Thoughts on design and more

I discovered TED in 2007 while I was in a hotel room late at night, during a business travel, wandering from one TV program to another, finally falling on a documentary about TED, showing the following video of Philippe Starck giving in a amusing way his thoughts , from design to "the global story" :

Hope you'll enjoy it and get the feeling to browse other videos.

JEE webapp RetroEngineering part 1 : database surfing

A few days ago I was faced one more time to an existing JEE application I didn't know much about before. Of course most of the team involved in design and development has left, leaving few documents behind...

Good points to start, project modules have been developed using ECLIPSE and MAVEN and managed with CVS.

I start with a quick look at the source code. Nothing very special : based on Spring, Struts2, ExtJS for a large part of the web front-end, OJB for the database mapping.

Then I look at the database, currently hosted on an ORACLE 10 instance.
Schema scripts exist in CVS and most tables are connected through numerous FK.
Okay, the schema seems to be consistent and strong (no hazardous implicit dependencies between tables, not much denormalization around at first sight).

Basically I think of two major options to learn more about the schema :

• read one by one the SQL scripts stored in CVS
• browse the living schema with my old friends SQuirreL, SqlDeveloper or the ECLIPSE plugins (my two favorites being SQLExplorer which is currently based on SQuirreL and ToadExtensions which seems to be a packaging of the old dead jOra that used to be at jora.luenasoft.de, as it is still referenced in the eclipse marketplace)

At this point, my mind starts to dream about a magical tool that would allow me to easily navigate from one table, call it TableA, to those "below" (referenced by FK from TableA) and "above" (referencing TableA by FK). In my dream, this tool is free, easy to install and use, non-intrusive and if possible open-source.

The company I work for uses Enterprise Architect, that can inspect a living schema and build up an UML schema from it, but I will finally get a gigantic sheet of paper with all the tables in random order (putting apart that it is not free nor open-source).

First I Google "database navigator". Mmmh first results does not appeal much to me.
Second chance, searched over sourceforge.net... not much either.
Third chance, searched over googlecode.com... bingo ! the oracle-genie entry catch my eye : high activity, web based... smells good...

The project page provides an impressive video of its capabilities :

Let's have a try.
I download the package (a single war), copy it in the webapps folder of my tomcat local install (a very old 6.0), start it with "catalina.bat start" (yes, I'm working on Windows Seven 64 bits...).
I open my browser on localhost:8080/oracle-genie/ and the oracle-genie login page appears.
I enter the JDBC url, the schema username and password and click on connect.

The whole thing took me about 5 minutes, and that's it.

I begin the navigation from one of the tables on the left pane, and its details appears. Two sections address my "need of navigation" :

• Foreign key section : the "below" tables
• Related table section : the "above" tables

Both provides links that make the navigation a breeze.

The tool also provides a cool semi-graphical view of current table, its "above" and "below" tables around (actually what I called "below" tables are shown above, and "above" tables are shown below, but arrows between tables make it very clear to read and understand).

That's exactly what I needed.

A bit of trip hop to put in your headphones

Yesterday evening I was watching again Paris from C.Klapish and I realized that the soundtrack was really good (at first sight a few years ago, I was probably too focused on the story and the characters, to pay attention to the soundtrack; it was clearly different this time).

So I listened to good trip hop :

and

  

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Puzzle of the day

The father has syphilis, the mother suffers from progressive tuberculosis.
They currently have four children, first being blind, second is dead, third is deaf mute and fourth has tuberculosis.
The mother is pregnant for a fifth time, do you suggest abortion ?

(answer lower in the page)


















If you answer YES, you just killed Beethoven...


So abortion is Evil ? Not so sure, it can bring social benefits, as demonstrated by Freakonomics.

Fun of the day

In love, there's no problem that cannot find its solution...

Shot in Trnava, april 2006

Misc of the day

• An instructive analysis of market share evolution during the last 30 years of personal computing, showing out of numbers the amazing increase of Apple, and a technologic mutation at the expense of PC : the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-computing
• An astonishing 3D panorama technology : airpano
• Even better, 360° live immersive video
• If you're a nerd, you may enjoy this set of citations (more or less) famous. You can even use it during a keynote to make a break or hook a sleepy audience...

Fun of the day : it's only truth

Source : http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/developers-designers-pms-qa.jpg

Fun of the day

Two web sites I occasionaly get a glance to make a break...

La Boite Verte, where I always find amazing, surprising, astounding, strange, funny, (put your prefered adjective here) articles. Some examples :
L’humour photographique de LIFE Magazine
du WTF à l’ancienne
du WTF à l’ancienne #2
La construction du Golden Gate Bridge

L’art du rangement d’Ursus Wehrli
D’étranges monuments en Yougoslavie
L’architecture soviétique de Frédéric Chaubin
 OakOak, du street art insolite français

I also laugh a lot on  There I fixed it, where you'll find the weirdest fix (often with tons of duct tape).

A short tour in Paris

Paris by night...

 

Definitely not fun to be a statue...

 

Flows that feed my mind

To be informed of what happens in the IT world and especially the Java EE area I work in, I use Netvibes to browse quickly many sources, including :

• news du LMI (Le Monde Informatique, France)
• DZone's JavaLobby
• Tristant Nitot's Standblog

To take a break from time to time I also get a glance to :

• Daily Dilbert
• Daily WTF (!)
• Boston Globe's The Big Picture

When I'm stuck with a tricky technical problem, stackoverflow.com often helps me to find a solution.

And there's a life apart computers, for example with :

• News : http://lemonde.fr 
• Legal : http://www.maitre-eolas.fr 
• Architecture : http://archidose.blogspot.com

Some soft music in this rough world

Well you'll tell me it's not tops of the day and you'll be right.

Let's start softly with a band I follow since their album Pedrolira, you name it, it's HOLDEN.
A song from their album Fantomatisme :

For those who didn't know about Carmen Maria Vega, like me until a couple of weeks, a song which should give you the desire to hear more from her :

A punchy guitar riff from japanese band named 9mm Parabellum Bullet ("Supernova" guitar & bass cover), catched on youtube after I heard it on the radio :

Last for today, a video published in 2006 from a young guitar prodigy playing a very very rock'n'roll version of Mozart's Rondo a la turca :

First post

After several years of resistance against blogging (I've nothing interesting to tell / it's a fashion, it will pass away...) I finally started one, considering it may be a good way to keep track of thoughts, tries, interesting things in a unique and reachable from anywhere location.

Inspired by prestigious bloggers as Maitre Eolas, Zythom, the dailyWTF, the Standblog and many more, here I am with this first pathetic post.

I don't really know what I will blog about; probably notes about :

• things I've seen or heard somewhere (in the street, on the radio, while surfing on the internet...) and that surprised / interested / irritated me...
• technology I work with on my daily JEE IT project manager job
• photographs, as this one :

A Blue sheep group in front of the BONN city hall (18 May 2012)