About Time

It is certainly about time I wrote a new post…

Easter was fun, photos from a trip to birdworld near Farnham to come soon, along with a whole set of sorted photos (you may have noticed I deleted almost all my photos that were up, as there were too many bad ones and they needed sorting. So I now will have a quarter of what I had online before).

Just before Easter I changed departments at work. It was pretty much a new job but without leaving the company (which is one of the reasons I love working for IBM, I have so many possibilities of what I can do and never have to search for a new employer to do it all).

I now work on the performance team (still on Message Broker), and it is my job as part of this small 4 man team to analyse the results of automated tests to see if i can figure out why any drops in performance have occured and reverse them. Another task I will have to do is analyse the jobs that take to long (the jobs the software does in real world use preferably) and try and find ways to make the code faster and hence speeding up the overall performance.

For the latest version the team managed to get an overall speed increase of well over 50%, so I have some big shoes to fill (I am taking over from a guy who is leaving the team).

This job will certainly give me in depth knowledge of the product, wich hopefully I can put to use by getting in touch with customers and helping them out a bit (I believe there is a set up for advertising my skills to customers as a kind of informal expert to them), but first need a little more experience with it.

I have been meanging to blog for ages, and have other things I am looking at with keen interest, but have not really had the time to do it yet. Just to give you a teaser, one thing I have been looking at is X10, which is an appliance control system which allows you to control lights and other appliances remotely over the power cables in your house. I would love to play with it, but do not really have anything I want to control at the moment. I also plan to look at then getting status and control onto the internet so that I can play with it all remotely (along with getting it on my XDA, not to mention a blogging client specifically for blogging from my XDA)