The lesser mabinogion

I was fiddling with the Dreamcast last night….I had been experimenting in the past with Linux on the DC with the goal of running something like MAME, or a SNES or NES emulator on it…..but recently I discovered that people have ported emulators directly to the DC. I had also recently been given a DVD with literally thousands of NES roms on it…so I spent the night creating a NesterDC disc with about 300 NES games on it.
It works really, really well, and I was suprsied by how many games I remember from the C64 that were out on NES – Platoon, Commando, Ikari Warriors, Bubble Bobble (Though it’s the arcade version I was most fond of), Airwolf, all the AD&D games (Hilsfar, Pool of Radiance, etc), Bards Tale…I spent an hour or so just flicking from game to game….heh. If you’ve got a DC, then you should locate some ROMs and give it a go.

One day someone will write the perfect Java database access layer. By perfect, I mean “Does everything _I_ want, and doesn’t make me do anything I don’t want to do, and doesn’t require XML configuration files either”. I’ve been investigating a few of them, and none of them really quite cut it….though simpleorm is pretty close to what I’m looking for. It has a couple of minor annoyances though…first, it needs to support the JDBC driver you’re using – my first experimentation with it didn’t work, since it didn’t seem to recognise the official MySQL connecter/J drivers….but at work using the Oracle driver was no problem. Secondly for its support for foreign key references to work, the foreign key field must either be named the same as the primary key of the linked table, or be SOMEPREFIX + the primary key. The apparent solution to the problem of a primary key named ID and an foreign key named Account_No is either 1. rename the fields, 2 create a database view, or 3. don’t use the feature. Not very helpful.
However, I think I’ll probably still use it anyway, because it’s still the lightest of any ORM or Database access library I’ve seen yet.

Well, I’ve been back at work for nearly a week now…and as always, it never really feels like you’ve been away. The suprising thing though, was cleaning up my inbox (323 spam during my absense), and _not_ finding anything to annoy me or cause me extra work…..which was nice, and let me get straight back on to what I was working on.

Well, it did dry up enough for me yesterday, so I did go out on a longer walk. I set out up through Flynn, and Fraser, and up to the top of Mount Rogers. Or maybe it should be called “Rogers Hill”….or “That slight rise in the land over there that we’ve named after some Rogers guy”.
OK, so it wasn’t a very big hill….but it was a nice walk…and I set myself a fairly quick pace, that I was able to keep up for the whole hour and 20 minutes, so I’m happy.
When I lived with my parents in Spence, I used to go to the top of (I won’t use the word climb, ’cause that’s too generous) mount rogers fairly often, since the peak was only a few hundred meters behind their house. I’d forgotten what the view was like though…
It was a fairly crisp but sunny sort of day…lots of cumulus floating around in an otherwise perfectly blue sky…causing islands of shade to float over Belconnen as I watched.
Canberra really is a very nice looking city…or at least Belconnen is….I’m not sure that a similar view from one of the hills in one of the southern suburbs would be as good – probably just a sea of red, orange and brown roofs.
You have the leafyness of the suburbs, with only the largest of roads managing to slice their way through, there’s lake Gininderra in the middle of it all, with Black Mountain (this one definitely qualifies for hill, but that’s about it), looming up behind….and all around you are the Brindabella, Giniderra and Tidbinbilla ranges….all very black and menacing since the bushfires.
I would have stayed up there a while…but I felt like I needed someone with me to share it with…and there were a couple of kids playing around up there that kind of broke the mood anyway…so I carried on back home.
When Tessa gets back, we’ll have to do some walks together…

Today, I headed out towards Melba…nothing spectacular there….just Canberra suburbs….’cept that just after the half way point, once I’d started heading back towards Charnwood, it started to rain….
At first it was OK, ’cause the walk up to that point had been fairly hot…and the rain wasn’t very heavy (even if the raindrops were rather large)…but then the sun went behind the cloud…and the rain got heavier….and I spent the last 20 minutes of my walk getting soaked.
I guess that’s what I get for going outside in spring….heh.