Tips for London

There seems to be the chance that i might be a’traveling to the fair US for one of my clients (a most exciting prospect), but how to act like a native in any given city: NY, Chicago or Detroit, anyone got any tips?

In return i offer 9 beginner tips for the joy that is London town.

1) Please stand on the right on escalators, the left is the fast lane (it is very defiantly not the “I have huge luggage and like to block peoples way” lane)
2) Public transport is the norm, both buses and trains/tube are used by ‘suits’, there’s no shame in it.
3) Its impossible to walk round anywhere without being given at least 3 free newspapers, they are mostly drivel.
4) You WILL get badly drunk (its the countries fav pastime), and it WILL cost you a fortune
5) Teenagers are the most dangerous thing in London (and that would include velociraptors if they had a colony in Trafalgar square) I’m not joking
6) All late nights will end up at a curry house (its a strange gravitation effect)
7) The only cabs to trust are the oddly shaped black ones.
8) Any inclement weather of any description with bring the city to a standstill for example “the wrong sort of sunshine”
9) If you get your self injured in our fair city, don’t worry, you don’t need any money or insurance, we got it covered as a freebie 🙂

The blog entry drought

Its been over a month since i last blogged, but I have a good reason, I have been given an amazing opportunity (given the current financial climate), and my working skill set has taken a amazing leap, I am now working on FLEX 3, Proper Java (with Spring, Hibernate and very serious web services) in addition to Domino, and all with those tight times that make a project fun, its been disturbing my sleep but i wake keen to be at work (always the best way to be), but time to get some useful blog entries out.

A decent domino calendar on the web

We all know that Domino should been good at calendar apps but sucks balls in reality, so i quietly poo’ed my self when a manger says “could we have something a bit like google calendar”, however flex comes to my rescue, now i cant claim any of this is mine its just gluing other people work together so first take Quietly Scheming’s Calendar UPDATE: the app is much newer than the blog posting would indicate, as it keeps being updated
sexy isent it?, now this takes an ical format as its data source, which in case anyone was wondering is just a vcalander file with some extra bits stuffed in (which we wont need), so to get to that data source, enter Jake Howlett’s excellent series of articles, in particular Flex with Domino Quick start, go pinch his example database for the ‘simple view’ stuff, you will want to butcher that to output your data as a ical text file (the download for Quietly Schemings flex apps has examples of what they should look like in the “data” directory of the zip file.),

One snag here is that the Adobe parser for icals is REALLY picky, there must be no extra white space in your file, and every line must finish with a proper Carriage return and a proper line feed (i ended up with computed text of “@Char(13)” at the end of every line in the view template and “@Char(13)+ @Char(10)” after every field in the view, so be careful, but other than that it works like a charm!!, and my manager thinks im a coding god (well he doesn’t because he knows me, but never mind)

there you go, if this dosent make sense just put a comment and i will explain more

Auto Update to Ubuntu 9.04

Just a quick note to the people out there taking advantage of the one click update from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, make sure you don’t have “auto logon” enabled, if you do, you stand a huge chance of happily screwing up your install (you will get lots of permission denied errors against /dev/null when you launch a xsession, even if your ctrl-Alt-F1 in and reset the security to “666” from “600” the darn thing resets on reboot (and anyway you just get a blank screen even if you get it (ie by ctrl-Alt-f7) to get back to xsession login,

….so careful careful party people

.. P.S. to the Mac boys out there laughing, i rebuilt in 14 mins (after backup), and i did not have to go to a “genius bar” to fix my problem…so RASSSSSSP!!