Back from My Holidays

I’ve been away to Greece over the last week, I got back over the weekend but I’ve been too busy to write a blog article. We visited Stoupa in the Southern Peloponnese and travelled with Greek Options, who we’ve used three times now and have always looked after us. Sadly we were only there for a week and therefore didn’t leave Stoupa to visit any of the fantastically old sites in travelling distance. We’ll have to go back. …

Dominic Kay

On the Sun/oracle blog, a couple of days ago, I noted my friend & colleague Dominc Kay’s first blog article. Today, on the same site, he wrote a very generous reference and associated me with some of the most powerful intellects working at Sun. Thanks Dom. …

Betrayal at the House on the Hill

For various reasons, the other month we went into Aldershot and visited “The Games Shop”. This is, as you’d guess, a shop that sells board games, games books, jigsaws and other games accessories; but not computer games, which is maybe why it has no web site. At our first visit, last year, we picked up “Murder at the Abbey” also here…, and this time bought “Betrayal at the House on the Hill”. Its fantastic – collaborative, re-playable, and with strong varied stories, our first night was Buffy’s Hell’s Gate, a deeply dramatic story. …

End of an Era

As the Easter holiday began, I picked the post of the floor and discovered three polling cards. Three!!. Goodness – they’re letting my elder son vote this year. I haven’t quite rushed to the photo albums to look at the pictures of him as a baby, but somehow, today, eighteen years seems to have flown like lightening. He can vote, kill & die for his country. (Don’t think he can stand as an MP though.) …

Some musings on programming languages

Over the last few days, I bumped into Tim Bray, (well, more accurately arranged to meet him). Somehow or other we got onto scripting, had a chat about languages and purpose. I’ve been mucking around with TCL/TK over the last few years and struggling to make it look right under my Linux builds. (The Laptop Diaries series may get there when I return to it). I reflected Tim’s view that TCL had probably missed its adoption window to Mike Ramchand, and he showed me ‘zenity’, which he uses to build the GUI for his dynamic system configurator. (‘zentity’ is part of Sun’s S10 Gnome distribution, although not its not on my Red Hat build.). Its obvious that I’m going to have to move on. Frankly, I should find perl or python easier than tcl; I started with COBOL and now use SQL or shell. …