I have recently purchased two new domains, one for my wife and one for me to use. The site for my wife is to let people know about her hand made bears, to show pictures and basically provide some marketing for her. My new site is for me to be able to look at making some of my own open source applications and promote these on the site. I’m looking to start using MySQl, Ruby and some client side scripting, probably Javascript. We are currently in the process of getting the hosting sorted out for these domains and I’ll update you and let you know what they are when they are available.
Another items that I have been working on this week whilst I’ve been having some time off work is to get an old Qume QVT119+ dumb terminal working against Ubuntu. This was actually quite straight forward to get going with the only issue being that the terminal itself developed a fault. After closed inspection, and managing to get the display logic board out of the housing, I found that the board was a little burnt out. Luckily I had another terminal around which would not power up, however the board in this terminal was actually OK so a quick swap was made and the terminal is up and running. I have a couple of lose ends to tie up, i.e. getting the getty to run at start up and also working out the best emulation to use or write my own QVT199+ emulation (if a can find a manual on line). The plan is to document this project and post it up on this website.
Another project which has kept me busy over the last few weeks is tweets4sweets. This is a project for SHACKNET which uses an Arduino and Ethernet shield to search twitter for a given phrase and when it sees the phrase it will release a sweet. The code is now working but needs refactoring and we have ideas for the hopper and the release mechanism. The next Shacknet meeting on the 20th September is going to be a good one.
I now have to go and lay a little wooden floor in our attic where my work area is and then I can get on to working on some of these projects in more comfort than a bare floor.
Richard
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Yesterday I attended Barcamp Barnsley. This was a one day event held at the Digital Media Centre in Barnsley, close to the town centre.
The event ran from 9.30am to around 6pm. The event attracted around 60 delegates from around the Yorkshire area as well as from further afield including the North East. I’m sure that the exceptional weather for the day was mainly to blame for the less than expected numbers with the pull of family and BBQ keeping people at home. They don’t know what they missed!
The Digital Media Centre is modern and stylish and was an excellent choice of venue for the day and was suited to the number of delegates that attended and could have easily coped with many more. Parking is available next to the building and was free for the weekend which was a great bonus. Refreshments were available throughout the day with pastries and muffins available for breakfast and afternoon tea and pizza for lunch. I liked the fact that there was tea, coffee and bottles of water available all day to just go and pick up.
The day started off looking as though there were not going to be many sessions to choose from as it appeared that for quite a few of the attendees it was their first attendance at a Barcamp and were unsure of what to expect. The board started to fill up and the sessions started.
I attended at least 6 sessions ranging from JQuery to protecting intellectual property to what to expect in a job interview. Other enjoyable sessions included coding standards and how to write an API.
I always come away from a Barcamp with some new knowledge, friends and ever so much more enthusiasm. Barcamp Barnsley did not disappoint and the Powerpoint Karaoke for the last session was as funny as ever. @marcjohnson and @jagusti did a great presentation for the Ikea Kitchen Build (but no one will ever live up to the presentation for this given by @KianRyan at #bcman2)
I didn’t make a presentation this time but I have one planned for my next Barcamp.
Unfortunately I can’t make the Barcamp Leeds next week but I will be at #bcblackpool and I look forward to helping out with the next Sheffield event. I also understand that plans are afoot for a Barcamp Bradford later in the year.
For anyone who has never attended a Barcamp I cannot recommend doing so more highly. They are experiences never to be missed and I hope to attend many more.
admin Barcamp Barcamp, barnsley
This weekend gave me an opportunity to have my first look at Visual Studio Express C#. After an excellent night out with friends and a trip to the local rock nightclub (Corporation), Saturday was always going to be a chill out day.
I have previously took a look at VB.Net which looks far better than the VB6 that I use in my day job. C# looks even better. I’m not sure if the IDE are different but there seems to be lots of great stuff in the C# IDE with the code snippets library, the plug in managers and some of the common controls that just save so much time.
In VB6 I do make a lot of use with control arrays. This is where it’s going to be interesting to see how I do things without the control arrays. The main reason for using them was to be able to attribute common code to then events and to be able to create new controls on a form on the fly. I have seen the nice way that you can assign code to events on multiple controls and that looks really neat as you can use the same code for different object types. I haven’t yet seen how to create the controls on the fly and assign the common code to them. If you have thoughts on this, please do post for me.
I used a few tutorials from the Microsoft website to take me through the IDE and these were really useful,easy to follow and intuitive. What I need now is information on how to code in C#, it’s a bit different in syntax to VB6 and to play more with classes and to find the best way to code OO.
One of the things that I need to catch up with is variable naming conventions. It appears, having spoken with others, that the naming conventions that I use from VB6 are no longer used in todays languages. The other thing is to write more OO code and to use classes rather than subroutines and functions. Another thing to do is to see how to write the unit tests for the classes to test the code automatically. Time to start doing some more reading. The Internet is great for finding out information but I have to admit that I do still prefer to read a good physical book rather than a web page.
After playing around for about 5 or 6 hours I came to the conclusion that I think I prefer C# to VB.Net.
If you have any good links to sites for C# please do post some links for me. I am very keen to take it further with this language.
admin Personal