Why do things feel as if they're going backwards now?

I seem to remember, for a short period in the late nineties, when things seemed to be getting better. Society seemed to be making genuine progress, albeit in baby steps. Tolerance, acceptance, and common sense seemed to be gradually pushing bigotry, intolerance and ignorance into the past where they belong.

Or maybe I was just the right age at the right time, and was merely observing the world through my last scraps of youthful optimism and naivety as I entered adulthood.

Things I Hate #344

Just a quickie, but in the long, long list of things that really irritate me..

SQL Databases that insist on enclosing table/field names with other characters. Usually quotes or square brackets.

SQL is an amazing language. On the face of it, it's incredibly arcane, but it's surprisingly versatile and powerful. However, some implementations really keep it stuck in the 1970s.

I'm using Apache Derby for the first time, and considering it's a modern project, I'm surprised I have to use quotes around table and field names.

Is it really necessary to have to do this:

SELECT
 "project"."proj_name",
 "project"."proj_root"
FROM
 APP."project"
WHERE
 "proj_id" = 5

And let's not even get on to update queries, where you have to offensive things like this:

UPDATE
 APP."project"
SET
 "proj_name" = '',
 "proj_path" = ''
WHERE
 "proj_id" = 5

It's just ugly, and unnecessary when other engines manage to cope perfectly fine without it.  Even Microsoft's SQL Server can cope without those hideous square brackets everywhere that it used to insist upon.

LedBorg Server, Client and Android app

The new HTML interface

Since the original LedBorg Vala project, I have been working on a total re-write, moving it on from a single source file experiment. It's now been split into libledborg which is a shared library, and ledborg-server which is the new version of the server, which has a cleaner and more consistent protocol (though very similar to the version in the original project), and a vastly improved HTML interface shown here.

I've also used libledborg to not only build the new ledborg-server, but to also build a separate client package, imaginatively titled ledborg-client. This is a simple command-line client that could be called from scripts to communicate with the ledborg-server.

ross@raikkonen:~$ ledborg_client --help
Usage:
  ledborg_client [OPTION...]

LedBorg Client 0.1.0 is a simple command-line client that allows
 network control of an LedBorg add-on for the Raspberry Pi
 by talking to LedBorg Server

Help Options:
  -?, --help                              Show help options

Application Options:
  -p, --port                              Specify which port to connect on
  -h, --host=HOSTNAME or IPADDRESS        Specify the LedBorg server to connect to
  -c, --colour=LEDBORG COLOUR TRIPLET     Specify the colour to send to the server
  -o, --operation=get/set                 Operation to perform
  -V, --version                           Show version information

Both of these new packages have been developed using the GNU build system (autotools), which has been a bigger learning curve than Vala itself! In addition, to complete the learning experience, I've been using the git SCM to manage the code.

Android ledborg client

Finally, I've been firing up the Eclipse IDE to develop a basic Android client app. This has, of course, been in Java rather than Vala.

The source code to all three packages is now available on github.

• libledborg and ledborg-server: https://github.com/themightyug/ledborg-server
• ledborg-client: https://github.com/themightyug/ledborg-client
• android-ledborg-client: https://github.com/themightyug/android-ledborg-client

The MagPi Magazine

This is going to be a quick one. Just to say thanks to the awesome people at The MagPi magazine for publishing my article on programming the Raspberry Pi and LedBorg add-on with Vala (based on my previous blog post).

The article appeared in the Feb 2013 issue, which can be downloaded as a PDF or viewed online here.