Fitness Week 17-18

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First person to win 250 squash games

Kieran: 41 Games

Mark: 66 Games

(1 point head start on a game for every 10 games the other person is ahead)

(we also play by “you have to WIN a game, genuine mistakes on game points are ‘let’ “)

We have now established that Mr green is the better player, and when hes on form I receive a savage kicking, however bloody minded malevolence and a evil heavy squash racket that can pop squash balls is JUST taking the day

First person to loose 2 stone

Kieran ( Initially 15 Stone, 8 pounds) : 14′ 10″

Mark ( Initially 16 Stone, 8 pounds) : 16′ 6″

no movement, nothing to see here please move on.

Easy substring with java

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

@formula is a fab thing, and some features just cant be beat, one of my faves is its

@Middle( string ; startString ; endstring )

Java has the normal substring stuff, but this format is a bit of a pain (I personally hate the whole “get indexof” rigmarole to do it), but with a bit of help from regular expressions we can just use this

private String getMiddle (String inStr, String startToken, String endToken){ 
String Expression = “.+” + startToken + “(.+?)” + endToken + “.+”; 
inStr = ” ” + inStr + ” “
return inStr.replaceAll( Expression, “$1”); 
}

so say we have this String

String longString = “GD=testing~BSZ=567~ST=1~UNID=357DHFDC4DA4AE802574F60006F249~”

Then

getMiddle( longstring , “BZ=” , “~”) will give us “567”

handy eh?

N. B. If you want to search for any of the following characters [^$.’?*+() you need to put \ before each one (except for “” which only needs 1) as they are special characters in regular expressions (yes i should just alter the function to handle them, ill do it later)

Tip to stop identify theft

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I’ve just been got by some little t**ds for identiy theft, initially this was embarrassing as I do security for part of my living, however this one was one i had not considered, and i suspect most of you wont have either, if goes like this:

If you only use the internet for communications with a mobile company (which quite frankly is what they would prefer), then the password on your account for customer services by phone is BLANK, the sub-humans only need your name, address, date of birth and they are in with full rights and can set the password!!, thankfully the customer services person i got through to at t-mobile, had their head screwed on, and recognised the unusual account behaviour, so all sorted, but a cautionary tale to all us ‘internet only’ bods, ignore traditional security at your peril, now off you go and set-up passwords on all your stuff that can be got to via phone!!

Fitness Week 16

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Hardly any movment or change.

First person to win 250 squash games
Kieran: 34 Games
Mark: 58 Games
(1 point head start on a game for every 10 games the other person is ahead)
(we also play by “you have to WIN a game, genuine mistakes on game points are ‘let’ “)

Each game is now a fight to the death, i only drew even this week as Mr green thought we had finished

First person to loose 2 stone
Kieran ( Initially 15 Stone, 8 pounds) : 14′ 9″
Mark ( Initially 16 Stone, 8 pounds) : 16′ 6″

no movement, i walk 25K a week and play squash twice, Waailll!!!, why is it not going down, the Green is nearly half way done!!!

If I didn’t have domino

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In a hypothetical world, if IBM shut Domino down tomorrow and I had to instantly swap to another platform to do my Domino dev work utilizing my existing skills/mind set (that would let me deliver stunning apps and keep me in a job) what would I pick?

Front End: Flex (and degrade to HTML5)
Back End Core Language: JAVA (under SpringSource)
Back End Server: Jboss
Storage: MYSQL for traditional storage for corporate clients, Amazon Simple DB (with S3 for Binary storage) for Document centric Applications
Security: Spring security Module
Communication: Blaze DS (for AMF as it hellish fast), degrade to Web services

I’ve used Microsoft stuff (i used to program in Access for heavens sake), and its very polished and simple, but I’ve been bitten too many times by being stuck with the proprietary side of it and the sudden steepness of the learning curve when you want to do something different (which always seems to hit during a tight deadline).

P.S. Cor!! doesn’t it take a lot to reproduce domino