Planet SCM

As a professional programmer, the languages I code in during the day are very much dependant on the particular project I am working on.  Also as a programmer I have a very low threshold for repetitive or complex tasks - basically if I have to do something more than twice then I'll probably write a quick program to do it for me (sometimes taking longer than the repetitive task would have done, but I have a lot more fun along the way :-) ).  These little programs are throwaway pieces of code.  I'll probably never run them more than once - I'll almost certainly never come back to them and I'm certain that no-one else will see them.

I find it interesting what language people choose to write these little disposal programs with - I call it your "Pocket Knife Language".  Currently I would usually use C#, despite that fact that I code all day in Java.  I would normally use C# just because it is that much easier to access the bits of the operating system I normally run on (Windows) - but there are a huge number of libraries and methods in the .NET framework to do the heavy lifting for me.  Jumping between C# and Java is pretty easy for my brain to cope with.

But It's not always been like this for me.  I guess my first pocket knife language was probably Excel and then I quickly moved on to Visual Basic.  I stayed with VB for a while. At the time I was earning a living writing mainframe code - anything that requires you to write a 30 line program (in JCL) to just compile and run your code is not suitable for inclusion in anyone's coding pocket knife :-)  In my professional career I then moved into web development, it was around this time that Java started to appear on the scene and I moved into J2EE work and at some point, I'm not quite sure when, I started using Java as my pocket knife language.  I went through a brief spell when I was doing a lot of front end web development that I dispensed with IDE's and compilers completely and JavaScript and the DOM actually became my pocket knife of first choice.  However I quickly saw the light.  Once I started working on .NET projects professionally it didn't take me long to move to C# as my pocket knife language and it has stuck there for a few years now despite moving back to Java on the professional front.

I was having a chat at the weekend with a friend of mine who is currently doing some very clever and complex work down at a pretty low level which requires him to be coding in C++ all day long - however I found it interesting that he was using Java as his pocket knife language.  Other people I work with would use Perl or Python as theirs.

So, dear reader, what is your pocket knife language and why?

<rant>Sigh.  Apple are really starting to get on my nerves.  Not only is iTunes on Windows consistently very buggy, slow and foreign looking in the Windows OS - they are now trying to trick Windows users into installing Safari.  On this particular machine I have never installed Safari, and I never want to.  At first I thought the offering of Safari via Apple Update (as a default option) was just a mistake, I figured out how to tell the installer to ignore the update and moved on.  The second time I gave them the benefit of the doubt - but here they are again.  Today I got the following fantastic message from Apple Update.  "WhichDescription()" indeed.  Gives you a wonderful feeling that they've spent a lot of time on this one.  So from today - Apple update is now disabled on my machine and will stay that way until Apple trick me into switching it back on again.

This is incredibly bad form and reminds me of all the rubbish that Real software used to get up to when they were still relevant.  The worse thing is that it will condition people to disable updaters when we live in a time that I would prefer people kept their systems up to date and patched.  I know that people will have said this in other places and in better ways - but if Microsoft pulled this sort of trick, just imagine the reaction.  This kind of move feels like one of desperation or arrogance - possibly both.</rant>

Apologies for the rant - normally I keep this sort of thing off my blog but this one really annoyed me.

This morning while I was preparing for a customer demo that I'll be doing over LiveMeeting later today, my DSL connection stopped working.  I have a reasonably complicated home office network arrangement - but it is most often my VPN connection or my unmanaged gigabit switch that are the problem. This morning however, my DSL was down.  Not a surprise to a lot of people, but I am with Nildram and this sort of thing hardly ever happens (BTW - I cannot say enough good things about Nildram as a broadband provider).

Anyway, I was kinda connected (the LCP was allowed to come up - whatever that means, and the ADSL light was green on the router), but I wasn't able to get my IP address or anything.  I have a static IP for my DSL connection so that is a little unusual.  While the demo is over 10 hours away, it still focuses the mind a little - I may have to change my plans for the day and fall back to my "disaster recovery office" (the spare room in my mother-in-law's house) if I'm not going to be able to get connected to the LiveMeeting from my home office.

So I began to try and resolve the situation.  Hmm, I wonder what "LCP was allowed to come up" means? I thought to myself.  I know - I'll check Google.  D'oh.   Hmm - how do I gel hold of Nildram customer services? I know I'll look up the phone number on their website and give them a call.  D'oh.  In the end, I fired up the browser on my mobile phone because my brain just didn't seem to know what to do without an Internet connection to refer to.  I found the number of customer support (which is open 24x7) and started to dial (on my cell phone, after having first picked up my VoIP phone to wonder why there was no dial tone...).  The moment I did that the DSL connection popped back into life (spooky - are they that good?).  Panic over - I guess some maintenance or something was going on somewhere - it was 6.30 am and it only lasted 15 minutes or so - nothing worth worrying about really.

However, It did remind me of the stupid things I do when the electricity goes out - constantly forgetting that with the TV not working I cannot switch on a light and read either.  Do I really take always available internet for granted as much as I take always available electricity for granted now-a-days?  Very strange - I know, I'll blog about that...

I'm joining my good friend Brian Randell to do a session on Team Build 2008 at TechEd Developers in Barcelona on November 8th.  If you are at TechEd then please do come along - it is shaping up to be a fun talk.  If you can't make it to the talk, then I'll be loitering around the Team System Ask The Experts area during other times.  Feel free to drop me a line if you want to meet up.

TLA316 Code It and Ship It with Team Build 2008
Brian Randell , Martin Woodward

This session covers how to define an end-to-end build process using Team System and Team Build 2008. First you'll learn what's new and changed from Team Build 2005. You'll learn how to manage the build, do desktop builds, and how you can setup Team Build to work in a continuous integration environment. You'll then learn how to customize the build process to perform all your build steps including running unit tests, creating custom build actions, generating setup programs and deploying to staging servers. Finally, you'll get a crash course in the new managed API for working with Team Build 2008.

Thu Nov 8 09:00 - 10:15 Room 115

An odd smirk followed by "You come here a lot" is not what you want to hear when at the customs desk waiting to come into the US.  Immediately I expected the worst - an armed SWAT team absailing from the ceiling to lead me off into a quiet room for interrogation while the snapping sounds of latex gloves ricochet out of the distant bowels of the customs hall.

When travelling for work, you get asked some interesting and always flummoxing questions on your way in to a country - one particular favorite appears to be "When did you last come to the United States", the other more boring question is "what is the purpose of your visit to the United States, Business? - what kind of business?".  After 8 hours sat on a plane cursing myself for choosing chicken over beef again - the questions at customs always seem to throw me.  So much so that as I stand in line for hours waiting to have questions fired at me by the seriously grumpy immigration official, I prepare answers to all the questions I have had before so that I don't freeze during my passport stamping/fingerprinting session.

However, this particular incident did not start well.  The person in front of me was obviously not familiar with customs procedures and had even more difficulty than me in coming up with plausible answers to strangely suprising questions.  Then I made matters worse because I waited to be called. Usually not waiting to be called is a shoutable offence. But in this particular case, unbeknown to me, I was expected to go forwards without being called.  In the end I got shouted at for my hesitation - not a good start.

Then came the swipe of the passport and some tapping at the computer followed by an evil smirk and the words "you come here a lot."  I was expecting a question - this was clearly a statement of fact.  The lack of a question mark left me in a spin - should I respond to a statement?  What was that visible (if fleeting) display of emotion all about? - I'd never seen such a brazen display of humanity at the customs booth before.  This was clearly an un-usual encounter and it clearly wasn't going to end well.

The official simply said "I did you the last 3 times".  He didn't bother asking any questions - he just stamped my passport, performed the fingerprinting/photo taking dance without another word (though when I knew to swap fingers and then look at the camera at the correct time it raised another smile).  He then sent me on my way.  As I look at my passport now I can see that of the 12 US entrance stamps in my couple-year-old passport, his writing is on 7 of them. 

However, the encounter left me stunned - this was almost a conversation (albeit a little one-sided).  As I left the customs hall I nearly thought of a clever response but by then the opportunity had been lost.

At least I have a new scenario to mull over for the next time I find myself waiting hours to get through customs.

At 4pm the floor of TechEd 2007 closed and I headed straight off to Cocoa Beach to find a spot to watch the Shuttle launch.  It was great driving along the roads, past all the people parked up on the side of the road. Obviously the traffic was pretty bad, but better than I expected.  We arrived just after 7pm and found a perfect spot on the beach in fantastic weather.  The sight and sounds of the actual launch were incredible, especially the belly rumbling thunder of the sonic boom and the cheers of joy from all the people massed onto the beach.  The most unexpected thing was the cloud left by the launch trail - a truly beautiful sight.  Photo's of the launch are up on Flikr and video available on YouTube.

Last night I had the privilege of being invited to a party hosted by the good folks running the Visual Studio Industry Partner program that Teamprise is a member of.  The venue was the perfect place to host a party for nerds - they hired out the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center.  I have wanted to visit the space center since I was a child so this was a great moment for me. They even allowed us in to the IMAX theater to watch the Space Station movie in 3D, and all the soda and popcorn was also included - fantastic.  As well as looking at rockets, there is a nice little museum attached to the conference center.  Thanks to everyone at VSIP for organizing the event - especially Laura and Joe. I've posted a set of the photos if you are interested.

It's been a busy day today getting setup.  Started over at the Teamprise Booth getting the stand backdrop and the various machines set up (without any exploding this time which is a bonus).  Then headed back to the hotel for 5 minutes to drop off my TechEd bag with all the associated swag.  If you are interested, the bag is better quality than last years, but the pen is not as good - a compromise that works for me.  After dropping off the swag, I headed back into the conference center to attend the staff orientation, get the VSTS TLC machine set up with Orcas Beta 1 of Team Foundation Server finishing up at about 6pm - enough time to get changed for the TechEd Edition of Party with Palermo.

I enjoyed myself immensely - possibly a little too much judging by how I am feeling now.  The Team System folks all ended up in a big group catching up on the gossip - and they are always a bad influence on me ;-)

Tomorrow (well today now I guess) is the big keynote and then I'll be hanging around the Teamprise booth during the exhibition hours.  Drop by if you are around.

I don't travel as much as I used to, but there are some things about a hotel that caters to business travelers that they should get right.  Forget about your fancy shmancy decor and strange taps that take you 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on, I'm talking basics here.  Here is my list of things that a hotel should get right:-

1. Internet access that does not suck, and is free.  You'd think that paying $12.95 per day would give you a decent internet connection wouldn't you - well apparently not.
2. An iron and ironing board in your room.  If I've traveled halfway across the world, then the odds are that my shirts are going to need a little bit of a press in the morning.  I do not want to have to call down to housekeeping for an iron and ironing board to take 30 minutes to arrive when I am already late.  I have a funny anecdote about ironing shirts in hotels that I'll share with you sometime - feel free to ask me about it if you see me.
3. A good shower.  One that you has a gradual range of settings from hot to cold, trickle all the way up to water cannon.  Pressure and temperature controls should not be binary in operation.
4. An alarm clock. When I wake up in the middle of the night with jetlag, it would be great to be able to look up at a clock to tell the time without switching a light on.
5. Air conditioning.  Any air conditioning system that is used should not sound like a 777 taking off.
6. A light switch by the door.  This seems to be something that American hotels have trouble with in particular.  I'd light to flick a switch by the door that switches a majority of the lights on.  I don't want to go fumbling around in the dark to figure out how to switch on all the lamps individually - what is it with that twisty thing on American light fittings?
7. Plenty of spare plug sockets.  I want to be able to plug in my laptop and possibly charge my cell phone at the same time without having to move furniture.
8. Hangers in a wardrobe.  More than 2 hangers please.  Real hangers are the best, but if you have to use those weird anti-theft ones then fine - but I might steal those just to make a point.
9. Curtains that shut in the middle.  In the precious few hours I get in my room I would love a bit of sleep - blocking the light out would help me a lot.
10. Noise insulation.  If the couple in the room next door is having a noisy argument (or worse, the couple next door are having a noisy something else) then I really don't want to hear it - especially when I've met the elderly and somewhat large couple occupying the room and so am unable to block the disturbing mental images from my mind.

Note that there is nothing fancy here.  Yet you frequently find hotels that consider themselves a bit more upmarket often get the basics totally wrong.  I've tried to be restrained with the nice things that actually make me smile.  Things like big fluffy towels, proper duvets, nice decor, alarm clocks than include an iPod dock, and friendly and helpful staff - those would all be a bonus.

Sorry for the rant - I love the work I do and I am very privileged to get to travel around talking to people about interesting stuff, I'm just tired and grumpy (possibly because my current hotel scores 2.5/10 in this list ;-)

I am currently sat in sunny Newark having sped through immigration in record time (there wasn't a single person in front of me in the queue - the first time that has ever happened. For anyone that it interested, I've fallen back into my Chicken rut. 

Anyway, I'm on my way to TechEd in Orlando.  This year I'll be working at the Team System TLC (Technical Learning Center) as well as hanging around the Teamprise booth (#1333 near the massage area apparently) - do pop by and say "Hi" if you are around or at any of the various parties etc.

Update: Woot!  I've just had an email telling me that I've been bumped to First for my Newark to Orlando segment.  Sweet.

Good news World's Smallest TFS Proxy fans.  At 11:10 this morning, the friendly man from Dell appeared at my door with a new motherboard flown in from Holland this morning.  With-in twenty minutes he had the motherboards swapped out and we plugged the SX270 in to hear that familiar whirr of the fans as it came back to life.

Now, I know that Dell customer support has been getting a lot of stick lately - but I have to say that I've been left seriously impressed.  Exactly 24-hours after reporting a problem with an old, out of warranty, machine I'd bought from their Dell Outlet store (which sells returned machines at a discount), I had a brand new motherboard and was back up an running.  Can't ask for more than that.

More importantly, the World's Smallest TFS Proxy Server lives again, hopefully to put in a few more years tireless service in my garage.

This morning we had a power cut which killed a particular tricky upgrade mid-way through trashing the machine I was attempting it on.  Luckily the machine in question was a VM Ware image and I had recent taken a backup snap-shot so I only lost a few hours work.

When the power returned I went out to the (now infamous) garage to switch on the machine I have running out there that acts as a VPN Gateway, TFS Proxy (the world's smallest) and Build Mirror which allows my network to seamlessly be part of the main Teamprise network. 

However it would not boot.  Being the technical minded English guy that I am, I unplugged the computer, went back inside and made myself a cup of tea in the hope that it would magically fix itself.

When I returned, I discovered that usually foolproof trick of simply ignoring the problem had let me down and it was going to be much messier than that.  I brought the machine into my office, opened it up and instantly saw the problem - a set of rather sick looking capacitors on my motherboard.

At this point, I figured I was just going to have to get a new machine.  Having recently got a fancy new workstation, I was not looking forward to breaking this news to my boss.  I hopped onto the Internet to see what the cheapest machine I could get was when I discovered that this was a reasonably well known problem with my Dell SX270 motherboard, and better yet Dell was doing an out-of-warranty repair program to fix them.

I gave Dell a call fully expecting to get the brush off, but after about 5 minutes talking to 3 people around the globe, I got through to a chap who has arranged for an engineer to come to the office tomorrow and replace the motherboard - free of charge.

This is a much abused and unloved machine that has been running more-or-less 24 hours a day since I bought it several years ago. Just as it was about to go to the great landfill in the sky, it sounds like it is going to get a new lease of life.  Sounds to good to be true - I'll let you know how the appointment with the Dell Engineer goes tomorrow.

On Saturday night I took a look out my kitchen window and was met with this view of the Moon and Venus.  I took a quick snap-shot with my very basic Casio Exilim 1050, but I'm sure you'll be able to find many more professional photos around the internet by now.

Sigh.  Why do I only experience travel delays when I am coming home and never on the outbound journey?  Last night, my first plane from New York to Belfast suffered a hydraulics failure.  Luckily they had a spare airplane lying around that they then got cleaned up, filled up with gas etc and let us on.  Amazingly after all the messing around in New York I landed only 3 hours late.  Just arrived home to find that my wife has gone out and locked me out the house, so I'm now sat in my garage feeling sorry for myself.

At least I have great WiFi reception out here in the garage - and to think I got mocked for rigging network sockets, UPS and a WAP out here.  Admittedly this wasn't the exact scenario I had in mind at the time I got the networking done, but still.

This is a follow-up to a post I made over a year ago.  I'm popping over to the US for a couple of days this week and I am currently sat in Newark airport with the New York skyline out one window, and Ikea out the other.  Since making that post, I must have been back to the US 7 or 8 times and flown on a few dozen flights with several different carriers.  On the flight over this morning, I finally broke with form and actually went for the beef option.  Crazy times :-)

While failing to get to sleep on the way over, I also listened to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Future series for the first times in a couple of years.  Considering this was broadcast in 2001, it amazing how much of this stuff has appeared as part of the Web 2.0 bubble - and how much of it is still yet to appear.  Anyway, even if you are not a fan of the (much missed) Douglas Adams, I encourage you to take a listen.

Right then, I promise that this is the last post I'll make on such an inane topic.  If I had a cat, I'd include some pictures of it just to get that out of my system.

I'm safely back from a fantastic week at the MVP Summit in Seattle / Redmond.  The week itself was very enjoyable and packed with tons of useful information - thanks to Noah and the VSTS team for being our hosts for the week.  While I knew several of my fellow Team System MVP's from previous brief meetings, I've come away from the week with several new friends.  For some photos of the event see Noah's and Willy blogs.

My journey home was nothing short of epic due to some weather difficulties in the New York area over St Patrick's day weekend.  It was one of those journeys that will go down in the Woodward Chronicles of Nightmare Travel Experiences (that always seem to happen on my way home - never on my way to an event).  Now that I have caught up on my sleep, the journey was actually quite funny and (believe it or not) a little bit life changing.  I've just had a phone call to let me know that my checked baggage is on a Taxi ride to my house at the moment as it took an independent route across the world to the one I chose but amazingly seems to have made it into the same country only a couple of days after I did.

Over the next few months I'm going to be doing a bit of traveling to the US again, and this offer could not have come at a better time - free TMobile access from my Windows Vista Laptop - sweet!  I'll post back when I have been through the sign-up process to see what validation it does of your Vista running status, I hope for their sakes that it is a little more than a User-Agent check...

Update: Sadly for them, they are simply doing a user-agent check. This offer may run out pretty quickly so sign up now if you can...

I'd been seeing this for a while now, the game of Blogtag has been running riot over the internet.  Blog memes are kinda like the blog equivalent of a chain letter or a pyramid marketing scheme but very slightly less dumb and hopefully have more positive consequences.  Goodness know what it does to the Google pagerank algorithm.  Anyway, last night I was tagged by Eric so here goes mine...

1. I used to compete in county cross-country championships for my school
2. I once spent a summer working as "Temporary Brand Marketing Secretary" for Reebok UK, dealing with everything from letters from school kids wanting free posters to sponsored athletes wanting free shoes to directors of football clubs (wanting significantly more) through to making cups of tea and coffee and doing the typing of 5 demanding marketing managers
3. I am a qualified fork lift truck driver
4. I have a bachelors degree in Physics from the world renowned Physics Department of the University of Durham.  My final year research projects included measuring the proper motion of nearby stars using data from my own observations and data from the Hubble Space Telescope.  My final year was also spent designing and building a magnetic field imaging device - after building the hardware and controlling electronics, I wrote the controlling and imaging software in QuickBASIC because Windows 3.1 based development environments (such as Visual Basic) didn't have any good way of directly driving the parallel and serial interfaces of the computer at the time without delving into the device driver level which was (and still is) well beyond my programming skills.  In my spare time, I was the manager of the St Chad's College JCR Bar and also set up the initial versions of the college and JCR web sites that are still used to this day (but have been totally re-written thank goodness).
5. Despite appearances, I do not like pies.

On to the fun part - picking 5 more people to tag.  I choose Rob Caron, Lorenzo Barbieri, Rob Burke, Buck Hodges and James Manning.  Let's see how many of them actually read my blog.

Update:  I was later tagged by Jay Flowers, so I'll allow this post to act as a bridge between two branches of the same meme.  At some point I might map all the links out into a pretty "5 Things" picture, but if I do you'll know I've far too much time on my hands...

I'm back home from sunny Barcelona, and just wanted to post a quick note to thank all the folks who stopped by.  It was great to meet some old friends again, and also to make some new ones.

The week went very well after such an inauspicious start.  After my power-supply incident, I went out for some lovely tapas and drinks at the MVP dinner, however I must have caught something or eaten a dodgy prawn as I woke in the night and was violently ill.   I stumbled into the conference centre for a full day at the booth on only 2 hours sleep - sorry if you came to speak to me on Tuesday...

After that things went really well.  I noticed a huge difference in Team Foundation Server awareness from previous shows.  Conversations typically used to be like this:-

Person:  Oooh, a that's a nice shiney Mac - what's that doing at a Microsft show?
Me:  Have you heard of Team System?
Person: Eh?

Now it is more along the lines of:-

Person:  Oooh, that's a nice shiney Mac, what's it's Windows Vista Experience Index?
Me:  Have you heard of Team System?
Person: Duh, of course - we've been running TFS for a while now.

Needless to say, there were a lot more people immediately interested in not only our product but also some people who just wanted to see something they had heard about actually working in the flesh.  While the demo on Windows is always pretty interesting, with the resounding sentiment being "it looks just the same".  On the Mac, the same things just look too good to actually be true.  A year on, I still love talking to Team Foundation Server from the Mac, it just shouldn't work as well as it does - kinda feels naughty.  Fellow Team System MVP Lorenzo Barbieri did a great write-up from the conference floor on his impressions of the Mac client.

Anyway, back to work and we are all heads down putting the finishing touches to V2.0.  I'm looking forward to blogging some more about that soon :-)

I've been having one of those days today.  It's setup day at TechEd Developers and I'm down at the Teamprise Booth.  Still not really ready as the pedestal that we've got turned out to be far too big and we're swapping it for a couple of smaller ones.  Hopefully everything will be ok for 10.00 tomorrow when the exhibition floor opens to delegates.

The personal highlight of my day was when I plugged in the brand new demo computer, freshly shipped from the states.  There was a very loud bang with a nice puff of blue smoke coming from the back of the computer - leading me to see the big notice on the back of it saying "Read instructions before connecting to supply".  Turns out that the power supply wasn't auto switching and I should have removed a sticker on the back and switched to 230 VAC.  Dope. 

There then followed an interesting conversation with a guy at the local PC City in my extremely poor Spanish.  Mind you - turning up with a smoking power supply in my hand helped get the message across.

Anyway, power supply works a treat (reminder to self, this one is 230 VAC only so shouldn't be plugged in back in the states without a new power supply being installed)...