Ethnic groceries on the Gold Coast

Haven't checked all of these yet, but intend to and report back...

The Spice Trail - Corner of Coolibah & Myall St., Southport
Ferry Road Market - Brickworks Centre, 107 Ferry Road, Southport
Russian Delight - Shop 18B, Centro Nerang, 57 Station St., Nerang
Continental Smallgoods & Butchery - 2380 Gold Coast Highway, Cnr Markeri St., Mermaid Beach
Mt Lebanon Deli - 2241 Gold Coast Highway, Nobby Beach
Global Food & Wine - 1/81 Lawrence Drive, Nerang
Sara & Sevda Persian Supermarket - 4/55 Nerang St, Southport
Paradise Point Delicatessan - Shop 2, 34 Esplanade, Paradise Point
Ming Mei Asian Supermarket - Shop G073, Australia Fair Shopping Centre, 42 Marine Parade, Southport

If you live on the Gold Coast and know of any more, comment!

Will report back...

Finished Richard Dawkins "The Magic of Reality"

Wow.
What a great book.
I recommend anyone with kids to get a copy and read it together with them.
Fantastic introduction to how science works.
Each chapter begins with a bunch of myths around the core question and then shows how science addresses it.
Brilliant!

Early Slava!

One of our colleagues is of Serbian descent and invited us around for early "Slava" on Saturday.
For those that don't know, that's the Serbian Orthodox tradition of the ritual celebration and veneration of a family's own patron saint.
(for more detail visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava)
Since I am an atheist, I didn't cross myself during the initial ceremony, but nobody seemed to mind.
In any case it was great food and great people.
Here's the menu:

Entree:
Chicken noodle soup (gf)
Vegetable noodle soup (gf)(vgn)

2nd course:
Meat sarma & punjaje paprika (gf)
Vegetable sarma & punjaje paprika (gf)(vgn)

3rd course:
Pork hock pasulj (gf)
Vegitable pasulj (gf)(vgn)

Main:
Fried cevapcice (gf)
Fried Egg plant and Temphe (gf)(vegan)
Roast vegetables (gf)(vegan)

Desert:
Cheese, spring onion and kale gibanica (vgt)
Cashew, spring onion and kale gibanica (gf?)(vgn)
cakes (gf)(vgn)

(gf) = gluten free
(vgt) = vegetarian
(vgn) = vegan

And he brought in some left-overs for me to take home!
Yum!

Grails: Why I think "hello world" should be considered evil

I started in IT in April 1977.
I sat in front of a terminal that year and typed "vi helloworld.c".
It as a simple program being just a few lines of old K&R C.
I was entranced.
It worked.
It printed out "Hello World".
(In those days that was real magic)

But I had deep seated anti-patterns flowing through me and I got the hint that something wasn't right.
Yes, the program worked.
Yes, it did what I told it to.

But...
It wasn't "real" in the sense that it didn't model the "real" world.

By 1985/86 I was responsible for a single program with 1 million lines of K&R C.
Excluding comments.
It still didn't model the "real" world but it did a darn good job of making sense of accounting data and was a serious contender for replacing SQL at the time.
It was HUGE and had a unique database model that we had patents on.
But...
It only had one database.
And I saw that as a problem.

Funny thing is...
Years later...
I see fat books touting this framework or that and see people getting all hot and bothered about them.

But...
For all their verbiage and explanations, they are just the same as that first C program I wrote in 1977.
They are the new "hello world" systems.
Acres of code.
Dependency Injection. Woooo!
Dependency management. Woooo!
AOP. Woooo!
Enterprise...  Woooo!
Seriously?
I know I'm a dinosaur, but seriously?
Yech.
And all of them treat the landscape or scope of their explanation as GREEN FIELD.
So they all describe in glowing terms about ORMs and finders and what not.
And guess what?
They only have one database.
Just like the 80's.

Hello?
Hello?
What colour is the sky in their world?
Not blue obviously.
Because you're not even in brown field territory.
Blackened, burnt, filled with the ruined spectres of testers, moaning project managers, nazi network engineers, multiple architectures, servers, clusters, app servers and and and...
If you want to use Grails or Rails or any other damn framework you have to fit into that view of reality.
And that includes that dreaded word...

"LEGACY"

Why is that word that word?
I hate that word.
Anyway...
The reality is that when you try to use these wunderkind frameworks with existing systems, everything crashes in a heap.
You have to twist and turn and hack and chop and do a whole pile of things which may include bedding down with the Ops manager to get them to work...
And the basis of it all is that so many of these frameworks assume that it's in a void.
One database.
Dependency injection at boot time.
WooHoo... Not.

Apart from taking all the fun out of programming, this isn't how the world works.

I have a situation with multiple database technologies and servers.
I love Grails and Rails and Groovy and Ruby and... well Java not so much.
But the frameworks are sh*t at handling those "legacy" systems.

I don't want DTOs, but the Tech team likes them.
So I have to be able to have these 35 DTOs pointing at that MySQL cluster with multiple databases/tables/read-write/read-only role based access, another 20 DTOs pointing at that MySQL cluster over there in the same manner, and, oh by the way, I have two MongoDB replica sets which need to be included.
And some of the DTOs are the same across the databases, clusters and collections so annotations won't cut it.
Oh, and I need to have DB_dev, DB_test, DB_stage and DB (for production) for each of them.
Oh and the Test Lead wants all the systems to work in the Test and Stage environments before being deployed.
Oh and the Ops Lead demands that all deployed systems use RESTful interfaces to reset and/or reload all database settings at certain times.
Oh and he wants to be able to "push" database changes using a RESTful interface into your app.

Grails in Action and Definitive Guide and... and... Nope.
Dependency Injection my ass.

Grails is a lovely technology.
I like it.
I have to admit I used Rails earlier and loved that, so I'm slightly biased.

But the ORMs out there are rubbish.
Total rubbish.
You have no choice but to define everything up front in a config file, externalise it in excruciating detail, or whatever.
Or, in Grails, bounce repeatedly through Spring hoops to get the scenario to work HOW THEY WANT IT TO WORK.
Total krap.

So you resort to low level API.
Then the real issues come out.
And you then resort to hacking someone else's code.
And you ask yourself: "WTF?"
Hasn't anyone else had these issues?
So you "google" and lo and behold, yup, others have.
And the answers you get are so complex or complicated or distressed or tired or RTFM or JIRA bug it or SUFFER DUDE that you are just left bewildered.

After 2 1/2 days phaffing about trying to get Grails to do what I needed (not wanted) to do, I had a hissy fit.
Hence this post.
So? I'm impatient - (shrugs).

Hello world?
Get off my lawn!

BTW... I'm going to write my own ORM that handles these scenarios.
Dunno when.
It won't happen overnight.
But it will happen.

Nothing in particular. (K)

Gardening done.

Bills paid online. 

Tax basically sorted.

UK GMC registered physician identified.

Bathroom cleaned and scrubbed. 

Sweat from this morning showered off. 

AirCon on and n*ked with a glass of wine. 

Only way to be. 

Max (our robot vacuum cleaner) started off upstairs doing his thing. 

"Thud. Bang. Thud. Bang. DooDoo-DOO-Doo!"

Banging about in the bedroom. 

He'll be in here soon banging about my feet.

But at least the vacuuming is done.

Tried to build a ramp for him so he can get into the bathroom...

Total trailer park epic fail. 

Sigh. I'm krap on the physical side of things.

Once built a rabbit hutch.

Used a manual.

Ah.

Now.

After I finished I looked at it.

And burst into laughter.

I expected a Leporidae Hutch Inspector to turn up at any moment and slapping a "Condemned - Unfit for Rabbitation" sticker on it.

FYI: go here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rabbit to find out more about where the word rabbit comes from.

Go figure. Never knew that you'd get your head punched in if you called a cricketer a rabbit. Funny things names eh?

Rant about enterprise framework lunacy formulating in my mind.

Finished the Sam Harris book "The Moral Landscape"

It's kinda difficult to characterise my feelings.
I was 2/3rds the way through the book (page 191 of 295) and had the odd feeling that the author was "wrapping up".
I turned the page and there it was: "Afterword".
What? It's over? That's it? Hey! What about the other hundred pages?
Notes.
100 pages of notes and references.
Don't get me wrong... The notes were interesting. Very interesting.

Now. I need to get down to it.
I was flummoxed by the 'end' of the book.
It didn't seem like anything had been established and felt like I'd been running and suddenly found myself like a cartoon character flailing madly as I ran off the end of a cliff.
No definitive conclusion.
I read the afterword.
THAT should have been the book.
I looked at the cover again: "How Science Can Determine Human Values"
Er... No...
I agree completely with the author as he seems to be saying "Whoops. Maybe that line was a bad idea."
Mainly because the book didn't seem to say "How Science Can Determine Human Values" but rather:

"Whether it may be possible at some time in the future that science may have some insight into what human values are and whether it may be possible to have something to say about how human brains work."

I sat back after the Afterword and thought for a while.
Or, as the author seems to be saying, "Thoughts had me" about the what I had read.
I concede that the author is very familiar with the subject of neuroscience and provided a lot of study results to back up his argument at any particular point.
But...
There seemed to be a, how shall I put it, somewhat "stream of consciousness" to the progress of the book.
I never got the feeling that any point had been established with any certainty.
I could characterise the entire book as a dinner party where a proclaimed intellectual giant arrives, dominates the group by monologuing for an hour or so, then for no seemingly good reason says:

"Right. That's established. I'm off. Here are my notes."

And leaves with everybody furrowing their brow and wondering whether they learned anything or had any insights.

Then another thought had me.
There seemed to be an unstated assumption that seemed to permeate the text.
It was like the elephant in the room.
Every statement and question seemed to be framed to avoid saying: "WTF! There's a bloody great elephant here!"
And that is that the author seemed to be skirting around saying:

"You are a machine. A complex machine, but a machine nonetheless. A body hanging off a bunch of chemical and electrical effects held in that head thing. You don't have thoughts. They have you. What you call your mind and your choices are simply post facto results of those chemical and electrical effects over which you have no more control than you have over your pancreas."

And for me that's a worry despite the fact that I agree with it with one proviso:

"My mind and personality may be determined by those effects, but I VALUE them independently of those effects."

Because it seems to me that if that is used as a basis for "Determining Human Values" then your "well-being" can simply be controlled by a bunch of medications or medical intervention.
And there are nutters out there who change:

"You are a machine"

into:

"You are JUST a machine"

And who, just who, will decide what levels of serotonin and dopamine or how many hours of exercise or which vegetables and fruit I eat will promote my personal well-being?
And what nanny state nutter will stop there?
Why not determine that having a choice about milk is not good for your well-being after age 5?
Why not determine that "fill in your horror scenario here."
After all, it's "science".

Hello THX-1138.

Then another thought had me.
There is no "soul".
But I consider myself to be a dualist.
What?
No not a body-soul dualist, but more of a brain-mind dualist.
That is, my mind is the emergent behaviour of the fantastically complex chemical and electrical effects in my head.
This can be shown by the "mind" changing as a result of pre-frontal cortex damage as shown by the author.
But I VALUE that emergent behaviour and I won't submit to chemical or societal force just because someone else's emergent behaviours determine that I'm damaging my "well-being".

Anyway.
Just a thought that had me.

On to a Richard Dawkins book.

Wow. We got a page view from Ecuador.

We started this blog as a means of getting link information out to internal staff.
I was quickly going through about 2 dozen sites each morning and composing a list of things that would be of interest to people within the company.
This was mainly news that would not hit the mainstream media, or would have been buried in the deluge of junk.
This got tedious using email as the 'to' line was getting very long, so we created the blog as a means of externalising and formalising the process.
We've only had it on line for about 6 weeks and have not advertised it in any way.
To our surprise it seems many people out on the inter-webs find the mix of techie, nerd, geek, business and politics links to be interesting.

For example: We've had 35 page views from Israel (presumably ShinBet because I post links from Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera), 19 from Russia 4 from China and today our first page view from Ecuador.



Hola desde Australia y gracias!

Thankyou!

Kimbo.

Live on the Gold Coast and want to a party as a Borg?

Then look at this:

Costumes by Robin

Although these make me feel a little unsettled: Mascots

Neat.

Grails: Intellij not hot-deploying application

Encountered this post which may be useful to others:

Intellij not hot-deploying Grails application

Grails: Adding logging to service classes

I had a need for this and was going nuts trying to get it working.
Then I stumbled on this: http://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2010/01/grails-goodness-logging-service-method.html
And did my own slightly modified version.
This entire approach is intriguing and I will no doubt be using this approach for other needs.

Works just peachy.

Thanks Hubert!