Its interesting to see what tools and environments give you the skills and knowledge to apply to different circumstances. Today I had someone ask me a question: how do I have a unique number against multiple databases in a system across multiple sessions in Kettle. The Kettle sequence generator by default isn’t able to be altered via params which means it starts from zero for each one, which isn’t what we really wanted. The solution was something simple: use postgres. PostgreSQL isn’t my most favourite database, its complete with lots of nice little traps for new users and I always forget the traps each time I set it up. I kid you not, it annoys me no end all of the little things I have to change to get PostgreSQL to work in the same fashion as MySQL. Its just that I don’t use it enough though its still more work. In any case, we created our sequence generator in PostgreSQL and connected it up to Kettle and the thing worked perfectly (once I got postgres listening on the right interface, gave the remote server access to connect and fixed up the permissions). Beyond that today was filled with not a lot else that was interesting, more PHP work, fun with ASP systems that nobody knows anything about and building my filesystem and crashing things.

To sum it up: shakey camera action to cover up the lack of a strong story line, with pathetically long character development and an ending that really reminds me of the Fellowship of the Ring: the damned thing still isn’t over. Spoilers ahead.

In fact I’d almost draw complete parallels with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Though I must admit that I thought Cloverfield grinded along more than the Fellowship but it at least had the advantage that you knew there were two more movies to come, that they had to stop it somewhere and they even did a better way. I’d almost rate the action in Cloverfield as on par as the Fellowship as well, unless you count the people hiding and things randomly exploding as action (the scene from where they go up to the room to when they go down to the alley way was just people running and screaming isn’t action in my opinion its just people running and screaming). So heres the basic layout of the movie:
1) Introduce the characters in a tremendously long party scene complete with a bit of stupid drama. Intersperse this with a long forgotten day with what I guess are two main protagonists, this guy and some chick he has been friends with for a long time and they really deeply love each other but never really let it show blah blah blah (Start of the Fellowship in the Shire)
2) Things exploding, people running and screaming, hiding somewhere for a short while before moving again (this time not really running) (the Shire escape through the forest perhaps, with the fight at Weathertop (iirc))
3) Their bridge and way out of the city gets taken out and the guy gets the call from the girl saying she is trapped come save me (Rivendell)
4) They go forth to save said girl and end up in the middle of a large fight with the monster and the army and end up in the subway (Moria!) and then end up being chased by monsters in said Subway (still Moria) before coming out into the light and into friendly company (barely Lothlorien/Caras Galadhon).
5) They end up running again and recover the girl (no match to Fellowship here) and start running back for their evacuation (back to the fellowship, except trade boats with choppers) and the monster knocks the chopper down and it crashes (the falls)
6) Big scary monster attacks them and kills one of them (poor Boromir) and the guy and his girl escape from this and hide under a bridge

Someone said it should finished at the point where the chopper crashes, I’d tend to go with that sentiment. There is one more part where they basically nuke manhattan (I’m guessing). During the credit it goes “help us” and “its still alive” so I guess the guy is edging for a sequel. However the worst thing for me was that the damned camera never stopped moving during the entire movie and was smack bang in the centre of the theatre (not as bad as up near the front) which caused me to be sick between 3 and 4 (I’m told all I missed was the monster appearing for a short while) because I’d eaten a bit too much popcorn before hand (that I had been overcharged for as well). That and the general feeling of the audience when the credits started was: what, that is it? It’s over? Just a deathly air of silence. This is tied with the last time I went to the movies to see The Golden Compass (was really looking forward to that movie and enjoyed it) and ended up having parts of it ruined by a baby crying and people talking to their children.

I think next time I’ll pirate the damn thing, not get over charged on top of the already rip off price for popcorn and some coke to watch some crappy movie that I can’t pause when I need to go to the toilet because the damned director decided to make up for the defects in the story by continuously shaking the camera. When I wasn’t feeling sick or nausea, I was bored and and at no point was I scared (perhaps because the camera kept moving I couldn’t be scared and when the camera wasn’t moving that much I was either waiting for something to happen or nothing exciting happened). The problem with the scheme as it exists today is that the shit movies still get box office ratings and money whilst being of poor quality. People can only stand being ripped off so much before they sick of it.

I’m going to start regularly writing daily posts about what I did today and the things I found interesting, I’ll at least try anyway.

First up for today is a personal thing, I completed a rather largish Uni assignment today which reminded me of all of the pains that come with C++, but to follow that I returned to working on my filesystem in C, which is just more pain. I got a quick response back, and almost full marks (96%) so I’m happy for all of the time I put in to get it done and how its probably far more complicated than anything else that will be submitted (it used Boost Signals and a whole heap of other things that I don’t think will ever be taught in the subject for a long time). But hey, thats just Uni!

Today I finally managed to get Pentaho, some business intelligence (BI) software, to play nicely with Novell eDirectory’s LDAP interface. I must have missed the option, but Pentaho doesn’t seem to accept anonymous binding to the LDAP server, which means I need to bind as a user. By default our users funnily enough have less access than the anonymous account (which is actually a proxy account with full browse permissions). The solution was simple enough: we shunted our dummy Pentaho user into the same group as the anonymous proxy account and everything worked. So I’ve now got Pentaho using LDAP for authentication (yay!) and a MySQL database to get its role/group permissions. Funnily enough when its all said and done the documentation is pretty close to the mark.

But once I had that I don’t have an ability to manage the groups/roles within Pentaho, so I end up having to write some small PHP to manage that. Luckily I worked on a project a while back that I called “Joomla! Central Management for Users” which basically connected directly to MySQL databases of Joomla! installs and altered the users. I had originally built it with a plugin infrastructure in mind so that I could plug other stuff into it later. Starting this morning it only had a ‘connector’ for Joomla! 1.0 via MySQL and LDAP, now it has one for the Pentaho security tables. This means I can easily copy users from LDAP or Joomla! into Pentaho without too much issues and has a debugged user interface already. But wait theres more!

When I was originally developing the tool I wrote a query language for it. See, SQL is a great language for databases, but its a bit hard to apply in situations where you don’t quite need all of that power. So I wrote my own query language. Its quite simple it can validate simple attributes and allows for set operations within “Sites” (a site is a container for users and groups). So for example I want to see all of the users who are on our web site but not in our LDAP directory:
existsin “Web Sites” and not existsin “LDAP”

Primitive sure, but it because writing a large SQL expression for something simple. I hope to expand on it, but it already does what it needs to do for the time being.

So I’ve covered query languages, LDAP and BI! All I need now is the filesystem news. Today there was a whole heap of fan fare on Slashdot about the ZFS news from Apple, whilst thats cool and all (especially since I don’t mind Apple’s UI), I personally have my own filesystem that I’ve gotten back into to do some work on. It also happens to be a Uni assignment due on Friday! So I’ll be back to working on that and hopefully I’ll have it to a nice stage that I can do some lightening talks at linux.conf.au!