101010 it’s a binary number and it’s a date. And it’s 101010 days away.
That’s right, folks, 42 Day is 42 days away!
According to The Register, Microsoft dropped themselves in a bit of bother after booking the Meter Maids to appear at its TechEd conference on Australia’s Gold Coast.
Some of the 2,700 attendees at the event grumbled that the half-naked ladies’ presence objectified women. One of the key talks at the conference had been a discussion about getting more women to join the IT industry.
Microsoft initially claimed that they had somehow managed to book the Meter Maids without actually looking at their website and that they had no idea what the beach beauties would be wearing until the day of the conference. Which brings me to my favourite part of this article:
But Microsoft’s decision to claim innocence about the booking has angered chief Meter Maid Roberta Aitchison.
She told the SMH that Microsoft in fact chose what outfits the women should wear at the event.
“The garments were chosen specifically by them over a period of two to three weeks of them looking at photographs of the girls,” she claimed.
So someone at Microsoft was being paid to spend two to three weeks looking at photos of scantily clad women. Nice work if you can get it.
If you spend any time developing RPG applications you will find that, sooner or later, you will need to debug a program that runs in batch. There are a few steps that you need to take in order to do this and, because my memory is terrible, I’m putting them here.
- Know what job queue your job is being submitted to. Hold this job queue.
- Submit your job.
- Your job is now sitting on the held job queue waiting to be released. Display the job and make a note of the user name, job name and number.
- Start a service job using
STRSRVJOBentering the name, job name and number from the previous step. STRDBG PGM(ProgramName). You can’t enter any breakpoints yet, so hit F12 to exit the source display- Release the job queue
- The Start Serviced Job screen will be displayed asking you to press F10 to enter debug commands for the job. Press F10.
DSPMODSRCand enter your breakpoints.- Press F12 to resume and F3 to return to the Start Serviced Job screen.
- Press Enter to start your job.
The job will now begin running and will stop, passing control back to your screen, when the first breakpoint is reached.
Python is a remarkably effective scripting language – it’s easy to read and understand yet surprisingly powerful. As such, it is something I often turn to when I need to knock together a quick script on my home PC.
It runs on most platforms including, it turns out, the IBM i. iSeriesPython was ported to the IBM i by Per Gummedal.
Now I just need to find an excuse to install it.
Until recently, my microblogging client of choice has been Gwibber. When it was first released, Gwibber was fast, stable and – most importantly – allowed me to follow multiple streams from the same window. But time moves on and Gwibber has become increasingly bloated and, frankly, a lot less stable than it should be.
So now I’m giving Pino a whirl. It’s not in the Ubuntu repositories yet, but it can be grabbed from the Vala team PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:troorl/pino
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pino
I’m impressed so far. Pino is fast and light and the only problems I’ve encountered so far can be put down to the fact that Twitter is being unbelievably unresponsive – again.
It would be nice, however, if I could follow both streams in the same window.
According to Computer Weekly, Brits waste millions on idle mobile phone apps. The report claims that UK smart-phone users spend 747 million on applications that are used once and then forgotten about.
The report quotes Mark Pearson, managing director of MyVoucherCodes, the site that carried out the study that came up with the numbers:
As cool as having an application that turns your handset into a light sabre is, think about whether you are going to be using it beyond the initial download – if not, it is probably money that has not been particularly well spent.
An app that turns your phone into a lightsabre is like insurance. You would hope not to need it, but it would be invaluable if you ever do run into a Sith lord.
Re-use rather than recycling is greenest IT strategy
In other news, reseachers have confirmed that the Pope is almost certainly a Catholic and Bears generally defecate in the woods.
To be fair, I didn’t know the numbers…
For IT specifically, the environmental payback for recycling is small, as the vast majority of energy use is expended during the production, rather than the use phase – 80% and 20% respectively.
… but continuing to use a perfectly good PC is clearly going to cost less than melting it down.
I’m posting this as a reminder to myself to go and take a look at iDevCloud.com when it finally goes live.
In the next few days or weeks, you will be able to go to www.idevcloud.com and sign up to get access to a range of IBM and Zend development tools and compilers, as well as a System i Model 525 server running i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1 and 7.1 to run against. The library of tools available to iDevCloud subscribers will include:
- the Eclipse-based Rational Developer for Power Systems Software (formerly RDi and WDSC)
- Rational Development Studio for i compilers
- Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Java tools
- Rational Team Concert for Power change management system
- HATS
- Rational Open Access: RPG Edition
- System i Navigator
- Zend Technology‘s flagship Zend Server 5.0 for IBM i development environment
- and everything else IBM makes available through its Academic Initiative.
It’s not cheap – $50/month touse a shared library – but the opportunity to play around with the latest and greatest technologies is certainly tempting. If I had more free time, of course, the cost would be less of a barrier for me so I shall keep an eye on this and see just how many hours a month I can find to poke around with PHP on the i when it finally goes live.
Brian Blessed lends his tongue to TomTom
Brian Blessed will become the new sound of satnav this October after a Facebook group of 25,000 showed support.
After Mancunian motorist Richard Gardner started a Facebook group called Campaign to get Brian Blessed to do a voice-over for my sat nav, TomTom said that they would negotiate with Brian Blessed if the group reached 25,000 supporters. Richard approached The Bearded One, who agreed to film a campaign video and lend his voice.
Now, with the group in excess of 25,800 members, TomTom has confirmed Brian’s voice will be used in satnavs from October.
Drive, My Hawkmen, Drive!
