Dock 22

Early this year I switched from IBM to OutSystems in a move some considered crazy, some considered bold and some considered fantastic. After 10 years working with infrastructure I am now working as a software engineer, the job I dreamed about when I was around 12 typing way on my Spectrum 48K. But I really don't get that kind of feeling like “I finally got there”. In fact I have grown an interest for many other aspects of computers and technology other than software so I am very glad to be a Cloud Software Engineer which means I get to build software with infrastructure and security in mind too. OutSystems is a great place to work. The company makes a huge effort in order to keep people happy and motivated. There are rules though that really make perfect sense and keep everyone productive and motivated rather than annoyed and controlled. They focus on how you should act rather than things you can't do. They also target management behaviour rather than being limited to the...

I have been interested in tracking my every move automatically for some time. I cannot count the times I have tried to remember "when did I got to that place" or "when did I do that thing with my friends". This is probably a common problem but I think I probably forget more than most people and being a geek and a gadget lover, I became somewhat obsessed with having my gadgets track me so I could get back to that memories easily. There are lots of services that can be combined together to create something like this and I have tried some of them. IFTTT , Momento  and Day One  are very good examples. None of them is exactly what I need but they are an excellent help. There is also the problem of who to trust with my data and how long will these services keep running and doing this job for me before they shutdown for whatever reason and I have to move my data around once again. So I decided to roll my own set of scripts that gather this data for me on my own hardware....

Really. This is just a test. Heading 1 Heading 2 Heading 3 Heading 4 Heading 5 Heading 6 Pre Blockquote Seriously. Just testing.

After years of dreaming of ridding a motorcycle, I finally got my license. But that wasn't all I needed to accomplish my dream. I also needed a bike. Off course there were always a lot of biker friends around to borrow a bike from. My favourite was my sister-in-law's 2008 black and white Triumph Bonneville T100. But it's not the same thing. I needed MY OWN bike. Two years too late, it finally came the time to get my bike. My search was a bit short. Too short maybe. But what did I search for? not too expensive classic look easy to ride practical As you can see, I lack the mechanical expertise to look for mechanical characteristics. I did ask a few experts but their opinions were almost always concluded with "... but you should try before you buy and choose whatever makes you feel better...". So short story really short, I got myself a 2010 Triumph Bonneville T100 Black and I'm enjoying every minute. Ridding this bike seems to me a pretty good definiti...

This is another post about time painfully spent trying to solve a simple bug. I'm currently migrating a lot of VBScript code to a VB.NET application. Before you email me about how I should be using C#, please take note that migrating code is already tricky enough as it is so I decided for a language that shares a lot of syntactic similarities with VBScript. Back to the bug, I was migrating this VBScript code: Const C_HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = 2147483650 Dim Server Dim strValue Dim objReg Dim strKeyPath Server = "localhost" strValue = "" Set objReg = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & Server & "\root\default:StdRegProv") strKeyPath = "SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName\ActiveComputerName" If objReg.GetExpandedStringValue(C_HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, "ComputerName", strValue) 0 Then Error ("error r...