Twang!

You gotta love GMail. Whilst sending a mail asking for advice on String manipulation in Java, I noticed that the sponsored ads gave me a link to a “Professional female string quintet” for hire and another to a site offering “Micro String Bikinis”.

Of course, I put two and two together…

Are you *still* there

Thought I might knock out a quick post, just to see if it still works.

On little boys, herding cats and too many sweets

I spent a few happy hours on Saturday taking Sam and six of his mates to the cinema for Sam’s birthday treat. I didn’t manage to lose any of them, in spite of their very best efforts. Every few seconds they seemed to perform a co-ordinated “bomb burst” maneouvre - the phrase “herding cats” springs readily to mind.

I”m pleased to report, however, that I managed to make two of them sick by taking an overly relaxed approach to the number of sweets they were allowed to eat. Bertie threw up on the station platform after turning several different shades of green and white. Harvey saved it until he got home, which is technically out of my control: his mother reported that it was mainly chocolate based.

I suggest that you don’t bother to see Arthur and the Invisibles – load of old tripe!

A daughter - Charlotte Williams Rose

Cathy and I are the proud parents of a beautiful baby girl who was born at 01:16 this morning in The Royal Surrey Hospital, Guildford. She weighs in at a might 9lbs (or 4.090 kilos if you’re that way inclined). We haven’t chosen a name yet but you’ll be amongst the first to know when we do. Here’s a photo to be going on with (there are a few more in my Flickr photostream over here on the right).

Last post

I haven’t posted for ages because I’ve been a bit busy learning some Java - so…

public class HappyNewYear {

    public static void main(String[ ] args) {

        System.out.println("Happy New Year!");

    }

}

Impressed?

Suggest us up

With only two months to go until the scheduled arrival date of the next Neveratoss junior our shortlist of potentail names is erm… short. We don’t know the sex of the baby yet but, if it’s any help, the witches covens in both Haslemere and up London have a “feeling” that it will be a girl: we had three magpies in the garden the other day which just about clinches for them. Sam is convinced that we’re having a boy and that he will be called Elvis. I’m convinced that it will be either a girl or a boy.

We need some suggestions, which is where you, dear reader, come in. Suggest away.

ERROR - Please fix

I just received the best ever error message…

Message . . . . : DATABASE ERROR in file , key , in , at

Crikey!

Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, in an interview shortly before his recent untimely death, said that as a child he quite enjoyed watching the Thunderbirds but there would always be a place in his heart for Stingray.

Why you little…

I think that Sam is watching too much TV. Yesterday he went to an activity day at the local sports centre for a day of, erm… activities. When I arrived home he was watching The Simpsons…

“How was your day Sammy?”
“Great!”
“Where did you go?”
“Erm… Springfield.”

Doh!

Keep banging the rocks together guys

In a previous job (a Synon/Cool/Advantage/Allfusion/Whatever/2e shop) I had a conversation with our “technical” manager regarding my approach to developing an RPG application to send and receive Websphere MQ messages formatted in XML. Whatever/2e is rather good (if a little out of date) at some things but rather bad at others: interfacing with Webshere MQ and parsing XML fall into the rather bad category. The conversation went something like this…

Me: I’m going to use RPGIV and ILE for this one.
Boss: Erm… OK, as long as it adheres to the standards.
Me: Do we have any standards for RPGIV and ILE?
Boss: No. What do you want to do?
Me: Well, I’d like to use stuff like modules, service programs, procedures, long field names and mixed case (we were restricted to uppercase and 6 characters in RPGIII).
Boss: Not allowed to use long field names and mixed case.
Me: Why not?
Boss: Standards.
Me: What standards?
Boss: Well, uppercase is more readable! (fair point, most of her emails were in uppercase).
Me: WOT, LIKE IN BOOKS AND STUFF? (I walked away shaking my head muttering something about Luddites and did it my way).

This was just one of many similar conversations throughout my career.

I’m very fortunate right now to be working for an organization which embraces newer technology and both encourages and enables programmers to use the right tool for the right job.

So, if you’re work in an environment where your only tool is a hammer and all the problems are nails, I suggest that you have a look at Bob Cozzi’s article (written in mixed case funnily enough) “It’s time to get out of the stone age“. This particular hammer hits the nail firmly on the head and obeys the first rule of IT Management by fixing the blame – firmly with IT Management. Print it out and leave a copy on your manager’s desk – assuming that you have internet access of course.

It’s not often that you’ll hear me defending IT Management but I don’t believe that they are completely to blame. If they start using RPGIV, C, C++ or Java they are going to need to train their people who will then leave; or hire new people who already have these skills. I know far too many iSeries programmers who are only too happy to plod along, safe in their own comfort zones, unwilling or unable to invest in their own skills portfolio. Decent iSeries people are hard to come by, decent iSeries people with broad skill sets are like hen’s teeth.

What came first, the dinosaur or the egg?