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So, I was looking for something to listen to whilst I decided what I was going to do today. Would I go and: hunt for a much needed filing cabinet, work a bit more on the tibco/rv project, try working some more on my pet internet project, or have another go at some Rails programming? Couldn’t decide.

So I hunted my music collection for inspiration.

Bizarrely, I chose Duran Duran‘s Wedding Album which I always kind-a linked even though I’m not a huge fan of Duran Duran or Weddings (apart from my own of, course).

I played it and I was immediately taken back to 1992/1993 when I drove around Tadley in a car not too dissimilar to this one.

It was sadly, not a Cosworth (like the one above) so was similar but not quite as good. Savour the scene. A 20 year old youth, with patchy stubble and DMs and driving around a nowhere-town in a 8 year old knackered family saloon playing Duran Duran. I probably thought I was cool. I was most definitely wrong.

There’s a few misty-eyed memories from that time, most of which I’m not going to share. But the thing I was doing at the time was working on a program called the “Fragment Data System” for a forensic research company. So I duly typed those words into the internet and discovered a link to something about it.

From the link I figured that it was from a table of contents from a book published in 2000 called “Forensic Interpretation of Glass Evidence”. One of the co-authors of which is an ex-colleague of mine (John Buckleton).

Now let’s get one thing straight, the Fragment Data System, was not a great product. It was probably the best I could have done in 1992/93 as an intern and it definitely worked. So, to have it mentioned in a book is kind-of surprising. But that’s not the most surprising thing. The most surprising thing is that I can find echoes of my 15 year old past on this damn internet. It probably has more things about me hidden in its dusty corners.

It gets you thinking. In 1992/93 the public internet was a new thing, it was starting to gain popular ground and dial-up was king. The youth of today have the internet available as soon as they want and it seems that disaffected youffs everywhere need to write about their deepest feelings on a myspace somewhere. Well fast forward 15 years and you’ll find most of your adult life documented in a publicly viewable place. Kind of scary. But not maybe for the reason you might think. If everything you do and everything you are is on the other end of a TCP/IP socket, and those boys are everywhere, you don’t need to remember anything. It’s all there. You just have to know how to find it.

This is great news! I just attach myself to a computer and I no longer need to know what I’m doing or who I am because the internet has all this information. A little like Memento but without the need for body defacement. Now if I could only remember what happened to my wife it would be really helpful …

Model-view-controller is an old, old, old but very good idea. It encourages the separation of model, presentation and control from each other. It’s used in so many places I can’t name them but frameworks like: Struts and Ruby-On-Rails actually enforce it.

For a long time it seems to me that Microsoft has lagged behind in allowing us to use this idea. Their once flagship product, Visual Basic 6, makes it almost impossible to write good MVC code. First of all, in VB6 there is no real inheritance which makes writing good models difficult. Secondly, if those models should contain any items that generate events then those items can not be defined in a class module and must be made public. Sure you can simulate and work-around these things by various means but in the end you will just be fighting the language. And that is never good.

So it’s good to see VB.NET, or .NET 2.0 to be precise, not only has excellent object support but a mechanism that can be used for MVC is actually built into the language. (more…)

So I ripped 30% of my music as OGG-Vorbis a while ago. I don’t think that necessarily makes me a bad person.

So then you’re faced with the dilemma of how you listen to it. Yeah you want to support non-patented software but it’s really hard to find a player that is still for sale and can be easily purchased that also plays OGG. (more…)

My wife and I recently purchased a new car. After much looking around on the market and test driving and the like we decided to purchase a vehicle through a company that I had previously worked for.

I agreed to purchasing the car on 0% finance and was promptly taken to a private room to go through their credit searching system. No one was as surprised as me to discover that the credit searching system I had worked on 10 years previously, at the finance arm of the company, was still functioning and was about to credit check me!

There was a brief moment when I had to cast my mind back to make sure that I hadn’t left any ‘testing’ back doors in the application that I might trigger if I was to apply but then I remembered that I had not because I had a feeling that one day it might come back to haunt me. Relieved about this I settled down to the long drawn out question and answer process that is credit scoring in the UK. But then something strange happened (room spins) (more…)