Learning Java

One of my clients uses Acronis True Image Home for their nightly back-up. I don't know the product well, but I like what I've seen so far - mostly. It seems pretty thorough. The backups run like clockwork every night. And I have successfully recovered a system which caught a nasty virus, such that a reformat was the only cost effective fix. But the other day, the front end application, the management console, would not start. It just froze, with a flash screen reporting that it was checking disk D. Quite why it needs to check Disk D before opening is a mystery, especially because it is not included in the backup and it need never need be read from. On the machine in question D is the manufacturer's "recovery" sector. Quite frankly they are a waste of space, and the word recovery is a complete misnomer - "Factory Reset" sector would be more honest and appropriate. And given that nothing useful is ever written there, it mystifies me that Acronis ...

Building a mini-app from scratch using only text files and the command line is a bit like building a piece of furniture from IKEA. I find that after five steps I realise I made a mistake in step 2, and I have to pull everything apart again and start almost from scratch. When I was creating the financial transaction table, I decided to dodge the date conversion issue and make the date field text only. After all it was my intension to read the data back into Excel or Access for a GUI presentation at the end of the day. But when I had imported the data and started to query the tables, I decided I needed to sort by date during processing. So I had to drop the table, with all its data, and create a new one with a real date field. The irony is that, such are the quirks of MS Access, it was much easier exporting to a CSV file with the exact date format, that Apache Derby 10.4.2.0 was looking for, than getting it back. When you export a CSV file Access gives you many choices o...

I have this weird belief that spending too long looking at a share portfolio is morally wrong, because it's only money. But then I get this guilt thing about a lack of due diligence. My compromise is to spend the weekdays on my main project, which is developing interactive assessment software, and a part of the weekend looking at and thinking about shares. My traditional tools for this are Microsoft Access and Excel. And while the market was diving, and I was only buying shares, that worked fine. All I had to do was to track what I had bought, what I had paid for it, and what it is worth now. But now the market is rising again, and a handful of shares have risen by silly proportions, I feel I need to sell small amounts of them, at least to recuperate the original investment cost. But I am doing quite nicely with baby bonuses and other means tested benefits, and I don't want to blow my income out of the water. So I need a quick but accurate means of tracking the cumulati...