There are gypsies on the helipad

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I love it when life throws up odd surprises, this morning when we arrived for work we found our helipad (in the centre of this satellite photo) had been colonised by travellers because it give me the once in a lifetime opportunity to use the title of this post!

I believe that the helipad was originally car parking, when this site was a nylon factory, and it has a wide range of interesting uses, not only does the occasional helicopter land on it but also a motorbike stunt guy practices there and the police teach each other how to drive on it.

The gypsies would have got more than they'd bargained for if a helipcopter had come in, but we're more dissapointed that it was the police driving yesterday, I'd've loved to see the faces all round if the travellers had woken to find themselves surrounded by the police driving school .

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against travelling people, I'm just a fan of serendipity.

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Swings and roundabouts in IT skills demand

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I was looking at this while reviewing salaries and found some interesting trends, reproduced here for your entertainment.

A) Oracle DBA's, polish up those Mysql Skills..

Fig 1 Mysql demand last 3 mths


Fig 2 Oracle demand last 3 mths


B) No one wants your java skills, go learn PHP...

Fig 3 Php demand last 3 mths


fig 4 Java demand last 3 mths

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Print to a network printer from Ant task on Windows..

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I wanted to print a checklist as the final task in a release management Ant job.
We have a predominantly windows environment on the desktop, so I thought I'd try using the DOS print command, but was initially foiled when trying to use a network printer.
I was then mislead slightly by this: NET USE LPT1: \\MY_SERVER\PRINTER which I found here.
In the end the obvious solution (to use the share name for the device) was the right one.
Reproduced below, it works a dream, now you too can spam your office printers!

<exec executable="print">
<arg value="/D:\\dundonald01\panasoni"/>
<arg value="${doc.dir}\checklist.txt"/>
</exec>

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Reviewer of the week

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Is it just me, or would this book review put you off too?

I loved this book. When I read it again someday, I will do it with an erasable crayon in my hand, marking it up like I do my Bible.

Have an award reviewer!

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Imperial War Museum

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Coo, we just got back from the imperial war museum where we not only saw a WW1 tank, which was smaller than I expected, a massive and excellent display of all things WW1 & WW2, and an enigma machine,



but also Lawrence of Arabia's Brough Superior. What more could you ask for from an afternoon at a museum?

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the innovations of yesterday today!

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Go take a look, you'll waste a lot of your friday afternoon..
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/

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prog eComm

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Ecommerce is the new Prog Rock!
Yes that's right, since I added the mini-note to my desk @work I now have three keyboards, one on the xps m1330, one on the mini-note and a full size one, elderly colleague X likened it to Rick Wakeman.


(if I owe you credit for the picture pls let me know!)

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April Fools

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Updated!

Lol.. CADIE http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html
CADIE gets nomintated :-)

But This one from opera gets the award, it had me laughing quietly to myself (the nearest I dare get to ROTFLMAO in a busy office!) http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/04/01/ I was particularly taken with the "Known Issues" which includes this:

Users visiting Web sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions.

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