Meine Urlaubslektüre 2008

Im Urlaub nehme ich mir eigentlich immer zwei Dinge vor: etwas Neues lernen und versuchen, Bekanntes aus einem anderen Blickwinkel zu sehen. Für das Neulernen habe ich mir dieses Jahr das Thema 3D Grafik und Animation ausgesucht. Ich habe zwar beruflich viel mit Softwaredesign zu tun, aber von Grafik und Animation im 3D Sektor habe ich keinen blassen Schimmer. Mein Favorit in dieser Kategorie ist "Das Blender-Buch" von Carsten Wartmann.

Im Umfeld anderer Blickwinkel kam mir ein schon etwas älteres Buch in die Hände: "Eine andere Art, die Welt zu sehen - das Aufmerksamkeits Defizit Syndrom" von u.a. Thom Hartmann. Wie soll ich sagen. Sensationelle Lektüre. Ich habe mit so einem Gebiet sonst nichts zu tun, aber das Buch gibt einem eine völlig neue Sicht auf die Bedarfe und das Verhalten verschiedener Menschen. Eigentlich wird hier meines Erachtens garnicht über ADHS geschrieben, sonderen darüber, worin sich Menschen unterscheiden. Sensationelle Einsichten, die mir ein völlig neues Modell darüber geben, warum z.B. beim Softwaredesign sich der Vertrieb so schlecht mit den Softwarebauern versteht...

moving can reveal buried treasures

At the beginning of this year we moved to out new private location. Thanks to the easter-holidays, i had the chance to unpack some of the last boxes from my personal equipment...
Two books, which i already marked as lost, were found: one of my famous books about data analysis and a book called "my job went to india - 52 ways to save your job" by chad fowler. I think, the book does not only deal with having the right strategies to stay employed (or to stay employable), it just describes how everybody should evolve in his job or even in his (or hers) life.
Sometimes, when i feel stuck, i take the book to get some ideas, what to do to move to the next levels... (okok, this book cvers life-aspects of softwaredevelopers, it won't help a single inch on painters or insurance workers).

As a frequent .net developer i now decided to code something in a competing technology as described: i will do something on java and especially java server faces. And it already helped: i got some pretty new ideas on .net problems just by comparing (or transferring) ideas to another world. So, just try new pathes and reach completely new viewpoints to you past work.

in Javascript, everything is a hashtable

Due to requirements of our customers, i have to go in more detail with javascript. I hope, i will learn my lesson: everything in Javascript seems to be best understood as an array, as far as i learned up 2 now... (this is my personal javascript in a nutshell ;-))

Water and Oil...

Von blogspot

As an experimental physicist i can not stand taking pictures while trying to create brownies ;-)

Arrays in VB.net

As a c and c# programmer i think i will never learn it: in vb.net, arrays (e.g. stringarrays) start by default with the index 0 and end with the dimensionparameter. So, a ReDim a(6) creates an array from a(0) to a(6), so it contains 7 (!) elements.

Hopefully, i learned the lesson now...

is a kilometer 1024 meters?

I just received as a gift (oh lucky me) an usb memory stick labeled 2GB. I just discovered, that there are only 1,86 GB shown in the filesystem. What is wrong?
Well, a closer look to the package of the sticks showed a small star near the sizelabel. The star had to tell me, that this is a 2GB stick, when 2GB are 2.000.000.000 Bytes.
Ok, for some people the real sizes of Memory sound stupid. But there is a reason for the strange boundaries. Decimal Systems do not always work good. I fear, the only reason for the 2GB label is marketing. So, again, marketing caught technical specifications...
In some sense this reminded me to the old story, that physicists think, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes and computer programmers think, that a kilometer is 1024 meters...

Microsoft Analysis Sevices 2005 modeling

After having my data in the new database, it was time to create a cube. I am used to do this in analysis services 2000 and have now the ability to learn new things...

An unclear error occured, when i tried to build the cube. I started building a dataconnection, draw a dataview with my facttable and dimensions, set up the "shared" dimensions and tried to build the cube.

Building the cube failed, because the modeler was not able to find connections between my tables. But i draw the connections between the tables. Even setting the connections up by hand failed. What was wrong?

The problem was (of course) in front of the screen. When i draw the datamodel, i refused to let the integrated development environment (ide) to set up logical keys to the database. I was asked by the ide and had the opportunity not to set up the keys. This lead to the problem not be be able to set up a cube.

Lesson learned: set up logical keys in the model, even if you have the choice not to do so...