Fiery Fred

Why is it that jobs that seem like they ought to be easy take ages to do? As a recent example I had to put up a new rotary clothes line in the back garden so I got hold of a support that can be screwed into the ground. Takes 30 seconds to install it said on the packaging and I can believe it… if you haven’t got a back garden like ours appears to be. It seems that after building the house the builders spread about 6 inches of top soil on top of rubble and then turfed it. When I tried to screw this thing into the ground I got it about 6-8 inches in before it stopped. In the end I had to dig a hole to remove the large stones and then repack the earth back in. So a job that should have taken about a minute ended up taking most of an evening.

A similar thing happens with software especially when the final system cannot be properly simulated. We put email support into two projects and it went in without a hitch; it pretty much worked out of the box. We then copied the same code over into another project and it took days to get it going. It worked a treat in QA but once in Production it wouldn’t work. Same setup, same servers as the other projects and it just didn’t want to work. In the end it turned out we had been given an incorrect email address and we had got a TCL list incorrect but because it was a production system it took a while to find this out.

Sometimes you just have to get someone else to give the code a quick look see. Several times colleagues have asked me to check their code and the fault just sticks out like a sore thumb; the difficulty then is to try not to act all superior because sometime the places will be swapped over and I’ll be the one who can’t see the fault in my own code and be banging my head on the desk thinking…’It should be this difficult’

The title is not strictly true since the change happened in December last year but I’m now using Vista on my work laptop. The old Dell laptop went back to the company and I got a new Lenovo Thinkpad with Vista Enterprise on. And I have to say that it works. I’d heard all sorts of stuff about Vista being a pile of rubbish that shouldn’t be allowed on a PC but I’ve not had any issues with it. Having said all that it isn’t doing much other than running some Oracle databases and allowing me to read email, view the web and develop TCL code. The main issues I have had have been getting used to SAPs corporate environment.

So would I buy a copy of Vista? Well I did, sort of. My wife has got a new laptop for her business and it came with Vista Business installed as well as the Windows XP disk for up/down grading (Delete as appropriate). And so far she has been running Vista because I couldn’t be bothered down the change and Vista has worked for me and seems to be working for her. She has also got Office 2007 which took her a few moments to get used to but I think if I tried to get her to use any earlier version I would have a fight on my hands. I’ve got to agree. Apart from a few oddities (Open, Save) the Office ribbon works well.

On the other systems, the server is still going strong with Centos 5. The only change there has been to encrypt the database partition in case it goes walkies. The family PC has just been reformatted and XP put back on along with Ubuntu 8.10. The Ubuntu installation has got to be the smoothest I have ever had with Ubuntu; the installation recognised that the video card was using the DVI port (rather than the VGA port) and even found the Belkin USB wireless card. In fact I was on the internet quicker with Ubuntu than XP!

I’m hoping to get some non work related code written this year. More of this on the next post.

I got a phone call from an old work colleague who said that someone was looking for me and wanted to offer me a job and would it be ok if they called me. It sounded interesting and so I said that yes. So I get this phone call from one of the directors of asking if I would like to come down to see them and talk about the possibility of me doing some work for them. The company makes mass spectrometers which is where I originally started coding and I have often thought of going back to the mass spec world. Anyway I took my last day of holiday and went down to see the company. The trip itself took about 5 1/2 hours and involved four trains, or it would have done if the last train hadn’t been cancelled. After a quick phone call the company aranged for a taxi to pick me up and take me to the factory.

The meeting I had there went really well and we seemed to be in agreement about me going to work there. I have to admit it felt good learning that they had been looking for me for about a year. It was also good to be able to go into a discussion about being employed knowing that I didn’t need a new job.

After another 5 1/2 hour trip home I was still pretty fired up and expected to receive an offer of employment quite soon. The offer arrived on Wednesday last week and I then spent a few days wondering whether to take it. In the end I decided not to. The main reason being the distance between where I’m living and the factory. The initial bit of software that needed writing was the calculations routine which could easily be done remotely. The later bits would involve doing instrument control and for that you can’t beat having an instrument easily available. Its bad enough trying to bug fix software on an instrument that you are not next to; I didn’t fancy trying to develop software the same way.

So I didn’t take on the chance to do something that I would really like to do. Hopefully there could still be a job there for me if I need it, but at the moment I don’t. Fortunately!

Its been a while since I’ve posted and quite a bit has happened. We (the family that is) have moved to a new house about 500 yards away from the old one. Why move such a short distance? Well our previous landlord wasn’t doing much to keep the place up and it was costing a fortune to heat. So we’ve moved into a newer place (about 10 years old) which is smaller than the old place but has a fourth bedroom/office and a garage.

Not much ITish in that you might say and you would be right. Except that I work from home and so doing a house move also involves moving the business phone line and broadband. And I have to say it has all gone very smoothly. BT did a fine job of getting things sorted. I stopped using the broadband on Friday in the old house and a BT engineer arrived on Monday morning at the new house to connect the phone line up. After about an hour they had me up and running on a new phone number and on Tuesday morning they swapped the new number back to the number I had at the previous house. And it all worked. Brilliant.

One other thing is that during my converstions with BT they convinced me to sign up for BT Fusion which gives you a mobile phone and a wireless router as part of the broadband package. The thing about the phone is that when it is in range of the router it gives you free calls to 01, 02 and 07 phone numbers using VOIP. I have to say that it seems to work pretty well. The call quality is reasonable and since most of my business calls are to 01, 02 and 07 numbers it should save my employers some money.

I finally got around to scanning in the dragons that my dad drew for me and have put one of them on the header. Hopefully I can get around to doing some work on the template behind this site.