I worked for a software house of 10 people. We wore what the hell we wanted unless we were facing clients, then we wore what the hell the client needed to see in order to believe we were professionals. Once the client "knew" us, we wore what the hell we wanted. We grew, we merged with a company of equivalent size to make about 200 people. We kept our "dress code". The merged company exploded in size, technology group represented less than 10% of the 10,000 staff globally a big group of that 10% wore some company branded hooey we stayed with what the hell we wanted. Someone tried to introduce the idea that we should conform to a uniform policy.

I find the requirement for "uniforms" for non customer facing resources to be offensive. I have enough trouble with the idea of "uniforms" for people that do face customers. What I understand is that some customers come at things with a view to what a professional looks like and in order to make the connection you have to conform until you can prove that your suit isnot what makes you worth paying to do your job.

I probably would have walked from my job over this issue because it really sits at the heart of my relationship with my employer. My expertise, commitment and professionalism are measured in what I do and not the clothes I wear. If my boss thinks otherwise then he or she is a tool. If I cannot persuade them or their boss of this issue then the company is not worth working for. Period.

We all have to make compromises and by the time this issue came up for me I was senior enought that I could have pulled weight and just ignored it but I was holding out for all the guys in our group who didn't have that ability. I cannot overstate how much this kind of thing shits me. I don't know about your Helldesk folk but the ones I work with fall into two categories, the good who treat most problems like puzzles and do what has to be done to solve them, for them I would go into bat to get 'em the right to wear what the hell they like. The others, you know the kind I mean, I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire and I have bollocked them and their managers over their work, I would be happy if their uniform was a grey smock and a dunces hat, just so we know what to expect...

If you cannot leave your job then suck it up and wait until you can because this kind of thing is a baaaad deal.

No, I think dumbing down the langauges is the right thing to do. Made my living writing software for 20 years, never wrote a piece of assembler once. Some of the stuff we wrote was actually hard. Still never wrote a single piece of assembler. For this I am eternally thankful. Clearly almost every language we have is a better (and dumbed down) compared to assembler. Don't misunderstand, I fully accept that assembler has its place, but that too is a fairly generic statement that I am happy to endorse "I accpet that has it's place".

When looking at something new, I now try and start with some of the more dumbed down languages, Python, Tcl, Perl etc. I even had to learn a bit of Ruby the other day because I wanted to enhance something that someone had written in Ruby. Their choice. Whatever reason. Now I have a tool that does exactly what I want and it took 2 days. Sure, not a complex task but writing in C or Java would have been a nightmare.

I am waiting for the "Fisher Price" language. A bunch of oversized blocks that you just "snap" together to make your applications. Sure you only use 2% of their functionality but the big blocks are robust and "apparently" simple to the "programmer" and all one needs to do is specify the "what" rather than the "how". And isn't that the real ideal. I am sure we've all thought it even if we were too ashamed to say it... "Aaargh, bloody machine do what I meant not what I coded". So the real developments in this area are to find "environments" that allow users to specify the "what's" and leave the hows to the "environment". The language can be as dumb as possible.

To paraphrase; "Everything should be made as dumb as possible but no dumber"

We have quite a lot of dumbing down to be done.

Ah, pre-christmas in London. Oxford and Regent Streets window displays and in particular "Liberty" (http://www.liberty.co.uk/fcp/content/find_us/content), buy some chestnuts (they may or may not be roasted on an open fire) wander around looking at the poor folk stressing about crowds/shopping. Marvel at the crowds. Many, many Christmas drinks to be had at that time of year, try "The City" almost any evening, many pubs many suits many parties.

Don't bother with your laptop. Frankly I wouldn't even bother with a camera, just get a PAYG camera phone on your way in and if you need more microSD cards as you go along just buy 'em. Besides I would lean towards searching out the kind of fun for which you would prefer for there to be no photgraphic evidence at all, there is a fair bit of that to be had in London.

Don't know how old you are, but Shoreditch (Cargo Bar, anything at all on the Shoreditch High Street) for the young, Kensington and Chelsea for the glam (or wanna be :-), Soho for the mixed. Covent Garden and Leceister Sq for the tourists. Other locales; Islington, Clerkenwell, Borough (try the markets on the weekend). And that's without even leaving the "Circle Line" (much).

See some stand up comedy (http://www.99clubcomedy.com/home.html). Try a different countries cuisine every night. Pick at least one Fine Dining restaurant if you can, the best are superb. Definitely go clubbing, if that's not your thing look for some live bands. Grab a TimeOut magazine and just pick stuff.

London can be really "isolating", but if you make the effort and just try and connect with people that are doing the kind of things you want to do, you'll find them (mainly the foreigners :-) really welcoming. I find that during the pre christmas time people are much more friendly so it should be easy enough to do.

Didn't mean to suggest that it was named after him, but rather developed by Ericsson the company, in house. The name is "deliberately ambiguous" according to someone who should know. (http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/ppxt/HT2007/general/languages/armstrong-erlang_history.pdf at 3.2)

Indeed the website for the language is "golang" just as ericsson is to ERlang, google is to GOlang. Seems maybe an OO corollary to erlangs functional paradigm. Will have to look deeper. I do love a new language,

I looked hard at netezza for a big project with "absurd" requirements (many 10^4 new records per second, ad hoc queryable by clients). It seemed to be the ideal solution. Nice to see it might have worked. How fast does your data grow?

I actually had this experience in my new Mazda2. It was quite scary. I was going up a steep hill and the engine revved a little higher than normal, I did a bit of gear changing (it is an auto) and the revving continued, as I pulled up to the queue of traffic at the lights at the top of the hill (with the massive truck behind me!). It was all getting out of control. What was weird was that the throttle was still responsive, depress it, the engine revved up, back off it de-revved, but back to well above idle.

I too was worried about the engine electronics, until I checked the floor mat and found it had slid up over the base of the accellerator, pulled the mat back and all was ok. All in all probably about a minute but very disturbing at the time. I can totally see the source of an accident in such an event. It really felt like an electronic issue at the time, until I realised what it actually was.