Paul Grenyer

Had lunch with a friend of mine today. She's writing a book and asked me if I could ask any question of anyone living or dead, real or fictional what would it be and who would I ask? I really had to think about it. My first thought was to ask president Bush if he planned and allowed the attacks on September the 11th. Then I started to think a little less seriously. I'd quite like to ask Freddie Mercury why he wasn't more careful. And of course there are my fantasies about a certain character from a certain science fiction series . Finally I decided that Peter Tägtgren from Hypocrisy and Pain had it right with the song Roswell 47 from 1996's Abducted album . I'd really like to ask Harry Truman what really happened in Roswell in 1947 .

I've just created a new blog for the ACCU Mentored Developers Effective Java Project: http://accu-mentored-ejava.blogspot.com/

Now it's dark so early it's quite exciting rolling past Canary Wharf on the train and seeing all the lights and thinking of Lehman building standing empty. It still fills me with excitement, just like the first time I went there for a job interview. Anyway, I wasn't in London last night to see Canary Wharf. I was there to see Anna-Jayne Metcalfe speak about PC-Lint . Although it pains me to say it and the possibility of a C++ project came up just this week, I don't do C++ any more. The last two years have been a really big change for me in that regard. However, I am more than a little responsible for the fact that Anna is speaking in London tonight, having volunteered her to Allan Kelly when he was looking for a speaker for November, so I went to show my support and take any flack. Anna had a really good turn out. ACCU London meetings usually attract between ten and twenty attendees and Anna had somewhere between ten and fifteen. She was obviously nervous and at time...

This is a modification of my original Boiler Plating Database Resource Cleanup article giving a bit more background, exploring a couple of different ideas and setting the sceane for the second part: The problem is simple. Cleaning up after querying a database in Java is unnecessarily verbose and complex. Plain and simple. I'll start with an example that demonstrates the problem. The system I'm working on currently uses a number of web services. We have a set of web services on the production box, another on the development box and another on our local machines. The system asks the relevant database for the location of the web service based on the services' name: try { Class.forName(driver); Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(connectionString,username,password ); try { PreparedStatement ps = con.prepareStatement("select url from services where name = 'Instruments'"); try { ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery(); if(rs.next())...

Speaker: Anna-Jayne Metcalfe When: 7:00pm, Thursday 20th November 2008 Cost: Free. Open to non-members. Where: 7city Learning, 4 Chiswell Street, London, EC1Y 4UP Map: http://www.7city.com/pdf/chiswell_street.pdf Registration is required for this event due to limited space and security at 7city. Reserve your place by e-mailing James Slaughter, slaughter@acm.org . About the Talk If used effectively, code analysis tools can make a huge difference to the quality of a codebase and its perceived reliability and maintainability. However, in the C++ world, the one static analysis tool which is most established - PC-Lint from Gimpel Software - is also probably the hardest to configure and use. Consequently, many organisations who have purchased it do not use it effectively (if at all). This session aims to present a practical introduction to PC-Lint from the perspective of how to configure and use it effectively to improve the quality of C and C++ codebases. Using a combinati...

For the Whitby Gothic Weekend this year I stayed with some friends at Amber Cottage . It's a compact, comfortable and utterly delightful little house. It has very good heating, a reasonable shower and Sky (FreeSat) TV! It's ideal for a small family or group like us. The only downsides are that there is very patch mobile coverage (none at all if you're with Vodafone. T-Mobile seems to be fine though) and there's no door between the lounge, the hall and the top bedroom. But I'm really struggling to find anything negative to say about it. I'm hoping to go back. Many times.

I love going to the Whitby Gothic Weekend and this year was as much fun as it's ever been. I took a friend of mine who had never been before (a Whitby virgin no-less) and she loved it, although I did manage to drink her under the table on the Saturday night. For the first time I didn't do the official Whitby. My friends and did the alternative Whitby which, for us, turned out to be lots of drinking in pubs a brief trip to a "bleepy" goth night, more drinking in pubs and finally Sexy Sunday . I think the highlights were catching up with old friends, the Sunday night in the pub, followed by Sexy Sunday and, of course, Lewis Hamilton winning the formula one divers championship. Although I nearly missed the entire race as I was on the phone to my wife. I seemed to do even more talking than previous years and have made even more new friends. Roll on 2009.

...or at least that's what I thought until just now when I looked them up with google to find a link for this blog post. It appears that Abigail Williams was one of the foremost accusers in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Abigail Williams are also a surprisingly good Black Metal band. I thought I'd passed through my black metal phase a while ago, but these have a bit of an extreme metal edge (think Dark Tranquillity , Arch Enemy ) which is really my thing at the moment. The first mini album Legend is like early Cradle of Filth (when they were good) and the new release, In The Shadow of A Thousand Suns, could not sound much more like Emperor if they tried. I love it. Give it a try.

Download You can download the latest version of the Marauder File Viewer here . I have implemented the following features since the last version: RDF layouts Saving and opening of projects Plugins It is now possible to develop plugins for the Marauder File Viewer by implementing a few small interfaces. If you would like details or have comments, please email me: paul.grenyer@gmail.com . I'm working on searching and layout manipulation for fixed length file layouts next.