So it was that time of year again: another dander! After the success of Malham last September, we opted for an August jaunt around the Yorkshire Three Peaks, a somewhat more challenging trot.

Once assembled at Kings Cross, your intrepid danderers (Matt White, the brave / crazy Alison, The Wookiee (plus his long-suffering wife Aliki), and yours truly) were good to go. We grabbed a train to Leeds, and then met up with Eileen Fitzgerald for the branch line out to our destination, Horton-in-Ribblesdale. I should note now that we travelled last Friday. Yes, Friday the 13th. Hmm.

Once in Horton, our accommodation was but a five minute walk from the picturesque railway station, so we settled in for a few drinky-poos and a nice big meal, storing up energy for the weekend’s shenanigans. For those interested, we stayed at The Crown Hotel, a fine pub with comfortable rooms, splendid food, and wonderful beer. What more could the unflinching traveller ask?

Saturday started early. We were punching our cards at the Pen-y-ghent Café a little after seven thirty, in readiness for a full day’s dander. The Yorkshire Three Peaks walk takes in, as you might guess, three peaks. These are (in order of ascent), Pen-y-ghent, Whernside (the tallest, at 2,415 feet) and Ingleborough. There’s a fair amount of trekking between these three little hummocks: road, bog, grassland and limestone slopes. All in all, a challenging walk, with the aim being completion within twelve hours.

Photo courtesy of Eileen Fitzgerald

Wisely, Mr. White and his good lady opted for an earlier finish after Pen-y-ghent, taking in some of the local sights instead of slaving up mountains. Grand notion, and what’s more, they were on hand come the end of the day to furnish us with much-desired refreshments outside the Crown! Thus it was that the Wookiee, Eileen and m’self soldiered on with the dander.

It was one hell of a walk, but most rewarding (especially when the ibuprofen kicked in, and I could stop malingering down the slope of Whernside). We finally punched in at the café a wee bit before 7pm, bringing our walk to eleven and a quarter hours. Not bad at all, and probably could have been quicker if it hadn’t been for my gimping on Whernside, and the general congestion around Pen-y-ghent (we walked on a very busy Saturday).

That first pint after such an endeavour is the sweetest thing, ambrosial one might say…

So, a recommended dander! If you want to know more, read Eileen’s take on it in her post,

Well worth a read, and needless to say coming from Mr. Elgort, it’s beautifully presented.

One of the more out-spoken (and frankly, interesting) characters in the ’80s Zappa band was Scott Thunes, the bass player. Listening to Broadway piqued my interest, and I ended up reading an abridged interview with Thunes, by Thomas Wictor (as an aside, I believe the interview excerpt came from Wictor’s book, In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians which looks to be well worth picking up). Here’s what Thunes had to say about his work as a bass player:

But I never thought of myself as a bass player; I was a musician. The actual role of the bassist does not interest me, and I don’t know how it could interest anybody else. It’s the ultimate non-glory position. Singers, guitar players, drummers, bass players-that’s how it goes, in order of importance. Though the function of the bass is very important in a rock band, I’ve never ever been able to perform that function without irony.
[…]
The joy of playing the bass is having my voice come out on an instrument; I don’t understand how that makes me a bass player. I also can’t understand how that makes me a chosen role model, because it’s the voice that’s important, not the instrument.

You can read more in the article, Scott Thunes: Requiem For a Heavyweight?

Now, what I wanted to highlight—hence the emphasis—is his outlook on music and his role in it: he came to the bass by default, and found his expression that way. Thunes’ words resonate when I read about the various language / platform / other wars that plague our wonderful world of IT: none of that crap matters, it’s the applications, stupid!

OK, so back to the Thunes website: one of his front-page posts links to an excellent article about life as a software developer, and it’s this link I want to finish with. In Thunes’ words, This article states my understanding of what I said way better than I could ever do. I guess I should have stayed in computers longer.—it is one hell of a read:

So you’ve just been hired by an IT department…

Link, and read more here: Ed Brill, Great DominoWiki case study now available.

IBM isn’t selling it. IBM isn’t marketing it. No one, at the customer-corporate level, knows what the engineers working on Domino are doing. They don’t know, and they don’t care. Why? Because, apparently, Domino does not show up on “the quadrant”. When corporate level strategy folks are trying to make decisions, they don’t have any guidance from IBM, or the analysts, or the trade magazines, or anyone, concerning the actual core capabilities of Lotus Notes, because Notes isn’t allowed to compete with Websphere. “IBM Lotus” shows up on the quadrant for “Social Software”. What does that mean? It means Connections and Quickr and Sametime.

jonvon.net - Lotus Notes: The Long Goodbye.

Lots of techie mentions, notably Atlassian and Wikipedia, with quotes from Steve Jobs and Skype.

If you have managers, they need to see this. I can’t guarantee they’ll get it though :-)

 target name = "clean"
 target name = "build"
 target name = "test"
 target name = "deploy" 

Now, for a clean target, I used to do something like this:

 <target name="clean">
 <delete dir="src" />
 </target> 

Simple and to the point eh: get Ant to delete your source directory, ready for the “build” target to, well, re-build it. Super, smashing, great. But if you use source control (and of course, you do) you may run into a whole world of trouble with this approach. For example, one of my clients uses Subversion, and I started to see these sorts of errors when attempting to commit the changes resulting from the build:

 Working copy not locked; this is probably a bug, please report 
 svn: Directory '/Users/SeymourButtz/Workspaces/Eclipse/Naffproject/src/.svn' 
 containing working copy admin area is missing 

Lawks! “Fear not” I said to myself, and popped off to the Ant manual “Delete” page. Once there, I discovered that I simply needed to get down with the kids, and update my Ant skillz. Don’t use the square old delete dir=… directive! Use this badger instead:

 <target name="clean">
 <delete includeemptydirs="true">
 <fileset dir="src" defaultexcludes="true" />
 </delete>
 </target> 

Slightly more verbose, but also a lot cleaner (pardon the pun): it wipes out your src directory as before, but having that defaultexcludes flag means the operation preserves any “required” sub-folders, which typically comprise such hidden gems as .svn and .cvs

Hip hip hooray!

(By the way, more on the Subversion error can be found in the FAQ).

Eric and David are co-hosting a seminar all about GTD, eProductivity, and getting the most out of your Lotus Notes set-up. In Eric’s words,

The event will be very valuable to anyone using Lotus Notes who wants to have more time and & less stress in their lives. Attendees do not have to use eProductivity as we will share tips that can be applied to any version of Notes.

So, if you’re interested in learning more, I would suggest signing up quickly: space is limited. What is more, attendees will get a combined GTD / eProductivity resource bundle, which can’t be bad at all. Good stuff!

Register now: Getting Things Done with IBM Lotus Notes.

 Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
 Call ws.EditDocument(False, doc, True, "") 

… results in:

Notes Error - This operation is not allowed while a dialog box is displayed.

Bah, of course. This rings a vague bell. So, in a pouty fit of pique I did this:

Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
 Call ws.DialogBox("Some form", blah blah blah … 

…and what do you know, it worked (even if the form you use for the dialog box isn’t in the database in which you’re working). So I’m still learning! To summarise: you can’t use NotesUIWorkspace.EditDocument from a dialogbox, but you can use NotesUIWorkspace.DialogBox. Of course :-)

For all those opining on the subject—how Apple should have done this, or done that, the specification is too limited, an Android pad will be better, an HP Slate will be better, Windoze Tablet is better, I can’t open the device and wire in my dog, blah blah blah—remember this: no-one did it. No-one else has created one of these things. Tablet PC has been out for what, eight years? Android’s here and has a vibrant ecosystem around it. There are many many players in the technology world. Have at it! Create something better! That’s what innovation is all about.

I’m not much an Apple fanboy: I whinge about certain things, whine about certain decisions. But I am not going to take them to task for releasing the iPad. You pays your money, you takes your choice. To the sceptics I will say this: no-one is forcing this technology down your throats. Go do something better.