July 2007 Entries
...and along the way mentions my favourite language, Smalltalk:-) "A decade ago I was talking to my old friend Tom Hadfield at OOPSLA 96. Java's rise was apparent and it was clear that Smalltalk's future was doomed. Despite my love of Smalltalk I was pretty sanguine. I felt that Java gave people enough of what they needed; while it wasn't quite as nice as Smalltalk it was enough of an improvement over C++, particularly with memory management, for me to be happy with it. Tom disagreed, he felt there was something fundamentally different about the expressiveness of Smalltalk, the way you could better capture the intention of what you were doing directly in your code - closing the gap between domain knowledge and programming. In the intervening years I've come to the view that Tom was right after all. After several years in curly brace land, Ruby reminded me of what I was missing. There's a clarity to reading Ruby code that just makes it an easier medium to work with, despite the inferior tooling. I'm way more sympathetic to the Smalltalk holdouts than I felt then, even though I haven't felt inclined to open an image in anger for a long time." MF Bliki: OneLanguage
No, it's not the title of the next Harry Potter book, but more a summary of how my week-end went. I went and bought the book at midnight at our local ASDA store. I was shocked to see a very large queue, that's the first time I've seen that happen in all the Harry Potter years; it looks like the film and the book coming out at the same time has really fired folks imagination. The last two books have been below par as far as I'm concerned, so it was with a little trepidation that I started to read this last book. I needn't have worried, JKR has done as all proud, this is the best one since GOF and in fact may well surpass it. Well that took care of Saturday and so it was on to Sunday. The morning started the usual way, yawn, stretch, scratch my arse, check my email, the normal stuff. However, there was no email. Now that is normally bad news as where there is no email, there is normally no web site either. Yep, I checked and my site was down. Now I host my site at with my old employer so I know there's no 24/7 support, so my site was down and it wasn't coming back 'til Monday morning at the earliest. Hey ho, not too worry, it could be worse. You may remember that whilst at my old employer I did some work for the Carnoustie Golf Links, home of The Open 2007 and they also host their web site. Oh yes, that's right folks, as the golfers played out the final yesterday, and the BBC were driving traffic to the Carnoustie Golf Links web site; on the most important day for Carnoustie since The Open was last here 8 years ago - their web site was down! Ouch; if I were the General Manager at Carnoustie Golf Links I'd have some blunt questions for my ex-employer. As my favourite project manager used to say, "today I'm handing out lollipops and arse kickings; and I'm all out of lollipops!"
 Cameron and Emily took part in an RYA 1 (Introduction to Sailing) course today at Monikie Country Park. They had a great time but were pretty tired afterwards. (Woo hoo, early bed tonight :-)) Dawn and I took the dogs up to meet them when it was finished as the land up there is great for walking the dogs. You can see some of the pictures I took here.
Technorati tags: RYA 1, Sailing, Monikie
Paul Foster, an Enthusiasm Evangelist at Microsoft (still the best job title in the world) tagged me with a meme to tell the world 8 random things about me, so here you go... - My first job after leaving school was as a police officer.
- I rose to the rank of Company Sergeant Major in the Army Cadet Force.
- I have a brown belt in Ju-jitsu.
- I do not have a university education.
- I am a self taught software engineer and have no formal training.
- The hardest thing I ever did in my life came with the smallest prize.
- I used to work with Christopher Eccleston, as a messenger, at a Manchester news paper.
- One of these random things is untrue and I stole it from one of the people I'm tagging just to annoy them. :-)
Okay guys, tag you're in:- Hamish, Barry, BarryD, Craig, William, Colin, Micheal, Dan
Fellow Charterite Patrick Long has an announcement on his web site regarding Microsoft Health Common User Interface. Go check it out, there's some pretty cool stuff there. Congrats Patrick! "For the last year or so I have been working on the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) project at Microsoft and today it was released here (www.mscui.com) and on here on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/mscui)." Microsoft Health CUI released today - Patrick Long's Blog
Want to know what a Windows Live Platform Quick Application (Beta) is (other than another great snappy name from Microsoft's PR people)? Well if you do, check out the link below. "Windows Live Web services are an ideal platform for developers. They offer a deep level of control with access to core services and data through open application programming interfaces (APIs)." Windows Live - QuickApps
Where will this page end up?
On 20th August I'm off to Birmingham to join the guys at the NxtGenUG where I'll be talking about Agile methods in the enterprise versus ISVs. You can get more details on the NxtGenUG site. If you are planning to come along, don't forget to say hi!
"February 27th as the day for launch of Windows Serve 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio" Steve Clayton: Geek In Disguise
Someone posted a link to this 13 year old's MySpace site on a developer forum that I watch. I ignored it, as you do. But then people kept posting follow ups saying how good her music was, so I clicked the link. Wow, just wow! Technorati Tags: Music, Talent, Children
Whether it's the BlackWatch serving in Iraq or a baggage handler at Glasgow Airport, Scotland's message to terrorists is clear... When asked if he had a message for the bombers, John Smeaton, the baggage handler who helped thwart Saturday's 4x4 attack on Glasgow airport, said, "This is Glasgow. We'll just set aboot ye." Guardian Unlimited
So I'm working away, minding my own business, when I get an email notification of a comment on my blog, it turns out to be spam so I delete it. Then I get another one, so I delete that too. As the third one arrived I was doing a "whois" on his web site, as the forth arrived I was looking at the details of his registration on his provider's site and as the fifth one came in his mobile phone was ringing. Funny thing is, there never was a sixth one :-) Usually you have to go via the ISP's abuse email address to put a stop to this sort of thing, but not this time, nope, this muppet actually put his mobile phone number on his registration form, school boy error. Technorati Tags: Comment Spam
For those of you following along at home, Hamish has the latest installment of our trip to DDD5 up on his blog, including the fact that during my presentation I managed to bore off the projector! :-)
"A supply teacher who secretly filmed unruly pupils for TV was guilty of unacceptable professional conduct, the teachers' professional body says." BBC NEWS | Education | Teacher guilty over secret film Maybe the General Teaching Council for England would be better employed helping to fix the problem instead of condemning those whose only crime has been to expose it!
Okay, I said I'd make my presentations available on my site and here they are. There are two presentations, my main one on agile methods and my grok talk on ten tools in ten minutes; enjoy! :-) Oh, if you want to hear about our trip down to DDD5 you can catch the first episode of it here, courtesy of Hamish.
Across on his blog, Dave McMahon says nice things about my presentation. "I was really impressed with Gary, nice delivery style and a well covered subject." He also goes on to say... "He seemed to run out of steam about 40mins in which was a shame" Dave was spot on. I'd contracted tonsillitis the week before DDD5 and that meant I missed an opportunity to rehearse my talk in front of an audience at work. If I had, I'd have realised that the rhythm of the talk went off around the 40 minute mark. I've since made the necessary changes to the presentation, so the next time I give it, it should be spot on. Also, due to the tonsillitis, my energy levels where a bit low, so I just didn't have the energy to lift the talk at that point. It was a shame that the first time I gave the talk was at Developer Day, as the first one is never the best - thought I might have gotten away with it though ;-) With regards to Developer Day, I'll make my presentations slides (both the main one and my grok talk) available for download as soon as possible, but right now I have to go and do some real work! Update: As more people get back from the event and start blogging there's quite a bit of positive feedback coming through for my presentation... http://www.peat.me.uk/2007/07/01/a-busy-saturday/
http://blog.colinmackay.net/archive/2007/06/30/89.aspx
http://leedale.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/ddd5-at-microsoft-tvp-reading/
http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2007/07/02/113645.aspx
http://www.hughson.co.uk/?p=19 It'll be interesting to see if that is reflected in the official feedback when it comes out.
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