Blogs

My pet project for the last couple of evenings.

A simple ant task and runnable JAR for translating Java property files using Google Translate. You'll need a Google Translate API key from the Google API Console.

Get it now on GitHub: https://github.com/tbarker/TranslateTask

Unit testing stored procedures is usually a pain. Database development don't seem to have the xUnit culture we have on the application tier. But there are some good tools if you look.

If you use Oracle, PLUnit is a necessity. The other Oracle test frameworks, PLUTO and utPLSQL, seem to want to force an OOP approach on plsql.

I met Vinay quite randomly in London just before I started working in Hammersmith, and he's a fascinating person to spend an evening talking to.

@Vinay - I'm still dubious about Seasteading. What use is Peter Thiel's money if your sociatel model fell apart in a best selling computer game :-)

(Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Legal System)

Sadly, we live in a litigious world. Civil law suits are often tools of business, rather than justice. Badly drafted laws create industries of vexatious litigant, the most modern of which is the patent troll. Unlike a commercial company, the troll seeks out the worst issued and most over-reaching patents his tentacles can grasp.

I came across a 4 year old comment of mine on peer-to-peer lending (before I had anything to do with it myself). And I'm surprised that I still agree with everything I said.

NOTE: Better informed people have since told me that the TARGET-2 system used to clear € payments makes central banks notional counterparties to all cross border payments (with the actual risk being on the ECB). So the self-regulating market mechanism I sketch below couldn't function within the current Eurozone payments infrastructure.

SWIFT is a miracle of 1970s ingenuity and a testament to man's ability to work across cultures and borders. (How many real institutions manage to have Iranian, Israeli and Arab members?) It's also €1 for a 700 byte message, takes £10,000 to set-up with my bank and requires dedicated private line for real-time connectivity.

Cookies are very useful, but they basically suck as they're just an ASCII string bounced between the server and the browser. RFC 2965 has standardised then, but they're still icky. You're best off avoiding them, storing per user data on the servers-side and having permanent session cookies with just a SUID.

If you want handle cookies with javascript and correctly handle unicode:

We might often complain about the grip banks have over our personal details and credit. And they certainly try to make the best of it. There won't be Flickr-style APIs for you Lloyds bank account any time soon. It's worth thinking about the fact that there doesn't really need to be.

The data comes from my employer, but this is was my pet project.
Note: Don't try a non-Sun/Oracle JVM with Jetty 7.

Everyone in retail finance needs to generate realtime graphs for the web. It gives users a sense of what the price is doing and they're pretty.