So I’ve been debugging some code that I wrote quickly to parse a couple of hundred megabytes of log files. I wasn’t surprised to notice that the most expensive method call was to getNextLine() in java.util.Scanner, but I was surprised to see that hasMoreLines() was the second most expensive. It appears that there is no buffering of the line when it does its search of the stream, which just about doubles the processing time if you’re reading millions of lines. I can only assume the same problem is encountered with the other return types (getNextLong(), etc).

Luckily it’s an easy fix, changing this code:

Scanner s = new Scanner(inputFile);
while(s.hasMoreLines()){
    System.out.println(s.nextLine());
}
s.close();

to:

Scanner s = new Scanner(inputFile);
try{
    while(true){
        System.out.println(s.nextLine());
    }
}catch(NoSuchElementException e){
    s.close();
}

For those of you used to exception-based programming this will seem obvious, but I’ve posted it here for everyone else!

So I was having a bit of a problem. I’ve got Perl installed with MacPorts – probably a little superfluous now seeing as Leopard is shipped with 5.8.8, but still. I’ve been wondering for a while about getting extra packages installed, and expected it to be as painful as many other unix tools are for OS X. How I was proved wrong!

Basically all you need to do is download the package from CPAN, extract it and drop the folder into /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.8.8 (for global addition of the package). The only caveat I found with this is that you need to make sure the naming is the same as you reference the package in Perl, so for example I wanted to use Statistics::Distributions, so I renamed the downloaded, extracted folder from Statistics-Distributions-1.01 to “Statistics” with Distributions.pm inside it, and it worked like a charm.

I’m guessing there will be some which need compiling and can prove to be a complete pain, but for now I’m impressed.

Today I became sold on OpenOffice. The beta release of version 3 has been released and they finally addressed the issue which kept me with Office for Mac for so long, and have switched to Aqua.

From a quick foray it is obvious how much better the interface is for Mac users now they’ve moved away from X11. Keep up the good work guys!

I have just spent the morning on the phone Federal Express, who refuse to accept that delivering parcels and giving no indication that there may be duty charges levied weeks later is wrong. Apparently the call centre crew have a distorted view of the law when it comes to things like this, because the guy on the end of the phone was basically calling me an idiot, when all I was trying to get them to do was recognise the flaw in the system and fix it. Ah well, I guess that’s what you can expect of large companies – people at the bottom who just don’t care.

Buylowest have dropped off the face of the earth. No surprises there. I am now initiating a dispute with PayPal, because the terms are hidden and they claim Royal Mail as their courier. I’ve paid FedEx the £50, and I don’t expect that to be seen again. It’s such a massive flaw that I can’t claim that £50 from PayPal because it didn’t go through their system, but I can hardly blame them.

In hindsight this is a clever exploitation of a delivery company’s import policy. The customer service rep for FedEx refused to believe it, so I’ll try the head office. It would be so easy for them to stamp parcels coming for outside the EU as having potential extra charges, or to include a little leaflet. At least then the consumer wouldn’t end up caught between a rock and a hard place. I for one certainly don’t relish the idea of chasing my refund from the United States. I’m just not that good at law (and not bothered enough for £50).

This post is an update for an earlier post: BuyLowest.com

North Wales Cave Rescue Organisation carried out a cave rescue scenario at Ogof Hesp Alyn on Sunday (20th April). For anyone who has yet to visit Ogof Hesp Alyn, don’t! The scenario comprised of a casualty with a fractured tibia who had fallen down a short pitch on the left-hand option after a series of crawls. The cave is very muddy and cramped, and was partially flooded due to heavy rainfall and winter, and the crawls were particularly wet.

The scenario was mostly a success, although the team decided not to perform a rescue through the crawls because of the time required. The notes I took from the exercise are as follows:

• The first team underground moves quickly to find and assess the casualty. In my opinion the cas-bag should be taken by the first team, as the impact of cold and shock are a primary factor. In this scenario we anticipated the casualty would have been injured for around 4 hours before cave rescue arrive at the surface, because of the time taken for the party to escape, call for help and for the team to be arranged. By this point hypothermia is a serious issue, even for members of the team who were not injured but have stayed with the casualty.
• The second team includes the underground controller, heyphones and vacuum mattress, and their target is the deepest site a radio link can be established. The second team also carries a belay kit and all the gear required to carry out a pitch rescue (if required).
• The third team provides the stretcher and extra kit requested by the first team through the heyphone.
• Communications need to be practised and pre-agreed. Several minor problems arose when testing the underground heyphone because or inconsistent use of callsigns (“surface control receiving” was used to tell the underground controller they were ready to receive a message, when we took it to mean they were receiving our message (which they weren’t). Heyphone communications are notoriously weak, so operators should have experience of both underground and surface control to better understand the constraints in rescue situations.
• Manoeuvring the casualty in a stretcher requires tight co-ordination between the stretcher carriers, and the haul team. Effective communication systems need to be practised to reduce time spent moving the casualty. Some system should also be devised to allow continuous movement of the casualty, either by passing the stretcher along a chain of rescuers (although we found the difficulties in leapfrogging members in front of the stretcher to be severe in cases) or by predicting the terrain and having small groups waiting to receive the stretcher at each constriction.

The scenario provided a chance for many team members to meet for the first time, following a recent resurgence in membership, and I look forward to more regular meetings in the future to increase our efficiency!

After a fair amount of trawling around the web for one of my software hut students I stumbled upon this excellent article about installing tomahawk in seam-gen generated projects:
http://demetrio812.blogspot.com/2007/08/install-tomahawk-in-seam-gen-generated.html

To be honest I thought the RichFaces library included with Seam was pretty comprehensive until today. I’ve been through the self-doubt and approached ICEFaces, but thankfully stepped right back into RichFaces once I realised I didn’t really gain anything. If only RichFaces would provide some comprehensive documentation. The examples on Exadel are excellent for showcasing Seam, but they really do fall short of demonstrating any usability, even for the basic form items.

The Tomahawk tag library adds some particularly useful tags, such as the scheduler, which is an incredibly useful extension to the standard calendar tags but allows insertion of information into the days/months. It also supports nested forms, which is an ongoing battle I’ve been losing with Seam recently!

All I need to do now is get my head around integrated testing!

Now I know it’s probably my fault for not paying more attention and checking every last facet of a website’s policies before committing to buy anything, but I was a bit shocked at buylowest’s policy of hiding the VAT and duty charges, and shipping everything from the United States.

I bought a GPS from them, paid the postage and have now been requested to pay over a quarter of the value to FedEx. Also beware – FedEx don’t tell you about the charges when the item is delivered – they just invoice you afterwards.

Now I may appear at this point to be a bit naive – a closer inspection of the site reveals prices with “Exc VAT” before them, but (at least in the UK), we think about tax so infrequently that the idea of completing a payment and not being given the true total is completely alien.

In case you’re wondering, buylowest.com do have a terms and conditions entry saying they do not pay VAT, but that is hidden well away on the bottom of the privacy page, and you do not have to visit the page to complete a transaction.

Needless to say, buylowest have now started ignoring my e-mails (and the phone number they provide is bogus). Obviously they deem it straight and fair to pretend to be a British company on the web (complete with London mailing address) when they actually have no representatives or operation here, and are just capitalising on most people’s lack of interest when it comes to terms and conditions.

Buyers, beware!

Well this weekend saw my first trip to Ireland (I know, I’m only 30 miles away). After an excellent introduction with a party in Dublin, complete with violin, guitar and Irish music (not to mention some excellent scones) we headed down to Dingle in Kerry with the DIT climbing club. Climbing.ie has a good set of route descriptions (Dunshean Head route descriptions) although we ended up at the cliff head without any guide. Dunshean Head is an ideal location for VS-HVS climbing, and is an atmospheric location with 25-40 metre routes from a wide non-tidal ledge. The rock’s all pretty clean and there are plenty of easy escapes, and you can’t beat the feeling of climbing with the sea beating about around you. The lie of the cliff means that even if it’s gusty around the Peter Pan route, the area around the needle should be sheltered.

The needle itself is worryingly thin, with a couple of good looking lines up it at VS and E1 (although I didn’t get a chance to venture out there myself). Overall, the area is well worth the visit if you’re climbing around VS, and the harsh E2 and E3’s of the smooth wall at least look like meaningful ventures.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was actually a full wall traverse from Peter Pan round to the niche before the needle. I reckon it goes at about V5/V6, although I never managed to link the move through the smooth wall. The puddles of water and seaweed were almost predictably placed below the crux, giving me plenty of time to soak in the atmosphere while me feet dried out!

The cliff is only about 5 minutes from Dingle, which in turn was only 4 1/2 hours from Dublin. We stayed in a rather luxurious set of holiday homes just before the “Welcome to Dingle” markings on the road. They’re just next to the hostel, and are a brilliant place to relax on the evening.

Unfortunately we didn’t get much time to see anything else except for the cliffs of Dingle, but I’ll certainly be heading back there when I get a chance.

I’ve been playing with Mercurial today as a replacement to Subversion, as part of a big effort to clean my stuff off 3 different servers I don’t really use anymore. My first thoughts are mostly good – local storage is a bit cleaner than CVS or Subversion, with only a .hg folder in the root folder of the repository. I’ll be interested to see how simple it is to use mercurial with modules like I used to with CVS – a quick attempt left me confused as to how you can export part of a repository without pulling down the whole thing.

One thing that I was particularly impressed with was how easy it is to use mercurial for version control locally. If you’re not interested in using an external server, it’s as simple as running hg init in the folder you want to version control to initialise the mercurial repository, then running hg add * and then hg commit. It’s all self contained, so you don’t end up with a separate repository somewhere else like CVS used to enforce, and cloning the repository to another machine is also pretty simple.

Well I’m at it again. I must write more first entries in blogs than meaningful posts, but that’s what you get for being fickle. I did learn an important lesson today about backing up databases though – a WordPress server I set up on my laptop held a decent tutorial on remote connection to a dynamic IP-bound computer. That’s lost forever since I upgraded to Leopard without a care in the world!

The aim of this blog is to keep a record of my trials and tribulations with JBoss Seam (and other web technologies), my research into noisy text as part of my PhD, and climbing, mine exploring and other generally dangerous exploits. I guess we’ll see if it falls into disrepair like all the other ones! My main impetus for creating this blog is actually TextMate, and its built in blogging feature – making it easier for me to procrastinate and write entries rather than thesis…