I am loading up the latest IDEA Aurora version 908

The main thing that jumped out of the changelog was the inclusion of HotSwap debugging. This is a feature I have sorely missed in the 2-3 years Ive been without IBM Visual Age. Apparently JPDA has provided support for HotSwap since 1.4. IBM used a completely customised VM for Visual Age which is I guess how they were able to do it back then. But Hallelulja my debugging productive will hopefully soar now. Will update this with my experiences.

Update: It kind of works for me. But it does seem to cause an awful lot of “Internal Errors”. Actually Im not sure if HotSwap is whats causing them. The Report Error Dialogue doesnt seem to want to let me report it either. (Known issue on the Tracker). In other areas they are rapidly adding many small niceties. I havent yet had any need to try my luck at the GUI tool so I wont mention that, however there are plenty new CVS niceties such as an improved history view and a CVS repository browser.

I am absolutely facinated with KDB a special database engine optimized for timeseries analysis a normally notoriously slow process.

This is of special interest in financial analysis and risk management for traders etc.

The way they have done it is interesting in its extreme simplicity. They use a column based approach rather than the traditional row based approach. How does that work? Each column in the table has its own datafile. Im assuming that anyone wanting to hack up their own version could use a version of Berkeley DB

All the data seems to be stored in a sequential fashion. Which makes sense for timeseries. The have 3 different table models ala mysql. You can pick inmemory for smaller datasets (sub 1G) the tables are stored to disk ofcourse when written to. Shuffle as far as I can work out stores everything on disk and uses a large in memory cache to optimize it. Parallell the largest is for insanely large datasets such as historical trading data.

What it all boils down to anyway are blindingly fast queries and timeseries analysis. While they support standard ansi-92 sql they have their own ksql dialect which has extensions for timeseries analysis. They also have jdbc drivers which I havent tried yet. I assume they are part of the commercial distro.

The interesting thing is that the whole thing is written in their own interpreted language K, which is a vector processing functional language supposedly with roots in APL. I know nothing about that whole world, but it appears powerful. The K download is tiny at 130k and kdb itself is about 50k. (Update: Just found this other K resource: K is all there is to K with good links and background)

It used to be in the 70s and 80s that there were various special purpose database engines. During the 90’s everyone kind of converged on the idea of one size fits all for database management. Databases had to be large monolithic servers like Oracle etc. Now with the advent of Prevalent Databases we have superfast memory resident databases that are great for non analytical stuff such as transaction processing, content managent and most other database applications. Analytical applications where you need to query vasts amount of data are not really practical with Prevalent databases, however enter KDB and there we go.

In the future will there really be much need for the traditional database server? I dont think so, however Im sure it will take a few years for this to trickle into most real world apps.

So all my code that was using PicoContainer broke after I did the latest update. It looks like its been a buz of activity which isnt all bad and theyve done some well needed refactorings.

The main one seems to be that they now have introduced a ComponentRegistry, which strangely enough handles Component Registration. I was using the HierarchicalContainer which has now been replaced by a HierarchichalComponentRegisty I am guessing in conjunction with a CompositeContainer. To be honest Im not sure yet, but with the help of IDEA it shouldnt be too hard to update my code.

We were awoken by a minor earthquake this morning at 3:30am. Apparently it was centered in Colon on the Caribbean coast, where there was some minor damage. I dont think anyone was hurt.

It measured 5.3 and it felt like everything was shaking. We woke up and went bake to sleep immediately afterwards. Its funny I thought I dreamt it and it was only when my wife asked me about that I realized that it actually happened.

Update: The USGS have it listed at 5.2 on the richter scale. All the papers are saying 5.3, but USGS are probably to be trusted more than newspapers.

Last year there was a series of earthquakes in Chiriqui close to the Costa Rican border. Back then I wrote this piece about Chirinet the Panamanian network of linux (apparently) based earthquake monitoring devices.

Just saw this excellent entry on Kirk’s Blog How Free is Your IDE?

This pretty much mirrors my reasons for sticking with IDEA for the time being.

If I look at it rational there are many reasons for me to move to Eclipse, however everytime I try it I get hit by a learning curve. Granted I dont think it would take me that long to get used to Eclipse, however it frustrates me when i just want to code.

The first IDE that I really like was IBMs Visual Age. It allowed me to be very expressive and thing in terms of classes, methods etc and not ascii files.

I then due to work ended up using JBuilder, which I never liked. IDEA allowed me on the first day to be productive. I like Kirk immediately bought the license as the trial period was dying out. It took me less than a day maybe not even two hours to be productive in IDEA. Just about everyone I know who has tried it has had the same experience. I guess I am looking for the same from Eclipse. But yet to no avail.

Everytime I make a concerted effort to like it I keep having to change my way of developing and doing stuff, where IDEA just fit right in where I wanted it.

I still have hope. Maybe someone needs to do an alternative repackaged version of Eclipse that is already setup with everything you need. When Release 3.0 is complete or in a state closer to completion maybe Ill try again.

Caught via SlashDot - Interesting Article by Ken Griffith.

He suggests that Sony should allow people to use real money in their EverQuest system. This is a pretty cool idea and if a company would actually implement such a system Im sure they would make a load of money doing it.

Ken suggests using PecUnix for this. This is a gold based payment system similar to E-Gold and GoldMoney

Technically speaking PecUnix is the most advanced of the lot, but its also the newest and there the smallest circulation. Its interesting and Panama would be the ideal place to do this.