The ramblings of a yorkshire tyke » Tips

rsync & permission denied/operation not permitted & arch linux

spgennard — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:31:36 +0000

I use rsync to sync directories between machines but one of my machines kept screwing up the permissions, I finally get time to track the “Operation not permitted” issue and it turned out to my vfat backup drive not being …

New Gadget

spgennard — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:57:29 +0000

Over the last couple of years I have not been getting on too well with my second generation iPod Touch but it has been a bit of a love hate relationship… I love it when works well with my mac’s …

Michael’s very own “Getting Started with Visual COBOL”

spgennard — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:04:07 +0000

Michael Burgun over at his own blog space has started blogging about using Visual COBOL… Its worth a look as having meet Michael last year I can honestly say he is a very knowledgeable and experienced chap, so I am …

DNS – Tweaks take 2

spgennard — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:10:04 +0000

Although I have good results tweaking my DNS it appears it can have its side affects if you have a very fast internet connection and are doing some serious streaming… have a read of the following quoted article. If I …

AzureKit and COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:26:19 +0000

AzureKit is a nice piece of source code released on CodePlex by Mark Rendle. The AzureKit makes life much easier for creating, searching, deleting elements in your Azure’s Table Storage. My idea was that if the AzureKit was easy enough …

DNS – Tweaks

spgennard — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:01:34 +0000

DNS speed can really affect your home router either for the better or worse.. I use a open source bit of software called namebench to periodically verify that I am using the most performant/reliable DNS server. Take a peek, it …

MacBook upgrade

spgennard — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 11:30:55 +0000

My home laptop is my beloved black macbook which has a reasonable Core Duo 2.2 ghz but unfortunately the hard drive is getting a bit full due using as my digital photo album… After a bit of research I decided …

Visual COBOL 2010 R3

spgennard — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:50:08 +0000

For the last couple of months I have been working on next release which is cunningly name: Visual COBOL 2010 R3 Which is surprising since the previous was called Visual COBOL 2010 R2. If you are using any of products …

spgennard — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:13:22 +0000

Last week I replied to a post about exceptions, it made me think those programming .Net daily take for granted the etiquette of using Exceptions. So I thought I would share some of my thoughts… well it is a sort …

Extending Visual COBOL 2010

spgennard — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:08:38 +0000

One of the many great reasons for choosing Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as our development platform for Visual COBOL 2010 is it ability to be extended… which we have done but you equally use third party extensions too. One of …

Reflection and COBOL

spgennard — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:56:01 +0000

For the last couple of months I have working on Visual Studio 2010 and this include Microsoft CLR v4 and I was recently asked how to write a test that determines at runtime which CLR is being used and what …

Manual for British Gas RC Plus Thermostat

spgennard — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:37:33 +0000

I recently tried to find our manual for our “British Gas RC Plus Termostat” on the internet as we have lost our original manual. Anyway, after some research, I found they British Gas just re-badged them from Drayton Digistat and …

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

spgennard — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:55:57 +0000

Microsoft have just updated the “Application Architecture”. I can’t say I have read it from cover to cover but it is being downloaded to my ebook reader… Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition The guide helps you to: Understand the …

Scripting Languages and COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:39:04 +0000

The use of scripting languages with other languages has increased over the last couple of years, from a simple case of interoperability, reuse of scripting code to allowing your code to customised via the user of external scripts. All of …

MacBook keyboard pains and VirtualBox/VMWare

spgennard — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:54:33 +0000

As a MacBook user who has used Virtualisation on the mac for sometime now but only usually with Linux based OS, I was forced to use it with Windows recently and I quickly found out how badly it handles UK …

Converting .chm’s for reading on the iriver story

spgennard — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:57:57 +0000

One of the first things I wanted to read on my iriver story was the montly msdn subscription magazine which is available as a .chm. Which unfortunately the iriver story does not support, so I needed to convert it into …

12 Tips for using Micro Focus COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:36:33 +0000

12 Tips for using Micro Focus COBOL As it is close to Christmas and I wanted to do something with 12 in the title, I’ve thrown together some useful if not un-ordered list of 12 things tips using Micro Focus …

A Comparison Of .Net COBOL, Visual Basic and C#

spgennard — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:35:44 +0000

Today my collegues Robert and Alex have finally decided to publish a document that compares Visual Basic, C# and COBOL for .Net under The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Rather than doing a cut-paste job, here is a quote from …

Java process id via java.lang.management

spgennard — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:53:13 +0000

While working on a project recently I need to find out the current process of the active running Java process (for tracing/auditing), however I never found a 100% perfect solution but did come across an acceptable solution to use the …

Design Patterns and COBOL

spgennard — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:40:29 +0000

As part of my working life I happy to say I use COBOL and for better or worse it is here to stay. With this in mind it annoys me I here/see saying things such as COBOL is a old …