Fallen in Love...

Oh I've fallen in love....

Ok, not literally. I've been hearing clips of Corrinne May's songs on 933 recently and was simply enchanted. For the first time in a long long time I start to walk into CD shops and search for Corrinne's CDs. For a CD thats currently promoted by a radio station, it was really hard to find.

I finally found her "Fly away" album in HMV on Fri. after getting home and playing thru the tracks do I realize that her "journey" track was what I was looking for a few years ago, after seeing an MTV but not knowing who the singer was then! "Fly Away" was excellent. It's been a long time since a song moved me to tears the way it did (No, i'm not some crybaby or soap-opera fanatic).

I've juz gotten her most recent album "Safe in a crazy world", knowing it will be as good as "Fly away or better. If you are looking to fall in love (not trying to be mushy here), let Corrinne help you do so.

Hella of a week...

Ok this week really sux. Reason I haven't written recently.

First of all, my monitor's pissing me off. everytime i switch it off and on, the display goes back to its "factory" setting, and that's a small vertical rect in the middle of my screen. Time to get LCD. damn.

Next, my design for a new website got rejected. damn. I must really have lost some touch for a client who was "impressed" with my past half-hearted designs to say no. damn.

I had to push my next MCAD exam back to 18th July, cos the CITREP application form needs to be submitted 5 days before the first test. damn.

The biggest wammy came when Derek told me that next semester's modules we have to take have clashing lectures! FYI, the next semester is my last sem as a student and I only have 2 major modules left to clear (CS3214 and ST1232) before graduation. And yippee, they clash!! An email to the course coordinator only told us to take a higher level ST module that doesn't clash. My schoolmates will know HOW MUCH I sux at Math, or any other calculation crap (No, programming and math are not brothers). Telling me to take a "HIGHER" math module is as good as telling me to throw in the towel. Damn.

Thankfully, our CS3214 lecturer was very helpful and somehow convinced the dean and co. to let us take the clashing modules. Heh, Mich says that this might be a conspiracy to kill us off, letting us take the lower ST module and failing us anyway. haha. Hope that will be my last brush with crap for a long time.

Fun with Enterprise Library for .net

I've tried enterprise library's data access application block (DAAB) for .net for my project recently and was quite impressed by the encapsulation it provides. Basically the factory classes generates the appropriate commands and connections for any supported ODP (MsSql and Oracle are provided by default) and you just call the same factory methods everytime. If you decide to switch database for your project, all you have to do is change the config file.

One thing lacking in the DAAB is the number of supported databases providers that comes by default with the enterprise library (MsSql and Oracle). As many small projects will go for Access or MySql, support for other databases will be useful. Luckily, it isn't difficult to extend the DAAB to support them as Nantz.org has done. I've tried using OleDb with the extended DAAB and it works fine. So if you are looking for data access encapsulation and reusability, give enterprise library a go.