Archive for the ‘ibm’ Category

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HackDay – hack attempt 1 – a wiki sync

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

Yesterday was IBM’s fourth HackDay. My first project attempt of the day was to try and ‘hack’ our internal wiki.

Background
We have an internally hosted wiki software on the intranet. Anyone is free to create a new wiki, and these wikis are used to manage anything from work projects and teams to community projects.

The idea
The plan was to write something that would let you have a local copy of a wiki – a copy which lets you read and edit an intranet wiki while offline (or with only Internet access). The idea was to have the ability to sync this local wiki to the intranet-hosted the next time you are on the intranet.

Why?
The thought was that sales or service IBMers who work at customer sites might not always have access to the intranet.

And even with Intranet access, I thought that some tasks – such as looking something up quickly – might be better-suited to the quicker access you could get from a locally-hosted mirror.

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Posted in ibm, tech | 2 Comments »

Business + Charity + Connexions

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Apologies for cross-posting… this post originally began life as a post for my work intranet blog, but thinking about it there wasn’t anything confidential in there so I’ve tweaked it a little for posting here.

The inspiration

Last February, I got invited to an IBM volunteering celebration event at South Bank (because of an event I ran for some local charities). I am on the board of trustees for a local youth charity, so I brought along Andy – the chair of the board of trustees of my charity. (I don’t often go up to London so I thought it’d be more fun to take a mate with me.)

The day included presentations – some from IBM employees talking about what they had got out of volunteering, and some from charities and community organisations saying what a difference IBM had made to them. In some ways, I found it a bit of an eye-opener – I often see the volunteering that I do as being separate to me at IBM. With a couple of exceptions, I’ve generally approached my voluntary work as an individual, rather than as “Dale from IBM”.

Listening to the presentations, I started to question my approach. One headteacher talked about the difference that his local IBM lab made to his school when an IBM employee called upon people from his lab to support them. This was a common theme in many talks – the potential to make massive differences to the local community when IBMers work together.

It’s not like I’ve not seen that at Hursley – I’ve seen it in things like Blue Fusion. But still, in many ways, it did get me thinking, and Andy and I spent the train ride back to Eastleigh thinking about ways that IBM could add value to the work that we do at SYA to support local young people.

That ideastorming, inspired by the work from IBM sites around the UK that we’d been hearing about, led to an idea – and the creation of a new project.

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Posted in charity, ibm | 4 Comments »

Finally – a chance to use dopplr!

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/dalelane

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Posted in ibm, tech, web | 3 Comments »

Turning C# programs into PowerShell scripts

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

I mentioned PowerShell – the new Windows command shell and scripting language – last year when I first tried it out. But other than playing with it a little, I kind of put it to one side and forgot all about it.

Yesterday I picked it up again and started playing with it again – using it to develop functions for WebSphere MQ (accessing it through the .NET DLLs that come with WMQ). The idea was to start and produce something which expands on the command line administration tools that come with WMQ – adding features that perhaps we don’t already provide.

You can see a walkthrough of what I’ve come up with so far on a post I wrote for the Hursley WMQ blog, but I thought I’d quickly draw out some of the more interesting bits that I learnt in doing it.

(It’s worth pointing out that if you’ve come to this page from Google looking for PowerShell tips and best practice, that I’m very much a beginner. As I highlight in the WMQ post, this is the product of an evening’s playing around – pretty much just trial and error and seeing what tab-complete suggests. It seems to work, but whether it’s the best way to do it… dunno 🙂 )

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Posted in code, ibm | 4 Comments »

Blue Fusion

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Today was a day off to be a ‘school host’ for Blue Fusion – IBM Hursley’s annual week-long Science Fair for Year 11 (15/16 year old) school pupils. The aim is to promote the benefits of science, technology and engineering to a younger audience. We invite local schools to come to the Hursley Park labs and compete in a variety of activities. The activites are designed and developed by teams at Hursley, focusing on balancing education with entertainment.

As a school host, I got to show the students and teachers from one school around today. It’s been too long since I last got to spend a day at work doing something ‘fluffy’ like this. I really like Blue Fusion – it’s a unique chance for us to try and encourage and enthuse what could be the next generation of scientists and engineers.

I haven’t had much to do with it leading up to the event this year, but I know from my involvement in previous years how much work is involved in getting it all ready. Hundreds of school children, ten guest speakers (some from outside IBM), and ten original hands-on educational activities. It’s an exciting challenge, and a satisfying extension to the ‘day job’.

Posted in ibm | 1 Comment »

Starting a new blog

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

I’ve been quiet this week because I’ve been working on the creation of a new blog. This one is a group blog that I’ve started for people that I work with on a software product called “WebSphere MQ”. It’s now live at hursleyonwmq.wordpress.com.

I went for a hosted service this time, rather than set it up all myself, so if I don’t have to worry about bandwidth usage if it proves to be popular.

And – also unlike this one – I actually bothered to customise the style of the blog and draw a custom banner image (my artistic skills truly know no bounds! ;-)).

Other than writing some posts for it myself, I’ve also been persuading colleagues to write me stuff, writing some of the static pages like ‘About’ and ‘Disclaimer’ to get it all ready, and double-checking our work guidelines on blogs to make sure I’m not breaking any rules!

Unless you have an interest in WebSphere MQ, it’s unlikely to be very interesting to you. But if you do, please take a look and add a comment.

(And if you work on WMQ and I haven’t badgered you already, please join in! Give me a shout with your wordpress ID and email address and I’ll add you to the list of authors. :-))

Posted in blog, ibm | 3 Comments »

Building in Second Life is kinda fun

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

I’ve dipped my toe into Second Life from time to time, although I’ve mainly been an observer of the whole thing – the increasing media coverage it has been receiving, and some of the interesting things that companies like IBM have been doing in this space.

After spending most of today “in-world”, I’m starting to get into the whole thing a little more. I’ve always liked the idea of Second Life and been excited by the potential, but my experiences with it before today could be pretty much summed up as “wandering around aimlessly looking for something to do”. When you actually have something to do, it all starts getting much more interesting.

I got to spend today in Second Life for work (a nice change from WMQ!), as a few of us spent the day developing a recruitment centre for IBM in Second Life.

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Posted in ibm, tech | 2 Comments »

Eating is a benefit

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Some flyers have appeared in the canteen at work advertising a new benefit hopefully coming soon for us. The idea is that we will be able to transfer money direct from our gross salary to our ID badges which we use to buy food in the work canteen. In this way, we make a saving by not paying NI and tax on money we spend on food and drink at work.

When you add up the amount I spend at the canteen for lunch each day, as well as the amount at the coffee bars and vending machines, this could actually add up to a nice amount of money!

I already do this ‘salary sacrifice’ thing (paying for stuff out of gross salary to save money on tax and NI) on pension contributions, and childcare vouchers. Thinking of food and coffee as a benefit sounds strange though! 🙂

Posted in ibm | 1 Comment »

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