Furo’s World

Fabulous NightWish Concert!

13 April 2008 – 23:14

I know Nightwish since 6 years and I never had the occasion to travel to see them in concert. When one of my best friend David told me that they were coming in Toulouse on the 12 of April I couldn’t resist to buy a concert ticket! Of course, I had my ticket since september

So here I was, surrounded by crazy people in the Zenith of Toulouse, jumping and singing with the band!

The first part of the concert was animated by the band Pain. The music is fun and the singer is really good on the stage so it worst it! Unfortunatly we had to wait 40mins before they could begin, because of a problem with the sound system.

When they finished, and after a short break, Nightwish came and it was… WAOW!!!

At first, I think I was afraid to see the performance of the new singer because her voice is totally different from the previous one. But in fact, I was really surprised and pleased to see how much energy she put into the concert. So good artist and good performance! And, of course, she sang old songs of the group like WishMaster, Dark chest of Wonders, etc.

The end of the concert came too quickly and I regret they didn’t played Come Cover Me or The Pharaoh Sails To Orion, two of my favorite songs. But the other songs compensate perfectly that!

So thank you Nightwish for coming in and for playing such a good music!

Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

A 120.000$ easter egg!

6 April 2008 – 20:28

Honestly, i’d like it was true :p

But this trailer produced by IGN and released on the 1st of April is nothing more than an easter egg… And a big one because the production of that trailer costed 120.000$ !!

Here is the link of the Legend of Zelda trailer, enjoy

Posted in Data bases, Video Games | 1 Comment »

ContextMenu and TreeView in C#

28 March 2008 – 18:51

Since a lot of time, I had a problem with the ContextMenuStrip on my application: when a user did a right-click on a node in one of my tree without having selected with left-click first, the node meant to be selected was not!

To fix that, just add this code on your tree “treeView1″ when the event “MouseDown” occurs:

private void treeView1_MouseDown(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs e) { TreeNode tn = treeView1.GetNodeAt(e.X, e.Y); treeView1.SelectedNode = tn; }

Troubles are finished for my customers! (and by extension for me as well )

Posted in .NET | 3 Comments »

ORA-06553: PLS-382: expression is of wrong type

28 March 2008 – 15:55

When you deal with PL/SQL functions, you have sometimes to create a function returning a boolean.

This is an example:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION I_AM_A_HERO (
name VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN is
BEGIN
if (name = 'Petrelli') THEN
RETURN TRUE;
ELSE
RETURN FALSE;
END IF;
END;

But if you wan’t to execute it like any other PL/SQL function you get that:

>SELECT I_AM_A_HERO('Petrelli') FROM dual; ORA-06552: PL/SQL: Statement ignored ORA-06553: PLS-382: expression is of wrong type

Why do we have this error? Oracle proposes a boolean type for the PL/SQL functions BUT this type is not implemented in SQL so basically, you don’t have the right to do that! However that also means that you can use your function into a PL/SQL block (of course, it would be meaningless otherwise!). So you can call you function like that:

DECLARE
RESULT BOOLEAN;
BEGIN
IF (I_AM_A_HERO('Petrelli')) THEN
RETURN 1;
ELSE
RETURN 0;
END IF;
END;

Now that you have a good overview of the problem, the solution is obvious. Instead of bothering making a PL/SQL block to access the function, we just have to change the return type:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION I_AM_A_HERO ( name VARCHAR2) RETURN NUMBER is BEGIN if (name = 'Petrelli') THEN RETURN 1; ELSE RETURN 0; END IF; END;

And we get:

>SELECT I_AM_A_HERO('Petrelli') FROM dual;
I_AM_A_HERO('PETRELLI') ----------------------- 1

Posted in Data bases | 1 Comment »

World Of Warcraft: 2.4

26 March 2008 – 13:54

Hey!

Recently, I didn’t played to a lot of games but sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I play to World Of Warcraft.

Today, a new game patch (2.4) arrive and is full of new content. One of the major change is the addition of a new Dungeon named Sunwell. This dungeon will be composed by 2 instances, one playable with only 5 mans and the other that will be a 25 man raid (a raid is a special mode in that game where groups are larger than 5 peoples and are necessary to kill special monsters). I have to admit that the changes and balance they made to the game sounds interesting: hope that my character Magdarhina will benefit of all those changes :p

[Rogue]Magdarhina

Posted in Video Games | No Comments »

Some words about IUP ISI

22 March 2008 – 19:55

Today I will briefly introduce the IUP ISI which is my current formation.

4 years ago, after having spent some time in Toulouse at the university Paul Sabatier studying mathematics and computer science, I decided to go deeper into the computer world by taking the orientation of the IUP ISI.

What is exactly the IUP ISI?

IUP stands for “Institut Universitaire Professionnalisé” which is a special cursus in french university. Basically, it covers the graduate diploma (3 first years at uni) plus the master diploma (5 years) and is focused on professionalization (by opposition to research). So when you finish your studies at the IUP you have the equivalent of a Master of Science (for scientific IUP, of course) and you have some experience in the work field thanks to the traineeships.

Of course, there are a lots of IUP and the one I study in is specialized in computer science, or more precisely, in Software Engineering: ISI, “Ingénierie des Systèmes Informatiques”. The particularity of the IUP ISI is that you have a traineeship every year of several month from april. This traineeship lasts at least 4 months and allows the students to participate to a real project and be a part of a compagny for this period. The last year of the IUP, students are on a work-based training: 2 days at Uni and 3 days in a compagny during 8 month.

For example, thanks to the IUP ISI, at the end of this schoolar year (end of June) I will have accumulated 21 months of work in compagnies (Siemens VDO SAS – 4 months, Airbus – 4 months, Freescale Semiconductors – 5+8 months)!

So this formation is a good mean the benefit from professionnal training and implies yourself in important projects.

Here is the link of the formation and here is the link of the forum if you need some more information from the students or the responsibles.

Posted in IUP ISI | No Comments »

Visual Studio 2005 and ClearCase

20 March 2008 – 19:18

ClearCase is one of the references when you deal about configuration management. It allows to manage a project’s life cycle, control changes on this project, proposes version and workspace management and of course, allows team development (multi-site).

ClearCase works with what it calls Vobs(Versioned Object Base) and Views. Basically, all the data, such as code files and documents, are stored into entities named Vobs. Those vobs are the repositories in which each developer will create their branch, manage and their project. To access those Vobs, they need to be mounted as a virtual file system through a dynamic view for example. So you can use your repository like any mounted drive on your OS! Of course, when you are editing or creating a file, you work on a private copy so there is no risk to erase project’s source whithout a commit.

Speaking of which, there is no notions of commit in CC, instead you use Check-out/Check-in commands. The first one is well known by CVS or SVN and the second acts as a commit. What about add or delete for example? They are managed by the view in your OS and validated by the Check-in! For example if you want to add a file, just copy paste it in you view!

Anyway, I’m not here to sell that product so let’s concentrate on development: ok it looks nice and different from other code management tool but how to use it with an IDE like Visual Studio 2005?

Well it is pretty simple

Visual Studio 2005 comes with a very useful tool which is “Source Control“. Visual Studio source control is simply an environment for third party source control plug-ins so to enjoy it you have to install the plug-in of your favorite tool.

In our case, ClearCase (mouahahah, case-case, ok I’m out…) plug-in can be found on IBM/Rationnal web site (here). Once this plug-in is installed, you have to activate it in Visual Studio options and source control will appear in the File menu.

It is nearly finished! First copy your project in your new ClearCase view and open the VS solution. Just go in “File/Source Control/Change Source Control” and bind your new project to the view.

And that’s it! Now you have the possibility to check-in/out, merge code, view history and everything you can do with ClearCase from VS. Of course, depending on your setup things will be different but I’ll detail it another time!

For now, the point is that with the Visual Studio Source control, you can manage easily your project configuration on ClearCase but also with other software of that kind (cvs, svn,…).

Posted in .NET, Software Engineering | 3 Comments »