Hands-On

My first month with the Blackberry Pearl

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 27, 2007 ⋅ One comment

(thanks to Dave Taylor for the post idea) I’m just finishing up my first month with my second Blackberry; well, actually my third, but the first two were the same type, the classic 7200 series. I appreciated the access to email, calendar, and contact information, but I didn’t like the way the integrated cell phone [...]

Is there a Design Pattern for "Update else Add"?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 9, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

They always say data conversions are a labor of love – you pour your heart and soul into the program, to get the most data converted as possible, and then, when you actually do run the code in production – it’s a one time event; toss the source files in the bit bucket. Well, that’s [...]

Look your best with little effort – Excel, Project VBA for Page Formatting

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 11, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some code to my site, so I thought I’d pop up a few more nuggets. For the first one, I was reminded of the functionality of good-looking printouts at a recent meeting. A high-pressure project, lots of analytics design, review, code, and test in a rather condensed period [...]

Turning a new page, and working on that home development environment

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 27, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

It’s vacation / pseudo-unemployment time for me, as I’ve made a career move to another company (spending a week between gigs). It’s a nice step up, and definitely will take me a bit farther away from the hands-on work I periodically enjoyed at my previous employer; on the other hand, it will get me back [...]

How Fun – Timesheets

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 27, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

In the early part of the year, we tracked our time as a group using timesheets. We don’t use these to justify our payroll or anything, just an exercise to validate that we were properly apportioning our time across multiple demands. Also, we wanted to help explain why it takes more than one week of [...]

Moving to Eclipse 3 – I Wanna be a DB Architect

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 19, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

(A preview of the End of the Entry: I was going to write about Eclipse as DB Tool, met with more barriers, but I’m finding success in flexing my Eclipse muscles re: extensibility). Fine, I’ll push off my XML project(s) even more, let’s tackle something that has been nagging me at work and I need [...]

Hopefully, my last spam post

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 8, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

It’s just that this guy, with 1M email a day, has me beat hands down.

Some followups from recent entries

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 6, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

This weekend’s Big Event was XML in Office 12 – millions of posts. Today it’s been all things Apple and Intel. I’ve seen ApTel and (my preferred) MacTel, but I’m not sure yet how it will affect our group, as we are fairly focused on Wintel for desktops, servers, and directory services. One very nice [...]

Moving to Eclipse 2 – Working out the basic process

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 5, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Installation was all well and good, but now I need to make a few minor changes to the site, so let’s go through the process. I get the weirdest, boringest links in my Adsense area lately, so I’m going to experiment with positioning by include script. Nothing too stunning technically, but since I use Blogger [...]

Moving to Eclipse Ia – Relevance

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 1, 2005 ⋅ One comment

Last post, I just focused on the tech play-by-play. More steps to follow, but let’s think about why the business-focused areas of the company might be interested in the effort: Cost-effectiveness: The obvious play is the cost angle – the budget-focused can be happy that Eclipse and a rack of free plugins might replace user [...]

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