Το φιτρί αγόρι (colourful life)

If you decide to live abroad some things you enjoy in your home country won’t be available. You change a bit your clothes, the food you buy and prepare and even the coffee and tea you drink. But even if you do change you still miss some things.

Sascha likes to buy Swiss cheese and prepare delicious pasta. Me, being from Spain, there is something that I miss a lot: Jamón. I also miss Spanish cheese and other “embutidos” (sorry, I can’t find a translation for it). So here is the question: What can you find in Greece?

Chorizo: you can find chorizo in Carrefour supermarkets as Τσοριθο. The quality is not very good but is edible.

Embutido: In AB supermarkets and form a Spanish company (Iglesias) you can find a tray with salchichón, lomo, chorizo and jamón. Good quality and around 6.5 euros per tray (250 grams).

Jamón: Also in AB supermarkets you can find a tray with jamón in slices from the same spanish brand. You can also buy a clean leg without bones and fat. The price in this case goes from 25 euro/kilo for jamón serrano to 58 euro/kilo for jamón ibérico.

I believe this is only a small part of all things you can find. If you, reader, know where to get any other typical Spanish products (wine, cheese, restaurants) feel free to comment

“Que aproveche”

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Whatever  blah= new Whatever();
blah= utility.GetANewBlah();

Today is the second time I get a piece of code like this and I have to stand this huge misunderstanding about references. This time was done in C# but the first was in Java. Anyway, they behave in the same way for this matter.

Java and C# behave with variables that point to objects as placeholders for references. Using the example code as a guide, we execute the following steps in order:

1. Define a variable called blah
2. Create a new instance of Whatever
3. Assign to the variable a reference to the new instance we’ve just created.
4. Call a method in the object utility. The utility variable in turn holds a reference to another object.
5. The method returns a reference to an object of type Whatever. We assign it to blah loosing the previous reference.

There is the mistake. We create a new object for the fun of typing code and then we forget about it. This behavior should be avoided in 99% of the cases because when the programmer does that he believes he is assigning the contents to the first generated object, when in fact he is forgetting about it and assigning a new one. This, if done in C++, will make your application eat your memory for breakfast.

This misunderstanding can lead to the following snippet I saw in a previous project.

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List<Url> blah= new List<Url>();
...
blah.Add(icanhascheezburger);
....
blah= utility.GetANewBlah();
...
this.useBlah(blah);

Of course icanhascheezburger was lost and the coder was wondering why. In this case the previous coder assigned to that project did the same, and the new coder, not being used to the Java language, followed his example copying the behavior. From this snippet we have to understand that in line 5 we loose the reference to the object and if we don’t have a copy of that reference whatever we did before is lost.

C# notes.

• No, the equal operator cannot be overloaded in C#.
• Doesn’t apply on properties. A property can replace the behaviour of the equal operator and, for example, on assignment copy the content. But we have to code that behavior.

Use with caution.

We can use this behavior in some restricted cases. For example when the new assignment is “exception prone” and we want to continue no matter the result.

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Whatever blah= new Whatever();
try {
blah = utility.GetPreviousBlahs();
}
catch () {}
this.DoSomething(blah);

In this case perhaps GetPreviousBlahs should return an empty list. Anyway, in case it fails, we can continue and operate with blah because it’s initialized.

Summary

Do not waste your time,others time, memory and CPU time. Object variables are references and the = operator removes the previous reference and assigns a new one.

“Yeah! All evening watching Eurosport.” I’m quite sure that many of you have listened something equal or similar to this. Put another channel, or add some specific sports. The image of a guy drinking beer while watching basket or soccer will come into your mind. I have to say that I’m not a fan of TV sports, but this last evening I spent it enjoying some TV sports (without beer but with feta cheese).

But I didn’t watch neither soccer nor basket. There is a trick. I found a broadcast of the Championship Gaming Series 2008 on Eurosport 2. I guess it was the quarters of the World Championship: Dallas vs San Francisco. Dallas was the favourite but the last Counter Strike round was amazing and San Francisco got the points.

It’s nice to see again some faces I saw in the documentary Frag. Like the Dallas team manager. At the same time is sad to see how the image changes from having fun playing games to teenagers squeezed by teams that use them to get money from sponsors.

Years ago I was playing games. I wasn’t good, but I enjoyed a lot. We had our clan and we used to meet to play games online and with our computers. We even used to go to lan parties together and had really good moments. We were the TnT Quake Clan. The good of been a free teenager.

Now I don’t play many games. Some times I play Wii Sports (I like to be pwned by betabug at Tennis) and some DDR, but not these times where you get tired of playing. I have some games I want to play still in the shelf. And today I realized that Red Alert 3 is out (but reviews don’t say good things about it). Buah! I want a month off!

By the way. If you’re in Athens and you play DDR or love C&C game series. We have a coffee pending

Warning, rant ahead!

Today I started to plan the deployment of a ASP.NET web application. For months we have been developing this web application in our development machines, but it was time to prepare an environment as much similar as possible to the production one.

So the production environment has a IIS 6.0 Web server running on a Windows 2003 server installation. Can I put IIS 6.0 on my windows XP? No, I cannot. Microsoft only allows a restricted 5.1 version. I can install the same Apache HTTP server that I can put on a production machine, a PostrgreSQL server, etc. I’m thinking in open source based solutions and I can setup my machine in a very similar the production environment will be. But not if you use Microsoft Windows.

I’m not saying that having another machine for testing is bad. It’s a good idea to have an exact copy of your production environment for final testing. But also being able to test in your machine without many dependences helps a lot when debugging new features.

I didn’t finished whining. We got some more problems on the database side, because the Microsoft SQL Server Express doesn’t want to accept connections with username and password. Till now we used windows based authentication. But the IIS 5.1 web applications don’t play well whith windows authentication (Even if the application was set to run as the same user I use in my computer).

So I see myself replacing my Windows XP by a Windows 2003 server and finding another machine for a real Microsoft SQL server installation.

End of Rant

Post your Windows rant here

In this blurry picture you’re watching a guy installing the first christmas lights. Ergo, Christmas is here. This is the signal shops need to start changing their windows. Adding fake snow, and fixing prices because “In Christms everybody buys”.

I like the “smell” of winter and therefore the “smell” of Christmas. You can see Christmas as some kind of game where people change a bit his attitude about others and everybody tries to be a bit more friendly because “it’s Christmas time”.

Presents, celebrations, meeting old friends. In Spain I like the “food” part of Christmas. Have dinner with typical spanish products. Yeah! I love it. (Yes, this means jamon :P). This year I’ll miss that part because I’ll stay in Greece. It’s gonna be my first Christmas here.

I hope it snows a little bit