The first party, Sunday night, not including the Aus & NZ Reception where we chatted up Santa Claus Dr Kim Silverman (one of Australia’s finest exports to Apple) was sfMacIndie which was well attended and had great food. I talked to some German dudes for most of the night, and then was challenged to find a Russian in the room. I watched demonstrations of an iPad case that is highly impact resistant (iPhone screens were perfectly undamaged after hitting the case with a hammer) and a demo of the Cloud Made map technology.

Monday through Friday: this is basically all non-disclosure territory, with the exception of some parties. Watch the Stevenote if you want to know things Apple. But I will say this: there’s a lot of cool new things for developers. And the juice was fantastic as usual.

We were in the keynote queue from 4AM, and were a little beyond where we were last year in terms of position: wedged neatly into the corner of the building. If getting up at 3:30 AM wasn’t enough, I only got to sleep about 1:30 AM so it’s fair to say I was feeling top of the world! Matt had the unusual idea of buying collapsible chairs for sitting on during the queue, and this made things a little more comfortable. I played some Torchlight. We socialised with the surrounding nerds. We acquired free t-shirts. And then around about quarter to 6, I had this brilliant idea. I loaded the immortal Rick Astley up in MPlayer on my 17″ MacBook Pro, hit fullscreen, full volume, hit play, and then started walking up the queue… Yes, I rickroll’d the WWDC queue. You can thank me in the comments.

I went straight to bed Monday night…well, as much as I could. We dropped by a bookstore before heading home and then there was a plumbing problem in the neighbouring room at the hotel so Matt and I had to shift downstairs, delaying sleep further.

Tuesday through Friday are a bit blurry and were quite uneventful during the day. The Apple Design Awards and Stump the Experts on Tuesday night were both great. Congratulations to Aussie developers Firemint for winning two (!) awards. I scored a shirt (again, though this one is XL) and boxed copies of the After Dark screensaver pack. The bash on Thursday night was awesome; the band was OK Go who had donned the conference jacket and made some witty remarks about Apple and the conference. But that’s not the best part. The band’s front man, Damian, hopped off the stage for a number and played…less than a metre from my face.

So the conference wound down and Friday evening rolled around. We hiked to Coit (yes, we were sure to catch a snap of Coit Liquors, ha ha) and caught the cable car back, and then joined the AUC people for the traditional dinner at Buca di Beppo. Tim drank an inordinate amount of root beer, and since Jess’s birthday was recent enough, we got the staff to sing their version of a happy birthday. Finally we cruised over to the Courtyard Marriott where a pile of people were staying, and hung out having a little after-party with the likes of Nick Circosta and Mark Bate, which was enjoyable.

Saturday was a little bit of a “free day” in some ways. After a rather late start at Mel’s diner for breakfast, we headed our separate ways. Tim chose to hang out in the hotel room and read a book. A couple of guys headed out with Bernie, another Australian, for a car ride around the place. As for Matt, Alex, Jess, Andrew, Dave and myself, we all went on a bit of a bike ride.

The ride started near to Pier 39, which incidentally is San Francisco’s quintessential tourist trap. We rode along towards the Golden Gate bridge and Fort Point, had a quick poke around the fort and then rode over the bridge. On the other side of the bridge we headed for Sausalito, and quickly ate a greatly delayed lunch (though it was delicious), followed by a ferry ride back to the other side.

That evening, a few of us went to see a film: Prince of Persia. While hardly impressive in terms of movies, it certainly tops the list of films based on computer games.

Lastly, on Sunday we got up late again (this being such a pleasant change from the early starts during the week let me tell you!) and joined Mark Bate again for coffee in Union Square. This was followed by a trip to Berkeley.

First order of business was to grab some bubble tea, and check out the comic store. Impressive range of American comics! Comparable to small manga stores in Japan. Secondly, we went to the hat shop.

Best. Shop. Ever.

I left with two hats: one stylish brown bowler-ish hat, and one tricorne pirate-style hat. Both of these were unanimously suggested as being awesome for me, and I think I agree. They both fit well. The others bought some hats too: Matt left with a black fedora-style hat, Nic bought seven hats (because he goes through them quickly) and Tim scored a very savvy grey top hat! To complete the ensemble the others bought parade canes and even some fake moustaches. Fun!

Thirdly, we waltzed over to the Indian (as in subcontinent) restaurant for some curry. The menu options for many were quickly settled down to “whatever the hottest thing on the menu is,” but despite this, nobody had big problems eating their meal.

Finally, we cruised around the university campus for a little bit. It seemed familiar…not because UC Berkeley is famous in computing circles, but to me it was because of the smell in the air. Turns out the place is full of eucalyptus trees! No wonder—that gum-tree smell is highly reminiscent of home and of UTas.

After BARTing back to San Fran, we made some further plans for the evening: another movie, and then dinner. Movie was The A-Team, which we all agreed must have been worth the nine dollars entry, even though it was excessively silly and full of explosions. It’s got some great moments, like the bit where they fly a tank.

Dinner was had at the Cheesecake Factory. Yes, they have a huge range of cheesecakes. No, we didn’t just have cheesecake for dinner. Yes, I had a steak too. Yes, the steak was pre-shredded and I would have rather had it in one piece, but didn’t particularly mind enough to not eat the thing. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory has a great view of Union Square.

And now I must post or this will never get done. I’ll do the last two days soon. It’s been delayed a little because the internet here at the hotel was down yesterday, and we have been a bit busy today. So maybe I’ll write it on the plane home…on my brand new iPad! Fork yeah!

See you next time!

V Australia is a recent addition to the Virgin brand (who I recently discovered also offer superannuation through their Virgin Money brand!), providing long-haul flights between select destinations on the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the US. I booked a series of flights starting in Hobart and ending in San Francisco, via Sydney and Los Angeles, spending about 14 hours over the pacific. Like most other things Virgin, flight VA1 was pretty sexy. I was particularly pleased with the food, the legroom (cattle-class), and the deviously funny flight information cartoon.  The one and only one downer was actually supplied by the Virgin Blue flight that got me in to Sydney. This flight took longer than usual, and combined with the laggy international terminal transfer bus (which stunk like my laundry bag) and the positively frenetic pace of Australian immigration and customs meant I had to run the length of the inordinately long duty-free shopping area at the Sydney international terminal, and therefore board VA1 covered in sweat. Not cool.

The bowl of ramen in the food court was acceptable late-night food, and yet nowhere near being in the league of the bowls of ramen I ate in Japan.

After polishing off the noodles at 11PM-ish local time, I caught the shuttle bus over to the Holiday Inn I booked to bunker down in for the night. Sorry to sound like a shill, but I was very pleased with the small things provided by these guys, like a bottle of water, free late checkout, and so on. In the morning I went to their restaurant and had some wonderful blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
That day, my fellow travel companions and I met up back at the airport for lunch and our flight to Las Vegas. After some confusion regarding the correct BART station to meet Paris and Jon at, we settled down for some more food court food and then caught the Virgin America flight to Vegas. Virgin America again has a distinctive and sexy service, with another flight safety cartoon full of wicked little jokes.

Now Las Vegas is known as Sin City–gambling, strippers and hookers, and booze seem to flow quite naturally there. What I wasn’t expecting was poker machines in the airport waiting area, straight off the plane!

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here: we stayed in the Stratosphere, the only hotel casino which is in the Las Vegas city proper (the rest are actually in unincorporated Clark County, though still part of greater Vegas). The Stratosphere is so named due to the tower over 300 metres high with awesome rides at the top. After leaving the airport, we basically checked in, found dinner over at the NASCAR Cafe, and went to sleep. The NASCAR Cafe serves very large portions of food like most places we ate, but aside from being particularly proud of this fact, they have a special menu item: the B3 burrito, weighing in at six pounds (!) and which if you can eat the whole thing, you don’t pay for it. Nobody tried it, but instead I managed to eat most of a huge burger and chips.

In the morning we ate breakfast at IHOP (ohgod: cheesecake pancake stack! Lethal!) We also went around on the monorail to some of the major attractions: the MGM Grand, the Excalibur (Arthurian-legend-themed hotel), Luxor (Egyptian-themed hotel shaped like a pyramid), and past many of the other hotels on the strip.

We wasted the most time at Luxor, since we had planned to see Criss Angel perform that night. Luxor had several fascinating things to do. We saw Bodies, a tastefully presented exhibition of plasticised human bodies. Some of us also saw an exhibition of artefacts retrieved from the Titanic. Both these exhibitions are well worth the regular ticket price! As for Criss Angel’s show, I was impressed by the speed of his magic tricks and the theatrics, especially of the Cirque du Soleil performers, but the guy came across as a bit of a wanker and his act seemed a bit repetitive by the end. We had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe, a rainforest-themed restaurant in the MGM Grand, which was fun, especially as Paris paid for all the drinks. The others all had stupid cocktails with excessive alcohol, but I was quite happy with my rainbow-coloured frozen sodas.

The next day we took a guided tour of the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona, unlike Las Vegas which is in Nevada. This boils down to a five-hour or so bus ride each way. Breakfast was all-you-can-eat McDonalds (the principal reason we suspect that this tour was suggested by Andrew). We stopped at some very interesting places along the way: the Hoover dam (damn we had some bad dam puns going), and the towns of Kingman and Seligman (spiritual home to the longest remaining pieces of historic Route 66).

The Grand Canyon is really fucking massive. The best way of explaining it involves the computer graphics concept of “skybox”: the opposite side of the canyon looks like one (like a flat backdrop!) We learned that the canyon is about as long as the distance we covered in the bus ride (about two hundred and something miles), and about 20 miles wide. I won’t put up too many photos since photos really do not do the place any justice.

After the Grand Canyon trip we had a few hours up our sleeve for dinner and some random activity. Dinner was to be had at the 50s-style diner located in the Stratosphere, which as usual had way oversize meal portions. I had a burger and a killer chocolate malt!
At some point however, the idea was floated to see a topless show as the night’s random activity. Pople staying at the hotel got a two-for-one deal on the tickets, which was a plus. The show was called Bite, and the theme was, naturally, topless female vampires. Out of sheer random spontaneity, we did it—everybody except Alex got a ticket and the eight of us all crowded around a table next to the stage.

What a great idea! The show was absolutely hilarious and weird, with a rocking soundtrack! Judging the faces of the fellow audience members, we seemed to be the only people who had a fun time. Maybe they were trying to get aroused. Who knows? My advice: go for a laugh!

And finally, we had yet another abridged sleep in the noisy, dehydrating hotel room before Alex and I woke up and competed in Google Code Jam online round 2, local time 7AM. Alex did way better than me as usual, but it was a curvy round and neither of us got through to the next one.

After that we went around a lot of other attractions: up the Stratosphere tower a bit, caught a cab to New York, New York to ride the roller coaster (FUN!), checked out the Belagio with its water fountain theatrics and did a bit of gaming (Dad asked for some chips: got you one!). We went into Paris for lunch (second lunch for some) which has a disturbingly cool ceiling which, when you don’t concentrate on it, makes you feel like you are outdoors. We then went through Bally’s and emerged on the other side. Finally we did a series of rather uninteresting moves to get back to the airport and fly back to San Francisco, but not before Matt and I played some single-deck blackjack together back at the Stratosphere. Matt made $50, I lost $10. Compared with the Belagio chips, the Stratosphere chips seemed really cheap and nasty, so I didn’t save one.

After arriving back at San Fran airport, we immediately headed for Palo Alto to collect our large baggage which had been stowed away at Jon’s apartment there. Highlight of the evening was the Chicago-style pizza from a place called Patxi’s. Oh. My. Gawd. That was easily the best pizza I’ve had in years. Three larges for the table had us all full. They took 40 minutes to cook properly (that gives you an idea of how thick they were!) and I think it was worth every minute of the wait and every penny we paid.

There’s a shiny, magical, completely imaginary universe, which does not and cannot exist, despite continual referral from our universe. The word that refers to it is “ideal,” and also its relative “ideally.”

In the ideal world, there are no cockups, and there are no conspiracies. Everybody lives in harmony, harmony always in the ideal lands. Ideally, everything everybody says and does is perfect, jobs get done on time and budget, paperwork does itself, iPads are freely available for everybody that wants one, alien lifeforms find themselves, and the gravy train runs all night.

And we don’t live in that world. At least, I certainly haven’t been.Never has this been more evident to me than over the last month.

Where I really lose in the “ideal world” department is, on occasion, I say or write the most incredibly stupid and insensitive things. For added measure, I occaisionally cock up the apology too. Why? Maybe I’m trying to be funny and go way too far. Maybe somebody sticks a metaphoric needle into a sensitive area of my psyche and I retaliate. Maybe I just haven’t figured out humans yet. Maybe I don’t realise precisely who I’m talking to, or who will overhear, until it is too late.

Whatever the reason, it certainly is not the case that I consciously try to screw things up. Why on earth would I do that? Yet, I accept full responsibility for my actions. It is my fault.

And it’s quite possible that even if I figure out the how and why I cocked up in every instance, and apologise, there’s nothing more I can do about it.

After the most recent cockup, it was pointed out to me by a very good friend that I have been acting passive-aggressively, and that my latest fiasco may well have ended up with somebody wishing I don’t exist. With regards to passive-aggressivity, I had to look up the concept since I wasn’t sure what it meant. With regards to not existing, there’s sweet fuck-all I can do to not exist, and the situation has made me quite depressed.

Sorry maclab, I’m hiding from you guys recently because I’m afraid of stirring the crap up any further, and I’m attempting to not exist. (And I rationalise it further by reasoning that I can’t possibly get any work done over there.)

About passive-agressiveness: sadly this has kinda fitted me recently. I could be stepped on or dominated by a number of people, and the response is not to express my anger or fear directly, but instead as resistance served with a smile,  coated with a thin veneer of (ill-)humour.

For example, I could be afraid that new faces in the crowd are very socially successful, and that I am becoming irrelevant. Why not give them an “endearing” nickname that is actually mildly offensive? (Said person was in a subset of people that already had a well-accepted stupid nickname, so that was a cock-up on two counts.) I should have been standing up for them instead of putting them down.

My very good friend also reminded me of one thing that I’ve now been concentrating on very hard: “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Thankyou.

I don’t want to be a massive jerk or a passive-aggressive brick sticking out of the wall, or depressed and locked down by fears. Is it just as simple as being something else? I hope so. I hope so so much that I’m declaring the answer is YES.

I’ll be trustworthy, and happy and energetic and full of hope. I’ll stand up for people and listen to them and be a good friend for them and make them a coffee and assist them in their dealing with their problems and tell them I’m here. I’ll focus and get the job done. And I’ll keep the gravy train coming all night if I have to.

This is where I stop talking about it and hit the Publish button.

Harmony harmony always,
Josh

There is the Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. It has displays of robots, cat brains, the space station, genetically-engineered plants, model demonstrations of concepts from quantum mechanics, and best of all: a fully-working mechanical model of the internet. (Actually, this was perhaps not as awesome as the robots.)

There is the giant ferris wheel. It has impressive views, is 119 metres high and the ride lasts 16 minutes. The audio system in our gondola played Ravel’s Boléro on the way up.

There’s a Toyota showroom. (Still popular when we had a quick look there despite the problems with their pedals). There’s a ginormous shopping centre. There’s strange buildings and huge carparks and musicians.

So that was fun. The next day we went to Nara, again, first with the Shinkansen to Kyoto and then a rapid train.

Nara is famous for its deer population. There are two things I learnt about the Nara deer from simple experimentation: they are natural posers for photographs, and will follow you if you rustle a plastic bag (this was handy: I got a deer out of the way of a truck that looked like it was waiting for a while.)

We did the usual shrine and temple tour, but unlike the ones in other places that had been ravaged by many fires or destroyed for one reason or another, and subsequently reconstructed, some of the original buildings in Nara have actually survived until today. Very impressive.

I like the smaller-town feel of Nara. It reminds me a bit of Hobart. It also rained for most of the second day, which helped.

Then the other day we went back to Kyoto. It’s convenient to stay here for the last couple of days since there is a train back to the airport, and we certainly haven’t exhausted the sights here.

We went to Nijo Castle. If I was Tokugawa Ieyasu I’d be pretty pleased with how expansive and decorated my castle was. Many of the fascinating original paintings are kept in the dark for preservation, and there is no photography allowed inside, but I did take a lot of photos of the gardens.

We also went to see a film. Being a huge gushing fan of the Haruhi franchise, I was thrilled to see that Kyoto Animation had finished the first Haruhi film (The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, or 涼宮ハルヒの消失) and released it to cinemas on the 6th. The large quantity of unsubtitled Japanese washed over my head but I was still really happy to see this film.

That pretty much brings us up to today—tonight, we fly back to Australia. Hope you’ve enjoyed the read. See you next time!

What would have been even more sensible is if I had worn sensible shoes. Sneakers are not for prolonged walking, even if these ones had recycled car-tyre soles. Furthermore they had become highly soggy from the previous day’s snow.

Between departing the ryokan and finding some new shoes, the solution I Macguyvered to prevent my socks and feet becoming wet was to use a pair of plastic bags. (The guy who sold me a new pair of shoes found this amusing when I was taking the old shoes off.)

In any case, to really grind it in, after covering most of Arashiyama’s gorgeous sights, we went back into town, this time headed for the inexhaustible supply of torii gates at Fushimi-Inari Taisha. There must have been several thousand bright orange torii gates, lined up one after another over the pathways between the main shrines. It definitely felt like we had walked though millions by the time we were done, particularly in those darn shoes.

Somehow I convinced Alex some new shoes were in order so after pottering around Kyoto Tower and a brief stop near a large line of vending machines, we walked another km into Gion where we finally found…shoe shops. \o/ yaaaaay

To give a rather uncomfortable-yet-thrilling day a decent finale, when we got back to the ryokan I got my courage up and went for a bath (ofuro), which involved asking to use it since it had been emptied (!). Japanese baths are actually pretty easy: there are two rooms, one for getting naked in, then you go to the other which has the bath and some facilities for washing yourself. You wash first, and then hop in the bath to soak. This is because the bath water is shared. In any case, I indulged in a nice 43 degree bath for about 20 minutes. Ah, one other thing: this particular time, I had to rapidly figure out how to stop the water flow using the computer panel on the side of the bath.

The next day we went to Takayama. (I parted ways with my old sneakers at a convenient heap of garbage next to the road.) To get there we caught the Shinkansen and then a regular train on our JR Passes (indispensable!)

A few remarks about the Shinkansen. It is like a plane in the following respects: you can reserve seats, there is a lady with a food trolley who will serve you, there is a “first-class” Green Car (don’t know what exactly the extras they get in there), and the toilets are a bit air-plane like. Unlike a plane there is also a smoking car. It is like a regular train in practically all other respects—except the speed!

The train into Takayama rolled past incredibly pleasing mountainous terrain blanketed with lots of snow. The town was full of snow. We found the place we were staying at pretty good, this time we only got one room worth of room (the previous ryokan mysteriously and rather generously let us use two adjacent rooms—same price).

Oh well. We explored Takayama for a bit, had dinner, came back, slept.

My favourite thing about Takayama was the cozy mountain-town feel. The copious snow added extra atmosphere.

The other neat thing about Takayama is the one-hour bus ride to Shirakawa-go. A return ticket was about $55, so the next day we went. The sights are exhaustible in a few hours, but are incredible. The whole place is yet another world heritage site. The gassho-zukuri roofs are amazing.

I confess, there was an additional inspiration for going to Shirakawa-go: that was, there was a certain anime set there. Just as we were nearly going to miss the bus, we finally found the shrine where fans of almost any modern anime keep drawing various characters onto their wooden wish thingies.

Hmm, what happened next? We went to Tokyo!

We found a store where they sold a variety of alcohol right near their range of electric pianos. We also had a traditional Japanese pizza for dinner.

Food and shopping. We stayed in Ikebukkuro, mostly a shopping district but it had a pretty good vibe. But the best shopping was definitely in Akihabara, where everything is an electronics store, camera store, anime or manga or video or book store, or a maid cafe. A new kind of awesome every five metres of storefront awaits.

In a typical music shop you will find at least one of what I call a “Hatsune Miku shrine”, a display of albums featuring the synthesized voice known as Hatsune Miku, from the VOCALOID program. Personally I don’t find Hatsune Miku music very thrilling, but there’s no accounting for taste.

In a typical manga/anime store that stocks merchandise, you will find a similar thing that I call a “Neon Genesis shrine”. Perhaps the new movies resurrecting this slightly tired (yet still terrific) story are bringing some fresh fandom and energy to the enterprise.

We went to the main tower of the Tokyo Municipal Government offices and rode up to the 45th floor on the elevator. Conveniently, this was a dedicated elevator for the task, having only buttons 1, 2, <blank>, and 45. Aside from the crazy views of greater Tokyo, there was also a bar/restaurant, and various tourist merchandise outlets (one of which naturally had a Neon G shrine.)

That pretty much covers until the end of Tokyo. Next time (hopefully tomorrow night), I’ll talk about our experiences in Nara and final days back in Kyoto. Goodnight!

This is where we checked out from the hotel in Higashiyama, went downtown again, returned to get our bags, then caught the train over to Arashiyama (on the other side of the city), and awoke the next day to go walking for kilometres around bamboo groves, temples and shrines in the snow. With me wearing my snow-soaked sneakers. That was fun :<

Next morning: woke up, did the cursory internetting for a few hours, then we went for a walk. Our path today: the Path of Philosophy, a trail going for a couple of km’s that goes past ever more shrines and temples and gardens, following a stream. It was really enjoyable (AAAAA++++ would walk the path again).

After checking out what looked like the final shrine on the path, we headed west, past the university, to the Kyoto Imperial Palace Gardens. Who needs a palace so huge? Some school kids had the right idea (or perhaps it was their teachers): run around the thing. The whole place is 1.3km by 800m.

Southward, about another k, and we got to the final attraction: the International Manga Museum. Photos were not permitted for most of the place, but if you could imagine a three-floor building with lots of manga (a collection of over 40,000 volumes) stacked on the walls, an exhibition of western comics for girls and women, a display of wood carvings, a reading room for kids, and lots of people sitting around just reading manga, then you’ve got the idea.

Finally, we were walking in the vague direction of the subway, when we came upon a garage-like sale at a shrine. It was “garage-like” in that it had the feel of a garage sale, and yet was clearly well-organised and with some interesting goods. My eyes happened upon a golden fully-mechanical pocket-watch, with no internal cover over the clockwork so that you can see the whole thing in action. Had. To. Have. Got the lady down to ¥8000–coincidentally, the amount of money I had on me. This is why I need to go to an ATM again so soon.

After all the excitement we headed back to the hotel, and promptly ran out of internet (because when they say 24 hours, they mean 24 hours!) but I bought some more. I’m not here to be so cheap as to make life totally inconvenient.

A while ago somebody had the idea of going to Japan. Hrm well actually the thought has crossed the minds of many. But since there’s no time like the present, we booked some fantastically cheap flights and leapt across ocean and landmass alike in an Airbus A330 from the Gold Coast to Osaka. Here are some airport/plane snaps.

My boss, on the other hand, has a slightly different idea of simplicity. Namely, in his view, simplicity = minimise number of tables, and rely on stored procedures for everything.  The arguments I want to win with him are not really what I want to blog about today.

Today I’d like to describe how I implemented strongly-typed lists of objects (think List<SomeType> in C# / list<AClass> in C++) adhering to my boss’s vision of minimising table count, using only three tables and a pile of T-SQL and custom constraints, instead of the “more complex” system of lots of join tables and foreign key constraints. I do not particularly recommend this mode of implementation. For a start, it has made use of .NET Entity Framework, shall we say, “interesting.”

So consider directly representing classes, such as a Product class, each with a table in the schema, such as tProduct. Suppose the Product class has properties with the types List<Extras> and List<Retailers>, representing the extras one can buy with a product, and the retailers retailing a product. (Suppose we also model Extras and Retailers with tExtra and tRetailer, respectively.)

If we were implementing this with regular old join tables, there would be no columns in tProduct to represent the lists, rather, there would be some table tProductExtras, pointing at both tProduct and tExtra with FK constraints (call the columns ProductID and ExtraID), and a tProductRetailers, pointing at both tProduct and tRetailer in a similar fashion.

But now my boss comes along and says, “Oh, that’s too many tables. Your join tables really have the same structure, two columns of type INT, so they could easily be merged.” And he’s right on the second point, but with one caveat. If we had one join table for the whole database, call it tJoin, that simply had e.g. ParentID and ItemID, we cannot use foreign key constraints on either of them, since ParentID points to any of the tables that represent objects possessing a List of something, and ItemID points to any of the tables representing objects being part of a List. Which means there’s no database-level way of enforcing data integrity in tJoin, right? Lists are now so untyped it’s not funny.

Well, there is a way. (My sincere apologies.) Enter tList and tClass. For simplicity, let tClass just be a table with a two columns, ID as usual, and Name, and containing with names of classes, each one with a table in the database. So going back to the example above, tClass has (1, “Product”), (2, “Extra”), and (3, “Retailer”).

Now define tList as follows: give it an ID column, and a column which is a FK to tClass, call it ClassID. The ClassID is going to give us the type of object being contained in the list—the “T” in “List<T>”, as it were. tJoin is now going to have the columns ListID (FK to tList), and ItemID. (It needs to have something else if the List is going to be a proper list and specify the order in which items appear, but if this bugs you, just imagine we have an Order column in tJoin that specifies what order things appear in the list.)


CREATE TABLE dbo.tClass (
ID int IDENTITY(0,1) NOT NULL,
Name varchar(50) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_tClass PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(ID ASC))
CREATE TABLE dbo.tList (
ID int IDENTITY(0,1) NOT NULL,
ClassID int NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PK_tList PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(ID ASC))
GO
ALTER TABLE dbo.tList WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_tList_tClass] FOREIGN KEY(ClassID)
REFERENCES dbo.tClass (ID)
GO
CREATE TABLE dbo.tJoin (
ListID int NOT NULL,
ItemID int NOT NULL,
)
GO
ALTER TABLE dbo.tJoin WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_tJoin_tList] FOREIGN KEY(ListID)
REFERENCES dbo.tList (ID)
GO


Now go back to tProduct. It is now going to have two FK columns to tList, call them ExtrasListID and RetailersListID. These will adequately model the Product having attributes of type List<Anything>. But really we also want to be sure that the tProduct columns point to the right kind of lists, i.e. that ExtrasListID refers to a tList referring to tClass with name ‘Extra’, and similarly for RetailersListID. Here comes the first custom constraint.

In SQL Server, one cannot have arbitrary code in a constraint—not even a SELECT. Only fairly simple things are allowed, such as =, >, IN, and BETWEEN. How is it possible, then, to enforce this kind of policy? It turns out that scalar user-defined functions (UDFs) are allowed. So we create a UDF like so, to perform a SELECT for us:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fListIsOfType]
(
@ListID int,
@ClassName varchar(50)
)
RETURNS int
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Result int
SELECT @Result = COUNT(*) FROM tList INNER JOIN tClass ON tList.ClassID = tClass.ID
WHERE tList.ID = @ListID AND tClass.Name = @ClassName
RETURN @Result
END

Now we have the pleasure of creating a custom checked constraint on each list column like so:

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[tProduct] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [CK_tProduct_Extras] CHECK (([dbo].[fListIsOfType]([ExtrasListID],'Extra')>(0)))
GO
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[tProduct] CHECK CONSTRAINT [CK_tProduct_Extras]
GO
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[tProduct] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [CK_tProduct_Retailers] CHECK (([dbo].[fListIsOfType]([RetailersListID],'Retailer')>(0)))
GO
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[tProduct] CHECK CONSTRAINT [CK_tProduct_Retailers]
GO

Great. Now we can be pretty sure that ExtrasListID is a List<Extra>, and not a List<SomethingElse>. We could stop here and rely on stored procedures to do the rest of the work—ensuring items are of the correct type when adding to lists and so on—but that’s no fun. Especially when *ahem* somebody invariably ignores the stored procedures and puts crap data in there manually.

The other side of tJoin requires constraining. This is a bit harder. Here’s how I did it. First, I wrote another scalar UDF like so:
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fItemBelongs]
(
@ItemID int,
@ListID int
)
RETURNS int
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Result int
DECLARE @ClassName varchar(50)
SELECT @ClassName = tClass.Name FROM tList INNER JOIN tClass ON tList.ClassID = tClass.ID WHERE tList.ID = @ListID
SELECT @Result = CASE
WHEN @ClassName = 'Extra' THEN (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tExtra WHERE ID = @ItemID)
WHEN @ClassName = 'Retailer' THEN (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tRetailer WHERE ID = @ItemID)
ELSE 0
END
RETURN @Result
END

Now I didn’t finish adding cases to the CASE expression, because I have a lot of tables. It’s boring.

The reason we can’t just write one metaquery, instead of a whole heap inside something like CASE, that finds the right table to do the lookup in is…because UDFs can’t execute arbitrary SQL. I’d love to just write

-- ...
DECLARE @sql nvarchar(max), @params nvarchar(max)
DECLARE @count int
SET @sql = 'SELECT @count = COUNT(*) FROM t' + @ClassName + ' WHERE ID = @ItemID'
SET @params = '@count int OUTPUT, @ItemID int'
EXEC sp_executesql @sql, @params, @count OUTPUT, @ItemID
RETURN @count
-- ..

and put that into a UDF, but due to the limitations we can’t (and fair enough, if we could execute stuff like that in a UDF, forget about query optimisation).

I stopped adding cases, but I used the function as the basis for something else. I wrote a stored procedure that updates the fItemBelongs function as follows.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[sUpdateItemBelongsTest]
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON;
DECLARE @sql nvarchar(max)
SET @sql = 'ALTER FUNCTION fItemBelongs
(
@ItemID int,
@ListID int
)
RETURNS int
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Result int
DECLARE @ClassName varchar(50)
SELECT @ClassName = tClass.Name FROM tList INNER JOIN tClass ON tList.ClassID = tClass.ID WHERE tList.ID = @ListID
SELECT @Result = CASE
' +
REPLACE((SELECT ' WHEN @ClassName = ''' + ClassName + ''' THEN (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t' + ClassName + ' WHERE ID = @ItemID)
' FROM tClass FOR XML PATH('')), '
', '') +
' ELSE 0
END
RETURN @Result
END'
PRINT @sql
EXEC sp_executesql @sql
END

“What the hell is that about?” I hear you ask. Well. It builds the ALTER FUNCTION statement using rows out of the tClass table, prints the statement just to show me what is being executed, then executes it. To build the massive CASE, it concatenates a pile of strings of the form “WHEN ClassName = ‘Blah’ (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tBlah WHERE ID = @ItemID”, using the “FOR XML PATH(”)” concatenation trick on the tClass table.

Now using the function is as easy as
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[tJoin] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [CK_tJoin_ItemsBelong] CHECK (([dbo].[fItemBelongs]([ItemID],[ListID])>(0)))
GO
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[tJoin] CHECK CONSTRAINT [CK_tJoin_ItemsBelong]
GO

and to ensure you always have a current fItemBelongs, consider adding the stored procedure to a trigger on changes to tClass.

Finally, I wanted to ensure that tClass only referred to things that have tables—specifically, tables with a proper ID column of the right type and so on. To do this, I wrote another UDF.
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fClassHasTable]
(
@ClassName varchar(50)
)
RETURNS int
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Result int
SELECT @Result = COUNT(*) FROM sys.tables T
INNER JOIN sys.columns C ON T.object_id = C.object_id
WHERE T.name = 't' + @ClassName
AND C.name = 'ID'
AND C.user_type_id = 56         -- 56 = int, YMMV.
AND C.is_nullable = 0
AND C.is_identity = 1
RETURN @Result
END

And using it in another constraint was pretty straightforward.

Illuminated road sign: "EXMAS PAGEANT"

And exmas means presents, right?

I’m kinda hopeless at the presents thing. I can get caught spending hours trying to find the right present for somebody, and completely forget to get a present for somebody supposedly more important!

That’s the story, anyhow. I believe all sorts of things that aren’t true—it’s called history. (And history doesn’t exist in the present, as it were.)

This is why, this year, my close friends are each getting something that is small and markedly similar to what all the others are getting.

But the silly season, or exmas, or [insert your favourite name here] or what have you has another meaning for UTas graduands-cum-graduates. Graduation! It happens between exams and exmas. In the case of me and some of my friends, it was Graduation 2.0 (Honours) and it happened earlier this week.

A hearty congratulations are in order to all my uni mates, you did well. Congratulations! It is a little strange to be in a social circle full of people who do so well. Uni really did turn out to be a completely different game to high school and college.

This leaves the rest of this blog post for some self-admirational studies into this strange metallic  drink coaster medal I received on stage at graduation. Additionally, because I couldn’t find any description or image on the entire Internet of what the actual medal looks like, only the rules for obtaining one.

It's a me

The University Medal from the University of Tasmania is a circular medal presented in a fuzzy-lined medal box. It is 60mm in diameter and approximately 3.5mm thick, and made of what looks like bronze. Here is a top-down shot comparing it to a 50 cent piece.

UTas Medal (left) and an Australian 50c coin

The front of the medal proudly displays the beautiful UTAS coat-of-arms. The motto reads INGENIIS PATVIT CAMPVS. I don’t pretend to know Latin, but it sounds cool. (You can look it up yourself, lazy!)

The back of the medal has the engraved text, and is otherwise flat.

"University Medal / awarded to / JOSHUA THOMAS DEPREZ / Faculty of Science, / Engineering & Technology / for academic excellence / 2009"

It’s got a nice weight to it. I don’t have any scales handy to tell you precisely how much it weighs. It doesn’t have a pin for pushing into one’s chest, nor a ribbon for hanging around one’s neck. (Thankfully, UTas is neither the military nor the olympics.)

As for the presentation of the medal, it differed only slightly to your regular First Class Honours conferral of a testamur in that they made me wait until all the other BSc(Hons) grads had walked the walk, and then made the Dean say all this:

Ceremony script cards, read by the Dean: "Chancellor, I present to you Joshua Thomas Deprez whom you have admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours. Mr Deprez has been awarded a University Medal, the highest academic award made to an undergraduate student. I ask you, Sir, to present the University Medal to Joshua Thomas Deprez." Seriously.

So now for a few words about the testamur. I can report that neither the class of Honours mark, nor the field of study, nor the fact a medal was conferred appear upon my testamur at all. It simply reads Bachelor of Science with Honours (and the usual—you know, university, name, etc).

But a few things did strike me. First was that, unlike last year, they did not hand me the testamur during the ceremony—the new procedure is to collect a worthless roll of paper on the red carpet, and proceed to collect the real deal afterwards and only after presenting some ID. (Though they did hand me the real medal during the ceremony. Huh. Perhaps I should test the veracity of the Chancellor next time I’m up there?)

The testamur now sports a holographic seal and an impression of the coat of arms on the left of the page, as opposed to the old-fashioned seal. The paper also looks a lighter shade. My BComp-BSc testamur has the old-style seal, so I now have one sample of each.

Framed BSc(Hons) testamur (left) and BComp-BSc testamur

Incidentally, I have left the paying of the rather expensive framing in both years to my dear grandparents Joyce and Joe.

Some final remarks about the graduation: the weather was stupidly hot but the Federation concert hall at a pleasing temperature, the finger-food and orange juice afterwards was good, the gown hire was the same price as last time, the speech by the DSc recipient was quite interesting and there were an awful lot of PhDs graduating at the ceremony.

Oh, and there was this guy who hunted me down, only to turn somewhat disappointed to hear I was probably not doing a Computing PhD next year. Sorry, Julian.

Left: Dr Julian Dermoudy, Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems, and myself

Of course, what’s it all for anyway?

Getting this pack of paper in the mail is probably the biggest reason for doing Honours.

Offer for an APA, from left: Cover letter, information sheet & offer acceptance form, application for admission to candidature, a notification of some rule changes, a banking details form, and finally the conditions of the award.

They even filled some of it in for me. How nice!