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 have just ordered a mail redirection, as part of our move to the new house... And at the end the Royal Mail ask you a series of security questions to "confirm" your identity.... OH MY GOD They are the most scary things to see, they were asking me questions about old addressed (totally unrelated to the addresses being redirected) they ask about current accounts opened sixteen years ago, they ask about my previous mortgages outstanding balance... Really scary things, and if you get the questions wrong they tell you, they know the answers. This is the most scary thing... I could sit with a credit card, paying a fee (I admit) and putting in the personal data of other people I know and I could learn new secret private information about them, okay they asked me three four different previous addresses... Only one applied to me... But, if you cross referenced this you could build a big picture about people... I'm honestly scared by something so mundane having access to so much ...

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 ...

I listen to my local BBC radio station, not the national stations, just the local one.  I had this very channel inflicted on me when I was a child, and always thought the music choice was about 20 years out of date quite fuddy duddy. Anyway, I find myself now in middle age and can't help but stop and pause when a song I remember from my teens or twenties; songs which I think are awesomely cool I might add; come up on this very same radio station. I think the songs have aged well, it makes me want to continue listening to this channel which I so derided as a kid... And I can't help but think it makes me feel old. What would some young person of today think of my taste in music?

I have no idea why you can hear my breathing so loud on cam... I promise I don't walk around wheezing... at least, I don't think... Shit, maybe I do?... Fat man fail I guess...  I'm pretty sure I blogged about my gut having to go, it's not... At all.

I had a bad time getting off my addition... Addiction?... What am I talking about?  Drink?  Drugs?  Women?... No I'm talking about Azeroth. Yeah, I was addicted to World of Warcraft, in a big way, it came after a time being a member of a top flight Day of Defeat teams - Yes, I was once a hardcore FPS player folks - Enemy Down ladder anyone?  Yeah, old school.... And myself and another couple of players on the team (waves to Chaplain) were looking for something else to play, and it was the weekend before I started a new job - the job I currently still have technically - and a friend came to stay (waves to Paul) and he'd just bought a new game "World of Warcraft". Now I knew about Warcraft, I'd played the RTS games (I even still have my copy of Warcraft II on the shelf behind me) but I'd not ventured into any MMO ever before; yes EverQuest and even Ultima had passed me by.  And I went out that night and bought the game from the local Asda. I rolled a human, a Wa...

Where have I been and what have I been doing?  Well my wife has been for more surgery, those of you know the tale will be well versed, for thos eo fyou not in the know, she's on the mend; slowly.  I have therefore been busy looking after her. In the hopes of getting more hours out of me the office delivered one of our huge machines to my home and I've been working from there, immediate results were that I did nearly 48 hours of project work whilst not in the office, unfortunately none of that project work is going to be used as the product has changed... Hey ho.  I've also learned that I could never ever work from home for real, even barring surgery recovery, she simply could not wrap her head around how you have to concentrate whilst doing my job and would say my name, wait exactly one second, and say it again, then again and again... So yeah, never going to be able to work from home. What form did this work take?  Well I was working on porting a Linux USB driver fo...

You know that moment when you've torn your laptop battery apart and find Li Ion cells so generic that you can only call them "orange"... yeah... I'm there.... This is like the third replacement battery I've gotten for this laptop, and I love the machine.  But with a battery life shorter than a Goldfish's memory I need to sort this out. Time to shop, and likely get scammed, trying to find affordable replacements. The wiring on this thing is also pretty rubbish, why the heck are there two batteries with opposing electrodes towards one another with just a piece of thin plastic card between them?... I mean, is it trying to burn my house down?

That moment you get half an hour into watching Brad Pitt in War Machine and the wife suddenly asks.... "Do you know him?" "Who?" "The actor!" "Which actor?" "Him with the grey hair?" "The General?" "Yes" "Brad Pitt" "Fuck off, that's not Brad Pitt" I gave up.

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...

I have a terrible relationship with food, my childhood was pained with my mothers dreadful attempts at cooking (nearly everything was either burnt or tasteless, and the menu variety was dismal) which resulted in my binging on sugary treats, cheeses or bowls of cereal to make up the deficit in calories, fine when one was training Karate four times a week and burning the rest off in walking places as I had no car.  But a problem as I reached my thirties, with two broken ankles Karate left the options list and furnished with terrible eating habits the weight came on board. Even the good-food I ate as a child, notably my Grandad's cooking, was heaped on me "big eats" was one of his favourite sayings, fine when I was a growing child, but later in life this feeling of needing to eat stayed with me. Combine all this with a clear genetic predisposition to be a big lad - my Fathers side of the family are all rotund - and a sedentary job in software I'm now approaching the big ...

Today marks an interesting day, we're a little after 11am my time and Italy has rocketed, for the first time, into my top ten source viewers company, equalling the United States... Welcome Italy! I also see their near neighbour across the waters Serbia on the list for the first time!... What are you all reading?

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...

This is a post about the worst beginner programming post I've ever read... I've been hounded by someone, I'll call them "LN" they have mailed me and told me that they really like one of my articles from June 2012... Checking my clock, I've posted a whole host of other stuff since.  However, they seem fixated on that pretty old post and strangely have mailed me that it makes perfect reading for "juniors as well as experienced programmers". I'm really not sure what they're referring to in that month of posts I go from inappropriate references to Ghost Busters, to peoples awful toilet habits to talking about the English football team and shit... Yes, I have a post titled "Hyperdefecation". In essence this emailer is full of utter crap, so what are they trying to do?  Well they've references another blog I do frequent "coding horrors", but again their comment is off the mark... Then they ask me to look at their 3000+ word ...