Strings in C can span multiple lines

December 19th, 2006

I came across a multi-line string while doing an inspection on a colleagues C code. I’ve never seen this sort of thing before, and didn’t know it was possible.

Something like this:


    char* welcomeMessage = "Hello "
                           "Dale. "
                           "How are you?";

    printf("%s", welcomeMessage);

will happily print out “Hello Dale. How are you?”.

It seems that you can define a string literal in C across multiple lines, without any need for a concatenation character (like ‘+’ in Java and C#).

I like that, even though I’ve been writing C for years now, I still occasionally come across little bits and pieces in the language that are new to me. And doing code inspections and reviews of other people’s code are a good way to share this sort of stuff and learn from each other.

Help is available from LearningNet

December 18th, 2006

I had an interview with someone from LearningNet today.

LearningNet is a workforce development project created by a group of voluntary sector organisations. It aims to identify and meet the learning needs of staff and volunteers working in the voluntary and community sector.

They’re an interesting organisation that I first heard of a little while ago. They’re working with us in Solent Youth Action to produce a learning needs analysis of the staff and directors.

For the staff, it is an opportunity for a thorough and independent review of their training needs which is not normally possible within an organisation as small as us.

Perhaps more importantly, for the trustees, it is an independent perspective on any gaps in our knowledge and skills. As volunteers from a variety of professions who came together to start this organisation essentially in our spare time, I think this is very valuable. When we started, we knew nothing of the laws or regulations we would encounter in starting a charity and company, being an employer, leading an organisation, or managing hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money. We’ve learnt a lot, but what don’t we know? What skills don’t we have that we don’t realise – skills that could potentially help us to do a better job? Or more worryingly, what don’t we know that could help us avoid a future pitfall we haven’t considered?

Read the rest of this entry »

How to avoid the housework when you’re still feeling ill

December 17th, 2006

Grace doing the hoovering for me

Read the rest of this entry »

Great Big British Quiz

December 16th, 2006

Last week’s cold (just as I was starting to feel better!) turned into infected sinuses. Not much fun… in fact, it was surprisingly painful, and left me pretty much useless for a couple of days.

This is all by way of an excuse for why I ended up laid out on the sofa this afternoon watching The Great Big British Quiz on five US. I’ve not seen it before, and as it was about the only thing I’ve done today, I thought I’d mention it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Federating is one way to tackle the headteacher shortage

December 12th, 2006

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months now, but we’ve had to keep this confidential until we worked out some of the details.

Our school has been looking for a new headteacher since the previous head left 18 months ago. We’ve been through the recruitment process – the advertising, shortlisting and interviewing – five times now. And still, we have not been able to find a head.

We’re not an isolated case – you don’t have to go far to hear stories of headteacher shortages:

Read the rest of this entry »

Solent Youth Action is a big charity?

December 11th, 2006

Interesting statistics from the Charity Commission:

  • 57% of charities earn less than £10,000 a year
  • 29% of charities earn between £10,000 and £100,000 a year
  • 6% of charities earn between £100,000 and £250,000 a year
  • 5% of charities earn between £250,000 and £1 million a year
  • 2% of charities earn between £1 million and £5 million a year
  • 1% of charities earn more than £5 million a year

In other words, the majority of charities get less than £830 a month. And 86% of charities (the vast majority of the 168,000 charities registered in the UK) earn less than £100,000 a year.

This surprises me – and makes me look at Solent Youth Action a little differently. I always describe SYA to people as a small charity. But we earn over £200,000 a year. So, relatively speaking, that means we’re not a small charity. We’re actually in the top 14% of the wealthiest charities in UK. Eeek…. scary thought 🙂

Lotus Sametime support for Google Talk

December 10th, 2006

I’m starting to feel a bit better after my recent bout of manflu. So time to catch up on what I’ve been missing for the last few days!

With an RSS reader that has been quietly collecting enough stuff to keep me reading all day, I thought I’d start by just skimming the headlines. One that jumped out at me was “Chatting with Lotus Sametime” on the official Google blog.

The new version of Lotus Sametime (IBM’s instant messaging service which we use at work) will support xmpp – an open standard which will let it interact with other xmpp-compliant services like Google Talk. As someone who uses Google Talk to keep in touch with people I know outside work, I like the idea of having a single client which I can use both to talk to IBMers on the intranet and friends on the Internet.

I’ve been using the new version of Sametime at work for a little while now – hopefully we’ll be getting the “IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway” (which allows Sametime to connect with AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger) soon.

intech is very cool

December 9th, 2006

I took my mentee to intech this afternoon. Intech is a science and technology museum in Winchester, who describe themselves as a:

…purpose-built 3500 square metre, award winning, building housing 100 interactive exhibits, which demonstrate the science and technology of the world around us in an engaging and exciting way.

Each exhibit is a self-contained, practical activity which demonstrates an aspect of science or technology by getting you to do something. Not all of them were a hit with him, but there is enough variety in the exhibits that we easily found enough to keep him interested and engaged for a couple of hours – no mean feat!

It was great to see him enjoy it. With some of the exhibits it obviously felt like an achievement when he worked out the idea behind it. That is perhaps the best thing about going to intech – even more important than the obvious education in science and technology, is the boost in confidence this can give.