I am not sure I will get a chance to go jogging tomorrow. I hope to have to go over to blacktown to pick up a circuit board some time during the day. In the morning I have a meeting with some representatives of the defence forces here in the morning. ANd there is the normal work that I have on too.

One of my clients had a horrible requirements… They wanted me to add another 20 or so fields in on of my programs – and this is a generic program the is used for many clients. Anyway I have found a ‘novel’ but horrible solution to this… I had a field for user defined data in the database anyway. So I made this field a bit bigger – up to 4000 bytes. Then I shoved all the 20 new fields into this single field as XML. And provided some code to grab the data out when it is retrieved.

This is ugly but it actually works, and seems to work fairly well. The advantage is that I can do similar things for other clients too.

Photo of the Day

This is a photo of the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. It is a really cool museum, similar to the Powerhouse Museum. They have a rainforest you can walk though with plants – quite serene actually. Te Papa is always on my agenda when I visit Wellington. Of the last three times I have been to New Zealand (Since 2000) I have been to Wellingtong once and Auckland twice.

This second photo is of some country north of Wellington… Not quite sure where it is, but it will be south of Rotorua. I love the countryside. It is so beautiful.