January 2006 Entries
Here's my sister holding my mum's new puppy "Aysha".
Last night I went to a meeting of Extreme Tayside, held at Dundee University department of applied computing. The meeting was almost the inaugural meeting (there had been a previous meeting but we decided to cover most of the ground again, as there had been a long and unforeseen gap between that meeting and this) so much of the time was spent discussing what we wanted out of the group and how we were going to proceed.
There was time however, for an interesting demonstration of a borehole measuring application from GeoMEM Limited and also a tour of the new Queen Mother building at the department. All and all a very enjoyable evening and I look forward to the future meetings.
There was a good mix of people there from industry and accademia, both under graduate and post graduate students and a member of the teaching staff ( Dr. Janet Hughes who is a ScrumMaster herself). One of the highlights of the night was finding out that the department is teaching C# and SCRUM - how cool is that?!
Sprint 2 of our bakery control system is complete. We were a day and a quarter late on this sprint. I don't have any burn down graphs as they normally show calendar days versus work done. As we are a small team we have to leave development from time to time to carry out support work, so the graphs end up being flat during these times. Next sprint I'm going to look at graphing development days instead of calendar days so hopefully I'll have some burn down graphs to show you next time.
I've started a flickr set with pictures of the GUI so you can see it develop. You can keep up with it here if you are interested.
Yep it's my birthday today. Check out some of the other (less important :) ) things that happened on this day here and here. Those of you on the other side of the pond, might like to look here.
If you look over on the left hand side bar, you'll notice I've implemented a reading list, which is something Dave Winer's been banging on about for a while now. Now, when I say I've implemented it, what I mean is that I think I've implemented it. :) James Robertson, for one, is no fan of Dave's spec for OPML and even the validator on the OPML site says...
"Because it's a beta, you shouldn't depend on the results."
but it validates so I think it's right. Now all we need is aggregator support for reading lists.
When you have users that don't really know, nor want to learn about technology. In which case you have to re-invent the wheel a little. I had a requirement the other day to "do ftp", without really doing ftp. This was due to the fact that the user was able to use the web, but working an ftp client might be a little more "techie" than they fancied getting.
So to solve the "problem" I provided a web page where the user could supply a user id and password as well as selecting a file to "ftp". I then wrote a Python cgi script that uploaded the file to the server, then ftp'd it to the required location, using the supplied user id and password. It's a bit of a strange problem to have to solve, but it does show off some of the capabilities of Python and if you are interested in the script you can get it here.
We have a client that runs a legacy Cobol system from a central server to 200+ branches in the UK. It's a system that works and needs little or no maintenance and if it does need some TLC then we have a tame Cobol programmer to do the work.
Recently, however, our client asked us to integrate a third party seller SDK into this system. This meant monitoring and responding to XML messages with information from the Cobol system. Oh deep joy! So, how were we to do this? There's a product called Relativity from Liant that enables Cobol flat files to be viewed as if they were tables in a RDBMS system. Once this is done you can access them via ODBC. Now both the server the system runs on and the system that has to access the files are SPARC servers, so you load the Relativity Server on the server and Relativity client on the client machine (no kidding eh!). Once everything is set up you simply have to write a bit of C code to access the files via ODBC.
Compile the code via gcc, or similar, not forgetting that you have to use the include files supplied by Liant and also their library, so the compile line will look something like gcc -I /usr/local/liant/include filename.c /usr/local/liant/lib/libodbc.so and you are good to go.
An example C file can be found here.
Charles points out that Norm Green of Gemstone will be presenting 64 bit Gemstone/S at the NYC STUG on February 1st. Check out their Wiki for details.
MacBU on stage at MacWorld
Check out these Smalltalk vidoes.
Steve Eichert bigs up Ruby on Rails.
Scary U.S. employment stats
- By 2008 the number of young adult workers, from 25 to 40 year olds, will DECLINE by 1.7 million. That's 1.7 million less workers to replace the nearly 77 million baby boomers who will be eligible for retirement. Simply put, there will be fewer people available for the top management slots and high-performance executive jobs. Over the next 15 years, there will be a 15 percent decline in the number of 35 to 44 year-olds.
- By 2010 we will have 167,754,000 skilled jobs to fill in the United States, but only 157,721,000 people in the workforce to fill those jobs. (Do the math!)
- Assuming that 5% of the workforce holds two jobs, we still will have approximately 2.2 million jobs unfilled.
A neat trick for embedding manifests (1=exe, 2=dll):
- mt.exe -outputresource:output.exe;1 -manifest output.exe.manifest
- mt.exe -outputresource:output.dll;2 -manifest output.dll.manifest
If you do a lot of demos, sample projects, or just things that you tinker with, you may find that your Recent Projects list on the Visual Studio 2005 start page gets pretty full and cluttered. If so, you may have wondered if you can clear it. Well, the bad news is that there isn't a hook into this from the GUI, but you can pretty easily clear the list (or individual items) by going to the registry key where they're stored, which is:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectMRUList
London Geek Girl Dinner event description from Sarah Blow:
"This is basically a networking event to get women in technology mixing and discussing technical issues and hopefully solving a few of each others technical problems. I would really appreciate it if you could spread the word about the event. They happen once every 3 months and we try to get technical females from all areas to mix."
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