Monthly Archive for April, 2006

About Time

It is certainly about time I wrote a new post…

Easter was fun, photos from a trip to birdworld near Farnham to come soon, along with a whole set of sorted photos (you may have noticed I deleted almost all my photos that were up, as there were too many bad ones and they needed sorting. So I now will have a quarter of what I had online before).

Just before Easter I changed departments at work. It was pretty much a new job but without leaving the company (which is one of the reasons I love working for IBM, I have so many possibilities of what I can do and never have to search for a new employer to do it all).

I now work on the performance team (still on Message Broker), and it is my job as part of this small 4 man team to analyse the results of automated tests to see if i can figure out why any drops in performance have occured and reverse them. Another task I will have to do is analyse the jobs that take to long (the jobs the software does in real world use preferably) and try and find ways to make the code faster and hence speeding up the overall performance.

For the latest version the team managed to get an overall speed increase of well over 50%, so I have some big shoes to fill (I am taking over from a guy who is leaving the team).

This job will certainly give me in depth knowledge of the product, wich hopefully I can put to use by getting in touch with customers and helping them out a bit (I believe there is a set up for advertising my skills to customers as a kind of informal expert to them), but first need a little more experience with it.

I have been meanging to blog for ages, and have other things I am looking at with keen interest, but have not really had the time to do it yet. Just to give you a teaser, one thing I have been looking at is X10, which is an appliance control system which allows you to control lights and other appliances remotely over the power cables in your house. I would love to play with it, but do not really have anything I want to control at the moment. I also plan to look at then getting status and control onto the internet so that I can play with it all remotely (along with getting it on my XDA, not to mention a blogging client specifically for blogging from my XDA)

Firefox plugins

There is a fairly good guide to Firefox plugins and I would certainly recommend the Session Saver, adblock, and web developer tabs he suggests as they are all incredible

Are Software Patents Evil?

I just read this wonderful article: Are Software Patents Evil? and encourage anyone with an interest in the issue to do so too.

I won’t spoil the read, but it certainly has opened my eyes to may issues regarding software patents.

Stallman’s talk at the ANU

All about Linux: The unabridged selective transcript of Richard M Stallman’s talk at the ANU is a copy of RMS’s views on the naming of GNU/Linux, the DMCA, DRM, Java, Opensource and is quite an interesting read if you are interested in free software / linux / your right to create software.

I should have been a mechanic

I bought a new chain for my motorcycle online, and was planning on fitting it myself. When it arrived I found it was just a long piece of chain, like a piece of rope, not a loop as I was expecting. It came with instructions saying to just rivet it together, but looking online a chain rivetter cost £70/£80, so I thought I would take it to a mechanic and get them to do it.

There is a Honda dealer near me, so I popped in to their service department, and they said it was a quick job (they could even do the rear sprocket if I brought it in without any extra hassle). So I agreed, waited for an hour and got charged £50. Now changing the chain should really be a 5 minute job, and so should changing the rear sprocket. I would have though the whole thing shouldn’t have ever taken more than 20 minutes… So how did they get £50 when their hourly rate is £59 an hour?!?

Next time, I am doing all the work I can myself, and when I really need a mechanic for the tools or something, I will find a small local mechanic with a cheaper hourly rate, and also agree the time beforehand - hopefully that will mean they will actually bill me for what they did…