What's Doing

Its the end of summer and it is raining. This caused my tennis game to be cut short last night. Which was not nice.

Even after nearly six years in Sydney I still have trouble remembering that Summer is actually the rainy season. Roll on Autumn – which either begins tomorrow or around the 21st of March depending on who you listen to – when the sun still shines but the humidity drops and the rain is usually absent.

I’m just so English, talking about the weather like this. To add balance to my life, let me just say “G’day cobbers”.

Every Tuesday morning on the Triple J breakfast show Adam and Will invite the lovely boys from Tripod to compose and perform a song in under an hour.

Today’s subject was the potential meeting of Bill Clinton and H.M the Queen who are both going to be in Australia this week. Their work was an elegant piece entitled “I fell in love in the arse end of the world”. Just pure quality.

Oh dear, an exert from an ICQ conversation with Ciaran, prompted by this article in the Register;

  andy47: SELECT * FROM lusers WHERE name = ‘Oxygen Thief’
  andy47: 65535 rows returned
  andy47: buffer overflow
  Ciaranh: lol
  Ciaranh: that could be a tshirt

Well, the good news is that the dress has been purchased. The bad news is that the wedding reception venue is, apparently, inadequate. Just shoot me, shoot me now and take away the pain. Please.

I had a jaunty little post in mind for today. Something about it being Monday and how the weekend had flown by, and it did, but somehow I don’t feel the need to talk about how nice the sailing was yesterday, or how well I thought I was hitting the ball in my tennis lesson on Saturday.

I just want it all to go away. Now.

Can you outhink a goldfish? Shame on you if you can’t. This link from the lovely people at MetaFilter.

The reason I am posting to my blog at 6:34pm on a Saturday afternoon is because Bobo and Alix have kicked me off the sofa so that they can look at wedding magazines. Oh, dear lord save me. Save me now.

Not to mention that the Super 12 is on, at least I can just catch the television from here at the back of the living room. Even if I can’t sit in comfort.

An observation, today’s date is palindromic if used in a certain format. The format of choice is DD.MM.YYYY which makes the date 20.02.2002. Remove the dots and you have 20022002 which reads the same backwards as it does forwards. How often does that happen?

Quote of the day: Last week, I went to Philidelphia, but it was closed. W. C. Fields (1890 – 1946) [ from QOTD ]

I’m not saying that I am a magpie, but I use this phrase a lot. Until today I didn’t know the definitive source, now I do. That means I have learnt something. Which is nice.

I still maintain that I went to Perth and it was closed.

Our phrase for today is “God Bless the BBC.”

Ah work, without it we would all be sane.

Today I found myself confronted by a colleague who was of the opinion that we didn’t need any kind of source code control. My immediate response was one of incredulity and downright bewilderment – “what sort of idiot would think to implement a computer system without source code control”, etc. Because to me this is a black and white issue. If we write computer programs, we put the source code under some kind of version control. Full stop.

Then I took a step back and looked at the actual situation. The person making this outrageous statement is not a programmer. He is not in IT, he is a senior manager in the finance division of the company I’m currently working for. He doesn’t know the difference source code control and a hole in the road – and he shouldn’t have to. That is one of the things that his company pays me (well, my employers) to worry about.

What I should be able to do is explain to him why he can’t get instantaneous bug fixes into production for his German subsidiary and why that is a good thing for his bottom line. To the casual observer the two things are not related, to those of us in the thick of it they are intimately acquainted.

Because the source code control system used by my confused user’s company is not very sophisticated the only way I can guarantee that the right programs are released to the right places at the right times is to batch them up. I then painstakingly check each and every program to make sure we are migrating the correct version in a bid to reduce mistakes. Mistakes like releasing a half finished program to the production environment that accidentally deletes his general ledger. Or maybe something really bad.

Because our source code control system is essentially manual we have to use several of my (very reasonably priced) hours checking each program as it is released to the different systems around the company. The short term cost of this rigourous and time consuming checking may appear outrageous, but the opportunity cost of not doing it is significantly larger.

Oh, and the invites have been printed. Many thanks to J Palmer esq. All I need to do now is chase down the brochures for Woodbury Park, or I could just put their URL on the back of each envelope.