Powerball and Tendinitis

Hi, quite a time since the last post, busy with holidays : )

In december when I was going around amazon I saw an ad of a "Powerball".

At first i thought it was some kind of portable batteries, eheheh, power+ball : )
After some research I found out that it was a rotor that works at high speeds and generate a strong force and that was recommended to tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. I used to have tendinitis and playing guitar and typing too much never went very well for me. It seemed quite fun, then I decided to give it a try and I got three of these, also as a present to my girlfriend.

Well, it turned up a really good for forearm muscles, and I really feel that it helped a lot with my tendinitis. I can play guitar now and then, and also working without feeling some annoying pains I would get normally.

And they even have a life-time guarantee for changing parts or broken ball. One of the ones I bought does a bit of strange noise and doesn't go too high anymore, they might be sending the changing parts next days.

And it's really fun and addictive. It has a sort of speedometer that shows the number of rotations for minute. My record so far is 12.400. I know not too high, but I haven't spend so much time also. You usually do sessions, that you keep it rotating with the weak hand (my left) and then transfer to the right to get the highest speed. It's funny that when I start I get around 11.000, after 10-15 minutes I get close to my record, 12.000.

It's also funny when you see someone else doing it (don't' think of anything else). In this movie, the powerball world champion at more than 16.000 rotations per minute speed.



I have it for a bit more than a month but I can tell that it's really worthwhile. If you have tendinitis or any other hand or arm injure, start slow, but you definitely will feel improvements.

• To buy:

I bought with amazon. A "professional" version, which is the one with the counter (no fun if you can't see how fast you go) in amazon is 13 pounds. In the original website is 23!! Don't ask me how amazon manage to sell so cheap...

You can buy cheap here:

A couple of links:
http://www.powerballs.com/benefits_rehab.php
http://www.powerballs.com/forum/

Oracle, XMLType, Spring and a couple of wasted hours

I had written an application that reads a set of XML files and writes them to an Oracle database.
I was using Spring configuration injection to get a DataSource and Connection and Spring JDBCTemplate to read and write to the database.

The field in the database I should write to was an Oracle XMLType, which is a kind of clob.

At the beggining to write using the JDBCTemplate I would use the following:

LobHandler lobHandler = new DefaultLobHandler();
Object clob = new SqlLobValue(xmlString, lobHandler);
insert.update(new Object[] {new Long(key),...

That did the job until today, when we needed XML files bigger than 4k bytes to be written.
I started getting the following error:

java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

It happens that the LONG for oracle is the CLOB, but it just treats as CLOB when the sizes is bigger than 4k (or somewhere around).

First I try to use OracleLobHandler instead of the Default one, then it would give:

org.springframework.dao.InvalidDataAccessApiUsageException: OracleLobCreator needs to work on [oracle.jdbc.OracleConnection], not on [org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolableConnection]: specify a corresponding NativeJdbcExtractor; nested exception is java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolableConnection
java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolableConnection

If I use directly an OracleDataSource on my spring configuration or if I would apply this NativeJdbcExtractor I would then got:

ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected NUMBER got CLOB

Ok, now I'm totally stuck I thought. Then I completely gave up using JdbcTemplate and went straight to JDBC. Well, even then things didn't go as smooth as I thought they would.

First thing, after some research I had to use the following getClob method, which I got in this Oracle OTN page here:

private CLOB getCLOB(String xmlData, Connection conn) throws Exception{
CLOB tempClob = null;
tempClob = CLOB.createTemporary(conn, true, CLOB.DURATION_SESSION);
tempClob.open(CLOB.MODE_READWRITE);
Writer tempClobWriter = tempClob.getCharacterOutputStream();
tempClobWriter.write(xmlData);
tempClobWriter.flush();
tempClobWriter.close();
tempClob.close();

return tempClob;
}

Then when setting it inside your preparedstatement:

CLOB clob = getCLOB(myStringObj, connection);
stmt.setClob(4, clob);

Also, in your SQL you should have something like:

insert into table (XML) values(XMLType(?)

Ok, after all this I still got the following stacktrace:

java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolingDataSource$PoolGuardConnectionWrapper
at oracle.sql.CLOB.createTemporary(CLOB.java:754)

Then I tried to use instead of org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource to use directly OracleDataSource, which worked, but the properties to set are different from those I used for DBCP, url is URL and username is user and I would like to keep it generic. That's when I tried to use Spring's org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource for my datasource configuration, which then finally got it working.

After this I tried to get back to have it working through JdbcTemplate and the new DataSource, but with no luck.