Have you considered New Zealand instead? I spent a year in Australia before coming here and I prefer it in NZ (been here over 6 years now). IT industry is mainly financial and internet, but there are some interesting jobs around.

He helped build the company up over 26 years, so you could say that.

The thread about interesting comments in code reminded me of a variable name I came across in my first job. We made Character Generators - boxes that put the text on TV screens for titles, sports scores, song names, etc (now fairly obsolete). Buried in the code was a 32-bit integer that was used to assign an ID to every graphic stored in memory - every time a new graphic was loaded it was incremented. The system wasn't intended to run for long periods so the variable never rolled over. Some anonymous predecessor of mine had called it "John_Smiths_Salary" - John Smith being the CEO of the company. PS. Name changed so I can't get sued.

Joe Woodbury wrote:

As long as you aren't mixing systems, either one works.

That's kind of the point - the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because NASA use Imperial and the subcontractor used Metric: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter[^]

I found a series of blog posts that deal with this, although I haven't tried it myself yet: Using Virtual PC for computer migration[^] Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 1)[^] Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 2)[^] Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 3)[^] Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 4)[^]

I've got a couple of old PCs that I want to decommission but I need to have access to some old builds on them. I've done this a few times before by setting up a virtual PC and installing the required tools then copying everything over but it takes a while. Is there a tool or technique for converting a physical hard disk to an image that can run as a virtual PC? I normally use Microsoft Virtual PC on Windows XP but I'm open to change if the feature was available.. Thanks in advance for any help.

I feel a Douglas Adams quote coming on - "Oh no, not again". I've lost count of the number of times I've seen this technology demonstrated or discussed, usually by a startup you never here from again. I think I first read about it in New Scientist about 5 years ago but I'm sure it's been around a while. It's one of those brilliant ideas that won't get off the ground until one of the major industry players does it and the others want to get in on the act. Until then we have to keep suffering from cable hell.

Yes, I've got one. The Embedded Fusion guys work down the road from me here in Auckland so delivery was easy. Installing the SDK and running the demo program from VS2005 was simple after I'd realised the difference between the .NET SDK and the .NET Micro SDK! Unfortunately I haven't had time to do anything else with it but I've got plenty of ideas.

Pah! Try Visual Studio 2005 plus Embedded Visual C++ 3.0, Embedded Visual C++ 4.0, Windows CE Platform Builder 4.2, Windows CE Platform Builder 5.0 and Windows CE 6.0 Platform Builder extension for VS2005.

Obviously a bunch of liberal-minded foreigners, if nowhere in America made the list. Q - What's the difference between America and yoghurt? A - Given time and the right conditions, yoghurt can develop a culture.

Aha, but how do you know that the Easter Eggs for sale now are intended for Easter 2007? Maybe they've already lapped us and are working on Easter 2008...

Never said I wanted him to be a software engineer like me, but I reckon by the time he gets to the job market everyone from stockbrokers to milkmen will be getting on the coding wagon.

My girlfriend's son is 7 and pretty good at maths, so I wanted to start teaching him the basics of coding. Now when I was a lad the school had a computer room with a ZX81, BBC B, Commodore Pet and 64, Vic 20 and we learned to program in BASIC, but these days a PC is too complex to learn the basics on. What do people recommend as a good teaching and learning language / package?

Wow, what a bunch of late starters! I wrote my first program on a ZX81 when I was about 9. What language? If you have to ask...

Does anyone know of a terminal program that can connect to a USB serial port?