Synon 2E and Plex Emporium by Lee Dare (A developer blog)

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Whilst most people I know are off on holidays this weekend (Easter), I have the unenviable pleasure of decorating my house. Like most people I have been doing this for what appears like eternity. I wouldn't say I am a DIY addict, but I have completed my fair share of decorating rooms over the years. So this weekend over the 4 days I have to decorate our hall, landing and stairs covering the ceiling, walls, woodwork and doors. Fit new door handles, hang pictures then prepare a bedroom and decorate ready for the new carpet that is being laid on Friday week. Now, I actually quite enjoy decorating and once this sprint is complete I would have conquered the majority of the house. The people before us clearly never bothered with general house maintenance and as such we have had a few issues but I am pleased to say that it will soon look stunning and be a joy to live in. The reason for the rush is that we have guests coming from overseas. I say overseas, I should say our homeland. We emig...

Will we run out of TLA (Three letter acronyms?) There are only 17576 combinations that can be considered when allocating a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for airport codes. Part of the challenge is that the code should also be meaningful and identifiable, for instance, everyone knows that London Heathrow is LHR and that Berlin in Germany is BER. If you don't believe me take a look at this site https://www.world-airport-codes.com/ . After a while some of the codes appear confusing. Hwanga in Zimbabwe has the seemingly obvious code of WKI . I assume this is pronounced Wiki. This may be of interest to some of the IT geeks reading this, assuming of course that the introduction of Google’s Knol has/will obliterated the Wiki concept. I can never work out why open source stuff like this "Wiki" is so damn difficult to maintain. I guarantee that Google or Microsoft will make this easy for Joe Bloggs general public to use. I can personally hear the death knell for Wiki already, l...

This has to be one of the most common questions asked of anyone in life. Apart from, How are you?, Can I buy you a drink? or cringingly, Do you come here often?. Well, this isn't an article about chat up lines or dating gotchas. I am long past all of that. However, many people can simply reply “I am a plumber” or “Nah, I’m a sparky geezer!” (Electrician), or perhaps they might say "I have my own business selling cars" or "I work for a bank doing banking stuff". The point here is that no matter what they do, their audience will immediately be able to understand what they do and if they need their help or services, they can simply ask. For the average IT geek, this is always a tricky and preferably avoidable question. We tend to shy away from disclosing our job because we are concerned about the impact of this little snippet of knowledge in the heads of a non IT savvy person. There is a common phrase in IT that goes something like, 'A little bit of knowledge ...

Development Standards are an important aspect of software development. Whether you are a one man band developing a small product for sale over the internet or part of a multi-national multi-disciplined software development team, getting them right for your environment has a significant impact on your ability to grow and maintain your application. Development Standards are all about best practices. This can be anything from a consistent screen design and menu layout right through to creating performance tuned code. Of course, in between there is a whole plethora of other important areas like architecture, naming conventions for your objects (tables, fields, programs etc), program layout, parameter interfaces, component selection and code comments to name a few. A full list would be almost infinite and depends on the type of application, number of developers, platform, language choice etc as to what and how you implement a standards strategy. However, not having a development standards s...