Alexander Mikhailian

Nearly everyone gets one surprisingly small monthly pay during his 1st year or so in a company.

In order to understand what happens, one has to know that workers earn their holidays this year for the next year. Once someone quits an employer, he gets a nifty paycheck which includes the monetization of the earned holidays that the employee did not take, yet. Now, once he decides to spend those holidays next year, he usually forgets that they have already been paid by the previous employer. That is, he actually takes an "unpaid" holiday from his current employer, instead of a paid one. Naturally, these days have already been paid before, but who cares, when the money is gone ;-)

All this is a prelude. Here is a nasty trick that makes the payslip look awfully unjustified.

The general rule is to adjust the monthly salary to take into account those "unpaid" holiday days not on a month-by-month basis, but once in a year, the month when the employee has taken more than 50% of the amount of the days off he was entitled to take.

Here's an example. You leave your old employer on December, 31. Next year, you take 5 days off during the first half of the year and then leave on vacation for 10 working days in August. Suppose this August had 20 working days. By the end of August, you will receive your salary for ~ 5 working days, as the salary calculation this month will take into account all the 15 "unpaid" days you have taken off so far.

ActiveRecord is a beautiful piece of software. But just step aside of the prescribed road, and you are guaranteed to have problems.

This time, my problems began when I started to design the model first. I quickly laid out a couple of screens of objects, wrote the connection line and ran the code.

class SubjectLocator  "String"
end

# a dozen more objects follow...

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter  => "mysql",
  :host     => "localhost",
  :username => "test",
  :password => "test",
  :database => "activerecord"
)

It has not come as a surprise that ruby replied with an exception.

Table 'activerecord.subject_locator' doesn't exist: SHOW FIELDS FROM `subject_locator` (ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid)

What surprised me is that after half an hour of search on the internet, I found no way to boostrap a DB schema out of the model. There were discussions on the rails mailing list. They even went as far as suggesting non-destructive automatic migrations, a feature that exists in Hibernate for at least 5 years already. None dared to implement either.

I am now left with one solution. Apply the DRY3 principle, aka "Do Repeat Yourself 3.times" and start writing the migrations script for my models (repeat!), as well as an SQL schema for my MySQL database that would keep indexes, views and triggers in addition to what I will boostrap from migrations (repeat again!)

Тут Лукьяненко поставил ссылку на высказывание об авторском праве Романа Афанасьева. Что симптоматично, у обоих комментарии отключены. К чему бы это?

ЗЫ: Назовите меня идиотом, но чтобы найти ссылку на этот постинг Лукьяненко, пришлось прошерстить 431 страничку, от id предыдущего постинга до id следующего. Примерно вот так:

for i in `seq 304622 305053`; do
wget http://doctor-livsy.livejournal.com/$i.html
done |grep gringrin *html

How can one not be disappointed with Groovy after looking at its User Guide?

Here is just one example. Can you tell from the StreamingMarkupBuilder documentation how it works? I bet no. After looking through the code snippets on the page and figuring out I could not understand a line of code there, I wondered what is the mkp variable that appears twice on the page.

It took me some time to get through the Groovy class hierarchy up to the BaseMarkupBuilder.java just to find the mkp namespace declaration.

 namespaces.put("mkp", "http://www.codehaus.org/Groovy/markup/keywords");   // pseudo namespace for markup keywords

After googling for mkp markup keywords, I found a page that explains in a few words the design of markup builders. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, I know everything I had to know about mkp and markup builders. The thing is, it is a post of the developer who just committed the markup builders feature. The documentation is supposed to be better that that but it not even worse, it is blatantly misleading.