Behind the times with NHibernate 2

I am so behind the times ... NHibernate 2.0.1 GA was released last fall and 2.1.0 Alphas are coming out. In the mean time, Hibernate.org has been subsumed by Redhat's JBoss. The url www.hibernate.org doesn't take you anywhere useful, and following the javascript menu to projects / services / hibernate still doesn't get you anywhere - pure garbage. It is clear that JBoss wants to sell you their enterprise build of Hibernate instead (that "Products" link works).

I have been so busy with my day job that I haven't been keeping up. I work at a hospital, supporting Cerner Millenium - writing CCL, Perl, Python, Microsoft SQL (occasionally), and a bit of C#.

Cerner CCL is a proprietary language that feels like a mash-up of Fortran IV and and an arcane dialect of SQL from 1976. The language used to run on VMS servers, but we have migrated to HP-UX, and I am OVERJOYED to have a choice of using a posix shell, ksh or csh. Also, I recently discovered that CCL allows me to map C library functions into the language. So far we have used this to allow file open, close, read, write and seek.

ADDPATH NT/DOS command line script

(Yes, We say script now instead of batch ... times are changing).

Here is a stupid little batch file that I have written several times. It adds a single argument to the path in your current command-line session (so it is not permanent).

@echo off
if "%1" == "" goto end_script
set path=%path%;%1
:end_script

Iron Languages on DLR

The "Iron" languages that run on the .NET DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) are making progress. I just noticed that IronRuby has a release on RubyForge.

To be honest though, I have moved to Python as my script language of choice, with Perl as the ever-present fallback. Iron Python seems like it is coming along nicely. Iron Python 2 can even host itself. I can't wait for MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop to support IronPython on Windows.

The Castle Project will facilitate native SQL.

I just spotted this on FishEye ... an example native SQL query. You'll need source from SVN or a recent download from the build server - more recent than patch 5551 by mzywitza on 17 February 2009.

This is very nice, allowing parameterized SQL without the hacks that I used (you can search here for some of my old blogs on the subject).

Search and Replace in Visual Studio 2005

I usually have to look this up, so I am posting it to my blog.

Visual Studio 2005 has a "Regular Expression" option on the "search and replace" dialog. (Previous .Net editions had it as well.) I occasionally want to rewrite several lines of text without writing a macro or wearing out my fingers. Here's what I do ...

If I have a file with several lines of

DECLARE R1 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST1")
DECLARE R20 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST2")
DECLARE R31 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST3")
DECLARE R42 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST4")

And I would like to convert these to

SET R1 = "TEST1"
SET R20 = "TEST2"
SET R31 = "TEST3"
SET R42 = "TEST4"

I would search for "declare [R|r]{.*} = .* with constant\({.*}\)" and replace with "set r\1 = \2" (don't add quotes into the search dialog).

This grabs the text in curly braces and assigns it to \1 and \2, so I can re-assemble it as I wish. I had to use a backslash in front of the parenthesis since otherwise this is seen as part of the reg-ex and not as a literal.

PdfPoster - a simple fix for Windows

I have tried a couple of times over the last 3 months to use PdfPoster on some Erwin documents. Unfortunately, I am using Windows XP on my work PC. It was clearly documented that I needed to install PyPdf 1.11 or higher, so I did easy_setup to install 1.12. Recently, I tried "C:\test>pdfposter -vvv -s 2.0 SCHEDULING.pdf scheduling_2x.pdf" ... and received a nice traceback (see below). This led me on a wild goose chase, under the assumption that my PyPDF library was not installed correctly. After a while, I decided to start python in immediate mode and just exercise PyPdf. It worked fine, but I noticed that the example opened a file using "rb" mode (read only, binary). So, I opened pdfposter/__init__.py under my site library directory, scrolled down to the bottom and changed the 3rd line of "def main" from "inpdf = PdfFileReader(open(infilename))" to "inpdf = PdfFileReader(open(infilename, "rb"))". Problem solved! So if you ever have problem with a python application, where it works under Linux but not under WinXP, try opening files in binary mode.

Mediasize : 1x1 a4
            595.00 842.00 dots
Postersize: 1x1 a4
            595.00 842.00 dots
---- processing page 1 -----
input  dimensions: 612.00 792.00 (trimbox of input page)
output dimensions: 595.00 842.00 (poster size)
Calculated page scaling factor: 0.972222
output dimensions: 595.00 770.00 (calculated)
Pages w/o rotation 1 x 1
Pages w/  rotation 1 x 2
Decided for rotation: no
Deciding for 1 columns and 1 rows of portrait pages.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python25\Scripts\pdfposter-script.py", line 8, in 
    load_entry_point('pdftools.pdfposter==0.4.5', 'console_scripts', 'pdfposter'
)()
  File "C:\Python25\lib\site-packages\pdftools\pdfposter\cmd.py", line 119, in r
un
    main(opts, *args)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\site-packages\pdftools\pdfposter\__init__.py", line 298,
 in main
    posterize(outpdf, page, opts.media_size, opts.poster_size, opts.scale)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\site-packages\pdftools\pdfposter\__init__.py", line 251,
 in posterize
    _scale_pdf_page(page, scale)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\site-packages\pdftools\pdfposter\__init__.py", line 235,
 in _scale_pdf_page
    content = ContentStream(page["/Contents"].getObject(), page.pdf)
  File "c:\docume~1\rtate\locals~1\temp\easy_install-gpolew\pyPdf-1.12-py2.5-win
32.egg.tmp\pyPdf\pdf.py", line 1114, in __init__
  File "c:\docume~1\rtate\locals~1\temp\easy_install-gpolew\pyPdf-1.12-py2.5-win
32.egg.tmp\pyPdf\generic.py", line 165, in getObject
  File "c:\docume~1\rtate\locals~1\temp\easy_install-gpolew\pyPdf-1.12-py2.5-win
32.egg.tmp\pyPdf\pdf.py", line 549, in getObject
  File "c:\docume~1\rtate\locals~1\temp\easy_install-gpolew\pyPdf-1.12-py2.5-win
32.egg.tmp\pyPdf\generic.py", line 67, in readObject
  File "c:\docume~1\rtate\locals~1\temp\easy_install-gpolew\pyPdf-1.12-py2.5-win
32.egg.tmp\pyPdf\generic.py", line 539, in readFromStream
  File "c:\docume~1\rtate\locals~1\temp\easy_install-gpolew\pyPdf-1.12-py2.5-win
32.egg.tmp\pyPdf\pdf.py", line 544, in getObject
KeyError: 0

Google Chrome and Iron

I'm sure most of you have heard of Google's new WebKit based browser "Chrome". Well, a German company has released a more privacy friendly version called "Iron", with the browser usage tracking removed. Their site is written in German, but here is a translation thanks to Google's Language Translation tools.

I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'm glad someone is taking advantage of the open source nature of Google's offering.