My new company gave me an IBM ThinkPad for work. Unfortunately I cannot do much real work on this thing. It is just for company email essentially. I must wait to get another computer from my client to do my programming.So that my first week did not go to a full waste, another developer let me borrow his computer at work for an afternoon. My job was to port some legacy Visual C++ 6 code to Visual C++ 2005. At the same time I was upgrading the database code from the Oracle 8 client to the Oracle 10g client.
So far I have had a little experience analyzing what it would take to do upgrades like this. In other words I was more prepared than most. However I did run into a number of things I was not familiar with during the Visual C++ 2005 move. Specifically it seemed strange that the new compiler deprecated most of the old C string library. Now we are recommended to use the secure versions of those functions. For example strcpy should be replaced with strcpy_s. And wouldn't you know it? They changed the interface to the function.
Having brought my laptop home, I connected it up to my wireless connection. And I found that there was a lot of e-mail waiting for me. This included a number of warnings that I had not submitted my time sheet electronically. Hello? I am filling it out on paper since I am new. I also found that I was scheduled to attend more training next week. I have mixed feelings over this. Since I have a lot of work to do, training may get in the way. Plus the training is on the other side of a traffic gridlock town. I still plan to go though.
All in all I am pretty pleased with my IBM ThinkPad from work. I sure hope I get a computer to do my actual programming at work soon. It is getting pretty old sitting around while lots of tasks are being assigned to me.
