Rich Rodriguez: Tech

PostgreSQL/JDBC tip of the day:

With the 7.1.x drivers, loading and saving binary data is an unintuitive process. Just keep these things in mind:

All access to OID columns must be in transactions. Even reads...
No BYTEA columns for you!
You might need to use the native Statement and ResultSet if you are using pooling software that acts as a proxy to the underlying implementation.
Use getBytes/setBytes

And this will supposedly all change with the 7.2 drivers. Boo!

Formatted Object (FO) tip of the day:

My client wanted their generated PDF documents to have the "Page x of y" footer. Getting the current page number is trivial (<fo:page-number />), but getting the page count isn't so obvious.

First, create a block where you know it will be the very last block in the document. Give it a unique id:

<fo:block id="endofdoc"></fo:block>

Then, use this element to get the page count:

<fo:page-number-citation ref-id="endofdoc"/>

This has been tested with the Apache FOP renderer.

Here's a very likely fact. WSDL is a delay tactic to keep the rest of us confused until Microsoft is ready to dominate the market. [Scripting News]

I think the confusion was just a beneficial side-effect. It will help sell copies of Visual Studio.NET, since few people are going to want to deal with WSDL by hand. The climax of the demos of that product has always been the part where they use it to automagically hook up to a web service.

I think WSDL is what happens when you get Big Brains locked in a room, with no real product to ship, and are told to "Come up with our XML strategy." They keep going down the rabbit hole until they have found a general solution to a problem they've long forgotten about.

We've all seen developers waste tons of money and time doing this instead of making the best possible use of the tools at hand, maybe improvising a few new uses for those tools, and getting things done.