Quiet day. Went shopping followed by a trip out to drink and eat with friends.

Bought a cheap video game, but I haven't had time to play it yet. Too busy enjoying myself.

 

Fairly quiet at work. We have an English institution called a "Bank Holiday" coming down the tracks on Monday. I think this means that most people head off early on Friday to make a long weekend even longer. Of course we hard working, resolute folk are immune to such distractions. And anyway, I bet all the roads will be dead busy.

Got a pressie yesterday. Something to do with having been married for a long time. Series 2 of Spaced on DVD. I feel that I'm probably too old to like Spaced as much as I do. It is very contemporary, very well put together and very funny. I'm rationing myself to 2 episodes per day at the moment - but it has that rare quality that means I will be able to watch them oodles of times afterwards anyway.. Buy it. Now. Find out more at this fan site (which is excellent in itself).

 

Finished off my fixes to the layout mangler. Now works fine. Spent a huge chunk of time just to get back to where I started. But the design is much cleaner and more flexible. I'm a bit peeved that I didn't think of this technique at the start, but sometimes you have to try to make a design work to find out if it is any good or not. And the new design is almost a work of art.

I have this sort of vision of the future, where computer programmers are recognised as creative artists in the same vein as Leonardo Da Vinci and people will be scouring the hard drive archives of the world for a "genuine Miles listing". They will then marvel at the superb layout, the apposite choice of variable names and the wondrous use of abstraction, interfaces and inheritance which the great programmer has brought to bear on the problem...

I'm not sure that this will happen (oh, alright I am sure that it won't), but I like to think that my code would stand up to such scrutiny if it did...

Also bought number one son his new portable. After trying to purchase an Apple Powerbook from the reconditioned store. Note for future customers: it only opens for a few hours each week and has this strange habit of saying there is nothing there when it opens, and then stuff suddenly appearing (and selling out instantly) somewhat later. Not being that keen on spending hours each week refreshing the browser to catch a machine (or watch as someone else catches it) we eventually bought a PC based Notebook. From a toyshop. If you want a keenly priced, fully featured laptop you should take a serious look in Toys R Us. Their range of Medion systems is just about unbeatable. And the machines themselves are great. This should give some concern to "proper" PC vendors, as things like laptops are now becoming commodities which can be sold by anyone. As for the new machine; I suppose it is just a matter of time before he has Linux running on it - but there's no accounting for taste...

Went to see "The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" tonight. Great fun. Smashing special effects. Johnny Depp was very good. If you want to find out what kind of pirate a permanently sozzled Mick Jagger would make (or if you just want some pure entertainment) I'd advise you to go and see it.

 

It pays to improve your word power dept: Moribond - noun: secret agent who hasn't been out much lately.

Spent all day paying for a silly mistake what I made. I've produced this rather nifty layout manager for .NET. It is designed to take the place of the lovely GridBagLayout which is provided by Java. We are using it in "the product which cannot be named" so that we don't have to place things like text, edit boxes, displays etc, on the windows by hand - and the windows can scale and resize themselves properly.

However, when I created it I made a bad design decision. Bad decisions have a way of coming back to haunt you - especially when they are in the underlying design of your system. I was getting to the point where I was spending more time thinking of ways to get round the problem (i.e. add more and more kludges) than it would take to fix it. So I fixed it. Made a simple change to the design and got around 900 compilation errors for my trouble, which I then had to work through and fix.

By the end of today I am down to 300 errors.

As for the fault, comparatively trivial, but very annoying. I made the layout information a property of the window component, not the other way round. This seemed OK when I wrote the first version, but when you want to start making components and deciding where to put them afterwards (which is what you end up doing) you are in a big mess. You have to invent "dummy" layout items just to keep the system happy (which is a kludge). The design now works the other way round. Layout items are assigned components to manage. We can easily change what appears on the screen and everyone is happy. And I've got backache...

 

Busy day. Writing material for the new .NET degree. Nothing improves your understanding of something more than writing a course about it. And you think of such weird things. I was trying to thing of a nice way of introducing managed code (sorry if this is a bit techie but hey, it's my job).

Managed code is where your program is not allowed to actually touch the hardware. It is a bit like me getting someone else to cut down the tree with the chain saw. Rather than Robert firing up the huge power tool and removing his arm along with the tree I would say "Cut that tree down please". This is safer for me, and also good news in that if I say "Cut down that tree over there" the guy with the saw can tell me that I don't own that tree, and anyway it is actually a telegraph pole. Anyhoo, you should now have the idea that a managed program just sits on top of something and tells it what it would like to do. The thing underneath (aka the environment) then does the operation if it is sensible.

Managed code is a big chunk of how Microsoft .NET makes sure that programs behave themselves. In this sense I guess you could call it somewhat "cutting edge", even though the idea has been around for a while. The funny thing is (to me anyway - but I'm a bit sad in this respect) when I started looking back to the first widespread managed code environment I hit upon good old BASIC, beloved of home computer users many years ago. A BASIC interpreter takes each instruction from your program, decides what to do and then does it. In this respect I reckon it is pretty managed in its approach. And the writer of one of the most popular versions of BASIC was a certain Mr. Gates, whose company you may have heard of.....

Also found time to go down to the pub with the usual suspects and discuss important issues such as.... oh, I can't remember. But I do remember laughing a lot

 

Psychologists have just identified a new mental condition which is called "Bloggers Guilt". This afflicts people who, for no good reason, have decided to place personal, narrative, details on the web (this condition is called "Bloggermania"). The guilt kicks in when the subject has not posted anything in the blog for a while (perhaps even for good reason like not being near the internet) and intensifies over time. The subject then thinks about all the ways that he/she can atone for their sins in the form of flashy graphics, loads of pictures or just an improvement in narrative style (as if).

Hmm. Anyhoo, it has been a while, but I am back now. I'll post some stuff about where I've been and what I've done when I can work out where I've been and what I've done, but for now all I can say is sorry folks and it won't happen again (at least until next year..)

Rant alert: I read in the paper that insurance companies are introducing a new technology in their call centres which is used to detect illegal claims. Apparently the software can tell when the customer is telling whoppers. I think this is rather scary. I mean, what would happen if they left it switched on by mistake: "Of course madam, we'll have someone round to sort out your claim in a couple of hours" - sound of alarm bells, machines shouting "LIE LIE LIE" in background.... However, the really funny bit was when they tried to justify their new system with the statement that someone had made a personal injury claim for losing an eye five times. Now call me old fashioned, but I don't actually think that you need new fangled technology to sort that one out. All you need is to work with other insurance companies to keep records of who you pay out to. Then add a line like:

IF NUMBEROFEYESLOST > 2 THEN PRINT "ILLEGAL CLAIM"

.. to your software somewhere and all should be well.