Saddle up and move on out.

I am going to move hosters. I am going to move www.spuggy.co.uk to an eapps hosting package that gives me a lot more facilities. What I hope to do is still use blogger but use my own j2ee apps for blog rolling and comments.

Yes I do need to get out more.

All in all it should be interesting as I never managed to move a domain name in the past without someone buggering it up.

We shall see.

The Judging Hat

Kirky, resplendent in the Judging Hat, in bowels of large Accountancy Firm, circa 1996. The judging hat was used to asses users requests/requirements. The user was permitted to explain their (often lengthy) request and then the IT person receiving the request would don the judging hat to make the decision for or against.

It was usually no. I think this is loosely called: service with a grudge.

Well it passed the time.

Testing, Testing ... come in over

I'm doing some testing at the mo which normally makes me want to gnaw my own arm off. Made me think of the only decent testing book I ever read which was The Complete Guide to Software Testing by William Hetzel. It is and old book and ridiculously expensive, but very readable and very good. Makes you thinking of testing throughout the development process, how to test etc. I had it years ago but someone nicked it; there are perverts everywhere aren't there?

Ooooo Betty

Mrs Spuggy has arrived home with Betty. Betty is a lurcher aparrently, but she looks like a dog to me; she is eleven weeks old and craps in the house. Betty's arrival means I have slipped off the "guaranteed food" roster. Which is, in order of feeding:

Kid1: Isabel
Kid2: The Beast of Hammersmith
Kid3: The Evil Doctor Pud
Cat1: Laverne
Cat2: Shirley
Dog1: Betty
Bloke1: Spug

Mrs Spuggy says not to worry as pot noodles have really come on in the last few years. It is only a matter of time before I'm out at night rummaging in the bins with the badgers.

Woof.

Godzilla vs WSAD

I am doing a bit of Java development at the mo; inbetween fixing some bleeding awful @formula language Hammer House of Horror.

Uptil now I had been using jCreator and Ant and everything was just tickity-boo. It is fab and groovy and cheap and runs on my poofy portable - it works. Tonight I decided to give WSAD a whirl. Specifically WSAD with Websphere Device Developer.

What a pain in the arse. After getting it downloaded and installed things just didn't work. Couldn't get my project out of my CVS repository, the promised device developer WSAD integration didn't work; in short everything is a struggle. It is probably some silly incompatibility somewhere but for crying out loud it's the 21st century; I don't want to worry about this crap any more.

I guess it is not just WSAD I think I hate all big IDEs (JCreator, NetBeans, Symantec doo dah cafe, Visual Chutney++ for Windows). Maybe it's because I am some chickenshit developer but their promised "productivity gains" just don't materialize for me, they just get in the way and add another layer of mystery.

Moan, moan, moan.

Voice: "Is that a plane landing?"

Nope it's just me moaning and a-whinging.

Buskin' the Tube

Bo Duke from the Dukes of Uke busking at Lancaster Gate Tube station. Here Bo does a Pete Townsend windmill finish.

Hey look ... some people smoke crack ok?

n.b Posted on the train out of London Paddington, via Bluetooth, Nokia 6600 and a lot of crossed fingers, retrys and looking out the window while pages loaded. Sigh

Sloppy Seconds

I had to fix a lot of code like this today:

Pi:= 3.14159265358979323846;

FIELD field1 = @if(field1 = field21; @implode(field9/Pi) ; @cos(field1^2)) ;
FIELD field2 = @if(field1 = field22 ; @implode(field7/Pi) ; @cos(field13^2)) ;
FIELD field3 = @if(field1 = field32 ; @implode(field7/Pi) ; @cos(field1^2)) ;
FIELD field4 = @if(field1 = field32 ; @implode(field4/Pi) ; @cos(field1^2)) ;
FIELD field5 = @if(field1 = field12 ; @implode(field3/Pi) ; @cos(field9^2)) ;
FIELD field6 = @if(field1 = field21 ; @implode(field2/Pi) ; @cos(field8^2)) ;
FIELD field7 = @if(field1 = field22 ; @implode(field2/Pi) ; @cos(field7^2)) ;
FIELD field8 = @if(field1 = field4 ; @implode(field2/Pi) ; @cos(field6^2)) ;
FIELD field9 = @if(field1 = field5 ; @implode(field2/Pi) ; @cos(field5^2)) ;
FIELD field10 = @if(field1 = field8 ; @implode(field2/Pi) ; @cos(field2^2)) ;
FIELD field11 = @if(field1 = field12 ; @implode(field2/Pi) ; @cos(field1^2)) ;

M=Field1:field2:field3:field4:field5:field6:field8;

E:= M * (C^2);

England's Newest Hitmakers

With their new hit single Sweet Georgia Uke

Gravy

The Biggest MUD Game ever

I'm sat here, lost in the Partner World forum on the Blue meanie web site. I am trying to claim the "You Pass We Pay Things" for one of the certs I did in August.

Boy is it hard work; the site is almost impenetrable. It occurred to me that perhaps it is all just a practical joke and in reality is just one giant MUD game. I find myself experiencing the same emotions, for instance:

"I wonder what they mean by that?"
"Oh we have been here before but thru a different door"
"I can only go thru here when I have the right key, where do you get the key?"

At some point I am expecting to click on a link and be presented with a big page that says "WELL DONE, YOU HAVE FOUND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS!!!"

Host-a-mola

Just signed up for a bit of hosting. It's just fab. I get tomcat and auction engines and ldap and mysql and lots lots more (he said in ronco advert voice). I manage all this thru a groovy control panel thing.

Click on this little image to witness the full glory of my control panel. Please hum "Fanfare for the Common man" as you click it.



It is with eapps by the way.

Installing WSAD: A chimp's perspective

... and then I installed the device developer edition ... gawd. My development system is hung like a Grand National winner too.

Infact it took so bloody long that if I had been a chimp then I would have probably gone through a few stages of evolution by the time it finished. I would be standing upright, living in Staines and drinking Bacardi Breezers.

I did say only a few stages ;-)

Things that just work.

If you are thinking about Notes and handheld applications, particularly on PocketPC devices, look no further than mForms from CommonTime. A few years ago my company had a requirement to build a handheld application for a well known drinks company. We did it in mForms and it runs and runs and runs and runs. The development on the handheld is much like notes R3 (layout regions aaiiieee!) but with a more powerful @formula language (while loops, decent @setfield).

The hand devices started as HP Ipaqs but they are now Orange SPV M1000 phones and all the replication is done over GPRS. The data is uploaded from the PocketPC into a domino web app with MySQL back end for reporting. I even managed to do a bit of XLST to transform the result sets into the graphs.

The best bit of all is that as the underlying system is Notes the design and the data is replicated. This means that apart from a mForms upgrade the field staff have not had to return to base for ...well yonks. This is something that many other handheld software charlies cannot match. Commontime's suppoprt is pretty damn good too.

You'll like mForms, it's one of those things that works.

Geek?

Geek? Moi?

More like a wide eyed loner on the edge of uke oblivion. Sort of like if Gram Parsons had been a Principal Certified Lotus Professional.

<Cough>