Just got very nostalgic as I came across the Amstrad 6128 Plus computer, the system that started my journey into the world of computers and contributed immensely to my current career path of programming. I think I was about 12 when Santa Claus delivered one and it has to have been the most significant and most used present I ever got. Everyone else at that time had their Commodore 64s and eventually their Amigas but I got years out of that Amstrad. My programming skills developed over countless hours of typing, modifying and creating BASIC programs.
It had a weird 3″ floppy disk drive that meant games were hard to come by, particularly in Laois/Kilkenny, but some of the games it did have were great, check out the version of Batman The Movie via Youtube.
Must have a root around and see if it’s still at home somewhere!
I’ve come across two very useful and powerful tools recently. One is a replacement for Windows Explorer and the other is a Text editor that doubles as a replacement for Windows Notepad.
Xyplorer is a very powerful alternative to Windows Explorer. I had enough of Explorer recently with crashing and hanging and general lack of power and I’ve switched to this new tool. It costs €17.50 for a license or €35 for a lifetime license but you can evaluate it for free for 30 days and from what I’ve seen so far I’ll definitely be purchasing it. One of the most obviously useful features is that it lets you create tabs so you can view multiple folders in one window. It’s also got very detailed file managment features.
Notepad++ is a free Windows text editor that has very quickly become my editor of choice. It can install itself as a replacement for the basic Notepad which is handy, it’s very fast and it comes pre packed with support for loads of programming languages. I’ve been using it for a lot of PHP editing lately when I can’t be bothered waiting for Eclipse to start up or churn through it’s annoyingly slow procedures.
Spent a few hours trying to deal with importing a huge sql data file into MySQL before I eventually found the easiest solution via another site - import large file into mysql. The file is over 1 Gig so it’s pretty big and phpmyadmin and the web server are limited in the filesizes they can handle, everything kept timing out on me. I even tried an alternate solution called bigdump but that timed out aswell. In the end the best way to handle it is very simple - let MySQL do all the work by using the SOURCE command from the command line, “SOURCE mybigfile.sql” then sit back and let the mysql server do it’s thing.
The simplest and best solutions often get lost in a maze of people trying to be too clever or not fully appreciating the capabilities of the tool in front of them.
I got a chance to go down to DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute) in Galway yesterday to check on some e-learning research they’re carrying out. DERI is a worlwide collaboration between many institutes, of which Galway is the Irish base, whose main interest is the use of semantics and the semantic web. They’re doing a lot of interesting work but with this type of research you need keep a close eye on what’s been done to ensure it meets your business requirements and that it will be applicable in the corporate world.
Research and Development has quite often been overlooked in Irish based IT work but in recent times the government have pledged financial investment. R&D is critical to the long term success and growth of IT companies but too often it’s an afterthought or sidetrack from the day to day work. All about return on investment I suppose!
