Work Xmas party

Time for an Xmas party at my work. For as long as I have worked there I have never heard of such a party. So I went there to hang out with some of my colleagues.

It started around 17:00 but we came there after 17:30 and by then the whole corridor was packed with people eating, drinking and talking. It was a nice way to mingle with hundreds of known and unknown. Most of them were unknown to me, but if we had this a little more frequently then soon it would be a totally different thing. I believe this is good for the atmosphere at a workplace so I would like to see this maybe twice a year.

We were offered some small plate with different pieces of food. Not much at all so I wish they had some bread to fill the belly with. But there was candy here and there so I ate quite a lot of chocolate. With the food we had the option of beer, wine or water. I think I had at least five glasses of wine so I got a bit drunk, but at a party like this most people need to get a bit drunk to create the friendly atmosphere to get people to talk to each others.

During the evening a choir walked down the corridor and stopped here and there to sing some Xmas songs. They were quite good. Better than me at least... :P

The party was supposed to end at 19:00 and by that time they started to clear off all the food and drinks. Many of us were not ready to go home yet so we stayed and talked to after 20:00. By then most people were gone and my friends went downtown to keep the party going in some bar. I went home to my girlfriend to help her prepare for our guests from England that will come in the weekend.

I think it was fun and it was good to see people I work with in a relaxed situation. I really home we will do the same for next Xmas.

O'Learys

I am now at the Copenhagen airport in Denmark with Jimbo. We have been on a BMC CMDB Atrium 2.X Administration course. Now the week is over and we are on our way back to Sweden.

We have a couple of hours to kill at the airport so we are eating dinner and drinking a couple of beers at O'Learys. The burger was good but was not very warm when served. The beer was as usual very good. Soon we are done and will look for some present for our girlfriends.

What should we buy? What do girls like?

Fika at work

After lunch we had a department meeting. Halfway through the meeting we took a fika break with coffee and ice cream. I love ice cream! :D

Slackware 13.0

It has been out since the end of August but I just noticed it last week. I was used to be freshly updated about this distribution for many years. Every now and then I went in to the Slackware change log to see how far they progressed on the next release. I have been using Slackware since my first experience with Linux in 1994 when I installed it on my i486 PC. 15 years is a long time...

But now I have been using Ubuntu for half a year since my old server melted and I had to buy new hardware. So I didn't find as much interest in following the Slackware distribution in detail. It is a bit sad and I feel like a traitor, but I was so impressed by Ubuntu that I just had to try it. Ubuntu has been a lot of joy and a lot of ripped hair from my soon bald head (because I am used to the Slackware way), but that is another story.

Slackware write in the release anouncement "Probably the biggest change is the addition of an official 64-bit port." and that is so cool. Personally I think it is a little late considering that AMD came out with 64 bit processors ages ago. Other than that there is a load of new cool and improved stuff in the latest release and I am tempted to install it somewhere.

Why don't you download it and give it a try!

In the head of Emily

I just found out that one of my friends have a blog at IT24. Emily is writing about her work with processes, ITIL and all other things she stumble over at work. She is writing in Swedish so if you are able do decrypt the language you can read about what is In the head of a processor. Her posts are written in a smart and funny way and it is worth reading about every one of her trivial and highly interesting reflections.

Who are you, really?

The other day, during a coffee break, we were talking about natural neural programming in the brain of animals and humans. What do we have with us from birth programmed from our genes? Why is some animals ready to run just a couple of hours after being born and why is a human so helpless for several years. I find all of this quite interesting.

Our topic were evolving and transforming several times and somewhere in the discussion while talking about psychology I told about my experience with a personality test I made online a couple of years ago. The Jung Typology Test.

The test is usually referred to as a MBTI-test (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). At first I was a bit skeptical that this was some Internet joke or something, but something felt right and I made the test. It takes some time and then I am done and gets the result.

First it says nothing else than that I have the personality type of an INTJ. What the %¤&# is an INTJ? Well there are some links on the result page to some descriptions of the result. Like this one by Marina Margaret Heiss. More descriptions are made by Keirsey who talk about four temperaments where I belong to the rationals.

Do the test now!

The reason I can recommend this test to people is that it gave me an understanding of who I am. The description of an INTJ fits me very well and I recognize myself in it. I have read special INTJ-forums on the Internet where they discuss the special features we share that are both blessings and handicaps. All of which I too have, more or less.

Only 2% of the population are INTJ so many others might think we are odd and strange... but we are the masterminds and we rule the world! Hee hee hee... ;)

If programming languages were...

As a computer programming nerd you often find yourself amused with smart jokes about nerdy stuff like programming and other things like that. So when I the other day got an email with a link where they compare different famous programming languages with religion I can not help to read it and smile approvingly.


If programming languages were cars...

• Ada is a tank. A butt-ugly tank that never breaks down. People laugh uncontrollably if you tell them you drive Ada, but really, do you want to be driving a sports car in a war zone?

• Assembly Language is a bare engine; you have to build the car yourself and manually supply it with gas while it's running, but if you're careful it can go like a bat out of hell.

• Basic is a simple car useful for short drives to the local shops. Once popular with learner drivers, it has recently been stripped down to a shell and rebuilt by a major manufacturer, The new version has been refurbished for longer journeys, leaving only cosmetic similarities to the original model.

• C is a racing car that goes incredibly fast but breaks down every fifty miles.

• Cobol is reputed to be a car, but no self-respecting driver will ever admit having driven one.

• C# is a competing model of family station wagons. Once you use this, you're never allowed to use the competitors' products again.

• C++ is a souped-up version of the C racing car with dozens of extra features that only breaks down every 250 miles, but when it does, nobody can figure out what went wrong.

• Eiffel is a car that includes a built-in driving instructor with a French accent. He will help you quickly identify and learn from your mistakes, but don't you dare argue with him or he'll insult you and throw you out of the car.

• Erlang is a fleet of cars that all cooperate to get you where you want to go. It takes practice to be able to drive with one foot in each of several cars, but once you learn how you can drive over terrain that would be very hard to navigate any other way. In addition, because you're using so many cars, it doesn't matter if a few of them break down.

• Forth is a car you build yourself from a kit. Your car doesn't have to look or behave like anyone else's car. However, a Forth car will only go backwards. FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN !

• Fortran is a pretty primitive car; it'll go very quickly as long as you are only going along roads that are perfectly straight. It is believed that learning to drive a Fortran car makes it impossible to learn to drive any other model.

• Java is a family station wagon. It's easy to drive, it's not too fast, and you can't hurt yourself.

• Haskell is an incredibly elegantly-designed and beautiful car, which is rumored to be able to drive over extremely strange terrain. The one time you tried to drive it, it didn't actually drive along the road; instead, it made copies of itself and the road, with each successive copy of the road having the car a little further along. It's supposed to be possible to drive it in a more conventional way, but you don't know enough math to figure out how.

• Lisp looks like a car, but with enough tweaking you can turn it into a pretty effective airplane or submarine.

• Mathematica is a well-designed car that borrowed a lot from the Lisp car without giving it nearly the credit it deserved. It can solve equations to determine the most efficient way to get to the destination, but it costs a fortune

• Matlab is a car designed for novice drivers going on short trips over terrain similar to the terrain the Mathematica car is usually driven over. It is very comfortable when driving over this terrain, but if you go off the trail even a little the car becomes so hard to drive that more snobby drivers refuse to even acknowledge that it's a car.

• Ocaml is a very sexy European car. It's not quite as fast as C, but it never breaks down, so you end up going further in less time. However, because it's French, none of the controls are in the usual places.

• Perl is supposed to be a pretty cool car, but the driver's manual is incomprehensible. Also, even if you can figure out how to drive a Perl car, you won't be able to drive anyone else's.

• PHP is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, it's bizarre and hard to handle but everybody still wants to drive it.

• Prolog is fully automatic: you tell it what your destination looks like, and it does all the driving for you. However, the effort required to specify most destinations is equivalent to the effort of driving there.

• Python is a great beginner's car; you can drive it without a license. Unless you want to drive really fast or on really treacherous terrain, you may never need another car.

• Ruby is a car that was formed when the Perl, Python and Smalltalk cars were involved in a three-way collision. A Japanese mechanic found the pieces and put together a car which many drivers think is better than the sum of the parts. Other drivers, however, grumble that a lot of the controls of the Ruby car have been duplicated or triplicated, with some of the duplicate controls doing slightly different things in odd circumstances, making the car harder to drive than it ought to be. A redesign is rumored to be in the works.

• Smalltalk is a small car originally designed for people who were just learning to drive, but it was designed so well that even experienced drivers enjoy riding in it. It doesn't drive very fast, but you can take apart any part of it and change it to make it more like what you wanted it to be. One oddity is that you don't actually drive it; you send it a message asking it to go somewhere and it either does or tells you that it didn't understand what you were asking.

• Visual Basic is a car that drives you.

If programming languages were religions...

• C would be Judaism - it's old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can't convert into it - you're either into it from the start, or you will think that it's insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.

• Java would be Fundamentalist Christianity - it's theoretically based on C, but it voids so many of the old laws that it doesn't feel like the original at all. Instead, it adds its own set of rigid rules, which its followers believe to be far superior to the original. Not only are they certain that it's the best language in the world, but they're willing to burn those who disagree at the stake.

• PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity - Fights with Java for the web market. It draws a few concepts from C and Java, but only those that it really likes. Maybe it's not as coherent as other languages, but at least it leaves you with much more freedom and ostensibly keeps the core idea of the whole thing. Also, the whole concept of "goto hell" was abandoned.

• C++ would be Islam - It takes C and not only keeps all its laws, but adds a very complex new set of laws on top of it. It's so versatile that it can be used to be the foundation of anything, from great atrocities to beautiful works of art. Its followers are convinced that it is the ultimate universal language, and may be angered by those who disagree. Also, if you insult it or its founder, you'll probably be threatened with death by more radical followers.

• C# would be Mormonism - At first glance, it's the same as Java, but at a closer look you realize that it's controlled by a single corporation (which many Java followers believe to be evil), and that many theological concepts are quite different. You suspect that it'd probably be nice, if only all the followers of Java wouldn't discriminate so much against you for following it.

• Lisp would be Zen Buddhism - There is no syntax, there is no centralization of dogma, there are no deities to worship. The entire universe is there at your reach - if only you are enlightened enough to grasp it. Some say that it's not a language at all; others say that it's the only language that makes sense.

• Haskell would be Taoism - It is so different from other languages that many people don't understand how can anyone use it to produce anything useful. Its followers believe that it's the true path to wisdom, but that wisdom is beyond the grasp of most mortals.

• Erlang would be Hinduism - It's another strange language that doesn't look like it could be used for anything, but unlike most other modern languages, it's built around the concept of multiple simultaneous deities.

• Perl would be Voodoo - An incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on friday night.

• Lua would be Wicca - A pantheistic language that can easily be adapted for different cultures and locations. Its code is very liberal, and allows for the use of techniques that might be described as magical by those used to more traditional languages. It has a strong connection to the moon.

• Ruby would be Neo-Paganism - A mixture of different languages and ideas that was beaten together into something that might be identified as a language. Its adherents are growing fast, and although most people look at them suspiciously, they are mostly well-meaning people with no intention of harming anyone.

• Python would be Humanism: It's simple, unrestrictive, and all you need to follow it is common sense. Many of the followers claim to feel relieved from all the burden imposed by other languages, and that they have rediscovered the joy of programming. There are some who say that it is a form of pseudo-code.

• COBOL would be Ancient Paganism - There was once a time when it ruled over a vast region and was important, but nowadays it's almost dead, for the good of us all. Although many were scarred by the rituals demanded by its deities, there are some who insist on keeping it alive even today.

• APL would be Scientology - There are many people who claim to follow it, but you've always suspected that it's a huge and elaborate prank that got out of control.

• LOLCODE would be Pastafarianism - An esoteric, Internet-born belief that nobody really takes seriously, despite all the efforts to develop and spread it.

• Visual Basic would be Satanism - Except that you don't REALLY need to sell your soul to be a Satanist...

AR-System 7.5 - What's new?

To increase the excitement in the project I want us to install the latest version of ARS in the server, mid tier, clients and why not exchange the whole ITSM with version 7.5! Yeeaahh! Here we go! :D


ARS developers x-mas:

• BMC Remedy Developer Studio. I haven't seen this yet but I have heard a little about what it can be and I want to say: Finally some improvements for us developers! I have also heard that it now can be possible to use Linux instead of this hated Windows for a development platform. I hope it is true. There is also a possibility to search for object, which is great when you have hundreds thousands to manage.

• Workflow debugger! Yeah! Finally!

• Version control. You can lock objects for others when you modify them and you can get a log of every change of an object.

• Application-Set-Filter-Phasing is a new run process command for delaying inserts of entries into a form so that they can be inserted in bulk for greater efficiency.

• Dynamic join of multiple forms on runtime using API call ARGetListEntryWithMultiSchemaFields. With this you can create recursive queries, value-set queries or joins with vendor form data in an external database.

• Run process command line can handle 4096 characters instead of 256.

• ARGetCacheEvent API call can be used to monitor if changes have been done in the workflow or not. Can be useful... we'll see...

• It is now possible to join external data sources with internal AR System forms.

• Possible to log to forms instead of to files and then put workflow to filter out what you are really interested in. This can be useful...

• A new log file for measuring mid-tier performance.

• 64 bit AR servers for UNIX and Linux using a 64 bit database.

• Image server object. This is "a place" where to store images in the AR Server. Then references to these images are used when building applications instead of a lot of copies of the same image. It is common to have images on buttons to give them a nicer look and a common feel throughout the application suite. It is a bit strange that they didn't implement this earlier.

• Remedy Import tool is dead, long live Remedy data import tool! The old tool needed an upgrade so we will see later how much better this all brand new tool is.

• arimportcmd is dead, long live "a Java data import command-line utility". Hmm.. why?

User impressions, or details that makes the ARS developer cool:

• Auto completion in fields that have a menu attached.

• Tooltips which is small messages that are shown when holding the mouse over some field or data. There is a HOVER event that can trigger active links. This sounds quite powerful and can be very useful to create user friendly interfaces.

• File system browser character field. A new display type for the character field. With this you can search for a file in the network and save the file name in a field but not save the file. I can see its use but it is very limited.

• Cell-based tables. Display the whole data row with several columns in one cell instead of several. Yes we can make more beautiful designs with this.

• Possibility to remove the (clear) value from drop-down lists. Our customer will be so happy!

• Panels! These sounds great... replaces the page holders and in many cases the trim box. These will probably make my life as a user interface designer much easier!

• The panels in the panel holder can have tabs like the old page holder, collapsible/stacked (not really sure what that is), splitter which lets you see all panels and drag to resize them, accordion which sounds a lot like the old tabs but but a bit cooler.

• The panels can have solid or gradient colours, background images, rounded corners.

• Possible to expand or collapse panels with workflow.

• Possible to trigger workflow on when a panel expand or collapse.

• Text formatting templates in HTML to be used by workflow with tooltips or viewfields.

• Buttons and URLs inside a table field.

• Possibility to use PNG or GIF images and use the transparency effect.

• Yahoo User Interlace Library, a collection of libraries in JavaScript™. With this library we get the possibility of animated highlight effects of fields using workflow.

• Quick reports in the browser, saved per server, per form and per user.

• Flashboards are using Adobe flash technology.

• There will be a countdown clock in the browser telling an inactive user how much time there is until his license is expired. Do we really need this? Can I turn it off?

• If you close the web browser or navigate away from the mid-tier, the license will be released after a configurable delay timer has expired. I hope this time can be set really really short, because we see this will be a problem today in earlier versions.

You can read more details here about BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0.

BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0

Here it is! In the middle of our project to implement version 7.1.0 of BMC Remedy AR-System and here version 7.5.0 is released. I can not believe that we will jump on the 7.5-wagon this late in the implementation project. But I wish we would... I really do... That would be exciting... in many interesting ways... :P

I will soon dig into the documentation and see what is new about this release. :)