Saturday, February 26, 2005

My drug of choice

Sherlock Holmes preferred cocaine; there was none at Height Ashbury in '67; Keith Richards never had a night out on it; nobody danced thru an all-nighter powered by it; no-one was sorted for it at Glastonbury and I have never seen it rolled into a Camberwell-carrot; but for a relaxing high, an enormous feeling of well being and no real come down effects, you can't beat Calpol

The top thirty countdown.

In at number thirty the new single from boy band "Lotus Notes" ... ..

Whilst the extraordinarily dull Project Management thing, formally known as Prince, a non mover at 22.

1. Office
2. SQL
3. Oracle
4. Unix
5. Win NT
6. Java
7. C
8. VB
9. C++
10. SQL Server
11. Win 2000
12. SAP
13. XML
14. TCP/IP
15. Access
16. .NET
17. Solaris
18. Exchange
19. ASP
20. C#
21. Sybase
22. Prince
23. HTML
24. Cisco
25. UML
26. Perl
27. OO
28. CITRIX
29. LAN
30. Lotus Notes

Meaningless Top 30 most wanted IT skills via NamesFacesPlaces via CWJobs

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Homeworking - The benefits

Over the last few weeks I find myself working at home quite a lot. eGrindstone.co.uk list the pros and cons of homeworking. One of which is:

'The world is your oyster' as you are free to explore a whole range of opportunities to diversify and develop your work.

not to mention:

Your family/partner will see much more of you. You can play a greater part in their lives, something you may not have had the luxury of doing before. Similarly, they may be able to help with your work.

Nowhere in their list how ever does it mention: "Knocking off early and going up the pub". Myself, the Baron von Pud, Mrs Spuggy, m'chum Rubbery Chapploe and Betty 'Bin Laden' the dog have all been up "The Ram" where we ate chips and drank "Old Spot"

Splendid

Here is a picture of my pint of Old Spot



In a paralell universe somewhere Gordon Gekko says:

"Lunch is not for wimps, lunch is a pint of Old Spot and some chips"

mmmmm greed is good -- <burp>

Monday, February 21, 2005

Jasper Reports

I wonder if JasperReports is any good? I wonder if you could plug it into domino?

Hmmm

XMLMind

This looks nobby

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Picking Up

Years ago I set up a YAC account to receive voice mails via email; this was at the height of the boom. Today for the first time in about 6 years I received a voice mail from an agent asking me if I was interested in a domino job.

They must have my details from before the last King died.

Things are looking up brothers.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Outsourcing

Spug: Over the past few weeks I have been managing an outsourced Notes development.

All: Hey what was it like?

Spug: Well, they were a bit dodgy to be honest, deadlines were promised and missed; agents with no option declare; still using navigators; no authors fields and all editors in ACL; some BIG assumptions about the clients setup that kind of exposed their lack of knowledge.

All: That doesn't sound good, were they cheap?

Spug: Well they did the whole job for 200 Benson and Hedges so I guess so.

All: How did you communicate?

Spug: It was all done with Skype and sametime for demos. Sametime is a bit dodgey IMHO.

All: Were there any language problems?

Spug: No, because the contact was an expat englishman. He sounded a like he'd been up all night on the marching powder most times, and all the developers were called lulu or la-la. I am assuming they were all Ladyboys.

All: So would you recommend them?

Spug: No. Not because I think outsourcing is evil, it is just that they were unprofessional and their code did not blow my hair back. I wanted it all to work, honest, as it would have been handy to have the option if my company needed it; trouble was they were shite and I didn't trust them. I think you have to be on the top of your game to be an outsourcer.

All: So do you still think we are all tomorrow's TV repairmen?

Spug: You bet I do you. We are all doomed and will wallow in the cess pool of out own making.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Workplace Client Technology architecture

This might help ...

IBM Workplace Client Technology architecture

Looks like we got a reader

I was reading about this fella who got fired from Google for blogging. The first line of this entry made me laugh out loud. Reminds me of that Bill Hicks routine.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Roller Weblogger Part I

In which the Spugster tries to get mail working in his install of Roller Weblogger.

Scene I: A small office in Gloucestershire.

I'd followed all the instructions to the lettter and copied the mail.jar and activation.jar to the tomcat/common/lib directory and I was still gettting the JNDI error about "Cannot create resource instance".

I fannied around for ages, googling this googling that and finally in bowles of some obscure tech forum:

Are you using Tomcat 5.0.25? If so, you may want to consider upgrading or just stealing common/lib/naming-factory.jar from a 5.0.24 version of Tomcat. org.apache.naming.factory.MailSessionFactory is missing from tomcat
5.0.25.


That was the daddy. About fours hours that took me, great.

As the man said; "Open source software is just fab if your time is worthless"

Friday, February 11, 2005

Vorsprung durch technic man bonnie lad

I often feel inadequate when I read the vowe posts in German. I wonder what he is on about? Perhaps he is from Redcar and he is just having us all on ;-)

The best I can do is post the previous entry in Geordie.

This, alang wi reality TV, is the begining o the end of western civilisation.

One gadgie wez stabbed near Ikea's newest store an several fowk were hurt in the crush as thoosands flocked te its midnight opening.

Nine ambulances went te the Edmonton store, north Lunnen , affta reports tha up te 20 fowk were suffering frem heat exhaustion an minor injuries.

Bargain-hunters even abandoned thor cars on the A406 north circular causing "severe traffic" problems, polliss sez
. More ..

IKEA gawd.

It is at times leik these Ah think wi should, a cyber stylee, aal join hands an sing a hymn ... aal together noo:

Aw went to Blaydon races
'twas on the ninth of Joon,
Eiteen hundred an' sixty two,
on a summer's efternoon,
Aw tuek the bus frae Balmbra's,
an she wis heavy laden,
Away we went alang Collingwood Street thats on the road to Blaydon

O lads, ye shud only seen us gannin,
We passed the foakes upon the road
just as they wor stannin;
Thor wes lots o' lads an lasses there,
all wi smilin' faces
Gannin' alang the Scotswood Road,
to see the Blaydon Races

We flew past Airmstrang's factory
and up to the 'Robin Adair'
Just gannin' doon te the railway bridge,
the bus wheel flew off there.
The lasses lost their crinolines off,
an' the veils that hide their faces.
An' aw got two black eyes an' a broken nose
in ga'n te Blaydon Races

O lads, ye shud only seen us gannin,
We passed the foakes upon the road
just as they wor stannin;
Thor wes lots o' lads an lasses there,
all wi smilin' faces
Gannin' alang the Scotswood Road,
to see the Blaydon Races

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Good Grief

This, along with reality TV, is the begining of the end of western civilisation.

One man was stabbed near Ikea's newest store and several people were hurt in the crush as thousands flocked to its midnight opening.

Nine ambulances went to the Edmonton store, north London, after reports that up to 20 people were suffering from heat exhaustion and minor injuries.

Bargain-hunters even abandoned their cars on the A406 north circular causing "severe traffic" problems, police said.
More ..

IKEA gawd.

It is at times like these I think we should, a cyber stylee, all join hands and sing a hymn ... all together now:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.


Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Officer Dibble

A few weeks ago I took up letter writing again. My mum has been the victim of vadalism and attempted burglary over the past few months so I decided to write to the police chief to see what he was going to do about it. Turns out the chief of police is called Inspector Dibble .... I kid you not.

Hey Benny can you believe it?

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Roller Weblogger

I have been mucking about with Roller Weblogger. This is the J2ee based blog software that is used to host all the jroller blogs.

I have some tomcat hosting so I thought I'd set it up.

Roughly the install went like this:

1. Download the WAR file containging the j2EE app.
2. Deployed this to tomcat via the tomcat admin tool. Edit a few xml files.
3. SSH'd on to my server, go to the WEB-INF directory, launch mysql
4. Create the database and try and to set up the character sets.
5. Realise the mysql version is to old and submit upgrade request to hoster.
6. wait.
7. wait.
8. give up go to bed.
9. get up.
10. Log back in to mysql and create the roller database with the special character set requirements.
11. run the supplied dbsetup.sql.
12. open up the URL to the roller app and login.
13. the first user becomes admin.
14. create a weblog entry.
15. find the comments don't work.
16. give up.
17. drink shiraz.
18. play the uke.
19. go to bed.
20. get up, let the dog out.
21. root thru the roller mail archives to try and find solution. looks like it could be the twisty comments.
22. change the theme and it works.

There you go, bit of a struggle but not too bad. The big difference and what is the greatest culture shock for us domino charlies is having to worry about databases.

We just install the .nsf and off we go. Here, I have had to fanny about a bit too much.

All: So where is it then for crying out loud. Good grief man you could bore the bollocks off a wooden horse.

Spug: Sorry, as we say in Gloucestershire yer tis



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