'Uncle Dave', as I like to call him, is a world class trainer in all aspects of project management; notably PMBOK® and Prince2®. He's a big name in the field of Project management training and has spent decades being flown all over the world to host PM training courses.

Fast forward twenty years and this jet-set lifestyle prompted Dave to decide to sell his house in Southampton (back in the rainy old country) and move to Spain. Even though this was a few years ago, Dave only just starting to tune down his travelling agenda and spend some time at home working on other ventures: Namely the creation of digital products and training courses.

So, in semi-part-timeish-retirement (if that is the word) Dave runs his business exclusively from his custom designed villa overlooking the Med.

What a life - Creating best selling products in his niche (Project Management) and making money through digital products on the Internet.

This little website has been online since 1998 (back in the embarrassing days of terrible bedroom derived HTML layouts) and running Drupal since Spring 2007. Over the course of the last four years of drupalishness, the online world has been attacked by spammers - the web equivalents of junk mailers. 

I was just upgrading a few modules, tidying and demoting some old content and found hundreds of registered users that have never ever been logged on. So, it;s time for housekeeping and delete that stuff to trim it down.

Bring on the User Prune module - http://drupal.org/project/user_prune

Very cool and once uploaded, installed in ../sites/all/modules just enable it:

and then go run it http://www.nicklitten.com/admin/user/prune (obviously you would put your domain name in place of projex :/ duh! )

It's a very cool utility and neatly removed just over 90 duff user accounts:

So, I've spent what seems like years trying to toss up between the Lightbox and Thickbox modules on Drupal. I like them both, but finally opted for Lightbox2 and have been using that on most of my sites for the last year or so. Lightbox is a great little module and works well across the board. However, after recently updating the most excellent Ubercart module I read an interesting thread on the ubercart forum, extolling the virtues of the new lightbox kid-on-the-block - colorbox. This new module was vocally supported for lots of little reasons so I decided to jump ship and give it a try.

I like it. This also gave me a valid reason to search for a sexy photo to demo the colorbox and I discovered Ms. Stacey Keibler, shown right, I had to look at this bikini photo quite a lot... I can tell you... /me continues to gibber and drool until mental function resumes...

• Install the Drupal Colorbox module in sites/all/modules
• Install the colorbox plugin in the sites/all/libraries folder
• enable it and i just works.

Very cool... and it possibly feels quicker rendering the images than lightbox2.

I'm going to run colorbox on nicklitten.com for a week or so and try to gain a real opinion on real life use of colorbox as a replacement for lightbox2... we shall see which one I end up using ;)

I really hope this finds its way on Facebook - my options are (1) it does so pour myself a nice glass of iced coffee and sit bag smugly or (2) it doesnt so slap myself on the forehead, groan and slowly pull my hair out one strand at a time!

The FBCONNECT module (for Drupal CMS based websites) looks promising and once I had figured out how to create a Facebook application to link my signin and publishing details it should be straight forward.

Here is a my first test blog to see what happens: Obviously I would rather that this get posted to  Facebook, which means I wont have to launch the laptop out of the window.   ;) 

/me breathes on windows and stands ready to write naughty words if it fails..

The documentation says:

-- SUMMARY --

Aaaaaaargh!

So, after a few hours of playing around with the Drupal for Facebook module, I'm scratching my head and groaning in despair. I've followed the installation instructions to the letter, downloaded facebook API's and code from the dot com website. I've enabled modules, created facebook applications, tweaked permissions and configured a huge combination of module settings. Still no joy :(

Most unsatisfying.

As with most things in this realm, the connection configuration is not obvious and quote technical so I presume I am doing something stupid.   :/

THIS IS A TEST OF THE FACEBOOK/DRUPAL CONNECTION

So, I'm trying to figure out if this darned Drupal Facebook Module will allow me to connect my main login information with Facebook. If this works then this will appear on Facebook.

If this doesn't work then I am going to sulk and write bum on the windows.

The documentation says:

With Drupal for Facebook, you can harness all the power of Drupal in you Facebook App. If you already have content in Drupal, you can expose it on Facebook.

The Drupal for Facebook philosophy is that the functionality already built into Drupal should be used to create Facebook Applications. Where possible, we use Drupal's user management, permission schemes, blocks, views, etc. to implement the Facebook App. Experienced Drupal users will find it very straightforward to build a Facebook App. While Facebook developers new to Drupal may want to spend some time on Drupal.org learning best practices.

So, as an RPG* Developer I am definitely biased towards IBM's best and most versatile language. IBM RPG has evolved massively from the early Report Program Generator that it was designed to be. The latest Incarnation of RPG is a leading edge web -savvy object oriented SOA language.

Here is my personal version of how RPG has evolved:

• 1960's(this is a decade of code evoloution): RPG was introduced but called something else. Dunno, much about this as I was only 3 years old and was busy learning to walk. Programmers started the decade wearing sharp 1950's style suits and ended it wearing tie-dyes and Greenpeace badges.
   

• 1970's: RPG II was introduced with the System/3 series of computers. It was later used on System/32, System/34, and System/38 and then the System 36 (!), with an improved version of the language. RPG2 was a beautiful language using a logic cycle, arrays and data structures and internal file layouts. Complex, hard to master and quirky... but strangely addictive.

I was recently copied on an interoffice email from a fellow RPG chappie (he's quite sharp actually despite his funny mockney accent).

Aforementioned Mockney-Coder was modifying a recent program, written by a legacy RPG3 programmer (these creatures are very rare to find in the wild and we have placed them on the endangered species list).

Amazingly, there are still a handful of RPG Programmers out there who still write in RPG3. RPG3 was upgraded to RPG400 in 1993(?) so if they havent upgraded to RPG400 yet then the chances of getting up to RPGLE and then to RPG/FREE are slim to none.

But Mockney-Coder is a diligent chap and he mentioned a neat little alternative piece of RPG/FREE code that could be used to replace the large subroutines and array handling code chunks needed to perform the same thing in the old fashioned and clunky column based RPG varieties. After all, Variety is the spice of life...

all names have been removed to protect the innocent ;)

All of us IBMi Developers use the System I Network as the holy grail of IBMi IT resources on the web. But not everybody knows you can get the monthly magazine for free……

System I News is the a free monthly magazine, in both physical and pdf format, that tells you what’s going on at IBM and specifically focussed on what happening with our ERP platform, new OS releases, service packs and security changes.

For example, this recent issue has covered the new OS IBMi v7 release (which finally lets us render webpages, XML, SOAP/REST and even PDFs direct from within RPG programs J), Security updates for IBMi V6. Web Enabling Legacy Apps like JBA, an interesting Open Source Document Management system that uses the Cloud for data storage and lots of other little nuggets of IT info…

System I News is free when you register at System I Network

The FREE Associate version is 50 pages of relevant articles and news for any professional involved with the IBMi platform. (there also a $paid PROVIP version for us IBMi Developers but its more code specific)

What is seesmic for blackberry?

Seesmic is a free blackberry app that lets me update all my social media websites with my status updates all from the comfort and convenience of my cellphone.

Quite simply, if you haven’t got the time or inclination to go updating your status or photos to all those pesky darn social media websites then seesmic is the clear solution. It’s a completely and utterly free application for my little Blackberry Storm (just weeks before I plan to migrate to the new and uber-sexy HTC Incredible – but that another story!) Seesmic lets me type in a status update and click SEND.

Then just put it back in my pocket comfortable in the knowledge that it is sending an update to Twitter, Facebook, myspace, Linkedin, plaxo, bebo, flickr… you get the picture?

Its the best Twitter app I have ever seen. Very clean UI, very cool and dead simple to use.

Check it out at www.seesmic.com

Recently at a client site, I heard a monotonous and really quite annoying sound: tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,TAP... tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,TAP... tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,TAP... tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,TAP... coming from the adjoining Dilbert cubicle.

This prompted me to ask what he was doing. He reluctantly moaned that "I have to move all these spool files to another output queue and their are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them"

I looked quizzically until I realized he was in WRKSPLF on the green screen and was manually selecting each and every spool file with a 2 before paging down for the next screen, for as many screen as was needed, he then planned to change the output queue.

Wow!

Loads of time wasted doing a manual task when the tools to move the entire output queue are already right there in Windows but just didnt know about it.

Bored in my hotel room last night I decided it’s time to do a little research about SAP: There’s been a lot of buzz around SAP since the mid 90’s… 15 years late I decided to check it out  ;)

This blog is an ongoing brain-dump so don’t take it as gospel

SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning eBusiness system – covering every part aspect of business requirements. The name SAP is an acronym for Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing. 

SAP iscategorized into 3 core functional areas:

I really like my little Blackberry Storm but the only bit thats a bit naff is the camera. In dark light conditions the photo quality is very bad and the video is just generally a bit crap. I like just about everything else about it, but it is a year old so it's time to start looking at what new smart phones are out there.

The iPhone 3GS is a nice phone but it has so many shortcomings; no memory expansion, poor video, naff OS, iTunes is the main PITA as I sync my music and movies across several home servers and media devices iTunes just blows it to pieces every time. I detest it(unes)

So, when I found the HTC Evo 4g was announced at the CTIA Conference in Vegas. I was initially excited by the claims of 4G. But when I actually looked at the phones specs... wow! It's fantastic and It ticks every single box for me.

This website has been running on the Drupal CMS since upgrading from Joomla to Drupal 5 back in  2007. I've closely followed each new Drupal release and experienced the teething pains as modules have evolved to the excitng state they are in the moment.

Drupal Rocks and I'm eagerly awaiting the new Drupal 7 release (as soon as some of my core modules are compatible - your hear that ubercart? ;) )

During this time I've managed to throughly cock-up a number of drupal modules, and while playing the php-cleanup-game on nicklitten.com this morning I discovered something rather nifty.

To re-install corrupted Drupal Modules using the Devel Module.

WDSC is a terrific graphical Coding Tool for the IBMi - Best in class of the 'free as400 coding' tools. For editing RPG and/or CL its a no brainer. Clean screen editing and a whole bunch of very cool tools that simply blow the old SEU environment out of the water.

"But what about the old SDA warhorse" I hear you ask.

Perhaps some of you are even, secretly, using RLU for your printer file layouts. (RLU gets a bad rap imho - I kinnd of like it, but thats another story completely)

SDA/RLU with WDSC 7 SDA is very easy to use with WDSC, once you have found out how to get it running: The WDSC-SDA component is called 'CODE Designer' and is included on one of the CDs distributed with WDSC 7.0. However, it's not installed by the WDSC installer. I dont know why its not installed by default - IBM are a bit crazy like that.

After WDSC is installed, you have to put the CODE CD into the drive and run the install program for that CD. WDSC 7.0 includes CODE and it works just fine on Win XP, Vista and Win7 (as I have it running on all three versions)

Having worked in IT for decades this is absolutely spot on:

A man in a hot air balloon, realizing he is lost, reduces altitude and spots a hiker below. He descends further and shouts to the man on the ground "Ahoy there, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am"

The chap below looks up, grins and says "You're in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"Wow! You must be in IT," says the balloonist.

"Actually I am" replied the hiker "How did you guess that?"

"It's quite obvious really" answers the balloonist "everything you have told me is technically correct but I've no idea what to make of your information and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've been no help. If anything, you've delayed my trip!"

The chap below laughs and says "Ahh yes, you must be in Management."

I recently stumbled across this fantastic advert for the Triumph Rocket III. Apparently its a real viral advertisement commissioned by Triumph back in 2007. I cant believe I had never seen it. Most amusing, in the style of the old Hitchhikers Guide and just, well, Bloody Good:

"Ever since the dawn of time Triumph have been producing large powerful motorbikes in their Hinckley factory near Leicester. With over 900 years of motorbike building prowess behind them Triumph have created two wheeled motorbike classics.

If you are one of the lucky programmers fortunate enough to program in RPG you will know of the ever increasing IBM supplied %BIF's that have made our life easier over the last few years. %REPLACE is groovy that lets us manipulate data content in any string: %replace(from-string:to-string{:starting-position{:length}})

The RPG4 %REPLACE Built In Function is very powerful but also quite complicated:

"What the heck is timshel?" I hear you ask.

timshel is a hebrew word with various meanings depending on the angle at which you read it, or indeed, the number of glasses of red wine you have consumed before trying to explain its meaning. Essentially it means "thou mayest", or implies "rule of control" over something, but mostly it means "Southamptons best rock band".  ;)

So, as I have a weeks downtime I'm looking forward to spending some relaxed time at home, I'm feeding my IT Addiction by building a new website for the fellas. I have a family connection, as my cousin Rob Litten is the drummer for timshel, but it took only minimal bribery to get me excited about revamping their static old html site and building a modern site with online music, videos and shopping cart for buying CD's, MP3's and whatever the future holds.

New site will be evolving over the next couple of days http://www.timshel-band.co.uk

Check them out.

timshel rock!