Long time no blog - I’ve been hugely busy as there was a competition to write an app for a new hand held thingy - I guess they see it as an iphone competitor so they want lots of Apps as selling point. How to get lots of Apps, cheaply and quickly ? Offer us daft muggins-iz a prize if we write one - sorry guys it was a closed competition otherwise I’d have invited you all in.

As this was on my time but I could use a bit of “slack” (joke) work time I’ve been up to my eyes day & night. It’s a shame that has left me too busy to write up what I’ve been doing because it has been quite interesting.

Most of the app is in Java Script which I have done a couple of dozen lines of before. Google for Java Script advice is like asking an Eskimo about snow - you get lots and lots but none of it simple enough to understand. It was quite fun really because it took me back to the bad old days.

To start with I don’t know the language, there isn’t any auto complete which I have got used to on stuff I don’t know - type class.m and MS Visual Studio C++ (or in VB / VBA) it will suggest all the methods starting “m” for that class, and show the parameter types - which helps if you are guessing what methods there might be. Also an F12 will take you to a class definition where you can read what methods there are - with maybe a comment about what they do!

Given I don’t know the language a bit of syntax checking could help - “error line 10 class doesn’t have that method” etc. Oh no, I’m back to type it, run it and if it doesn’t like it you get a blank browser! My tactic was to comment off lines until the error went away and then figure out what was wrong. Actually it was worse than that because with some errors the code would run up to that line and then skip out of the method - leaving bits of code un-executed but not telling you which ones!

Finally debugging - no debugger. Well not without installing a load of junk I didn’t want. So no break points, no examining variables, no tracing through executing code. I’ve worked that way before, you need a lot of patience and output debug strings. No out put debug strings - not without installing a load of junk I didn’t want. I ended up using an on screen text box to display debug messages.

Still, it all worked (by hook, crook or bodge) and is submitted so now I’ve got time to blog (between catching up on work and life) but not such interesting things to blog about!

Wow! I’ve bought a PC! You may think that’s the kind of thing I do a lot but I’ve been working from home (on and off) for 20 something years so initially having a PC at home (albeit a work one) was more than most people had. That first unit was very much “mine” - it shared home and work duties.

In 2000 and a bit I went back into an office so bought a decent PC for home. Having trawled the net for the cheapest I ordered it only to have the company go bust the next day. Fortunately I got the cash back as it was a credit card order and I went for safety and bought from the company I was working for. However, it came pretty much bare bones and I had to install my own memory as well as software. That PC (a P3) with various disk (60G), OS (dual booting 98 & XP) memory upgrades (maxed out at 256M) has staggered on until now. The lack of memory being the real issue.

I’ve built PC’s out of work cast offs for various family members and ended up keeping a laptop ebayed for the in-laws but beyond their eyesight and co-ordination to use. Unfortunately a dodgy power connection on the laptop (battery was dead from day one) meant you could lose your work at any time and as it was also maxed out with 256M of memory the chances of doing anything before it died were minimal.

So I’ve bought a new laptop. New, from a shop, with software installed, legal paid for software and everything - not just some old bit of kit I’ve reformatted and put a collection of freeware and borrowings on. It took it out the box, turned it on and it worked - spooky.

And where did this ageing techie go for his hardware? Having considered another ebay purchase, having price checked the company’s staff discounts and special offers, having perused the many el cheapo sites I’ve squirreled away over the years my arcane knowledge took me to….

..Tesco.

Yes, my local supermarket had a good basic laptop for not much over £300 (£329 but double points traded up gives me effectively another £25 off that and you can get a £10 off on line purchases). http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.207-0318.aspx is not quite what I’d have chosen given days to pore over specs but it was close enough to both the price and performance I had sketched out in my head and easy to get hold of and to take back if it was DOA that it was a no brainer in the end.

If you’d have told me 25 years ago I’d buy a laptop along with the weekly shop….

http://www.itpro.co.uk/623338/microsoft-calls-ie6-spoiled-milk

HP to Acquire Palm for $1.2 Billion

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100428xa.html

HP has bought 3Com (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100412xa.html) which gives HP an impressive end to end product range or service delivery or whatever the jargon is.

HP are saying they are committed to becoming market leader in networking, as they already do plenty with servers, clients, desktops, laptops and what’s that other thing? Oh yes, printers they pretty much have it covered. What isn’t mentioned there (it would spoil the flow for the printers gag) is software / services which they also have covered via their previous EDS acquisition.

They are already the worlds largest IT company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue - c’mon, wikipedia is never wrong!) so I guess it’s a case of tomorrow the world, mha-ha-ha-ha etc.

Over at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/eds_mainframe/ you can read what happens when you count beans and think that is all that matters.

It appears that a crucial system at RBS went down because no one was looking after it. Why was no one looking after it? It was an EDS system, and when good old HP bought EDS they laid off all that dead wood, useless, engineery types. Hmmm, maybe they didn’t have lots of meetings with power point but perhaps they did have uses after all…

I’ve been listening to “Dear Granny Smith” (you can catch some at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pgm7r) a blog on the demise of the Royal Mail. One story really caught my attention,  management base route times on some software that simulates walking the routes (pegasus?). OK maybe you can walk the route but what about actually delivering letters? Walking up drives, filling in “you weren’t in” forms… Classic, management completely ignoring what the actual job function is.

You might as well figure out how long I should spend writing code by the amount of time it takes to type it. Or decide you don’t need support staff because nothing goes wrong - oo when they aren’t there things do go wrong, how did that happen?

Hi - I’m back!!! Sorry for the blog absence but it’s taken me a while to get me main PC up and running again. Yes it could have been quicker but I was getting by with an old one and my work one. I did post a bit from the old one but obviously I couldn’t use a work machine for personal stuff - I’ve attended company trainign that explains that any such use is really theft.

Of course, like most stuff with my company that is a one way street. So much so in fact that although I mustn’t use their kit for anything but work I am no longer to be reimbersed for my home Internet access or second phone line. This is despite the fact I work exclusively from home, couldn’t work without the net, have to pay for a top line service as I down load megs of data on a regullar basis and am expected to spend 3 hours at a time on company calls. As long as I type in a 14 digit key I won’t be charged for the calls so that’s OK. Just a shame if anyone else in the house wants to use the phone eh?

I suspect I could just not do any work, presumably they couldn’t sack me as they haven’t given me the means to do the work. However, I’m not ready for redundancy so I guess I’ve got to cough up.
 

For access to my company’s intranet I have to go through a VPN; because of problems with the servers I was getting between 100K and 150K download speeds. Faster than my old dial up but a vast number of sites just aren’t usable at that speed.

Unfortunately that includes just about all our intranet sites - oh well, I’ll be working offline today!