I used to walk this route daily to get to school... but backwards... School was Heron Wood (near where you started) and home was in the old Military housing, Willems Park (which used to be near Asda where you finished). Thanks for the memory jogger   :)

Must try and find some old pictures of WIllems Park... it was a rather grim 60's style tower block but great fun for kids to run around and create mayhem:

Willems Park block was army married quarters on Wellington Avenue. It was built about 1964 and demolished in the 1990s, to be replaced by houses again used as married quarters. It was built on the parade grounds of the old cavalry barracks. 

So, I was writing a little code snippet for a client after being told that all warehouse codes must be treated as 3 numeric character integers ranging from 1-999 and soon saw that the warehouse value was an alphabetic field? Huh? A little more digging around and I soon found a problem in their database design: They have a database storing warehouse codes, but in some tables they are stored as two character alphameric values, sometimes as three character alpha's and other times as 3 character numerics! :/

Now, if that doesnt set off all kinds of alarm bells in your brain, then you probably want to stop reading and go and make a nice cup of tea and watch a reality show on the Discovery channel. But, if you are a techie and just scratched you head and thought "WTF? Who designed that database then?" the simple answer is NOT ME. Obviously, it was designed by a maniac. Sadly, I'm the programmer who has to work with it and it's established in the business so us poor programmers just have to figure out how to best work with it.

Anyway, before I spend too much time moaning about lazy programmers and their crappy database design, this is how I got around it.

Last week was an exciting one... driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas on Friday (including the obligatory but less than amusing Boris Breakdown)... packing and loading my moving truck on Saturday/Sunday and then driving across country to my new home here at Folly Beach South Carolina.

Unpacking was fun, courtesy of three little helping hands (Nate, Fin and TIggy) and four little paws (Bailey) and now a week later I'm delighted to say that I'm mostly settled. Pictures on the wall, wireless network up and floating around the beach air, media server is serving and the coffee maker is bubbling.

Bailey the super dog is getting his regular walks around the neighbourhood and I'm feeling myself de-stress on a near hourly basis. No wonder folks who live at the beach have this perpetually smug, self amused and content look to them.... Life is Good!

Wordle is an excellent website for a some serious lunchtime cyberloafing.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

It basically takes any string of text, parses it and creates a nice little word-cloud graphic with the most used words. It's neat stuff, and gets even neater when you feed it a website address. Give it a URL and it looks at the whole website and comes up with a graphic of words used through the site and makes it look kind of... well... just funky.

This is what I get when I feed it http://www.nicklitten.com

I got this little digital thumbs-up from LinkedIn, telling me that my LinkedIn profile ranked among the top 5% of most viewed profiles during 2012!  Woooo! Queue long armed over the shoulder patting for Moi! 

I'm in the top 5% of my industry....

Well, thats not quite true. It's not even remotely true actually. To be honest, its a big fat lie! What it should say is:

Of all the lots and lots of people on Linkedin - 5% looked at my profile and thought "What has that clown got in front of his eyes?"

I got an email this morning telling me that I have somehow, miraculously, out of nowhere inherited over ten million dollars. Yahooo! I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams.

All I have to do is email my personal information, my bank account details and my drivers license information to The Very Reverend Doctor David Anderson in China. Once they have verified my information - they will send me $10,500,000.00!

*sigh*

I wrote a data encryption routine a few years ago. In my ongoing mission to refactor my old utilities, I was looking at it this weekend thinking about ways to improve it. The basic premise behind my routine is to read a row of information from a file, perform encryption of said data based on a specific 'key' and then hide the key within the encrypted data - so it can be decrypted correctly at a later date. Keeps data safe from prying eyes even if they manage to get access to the file data itself. This worked very nicely for obfuscating the source code for my Projex4i programs, but has bitten me on a few occasions when somebody has tampered with the data in the file, therefore making my encryption key incorrect. Tampered data means I have effectively lost my ability to decode it.

There must be a better way right?

There is - FIELDPROC in IBM-i v7.1

What is Field Proc?

It Consultant desperately seeking long term relationship with single white beach front location

So, after spending the bulk of 2012 working in the desert (Las Vegas Nevada to be more precise) the New Year means it’s time to head back to my spiritual home... for a little rehydration, southern lifestyle and early morning walks on the beach. I'm officially addicted to Charleston, South Carolina. I’m moving out of my condo in Vegas this month, packing up and heading back to Charleston on Feb 1st.

I'm looking to rent a beach-house (no condos please) with at least two bedrooms, preferably first or second row on Folly Beach, Sullivans Island or Isle of Palms. I'm looking for something long term, a minimum of a year preferably longer. As an IT Consultant I work from home - so all I need is a fast internet connection, smartphone, shorts, flip-flops and if the home office has a view of the beach then I'm sold!

If you want a memorable website that attracts new customers, a website that explains who you are and explains how to contact you... You've come to the right place.

I have always focussed on quality affordable websites designed and built to your requirements. I offer input where needed but strive to build a site that matches your vision. Over the Years I've developed websites for clients worldwide. Once the website is delivered I still stay with you because building your website is only half of the job, your website needs to be properly marketed to generate fresh visitors and sales.

• Need a website?
• Want a cool domain name?
• Email that you can access just like Hotmail?
• A family website for sharing photos and videos like YouTube?
• Is your search engine ranking high enough?

I've built websites ranging from single pages to complex eCommerce sites allowing customers to interact with each other on a forum. The key is in listening to your needs and creating a solution that exceeds your expectations.

I recently installed the DRUPAL MEDIA GALLERY module and really like it. Finding a simple to conifgure Drupal Image Gallery has been a thorn in my side for an age. This one works nearly perfectly - except it just will not handle COLOROBOX as its image handler because of its inbuilt integration with LIGHTBOX  - a similar function but I prefer the way colorbox looks looks. So before I was forced to unisntall colorbox and integrate lightbox instead, a quick Google search showed me this simply excellent blog post by Paul Junior.

It's not often I repost someone elses blog but this one is just spot on:

Anyone who has tried to user the Media Gallery module on a site that already has the Colorbox module installed will know that they do not play well together.  If you have both modules enabled, create a gallery (with lightbox capabilities) and try to click a thumbnail, the lightbox will not show.

How to view big fat fields using the RPG Debugger

In my on-going mission to to prove that you can teach an old dog new tricks… I learned a neat one today. I was trying to debug an IBMi Web Interface program (IBM RPG/FreeFormat Language) that was blowing the 64k field size limit when reading in an XML string containing hundreds of order lines.

"Yes, I know the upgrading to IBMi 6.1+ will solve the problem and increase the field limit to 16MEG (Yum!) but the client is on v5r4 and I’m stuck with that….”

So, after a little XML cleanup routine I go the field size down below the 64k limit but still had a problem with XML validation. More scratching of head and after running around in debug I discovered that my XML-RPG validation routine didn’t like something at character position 34,381 in the string. Of course, when in debug and you look at a variable it only shows you the first 1000 character of any fields data:

Build a Resume From Your LinkedIn Profile

If you keep your LinkedIn profile up to date—and need a hard copy of your resume—give LinkedIn's Resume Builder a try.

http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/

Once connected to your account, the app takes the information from your LinkedIn profile and generates a resume. You can choose from a number of templates—from "classic" to "law" to "executive"—and edit any blank fields right on the page. LinkedIn's Resume Builder also lets you save your resumes, share them and keep them private, if you prefer.

Hello... my name is Nick litten and I am a curry-a-holic.

I was talking to a colleague yesterday and he asked what I missed most about England. I didnt even need to hesitate in answering the Good old Anglo/Indian Curry (closely followed by 'the local boozer').

I've now been on this side of the pond for nearly four years and have still yet to find an Indian Restuarant that comes close to The Surrey Tandoori for their excellent Chicken Patia or my late night favourite the Diwan-E-Khas, where I would stroll every week for a post-pub noshup. My mouth is watering just remembering.....

I love to make my own little spicey dishes of random stuff. Everything ranging from my vesion of a Curried Duck to a pot of left overs with lots of chillis and spices. The Hotter the Better!

Randomly surfing looking for inspiration for this evenings meal I stumbled across this excellent little page talking about how to make a simple curry sauce which can be cooked with anything... just add chicken, pork, vegetables, seafood, etc... Yummy!:

Question: How do I promote External Procedure using Turnover and get them to automatically *REPLACE on the destination machine?

Answer: Like this!

The problem here, is that SQL Stored Procedures have no equivalent of *REPLACE on the CREATE PROCEDURE statement (they do in IBMi 6.1+). That's easy - "just add a Drop to line one of the SQL source code" I hear you say... Well its not that easy in Turnover either. Adding a DROP to the SQL, while using IBMi V5R4 issues a Severity 20 warning message and unfortunately a SEV(20) causes the Turnover SQL Promotion to *FAIL.  Aaaarrrgh!

But wait... help is at hand. We just need to over-ride the default SQL *EXTPRC command to only fail if the severity breaches 20. How about we set it at 25? Luckily thats easy to do:

1 - Set 25 Default

Setup Turnover to over-ride the default severity on the TRUNSQLSTM command (this is the command that Turnover runs to create stored procedures during promotions). So, luanch Turnover and goto DEV | ADMIN | Type Codes and select EXTPRC.

I was reading an interesting thread on Linkedin this morning, discussing another article about the much loved AS/400

Being as I am an old-school S/34, S/36, S/38 guy from back in the Reagan/Bush days ~ I will still call it “the 400” ~ (iSeries / Series i / Power systems never caught on with me). The original “Silverlake” project started over 25 years ago, and the 400 is still cranking. I raised my children from diapers to degrees while programming on this durable box.

There have been many improvements to the 400, heck IBM even switched it from plain ugly tan to cool sleek black – but the fundamental machine is still the same. It has not tried to be something that it is not. The 400 has not been “improved” beyond what is reasonable. It has remained as steady (and ubiquitous) as the ordinary cup holder – which is pretty extraordinary these days.

[original article]

Windows Key + PrintScreen: Screen capture

I've long used the SHIFT-ALT-PRINTSCREEN technique to capture screen shots in Windows XP thru 7.

But in Windows8 there is a new PrtSc function - when you press WindowsWindows-PrtSc it not only captures the screen but also saves the screen short as a PNG FILE into the Screenshots folder located in your picture library.

The old methods of a simple copy to the clipboard can also be used by pressing the PrtScrn key or Alt-PrtScrn for the active window only.

I'm an IBMi Developer - do I choose SEU, RSE or WDSC?

If your caught between using SEU (Stoneage Editting Utility) and RSE (Really Stupidly Expensive) for your IBM-i code development environment - you have one other glaringly obvious choice - WDSC (Wonderful Double Super Codetool).

Personally, I like WDSC because its $FREE. This was the last iteration of the Websphere Development suite before IBM, rebuilt and rebranded it as the 'Rational Developer Tool' and decided to charge $900 per copy. For Freelance RPG Programmers like me that just puts the tool completely out of my budget. I pay one third of that for a license for every piece of Microsoft Software out there... but enough of my gripes about IBM's ridiculous software costs for us freelancers.