Wednesday, August 26th 2009 Oh the irony
This is probably why you shouldn't call your business "Smart IT Consulting"
This result greeted me when I was looking for tips on best-practice database design:
Uh huh.
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Saturday, July 4th 2009 --and-baby-makes-four
num_humans++;
I'm finally sitting down and writing this after 2 weeks. And what a 2 weeks it's been! I'm proud to announce that Emilia Paige Ritchin was born 19:16 on 20th June 2009!
Although Emilia came a little earlier than we were expecting, I'm told 37+2 weeks is actually considered full term, so that's okay. Cat and I were at her parents' house she started getting cramps. I went to bring the car around the back of the house so it was a shorter walk for Cat and when I came through the garage door, her waters had broken.
Cat's dad and I literally lifted Cat into the car and I drove (the LONG way apparently) to Joondalup Hospital, Ada's The Wiggles album unhelpfully providing some ambience.
Joondalup got Cat into a birthing suite, and pretty much immediately announced that she should start pushing. Two hours after going into labour, and an hour and 15 after her waters broke, Cat and I had a beautiful baby girl in our arms.
Emilia all wrapped up
Cat and Emilia were out of hospital in a matter of days which was great. Ada's slowly getting used to her new sister, but cries when Emilia cries. She's very gentle when touching Emilia and offers her food, drink, blankets and dummies.
Emilia's first car ride
A big thank you to all our family and friends, and all the staff at Joondalup Hospital who were so helpful through this time.
[Permalink]1 comment
On Sunday, July 5th 2009, at 11:53AM WST Jonathan Young said:
Seems very well assembled. Nicely done. Good to see an update on your blog for a change too. (Yes I know, more than I can say for mine.)
Monday, April 20th 2009 --upgrades-downgrades
Eclipse Ganymede a no-go on Jaunty Jackalope
I'm doing a bit of personal C development on Linux these days, and my IDE of choice is currently Eclipse.
As much as I despise Java-based software for its general instability, I actually like Eclipse as a product. The crashes are an annoyance, but almost always happen directly after saving a file, or during compilation so I haven't lost any data yet. I find Eclipse to be a decent IDE, and in any case much better than using vi or gedit and compiling manually.
Anyway, after upgrading my system to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope - which went perfectly), I was surprised to see that the packaged Eclipse was still version 3.2, not 3.4 which is current. Anyway, since the C/C++ development pack Eclipse is available as a tgz which you just unpack and stick in a directory, I decided to download the latest version and run it concurrently with the packaged version.
Unfortunately, this version of Eclipse could nary compile its built in "Hello World" skeleton program. I encountered multitudes of errors related to the standard libraries, which points to a path problem with the compiler. Further complicating the issue was the fact that I could see no way of explicitly specifying that the environment should be left alone (Eclipse's own makefiles ran fine in a terminal session). For some reason, Eclipse set up a wierd environment to compile in, which didn't actually work.
After many hours tearing my hair out and asking for help on Whingepool, I decided to scrap that and get the stock standard 3.4 release and add in the C/C++ development stuff manually.
This attempt had much the same result. After dealing with a weird Java dependency issue (another reason I detest Java) and finally getting the C/C++ pack to install, I deleted the .eclipse and workspace directories and attempted to generate another Hello World app. This one failed to compile with an altogether *different* set of error messages. More hours later I scrapped that as well and grudgingly went back to Eclipse 3.2.
This one compiles perfectly, and although it's not as snappy, and the editor is not as featureful it at least works. Long story short, Eclipse 3.4 does not appear to work under Ubuntu 9.04. I think I'll wait patiently for 3.4 to be bundled with Ubuntu rather than attempt this excersise again.
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Tuesday, March 24th 2009 --ada-lovelace-day
Women in Computing - Adm. Grace Hopper
In celebration of Ada Lovelace day, my blog post is about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.
Wikipedia has a good intro on Adm. Hopper:
"Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Naval officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvards Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language."
I first read about Hopper in an old university textbook about computers in general, the quaintly titled "Computers: Tools for an Information Age".
Hopper was the driving force behind COBOL, however given the breadth of the rest of her accomplishments, I think we can forgive her. All jokes aside, COBOL was the first plain English programming language of its day, and paved the way for later languages such as FORTRAN, C, & Pascal. Without COBOL's influence, languages would look very different than they do today.
It is said that the term Computer Bug came into popularity when Hopper's team found a moth in a computer relay. Hopper immediately called it a computer bug, and the term stuck (although it's also reported that engineers were using this as a rare term before this). It's said she also coined the term "debugging", which is an accepted (formal) programming term today.
Hopper also invented a few of my favourite sayings:
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" - definitely an adage I tend to live by.
Also attributed to her is the quote, "A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for."
Hopper pioneered the use of standards (yay for standards!) and drove convergence of amongst different language dialects from different vendors. Her work was so good that her standards guidelines were taken over for administration by NIST.
After retirement from the Navy (at which point she was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat award possible by the Department of Defense), she worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC - who used to make some pretty nice kit before they went bankrupt). She remained there until she died, aged 85.
Today COBOL remains in use in thousands of mission critical applications, the software in most cases outliving the rusting mainframes it runs on; however, every time an aging COBOL application is replaced by something newer, faster, cheaper and easier to maintain, Hopper's legacy lives on in the structure of the language the replacement app is written in, and in the standards that govern the interoperation of the software, and in very use of computers as a useful business tool.
[Permalink]1 comment
On Tuesday, March 24th 2009, at 12:44AM WST Andy Roberts said:
It doesn't sound like you are really very impressed by the high level English-like nature of COBOL syntax. I'm pretty certain though that Fortran was around before COBOL, with COBOL being adopted as an improvement up fortran if you wanted to write clear business orientated code that others could maintain. Languages like C seem to take a path backwards again towards a more formulaic mathematical syntax that takes up less space in the source files, but is less intuitive to learn for novice programmers.
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