SQL Server - argh!

I'm currently having to get 'into' SQL server at work. I come from an Oracle background, but hey, how different can they be, right? Well... you'd be surprised.

One of the nice things about Oracle is PL/SQL. In my last job I wrote a lot of PL/SQL... it's easy, quick to do, well documented, and allows good software engineering. SQL Server uses something called 't-SQL' and compared to PL/SQL, it's appalling. The best way of demonstrating this is with an example. In stored procedures I can do this in PL/SQL:

PROCEDURE MyProcedure
    errorCode        OUT NUMBER,
    errorText        OUT VARCHAR2,
    someItemID    IN     ITEM.ITEMID%TYPE,
    someNumber    IN     ITEM.ITEMNUMBER%TYPE,
    somethingElse IN OUT NUMBER,
    result           OUT RESULTTABLE.RESULT%TYPE) IS

This can be part of a package defined as two files - a spec and a body. All good software engineering.

With MS SQL Server I simply can't so this. As far as I know, there are no packages with specs and bodies, for one thing. There are weird, implicit returns for selects, variables defined within the procedure, and other strange and wacky stuff that really works against every good software engineering principle. Also, a roughly equivalent header might look like this:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[MyProcedure]
    @errorCode     INT OUT,
    @errorText     VARCHAR(1024) OUT,
    @someItemID    INT,
    @someNumber    INT,
    @somethingElse INT OUT,
    @result        INT OUT AS

The biggest problem is that you can't get the type from the columns of a table, so if the table changed you have to change all of your code. This is insane! Large applications may have thousands of stored procedures, all of which would have to be changed. The lack of packages (although as I say, I might be wrong there) mean that you can't logically group procedures either, and you lose some context that you get in Oracle just from the package name.

As I mentioned, the way stored procedures seem to work in SQL Server is by implicit returns. For example, say we have this line:

  declare @intReturnCode int

We can then add a 'return @intReturnCode' later and return a value not even defined in the header. Worse, you can do something like this:

  set @someValue = (select fieldValue from someTable where name = 'this')

So looking at the parameters you'd have no idea that you were going to get 'someValue' back, or what type it is. Madness, absolute madness.

I must admit I was wary of SQL Server, but the more I look at it the more I'm amazed that anyone actually uses it. I mean, they only added exception handling in 2005! It's like some sort of toy database, but with a fairly hefty price tag.

Anyway, feel free to correct me. In the meantime I will continue to think poorly of it..

Bibcursed bug fixes

My tiny 8 year old curses-based application Bibcursed has some reasonably dedicated users. One of them sent me a bug report recently, so I've just put together the first new release for five years or so. You can grab it from SourceForge.

I think I'll Mac-ize it next... put a GUI on there and see what happens, although I'll keep the curses version too. Terminal-based apps are usually all you need for useful tasks, and the ability to run them over SSH in a terminal is useful. It sounds daft, but one thing that attracted me to OSX is the fact that BASH and vi and there by default. Windows just doesn't have that functionality and probably never will, which is why it will never displace UNIX when it comes to serious usage in critical applications.

Embracing Facebook

So, Facebook is still growing to encompass almost the entire world. This can't be ignored when you're a dynamic and hip Internet music outfit like we are here at The Filter, so today we released the MyFilter Facebook app.

Please give it a go. While you're at it, you can install the client (from our Web site) to get you personal charts and recommendations. You can get the client for Windows and OSX, of course. And Nokia phones.

So, that might all sound like a bit of an advert, and I suppose it is. However, we've got some genuinely exciting plans and it's all free, so what have you got to lose? It's time for us all to rediscover our music collections!

Girls, Geeks, Google

Yesterday evening I went to the Google offices by Victoria Station in London for the thirteenth Girl Geek Dinner. This was the first one I've attended at a different venue, and I was interested to see the Google offices. They're in Belgrave House on Buckingham Palace Road - an impressively large building which also houses American Express (I think). The event itself was held in the staff canteen, and Google had laid-on food, booze and so on, as well as some cute promotional stuff. Top marks for all of that.

The first talk was given by Shivauna Raff, who talked about the future of search. She touched on some interesting stuff about vertical searching, and how she thinks the search market will go generally. The next talk was by the Google team behind the mobile version of Google Checkout. They had some interesting tales of the rather painful-sounding world of getting applications to run on phone... not an inconsiderable challenge when you consider the different phones that exist, and the fact that the same phone models can differ when used on different networks!

The way that products are developed within Google provoked some discussion. For the size of the company and number of users, Google use quite small development teams. This surprised some of the audience, but I think Google must have something right! I'll argue about the best way of doing things with them once I've made my own billions...

Sarah recorded the talks - you can find them on Viddler. You can also see Jane Dallaway's photos on Flickr.

Developers Developers Developers!

...so goes the familiar Microsoft rant, as expressed by Steve Ballmer. What he should have added, of course, is "They had better not be too clever if they want to work with us!". A guy called Jamie Cansdale has found this out to his cost by developing his Testdriven.NET plugin for Visual Studio. Basically, Microsoft are going to sue him for using APIs they encouraged people to use, mainly because something he's giving away for free might compete with one of their products. It's worth reading this article on it, including the increasingly threatening emails they are sending him.

Every day I'm glad that I don't have to develop on Windows. Not only would it mean actually using Windows (something that I can avoid completely now, thankfully), but Windows developers have such an overpriced monoculture to deal with when it comes to development, that it pretty much stifles innovation... unless you have piles of cash, of course. There's a pretty good reason why all the best new ideas are coming from non-Windows platforms, and by acting like they are in this story, Microsoft are only going to make the problem worse for themselves.

Isn't The Internet Brilliant?

Google continue to chuck-out things that impress me, and even better, they're free. Take the recent addition of 'Street Views' on Google Maps, for example. You can now become a virtual tourist of several cities in the US, and it is done really well. I'm not sure how they've done it, but the objects (people, cars and so on) all look normal and not stretched and stitched, as you'd imagine. I spent a few minutes looking at exactly the same views I had poking around San Francisco and Las Vegas last year - it's almost spooky.

Also on the Google front, Checkout is brilliant. I buy quite a lot of stuff from eBuyer as they're very cheap for computery bits and pieces, and for orders over thirty quid you get ten pounds off simply buy paying with Google Checkout! Can't argue with that - I've saved quite a lot already. Well... 'saved' in a sense, since I probably didn't exactly need some of the things I bought, but you know what I mean.

We're now into June, so I'm looking forward to the WWDC on the 11th. Not that I'm going myself of course, but we'll finally learn the 'super top secret' Leopard features, plus I'm sure there will be some product announcements. I'm hoping for a boost in Mac Mini specs, but there is a rumour it is being dropped! I guess I'll find out soon enough, but if it is dropped then I'll just have to pick-up one of the remaining ones. The current Core2Duo would do the job, but hopefully I'll be able to pay the same for a better machine.

There's iPhone promotion going on at the 'All Things Digital' conference at the moment, but that's far enough from its UK release that I'm not really thinking about it. At the same conference, Microsoft showed-off a whizzy table that is a bit like a giant iPhone. I guess it was kind of cool, but they're talking about around ten thousand quid for it, so it's not exactly a consumer device. Looking at the demo video, it's pretty similar to the iPhone Multitouch interface too, so not that innovative.

Facebook continues to gather steam. Every day it seems more people I know join it... I think it has reached that critical mass now where a social networking site actually becomes useful. The new applications that can be added to your profile page are also pretty cool, and as long as they don't allow people to change their page layout/fonts/colours then it's all good. If people start being able to mess with their pages then it will just become another MySpace, with people getting 'creative' and making horrendous, unreadable pages. Urgh.

Geeking Out

On Thursday I was in the City at the eleventh London Girl Geek Dinner. This was the third one I've been to, and this time I offered my video services. There were a couple of issues with the camera and the new wireless mic I have, but with a bit of crafty editing it hasn't come-out too badly. You can check it out via this link to Viddler. Be patient with the crazy camera swinging - it calms down after a minute or two! I was fiddling around and slightly boozed-up.

The event itself was interesting. First-up was David Terrar from Wiki Wednesdays, which is another geeky networking London event. Then there was Angela Beesley from Wikia, which is a bit like a commercial Wiki site, although Angela talks about her work with Wikipedia too. Finally there's the Wiki team from Astraware who talk about using Wikis in their company. All quite interesting, although I was quite boozed-up by the end. Hopefully that doesn't show too badly in the video! Sarah says more about the evening in her post (the first link here), so check that out if you're interested. Oh, and Radio 4 were there recording the event for Woman's Hour, so I guess it may crop-up on there too. You never know.

Eyejot

I've been playing around a bit with Eyejot, a Web site that allows you to send video messages to anyone else with an email address. Now this may not sound particularly revolutionary, but it's all Flash-based with nothing to install, and should work on pretty much any machine. It worked very easily with the built-in iSight camera on my iMac, for example. You can watch your video before you send it, and it's all quick and painless.

So why would you want to send a video instead of text email? Well, it's quicker, and I can see occasions where it's more efficient to blither-on for a few seconds than to send an email. It's all free anyway, so why not give it a go and see what you think? It's one of those ideas that might just take off...

The death of DRM.. and WMA?

Today at 1pm the world of online music buying was changed in a big way when Steve Jobs announced that DRM-free music will be available from the iTunes store. The DRM-free music will be 99p per track (instead of 79p for DRM) but will be at twice the bitrate, which is 256Kbps AAC. The per-album price will be the same as for DRM-restricted albums, and users will be able to upgrade their existing DRM-restricted tracks.

So why is this big news? Well for one thing DRM-free music is what everyone wants. You will now be able to buy music from the iTunes store and play it on any device, whether portable player or computer, etc. The higher bitrate is an added bonus of course as music will now sound even better. The objects that some people had about buying music on iTunes were largely about 'lock-in', but now all of those objections no longer apply. If people really object to the higher price and don't care about DRM then they can still buy the DRM-restricted files. Everyone is a winner!

The best thing about this move is of course that it will kill the WMA format. EVerything can play unprotected AAC files (yes, even the Zune), and the iTunes store easily has the largest selection of music available of all of the online music sites. The Zune wasn't an attempt at a competitive music player, it was an attempt to lock people into WMA, and therefore Windows. The multiplatform AAC and iTunes now stomps all over it as you'd be daft to buy your music anywhere else. WMA is dead as a commercial digital music format.

The consumer will benefit. Other music stores that only offer DRM-limited files will have to remove the DRM to compete, and at that point all online music stores will be competing on 'real' terms - price, available selection, and so on. It is a good day for everyone, even those who don't care for the iTunes store. Freedom of the user, and value for money, has been substantially increased.

Only EMI have signed-up so far, but that's about 20% of the music. The other labels will sign-up if they see that the EMI move is sucessful, so let's make that success happen! At least one of your favourite artists will be on EMI - buy a DRM-free track of theirs when you can and lets show that we consumers want the freedom to play our music on whatever device we want to.

Vista Will Steal Your Rights, Then Destroy The World

Windows Vista is unlikely to destroy the world all by itself of course, but as this interesting article points out, it will certainly help fill landfill sites, increase global warming, and result in mountains of perfectly good hardware being thrown away. Something to think about. As well as all of that it also takes away your right to do what you want with your own computer. I think this is going to hit creative people first, but will there be a backlash when people realise they can't watch their BlueRay or HD-DVD films because Microsoft doesn't approve of their monitor? We'll see.

Ha! Nice One, Bill...

Today sees the general retail launch of Microsoft Windows Vista. This isn't a cheap thing to buy in the UK, being about twice as much as it is in the US, but let's leave that aside for the minute. For now I feel I have to draw attention to the ridiculous things that Bill Gates is claiming, specifically that Vista is "dramatically more secure than any other operating system released". Let's just think about that statement for a minute as it's a ridiculous claim on a couple of levels.

Firstly, you never claim that sort of thing on the day of release. Let's just imagine that someone releases a worm that breaks Vista in the next few months. It's almost certain to happen. It's going to make Bill (and Microsoft, by extension) look silly, and a bit cocky, while just saying "it's better than XP" wouldn't. Second, it's simply not true. I'm willing to accept that it's the most secure version of Windows ever, but any IT professional knows that Windows is a bit of a joke when it comes to security compared with any UNIX-based OS. There's a good reason why you just don't get viruses on Sun boxes and Macs - they're inherently more secure from the bottom-up than Windows is. UNIX has been around in one form or another since the 70's, and with software the older something is, the more time people have had to find bugs in it. Developing a modern OS from scratch is always going to result in more bugs than anything UNIX based. Developing something from current Windows code is going to be even worse.

Let's hope that people don't fall for Bill's PR line. Where is the innovation? Were is WinFS? Where is, oh, anything that's not pretty-much ripped off OSX? Buy Vista if you have to use Windows, but don't claim it's more secure than anything else. I'm not knocking it - I'll install it where I would have had XP before, but it's not Gods gift to computing and I'd bet Windows users will still have to suffer virus checkers, spyware detectors, and all of the other stuff you have to currently run if you want to use Windows on the Internet.

BBC On Demand

Technological progress has been slowed today by Ofcom after they ruled that the BBCs plans to provide content on demand are too good and might hurt commercial competitors. Don't Ofcom realise that this ruling is completely stupid? The 'commercial competitors' won't be showing BBC programmes anyway, and the BBC service will only show BBC programmes. Where is the cross-over? As for 'damage to DVD sales', they are DVD sales that the BBC will lose! The whole thing is utterly stupid, and thanks to some stupid old men with weird ideas, having all of the BBC content I have already paid for (through my licence fee) available on demand looks like being that bit further away.

Vista and DRM

The fact that Vista is locked-down and slightly crippled thanks to DRM is relatively well known in techno-geek circles, but do consumers know what they are facing if they shell out for it? There's an article on the BBC today that mentions the forced degradation of video quality if you play your (legally purchased) content on equipment that the film studios don't want you to use. What's worse is that even if you have the right equipment, playing the content is going to cost you CPU cycles just to remove all of the DRM that has been added anyway. Extra CPU cycles means a slower computer and more electricity used, along with more global warming of course. And for what? Those who want to rip the films and distribute them on the P2P networks are going to get around this anyway, so the only people who lose-out are legitimate users.

I predict that some people will defend Microsoft and claim that it's not their fault if the film studios insist on this DRM. Well, guess again. Do you really think that the studios would release films that couldn't play on PCs and 'media centres'? It's an increasingly large segment of the market, and essential if high definition discs are going to take-off. Microsoft had a choice, but they decided to play along at a real, monetary cost to all of their users. Now of course I'm picking on Microsoft here and other software vendors might do the same, but let's face it, we're talking about the Mac and Linux as far as competitors go. Linux won't have DRM, and Apple have a good track record compared to Microsoft. There's no tax to Universal on an iPod, unlike the Zune - there's no limitation to 96kbps MP3 encoding in iTunes, unlike Windows Media. Time will tell, but it looks like Windows users will find their ability to actually use their own machines being increasingly crippled. It's time they made a stand.

Slingbox

So anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got around to setting-up my Slingbox. Here it is still in its box and ready to join its friends under the telly:




It's pretty small. For comparison, here it is alongside a bottle of beer and a Wii remote:



Cool. Anyway, as you can see from the first photo I need it to 'play nice' with my Tivo and cable TV box. In theory the cable should be ok if it can live with the Tivo, and indeed it can. Although there are no spare SCART or composite outputs on the Tivo, the Slingbox comes with an adapter that sits between the SCART socket and cable and sneaks some composite video out. This goes into the Slingbox. Out of the Slingbox come two IR LEDs that you position in front of the Tivo so that it receives their signals, as if they were the remote. The Slingbox then plugs into the gigabit Ethernet switch that I have at that end of the room.

So does it work well? The answer is yes, it most definitely does! I downloaded the latest Mac Slingplayer software from Slingmedia site and gave it a go. Video quality is excellent, and alongside the video feed is a 'virtual' version of the Tivo remote that behaves exactly as the real one does. The software determines how much bandwidth you have and adjusts the video feeds accordingly, so with gigabit Ethernet in the house it does pretty well. I also tried the Windows client on my work laptop and it's not bad from the office - certainly watchable.

All in all a pretty good gadget then. While I could just get a USB TV tuner, I have to say that it's very nice to be able to watch my own Tivo from anywhere. I can also set it to record stuff if I'm out too, and watch pre-recorded TV, so it's much more useful that just watching what's on at the moment. Top stuff. Coincidentally, Dixons are selling it for 40 quid off from their Web site if you enter 'NOW35' at the checkout. Top tip from Google sponsored links there.

Macworld

Just a quick post - I'm away with work and grabbing two minutes. So, Macworld happened. The AppleTV (aka iTV) is pretty sweet, but check out the iPhone! It's super sexy. Sign me up for one... just as soon as they reach the UK. Looks like that might be at the 'end of the year' though.. bah!

Good old Apple. When they do something they do it right.

On OSX and Vista

In my 'tech predictions for 2007' I remarked on how Vista is a poor copy of OSX. This irked several people and I received the expected accusations of being a fanboy. Well, it's not just me - this bias-free article from InformationWeekcompares OSX with Vista. Have a look. Most IT professionals won't argue that OSX isn't technically superior, and it's nice to have an article to point people to.

2007 Tech Predictions

Predicting what may happen in the coming year is one of those entertaining traditions that lots of people like to maintain, so I felt I would join in! The danger of predicting technology trends is obvious of course, but I should be relatively safe with a 12 month timeframe! So, here goes...

1. On its UK launch the PS3 will sell fairly well, but by the end of the year the Nintendo Wii will have the most units shipped. XBox360 will be in second place.


2. The Zune won't sell well and will quietly be dropped. I mean... who owns one? The only one I've ever actually seen 'in the flesh' was owned by a Microsoft employee.


3. Vista will finally ship (what is it... 3 years late?) to generally underwhelmed consumers. The only people who will bother with it are those who will get it bundled with their new PCs, but of course it will become the dominant OS by default. Meanwhile, Apple will release Leopard so that MS will have something new to copy (badly) for their next version of Windows. To be fair, Vista looks better than XP and will probably make my life at work (where I have no choice but to use Windows) easier, but it's very little very late, and hardly 'innovative'


4. Consumer broadband connectivity will be high enough to really start eating into TV viewing. Channel 4 have their on-demand service already of course, and once the BBC service is running I predict that people will start to drop cable and satellite subscriptions. After all, these are mostly held for the convenience of 'something good being on' when you sit down to watch, rather than the number of channels.


5. The fullscreen video iPod will launch, with moderate success. Technogeeks will love it, but most people don't want to watch video on small devices. Much more successful will be the video downloads from the iTunes store though - people can use this and still watch video on their monitors (and TVs, thanks to things like the iTV), and that's what they want. The new video iPod will simply be a channel to enable this.


6. Hardware sales of desktops and laptops will rise, but more slowly than the last few years. Most people who want a computer already own one that is powerful enough for their needs. More gaming will take place on consoles, so the major driver for more powerful computers will be lessened. The MacOS will see a modest increase its overall percentage of OSs in use, as will Linux. Mac hardware will see a good boost since people can now run Windows on it, if they must. If Leopard really does run Windows apps seamlessly then that will help too since people won't have to install Parallels, or any other third-party software.

OK, there are my predictions. Let's see what the year brings!