Day 03 – What does you day job involve?

Going to work.

I work in a small team with Telecom NZ to build typically .NET based web applications to replace Access and Excel used internally by different business units within Telecom NZ.

I also develop and support a number of Excel macros and .NET desktop applications that interface with a terminal client to automate processes that transact against a terminal based application running within said client.

So my daily job typically involves building applications from end-to-end – from design to test to implementation and deployment, and to on-going support.  I am typically involved in every step of application development.

I design solutions.  I estimate the time and cost involved.  I build and test the application.  I deploy and handle the change requests and the manage incidents raised concerning faults with the applications I support.

Not all incidences are faults!

I also help steer my team towards best practices of development and selecting technologies that help us deliver better products for our customers.  In addition to this I also find tools and utilities to help me and my team mates to be more productive.  I either find something useful already fit for purpose, or write my tools or helpers to make life just that little bit easier.

It is a job I love and I cannot imagine doing anything else.

Day 02 – Preferred programming language?

This is an ever-shifting line.

I currently prefer VB.NET but mainly because my last two jobs spanning six years basically dictated that choice.  But as time goes on I am starting to lean towards C#.

Of course VB.NET wasn’t always my preferred choice.  Previously, I worked predominantly in Java which I enjoyed and it helped that it was free and they were some very good IDEs for it that were free.

VB.NET is not the only language I work with.  The nature of the line of work that I’m in means that I’m versed in a number of different languages.  My main focus is web development so that means I work with HTML and JavaScript, and every application I work on has a database behind it so then there is also T-SQL in the mix.

So as time moves on, technology will advanced and my preferences will change.  I’ll most likely end up in C# some day as all the cool geeks seems to prefer it.  But maybe I’ll stick to my preference and not conform to most others in the .NET environment. 

Perhaps VB.NET is actually more geeky because it isn’t the perceived norm.  Wouldn’t that be a laugh!

Day 01 – Why do you consider yourself a geek?

I think therefore I am… a geek!

I look at the entry for Geek on Wikipedia to see what it has listed there.  This act is possibly a hint towards me being a geek all by itself but does reveal a number of definitions that I identify with.

Interests in technology and computing are apparently good indications of being a Geek.

My earliest recollections of being interested in computers was what was once called Standard 3 or 4, I don’t know what “Grade” they call it nowadays but I was about 9 or 10 years old – nearly 30 years ago.

Somehow I discovered computers and computer programming.  I do not remember how, but I began to read programming books.  Generally I think they tended to be aimed a teaching kids about computers and to program, but sometimes it would be quite serious textbooks.  I do not recall how much I understood, as most of it was pretty much way over my head at the time.

Also around this time, various stores in the neighbour mall had the latest computers on display.  The Commodore 64 being one of the most common on display with actually games running and available to try out.  I recall one game was some text based adventure game, and another was some white on black vector based shooter something like Asteroids.  I do not remember their names but I did spend a lot of time in those stores.

Then one day one store had an Acorn Electron computer on display but it wasn’t running any games, it only had its basic operating system available.  The best thing was I also had access to a programming book from the library on this very same machine and so I spent many an hour at this store copying in the programs I found in this book and seeing what they do – and I loved it.

It was a very sad day when the store eventually removed the computer from the bench they had it on display.

Why I did not grow up to found Microsoft or Google, I do not know but this was when I took my first steps towards Geekdom.

30 Days of Geek – Starting April 1st 2011

It seems I’ve been conned into participating in this challenge.  Thanks @NZCoderGuy, @JamesHip and @CyrisXD!

It is going to be hard.  I have a terrible habit of procrastinating like there is lots of tomorrows.  So trying to post something everyday is going to be very, very, very hard.

So, I’ll give it my best shot and will hopefully be able to keep up with the schedule below.

Day 01 – Why do you consider yourself a geek?
Day 02 – Preferred programming language?
Day 03 – What does your day job involve?
Day 04 – Greatest application written to date.
Day 05 – Quick nifty hacks you’re proud of
Day 06 – Primary geek fuel (snacks/drinks)
Day 07 – Preferred smartphone platform. And which do you use?
Day 08 – Preferred method of communication with humans
Day 09 – What OS/distribution do you run?
Day 10 – Picture, screenshot and specifications of your primary computer.
Day 11 – Favourite hacking environment – music, light, seating, etc
Day 12 – What area do you want to expand your skills into?
Day 13 – How did you become such a geek? Career? Personal interest?
Day 14 – Favourite computer conference?
Day 15 – Earliest geek experience
Day 16 – First computer you’ve ever owned & your favourite ever.
Day 17 – Post a useful HOWTO to solve a challenge you’ve come across recently.
Day 18 – Most cringe-worthy geek moment
Day 19 – Most hated computing environment.
Day 20 – Where do you stand on Internet Censorship?
Day 21 – Favourite thing & worst things about working in IT?
Day 22 – Release some software under an open source license that you haven’t released before.
Day 23 – Post a review of an application that you use.
Day 24 – How do you feel about Open Source vs Proprietary software?
Day 25 – Microsoft – friend, foe or other?
Day 26 – Apple – friend, foe or other?
Day 27 – Fix a bug in some open source software and commit the patch
Day 28 – How many computers lying about the house?
Day 29 – Looking back (at geek life), would you have done anything differently?
Day 30 – Where do you see technology advancing in the next 20 years – and where will you fit in?

It’s a Wonderful Life

One week ago my beautiful wife gave me a son.

Actually it was more like a surgeon removed my son from my beautiful wife, handed him to a paediatrician who cleaned him up, I ceremoniously cut the cord and then the paediatrician handed me my son and I presented him to my beautiful wife.  But that description seems a little less romantic.

Either way, we now have a complete family with the addition of Dean Patrick Harris, born on 22nd September at 3:34pm New Zealand time.  One whole week after his sister Serenity had her first birthday.

He weighed in at a very reasonable 4kg (8lb 15).  The odd thing is he is taller than his big sister, but his feet are a little smaller.  Though his toes do seem almost freakishly long.  You can find some pictures on www.facebook.com/blackmael/photos.

This time we ended up opting for an elective caesarean section.  As such, it was quite a different experience from Serenity’s emergency c-section.  Last year, after a 19 hour labour, rushing into theatre after being up all night was much more surreal. 

So tired.  So emotional, So stressed,

The whole procedure went by in such a blur.  You barely had time to think.  And I had the easy part.

This time around you noticed everything.

My wife noticed everything.

Last year, she was so tired the surgeon had difficulty keeping her awake enough to confirm if the epidural was working sufficiently to continue with the procedure.

Being fully aware of what was going on has a significant downside.  Of course for both Dean and Serenity, the main action was hidden from us behind a curtain.  But this year we had time to hear everything and the procedure sounded very different from what we remembered from last year.

The most noticeable sound was an awful lot of snipping.  A serious amount of snipping.  I don’t remember any snipping from last time.

Then there is the physical tugging and pulling.  I cannot imagine how that felt.  Dean is a longer than the average baby and it seemed the surgeon and her assistant had a little difficulty even pulling Dean out.

Eventually Dean was pulled from his warm home of nine months and was quickly presented to his parents over the top of the surgical curtain.  Suddenly it was all worth it.

All the pain and discomfort of pregnancy and surgery was instantly cast aside once we met our baby boy for the first time.

No more fears.  No more anxiety.  No more stress.

At least until the euphoria of child birth was worn off and we then have the fears, the anxiety, the stress of raising and caring for two children…

Email Attachments

Today I spend just a little too long trying to attach a in-memory Excel 2007 spreadsheet to an email.

I have recently started using ExtremeML to create Excel documents and today I attempted to go a step further and use the in-memory instance of the generated document as an attachment for an email.

It seemed straight forward, create a MemoryStream object and pass it to the routine in ExtremeML to fill it with the Excel document.  Then add the MemoryStream object to the MailAttachments property of the Message object and Send!  How easy can that be…

Well, I receieved the email, the attachment was there but it was empty!

Actually, Outlook was stating it was stating the attachment was 386B but when I saved the attachment to my desktop, it was actually zero bytes.  I can only assume that Outlook is reporting the size the attachment is taking up in respect to being embedding in the raw email body.

Anyhoo, I am left scratching my head for ages.  I can swap the MemoryStream for a FileStream and it successfully saves the file.  But if I use a MemoryStream it suddenly forgets the data.  I can check the stream before it attaches it to the mail message and it seems to contain data.  And then I realise…

The stream has just been written to, the pointer within the stream is pointing to the end of the stream!

   1:  attachmentStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

Is all I had to do before attaching the stream as a attachment.

I fire up the test app and I dutifully receive the email with a fully populated attachment.

I win!

Lufthansa Virtual Pilot

Not sure how good or bad this is but I seemed to be doing reasonably well for making mostly guestimates.