It really seems that Windows does indeed have a path limit.

While checking some files into a subversion repository:

• The repository was D:\Adrian\my-respository
• Within the repository I had quite a deep directory structure, to access this particular project
• Within this particular project, the IDE I was using had a few levels of directories, to include "work/src" and so on
• The class path of the Java classes was quite deep, "com/company/project" etc
• Subversion itself puts a few levels of dirs in ".svn/text-base" and so on

While checking in all this stuff, I got the error "path invalid" suddenly. And opening the created .svn directory in Windows Explorer, right-clicking, and chooseing "new directory" immediately brought up the error:

Cannot create 'New Folder': path invalid

So it seems paths have a limit in Windows. The existing working path was 220 characters long, with 20 directories including the working directory and the hard disk's root directory.

This is all very annoying, as I can't really do anything about any of the above reasons why the path is so long.

While moving a folder "old-cvs-data", with many subdirectories, to the Recycle Bin under Windows XP…

Maybe each file that is stored in the recycle bin has a "original path" attribute, with a max length 256 chars, and that stores the original path like "Dir1\Dir2\Dir3\file.txt". Maybe if files are nested too deeply that attribute cannot hold the value. But that's just a guess.

Maybe it really is time to get a Mac.

Ah MySQL (at least MyISAM) so isn't a real database!

Firstly, when doing an insert, I did some arithmetic. The numeric column was of a certain width. If the result of the arithmetic is larger than the maximum allowed value my number was just getting turned into that maximum allowed value, without warning or error. A large number suddenly becoming some other large number may sound good in the philosophy of "errors are bad – we want to minimize errors!" but literally it's never what you want. Oracle gives an error if a number is too big to be stored in a column. Which is what you always want.

Secondly, due to above arithmetic overflow errors, my insert statement was failing (as multiple values that should have been distinct, but beyond the maximum, were then identical, equal to the maximum). I kept on doing it and it kept on failing. Then I looked at the table and each time I'd done such an unsuccessful insert (a single statement to insert maybe 10k rows) some rows (but not all – due to the error) were getting inserted. Having half a statement succeed is never what you want! Oracle sets an invisible checkpoint before each statement and if the statement fails, rolls the database back to that checkpoint. That's always what you want!

This just annoys me so much. The sum of an empty set of integers is zero, not undefined.

However neither Oracle nor MySQL understand this. I can only assume this variation from common sense and mathematics is considered the “best practices” definition of the SQL SUM function.

mysql> desc email_box;
| box_size_bytes | int(10)     |

mysql> select count(*) from email_box;
|        0 |

mysql> select sum(box_size_bytes) from email_box;
| NULL |

well really a lot of things were far from optimal about the software. lots of bugs but a lot of things which were integration troubles, i.e. one bit of software worked 95% and another software worked 95% and together they worked 0%. today and yesterday sat with smo and went through a whole bunch of software from a whole bunch of people and just hacked away until it worked. now there are last 5 galleries etc on the start page which is quite cool.

new galleries is not as cool as it could be, as they are "checked", i.e. when the customer care agents go home then there is no new checked content. but the newest blogs are interesting as they are not checked.

surprisingly people tend to use the new blogs much as the old galleries, i.e. just lots and lots of photos. surely the gallery is the more appropriate forum for such content. but hey, if the users like it, that's all i care about.