wild fire. Let’s see. I’ll tag Anders, Henrik, Malcolm, David Clegg and Danny Thorpe.

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on January 16th, 2007 under Misc | 2 Comments »

The ECO home page

I guess there are more ‘lurkers’ than posters in the ECO news group (newsgroups.borland.com / borland.public.delphi.modeldrivenarchitecture.eco) so it may be worth mentioning here too that we have collected some ECO information on the ECO team’s home page. We have some unofficial patches uploaded to CodeCentral that you most likely would like to look into.

 

I hope to see you in the news group. Lots of friendly and skilled people there who most often are ready and willing to lend a helping hand.

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on December 11th, 2006 under ECO | 4 Comments »

Med Rymden i Blodet

I’m just sitting here in my home watching live TV from the docking of the space station to ISS. It’s a service from NASA TV from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html. The reason I watch this apart from a general interest is that the first Swede in space is on board, Christer Fuglesang. Congratulations Christer from the ECO team!

 

Personally I am all for space research and hope we reach for the stars!

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on December 11th, 2006 under Misc | Comment now »

Look at me when I’m talking to you!

Let’s meet!

 

My good friend and colleage Fredrik has set up a Delphi meeting in Stockholm (September 14th). While aimed for the developer crowd in the Stockholm region (or at least Swedish speakers) parts of the ECO R&D team will be there (maybe not all, but at least me, Jonas and Jan . Not yet sure about Anders).

 

Follow this link for more details.

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on August 25th, 2006 under ECO | Comment now »

Meta sports

TV season is over

Summer seems to have entered center stage and come to stay for a while in Sweden. My favourite TV shows (some of you have guessed it’s this one and this one). The rest of TV seems to be filled with some sports tournament…

Anyway, if you’re into meta sports, I found a link for you.

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on June 13th, 2006 under Misc | Comment now »

Eco book in English

Eco book available - in English

 

Lots of very valuable information in the ECO book now available in English. Those of you who still prefer a German version can still find it here.

 

A big thanks to Alois for this effort in making ECO information available! Do support his efforts!

 

–jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on May 24th, 2006 under ECO | 4 Comments »

Code compatible

Code compatible

 

Whenever there’s development afoot we realize we can do better. First and foremost this pertains to the feature set, and sure, we’ll continue to add features that rock the world.

 

What is more problematic is when names are no longer appropriate or API calls need (or in some cases merely "need") to move.

 

An example of the first case may be a function that is called CreateSchema. Let’s say it’s implemented on all the persistence mappers that can actually create a schema in a SQL backend. Now, what if we want to unify the behaviour with the XML mapper. CreateSchema in that context would probably do something like delete the file containing the data. So, we add the operation CreateSchema to the XmlMapper… however, it no longer always create a schema, but rather prepare the storage space.

 

What would you prefer, that operations slightly change scope, but not name, or that we keep naming updated to reflect functionality? Obviously, we could keep the old name and add a new name, thus widening the API, and having to explain that in some cases, but not all CreateSchema equals PrepareStorageSpace.

 

The other case is somewhat similar, in that we judge the overall energy required to maintain the mental model of the system would go down if we moved a call from here to there. It would break code, if that particular operation was put to use, but add the benefit of making the entire system easier to understand.

 

We could leave traces, like pepper the code with obsolete attributes and remove obsoleted function points after a release…

 

The main problem with changing the API is that it does break user code, and we firmly believe you all want to install your new version of Delphi and just recompile your application. When is it ok to require you to do changes before you get to the "Compile OK" message?

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on May 22nd, 2006 under ECO | 5 Comments »

New ECO tutorial out there

ECO tutorial in English

 

I just found out about an ECO tutorial in English. Great work Johan! I also added it to my list of online resources for ECO.

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on May 16th, 2006 under ECO | 1 Comment »

Tools for nothing (we gotta move those microwave ovens)

Helping the community

 

The fine folks at ModelMaker are giving away free stuff (should really use the blink-tag for that ). Check out the details at http://www.modelmakertools.com/free-licenses.html on how to win a ModelMaker product (like Eco3Modeler)

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on May 3rd, 2006 under ECO | Comment now »

Go .com yourself

Go .Com yourself

 

Remember that nice little slogan from a few years back? Well, did you? A whole lotta people did, as approximately 50 million .com domain names are already registered. On a recent radio show from Future Tense I learned a lot about this, especially after looking at this in-depth analysis of names.

 

• All two-letter domain names are taken.
• All three-letter domain names are taken.
• Slightly less than 80% of all four-letter domain names are taken.
• Approximately 7% of all five-letter domain names are taken.

 

The article doesn’t end there. You get distribution curves of name lengths, learn how many domain names contain the sequence sex and how many of those also include the sequence free. Did you know how long a domain name can be? 63 characters. How many of those are registered? Only 538, actually.

 

Ever wanted to know the distribution of initial letters in a domain name? Yep, it’s there too!

 

–Jesper

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Posted by jesper hogstrom archive on April 7th, 2006 under Misc | 1 Comment »