Work

Items of relevance to my work for a company in Edinburgh providing solutions to the Finance Industry.

ARCast – Modern Software

alistairl

I’m working through the ARCast collection in a pretty random manner, or more likely I’m working through them in some filename order that my mp3 player dictates – it’s just that it displays the description of the track when it is playing, so I don’t know (or particularly care).

I listened to one of the ARCasts from earlier on in the year – Modern Software, with Ron Jacobs talking to a chap called David Chappell. A lot resonated from David’s comments, on one had he was quite negative about the success of SOA, but in a way that really connected with the business view of IT. IT departments lack credibility, so they are the last people you would ask to change your business process. And SOA doesn’t work because organisation departments and therefore budgets just don’t lend themselves to centralised services.

If you want business change resulting in the application of IT, get the businesses to hire the consultants themselves – ouch.

Listening to the ARCast I went from agreeing with what he said, being interested that he is still obviously engaged in the technology, then being a bit depressed after checking out his previous articles on off-shoring development etc. Having seen the pictures of Ron and David, I wonder if I should get the beard back ? 🙂

The week in summary

alistairl

This week has been a welcome mixed bag, the weather is picking up and the plants in the gardens have taken this as a signal to start growing. Our Silver Birch in the front garden is unfurling its leaves as we speak, and next door’s beech hedge has done the same. Only downside is that the grass has woken up too, time to see if the lawn mower still works.

Monday

My Cousins and Aunt, originally from Derbyshire and now a mix of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire were up spending a week in a cottage in the Lake District, so we drove down and spent the afternoon with them at a place near Ennerdale Bridge. Nice scenery, although the weather was a bit unsettled. The drive back was glorious.

Tuesday

Had taken the day off after the long drive, but didn’t feel too bad. A school holiday but exam time for my Daughter so I gave her a lift into school, then picked up some bits at B&Q for a repair to the garden shed. A nice quiet day.

Wednesday

First day back at work, usual rise in stress levels. Saddened to see the aftermath of a collision between a motorbike and car on the A71. Quite hard to see what the lead up had been, the bike had hit the car on its RHS to the RHS of the car. Either a U-Turn by the car into the path of the bike, or bike overtaking car which was turning right into a farm road. About 1 mile back towards Livingston from Wilkieston, the rider was still unconcious under the bike when I drove past. I haven’t ridden the road since to see what the visibility is like, but inevitably made me reflect somewhat now that I’m back on two wheels. Then I kept an eye out for the converging emergency services, right enough I had a police Mercedes patrol car overtaking towards me then two police Honda pan-european motorcycles and another Mercedes car when I was waiting on the bus at the park and ride.

Thursday

Opportunity to get back to the office for a meeting late on, a great opportunity to be involved with the folks that employ me – there is a whole pile of stuff that you can’t get involved in when you are on-site long term.

Friday

Another glorious sunny day, tried to get on with work and not get wound up. For one or two reasons it didn’t quite work, but I am working that through. Made progress this week on all fronts, building my enthusiasm back up by listening to the ARCasts and that is a good thing.

ARCast and my Creative Zen Nano Plus

alistairl

Since I got some money for a wedding anniversary present, I’ve been trying to decide what to buy. Settled on a Creative Zen Nano Plus – has 1Gb of memory and does protected wma files which is what I have most of my music on. Oh, and I got it in black of course, and bought a pair of black earphones.

1Gb demands a bit of thought in choosing tracks – it isn’t enough for arbitrary selection from my tracks, so I decided to go for a balance of music, bits of classical (Beethoven and Saint-Saens), bit of modern rock (Evanescence, Linkin Park and Kelly Clarkson), odd bit of pop (maybe that’s where Kelly Clarkson goes) and trip-hop dance (Faithless), electronic (Depeche Mode), and of course – podcasts.

Quality varies in the podcasts I’ve listened to, and I think because a PC screen has so much going on that the spoken word washes out a bit. And that’s just the editorial control, the production quality can really vary too. I’ve really got in to the ARCast series, and I’m working my way back through them. Notable highlights so far have been the Ivar Jacobson chat. I didn’t know that he was a Project Manager by trade, and he also put the whole process thing in context. Another good one was on agile methodology with Colin Bird of Conchango. I’ve downloaded the ARCast set to my Nano and I’m working through them on the bus to and from the park and ride. The only thing is, like I discovered years ago watching Hong-Kong Fuey back to back – the intros get a bit cliched. Ron Jacobs says “Welcome, Welcome Friends, Welcome” every time.

Joel on Software on the Development Abstraction Layer

alistairl

An excellent article from Joel on Software on what he calls the Development Abstraction Layer.

I agree with what he says about the way to run a great software company, and how to get the most out of programmers,  and the first time I’ve seen anyone comment on the success of Microsoft Alumni in setting out on their own!

But PS, I don’t personally have any experience of the sort of company he describes. Does that mean it can’t exist?

How to change the speed of an Intel NIC through script

alistairl

I was talking to a friend the other night about scripting and desktop deployments. He works in a team that mainly works on packaging applications for distribution to lots of desktop PCs. When we talk shop I find it a good learning experience for myself as a developer. We’ve all got so complacent in recent years with Web Applications, providing they’ve all got Internet Explorer whatsit then we immediately think of deployment as a copy and paste job into the IIS virtual directory.

He has to think about hundreds of PCs being in various states, logged on, logged off, and funnily enough being switched off can be a real tricky one. Fortunately efforts in the procurement of desktop PCs mean that many with embedded network cards are built to power on with the correct packet from the network, saving a visit, even if they insist on trying to boot off the network – another issue.

We got talking about scripting and network speed, apparently autosense doesn’t do the thing with their switches. I did a bit of Google and msdn research and established that WMI didn’t go there for read/write on that setting. I asked about the hardware and was told that it was a mixture of Intel kit. That is a good thing, Intel are pretty good with their support through their Proset drivers. Had a look through the docs for that, but it looked like I would have to do a bit of vbs hacking to get the setting value pair.

On a different tack I found a utility from Intel themselves to alter the speed directly. Their SETSPEED.EXE script utility takes a single parameter to set the speed and duplex of one of their supported NICs. The main gotcha is that this is a setting that is based in the registry, so you have to kick the driver into re-reading the registry if you change the setting. Either a specific start/stop (I’m not sure if this service based) or a reboot.

The research showed up an interesting option in the SavRes.vbs script which is a vbs implementation of the Proset support for WMI etc. I would probably use this as the start of a script for dealing with more of the settings on a NIC.