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I’ve had Frank Sinatra in my head ever since I heard that the last Harry Potter book will be out on the 21st of July this year. That will be the end. First off my predictions were totally off. I was convinced it would be Halloween or the Winter Solstice. I was of the opinion they’d never release a book and a film right at the same time let alone the LAST book and a film but that’s exactly what they’re doing. So, color me surprised as hell!

I have to say my initial reaction is not really one of joy but rather one of melancholy. I’ve been looking forward to the next Harry Potter book for years now. First it was the Order of the Phoenix, then it was the Half Blood Prince and now, for just a few more months, the Deathly Hallows. For years now there’s been the suspense as to what will happen next, the theories (mad and intriguing), the discussions with fellow fans …. the end is neigh.

Sure, it will be great to know how it ends, but what if I don’t like the ending, it could ruin everything! Years of fandom for a series that turns out to be a brilliant lead-up to a terrible ending! But I shouldn’t be thinking like this. JKR hasn’t disappointed yet so why should this book be any different? Why should it be any less enjoyable, funny, unexpected and brilliant? I’m sure it will be as great as I’ve imagined ….. but maybe no book CAN live up to such huge expectations …

[tags]Harry Potter, JK Rowling, Book 7, Deathy Hallows[/tags]

This is a question Daren Barefoot is investigating. If you’re a blogger and you’re reading this he’d really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to complete his short survey at www.whydoyoublog.com/survey.

As to why I blog, in short:

• Gives me a place where I can keep a record of all the technical stuff I figure out and the cool software I come across making it easy to find in future. When I come across a problem I know I’ve solved before I just go to my blog and search! I could keep that kind of stuff private but why? When it’s on the web I can get it form anywhere and others can benefit too!
• Gives me a place to send people when they ask me a question I’ve answered before.
• From time to time I actually enjoy writing. I know the vast majority of my articles are technical but when I feel like writing an article on something I’m interested in (even if it is just Harry Potter some of the time) I have a place to do it.
• By writing down my opinions and predictions it gives me a good way to look back and see how good of a handle I really have on things.
• I actually have some readers!

For those of you on another planet JK Rowling released the title for the seventh Harry Potter book on Friday the 22^nd of December. The title is:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I’ve given myself a few days to mull this one over and see what the Potter fandom are making of it before committing my thoughts to electrons. I have no doubt I’ll look like a fool when the book comes out and I’m shown to be totally wrong but on the off chance that I actually have it right I’d like to have it on record so I can gloat properly 🙂

[tags]Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows, Book 7, JK Rowling[/tags]

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This is the third part of a series of posts I've been working on for a while detailing what I think are the important hints for the final book in the Harry Potter Series. In the first part I looked at Petigrew's debt to Harry and in the second part I looked at Dumbledore's Unexplained Look of Triumph . In this part I'll be looking at the second book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, because JKR has said that it contains some very important clues for the seventh book. In this post I'll be explaining why I think House Elves are the big clue from this book. Read more

I was away from work for two weeks and this is what my Thunderbird icon lookes like now:

Right, well I’m off process this lot. Fun fun!

Something which has annoyed me of late is the up-surge in mad theories revolving around the Mirror of Erised showing Harry where the Horcruxes are hidden. The basic idea is that Harry just has to really want to find a Horcrux, look in the mirror and then he'll see where it is. This theory is ludicrous for a number of reasons which I'll happily share with you.

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This is the second part of a series of posts I'm putting together on the various clues I think JKR has scattered throughout the first six books to give us an idea of what will happen in the final book. If you haven't read it yet the first part was about Petigrew's Debt to Harry. This post discusses the second clue which can be found near the end of the fourth book but is very easy to miss. it is literally contained in a single line, but to me that makes it all the more signifficant. Read more

Was just reading the news headlines on MyYahoo and came across this groan-inducer by Shawn Pogatchnik of the Associated Press in an article about Ireland officially being called Eire from now on:

DUBLIN, Ireland – Ireland is entering a new Eire. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern agreed Tuesday to use the Republic of Ireland’s Gaelic name (pronounced AIR-uh) during European Union summits.

Having just finished re-reading all the HP books from one right through to six I think now is a good time for me to write down my thoughts on what the important hints are with relation to book seven that JKR has littered through the books. It is a well known fact that JKR has been dropping us hints and fore-shadowing stuff right from the start so I re-read the books taking note of things I interpreted as clues that have not yet come to anything as of the end of book six. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a number of articles that follow on from this one, each one focusing on one hint or a related set of hints. I’m going to kick off the series with one of the simpler clues which comes form book three, Petigrew’s debt to Harry. Read more

Having first read all the documentation on Foreign Keys and hence side-stepping the most common pit-falls by making sure all my tables were of type InnoDB, all the columns involved had indices and had exactly matching types I was most disappointed to get a bizarre and senseless error from MySQL:

Can't create table './epath/#sql-1a1_f9.frm' (errno: 150)

I’m using the latest stable release of MySQL (5.0.22) on OS X 10.4 Tiger.

The first thing I tried to solve this was a bit of googling which led me to loads of threads reminding people about the obvious stuff I was sure to avoid (table type, indices & matching data types). However, deep in the bowls of one of these discussions I did discover that, despite the documentation’s utter failure to mention this fact, foreign keys apparently only work when the columns involved are un-signed numbers.

The columns I was trying to link first were both of type varchar so I tried with a different pair of columns of type int (which I first set as being un-signed). This worked so I took the identical syntax and tried again with my varchar‘s, no joy, just the same uninformative error. It then occurred to me that the items in these columns will always be exactly two characters long so I changed their type to char(2) but again I got the same nonsensical error.

Some more googling seems to confirm my theory that MySQL will only be happy with foreign keys that are numeric un-signed types. This is a serious problem for the project I’m now working on. My data has a load of primary keys that are non-numeric that need to referenced as foreign keys all over the place. The two most obvious examples being 2 letter department codes and 3 letter alpha-numeric machine IDs. I could hack this by creating additional integer auto-increment fields in my departments and hosts tables and using these as primary keys instead of the logical fields but that is wasteful and pointlessly complex.

This is my first foray back in to serious MySQL development for a year having used PostgreSQL in the interim and I think I’ll be switching back to PostgreSQL before you can say ‘MySQL sucks’.

Tagged with: databases • MySQL

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