General

Today I realized that I'm need of a DB persistence layer for Ruby, making it easy to map a DB table to an object. I know that something like this already exists, it's the ActiveRecord part of Ruby on Rails web application framework. But... I don't want to restrict myself to web applications, and I don't want to rip out the ActiveRecord part out of RoR, I want to write it on my own. Fortunately, Ruby makes that pretty easy, as it is completely dynamic, and thus makes it possible to "define" new methods on-the-fly (actually, it works a bit different internally, but you won't be able to see any difference from outside -- that's how encapsulation should be ).

I did some research on the topic of good DB persistence layer design, and found a nice page on exactly that topic. I won't implement all the optional parts of the whole concept, and Ruby simplifies a few things so the class diagram will be a bit simpler for my system, as the paper is actually a bit Java-specific.

What will definitely miss is the automatic "resolution" of 1:1 and 1:n relations as found in RoR, but so far the design is so simple yet flexible that (I think) it will also be usable for stuff like LDAP. So far, not much code exists, but I will keep you up-to-date.

On an interesting side note, an (ex-)colleague was poached for writing a simple and fast persistence layer for Java. But I don't even think about leaving my current employer!

The internet is a great thing. Many people and organizations put a lot of information on their websites, which only have to be combined. If done properly, it's interesting how much information can be retrieved within a very short time.

My goal was to identify a nuclear power plant in the United States of America on a satellite picture. First of all, I searched for a list of nuclear power plants in the US. That was easy: http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/united_states.html

The "International Nuclear Safety Center" is so kind to put up a good overview over the power plants in the US. I chose one of the power plants, namely the one in Oyster Creek, N.J., according to this page the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the US, and known by fishers as certain kinds of fishes are attracted by cooling system's warm water output. That reminds me of some studies that concluded that river Danube would have the right temperature for alligators and that type of animals should the Zwentendorf power plant start operating. But I digress.

After a few minutes of searching, I also found a topo map of exactly that area showing where the nuclear power plant (only called "power plant" in the map) is:


And from that on, it was all very easy. The coordinates are about -74.19621 longitude and 39.81927 latitude (the online interface where I retrieved the topo map from gave me those coordinates, it was linked by some fishing website, BTW), and retrieved a few more detailled images from Terraserver-USA:





Et voila, we have a nice overview over the area of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant. And when I'm able to do that within an hour, what keeps terrorists off from doing the same type of research?

A dissertation got censored because of similar type of information which "might help terrorists", and not even pilots get this kind of information even while they're forbidden to fly over nuclear power plants (and Oyster Creek is explicitly on that list, although I lost the link to it...).

le already blogged the traditional meal for Easter, so here you have another picture of the wonderful Weihfleisch we had today:

I'm finally out. Yesterday I left Roman Catholic Church. I haven't been to church for at least 10 years, and I actually haven't belived in anything what the church had proclaimed. I converted to Atheism a few years ago, not only because the concept of belief in a religious meaning seems so totally unlogical to me, but also because all religions actually seem quite silly after you've had contact with Discordianism.

Anyway, religion in the western world is very often constructed in a way that it has real influence on the people without providing hardly anything substantial. Mankind was always occupied with questions like "who are we?", "where do we come from?", "where do we go?" (and probably "what shall we have for lunch?"), and religions claim to have answers to the questions, without actually providing real answers, but only "believe that it was in that and that way". This doesn't give anything to me, it doesn't make me happier in any way, it's actually the other way around: religion would put the burden of sin and a double moral standard on me, something that actually would make me less happy, so Atheism is the way to go for me, as I can make my own moral and ethical standards.

So I think leaving church was a good decision, as it finally interrupts the final connection that I had to it.

Yesterday I posted some examples for censored material in NASA's World Wind. Well, today, I searched around a bit and found some quite interesting surveillance material of Andrews Air Force Base, which I collected here. Again, some of the pictures are distorted, because I found out too late that the distortion can be disabled. Anyway, interesting details can be recognized, e.g. a squadron of eight F/A-18 Hornets (WP link) or seven F-16 Fighting Falcons (WP link).

Just in case you didn't know: Andrews AFB is the home airport of the Airforce One, the US president's plane. It's interesting that they give out that detailled information about it without any problems while they censor photos of the White House and the Capitol.

Despite popular belief, the content of the posting that I did this day in de.alt.sysadmin.recovery is not true. Fortunately. Don't ask.

World Wind is a really nifty application to look at satellite pictures from the whole planet (with varying resolution). Unfortunately, it's Windows only, and of course, you only have really good quality when you look at US maps. But look at what they did to the picture material of the White House and the Capitol:


(should some of the buildings look distorted to you, that's because it's a 3D map, and the data for the height isn't very accurate...)

Today's good news: I got the acceptance for my first flat. Next sunday I will have a meeting with the landlord, and do stuff like the contract. The flat has 43 m2, lies on the Auberg in Urfahr, the part of Linz north of river Danube, quite central, but quite calm, too. More information including photos and stuff will follow in about a month.

Yes, you can now buy a law in the European Union: see here.

Yay! Finally, I've completed my apprenticeship final exam. All I had to do was answer a few simple questions about different parts of computing, pretty easy all in all. And I even passed with "Auszeichnung" (distinction). It's wonderful that it's finally over. Now let's go on with real life.

Since WP 1.5 is out for quite some time, I decided to take the risk and upgrade. I also added a new and better CAPTCHA. The theme will definitely change in the next few days, but the theme that I used before isn't available as WP 1.5 theme.

First part done, second (and final) part to come next tuesday. Quote of the day: "you are the first candidate ever to hand in an object-oriented solution to this problem." w00t!

Tomorrow I will have the first part of my apprenticeship final exam. It will be trivial, AFAIK: the tests that all the other people had to do was nothing but creating a simple database and a simple user interface with some logic behind it. In PHP. With MySQL as database. harhar
The second part will be user interface testing, i.e. one gets a program, and has to create a test plan, and then test the application accordingly. Not really impressive, either. Anyway, you will read more about it tomorrow.