OK, so I'm going to start a limited company for when I become a contractor. Part of the contracting plan is to save up and have a couple of months off here and there, and finish some of the various software products I'm in the middle of in order to sell them. I'll sell them through the limited company, so I've got everything nicely contained.

I don't want an off-the-shelf company name, as two contractors I know have ended up with "FileWeb" and "Normal Consultancy". Julia came up with "Softly Software", which I quite liked, until I realised that softlysoftware.com is unavailable.

So this leads into the competition. I'd like you to suggest a company name that I can use. If I use yours, or something clearly derived from it, then you are the winner, and you get the goodies. To enter, just leave a comment, with your name and the company name. I'll need to get in touch with you if you win, so you could link to your blog, or contact page, or leave your email address, or email me privately (in addition to the comment).

Rules:

1. You may enter as many times as you like
2. You may only suggest names that you think I'll actually use
3. If I'm offended by your suggestion, I'll delete your comment
4. You may live anywhere
5. Friends and family of mine are welcome to enter
6. If no entries are chosen for the company name, then nobody wins the voucher.
7. Closing date: noon GMT on Feb 6th 2007

Hints:

1. The names I've liked so far are "Softly Software" (domain unavailable) and "Elephant Development" (bit of a mouthful).
2. Your name is more likely to win if the .com domain (without punctuation) is still available. (n.b. I'll buy the domain before announcing the winner).
3. Names with more than four words are unlikely to win
4. I like rhyming, spoonerisms, puns, proverbs, word-play and general grammatic cleverness
5. Existing company or blog names will be unlikely to win

OK, good luck! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Last night was the first Brighton Girl Geek Dinner, and it was excellent. Jane's written a good review of the evening, so I won't repeat it.

Personally, I enjoyed the role reversal. Being male, I was the in the minority at a tech event for the first time ever, and although intimidating is probably too strong a word, I felt a little uneasy at times. As I'm male, middle class and white, I'm not used to being a minority (at least in Uckfield), so I'm glad I experienced it (slightly). Also, I was more hesitant about chatting to strangers than usual, as approaching girls in a pub has "connotations".

It was good meeting the organisers in person, as we've been emailing each other since the event was announced. I had already met Ruby at the Ribot Users' Group meeting last week. A nice bunch, and hopefully they'll all make it tonight.

Jane's also set me a challenge to improve tonight's Sussex geek dinner. I have one improvement planned over our last one - a radio mic. We're also going to attempt recording Mikel's talk too. As for colour-printed name badges, information sheet and guest book, I don't think I'll have time. The food won't be as good either, as it's free (last night's food was paid for by the sponsors, and was delicious).

On the way home, I did contemplate the differences between the recent SGDs and the BGGD, and wondered if I should emulate the far more professional BGGD. My initial conclusion was that I shouldn't. It doesn't take up too much of my time, and there's no money changing hands, which makes it easier for me to manage. (The last thing I organised was a beetle drive when I was 10.)

There's only me organising the SGD, whereas BGGD has four organisers. I guess I should recruit a helper if I decide sponsorship and posh nosh is the way forward, and they can sort that out. For the moment, I think I'll leave it be, as it seems to work for the majority of guests. Any suggestions are welcome though...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to tonight, and Mikel's talk in particular.

The job hunting is great fun. I've posted my CV to a couple of sites, and contacted the most excellent Andy Hammond from Siptus, who got me this job.

I've been bombarded with phone calls from agencies, and my favourite was from a lady who told me I shouldn't have posted my CV on jobsites, and just use one agent (her), not that she calls herself an agent, and that I wasn't good enough for investment banking, and that she deals with lots of places in the city. I'm not looking for a job in the city, so why she even called was a mystery, but it was a fun conversation trying not to laugh!

A good thing about us all being told at the same time is that we don't have to be surreptitious with agency phone calls and say "Hi Mum" to the agents. We've also been passing job specs around and recommending people.

Thanks to Helen, Ian and Sven, who saw my last post and gave me some job details. One of the jobs was entirely suitable for a guy in the team, who's got a "dentist appointment" with them soon.

There's a real team spirit here, which I've only seen in the 2001 floods and the 1987 gales, where we're all clubbing together in the face of a large problem.

Shocking news this week, the company I work for announced they are closing my office in May. There's over 20 of us affected by the closure, and anyone that doesn't want to apply for (and get) jobs in head office (50 miles away) will be made redundant.

I've been a developer for 11 years, and I've been writing a .NET 2.0 Windows forms app and an ASP.NET 2.0 web framework for the last two years or so. Amongst the team now job hunting are other .NET developers, some testers and some technical supporters. I can recommend them all without reservation. I have been truly blessed to work with such good people.

Strangely, I'm quite excited by the idea of working somewhere else, and I think I might start contracting. My main reason for permanent work was job security, which now doesn't seem much of a reason. My main issue for contracting is that I'm on 2 months notice, so I can't just find a contract and start on it. If I can get a permanent job close to Uckfield, I may take it, but Uckfield is no Silicon Valley.

So, dear readers, there are several ways in which you may like to respond:

1. If you'd like to offer me (or talk to me about) a nearby job, please do.
2. If you're interested in employing one of my colleagues, email me details of the job and I'll pass them on.
3. If you can offer me any tips about becoming a contractor, particularly in Sussex, please email me or comment below.

Of course, any sympathy, reassurance and meaningless platitudes left in the comments will be most welcome too.

This week I had occasion to write a small Windows utility for a support team. Somebody would phone a, er, supporter for an n character alphanumeric code. The supporter would use the utility to generate the string and read it back to the caller.

Being a usability fan, I made the string really big, used Courier New to ensure even spacing, and lower case, to allow easy distinguishing of o and 0. I was quite pleased, so I showed an associate of mine. He said that it should have the phonetic alphabet (Sierra Golf Victor etc.), as that's how they read them out to the customer.

What a great idea! Using Wikipedia and the world's simplest code generator, it took me half an hour to knock something up. I put the words three to a line, and alternated the colours to make it easier to read out. So, here it is:



I would certainly prefer the words to the string. I'm not totally sure about the font; there must be better. I didn't have the time to experiment too much, but I'm still very happy with the idea.

[Tags: usability phoneticalphabet phone support gui]

This week I had to look at some 10-year-old C++ code. I was quite looking forward to it, as I haven't look at C++ code for a few years. However, the first couple of lines in the method function I needed to look at started with

int n_len, n_numbytes, n_crc, n_crc2, crc1, crc2, crcx, n_add, n_and, i,j,k,n,ii;
int i_p,i_t,n_crcc;

I didn't get very far with it, and plumped for a work-around instead of a bug-fix.

[Tags: legacy code cryptic nonsense idiot]