Month: April 2004

Since we’re on a roll talking about Microsoft, I should mention this: IKEA founder ‘richer than Gates’.

The interesting things to me is that this news came out the day after I went to IKEA. I like to think I had something to do with it… I like to think that because it amuses me.

The other interesting part is that I noticed IKEA uses neoware machines running Windows NT 4. Yes, NT4! Now, I could say that IKEA’s founder would not be richer than Gates if they had upgraded all of those machines to Windows 2000, because that would be funny… or I could say that IKEA’s founder would be even more richer than Gates (more richer?) if IKEA had been using Linux all along, because that would be political…

We all know you can’t be funny and political at the same time…

Besides, we also know that Windows is cheaper that Linux anyway… We know this because Microsoft tells us so.

I said recently that Windows Hates Me, and it must be true. I think Windows hates me because it knows I usually prefer non-Microsoft technologies. See, even when I use Windows, I end up using something like Perl. So when I said that Microsoft SQL doesn’t like to store a lot of text, what I should have said is that the non-Microsoft tools I used didn’t like to work with SQL to store/retrieve a lot of text. So I’ll give Microsoft SQL a point there. It stores lots of text, I just can’t easily do it with the tools I’m using. That damn Win32::ODBC module is partly to blame, as it has it’s limitations…

Of course if I was using some other RDBMS like MySQL and Perl’s DBI module, I’d have no problems. Microsoft SQL hates me too you see…. and if I was using MySQL and Perl, I’d try my hardest not to do it on Windows…

I won’t even get into the scheduler and how I need to bug an admin go in via VNC to add a scheduled job instead of just using crontab…

Windows, Microsoft SQL… Why do you hate me so?

The options for not using Word on Mac OS X continue…

• OpenOffice.org
• NeoOffice/J
• AbiWord
• Antiword

The AbiWord folks have a development release of AbiWord v2.1.1 (MacOSX, Jaguar/Panther), which I have yet to try out. I’ve pretty much quit using OpenOffice.org for now and tend to use NeoOffice/J for editing Word files, and for the simple conversions I use Antiword along with ps2pdf to turn Word documents into PDF files…

It’s still a pain to receive Word documents, but some people just refuse to send you anything else…

I think I’ve finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter that I hate Windows, because Windows hates me!

I’ve never actually wanted to use Windows, it always been a requirement for some form of employment I’ve had over the years. I’ve wanted to use the Mac OS, I’ve wanted to use Linux, but never was the time I wanted to use Windows. Always forced… Still I try…

Our latest episode goes like this: I needed to build a simple application. A perl script would request an XML feed (no, not RSS or Atom) and process it, and store the results in a Microsoft SQL database. I ended up writing almost all of the working code on Mac OS X, except for the SQL part. I normally use MySQL, but when forced to use Microsoft SQL, I use the Win32::ODBC module, which is ok, it’s not DBI, but it more or less gets the job done. We are also using XML::DOM and HTML::Template.

Problem #1: XML::DOM doesn’t work on Windows. Try to install it. ppm says it’s installed. System tells me it can’t find it. I can’t find it either. Try again. Try again. Try to delete it. System tells me it deleted it. Try to install again. Get pissed. Reboot. Try it all again. Seems to work. During that time I also read docs, contemplated rewriting code to use XML::Simple or something else, and said expletives… In the end, it worked, but took much too long.

Problem #2: Microsoft SQL doesn’t like to store a lot of text. Well, the installation/configuration I’m using doesn’t. I want to store this XML document, but I can’t make the field big enough. Again, I’m thinking in MySQL mode, since last week I knocked out code to store huge amounts of poorly-formed HTML in MySQL and never had any problems. Still, I’m informed by people that know more than I do that with Microsoft’s SQL server there are these limits to the sizes of fields and columns and tables, that seem ridiculously small for what I’m trying to do. (I’m talking less that 10,000 characters, BTW.) I finally solve this by not storing the XML itself, but a hash of the XML, a compromise…

Problem #3: This is the next problem I face, making the Win32 scheduler work as it should, or should I say, as cron works…

None of this stuff is insanely complex, and I’m sure your average Windows developer could figure it all out, but coming from where I’m coming, and doing what I’m doing, I always have problems.

My final conclusion? Windows Hates Me.