Twenty years!

It hardly seems possible but I celebrated 20 years at IBM today! Here’s me foolishly thinking that I’d be staying for up to four years while I work out what I really want to do…

…and now I work just up the stairs from where that photo was taken. I’ve gone far!

Twenty years is a long time but I’ve done a few things on the way, so it hasn’t been at all dull!

MQSeries

I started out in technical support on a machine/OS I’d never heard of, asking such questions as, ‘Where is the design that describes what this command should do?’ Much mirth!
Later I worked in test when I discovered that ‘temporary’ generally means several years… maybe decades… probably still there actually… sorry!

Message Broker

…or whatever it happened to be called in any particular week.

Here I learned that a solution can take on a life of its own, becoming only tenuously related to, or even completely detached from, the problem it was meant to be solving. (If only someone had come up with design thinking sooner!)

Master Data Management

Lots of Master Data Management- almost 10 years of that alone!

Product information management, user interface generators (still gutted this one didn’t make it), model driven development, sketchy thingy, the MDM Developers community and probably more. There was definitely some virtual universe community in there as well.

Plus a really nice office with a window seat! And rats, and floods…

Watson

A tiny amount of Watson! Despite being barely a year, most of that time seemed to involve moving desks! Also the only time I really didn’t want to move on but serendipity led to…

Blockchain

An actual open source project this time, which is something completely new for me! And blockchain which I still think is one of the most interesting technologies to come along in… well, in the last 20 years!

And then

I doubt I’ll be in Hursley for another 20 years, so who knows. Having said that, I never intended to be there by now either!

It has been a privilege to have worked with so many amazing people who together made most of those 20 years an absolute pleasure. There really are too many to list without an Oscar speech but I will just mention two: Mark Phillips, who was a bit of a role model right from the start, and Patrick Wagstrom who you should jump at the chance to work with if you ever get the opportunity!

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And now for something completely different

After almost 10 years in Master Data Management, most of which with the rather lovely view below, I’ve moved on to Watson.

I can’t quite believe I stayed in the same department that long but there were plenty of fresh challenges along the way, and no shortage of people inside and outside IBM to keep it interesting.

I’ve been particularly lucky to have had so much support building up the MDM Developers community, which should be in safe hands to continue growing in the future. (If you’re interested in MDM and haven’t attended one of the live tech talk sessions, I would definitely recommend trying one. There are recordings of all the previous events on YouTube and check out Dany’s OSGi talk for a great example.)

If my first day in Watson is anything to go by, the next challenge is going to be far from dull!

Hursley 3D Printing Expo

D’oh, looks like I missed a swarm of 3d printers in Hursley recently! I wonder if anyone has printed a model of the house/site yet.

I’m still looking for even a vaguely plausible excuse to splash out on a 3d printer, but printing models or new 3d printers still isn’t quite enough to justify the money (or space these days)!

Java dumps

I recently had to debug a problem with the MDM Workbench where exporting a tailoring project for Information Server didn’t do anything. In fact it didn’t even report any problems!

Unfortunately the code in question likes to put a brave face on things and just reports that everything was OK, even when something goes wrong. This was the perfect opportunity to try out some of the diagnostic tools available for the IBM Java runtime, which I’ve been meaning to try for ages. I had an idea where the problem was likely to be but to find out for sure I started the workbench using the following command line:

eclipsec -vmargs -Xdump:system:events=catch,filter=java/lang/AbstractMethodError#com/ibm/mdm/tools/export/infoserver/job/MDMDatabaseDAO.queryDatabaseWithoutFilter

Sure enough the failing export produced a dump which I could check using the Memory Analyzer tool. You can get the IBM version via IBM Support Assistant but it’s probably easier to get the standard Eclipse Memory Analyzer and add the required IBM plugins from the DTFJ update site.

I’m fortunate enough to work in Hursley so I could pester someone who works on IBM Java runtime diagnostics, but there’s also a helpful article on developerWorks with details of how to trigger dumps, and how to run queries using OQL:

Debugging from dumps: Diagnose more than memory leaks with Memory Analyzer

So mystery solved- if you have an Oracle database and want to exporting tailoring projects for Information Server, make sure you set up the database connection with a more recent JDBC driver than the defaults.

Recent hacktivity

This time of year seems to be hacking season and over the last few days I’ve been along to two hackdays!

Friday was IBM’s internal Social Business Hackday. There was some MQTT hacking, a z/OS hack, hacks with Lotus Connections, hacks that could be the future of Lotus Connections, and I was attempting to hack a work around for a Jazz work item. And that was just at the Hursley local event! We were able to link up with a few other labs, but over two days there were IBMers hacking around the globe. There are going to be a lot of amazing projects to choose from when it comes to voting.

(There are a few more photos from HackDay X, and previous hackdays, on the IBM hackday group on flickr.)

For round two, today was the soutHACKton hack day. By the time I arrived the soldering and drilling had already begun!! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay long so I’m hoping there’ll me more of these in the future. I did just about have time to try out an idea I had to hack an old doorbell to sense people using the door knocker. A while ago I had accidentally created a touch sensor with a 555 timer while attempting to build another circuit. So my cunning plan was to deliberately create a 555 touch switch and connect it to the bolt on the inside of the front door. Unfortunately the best I could manage today was a two wire touch sensor, which isn’t going to work. At least not without leaving a wire hanging out of the letter box with some instructions attached! Unless someone who knows more about electronics can suggest a plan B, I may just resort to a boring doorbell button instead!!

Meet the team

It looks 2009 is the year for people I work with to start blogging, and they’re all on Twitter… coincidence? So if you’re looking for a good read, you might like to check them out. Starting with the newest blog…

February 2010 (the power of peer pressure brings out another blogger in the team in 2010!)

Iain’s Blog (@iainduncani)

A web 2.0 skeptical geek all rounder planning to write about technology, politics, growing vegetables, board games and walking.

October 2009

Ed’s World (@ejellard)

Off to a flying start with some great home automation with arduino, Home Easy, MQTT and a helping of hackery.

Limboworld’s blog (@jaylimburn)

Conducting a scientific experiment in to the value of blogging, so make sure you get as many people to read it as possible! Some good DIY posts to kick things off. (There would have been a few DIY posts here if I’d started this blog before fitting the kitchen!)

September 2009

The World Of Gavin (@gavinwillingham)

Definite technology slant with an enjoyable hint of grumpy old man which I’m definitely hoping will continue!

April 2009

Cobweb (@techcobweb)

Some really varied arduino projects in addition to home automation and tweeting cats. While the only circuit I’ve cobbled together recently is sitting in an ice cream tub in the porch, Mike is a master at packaging projects- his scalextric race timer is a work of art!

May 2006 (so blogging way longer than the rest of us!)

Nigel’s blog (@planetf1)

Not as easy to sum up given the number of posts but a distinct focus on technology of various kinds. Probably need to run it through wordle to get a better idea!

The trouble with making lists like this is that I am bound to have missed a few! I’ll just sneakily add more if I have… which reminds me, I was going to make more of an effort with a blogroll at some point soon.

Updated: another blog for 2010! (8 March 2010)

And the winner is…

The heated competition for a once in a lifetime opportunity to receive a postcard from Hursley has been won with a last minute entry of an impressive 6807 miles!

Congratulations Martin, the postcard will be on its way from this marvellous antique letter box the next time I walk past it!

Commiserations to everyone else who entered:

• The prize for first entry goes to Jo
• Pete’s promise of an entry from Antarctica which never arrived!
• Wooden spoon goes to Nick for not being any further from Hursley than Jo!
• Wearing the yellow jersey for most of the race was Kelly
• Andy, who had plenty of time to travel somewhere remote, but didn’t
• It could have been the winning entry, unfortunately Richard couldn’t hang on in New Zealand long enough
• And of course Martin with his dramatic last minute entry

Thank you to everyone who took part; you made the competition far more successful than I was expecting!

(The judges decision is final!)

Competition time!

No idea whether this is going to work but I have a postcard of Hursley which I bought on some strange impulse recently. I don’t even send postcards when I’m on holiday usually, and I have no idea who would want one of Hursley…

…so, here’s the plan: this amazing swag (ok it’s just a postcard but it’s very rare!) is up for grabs. To win, just leave a comment below, and the comment from the furthest away wins. Simple; no need to buy anything, or annoy people with daft hashtags on Twitter!

I’ll even post it from the Hursley post office.

Wii for sale

After doing a fine job collecting dust, I’ve decided to sell my Wii. Despite being a lot of fun, computer games still don’t keep my attention. The only chance they have is with multi-player games (I still remember the days of Micro Machines on the playstation and Golden Eye on the N64!), but that’s more the people than the games.

The other thing that puts me off computer games is the entertainment industry’s weird obsession with draconian restrictions on their hardware and software. Despite technology’s potential for connecting the globe, I can’t buy games for my Wii in this country because it was a gift from the US. Entirely artificially, that makes it different region.

Before selling I wanted to reset everything but formatting reveals more restrictions:

“If you remove your Wii Shop Channel account, all of your currently registered Wii Points and downloaded software, data, and services will be deleted and software stored on an SD Card will become unusable.”

“If you plan to transfer ownership of this Wii console to someone else, you cannot transfer the Wii Points you have purchased or the software, data, or services you have downloaded, so you will need to remove your Wii Shop Channel account on this screen.”

So that’s nice, everything I did buy is gone for good, whether I’ve saved it to an SD card or not. I might have got another Wii in the future, or I might want to give the games away with the Wii, but tough luck. And then there are our Miis. I’ve saved them on to a controller which I’ll be keeping, but they too are linked to the console they were created on; I can move them, but won’t be able to edit them any more. Thanks Nintendo, you guys really know how to make a customer feel special.

Still, don’t let all that put you off buying a second hand Wii- I doubt the competition is any better!! So what’s a good price for an as new boxed up US Wii? £120? I’ll be putting it on the Hursley for sale forum shortly.

Update: looks like the DRM obsession can cause issues when upgrading to a Wii U as well. Nice work Nintendo. (21 November 2012)

 

Social radar

Some technologies change the way you do things. Before mobile phones you had to plan where and when to meet people in advance. Before PVRs it was easier to watch TV when the show you wanted to see was on, unless you found a tape which you were at least vaguely sure didn’t have anything on you wanted to watch again, not to mention the ten minutes needed to set the VCR to record… on the wrong channel yet again! Radio, antibiotics, electricity, cars, planes, the internet, the wheel; the list goes on.

Earlier this year Twitter gave me a glimpse of something with the potential to rival even the microwave oven. Twitter is almost pointless in its simplicity: just answer the question, “What are you doing?” In most cases you’ll probably be wondering, “Who cares?” If you need convincing, there’s a very good guide to Twitter on YouTube. The real revelation for me was the power of Twitter on the move. You can still send updates using SMS, but at its peek you could also receive them, either from direct messages, people you were following or (and this was the life changing one) any updates that contained words you wanted to track. I got in the habit of tracking places I was about to visit, giving me local knowledge of things to check out/avoid, traffic/travel problems, other people in the area- what ever people were saying.

Last week could have provided another great example: I tracked ‘Hursley’ which is where I work, so on Thursday I would have got an SMS telling me that the site was closed because of a burst water main. Sadly Twitter has been on a steady decline ever since I started using it, so it was only by chance I checked Twitter before leaving for work. Without tracking, without SMS notifications and without IM, twitter has gone from personal radar to little more than Facebook status updates.

I haven’t given up using it just yet though. In fact I’ve just been cutting down the number of people I follow so I can keep up more easily; 80 is about enough for me. I don’t have any set rules about who I follow like some people, otherwise Martin would have gone just for the amazing number of ‘#’s he gets through! A good way to stay in the list is to make me laugh, and it’ll be hard to beat, “Convinced people are practising yogic flying in the meeting room near me“! After much agonizing I even unfollowed Stephen Fry despite him being nice enough to follow me back- still a huge fan but somehow felt a bit too stalkerish. Having said that, Robert Llewellyn is too interesting to unfollow just yet.