went smooth, i think

A while ago i wrote this “four easy steps to permenant residance in the dog box” which goes a bit like this

1. Spend two lots of THREE weeks out of the country on business (Redmond)
2. Miss Mothers Day because you are out of the country on business??
3. Spend another FIVE Days out of the country on business (Barcelona, Tech-ed IT Forum)
4. Miss the wifes birthday, because your are out of the country on business

Now I have fifth one

5. Accept a Facebook friend invite from an EX-Girlfriend

In fact given the effect , it should be number ONE on the list !!!!!!!!!!!!!

At a School event recently I was shown a a very powerfull video which puts the challenges that schools and society face today into perspective and is a real eye opener.

One thing in particulare stood out to me
“We are currenlty preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist… in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet”
Think about it. The WEB did not exists when many of todays WEB designer left school …………….

The Video is here http://is.gd/t1T

I went to a school meeting last night where where there was a presentation on “Virtual Learning Environment” Collaboration to you and I

The teacher doing the talk was saying how kids use IT, is very different to adults

20% of his Year9 class has had a online chat with someone in a different countrty this week
20% had posted to youtube this year
80 % had watched a youtube this week
Then he said, i want make a comparision
Everyone to stand up, (Parents and governors, 50 ish total )
He then Said

Sit down if you Don’t use email? No one sat down !
Sit down if you are not carrying a mobile phone, Three sat down
Sit down if you Don’t use MSN? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t use facebook/myspace? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t have a blog

Hmmmm, only TWO left standing, Me and a Teacher…..

Recently I have been involved in a few projects where for a long time I was bogged down by huge amounts of what appeared to be useless paper work, High level design, Service Definition, Service Description, Detailed design, Support documnetation, CMDB requirements, bulid documenst,??architecture review??etc, etc, etc . All of which seemed to be just a painfull, civil service mentality excercise designed to slow things down.

However having now come out of the other side, the penny finaly dropped. No one man can think of everything from every point of view at once. So the during the process of writing up and author review, peer review etc?? almost all of the assumptions, mistakes and missing bits get sorted out. In particular reviews by non technical people, seemed to serve the most benefit, as they will make totall different assumptions from a completely different view point.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe there has to be a better way and I am certainly not looking forward to the next project, but I am sure I won’t complain so much

Many roundabouts have concentric lanes, which just go round and round for ever, so to exit the roundabout you must change from one lanes to the next (hopefully with the use of those orange flashing lights which seem to be optional on so many cars these days) and so on, simple.

Some however, like the one at the C&G roundabout in Gloucester have lanes which wind out as you go round the roundabout, so provided you get the approch correct, you stay INSIDE the lane marking, and will arrive at you exit, it does actualy work rather well…..

Then you add an ageing retart to the mix, who wants to drive round 8 feet from the kerbs and then shouts at me for not indictaing and cutting him up, when infact I was staying within the lane markings, and it was him who changed lanes (inwards) while he was trying to maintain his 8 feet distance from the roundabout kerbs. Then his wifes chips in accusing my of dangerous driving. Shame they did not report me for dangerous driving, i would have loved to have seen his face when the copper tells him he was the one changing lanes without indicating !!!!!!

So he we go, upgraded to 2.6.2

And it all fell to bits, could not login, but did not get the wrong password error.
cleared all the cookies, and tried different browser , same deal !!!!
hmmm, Rolled back to 2.6.1 same deal !!!!

So this is getting drastic
Copied the setting file somewhere safe, nuke the whole lot ( except themes) and re upload
It worked, cool, put some plugins back, wp-gravatar and spam Karma 2
It blew up again , now getting annoyed
removed plugings, now works, login to admin page and got to plugins section, and disable all plugins,
re install and activate, WP-Gravatar, wp-mobile, Spam Karma 2 and reCaptcha
All seem to work, will leave it alone for a while now

Mind you i have been thinking aboiut a clean up for a while now, the WYSIWYG editors have not been right for a while, odd mix of JS files i suspect

it was there so i did it

Upgraded, seems to work Ok

I have been working on a ZERO touch build script for IIS on and off for a few weeks,

One of the last stepping stone for formating the “data” drive prior to setting everything up

“FORMAT H: /FS:NTFS /V:ASG” will prompt for “do you want to erase all yoiu data”, and again if the disk is in use !

So enter WMI, after only 20 mins of digging around the the internet I found some code to do a defrag, a few tweaks, and I have some VBS code that will format a DRIVE, NO questions, even if the drive is in use, and it is ONLY 7 lines

strComputer = “.”
Set objWMIService = GetObject(”winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2″)
Set colVolumes = objWMIService.ExecQuery (”Select * from Win32_Volume Where Name = ‘H:\\’”)
For Each objVolume in colVolumes
errResult = objvolume.dismount(1,0)
errResult = objVolume.format(”NTFS”, 1, 4096, “ASG”, 0)
Next

We may all complain about bad days or even weeks at work, the price of fuel or get annoyed that the bank has just charged you £30 for a £1.20 mistake, but recent events in my life has put that all into perspective.

Yesterday I attended the funeral of a 19 year old lad (nephew in law), who was tragically killed in a car accident. Witnessing parents and grandparents grieving, over someone who has died so young, certainly puts life into perspectiveNo parent or grandparent should ever have to go through this………