Are they really in touch with what matters?

As I was developing today, I found this article about pluralizing tables name in ruby on rails:

http://devilelephant.blogspot.com/2007/01/rails-plural-table-names-lame.html

Is it me, or the guys argument is completely subjective? I quote:

Most experienced DBAs will tell you that the name of a table should describe what one record in that table would represent. Who would recommend plural table names? Developers seem to like plural names because they equate database tables with Collections

Basically: "You should not do that because most of the guys I know all said it was bad, trust me"

Furthermore, isn't a database table a collection of things, indeed? My opinion is that it's perfectly normal to pluralize table names. But then I didn't ask my friend to tell me their opinions on the matter ;-)

2 things I've learned related to the Belgian crisis by going on vacation abroad

This first week of July I went to Tuscany by car, with family and friends. Starting from Brussels to go in the neighborhood of Lucca, you have to go down through Luxembourg, a bit of France, pass by Switzerland and go over the Alps, finally arriving in Italy.

I don't know much about Switzerland, except that I went skiing there for the first time when I was twelve (a marvelous overnight trip by train through the mountains), that they have over-zealous custom officers, and that it's amazingly beautiful.

Also, it's a federal state - just like Belgium. They speak 3 languages, just like in Belgium. They also have bilingual areas. For all I know (I might be wrong), they don't fight about cultural differences, territory or language. They all feel Swiss, as far as I know.

Italy, this year was celebrating the 150th anniversary of its unification. Flags and celebrations everywhere! Wait, what? 150 year? So Belgium has existed longer than Italy? I never heard anyone saying that Italy wasn't a "real" country because its history was so short! Belgium will celebrate its 181 year of existence this 21th of July.

They have a region where people speak and learn German in Italy, too, by the way. I went there for two weeks, three years ago. These people feel Italian.

Exactly what is the problem here in Belgium that makes it so difficult to accept that we have three languages, cultural differences and still that it's possible to live together, to have a Belgian identity? I suspect it has nothing to do with culture or language.

discarding car maintenance byproducts in Brussels

I'm the proud owner of a 1978 Fiat 124 spider. She's my only car, and I drive it everyday: she's very trustee, even though she has its mood. The engine and general mecanics are very basic and simple, so I do maintenance work on it myself: first because I enjoy it, then it saves me a few bucks.

I'm not learning you anything if I say that when you do that kind of work on a car, there are a string of byproducts resulting; used up oil, discarded oil filters, etc... In Belgium we have a quite efficient system for recycling houseold waste, but it's very difficult when you come with that kind of toxic wastes. You have to wait for a specific waste recycling bus to come along in a place near you.

[EDIT] Recently I've learned that you could also bring those up in a garage near you. That's what I did, good to know ;)

Very good article about software that changed computing forever (through digg)

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/ibm_os360_windows_31_software_changed_computing

Paypal don't really care about its clients, and its client's clients...

A few days ago we, together with my associates, started a new brand of shavers that currently sells only over the internet. I won't digress about the concept, except that you can get more information here: Raz*War , or on this nice blog post explaining the concept.

We launched the service during the eleventh Brussels beta group and I think people really liked it. So far, so good, we're selling our products and everything run smoothly, except with the payment system.

We use paypal because it's easy to set up, and applications to the big payment gateway are long, cumbersome and they usually reject you when you don't sell 100k€ worth of stuff in a month (this actually describe my application with chronopay). But...

Paypal is far from cheap: they basically rip us of a minimum of 0.65€ per transaction. Also, they have a security system wich, in an obscure and unexplained way, can accept or reject someone's credit card based on a calculated "risk" that seems to take into account the amount, card type and e-mail. Customers are then simply disallowed any transaction, receiving the following message:

"The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number."

... With a perfectly working card. Paypal does not give any explanations, and actually doesn't even reply to my inquiries, and a significant part of our customers have experienced this: needless to say we are looking for another way to

Data compression and the growing number of cores in modern CPUs

Since very early in my geek life, I've been fascinated by parallel processing and, generally speaking, systems that make use more than one processor. So you can imagine my delight when the era of multicore processors came.

Not exactly so. A frustratingly high number of tools and operating systems still does not use the potential of multiple cores, even in the server world. Virtually all modern computers have at least two of the little guys, yet it's still difficult to keep them busy.

In my dwelling on the internets, in found that the bzip2 compression utility have finally a multi process capable version: pbzip2 (out since a while : first non-beta was released in march 2007). It works great and I started to use it in production with our backup and service scripts. You can either let it detect the number of CPUs, or specify it yourself (and keep some processing power for other tasks) with the -p option - though I suppose the performance increase should be lilmited by disk throughput

I've been able to use it successfully on debian/ubuntu and Macos X. Enjoy.