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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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.
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Hey, So tickets for Barcamp Blackpool have been released. This is being held on the 3rd July and I can’t wait. Looking on the Google Groups ofor the event shows some exciting presentations that I am looking forward to going to. One of the talks is on how rubbish coding can cost time and money and ways to prevent it.
I have just completed reading Practices of an Agile Developer and found this, along with The Pragmatic Programmer, really useful. It does go over a lot of things which shouldjust be natural to any programmer but reinforces the practices. I am now actively try, as we all should, to make my coding and working practices much better.
Easter Monday we took the kids and some friends to Beltchley Park. The kids had a great time doing the easter egg hunt and making easter baskets. It’s amazing that every time we go to Bletchley that you learn a little more of what went on there and things that went on during the war.
The National Museum of Computing which is based at Bletchley is also a great place to visit and is always expanding. It always takes me back to when I first started working back in the late 80’s, especially on this visit when I saw an old IBM mini which we used to run PICK Blue on. PICK Blue was the IBM implementation of PICK.
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