Finding the chase and cutting to it

Reused from…

I first learnt to programme on a Commodore C64, and the way I used that computer was through what I now know is a command line interface or CLI.  This interface is a shell between me and the fundamental operating system which allows me, the user, to read data off the storage and put them into the computer’s memory or RAM: when this data forms instructions, this shell allows me to run a programme.

I was taking my first steps in the 1980’s at home.  In the commercial world, Mike Cowlishaw of IBM was producing a language which could be used in a command shell to run other programmes as if a human were using them through the command interface.  This language was called REXX, if you’ve used macros in Excel or Word, REXX was the granddaddy of macro languages because you could run a REXX script outside of the programme and indeed link the output and functions of many programmes together to achieve your goal.  I encountered REXX in 1995, in a port on the Amiga 1200.  That was when I finally moved away from using the mouse as my main interface with computers by preference.

In Windows 7, 2008, 2012 and finally 8, everyone gets use of PowerShell (in various guises) which has this REXX capability.  You have the ability to manipulate programmes in Windows to perform repetitive tasks quickly, easily and safely.  The normal DOS shell lacked this, so it was with interest that I first looked at using Powershell at the recommendation of a friend.

I have successfully used Powershell to get Excel reports out of hundreds of Word documents, convert 100’s of Word, Powerpoint, Visio and Excel documents to other formats (typically png and pdf), complete templates from data held in Excel documents and run testing schedules for web programmes.

It’s very good: multi-threading is built in to get through tasks quickly and I’m not even using it to it’s fill extent.  If you are learning to programme, this may be a useful first step 🙂

The outlook is not good.

In 1993, on the back of a piece of paper I drew what I thought a pump should look like: a motor, a casing and a pen cartridge, some tubing and the cannula.  In 2002, I got my first pump and it looked like that, albeit with a 3ml cartridge instead of a 1.5ml one (which is much, much, much better).  The beauty of using a pen cartridge is that if the pump breaks, I whip the cartridge out and put it into a pen.  I have one set of orders out for spares and day to day living.  Simples!

But the company I bought the pump from sold to Roche and after 12 years, they are dropping the product.  I have tried different pumps but nothing is as nice as the Dtron or as convenient. Especially when it comes to travel and ordering supplies from the GP.

There is a new pump manufacturer out there, the http://www.snappump.com which is built round the pen cartridge.  Not nearly as pretty as mine, but I can put up with ugly for the sake of not having to draw up a cartridge once a week.  I wish they would talk about how the basals are delivered – that is the other nice thing about the Dtron – every 20 minutes I get a tiny amount of insulin…

XP dies on the 8th April 2014.  Actually it doesn’t, it’s just that Microsoft is no longer going to support it.

While some made the move back in 2006 to Windows 7, many held back and are now looking going straight from Windows XP to Windows 8.

If you followed the expected path, Windows 7 included a virtual machine enabling old XP programmes to run despite a change of operating system.

Windows 8 does not include this as standard, but you can achieve the same result!

Step 1: download the tool allowing Windows 8 to pretend to be XP.

On the expensive version of Windows 8, this is available as part of the package and can just be installed, otherwise you need to get it from the Microsoft Download Centre at Client hyper-V .  Client hyper-v will allow you to run XP and its programmes while still running Windows 8.

Download then install Client hyper-V.

The rest…

is covered in How to build a new XP VM.

We have a family motto: my word is my bond. Mostly ,I think because none of us disrespects anyone enough to lie: treat others as you would have them treat you.
But maybe it gives you unrealistic expectations. Maybe others do not appreciate when they lie.
I recently had a case where I took someone who was in need at their word and gave them a big helping hand. They made three promises when they accepted that help and kept not a single one of them.
When it came to withdraw the favour because they were hurting my property, and ultimately my family, they made a last promise. As of mid-night, they have reneged on that too.
I feel completely let down.
Did I expect too much from someone who claimed to be my friend?

I was born in Ipswich, Suffolk in 1973. The year Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I watched the news with my parents not really understanding why it was such a big deal. Mrs Thatcher was not only a grammar school kid, she was a woman.
If we look at the prime ministers of the past 15 years (Mr Blair came in while I was in my final year of university), the majority have attended independent schools (Eton educated Mr Cameron, Fettes College was Mr Blair alma mater and Mr Brown was a student at the Kirkcaldy High School comprehensive although at the time it had a fast track scheme for the exceptional students like Gordon Brown).
So, I have the comprehensive curse. Suffolk small town comprehensive curse, where having a passion for history and maths did not suggest anything more than accountancy or tax inspector.
I also live in a community where few school girls grow up wanting a serious career and few educated women succeed in the locally run businesses.
I tried to buck that trend by joining a large multi-national but where London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow have women in the top teams, that does not happen in Ipswich for my company. Recently I mentioned the fact that only 8% of women earn £40K or more per annum and a couple of my local male work colleagues suggested that women did not want to earn that much.
This is not true.
Neither is the fact that women returning from maternity leave do not wish to have a meaningful career. These two men felt that the majority of women were not interested and in fact many preferred to stay at home.
When I talk to women who did get as far as A levels, this is also not the case but the low wages they are often taking home and on-going commitments mean that many do not see the point. Women earning a lot in Ipswich tend to be GPs or in education which have understood how to retain and progress female career women. It’s beginning to change in my company but it’s taken a long time and having got past child producing age, it does seem to be changing faster.
On my return to work having had my son, my male manager was stunned that I had actually done some meaningful work on my first day back from maternity leave!
In many ways I have been lucky, when I was given an opportunity to run a team that had been run by a man earning £20K more than I was salaried, I did get a solicitor to help me fight to close that pay gap – all the men, many of whom joined the company after me and were operating at the same grade as I was were on a minimum of £7k per annum more than I was getting. Money allows many opportunities, including more time. Out-sourcing means I have more time.
And time is the valuable piece. I travelled 30K miles last year not just for work but for all the commitments including getting my insulin to keep me alive. On average I spend 1 hour a day in the car – I live only 18 miles from work.
So why am I not running for parliament this time round? Well, to be honest, I would love to. I am an engineer with a passion for politics but I have very little support from friends to do this and a woman is a hell of a risk. Possibly a software engineer more than that.
Unlike the men of my age, education and intelligence levels, I have not been encouraged to fast track for my career allowing me the financial cushion to take the risk personally. If I take a year or more off to develop a career in politics, who is to say I would ever get to the same level in industry again?

It happened this Wednesday: Facebook finally took the top spot globally according to alexa.com.

Of course, by the time I write this blog, Google is back up there but what helped Facebook outpace a search engine?  How long before youTube overtakes Google?

Over course, it helps to understand what the top ten sites are: we have 4 web search engines up there, but if you want to find something out quickly that wasn’t necessarily fixed published information, would you use a straight web search engine?

A great example is the use of the global village.  Say I am heading out to Birmingham tomorrow, would I read a weather report or look at the tweets or Facebook reports from friends talking about the commute or school run?  If they haven’t done that, a quick FB message is much more likely to get a response than a txt or email.

Of course the beauty of Twitter is the tweets can be fully public where-as Facebook is still working on that one (if I publish something, who is consuming it today?)

For me, that’s the reason Facebook and Twitter sit in the same company as Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and of course, Baidu.  QQ is a similarly marketed “life portal” as Facebook within China (numbers count).  Google is making headway with Google+ though it is much easier to get a decent smart phone/tablet app for Facebook than Google+ today.  Maybe, today that’s the point – anywhere, anyhow, any time access.

But, what of youTube?

Smart phones, tablets, computers and newer TVs can all consume youTube.  How long before the battle stops being between search engine and social networks but between web and TV?

I was asked this on Christmas day, much to my amusement. Since 1996 I haven’t used any kind of editor outside of a classroom (you know, where the tutors are insisting you don’t use notepad (actually I prefer Vi as the text editor of my choice and have ported this to most of my computers)).
Back in 1996, I took a course in Virtual Environments and Multimedia at the University of Hull as part of my degree course and at the time Netscape came with a WYSIWYG editor and I did use it, I carried my website around on a floppy so at any computer connected to the internet, I had my links.
But learning about the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C to you and me) and the standardisation of HTML made me look at how Netscape was rendering my HTML.
It was a mess, not as bad as some but I stripped out all the Netscape’isms. It was all done in notepad on a PC and Final Writer on an Amiga: Final Writer had an AREXX port that would verify my links and also render the pages to test.
I had a style I was using but these were defined in the forerunner of cascading style sheets and were easy to find and replace when I wanted to change the look and feel. By the end of 1996, my website fitted on a single floppy including 30 images.
All well and good, but the grounding in HTML meant that when new things came along, I could easily incorporate them. I took CSS (cascading style sheets) under my wing in 1999 and was writing code that could dynamically create webpages back in 1998. (CSS meant this was really easily achieved, a single style sheet for an subsite) and by 1998 my pages did not sit on a single floppy. I even did a javadoc style interface for Oracle Web Server interfaces – 80 functions presented in HTML and used by around 500 people within the company paying for my time.
I had also started to do this at work: data driven quotation tools using Oracle web server, even a data driven style sheet meant that a website generating 1300 page combinations could be restyled in less than five minutes.
innerTube when it came along in 2008 had a similar basis. A library of code driven from a data base. More importantly, moving that to HTML 5 took 30 minutes while testing on the top five browsers to do all 7 sub-sections of my home web site and less than that for the ones I run at work.
There are still differences between them, and there are many more out there than Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari as tracked by the W3C. I usually like to get users to test pages rather than checking it myself (user acceptance testing at the same time) but if I am seriously trying something new, I use http://browsershots.org/.
Very occasionally I do forget the pain and try to use Front Page or Dreamweaver and they do what they set out to do, create very standard pages quickly and easily – but the post processing necessary to get them to do anything like managing anything about 5 pages is always the let down – who has time for that?
Have you considered using WordPress?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  Surfing habits are not significantly different since April this year, apart from the obvious swap between the positions of Twitter and Amazon. Good news for the on-line trader but is this a seasonal blip?  Would you expect surfing habits to move from the twits to the shops?

Amazon is interesting at the moment for a verity of reasons not least its changes to its virtual desktop offerings.  Amazon, like Google, allows registered users in the USA to get a desktop, storage and services at a moments notice by a pay as you go model.  In late November it upgraded this offering in terms of bangs per buck, with a desktop with much more punch (ready to run a Windows 8 desktop?).

So is it just shopping increasing Amazon’s surfing draw or will this trend continue into the new year?

From quite early, you are asked what you want to be when you grow up.  I knew I’d go to university from when I was very small but as I grew up that changed from being a medical doctor to a masters in business administration to something with maths and computers.

I basically didn’t know and there wasn’t an obvious thing I could see: I always enjoyed maths but didn’t want to do that for a living and computers were things seriously clever people did otherwise it wasn’t interesting.  I found languages interesting, I did French and German at GCSE, and loved history and geography especially the practical.  I did physics and chemistry because they were interesting at GCSE but again couldn’t see a future for me doing those (though my Chemistry teacher did cry when I didn’t do Chemistry A level, I think my physics teacher cheered!).

So for A levels I choose double Maths and German at school and promptly left to do Economics, Pure Maths and German at college (long story), with still no clue.  I wanted to do computer science but there didn’t seem to be a quick way in – all my programmes had been done at home (let’s face it, the home computer was way better than the green terminals at college and school).

At 18 I left home, travelled 256 miles to do an interview for an apprenticeship with the MOD.  This was no easy option: we had 9 week blocks alternating between placements (in the first year these were highly practical engineering techniques) and academic.  If you failed one of the modules (and there were typically 4-6 subjects from GCSE in the first year to A level standard in the 2 and 3 years) you had one chance to resit otherwise you were asked to leave the job.  I didn’t resit any subject.

It was hard and interesting, on top of our wages we were given money to rent accommodation but we were completely responsible for everything.  I was 18 when I start but some of my colleagues were only just 16.  By the end of the first year, 3 people had dropped out.

I didn’t complete the four years: I sat an extra A level at the end of my third year so I could leave for university.  By comparison, university was a breeze 🙂  I did joint honours computer science and mathematics.  I did OK, although a friend at university complained that it didn’t look like I was working hard because everything was in on time and I didn’t revise like a loon during exam week.

But my apprenticeship was fun, really interesting and I would encourage any one who does not know exactly what they want to be at 16 to consider one.  It’s not a soft option, but a real opportunity.

I have just finished listening to an interview of Tanni Grey-Thompson by Aled Jones: what a terrific person.  Someone I would definitely want to talk to if I ever met in a pub or on a train.

One of the most interesting things Tanni talked about was when she got her first wheel-chair.  This isn’t a direct quote, I didn’t write it down, but the gist was “I didn’t see this as giving up, I didn’t see it as accepting defeat.  Many friends saw it as a huge transition but I saw the wheel chair as an enabler, something that helped me to live”.

Many see insulin the same way: there is almost a reluctance to provide insulin via injection until there is no other choice.

I find this strange: I don’t like injections, sometimes they really hurt, but my insulin is my enabler, it makes life possible.  I very physically hurt if I don’t have it.

It’s not easy replacing what my body is failing to do naturally but that is the choice.  Give up or get on with it.

Some on the planet see requiring the injections as being repulsive, the fact that it’s extremely difficult sometimes to get it right every minute of everyday, abhorrent.  There are definitely days when it seems like way too much bother, but unlike the friendship I wouldn’t want from these people, I am in this for the long game 🙂