I’ve been particularly enjoying my job over the last few weeks. There have been plenty of new products to look at and play with. I’ve been to visit clients. We’ve delivered working code. I’ve even done some fruitful pair programming.
Right now we’re in the middle of delivering a J2EE web app to a client. The system is functionally OK, so Charles and I are looking at the performance.
Our first task was to work out how to load a realistic number of records. We’re aiming for 75,000 people, a few more than the twenty or so we use for unit testing. We chose to load data through the applications web interface, modifying existing unit tests based on the httpunit library. That took an afternoon, and we can now load arbitrary data as fast as the server will handle it.
The problems we’ve come across so far have proven surprisingly tractable. A few log statements new database index here, and re-written Hibernate query there, and issues either disappear, or are at least reduced to acceptability.
One neat Oracle feature is the Function Based Index, which lets you create an index based on a function, such as UPPER(surname). In our case, it saved having to create a special column in the Person table to hold an uppercase version of the surname.
Meanwhile, my boss has sold me to another client. Next week I’ll be on-site for a few months with another good friend. The down-side is that the project is in C++, but the up-sides are many:
Woohoo!
Went and saw Matrix: Revolutions Saturday night. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Great piece of escapism.
I find myself agreeing with Andrew O’Hehir’s review at Salon.com. The Matrix is a good movie, but not a great movie, and many were hoping for a great movie.
Oh well. I gave up expecting much from sequels after George Lucas decided that Jar Jar Binks could be a General in the battle for Naboo.
Even so, Matrix: Revolutions is cool. Neo gets a social conscience—completing the transformation from lone hacker to saviour. Characters that were very important fade into the background and new ones come to the fore. You get the feeling that this is a big world.
I liked the ending too. It didn’t try to do too much, just completed the story without trying to tie up every loose end.
I look forward to more stories from the world of the Matrix. Maybe Animatrix 2?