Archive for November, 2005
I’ve just finished the weekly WS-Addressing Telecon. and everyone else in the house is already in bed!
When you think about going to work for IBM you don’t automatically assume it includes developing educational games for schoolchildren and running a week-long event for children to play them… but it does.
Hursley runs an annual event, Blue Fusion, where several hundred local school children are invited to IBM to compete for a prize for themselves and their school.
This event is run by recent grads, with most of the organising team being new grads… meaning those of us who started a few months ago. Planning is well under way, with invites already out to the schools, activities under development and my part of it - logistics beginning to warm up. My current task: arrange for the decoration of Hursley House - a grade 2 listed building to make it child friendly.
Doesn’t exist… I’ve just checked.
This really can’t be helping the cause of web sites powered by Java. The relevance of IBM and Java has been questioned in an AJAX world… or a world where all the cool kids (yeh, so no genuinely cool kids do what I’m about to say but there are some misguided people who think they are and do) are programming in PHP, Ruby-on-Rails… whatever comes next.
But Java is very powerful, I was wanting to use facilites from JSR170 today to build a repository for openclipart.org. Given that and other powerful features (e.g. JAX-RPC) available from Java and a great development environment from Eclipse I could have knocked together such a repository in a day (perhaps a little optimistic)… something that has eluded openclipart.org for years… but I couldn’t find anywhere cheap any easy to host it so I didn’t.
This is something that needs fixed if Java is to be used at the low end of the web hosting… which is important because innovation is happening outside of mega-corporations and is being scaled up from humble beginnings.
… but it’s not considered polite.
And…
It’s a bit odd knowing that some pretty serious people in the IT industry will probably browse this site to work out who I am (when I show up at the WS-Addressing F2F)… makes me wonder what they’d think…
Scotland just lost 29-10 to the All Blacks.
This is respectable given other recent encounters… and more that it only being a 19 point defeat, the second half contained lots of good Scotland play and was a 7-7 tie.
So some positive encouragement for the 6 nations and a cause to be slightly proud to be Scottish.
I’m feeeling much better and I went back to work yesterday.
It’s all going well in open plan and I’ll try and get a photo of my new ‘pod’ up here at some point…. but probably before we start decorating it for christmas.
I woke up this moring at 3 in pain - back, leg, stomach, a headache, and felt sick whenever I tried to drink any water… so I’m off work… but the worst thing is that the much vaunted google doesn’t seem to have any suggestion for me 
[Update] 24 Hours later and I still have all of the above symptoms… so I’m thinking it is might be flu… so another exciting day at home alone.
[Update 2] Another 24 hours later and most of the symptons have gone… my stomach is the only part of me objecting to returning to work…. so one more day…
Just when I was getting dissapointed that Scottish rugby isn’t on TV in Southampton… and 30 mins into a match… I find a live viedo feed on the BBC website 
Shame about the turnout… I wonder if they’ve put prices up this year…
[Update] Scotland won but not overwhelmingly… and watching on the website sucked a bit ‘cos it seems to regularly drop frames so your eyes look for the ball somewhere… and it isn’t there… then you get surprised that it’s jerked further through the motion. Didn’t take enough advantage of being close to Murrayfield when living in Edinburgh.
Ok, so with appropriate nudges I’m going to pop up to Dundee + Edinburgh on the weekend of the 3rd/4th of December.
Plan is:
- Fly to Edinburgh on Saturday morning… hopefully see some people
- Train to Dundee in afternoon to see family + stay the night
- Train back to Edinburgh on Sunday morning… see some more people
- Fly back to Southampton.
Anyone who’s around Edinburgh/Dundee then, I look forward to seeing you.
