sieze the day

From July 2004 to June 2009 - 5 years since my first weblog post!!

About 5 years ago, I did my first blog post and it is hard to believe that 5 years has elapsed since that time.
I aquired my first mobile broadband device - and how things have progressed since then.

The big news now is the impending release of the new 3G Iphone - the second 3G IPHONE.

Here are a couple of my favourite weblog posts to celebrate the last 5 years...

Photo - Bella and Max

Live Band Review - Dr. eELephant in Nov 2004 - Vocalist Damien WIcks - later of "Biggest Loser" fame

Handy Work for Non-Handy People - My best photoshop efforts!

And one more for a laugh!

Up and coming Melbourne Artist - Hannah Gatland

Had the pleasure of meeting a very talented young Melbourne artist who has a very unique and engaging style.

Her name is Hannah Gatland, and you can see some of her art here

I particulalrly like THIS PAINTING

Cobol 2002 - Could I use this for my development project??

The adventure continues... see previous Blog entries for context!.
Been readings some introductory pages to books with such titles as "OOP De-mystified", "Dummies Guide to Ruby on Rails" and "Ruby by Example - concepts and code" and "Ruby on Rails Bible" (talk about try to get religion into EVERYTHING!!) - I get objects, I get classes, I get attributes and methods - ALL GOOD - then I find a page that I read half-way and fall asleep!! I go back and try to re-read it three or four times and each time I fall asleep - thanks to these books, the bags under my eyes are rapidly disappearing... but I am no closer to climbing "my mountain" - the metaphorical one.. you know.... Then I keep harking back in my mind to the statistic that according to GARTNER (world MAVENs on everything IT) 80% of the worlds computer software in production is COBOL - how is that for a nifty little statistic.. and get this - every year 5 BILLION new lines of COBOL code are added to the world's COBOL production systems!! - who is writing and maintaining this stuff - I haven't PLACED a COBOL programmer in almost 20 years!!
So, the bottom line is for me - every time the going gets impenetrable, I fantasize that there must be a version of COBOL that is OBJECT ORIENTED and just PERFECT for writing heavy-duty, state-of-the-art web applications...then i go to GOOGLE, enter in the word COBOL and pray that there will be a search result that says - NEW COBOL 2002 - FREE COMPILER - perfect for writing dynamic web applications ... but ALAS - no such result pops up... what I did find this evening though was this little "gem" from computer scientist E Dijkstra. I didn't know whether to fall about laughing or try to understand his point .. but here is the link anyhow* - his short article is called "How do we tell truths that might hurt?"  written in 1975 it seems

The beginning of his article starts off bysaying;

"Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles, and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)"

A couple of the statements in his short musing are as follows;

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."

Anyone with even moderate interest in IT , languages, evolution and history of IT, will find his article very interesting.

OK back to the book "OOP De-Mystified"

Another VERY interesting article  - "CONFESSIONS OF A COBOL PROGRAMMER"

Cobol 2002 - Could I use this for my development project??

The adventure continues... see previous Blog entries for context!.
Been readings some introductory pages to books with such titles as "OOP De-mystified", "Dummies Guide to Ruby on Rails" and "Ruby by Example - concepts and code" and "Ruby on Rails Bible" (talk about try to get religion into EVERYTHING!!) - I get objects, I get classes, I get attributes and methods - ALL GOOD - then I find a page that I read half-way and fall asleep!! I go back and try to re-read it three or four times and each time I fall asleep - thanks to these books, the bags under my eyes are rapidly disappearing... but I am no closer to climbing "my mountain" - the metaphorical one.. you know.... Then I keep harking back in my mind to the statistic that according to GARTNER (world MAVENs on everything IT) 80% of the worlds computer software in production is COBOL - how is that for a nifty little statistic.. and get this - every year 5 BILLION new lines of COBOL code are added to the world's COBOL production systems!! - who is writing and maintaining this stuff - I haven't PLACED a COBOL programmer in almost 20 years!!
So, the bottom line is for me - every time the going gets impenetrable, I fantasize that there must be a version of COBOL that is OBJECT ORIENTED and just PERFECT for writing heavy-duty, state-of-the-art web applications...then i go to GOOGLE, enter in the word COBOL and pray that there will be a search result that says - NEW COBOL 2002 - FREE COMPILER - perfect for writing dynamic web applications ... but ALAS - no such result pops up... what I did find this evening though was this little "gem" from computer scientist E Dijkstra. I didn't know whether to fall about laughing or try to understand his point .. but here is the link anyhow* - his short article is called "How do we tell truths that might hurt?"  written in 1975 it seems

The beginning of his article starts off bysaying;

"Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles, and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)"

A couple of the statements in his short musing are as follows;

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."

Anyone with even moderate interest in IT , languages, evolution and history of IT, will find his article very interesting.

OK back to the book "OOP De-Mystified"

Another VERY interesting article  - "CONFESSIONS OF A COBOL PROGRAMMER"

From "Stone AGE" (Data Processing) to TODAY - dynamic web 2.0 application development

OK - Hi again, and welcome to the "diary" of the personal challenge that I have set for myself.
My challenge is to lead and participate in the design, build and deployment of a very significant web application that will be built using "state-of-the-art" business analysis and software development tools and strategies.

What can I do/ what do I actually know at present? - The answer is not very much in terms of the latest tools and methodologies!!

I know enough to know that a great system needs to be "envisioned" - it needs to be formulated - architected and then it needs to be designed and then specified... right? (By the way - the reason that I am writing about this is to invite contributions, suggestions, mentors and even just plain rude old "naysayers" who will tell me it just can't be done - you can't teach an old dog new tricks right? An Analyst/programmer from the 70's and 80's could never be as good as a developer who has always started with OO and all the other related tools, methodologies and technologies..right? )
So, back to the design and specification - how is it best to START?? That is the first question I have ... where do I start? I have the idea - the concept for the web app - the business model if you will - but what is the first step of the journey that will end with the "going live" of a highly efficient and effective application that will completely support a major peice of B2B e-commerce?
What is the app I hear you ask??- aha .. that would be giving the game away, so we will need to move forward speaking in very general terms about the actual application being developed.

NExt STep - and feel free to comment - need direction and input - WHAT IS MY NEXT STEP??

From "Stone AGE" (Data Processing) to TODAY - dynamic web 2.0 application development

OK - Hi again, and welcome to the "diary" of the personal challenge that I have set for myself.
My challenge is to lead and participate in the design, build and deployment of a very significant web application that will be built using "state-of-the-art" business analysis and software development tools and strategies.

What can I do/ what do I actually know at present? - The answer is not very much in terms of the latest tools and methodologies!!

I know enough to know that a great system needs to be "envisioned" - it needs to be formulated - architected and then it needs to be designed and then specified... right? (By the way - the reason that I am writing about this is to invite contributions, suggestions, mentors and even just plain rude old "naysayers" who will tell me it just can't be done - you can't teach an old dog new tricks right? An Analyst/programmer from the 70's and 80's could never be as good as a developer who has always started with OO and all the other related tools, methodologies and technologies..right? )
So, back to the design and specification - how is it best to START?? That is the first question I have ... where do I start? I have the idea - the concept for the web app - the business model if you will - but what is the first step of the journey that will end with the "going live" of a highly efficient and effective application that will completely support a major peice of B2B e-commerce?
What is the app I hear you ask??- aha .. that would be giving the game away, so we will need to move forward speaking in very general terms about the actual application being developed.

NExt STep - and feel free to comment - need direction and input - WHAT IS MY NEXT STEP??

From Cobol in the 1980's to OOP in 2008 - The journey begins!!

WHat is it like to have a burning desire to develop systems and applications in 2008 when the last line of computer instruction code you wrote was a LIFETIME ago??? WHat is it like to have a great idea for a web application and be unable to progress it because the world of application development is completely new, foreign and completely obtuse and incomprehensible?

I invite you to join me on a journey of dicovery, some pain, more discovery and snail like progress as I attempt to get something a little more than "Hello World: out of today's system development tools and programming languages.

I think I wrote my last line of COBOL code in about 1984 - back in those days the "best" programmers took great pride in their "Structured programming techniques" - a term made famous by programming "guru" Ed Yourdon et al. To my way of thinking, structured programming was the practice of building programs that were made up of three "structures" - 1 - a sequence of procedures (PERFORM A, PERFORM B...) ,2. an iterative loop (PERFORM UNTIL...) and an "IF THEN ELSE construct.

Programming was sequential, data files were simple - Indesxed or "direct", databases were not really much used and on-line real-time screens were all character based - nothing  like the PLETHORA of widegets that are available to todays application developers! No wonder it takes an architect, graphic designer, business analyst, usability analyst and web UI coder just to create one simple application screen!!

AH yes, the COBOL program - how simple it was back then to develop systems... even on-line real-time systems were "easy" - screen design was character based - 80 characters across by 25 lines (rows) - and compared to the graphical user interfaces of today - how simple was it to create screens and systems.
In those days, we had wonderfully simple things called transaction files and masterfiles, and sometimes we had history files, audit files and various forms of reporting files. Data dictionaries were heirarchical and consisted of documentation on files, records and data elements.

I have been on this journey seriously now for about four weeks - sure I have had a number of attempts at developing my own applications with various tools and technicques but I have not until recently, put the bit between my teeth and launched myself into web application development 2008 style.

I have discovered some amazing software aids and tools and I will be mentioning these and doing some reviews along the way... so stay tuned for my next installment in "The journey to web app development capability, 2008 style?

BLIND SCHOOL NOW - CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED - PRESS CONFERENCE HELD - THURSDAY 13TH November - ST KILDA RD

This week - we will be posting a page giving full details of the Press Conference that was held last Thursday to officially announce and launch the campaign to establish a new blind school. Photos of the event will be available.

Recordings were made of most of the press conference and these are being processed at the moment so that they can be loaded up to this site as pod-casts.

One of the HIGHLIGHTS of the press conference was the sharing of expeiences by the panel, who had all volunteered to give of themselves and share their life experiences as blind people, teachers, parents, students and family members.

After the success of the press conference which was held in Melbourne last Thursday (13th November, 2008), there are a number of follow-up activities planned and further announcements will be made as the week progresses.

The PRESS CONFERENCE was a very lively event with a large board-room in St Kilda Rd overflowing with supporters, familes and many other interested parties who had come to lend support to the cause of BLIND SCHOOL NOW!

Vision Australia to close Burwood Blind School - Pupils need new school

Without getting into too much detail here, I want to highlight an issue that deserves some attention and support.

Vision Australia (and previously RVIB), has been running a specialist school for blind children for many many years. Recently, Vision Australia have announed they are to close the school - the site at Burwood has been sold to a propeprty developer (for approx $25mill?) and the children who need this type of education facility will HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE, than to enter "mainstream". The point here is that whilst MANY blind children can thrive in mainstream education, there are also many children who have additional needs and the parents of these children are convinced that these children absolutely need a replacement specialist school.

I draw your attention to the weblog of the COALITION FOR BLIND SCHOOL NOW!!

Go have a look at this site - there is a great deal of information about this issue - go and post a comment, download a petition and bring this to the attention of your friends.

Also, go have a look at the FACEBOOK CAUSE SAVE THE EDUCATION OF BLIND CHILDREN

Mushrooms that turn into black slime

Ok - Here are photos of some mushrooms that are proving difficult to identify exactly..CAn anyone out there let me know with some certainty what they are and if and how toxic they  are?

 

Another shot - they are really not pretty - I have done quite a bit of reviewing of images on the web but don't feel like I have been able to identify these beyond doubt.