Odds and Ends

Friday was my last day...

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:03:10 GMT

Friday was my last day at Barbon Insurance Group Ltd. A company named after the guy that invented Fire Insurance, Nicholas Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon. I kid you not! (Incidentally, the change of name to BIGL, for short, had nothing to do with me handing in my notice. Although I have to admit, I had an urge to come in on my last day with a set of flying goggles, reminiscent of the famous fictional pilot, Biggles.)

Just after I handed in my notice, I left my desk for a few moments and when I returned I discovered an Evil Monkey sitting on my PC. (see right) Oops! My bad! He left again shortly afterwards. No doubt after realising that I wasn't Chris Griffin.

My boss, Steve, (strictly speaking my boss's boss) gave a wonderful farewell speech that talked about the projects I worked on and my accomplishments since I started with Lumley, which was then bought over by Erinaceous, which was put into administration and split up, and ultimately became Barbon. He also said that it would have been nice if the business had actually allowed most of these projects to come to fruition and be put live. I completely concur with that sentiment, perhaps I would have felt more useful if it had. As it happens, only one of my projects went live (and it works very well I'm pleased to say). I have to say that I've enjoyed working with everyone in the development team immensely. I'll miss the camaraderie most.

My colleagues in Glasgow had a whip round and signed a card (see below) when I was down in Lincoln training up the developers there in how to use .NET. They raised much more than I expected so when I left they gifted me with an Ubuntu Linux 8.4 64-bit server install DVD, a Granny-Smith apple (the only apple I would accept [for the uninitiated it was a joke on my opinion about Apple Computers]), a T-shirt with "I survived ~~Lumley~~ ~~Erinaceous~~ Barbon" written on it (see left), and a Wii Fit. I felt really appreciated that gift because I know that Duncan had spent a lot of time phoning around and ultimately queuing for ages trying to get one, and his wife was most understanding also.

After work, we went to the pub for a couple of drinks where Frank, my immediate boss, joined us after returning from holiday. We headed off to The Spice Garden, an Indian restaurant just across the Clyde to have an excellent meal. I have to say that the staff there are very pleasant and helpful and the food is great. I have to admit that my experience of Indian restaurants has generally not been good, but this place really makes up for it. The only thing that I would give as a negative is that it is directly under the tracks for Glasgow Central Station so you have trains rumbling overhead every two minutes. The best thing is that they do take-out as well. Did I mention the food was great!

When I returned home I was full, but the Wii Fit was beckoning. I decided that I would watch an episode of House first in order to let my food settle, then I could at least set it up and start using it the next day. When I went to set it up, I discovered that it would only give me measurements in imperial units. I don't understand those but I could not discover a way to change it. After going on line I discovered that by changing country it could change units. Apparently the United Kingdom is set to imperial. There were many forums of irritated people complaining that to use the units they wanted they had to change the language to Spanish - so they had a choice, a language they could not understand, or a set of units they could not understand. I eventually discovered that by going into the Wii Settings (for the whole console) and changing my country to "Australia" I could get the Wii Fit to display kilos and centimetres. However, that wiped out my settings for the Weather and News "channels" on the Wii. Apparently it was freezing in Sydney last night. Well, it is winter over there...

Technorati Tags: barbon,evil monkey,chris griffin,lumley,erinaceous,glasgow,lincoln,.net,ubuntu,linux,apple,Wii Fit,Spice Garden,House

Curious calculation

Colin Angus Mackay — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:55:28 GMT

Last weekend I had to replace two tyres on my car as they were wearing down. It cost £85.50 each to replace them. I was told that usually the back wheels wear away at half the rate of the front tyres. Given that the car has done 25,000 miles, it means that for every 50,000 miles I should have bought 6 new tyres. 6 tyres will cost £513. £513 into 50,000 miles is £0.01026.

Put it another way, my tyres wear away at a rate of just over 1 penny per mile driven.

Or, in terms of fuel costs, it would be like adding roughly 9p to a litre of petrol.

Technorati Tags: fuel,tyres,cost

Google Maps are borked

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:55:55 GMT

I don't know what is up with Google Maps, but when I looked at them earlier today they seem to be borked. Roads are incorrectly designated and rail tracks seem to be misaligned.

For example, if you know the Glasgow area you should instantly spot what is wrong with this:

For the uninitiated, there are two north-south running motorways (blue roads). There should only be one. The easterly (right) route is actually city streets for the most part and cannot be classed as a motorway. However, just drawing the route in blue wouldn't be so bad, but they've actually re-numbered the route. The road should be the A77 is now the A77(M). Not much of a change I suppose, and it doesn't seem to needlessly route people down that road. For people that don't know the area, and are not relying on Google's routing capabilities, it could add significant time on to their journey, and they might be wondering why the road is not up to motorway standards.

In fact, if you look at the route's northern terminus, it looks even crazier for a motorway - That's one helluva bend just before the Clyde!

Technorati Tags: google,google maps,glasgow,A77,M77

Monthly stats

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:36:51 GMT

I stopped posting my monthly stats because some of it was getting predictable. People seem to stumble across the same issues time and time again, although not the same person obviously. My post on Internal Error 2755 caused by Folder Encryption is consistently near the top of the list as is my post on the SqlException.Number property when a timeout occurs. In fact 7 of the top ten posts viewed in the last month were not even recent. By that I mean they were from last year or before.

So what recent stuff (i.e. stuff I posted this year) did make it in to the top ten? The first part to my introduction to LINQ to XML series, a series I'm still writing; a tip-of-the-day on constraining SQL Server memory usage which is a surprise because it has only been on for 10 days; and the second part, on getting data out of XML in my LINQ to XML series.

Outside the top ten, other recent posts of note high up in the listings are:

I am encouraged by the popularity of my LINQ to XML series, and I'll try to get more posts in that series up on my blog soon.

Technorati Tags: stats,blog,ego

A Cautionary Tale

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:17:54 GMT

XKCD can be variable in quality (or maybe I just don't understand all the jokes), but it has this cautionary tale about Linux:

Technorati Tags: xkcd,catroon,linux,caution

How I got started in Software Development?

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:14:02 GMT

There is a meme going around at the moment and I thought I'd join in even although I've not been specifically tagged by it, it looks good fun. I spotted it on Phil Haak's blog with his response.

How old were you when you started programming?

I was 8 years old.

How did you get started in programming?

When my dad bought a ZX Spectrum in 1983 (It was a Mark II, 48K RAM). I started by typing in programs from the manuals, then by creating my own programs. One of the first I remember creating was to stop my sister using the computer. She was younger than me and the program was something like this:

10 PRINT "How old are you?"
20 INPUT a
30 IF a < 8 THEN PRINT "You are too young to use this computer."; GO TO 10

What was your first language?

ZX Spectrum Basic

What was the first real program that you wrote?

The first real program that I wrote as part of a job was a tool to summarise and format certain data in a database. What today would be handled by a few drag & drop operations and some mouse clicks in SQL Server Reporting Services took me about a week or so back then. It was written in a language called Magik (yes, with a K)

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Well various flavours of BASIC (ZX Spectrum, BBC, Visual Basic, VBA, etc.), COMAL (used by my high school), PASCAL, C/C++, COBOL, Magik, javascript, C#. There are probably a whole slew of other languages that I've touched over the years but not spent any significant time with that I've missed out here.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes, I would still have started programming. I probably would have done it a lot better though. There are a lot of things I've learned along the way that I wish I knew earlier. But, then again, if I never made those mistakes what lessons would I be learning? I guess I would be answering this questions pretty much the same way, but thinking of a different set of mistakes. Or would I? Maybe, since I didn't make those mistakes in the first place I would end up being an incredibly arrogant insufferable arsehole.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Last year, I interviewed for 3 months to hire a developer. From that, the one major thing I think people need to understand is that in software development you must continue to learn constantly. I was interviewing candidates with 10+ years experience that had pretty much never learned anything since leaving university. Sure, they were using new languages since leaving, but they never learned about how to really use this fancy new object oriented language, or how to defend against SQL Injection Attacks. Most of them couldn't even write a fizz-buzz program for goodness sakes.

So, my answer would be life long learning. If you don't want to do it then do something else.

Who do I tag?

It is an interesting set of questions, and I'd like to know the answer from the following people:

Technorati Tags: meme,software development,programming

Fizz-Buzz in LINQ

Colin Angus Mackay — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:13:52 GMT

This just occurred to me. It is somewhat pointless, but I thought it was interesting:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var result = from say in Enumerable.Range(1, 100)
                 select (say % 15 == 0) ? "BuzzFizz" :
                    (say % 5 == 0) ? "Buzz" :
                        (say % 3 == 0) ? "Fizz" : say.ToString();
    foreach (string say in result)
        Console.WriteLine(say);
}

Technorati Tags: linq,fizzbuzz,buzzfizz

Donate to Sense Scotland

Colin Angus Mackay — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:32:13 GMT

A friend of mine, Martin Bell, is going to do a crazy thing for charity to help raise money for Sense Scotland right after Developer Day Scotland. Sense Scotland is a charity that works with children and adults who have communication support needs because of deaf-blindness, sensory impairment, learning and physical disabilities. It is an excellent cause and the money will be put to very good use.

If you want to sponsor him then you can go to his sponsorship page and donate what ever you feel is appropriate. If you are a UK tax payer then you can also "gift aid" it where the Government will gift the tax to the charity too.

Technorati Tags: sense scotland,donate,charity,martin bell

Aggressive Spam Filters

Colin Angus Mackay — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:06:33 GMT

Today I discovered quite by accident that I have 9 genuine emails sitting in gmail's spam trap that were sent to me over the last 24 hours. The genuine emails were from Microsoft, Quest, Redgate and Scottish Developers! I hit the "not spam" button for each of them so hopefully gmail learns and I'll get them in future, but for the next few days I'll be watching my spam folder for potential genuine messages disappearing.

Technorati Tags: spam,gmail

Woo-hoo I won a prize

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:31:42 GMT

For my community work in February I won a prize from those great folks at Community Credit.