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Home News, Monday 16 September, 06:05

Well, I am back on the train rushing back to Cardiff, and this time I haven't forgotten my Palmtop. I managed to survive last week without it, after I forgot it in the cubbyhole of the car and left fot Cardiff without it. I had to resort to paper for notes and meetings and on the limited set of phone numbers programmed into the Nokia. I was also unable to keep up to date with my home news on the train and had to resort to reading VB articles from TechNet to while the two and a half hour journey away.

The weekend was fab. It seems that Summer decided to have it's last gasp before leaving us on it's winter holiday in South Africa and Australia. It was shorts and T Shirt weather again after a few weeks where a jersey has been a requirement and the central heating was almost turned on in the evenings. As you can appreciate, most of the weekend was spent outdoors enjoying the weather and doing some essential home chores like clearing the jungle in the top garden, mowing the lawn in the bottom garden and putting up our house name plate. We now life in "Tuynhuys, 5 Parliament Place, Winchester, Hants, SO22 4QS". I think the latter part of the address remains mandatory, just addressing your mail to "Tuynhuys" will not guarantee delivery, not yet at least.

This weekend on the PC was spent installing NT 4.0 Workstation on Tomcat and getting it all working withe the LAN and the peripherals. Still haven't got the Zip drive working under NT, but I have installed it as a dual boot operating system, and have left it booted to Win95 so as not to confuse "the locals". It is visually similar to Win95, but surprisingly different underneath. The install and setup was done without the aid of any manaual or documentation, one of the downsides of relying on MSDN for your O/S, so yesterday I went out (to PC World - who would have guessed) and bought an NT4 book and abouther Microsoft Press book, "Developing Applications with MS Office 95", another good book to recommend.

Maggie and the kids are all fine. Nicky is really enjoying high school, and with her whole "role model" set having just matured by 6 years, has suddenly become a very grown up young lady. Tarryn is enjoying the seniority of being in the top class of St Bedes and also the independance of not having to go to school with and tag along after her sister. The three of them went through to London yesterday (Sunday) for a needlework craft show at Earls Court, a pleasure which I passed on. They hame back loaded with goodies that they had bought but all feeling pretty wacked from the normal London sxperience (not our favorite place). Maggie starts her range of Adult Education courses today, including picture framing, sketching, yoga, pottery and ribbon embroidary. This burst of creativity and the Hobbies and Crafts superstore which has opened up in Hedge End means that you should brace yourselves for some homemade Christmas presents.

The work at SWALEC is progressing well, although I am having to get involved in more "team leadership" than I would like to and only really get to indulge myself in Vb coding before 9 and after 6. Otherwise it is as you would expect, trying to get a team up, together, focused and motivated - working on standards and methods, and trying to reshape the perception of the team amongst the users. It is all coming off a VERY low base with nothing much to build upon except some pretty good and enthusiastic people, most of who have just joined the project. The working at home bit doesn't seem to be working very well, as I tend to get side trached with my own PC stuff or spend the time at home with Maggie and the kids. But with extra long days Monday to Wednesday (normally 07:30 to 19:30) and some work done on the train, I am able to have the free time and still get the hours done.

Last weeks VB project is pretty well finished and provides a snapshot and comparison facility. You point at a DB2 table on the mainframe (the whole thing is dynamic, reading its list boxes from the DB2 catalog) and then snapshot it to a locally created MS-Access table. Later you can use this snapshot to do a camparison of the structure, the row count and the row contents (the data) to highlight changes. All pretty usefull stuff, especially when they have loads of developers currently tripping over each other by changing "stable table" data when they shoulnd't and then tripping over each other when they try and unravel why their migration and system tests no longer work. I am pretty happy with it all, but want to try and speed up the snapshotting process. It is super fast getting the data from DB2 but annoyingly slow at inserting the rows into Access. Still compared to their current process of printing out and comparing by hand, it is a pretty good step ahead.

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