Today is my day off, but I wake up and have a quick look at nagios to see if there is anything I need to worry about. Yes there is, SQL Server has run out of disk space on its data disk. I race downstairs and VPN onto the server to find out what has happened. One of my monitoring databases has had runaway log growth...
Last night I started reading The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas . One practical tip that immediately jumped out at me as useful in my quest to be a better programmer: Don’t live with broken windows. The theory goes like this: an abandoned building with a single broken window attracts additional...
For a while now I have been at the door of describing myself as a developer, but I think I have finally gone through that door. It is all a state of mind, its not about having x amount of knowledge, its just about saying “Yeah, I’m a developer now.” One thing that pushed me through that door, was an application form...
For a while I have been threatening to try a user group. Well this week I went to my first meeting. The user group I went to is called Leeds Sharp who are celebrating their third birthday, happy birthday guys and thanks for the cake. The talk was all about F#. I know nothing about F# other than it is in visual studio....
I recently replaced my installation of Visual Studio 2013 with Visual Studio 2015 RC. I like the new version, I am not a Visual Studio expert so it will probably take me a while to find all the good stuff but here are some initial thoughts. Being as my MSDN subscription is still valid I have installed the professional...
Today I encountered a new error. Run-time error ‘6’: Overflow doesn’t really tell me much. The error was occurring in the Access ADP front-end of our main database. It was only occurring for one particular Id number which was really confusing me. First thing I tried was to remove the most recent changes I had made,...
My laptop has been getting a bit cluttered up with stuff so this weekend I gave it a reset. As I am using windows 8 this was much easier than doing a format reinstall which I have done many times with previous OSes. Open settings and select recovery and after about 4 hours everything was back to factory settings. I...
In Cloud Computing there are a lot of terms that end aas or As a Service. Most of these I hadn’t heard of until I started writing this list. Any service that is delivered over the internet instead of hosted locally on your network or PC could in theory be described as an As a Service. PaaS Platform As a Service This is...
I am going to take a break this week from talking about technology to talk about Star Trek. I have just listened to a podcast where they consider this list of great Star Trek Characters. I am now going to try and come up with my own top 25 characters. Here we go. Spock. My number one star trek character is Spock....
Rubber Duck is a process in development where you talk through an issue with an inanimate object such as a Rubber Duck. It gets its name from the book The Pragmatic Programmer where it was first used. I am the only programmer where I work and often I find myself with a question that I can’t find the answer to. I do...