sutton050

Announcement time, I'm unemployed... Yes, as of the 28th December 2018 I have not been gainfully employed.  But fear not, I am starting my new job on Wednesday 2nd January. I've covered this in a nattering brief on my YouTube, which I now link, but stick with this post for more information. I've never really spoken directly about the job I've had and how its evolved over the years I've been with it, so I was at that role for 14 years.  That's a very long time, especially in today's markets, but as you all know I keep myself busy and informed on these very pages. I did work in what's euphemistically called "the pay to play industry", this is the gambling industry to the rest of the world, but saying that I didn't write the actual games.  I was a systems engineer, so I wrote software which drove the money accepting and paying hardware, and especially software which worked to store the current state of a machine, avoid frauds, count, collate a...

Its the day after THE day we wait for all year, yes today is Boxing Day and so yesterday was Christmas Day and I've had a fab day, thank you for asking!  Lots of food, a little drink, a fair amount of chocolate, a home made cheese cake to die for and about an hour in the freezing air enjoying the hot tub with all the bubbles on... Hands down has to rate as one of the Best Christmas Days for me ever... and I hope yours were all as good. Now, I know you're all asking, why have I been so quite on the old blog and YouTube Channel?  Well, you know moving house completely threw things off, but also, in case you missed this news, I'm changing jobs. Yes, after 14 years I'm leaving where I've been and I'm going to be doing something else.  Quite what I can't tell you very much about, probably for a fair while.  But what I can tell you is, I start the new role on the 2nd January, the team I have been assigned to is brand new and we travel to the US in mid-January to c...

Harping back to my prior post about learning to program, when I spoke at my old Uni, I spoke to a lovely trio of ladies, whom wanted to be programmer/computer folks... And one thing struck me, was how narrow their knowledge was. When they asked me how I got into programming and I explained that when I learned to program in the 1990's there was no github, indeed there was no internet, you could not just go and download a program or join an open source project.  If you wanted tool, and had no BBS dial up to find someone with something like it, you wrote your own. I wrote code to record kills in games on the Atari ST, I wrote text editors for the ST and DOS (EGA graphics FTW), I write 2D painting programs for DOS.... I distinctly remember my college tutor seeing my using DOS interrupt 11 to control the mouse and his saying "you're the first person I've seen work that out"... I didn't work it out by trial and error though, I worked it out by reading, about the DOS...

I am not on LinkedIn, there I said it... This seems to be something of a mystery to folks, why are you not on LinkedIn?  You should be on LinkedIn!  I'll send you a link to link up in LinkedIn... The problem is.... I don't want to me on LinkedIn.  I don't particularly engage with social media; I understand many many people do, I myself personally do not; facebook is extremely minimal for me, Google+ has a message from me saying I won't be using it; just because my YouTube account got forced to create one (and they did that automatically); and I only use twitter to complain to companies about poor service! Perhaps this is the problem, putting oneself on social media makes you immediately accessible, searchable, findable, but not always in the form nor forum you desire, being pulled from pillar to post. I've been reading a book by Neem James, essentially about how distracting life is and as a developer, I find the number of distractions I can recount moment on moment ...

Being English, specifically an avid supporter of English Football this week is extremely hard to bear, the hope, the wish, the fear the turbid mix on the street, wafting on the radio airwaves and in nearly every news report. I love English football, the agony, the pleasure, that moment the wife storms out the room declaring "I'm stopping watching this" only to see here peeping around the door-frame thirty seconds later. We love you England, we do. And I find a tear in my eye whenever I think back to that warm summer of '96 as here in Nottingham we saw the Turkish team play at the City Ground and the hurt that followed. I stand up to be counted.  I am English.  We are United.  We will play.  I hope they can win. But whatever the weekend brings, we still have our Lions, three of them, proud and loud. Hear Us Roar.

I've often asked this question "is it filmable", such as the age old argument that the Lord of the Rings was not filmable before Peter Jackson proved that theory wrong... Sort of (cough). So what don't I think is filmable?  Well, the Tom Clancy novel "Red Storm Rising". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Storm_Rising I really like this book, I read it every couple of years and get really engrossed in the concept of what a war in the Europe of my youth would have been actually like. Remember, I'm a kid who played on the beaches of Skegness (in the UK) when A10 Warthogs were flying low over the coastline in dummy strafing runs, we could find spent 50'cal bullets (metal and a stone line practice bullet too) from their activities and we read up avidly about the new to service Tornado jet. I have a vivid and expectant concept of that that war might have been, everything from blistering nuclear instant death, to a lingering radioactive malaise, to the starv...

As a technologist I've always been interested in the newest kit coming out, and many moons ago this exact demand for kit made me very mad. For you see, the previous year I'd built my first 2 ghz machine, and it was very costly.  Hyper threading was new to the market, at least in the Pentium 4 range.  And as usual I had need for more power from my machines. So I hit the interwebs and found a machine (on ebay I think) which was 2ghz... A nice CPU was mentioned in the specification... But the memory and graphics capability were lacking... I could make the difference up from my spares bin, so I took the dive ordering this machine as a base on which to work. It duely arrived, I plugged it in, and was dismayed to find it clocking only around 1.1 ghz.  Baffled, I check the advert, "Dual core 2 ghz chip" was definiately there, with the sub-note "exact type may vary, select Intel or AMD preference". Back to the machine it is dual core, but it is not 2 ghz, no where n...

A few of you maybe aware of the book on Python I wrote , and published, last year?  And I've had at least one reader get in touch for a second part.  Unfortunately my gaze has passed over Python and returned to where I live.  The world of C++. I have a particular problem with the C++ developers I'm meeting of late, they're either simply not C++ programmers, being an actual mix of good and bad C programmers or just not programmers at all (in one case).  Then even when they are very good C Programmers, there's been a mix of the up-take on ideas and feature benefits of modern C++ itself. Its to and for these fair folk I have begun to write about C++, a new book, based on my own real experience but tempered with where I believe teams and individuals are going wrong when converting their skills to modern C++. For the programmers reading here now, it starts with a chapter zero... Lets take a sneak-peek.... Chapter 0: Introducing C++ It is incredibly hard to introduce the C...

Seventy Three years ago, I know roughly where and what all four of my grand parents were doing... All were variously occupied fighting as part of the British effort of World War Two, I do not know whether they were aware of the cease fire or impending Victory in Europe, and indeed for one of my Grandfathers the war was not over; as he was aboard HMS Belfast, just refitting for redeployment to the far east and the on going war with the desperate but crumbling Empire of Japan. In this post, I'll cover what little I know, to share that nugget of who these people where and what they were doing.  So from oldest to youngest. We have my Nan, or Nanna, Kath.  She was a young woman by the end of the war, from a child at the out break, a hard beginning in life in the care system with both parents gone by wars end she was in the Land Army working the fields of Norfolk, though a native of London.  She was born in the shadow of Portobello Road, and to this day (despite living in Notti...

Just watching this travesty.... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44017172 What he fails to mention is that when everyone has a gun they hang out of casino hotel windows gunning down festival goers, kids kill kids in the hall ways of schools and colleges, that murder suicide is through the roof and you can be shot dead for as little as looking at someone in the wrong way. Donald Trump and especially the NRA have this attitude utterly and totally wrong, and I can't begin to express how god awful this man is. But then, let us remember, he is "leader" of a country where we report mass shootings as "the worse in" and insert very short amounts of time.  This however is glossed over in US reporting of this to it's citizens.  Where as we hear that Stephen Paddock killed 58 people, " the worst mass shooting in the US since 1991 ". The CNN version states " the deadliest mass shooting in modern US History ".... Define Modern Mr Trump and Ms CN...

A long time ago, in an office far away from where I now sit, I once worked with a chap I still refer to as the best programmer I've ever met. This was a guy who could take the whole code base, in Delphi, home and over a single weekend re-write it in Java. This was a guy who I saw, from scratch, write a C controller for an embedded PIC to capture an image from a supposedly incompatible TTL driven camera and then an analyzer for the captured images which would detect and show motion, making for our common employer their best ever selling product a cheap security motion detection system, which didn't rely on relatively expensive high resolution cameras. It was awe inspiring as a newly graduated programmer, whom had a huge background in DOS programming, but whom had never worked in Enterprise level development before. I sat next to what I still regard as near genius. This very same chap was also the worst programmer I've ever worked with. Because he was so highly functioning he...