Draw near and open your ears Dominoista's and Noterati for one of our number needs a wee hand with something in her community.
Francie Tanner of Udder Chaos and lately of Anguilla, which for those not in the know is a "not very big" island in the Caribbean. Whilst a paradise for goats, cats and transient Notes Bods on their holidays being "not very big" comes with it's own set of problems, not least being a chronic shortage of bananas.
The great Anhuillan Banana Shortage is not the problem on this occasion it is rather more serious and it is a real worry for Francie and the other Angulliotes and it concerns the continued status of one of their schools ... The Teacher Gloria Omololu Institute
Now I am very keen on the idea that our children are our future and it really doesn't matter where the children are, collectively they are the world that is to come and the more educated they are the less likely they are to make a big a pigs ear of the whole sheebang as we seem to be doing.
In the world just now there are lots of demands on our cash but if you can spare even a couple of bucks and sponsor a brick or buy a raffle ticket which it has to be said has a really whizz bang super duper cracker of a prize, take a moment to click on the school's site link and put your credit card to good use. ;-)
The wee folk of Anguilla will be very grateful if you do
Sunday 22 February 2009
Saturday 21 February 2009
Fun things to do with Javascript
OK picture this.. you are having an argument with a chum and you suddenly need to convince your colleague that in fact the top news stories on the BBC are all about the creme egg crisis...
Pieces of piss
Go to the BEEB
Paste the line below into your browser Address bar
et Voila you can tweak all the content the way you want.. like this
Pieces of piss
Go to the BEEB
Paste the line below into your browser Address bar
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0et Voila you can tweak all the content the way you want.. like this
Friday 20 February 2009
Creative profanity (very NSFW)
I feel compelled to scribble a few notes in the back wash from the recent brouhaha over at Mr Bynkii's site (I wont link to it, I am sure you have all seen it)
Others can and will comment on the whether the sentiments expressed have value or not and I am not joining that particular debate, however having read Mr Bynkii's missive I am left with a feeling of dissatisfaction at the style and particulary poor use of expletive gymnastics he and his fellow travellers used in this post .... where has creative profanity gone?
Now as my more astute readers will be aware I do like a string of well formed, creative profanity. You may argue that profanity of any sort is not big and is not clever and yes that argument does hold some water in polite society. However an expletive in the hands of an artist can be used to create word pictures that clean and sturdy metaphor or muscular but inoffensive similie can never hope to achieve.
Profanity, like salt improving a under seasoned soup, improves the flow of the text. The Bard himself, old Billy Shakespeare was not above slipping in the odd expletive into his plays, although he did it with style and finesse. His audience's picked up on these at once and no doubt tittered and guffawed in equal measure. For example Malvolio slipped this line into one of his speeches
"These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus she makes her great p"
or when Hamlet makes reference to "Country matters" as he pointedly lays his head in Ophelia's lap it is fairly obvious what he is getting at and on what syllables the emphasis should be laid!
Mr Bynkii has his fellow travellers have fallen into the trap of believing that simply sprinkling "fuck" into a sentence shifts the energy of the sentiment they are expressing to level where we gasp at his prowess. But no! He lacks the panache and verve of one who is truly profane. Alas, his writing style appears to be driven by a pair of shite encrusted underpants lurking in the linen basket of his imagination. What makes matters worse it appears they were worn by a doubly incontinent syphilitic fuck wit who has all the inventive skills of a scatological sybarite licking the puckered arsehole of mediocrity .... and his goatee makes his face look like a baboon's arse.
Others can and will comment on the whether the sentiments expressed have value or not and I am not joining that particular debate, however having read Mr Bynkii's missive I am left with a feeling of dissatisfaction at the style and particulary poor use of expletive gymnastics he and his fellow travellers used in this post .... where has creative profanity gone?
Now as my more astute readers will be aware I do like a string of well formed, creative profanity. You may argue that profanity of any sort is not big and is not clever and yes that argument does hold some water in polite society. However an expletive in the hands of an artist can be used to create word pictures that clean and sturdy metaphor or muscular but inoffensive similie can never hope to achieve.
Profanity, like salt improving a under seasoned soup, improves the flow of the text. The Bard himself, old Billy Shakespeare was not above slipping in the odd expletive into his plays, although he did it with style and finesse. His audience's picked up on these at once and no doubt tittered and guffawed in equal measure. For example Malvolio slipped this line into one of his speeches
"These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus she makes her great p"
or when Hamlet makes reference to "Country matters" as he pointedly lays his head in Ophelia's lap it is fairly obvious what he is getting at and on what syllables the emphasis should be laid!
Mr Bynkii has his fellow travellers have fallen into the trap of believing that simply sprinkling "fuck" into a sentence shifts the energy of the sentiment they are expressing to level where we gasp at his prowess. But no! He lacks the panache and verve of one who is truly profane. Alas, his writing style appears to be driven by a pair of shite encrusted underpants lurking in the linen basket of his imagination. What makes matters worse it appears they were worn by a doubly incontinent syphilitic fuck wit who has all the inventive skills of a scatological sybarite licking the puckered arsehole of mediocrity .... and his goatee makes his face look like a baboon's arse.
Creme Eggs - the scandal!
Dearest assembled geeks, geekettes and nerds of the associated and allied trades!
I am DISGUSTED and outraged at the scandal of the shrinking Creme Egg. As a callow youth I remember creme eggs as being much more substantially sized and only cost 3d (thats 1.5p to you young whipper snappers).
This is the situation the world finds itself in yellow and white centred microcosm, the men with Ex-Hell spreadsheets and their pencils neatly arranged on a tidy desk have gradually over the years scrimped and nipped and tucked the majestic creme egg from it's once majestic glory into the modern shadow of it's former self.
Yes J'accuse those second cousins of bankers, accountants, for tis with them that this crime lies!
Above a creme egg being delivered circa 1965 cost thruppence weight 14 hundredweight
The creme egg today a shadow of it's former self you can fit 2 on your hand for goodness sake!
BAH HUMBUG is say.. nay THRICE BAH HUMBUG!
I am DISGUSTED and outraged at the scandal of the shrinking Creme Egg. As a callow youth I remember creme eggs as being much more substantially sized and only cost 3d (thats 1.5p to you young whipper snappers).
This is the situation the world finds itself in yellow and white centred microcosm, the men with Ex-Hell spreadsheets and their pencils neatly arranged on a tidy desk have gradually over the years scrimped and nipped and tucked the majestic creme egg from it's once majestic glory into the modern shadow of it's former self.
Yes J'accuse those second cousins of bankers, accountants, for tis with them that this crime lies!
Above a creme egg being delivered circa 1965 cost thruppence weight 14 hundredweightThe creme egg today a shadow of it's former self you can fit 2 on your hand for goodness sake!BAH HUMBUG is say.. nay THRICE BAH HUMBUG!
Tuesday 17 February 2009
Notes does Steampunk (Dr. Xavier Pages and Tiddles)
Number #1 - Its odd what Emmerdale can do to the mind....
Sunday 15 February 2009
Thoughts on 8.5 with 2 Months under the belt
[~Off topic~ just noticed this is the 400th blog posting since I started this one. That has to be a milestone and a surprising low one given the levels of gobshitery I aspire too]
Back on topic again ... OK I upgraded my development server and home boxes to V8.5 almost as soon as it was available and I could actually get attached to the Passport Adv download site and to date I have been impressed. Which in itself is odd because I am starting to hear people get quite cross with DDE in particular both on their blogs and twitter. It is odd because I have very little negative news to report.
Well apart that is from a couple of occasions when I got a "Platform Command processor has encountered an error" when trying to open the designer client. The extra details on the error were abbreviated to a parallax of brevity in that they comprised of the single word "error" and it was not even capitalised! Sort of the error equivalent of the Gallic shrug so beloved of my French colleagues.. "it is fubar, c'est la vie ~shrug~"
Must ferkling and swearing later, DDE would not arise from the grim depths of whatever the "error" was. I would get the splash screen, the sign on and then 10 mins of the status bar moving really slowly and then .. the status screen disappeared and .... nothing.
The problem is something to do with something in the /data/workspace dir which shoots from a normal 50-80mb to 770mb during the problem. The more you try to open DDE the bigger the DIR gets and oddly it is not the /log/ dir? On the first occasion I eventually gave up looking for the problem and just renamed and deleted the directory it had reached 1.9Gb! There is obviously something amiss there.
However it has only happened three times(twice on Vista and once on XP) and I have been using it daily. I now have a .bat file that renames the /workspace/ dir and then deletes it. Hmm I wonder do DOS skills date me?
Those 3 occasions have been my only major problems to date.
The only other thing of note is a problem that I had in V7 and earlier V8 DDE and that is with the JS complier which remains ... hmmmm ... very like a grounded teenager on a Saturday night ... it sulks a lot when there is a problem, doesn't give you any idea of what the problem actually is by saying "Error compiling script" and then hides the cursor to spite you. The only way out is to close the element you are editing without saving and then re-open it.. and then 9 times out of 10 the change you made HAS been saved and there is no problem.
I have yet to see the problems of the load times in DDE, it remains satisfying brisk on local and on servers in VMs, on local LANs and even on remote access over a VPN is fine, well within workable limits but then I have over the years taken to doing a full re-compile on an NSF when I open it in a different version of the designer than it was designed in. I got caught badly in the V4.5 -> V5 world by not doing this, so I may have inadvertently missed the problem John Roling had here and that John Head describes here in point 3.
All in all I like 8.5 both client and DDE better than I liked 8.0.*. (Which is not to say I disliked 8.0*) every seems smoother, faster and more managable.
I could kiss the person that put CSS as a direct edit in DDE, that alone was worth the wait. The number of times I fecking forgot to refresh CSS files after edits in V7 and V8!
I do not seem to have been affected by the DDE slow loads reported by other colleagues, but then I am not dev'ing on a mac in a windows VM which does seem to be a common thread in the reports of sluggish load times. My Windoze boxes are either XP64 (4gb with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set) and on VISTA HP64 with 16gb.
I have run up XP SP2 in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu with 1gb of ram and a 4gb virtual disk and DDE can be a bit chuggy on the initial load of a new NSF, but the waits are not of the "go away and make a coffee, smoke a cigar and arrange a romantic assignation with Sandra from Quality Control" variety.
All in all, I am happy with 8.5 so far it is a 8.5 outa 10
Now it is getting near supper time and the McDonagh Horde is getting restless and hungry so I had better be off
Back on topic again ... OK I upgraded my development server and home boxes to V8.5 almost as soon as it was available and I could actually get attached to the Passport Adv download site and to date I have been impressed. Which in itself is odd because I am starting to hear people get quite cross with DDE in particular both on their blogs and twitter. It is odd because I have very little negative news to report.
Well apart that is from a couple of occasions when I got a "Platform Command processor has encountered an error" when trying to open the designer client. The extra details on the error were abbreviated to a parallax of brevity in that they comprised of the single word "error" and it was not even capitalised! Sort of the error equivalent of the Gallic shrug so beloved of my French colleagues.. "it is fubar, c'est la vie ~shrug~"
Must ferkling and swearing later, DDE would not arise from the grim depths of whatever the "error" was. I would get the splash screen, the sign on and then 10 mins of the status bar moving really slowly and then .. the status screen disappeared and .... nothing.
The problem is something to do with something in the /data/workspace dir which shoots from a normal 50-80mb to 770mb during the problem. The more you try to open DDE the bigger the DIR gets and oddly it is not the /log/ dir? On the first occasion I eventually gave up looking for the problem and just renamed and deleted the directory it had reached 1.9Gb! There is obviously something amiss there.
However it has only happened three times(twice on Vista and once on XP) and I have been using it daily. I now have a .bat file that renames the /workspace/ dir and then deletes it. Hmm I wonder do DOS skills date me?
Those 3 occasions have been my only major problems to date.
The only other thing of note is a problem that I had in V7 and earlier V8 DDE and that is with the JS complier which remains ... hmmmm ... very like a grounded teenager on a Saturday night ... it sulks a lot when there is a problem, doesn't give you any idea of what the problem actually is by saying "Error compiling script" and then hides the cursor to spite you. The only way out is to close the element you are editing without saving and then re-open it.. and then 9 times out of 10 the change you made HAS been saved and there is no problem.
I have yet to see the problems of the load times in DDE, it remains satisfying brisk on local and on servers in VMs, on local LANs and even on remote access over a VPN is fine, well within workable limits but then I have over the years taken to doing a full re-compile on an NSF when I open it in a different version of the designer than it was designed in. I got caught badly in the V4.5 -> V5 world by not doing this, so I may have inadvertently missed the problem John Roling had here and that John Head describes here in point 3.
All in all I like 8.5 both client and DDE better than I liked 8.0.*. (Which is not to say I disliked 8.0*) every seems smoother, faster and more managable.
I could kiss the person that put CSS as a direct edit in DDE, that alone was worth the wait. The number of times I fecking forgot to refresh CSS files after edits in V7 and V8!
I do not seem to have been affected by the DDE slow loads reported by other colleagues, but then I am not dev'ing on a mac in a windows VM which does seem to be a common thread in the reports of sluggish load times. My Windoze boxes are either XP64 (4gb with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set) and on VISTA HP64 with 16gb.
I have run up XP SP2 in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu with 1gb of ram and a 4gb virtual disk and DDE can be a bit chuggy on the initial load of a new NSF, but the waits are not of the "go away and make a coffee, smoke a cigar and arrange a romantic assignation with Sandra from Quality Control" variety.
All in all, I am happy with 8.5 so far it is a 8.5 outa 10
Now it is getting near supper time and the McDonagh Horde is getting restless and hungry so I had better be off
Domino.Doc what IS the way forward?
Hmmmmm.. there have been a few post LS posts about Domino.Doc and Version 8.*
and to be honest I am confused. Domino.Doc obviously had a limited life as can be seen by the purchase of the Aprix CMS by IBM, which was Domino Based but now appears to have been sucked into Portal.
So wither Domino CMS? Ah Ha! you might exclaim , that's where Quickr comes in. Indeed so , but the basic Quickr toolset is not quite as feature full as the old Domino.Doc was particularly in the workflow engine. You may counter with well there are Quickr connectors to Filenet and IBM Content Manager ... yes indeed there are but again they are in Websphere not Domino..
I notice I am not alone in my concern.... Patrick Picard mentions a slightly different and for him more pressing problem.
I have had a look see on IBM.com and for the life of me I cannot find anything that defines where Domino.Doc users go now, other than in the broadest of terms and I am left wondering where does all the Domino.Doc data silo'ed in domino servers go now? Do we keep the Domino.Doc server @ V7 whilst the rest of the organisation skips gayly into Version 8 and beyond?
Perhaps someone out there in the blogsphere knows?
and to be honest I am confused. Domino.Doc obviously had a limited life as can be seen by the purchase of the Aprix CMS by IBM, which was Domino Based but now appears to have been sucked into Portal.
So wither Domino CMS? Ah Ha! you might exclaim , that's where Quickr comes in. Indeed so , but the basic Quickr toolset is not quite as feature full as the old Domino.Doc was particularly in the workflow engine. You may counter with well there are Quickr connectors to Filenet and IBM Content Manager ... yes indeed there are but again they are in Websphere not Domino..
I notice I am not alone in my concern.... Patrick Picard mentions a slightly different and for him more pressing problem.
I have had a look see on IBM.com and for the life of me I cannot find anything that defines where Domino.Doc users go now, other than in the broadest of terms and I am left wondering where does all the Domino.Doc data silo'ed in domino servers go now? Do we keep the Domino.Doc server @ V7 whilst the rest of the organisation skips gayly into Version 8 and beyond?
Perhaps someone out there in the blogsphere knows?
Painting and thinking about depression.
My chum and fellow blogger Rob McDonagh has just posted a very good post on Depression and while I am not a fellow sufferer someone very close to me is, and his post describes almost perfectly what I saw (or possibly what i thought i saw) as the carer for someone suffering the trials and tribulations of an acute depressive episode.
I recommend you nip over to his blog and read it.
I have never had a depressive episode like the way he describes or like the one I experienced second hand and I hope I never do. I have been down yes, everyone has those days but I have never had that seemingly all encompassing black cloud descends and sucks the joy out of life.
Rob, my friend , I salute you .. a very brave and incredibly well written post!
I was sitting as you do on a Saturday evening re-reading Rob's post and remembering my own experiences and I remembered some paintings I did partly as catharsis and partly to expose my own demons. There are no answers in what follows, just thoughts and some brush strokes on paper.
A solitary figure poised cruciform above a swirling void, a red point of dull light at the base. Fingers of cold blue reach out. The symbolism is fairly brutal and simple, but that is the way that it appeared to me when my loved one was in the throes of her depression.
I felt that I was an observer, forced to watch this dive into the void and unable to help, as the hell I could only guess at was completely internal to someone else.
This next one came along when the anxiety and anguish kicked in. The mood swings that went from normal functioning human to one where every limb was contracted and twisted, every wrinkle was a fissure of deepest despair. It was around this time I started to understand what "anguish" really meant.
This one started as a homage to several nudes by several artists but as I painted it became a much more personal experience. It went from one colour to another and eventually settled on red, a warm colour but also the colour of rage, pain and danger.
A turned back is a sign of dismissal, a refusal to engage,the bald head a ancient sign of grieving In this instance as a symbol of the partial death of the self in the sufferer.
Lastly this one... a much stranger painting ... an open window inviting the figure to exit the dark room into a summer day. The figure with dropped head facing away from the outside, but yet may have opened the window in preparation for leaving.
The figure is facing a falling leaf, in nature a sign of the transition from one season to another, here a symbol for the demise of the depression
when the leaf hits the floor, the figure may well leave the room and enter the sunlight.
Who knows....
Painting these pictures helped me get through a difficult time, looking at them now, having dug them out from under my study table is an odd mixture of remembering the way I felt watching a loved one implode and relief that while there are still echoes from time to time, the dark visitor that made her life a misery has not come back to stay.
Cuz Rob .. and the rest of your family.. You are in the thoughts of the McDonaghs on the other side of the pond and we are send as many "Feel Better" vides as it takes to make a difference. :-)
I recommend you nip over to his blog and read it.
I have never had a depressive episode like the way he describes or like the one I experienced second hand and I hope I never do. I have been down yes, everyone has those days but I have never had that seemingly all encompassing black cloud descends and sucks the joy out of life.
Rob, my friend , I salute you .. a very brave and incredibly well written post!
I was sitting as you do on a Saturday evening re-reading Rob's post and remembering my own experiences and I remembered some paintings I did partly as catharsis and partly to expose my own demons. There are no answers in what follows, just thoughts and some brush strokes on paper.
A solitary figure poised cruciform above a swirling void, a red point of dull light at the base. Fingers of cold blue reach out. The symbolism is fairly brutal and simple, but that is the way that it appeared to me when my loved one was in the throes of her depression.
I felt that I was an observer, forced to watch this dive into the void and unable to help, as the hell I could only guess at was completely internal to someone else.
This next one came along when the anxiety and anguish kicked in. The mood swings that went from normal functioning human to one where every limb was contracted and twisted, every wrinkle was a fissure of deepest despair. It was around this time I started to understand what "anguish" really meant.
This one started as a homage to several nudes by several artists but as I painted it became a much more personal experience. It went from one colour to another and eventually settled on red, a warm colour but also the colour of rage, pain and danger.A turned back is a sign of dismissal, a refusal to engage,the bald head a ancient sign of grieving In this instance as a symbol of the partial death of the self in the sufferer.
Lastly this one... a much stranger painting ... an open window inviting the figure to exit the dark room into a summer day. The figure with dropped head facing away from the outside, but yet may have opened the window in preparation for leaving.The figure is facing a falling leaf, in nature a sign of the transition from one season to another, here a symbol for the demise of the depression
when the leaf hits the floor, the figure may well leave the room and enter the sunlight.
Who knows....
Painting these pictures helped me get through a difficult time, looking at them now, having dug them out from under my study table is an odd mixture of remembering the way I felt watching a loved one implode and relief that while there are still echoes from time to time, the dark visitor that made her life a misery has not come back to stay.
Cuz Rob .. and the rest of your family.. You are in the thoughts of the McDonaghs on the other side of the pond and we are send as many "Feel Better" vides as it takes to make a difference. :-)
Monday 9 February 2009
Twestival - Twitter's doing something good for the world
Ok geeks and non-geeks, twitters and non twitters here is a chance to part of a world wide event,meet the faces you follow, have a bit for craic and raise some cash for a good cause.
The TWESTIVAL is on the evening of Thursday the 12th Feb and in 175+ cities around the world, twitteres and their friends are getting together all in the name of charity:water a organisation who recognise that 1.1 billion of our fellow human beings do not have access to clean safe water.. That is around 1 in 6 of us!! Which is appauling!!
So i implore you visit TWESTIVAL look up your city and come and join the 100,000's of twitters from around the world doing something good and having some fun.
The Northern Ireland one is in Belfast in Lavery's Bunker .. so if you want a bit of craic in the big smoke that will raise some cash for a good causesee see here for details
For my NI readers if you live along the A26 and need a lift in I will driving down from Coleraine
after work.. drop me an email mcdonaghs at utvinternet dot com and I will see if I can squeeze you in!
For the rest of you.. check out your nearest city and go along!!!
The TWESTIVAL is on the evening of Thursday the 12th Feb and in 175+ cities around the world, twitteres and their friends are getting together all in the name of charity:water a organisation who recognise that 1.1 billion of our fellow human beings do not have access to clean safe water.. That is around 1 in 6 of us!! Which is appauling!!
So i implore you visit TWESTIVAL look up your city and come and join the 100,000's of twitters from around the world doing something good and having some fun.
The Northern Ireland one is in Belfast in Lavery's Bunker .. so if you want a bit of craic in the big smoke that will raise some cash for a good causesee see here for details
For my NI readers if you live along the A26 and need a lift in I will driving down from Coleraine
after work.. drop me an email mcdonaghs at utvinternet dot com and I will see if I can squeeze you in!
For the rest of you.. check out your nearest city and go along!!!
Sunday 8 February 2009
Another painting "Winter thorn"
I sort of like it...
Wednesday 4 February 2009
25 things that piss me off - The Facebook Anti-Meme
I have been tagged several times in the Facebook "25 random things about me" and last night I succumbed and slapped up 25 VERY random things about me, which involved the knicker elastic of Dutch prostitutes, Nuns in my bed and other strange and wonderful things.
However being a ranter of some regard I am tempted to start my own meme of "25 things I hate" in the vein of "Room 101" here goes....they are in no particular order just as they come into my head.
01. Flowery Curtains - with or without matching cushions.Yes I know that they set the ambience for a room but FECK life is too fecking short for me to care or for that matter for me to notice.
02. Aga's - it is a cooker from the last century! Having one in your kitchen says to the world "I couldn't think of anything better to spend £3,000 on"
04. The new Volkswagen Beetle FECK it is an ugly expensive heap of marketing hyperbole and what is it with the bloody plastic friggin flower in a wee holder on the dashboard? It is the My Little Pony of cars.
05. Door step evangelists, although they can be good to taunt if you are in a good mood. Proof if proof be needed that Psychiatric Care in the Community is NOT working!
06. Philip Pullman - His entire ouevre is best used as toilet paper as least your bum would enjoy it!
07. Queuing in airports - why is it you are always sandwiched between people to whom the idea of preserving your personal space is a total anathema and you can't slap them or security get cross.
08. Bad Shopping Trolley drivers - why is it that I find myself apologising when a ton of chicken breasts, jaffa cakes and cornflakes piloted by an inattentive fellow shopper separate my Achilles tendons whilst I ponder the nature of frozen peas?
09. Any advert that mentions something like "Oxyboxytoxymoxyanol" is good for Hair/Skin/Periods .. are women really that stupid? - In Casa McDonagh the tag line "Cos Im Worth it" is usually followed by "Aye worth a good fecking poke in the eye with a sharp stick"
10. Ant and Dec - In the proverb dictionary under "empty vessels make the most noise" is a picture of these demons from the darkest pits of hell grinning inanely and prancing around in a way that makes grandmothers go weak at the knees and start to think of lacy underwear.
11. Talking of Grandmothers .. Daniel O'Donnel ..... nuff said there i think
12. IKEA - God almighty what a horrible but nicely decorated place. Last time I was there I discovered a squad of Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Award candidates who had been tasked with finding the purchase pick up point as part of their 3 day expedition. Poor souls had got lost in the Shaker Kitchens section.
13. Lycra see here for details
14. Very formal variable names what is wrong with Dim AmberArseMagnet as New Doobry ?
15. Being tidy ... sod the conventional thinking that it equates to a tidy mind embrace your mess and call it nice names!
16. Lilly "what-a-talentless-squeaky-toned-mockney-jumped-up-wee-bitch-and-a-complete-waste-of-fecking-time" Allen
17. Which leads me to Coldplay.. lead singer Chris Martin is a Onanist masquerading as a lycrist. He massages his lyrics in the same way a 14 year old boy left alone with a copy of "Tits and Bums Monthly" does only Martin's lyrics have less pleasure and the only kleenex required are for tears of pain and loathing. Their melodies have the same mass-produced "character" as the pictures that hang in a Holiday Inn lobby and all of Coldplay's albums sound like the audio equivilant of syrup of figs , cures your constipation but gives you the shits!
18. People who claim to speak "for me" or "for the people of Northern Ireland" or "all right thinking people" all these phrases are usually followed by something that makes my blood boil and makes me reach for my "pithy" pencil to dash of a sternly worded rebuke.
19. The transition from "disgustingly young" to "merely disgusting" was harder than puberty but had less acne and there were no self help books.
20. When you go to a big gig, the twonk in front of you hoists his girlfriend onto his shoulders and takes it personally when you inform him that you paid 60 quid to see The Foo Fighters and not his floosy's big fat arse. Ditto Umbrellas at outside concerts, it is fecking Ireland ... it rains ... get wet like the rest of us. What sort of person goes to a rock concert with an umbrella? (Ok I would possibly run with a black leather with studs brolly if such a thing exists)
21. Standing at baggage reclaim in clothes that looked cool and happenin' on holiday but totally fails in the non-holiday context.
22. Getting blow back while inflating an air mattress by mouth,ooooo nasty
23. USB rage - you know when your favourite shagging dog, poledancer , coffee warmer suddenly stops working and you fly into an uncontrollable temper.
24. Having sand up the shoughs of your arse. (shough of your arse = your bum crack). When 17 it was an acceptable pain if accompanied by a bit of grope with the girlfriend. In middle age it is just deeply deeply annoying.
25. People who decorate ice cream vans ..... are they DRUNK when they do it or are they totally incapable of drawing Micky Fecking mouse, Picatu or Captian America? It's not hard to find someone with a smidgen more artist talent than a sloth on acid.
Hmmm 25 things didnt take long it is a lot easier to find things that annoy me .. so come on bloggers get ranting and show Facebook the dark underbelly of their meme.
However being a ranter of some regard I am tempted to start my own meme of "25 things I hate" in the vein of "Room 101" here goes....they are in no particular order just as they come into my head.
01. Flowery Curtains - with or without matching cushions.Yes I know that they set the ambience for a room but FECK life is too fecking short for me to care or for that matter for me to notice.
02. Aga's - it is a cooker from the last century! Having one in your kitchen says to the world "I couldn't think of anything better to spend £3,000 on"
04. The new Volkswagen Beetle FECK it is an ugly expensive heap of marketing hyperbole and what is it with the bloody plastic friggin flower in a wee holder on the dashboard? It is the My Little Pony of cars.
05. Door step evangelists, although they can be good to taunt if you are in a good mood. Proof if proof be needed that Psychiatric Care in the Community is NOT working!
06. Philip Pullman - His entire ouevre is best used as toilet paper as least your bum would enjoy it!
07. Queuing in airports - why is it you are always sandwiched between people to whom the idea of preserving your personal space is a total anathema and you can't slap them or security get cross.
08. Bad Shopping Trolley drivers - why is it that I find myself apologising when a ton of chicken breasts, jaffa cakes and cornflakes piloted by an inattentive fellow shopper separate my Achilles tendons whilst I ponder the nature of frozen peas?
09. Any advert that mentions something like "Oxyboxytoxymoxyanol" is good for Hair/Skin/Periods .. are women really that stupid? - In Casa McDonagh the tag line "Cos Im Worth it" is usually followed by "Aye worth a good fecking poke in the eye with a sharp stick"
10. Ant and Dec - In the proverb dictionary under "empty vessels make the most noise" is a picture of these demons from the darkest pits of hell grinning inanely and prancing around in a way that makes grandmothers go weak at the knees and start to think of lacy underwear.
11. Talking of Grandmothers .. Daniel O'Donnel ..... nuff said there i think
12. IKEA - God almighty what a horrible but nicely decorated place. Last time I was there I discovered a squad of Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Award candidates who had been tasked with finding the purchase pick up point as part of their 3 day expedition. Poor souls had got lost in the Shaker Kitchens section.
13. Lycra see here for details
14. Very formal variable names what is wrong with Dim AmberArseMagnet as New Doobry ?
15. Being tidy ... sod the conventional thinking that it equates to a tidy mind embrace your mess and call it nice names!
16. Lilly "what-a-talentless-squeaky-toned-mockney-jumped-up-wee-bitch-and-a-complete-waste-of-fecking-time" Allen
17. Which leads me to Coldplay.. lead singer Chris Martin is a Onanist masquerading as a lycrist. He massages his lyrics in the same way a 14 year old boy left alone with a copy of "Tits and Bums Monthly" does only Martin's lyrics have less pleasure and the only kleenex required are for tears of pain and loathing. Their melodies have the same mass-produced "character" as the pictures that hang in a Holiday Inn lobby and all of Coldplay's albums sound like the audio equivilant of syrup of figs , cures your constipation but gives you the shits!
18. People who claim to speak "for me" or "for the people of Northern Ireland" or "all right thinking people" all these phrases are usually followed by something that makes my blood boil and makes me reach for my "pithy" pencil to dash of a sternly worded rebuke.
19. The transition from "disgustingly young" to "merely disgusting" was harder than puberty but had less acne and there were no self help books.
20. When you go to a big gig, the twonk in front of you hoists his girlfriend onto his shoulders and takes it personally when you inform him that you paid 60 quid to see The Foo Fighters and not his floosy's big fat arse. Ditto Umbrellas at outside concerts, it is fecking Ireland ... it rains ... get wet like the rest of us. What sort of person goes to a rock concert with an umbrella? (Ok I would possibly run with a black leather with studs brolly if such a thing exists)
21. Standing at baggage reclaim in clothes that looked cool and happenin' on holiday but totally fails in the non-holiday context.
22. Getting blow back while inflating an air mattress by mouth,ooooo nasty
23. USB rage - you know when your favourite shagging dog, poledancer , coffee warmer suddenly stops working and you fly into an uncontrollable temper.
24. Having sand up the shoughs of your arse. (shough of your arse = your bum crack). When 17 it was an acceptable pain if accompanied by a bit of grope with the girlfriend. In middle age it is just deeply deeply annoying.
25. People who decorate ice cream vans ..... are they DRUNK when they do it or are they totally incapable of drawing Micky Fecking mouse, Picatu or Captian America? It's not hard to find someone with a smidgen more artist talent than a sloth on acid.
Hmmm 25 things didnt take long it is a lot easier to find things that annoy me .. so come on bloggers get ranting and show Facebook the dark underbelly of their meme.
Simple beauty in the helix of a shell on the beach
Pardon my language .. but F**K that is beautiful!
You can have a play with Twimino V0.0.1 if you want
He ho Peeps.
If you will that way inclined you can have a play with Twimino V0.0.1 ... it is no where near done yet, I have perhaps worked on it for 3-4 hours so do NOT expect loveliness!!! It not all there yet and it is likely full of of bugs.. but it works after a fashion. Thomas's version is slightly different I use the Domino SAX parser and he doesnt (it has to be said his is a good deal more professional than mine, but what the hey ...)
The Twitter API is doing something strange with the DM api and it might take a few refreshes of the agent to see you DMs appear...(they are GREEN in the Friends Time line BTW)
You can download it here. (116k ish)
Once I apply some polish and some more features , friends, searchs, automatic SNURL/SNIP and the like, I will bung it up on OpenNtf for now have a play if you feel that way inclined the code is all LS and is not that difficult to follow.
Once you have done the first Harvest the agent will kick in and run every 5 mins, you may have to press F9 to refresh the view, the friend list builds as you get Tweets in.
Click on a tweet to get the option menu, or right click and use the options you find there.
You can also click on your Friend list to get a menu there.
Non-automatic manual refreshes via the big button on you friends time line
No piccies as yet I am afraid
If you will that way inclined you can have a play with Twimino V0.0.1 ... it is no where near done yet, I have perhaps worked on it for 3-4 hours so do NOT expect loveliness!!! It not all there yet and it is likely full of of bugs.. but it works after a fashion. Thomas's version is slightly different I use the Domino SAX parser and he doesnt (it has to be said his is a good deal more professional than mine, but what the hey ...)
The Twitter API is doing something strange with the DM api and it might take a few refreshes of the agent to see you DMs appear...(they are GREEN in the Friends Time line BTW)
You can download it here. (116k ish)
Once I apply some polish and some more features , friends, searchs, automatic SNURL/SNIP and the like, I will bung it up on OpenNtf for now have a play if you feel that way inclined the code is all LS and is not that difficult to follow.
Once you have done the first Harvest the agent will kick in and run every 5 mins, you may have to press F9 to refresh the view, the friend list builds as you get Tweets in.
Click on a tweet to get the option menu, or right click and use the options you find there.
You can also click on your Friend list to get a menu there.
Non-automatic manual refreshes via the big button on you friends time line
No piccies as yet I am afraid
Tuesday 3 February 2009
Twimino Nearly Ready
I got a bit bogged down in another issue so I am not quite there yet. I still need to do a couple of views and enable a click-up menu of options on the friend list for "Tweet At Twit", "DM Twit" etc
However the underlying guts is all there now.. sort of.
This is what it looks like now in Default view
with the OPTIONS bar closed. Your Friend Time line is displayed in the main body part of the screen with unread marks and message threading where possible (some clients don't do replies and as such the thread gets broken)
This is the Option Bar open where you set your profile, sign the DB turn the harvesting agent on and off it can be slid away when not needed.
When you click on a tweet in your friend's timeline instead of the tweet opening you get this menu which allows you to Send a new TWEET
Reply to the TWEET you clicked on
Retweet the TWEET you clicked on
Or Open the first URL in the TWEET text in your browser
This is your send a tweet dialog, it can copy with new Tweets, Replies and Retweets. (Tomorrow it will get DMs)
All these options are also on the RIGHT CLICK menu for the VIEW
The agent runs every 5 mins to harvest the tweets but you can do manual refreshes using the view's "Manual Harvest of Tweets" button
At the minute the Friend List Auto Populates from the Tweets you harvest
I have a background agent that your can run that harvests "All your followers" "All Someone Elses Followers" and will allow you to add and block chums...but that will be for Version 0.0.2
Anyhows Off to bed for me...
However the underlying guts is all there now.. sort of.
This is what it looks like now in Default view
with the OPTIONS bar closed. Your Friend Time line is displayed in the main body part of the screen with unread marks and message threading where possible (some clients don't do replies and as such the thread gets broken)
This is the Option Bar open where you set your profile, sign the DB turn the harvesting agent on and off it can be slid away when not needed.
When you click on a tweet in your friend's timeline instead of the tweet opening you get this menu which allows you to Send a new TWEET
Reply to the TWEET you clicked on
Retweet the TWEET you clicked on
Or Open the first URL in the TWEET text in your browser
This is your send a tweet dialog, it can copy with new Tweets, Replies and Retweets. (Tomorrow it will get DMs)
All these options are also on the RIGHT CLICK menu for the VIEW
The agent runs every 5 mins to harvest the tweets but you can do manual refreshes using the view's "Manual Harvest of Tweets" button
At the minute the Friend List Auto Populates from the Tweets you harvest
I have a background agent that your can run that harvests "All your followers" "All Someone Elses Followers" and will allow you to add and block chums...but that will be for Version 0.0.2
Anyhows Off to bed for me...
Sunday 1 February 2009
Twitter in an NSF (...continued)
Having had a look at Thomas's Twitter NSF last week. Initially I decided that my own wee app would die a death and I cast it aside. However the TV was that crap this weekend that I fiddled away at it and have moved to a point were 2morrow (hopefully) I will be able to give you my version of the same thing cept mine is called Twimino and looks like this.
I don't have avatar pictures in mine (yet) and it still has some idosyncracies to work out but the V0.0.1 very beta beta should be ready for people to tear to shreds tomorrow or Monday
I don't have avatar pictures in mine (yet) and it still has some idosyncracies to work out but the V0.0.1 very beta beta should be ready for people to tear to shreds tomorrow or Monday
Thursday 29 January 2009
Twitter in an NSF (follow up)
Yesterday I posted about my playing with twitter in a NSF, since this fiddling came from a request of "how to read XML from an external URL in LS?" I didn't google or PL twitter and NSF and as a result didn'f find out about a fine little app put together by one of our own Thomas Adrian who hales from Sweden. He has got a really sweet little NSF app has matured to Version 2 and does all that I planned to do. So any of you that are interested take a look at his post here.
Kudos Bro!
A fine wee app! Thanks for sharing it :-)
Kudos Bro!
A fine wee app! Thanks for sharing it :-)
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Twitter in an NSF
Greetings and felicitations peeps and peepettes,
In a fit of pique at not being at LS09 and wishing that I could get a decent Twitter client that had a decent search, sorts and message threading also I was asked a question by a virtual colleague about "how to read an XML data stream in LS?"
So I threw together some LS at an NSF and "DYMTweetlet" was born. I now have a local NSF that sits and merrily polls my twitter stream every 3 mins if my notes client is up. Stores the tweets in a notes doc and then has all the notes-ee goodness of message threading, views, sort, search and the like. It also finds tweets from your chums that are "reply to" people you aren't following and sends them "Can I follow you" request.
It looks like shite at the minute, but it works, all I need is a way of getting the avatar piccies down to add to the PEEP document. Wild Bill & Matt White have pointed me at Java for this which I was investigating this evening, tomorrow I will give it a go and see what happens
In a fit of pique at not being at LS09 and wishing that I could get a decent Twitter client that had a decent search, sorts and message threading also I was asked a question by a virtual colleague about "how to read an XML data stream in LS?"
So I threw together some LS at an NSF and "DYMTweetlet" was born. I now have a local NSF that sits and merrily polls my twitter stream every 3 mins if my notes client is up. Stores the tweets in a notes doc and then has all the notes-ee goodness of message threading, views, sort, search and the like. It also finds tweets from your chums that are "reply to" people you aren't following and sends them "Can I follow you" request.
It looks like shite at the minute, but it works, all I need is a way of getting the avatar piccies down to add to the PEEP document. Wild Bill & Matt White have pointed me at Java for this which I was investigating this evening, tomorrow I will give it a go and see what happens
Friday 23 January 2009
Bill Buchan's secret anchestry revealed
Much was said this past week about Mr Mooney's Scottish parentage in that he is indeed the skinny love child off our own Mr Buchan, this may or may not be true and is not really anything to do with this post ... I was reviewing the LS09 Flickr stream and I came across this picture .. go look at it now ... i will wait ... the similarity struck me like large lump hammer wrapped in enlightenment.. I knew exactly who bill looked like and had at once to put pen to paper...before the mood went off me. To Find out what the Feck I am talking about click the button below
Wednesday 21 January 2009
My First V8.5.0 project - Getting a decent floating layout
It seemed that the only way to do this was with absolute positioning, which I wanted to avoid if at all possible!
Then I came across this article by Shaun Inman and my problem was solved! He describes the solution much better than I can so I advise you to go have a look see if such things make you moist.
He has a really simple CSS and JS resolution to the problem so I copied it down and into a NSF page to see if it would work and it does!! Wonderfully fluid centered [div]s with a header at the top and a footer at the bottom ..(see below) ... Yippee ... Just what I wanted. Now if I can just get it to work in xPages which is being somewhat of a puzzle, but I shall continue on regardless. More tomorrow.
Memories of my Father that made me smile
My father was a great fan of Gerald Hoffnung, and I came across this the today, which made me smile and brought back memories of a life long ago. There is no video and if you haven't heard the bricklayers lament before.. give it a go... you will enjoy it:-)
Tuesday 20 January 2009
V8.5.0 designer - my first play
I have had about 4 hours playing with the v8.5.0 designer client and I could be all serious and professional and say how well it fits the paradigm of a modern designer interface. How the interplay of the various components react together with a synergy that excels even my jaded sensibilities .. on the other hand I could yell ...
YIPPEE!
and run around the room naked waving my arms like a demeneted dervish. Since I am at home and everyone is in bed i think I will [pause for silliness]
Now as you may have noted I am not at LS so I don't have the benefit of listening to thoses that know how it all fits together AND I have only just this weekend downloaded the 8.5.0 code so I have had 2 hours yesterday and perhaps 3 today to play with it.
I of course dived straight into xPages and yes I can see how wonderful it is going to be. However I couldn't get CSS to work the way I wanted it, floats and clear's didn't seem to work and you can't set the left and right margins to "auto" ... as in (margin-left: auto; ) from the properties panel of an object. But this is probably me not doing it right rather than any fault of xPages.
I did manage without the aid of the help, or of my collegaues on the web to get a view working which is "bloody marvellous" and a testament to how easy it is to code! I will have to do a deep dive or two in the comming weeks to get to grips with all the bells and whistles!
On ordinary matters I really do like the fact that when I edit external style sheets I don't now have to remember to refresh the damn things. You just double click, edite them in the IDE, with a very nice properties panel at the bottom (no more typing maargin-botom: for me) enter your CSS, save and refresh your page in the browser. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! Remembering to refresh the CSS file in the NSF was the bane of my life and made many of my colleagues blush when I gave vent to my frustration in that regard!
The new editing layout or as it is called in designer "the perspective" is good, everything is at hand and easy to find for those used to the older designer clients. However I would challenge the "perspective" label. To an artist this means and image that is an approximate representation, on a flat surface, of an image in three dimensions as it is perceived by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are drawn smaller as distance increases and are foreshortened along the line of sight but I suppose in this context it means the faculty of seeing all the relevant data to do with a project in a meaningful relationship ... ok I DO have my pedant hat on .... but because I have drawn and painted for a lot longer than I have coded it does midly annoy me. ;-)
I digress ... (as usual) ... my first impressions of V8.5.0 designer are very good but I can see a whole new set of tricks that will need to be learned to leverage max value out of it. So LS09 dev session folk we non-attenders really do need your examples and presentations so we too can get up and running ASAP with all these new toys! Pretty Please!
Monday 19 January 2009
Tony Hart RIP
Hey ho :(
Another great has left us to go on life's greatest adventure.
"Vision On" then "Take Hart" launched 10s of thousands of young brits off in search of pencils, crayons, sticky back plastic and paints. He launched Morph produced by Aardman who went on to bring us Wallace and Gromit.
But for me like many others it was the gallery that will stick in the memory. Particularly for me because one of my pictures was actually shown on it, many many many years ago on Vision on ... Tony ... thank you!
Another great has left us to go on life's greatest adventure.
"Vision On" then "Take Hart" launched 10s of thousands of young brits off in search of pencils, crayons, sticky back plastic and paints. He launched Morph produced by Aardman who went on to bring us Wallace and Gromit.
But for me like many others it was the gallery that will stick in the memory. Particularly for me because one of my pictures was actually shown on it, many many many years ago on Vision on ... Tony ... thank you!
Wednesday 14 January 2009
Not Going to LS09? Join the proud non-attendee's who are not jealous at all!
After a tweet here and a tweet there from some of my chums on twitter
it has become clear that we non-attenders are feeling low and jealous as ***k.
So if you aren't going and are feeling down, hold you head high cos there are 1,000's
of us and we WILL be there vicariously on Twitter and sundry other sites.
Lotusphere Non-attendees UNITE!
it has become clear that we non-attenders are feeling low and jealous as ***k.
So if you aren't going and are feeling down, hold you head high cos there are 1,000's
of us and we WILL be there vicariously on Twitter and sundry other sites.
Lotusphere Non-attendees UNITE!
PS Please feel free to steal this image and post it on your site
** Update **
Ben Langhinrichs has kindly added "Missing GONADs" to his LS Session Database
for those that that cannot attend!
Thank you Ben you shall reap your reward in Heaven!
** Update **
The Roll of Honourable Non Attendees
Steve McDonagh -&- Steve Lapthorn
Vitor Pereira -&- Bob Brodsky
Pedro Quaresma -&- David Vasta
David M Taylor -&- Ben Poole
Big Bear Freddie -&- John Turnbow
Vaughan Rivett -&- Tony Palmer
John Turnbow -&- David Killingsworth
Michelle O'Rorke -&- Chuck Dean
Ulrich Krause -&- Christian Tillmanns
Dave Harris -&- SvenM
Chris Harris -&- Chris Coates
Sean Cull -&- Guy Wakely
Grant Norman -&- Philip Storry
Per Henrik Lausten -&- Adam Gartenberg
Ray Bilyk -&- Mats
Alan Dalziel -&- Tim Lorge
Lars Berntrop-Bos -&- Sjaak Ursinus
Ian White -&- Gareth Howell
Marzel Laning -&- George Paglia
Simon Scullion
We will not be there in person but we will be WATCHING you that are!
(And if you don't enjoy yourselves we will come round and do unspeakable things to you with Custard and Herrings!)
** Update **
Ben Langhinrichs has kindly added "Missing GONADs" to his LS Session Database
for those that that cannot attend!
Thank you Ben you shall reap your reward in Heaven!
** Update **
The Roll of Honourable Non Attendees
Steve McDonagh -&- Steve Lapthorn
Vitor Pereira -&- Bob Brodsky
Pedro Quaresma -&- David Vasta
David M Taylor -&- Ben Poole
Big Bear Freddie -&- John Turnbow
Vaughan Rivett -&- Tony Palmer
John Turnbow -&- David Killingsworth
Michelle O'Rorke -&- Chuck Dean
Ulrich Krause -&- Christian Tillmanns
Dave Harris -&- SvenM
Chris Harris -&- Chris Coates
Sean Cull -&- Guy Wakely
Grant Norman -&- Philip Storry
Per Henrik Lausten -&- Adam Gartenberg
Ray Bilyk -&- Mats
Alan Dalziel -&- Tim Lorge
Lars Berntrop-Bos -&- Sjaak Ursinus
Ian White -&- Gareth Howell
Marzel Laning -&- George Paglia
Simon Scullion
We will not be there in person but we will be WATCHING you that are!
(And if you don't enjoy yourselves we will come round and do unspeakable things to you with Custard and Herrings!)
My sepcial "hero" power recognised!!! Yippee!
Came into work today to find at the top of my inbox a message from Angela Petrelli no less! At long last my "hero" superpower has been validated! BAH! What good is being able to fly, see the future or travel in time if you can't peel a satsuma in one long bit with no breaks? Expect to see me in the next series as the "citrus-fruit-peeler-man"
Tuesday 13 January 2009
Does anyone fancy tweaking the Blog template with me?
Ben Poole was having a vent about the lack of movement in the "out of the box" templates over on his blog here. I responded there with an idea that post LS when youse folk are all fired up with enthusiasm that if a couple of us got together we could perhaps put some xpages gloss on the blog template.
It would be a learning experience for us all, we could blog about a collaborative development project, how it works and what we are doing and with a nod to professionalism even document our code... (did is say that out loud)
I am not looking for answers now, but think about it and after the fuss of LS has died down drop me an email.. the addy is on the left and lets see what we can do?
It would be a learning experience for us all, we could blog about a collaborative development project, how it works and what we are doing and with a nod to professionalism even document our code... (did is say that out loud)
I am not looking for answers now, but think about it and after the fuss of LS has died down drop me an email.. the addy is on the left and lets see what we can do?
Do users pay lip service to Collaboration?
It is late at night again.
I have just finished doing some coding for a work project, which is a nice little collaborative app that should make life easier for the end users that will use it. It is not a Web 2.0 "wunderkind" it is just one of those 1,000's of apps we Domino/Noterati developers make live daily. It will trundle away doing what it does quickly and easily and after a brief period of interita fuelled "do we have to?" Users will get used to it and it will fade into the background noise of everyday work.
But will it be really collaborative?
What do I mean by collaborative?
Do end users know collaboration from a hole in the head?
And that is where this post started forming in my mind. I have I suppose a vision of "collaborative" that is viewed through my Black and Yellow tinted evangelist's glasses and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that.
In the wonderful Domi-No-Yes-Maybe world, Engineers are happy to share their expertise with Sales, Marketing will get moist at the idea of having closer links with Production and of course everyone will just LOVE the auditors. Sadly this is not often the case.
There are loads of examples where we in the geek community try our damnedest to light fires of enthusiasm. Marybeth and her team (bless their collective cotton socks!) are excelling in their goal of making the user's experience of the client the best that it can be. Chris Blatnick and his unbounded enthusiasm for the "Cool Interface", joined now by Tom Duff and his Plumber to Painter Damasene conversion to designing both the functional AND cool, to name but a few.
I am not dissing any of the above nor any of my geek readers who daily suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous project creep in an effort to make our end users happy. The target of my vented spleen on this occasion are the fecking end-users! There are days when I could see the whole end-user community impaled on a sharp stick and roasted slowly over a ligthly smouldering heap of now defunct project specifications.
Why if they can see the benefits of collaborating (or so they tell me) do they insist on sticking to the comfy and secure modality of departmental, regional or customer/client demarcation?
It just doesn't make a whole heap of sense ....
~sigh~ well that's now off my chest tomorrow I will put on my smiley face and get back to the job in hand and start re-coding an old app so that less people have access to the data ...
I have just finished doing some coding for a work project, which is a nice little collaborative app that should make life easier for the end users that will use it. It is not a Web 2.0 "wunderkind" it is just one of those 1,000's of apps we Domino/Noterati developers make live daily. It will trundle away doing what it does quickly and easily and after a brief period of interita fuelled "do we have to?" Users will get used to it and it will fade into the background noise of everyday work.
But will it be really collaborative?
What do I mean by collaborative?
Do end users know collaboration from a hole in the head?
And that is where this post started forming in my mind. I have I suppose a vision of "collaborative" that is viewed through my Black and Yellow tinted evangelist's glasses and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that.
In the wonderful Domi-No-Yes-Maybe world, Engineers are happy to share their expertise with Sales, Marketing will get moist at the idea of having closer links with Production and of course everyone will just LOVE the auditors. Sadly this is not often the case.
There are loads of examples where we in the geek community try our damnedest to light fires of enthusiasm. Marybeth and her team (bless their collective cotton socks!) are excelling in their goal of making the user's experience of the client the best that it can be. Chris Blatnick and his unbounded enthusiasm for the "Cool Interface", joined now by Tom Duff and his Plumber to Painter Damasene conversion to designing both the functional AND cool, to name but a few.
I am not dissing any of the above nor any of my geek readers who daily suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous project creep in an effort to make our end users happy. The target of my vented spleen on this occasion are the fecking end-users! There are days when I could see the whole end-user community impaled on a sharp stick and roasted slowly over a ligthly smouldering heap of now defunct project specifications.
Why if they can see the benefits of collaborating (or so they tell me) do they insist on sticking to the comfy and secure modality of departmental, regional or customer/client demarcation?
It just doesn't make a whole heap of sense ....
~sigh~ well that's now off my chest tomorrow I will put on my smiley face and get back to the job in hand and start re-coding an old app so that less people have access to the data ...
Sunday 11 January 2009
Best song of last year.....Phil Campbell "No Love Songs"
Best song of last year.....Phil Campbell "No Love Songs" ... check it out.
The nature of belly button fluff, the credit crunch and the dissonance of LS envy
It's 10 past midnight on a Saturday night, there is a week or so to go until lotusphere. the blogsphere is alive with Version 8.5, the new entry requirements for a visa waiver and all things X-page related. ~sigh~ the lotto once again did not make me financially independent enough to afford the beer bill let alone the air fare to Florida. I suppose it is time for one of those Gallic shrugs and a darkly muttered "c'est la vie" that my French colleagues are so found of.
Anyhow here I sit in the study sipping on a "left-over-from-xmas" Stella Artois feeling sorry for myself and finding new ways to make any combination of 3 colours of paint into yucky-brown. Why is that? Try it yourself, take any three colours from a paint box mix them and you get a sort of greeny-brown sludgey colour that is to fine art what Paul Mooney is to tall people. The magnetic effect of brownness when you mix paint is in that same cubby hole of unexplained shite that is inhabited by belly button fluff. (I believe my USian readers call it "lint"), i digress ... whilst any combination of 3 paint = brown, belly button fluff is ALWAYS greyish blue. WTF? I have a penchant for white or black tee-shirts and my belly button fluff is fecking blue, wearing the colours I do, surely my BBF should either be Zebra striped or like 1960's TV glorious monotone.
Zebra striped belly button fluff would be really cool would it not? It would be the perfect starting point for a conversation with a stranger at a dinner party. Imagine it ... that pregnant pause after saying "I work with messaging and collaboration Software?" when you have been asked "What do you do?" ... I could fill that pause with ".. but I have zebra striped belly button fluff wanna see?" What friendships could be forged on the anvil of such a wonderful statment? But as the fecking stuff is always bluey gray I will never find that out.
I am getting really naffed off with the fecking credit crunch for it has borked any chance of me attending LS09 ... yes I know I should be a bigger man and worry about all those who have lost their jobs and I should be terrified by the fact that we are circling the rim of the capitalist toilet all be it nicely deodourised by the Toilet Duck of media mediocrity in preparation for the final flush. But I am a shallow callous indiviual .. so sue me ;-)
My Stella is nearly done, so it is therefore time for bed ... nite nite for the now :-)
Anyhow here I sit in the study sipping on a "left-over-from-xmas" Stella Artois feeling sorry for myself and finding new ways to make any combination of 3 colours of paint into yucky-brown. Why is that? Try it yourself, take any three colours from a paint box mix them and you get a sort of greeny-brown sludgey colour that is to fine art what Paul Mooney is to tall people. The magnetic effect of brownness when you mix paint is in that same cubby hole of unexplained shite that is inhabited by belly button fluff. (I believe my USian readers call it "lint"), i digress ... whilst any combination of 3 paint = brown, belly button fluff is ALWAYS greyish blue. WTF? I have a penchant for white or black tee-shirts and my belly button fluff is fecking blue, wearing the colours I do, surely my BBF should either be Zebra striped or like 1960's TV glorious monotone.
Zebra striped belly button fluff would be really cool would it not? It would be the perfect starting point for a conversation with a stranger at a dinner party. Imagine it ... that pregnant pause after saying "I work with messaging and collaboration Software?" when you have been asked "What do you do?" ... I could fill that pause with ".. but I have zebra striped belly button fluff wanna see?" What friendships could be forged on the anvil of such a wonderful statment? But as the fecking stuff is always bluey gray I will never find that out.
I am getting really naffed off with the fecking credit crunch for it has borked any chance of me attending LS09 ... yes I know I should be a bigger man and worry about all those who have lost their jobs and I should be terrified by the fact that we are circling the rim of the capitalist toilet all be it nicely deodourised by the Toilet Duck of media mediocrity in preparation for the final flush. But I am a shallow callous indiviual .. so sue me ;-)
My Stella is nearly done, so it is therefore time for bed ... nite nite for the now :-)
Friday 2 January 2009
Installing IIS7/php and MySql in under 20 mins on a Vista Home Premium PC
I don't take my position as a Geek lightly I can tell you!
When asked "Can I run IIS / PHP / MYSQL on my Vista Home Premium PC?" I must admit that after the bout of laughter induced hiccups had subsided I was intrigued. Could you do it? Personally my php/mysql stuff is all done via an old PIII with 512Mb of memory running Ubuntu Server, Apache PHP and MySql works like a treat too. However the person that wanted to do this has only one box and it is a relatively nice core duo 2gb yadda yadda and Vista HP. #involuntary shudder#
Now it does has to be said. I havent used Vista that much and I am reacting more on the inital reports rather than the way it is now but it is hard to get over that "EEEEEEUIUUUUUUU" moment when you see it first.
After a bit of googling I came across this link and followed the clear consice instructions to the letter and bugger me they worked. Two reboots in total and there it was an IIS server PHP and MySql all running. No Errors .....Nothing...... total time 23 minutes i am stunned and my chum is happy. 3 Cheers for that chaps at Maximum PC Guides!
When asked "Can I run IIS / PHP / MYSQL on my Vista Home Premium PC?" I must admit that after the bout of laughter induced hiccups had subsided I was intrigued. Could you do it? Personally my php/mysql stuff is all done via an old PIII with 512Mb of memory running Ubuntu Server, Apache PHP and MySql works like a treat too. However the person that wanted to do this has only one box and it is a relatively nice core duo 2gb yadda yadda and Vista HP. #involuntary shudder#
Now it does has to be said. I havent used Vista that much and I am reacting more on the inital reports rather than the way it is now but it is hard to get over that "EEEEEEUIUUUUUUU" moment when you see it first.
After a bit of googling I came across this link and followed the clear consice instructions to the letter and bugger me they worked. Two reboots in total and there it was an IIS server PHP and MySql all running. No Errors .....Nothing...... total time 23 minutes i am stunned and my chum is happy. 3 Cheers for that chaps at Maximum PC Guides!
3 Cheers for the Northern Ireland MLA's
That is not something you will hear me say very often!
For my foreign readers and MLA is a "Member of the Legislative Assembly". Sort of like an MP in Westminister except their mandate is provided by the voters of Northern Ireland which after 50 odd years of being "run" 100% by the Westminister Parliment having voted for these folk it is nice to see they actually "do" something.
What have they have done to deserve my praise?
Well they have slashed the price of a medical perscription fro 2009 and plan to make them free in 2010. For most folk this isn't a cause for much celebration but I was paying £7.00 per item on a perscription (and i need 4 items every 2 months) it is now £3.00 per item on a perscription!!
YIPEE thats my drugs bill down from £170 to £72 a year. Even better if I get a "PrePay" certificate that reduces it to only £25 for the year .... ~does small jig of delight~ ....
Now if we can just get them to forget about bringing in water charges !
For my foreign readers and MLA is a "Member of the Legislative Assembly". Sort of like an MP in Westminister except their mandate is provided by the voters of Northern Ireland which after 50 odd years of being "run" 100% by the Westminister Parliment having voted for these folk it is nice to see they actually "do" something.
What have they have done to deserve my praise?
Well they have slashed the price of a medical perscription fro 2009 and plan to make them free in 2010. For most folk this isn't a cause for much celebration but I was paying £7.00 per item on a perscription (and i need 4 items every 2 months) it is now £3.00 per item on a perscription!!
YIPEE thats my drugs bill down from £170 to £72 a year. Even better if I get a "PrePay" certificate that reduces it to only £25 for the year .... ~does small jig of delight~ ....
Now if we can just get them to forget about bringing in water charges !
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