Author Archives: spgennard

MacBook keyboard pains and VirtualBox/VMWare

Posted on January 9, 2010 by spgennard

As a MacBook user who has used Virtualisation on the mac for sometime now but only usually with Linux based OS, I was forced to use it with Windows recently and I quickly found out how badly it handles UK … Continue reading →

Posted in MacBook, Tips | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Olympus E-P1 Flash promotion for European customers

Posted on January 3, 2010 by spgennard

Today I got opened up ,y Amateur Photography magazaine and found an advert for a free flash for people who have purchased an Olympus E-P1 over the christmas period. I personally did not purchase one but someone near and dear … Continue reading →

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Converting .chm’s for reading on the iriver story

Posted on December 30, 2009 by spgennard

One of the first things I wanted to read on my iriver story was the montly msdn subscription magazine which is available as a .chm. Which unfortunately the iriver story does not support, so I needed to convert it into … Continue reading →

Posted in chm, iriver, iriver story, pdf, Tips | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

iriver story – firmware upgrade

Posted on December 29, 2009 by spgennard

Santa was very kind to me this year, as he has treated me to an iRiver Story ebook reader. Hopefully this will help me become less reliant to printed books! The first thing I found was that the firmware had … Continue reading →

Posted in ebook, firmware, fun, iriver, iriver story | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

12 Tips for using Micro Focus COBOL

Posted on December 22, 2009 by spgennard

12 Tips for using Micro Focus COBOL As it is close to Christmas and I wanted to do something with 12 in the title, I’ve thrown together some useful if not un-ordered list of 12 things tips using Micro Focus … Continue reading →

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A Comparison Of .Net COBOL, Visual Basic and C#

Posted on December 15, 2009 by spgennard

Today my collegues Robert and Alex have finally 🙂 decided to publish a document that compares Visual Basic, C# and COBOL for .Net under The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Rather than doing a cut-paste job, here is a quote … Continue reading →

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Free compiler for non-commercial use.

Posted on December 8, 2009 by spgennard

If you are interested in trying out some of my examples with a modern COBOL compiler.. let me give you a quote from a friend. From: Twitter “

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Factory Method Pattern in COBOL

Posted on December 7, 2009 by spgennard

Continuing my series on design patterns for the COBOL, the next one on my list is the “Factory method” pattern. The pattern is useful, as it helps you hide the real implementation/creation mechanism of your classes. I you are fond … Continue reading →

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UK National Lottery Wierdness

Posted on December 6, 2009 by spgennard

Some people think the UK National Lottery is a bit of a con and the prize money is a bit low.. but surely it can’t be this low! I think this week I will give it a miss 🙂

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Using sun.jvmstat.monitor to see active Java processes

Posted on December 5, 2009 by spgennard

Monitor’ing Java processes can be achieved using the jvmstat monitor classes provided in the JVM. The documentation is a bit sketchy but with a little experimenting it can be done. Below is a little example that shows you how to … Continue reading →

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