Mark's Posterous

General musings - some work some play
About Me

Product Manager for COBOL products at Micro Focus. Previously a s/w development manager at Micro Focus and various other companies in ALM and the airline industry. Interested in technical geekery and webery (did I just make that word up?)

My Other Sites
TwitterLinkedIn
Archive
2011 (1)
2010 (21)
2009 (8)
 

Las Vegas

(download)

I've got hundreds of pic's plus plenty of video to sort out but here's a start with a demo of how good the iPhone 4 camera can be in pretty challenging conditions.

Posted
 

80's Rewind Festival

(download)
Finally got around to uploading a few photos from the 80's Rewind festival from last August.

 

(download)
(download)

Posted
 

Windows v1.0 Press Release - has much changed?

http://docs.com/8NAK

Well, I guess the "breaking the 640K RAM" barrier isn't so impressive these days (although it is amazing to think just how much could be done in so little memory), but it seems to me the Press Release looks like one that could have been written (by me!) in the last few weeks. I don't think PRs have changed much in 25 years sadly.

It is great to see this blast from the past - an era of great names like Apricot and Tandy, when companies listed their Telex numbers but no email addresses, when "Print Spooler" and "Reversi" both counted in the applications "free" in Windows vs, TopView & GEM (remember them?)

One thing that Windows v1.0 did that I'm not sure I can do in Windows 7 today - tile all windows from different apps to fill the screen.

Posted
 

Visual COBOL tips: Snippets

Excellent article on using & sharing snippets in Visual Studio on MSDN – For Visual COBOL users, there’s a great knol that Alex Turner started for COBOL programmers to share their snippet gems.

Posted
 

Belfast

Harland & Wolf Dockyards

Img_0003

Posted
 

US Charging for entry

It was good news that I didn't have to fill in the green I-94W to get into the US on this trip but the lines were still long now they want to charge £9 to get the ESTA you need before being able to travel. Unfortunately I don't anyone that already has one can renew before the deadline to get the renewal for free :-( I hope the money is spent on making it easier & quicker to get in.

Posted
 

Enough COBOL! Tea bags are the really important topic of the day!

It's Friday and anyone who reads these posts has probably had enough of Visual COBOL and COBOL for Eclipse posts this week so let's get onto the really important stuff - tea bags!

Posted
 

Eclipse: COBOL developers using Eclipse - do they match the overall community?

I won't just be posting about Visual COBOL (although there will still be a lot of them!). Micro Focus has a great development environment in Eclipse for COBOL aimed at programmers targeting UNIX and Linux (but it's also available on Windows - great for mixed Java & COBOL development). We've got even more coming later this year.

I see the Eclipse Community Survey (full report here, great summary here) has just been published and has some interesting insights - for example, there is a continuing rise of developers using Linux on their desktop - not a great surprise, I guess.

89.1% of users are "satisfied" or better with Eclipse.

Unfortunately the survey didn't capture any COBOL programmers for input. Are there any out there want to add their comments?

Posted
 

Visual COBOL Tips: Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools for COBOL

I see Microsoft have released the first "Pro Power Tools" pack for the Visual Studio 2010. The great news for COBOL programmers is that they're mostly useful for Visual COBOL as well.

The "Document Well" features are good if you have a typical "messy desk" approach with loads of tabs open all the time.

Selection and search tools are great, especially the "Ctl+Click" for Go To Definition. For traditional COBOL style code, then the Column Guides could be useful to keep source code tidy. Unfortunately, the related tool to align data assignments doesn't work which might have been nice to line-up picture clauses etc. Heh-ho.

This shows the value of being a good language in a well supported and growing development environment - when new features come along like this, all users get to benefit.

Posted