… about things that interest me
This is a test post for the wp-syntax plug-in. Here is some simple Ruby.
# The Greeter class class Greeter def initialize(name) @name = name.capitalize end def salute puts "Hello #{@name}!" end end # Create a new object g = Greeter.new("world") # Output "Hello World!" g.salute |
Hey look it works 🙂
I have noticed lately that when I think about starting a programming project I get bogged down with choosing which language to implement it in. This takes up time and sometimes even leads to the project being abandoned.
I really must decide on one language and use it on a number of projects. This will increase my fluency with the language avoid the initial choosing that I find so difficult.
All I need to do now is decide on the language to use 🙁
More of this anon ….
This blog was originally hosted using the “1&1 Blog” built-in WordPress installation from my web host. However this was designed for ease of use and did not give the full power and configurability of a full WordPress install.
I have now updated my hosting package to include MySQL databases and installed WordPress 2.8.6, these words are now being served by that install. One of the main reasons for this was so that I can install new plugins to allow such things as syntax highlighting for code examples.
I intend to make full use of these additional facilities in the future.
I have just changed my mobile phone to the Android powered HTC Hero. I have not had that much time to play with it but it is working well so far. I have also decided to do some coding for Android.
I have downloaded the development tools and brought a copy of “Hello, Android” from the Pragmatic Programmers. So far I have made the initial “Hello World” app to make sure that the development tools are installed and working correctly. Now to move on to more interesting things!
As I have said before I have been using “Life Balance” and “My Life Organised” to handle my todo list. Both of these are very good but have the limitation that they are only available on certian platforms. My Todo list must be available both on my PC (for ease of data entry and review) and my PDA (for when I am out and about). I originally used LB on PC and Palm but had to change to MLO when I changed to using my Windows Mobile phone as my PDA as there is not an LB version for WM.
Now I am changing my mobile phone and do not want to be limited in choice by my Todo application. I also use both Windows and Linux on various PCs and finding an application that runs natively on multiple platforms is not that easy. For these reasons I decided to use an on-line Todo service. After looking arround at the various options I decided to go with Toodledo. I have now stopped using MLO and so far Toodledo is doing everything that I need.
I am a little worried that my todo list is now in the cloud and outages could cause me to be unable to see my data. However there are some ways around this. I have brought the Toodledo native application for my iPod Touch, this syncs with the web version and keeps a copy of my data on the iPod. I also export my todo list regularly as XML and back this up on my network. For the future these is discussion of a Gears version of Toodledo, this would be good but we will have to wait and see.
All in all Toodledo should serve my needs until my own GTD application is ready 🙂
In order to keep my life in order I have for many years used a task management system based on Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. Initially I used a system called Life Balance on PC and Palm then moved to My Life Organised on PC and Windows Mobile.
I like the way that both of these systems work but as a software guy I have always thought “I can do that!”. So now I am putting my money where my mouth is and have started my own open source GTD project. Initially I am implementing a library to handle the GTD data items (Tasks, Contexts, etc.), this will be followed by desktop, mobile and, maybe, web applications that all use the library.
The library is called BjbGtdLib, is written in Java using NetBeans and is hosted on Kenai.
Go take a look!
I was at the Cosford Airshow on Sunday and took a lot of photographs. Some of the better ones are on Flickr.
www.flickr.com/photos/barrybridgens/
One thing that I noticed when reviewing the shots back on the laptop at home was that most of the pictures that I took are not as sharp as I would like. My old 75-300 (non-IS) lens significantly limits the quality I can get in these situations. Time to think about upgrading (when the financial situation improves!).
My new macro lens (Canon EFS 60mm F2.8) arrived today. There was not much light left when I got home from work but I had to try it out! I managed to get a couple of shots outside in natural light and then had to resort to flash.
As I was in a rush I didn’t get out the tripod or the external flash. This left me hand holding and using the internal flash on the EOS 40D. With these handicaps I am surprised that I got any “keepers” at all but a couple of the shots were OK. These I have put on Flickr for the world to see!
Take a look on www.flickr.com/photos/barrybridgens/
In these days of cloud computing it is getting to the stage where it is not possible to do even the simplest things without an internet connection. All of our data is “in the cloud” rather than on individual computers. This is a good thing in my case as I have a number of devices (laptop, netbook, phone etc.) that I use at various times and need to have access to my information.
To help with this situation I have taken two actions, the first is to signup for mobile broadband for he first time and the second is to increase the monthly data limit on my phone. I have been impressed with mobile broadband, plug the dongle into the laptop or netbook and away you go. The speed is good when there is 3G coverage and so far it has been very reliable. Bandwidth is obviously limited but should be fine for what I need. Most of my access will still be at home or at work with the mobile broadband just for when travelling and when on holiday. I have 1Gig a month on the mobile broadband and 250Meg a month (up from 4Meg) for the phone. I can now access my data, surf, e-mail, blog, etc. from wherever I happen to be without worrying too much about hitting limits or extra charges.
The information age is a wonderful thing!
Yesterday I finally took the plunge and installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) on my Aspire One. I had been thinking about changing from the default Linpus distro for a while. Linpus works fine but being based on Fedora 8 it is not exactly cutting-edge!
One users on the net gave varying reports of the performance of UNR on the One, some had few problems while others appeared to have to do a lot of work just to get basic functionality. I brought my One to use, not to spend lots of time tinkering and so held back on changing for a while. Yesterday I brought a copy of the UK Linux magazine “Linux Format” and they had an article about UNR on the Aspire One. If a mainstream magazine was using UNR on the One with no problems then it time me to go for it!
I downloaded the latest Jaunty UNR image and copied it to a USB stick. Booting into live mode allowed me to play with the new distro and confirm that it worked OK before overwriting Linpus with a full UNR install. For the install I kept the partition structure that Linpus had used (ext2, 7Gig for / and 1Gig for swap) on the internal SSD and put /home on my 16Gig SD card, again using ext2. Shortly afterwards I had my new distro up and running.
UNR looks great and works well so far. Wireless worked out of the box. The only problems I have seen is that the wireless status LEDs do not work and the right hand memory card slot does not appear to be able to hot swap cards (I read that it works OK if a card is in the slot at boot time but have not checked this).
I am typing this post on the One and I am happy that I now have Ubuntu on my netbook.