It appears that it is a time of change for me at the moment so I thought I’d take a moment and let you all know what’s going on. The first and perhaps the most obvious is the theme for the site has been updated, after close to two years I felt the old design needed a bit of a refresh. The new site is using a lot of HTML 5 and is all semantically marked up with sections, articles and such, I’ve got to say HTML 5 is makes a lot of sense for a site like mine allowing a lot more meaning to generated from the code itself. I’ve also increased my ‘social presence’ in the sidebar adding in links to my github, Google+ and Stackoverflow profiles.
Now I’ve mentioned github I think that it’s worth noting that from now on I’m primarily going to be using that for hosting my source control, I’m by no means an expert with git but I’m learning and enjoying using it so far. The only legacy codebase of mine that I’ve migrated to github currently is gIDE which can be found here. Thinking about projects going forward I have two projects which I haven’t mentioned on this blog, I’ll briefly mention them here and later provide a more indepth post about each of them.
CRAPI – One of the projects I have worked on in the past was a REST API for Coldfusion, during which I found CF to be a bit lacking in what I wanted it to do. So to remedy this I have started CRAPI which stands for a Coldfusion REST API. This framework is inspired by the various MVC frameworks that I have toyed with (though it supplies no ORM functionality) and I like to think that it is reasonably easy to use. The name is only a placeholder at the moment and I will most likely be changing it to CFRest before I make a post about it.
MarkPDF – I like markdown, I think it is fantastic for a quickly written document to get some formatting. Recently I have been playing around with taking a document formatted with markdown and transforming it into a PDF, MarkPDF is my progress so far it’s a small commandline app written in C#. I’m working on adding more functionality to it at the moment (mostly around metadata) before I make ‘proper’ post about it.
Finally I’m going to end this post on a bit of a downer. February the 10th marked my last day working for LayerX, unfortunately I was made redundant. I started at LayerX on the 6th of July in 2009 and I enjoyed my time with the company, I’m looking forward to what the future has instore for me and I’ll update this blog when I find as things progress.
I found that for me this weekend is going to be a bit of a quiet affair so rather than sitting around all day doing not very much I decided that I’d try to be productive. It’s been a while since I sat down and done any meaningful amount of coding for myself so I thought that is where I’d start, my next question was what do I want to write? I then remembered that I’m not overly fond of most of the music players that I’ve tried on Windows, the closest so far to something I find acceptable is iTunes. With that I had it: my goal for this weekend would be to write (or at least make a dent in writing) a music player that I would like.
Alright, that’s all fine and dandy to say but what does that actually mean? Brainstorming it I came up with seven key features that I want in my media player:
Only plays music, doesn’t try to do anything else.
To implement this I’m planning on using C# and WPF, I haven’t had a good chance to play around with WPF or some of the new Windows 7 features that are available so I figured this would be as good a time as any. Finally my other goal with this project is an attempt to get me back into blogging, to that end I will hopefully be making a post at the end of each day summarizing what I’ve done – possibly with some screenshots. Until then I should be posting some updates to my twitter feed.
So it would seem that I might be starting to go a little theme happy. Not one week after releasing the new theme to my own blog I’ve tried my hand at another theme. At work we are gearing up for the release of theCloud our hosted services platform and I had the pleasure of designing the blog theme that we are using for theCloud blog which was launched yesterday there over the next little while you will be able to find posts related to hosted services, cloud computing and other related topics. I’m hopefully going to try and squeeze in some posts about customising the software we have available through coding.
If you have actually browsed to the site to read this post you will have noticed that Mike’s Musings has had a fresh coat of paint, also if you’ve read my previous entry you will have noticed that it is not the theme that I mocked up. In the end I thought that the first theme was not a good fit for the site, though one day I might turn it into a real theme.
The motivation for changing the theme in the end came down to a mixture of the following factors:
Fluid Blue the old theme had been in service on this site for getting close to four years now and it was time for a change.
I wanted to try my hand at a bit of design, I knew it was not going to be any hugely fantastic but I’m happy with the result.
Finally I wanted to integrate some of the various social networking sites that I belong to into the site, I found that fluid blue didn’t really lend itself to how I wanted it all displayed.
As I noted above I wanted to integrate some of my social site activity into the site to that end I have also integrated my twitter stream into the left sidebar. As with any new piece of code I will not be surprised if there are bugs, I have tested it in IE 8, Firefox and Chrome and it appears to work fine but these are not the only browsers in the world. If you do happen to find anything wrong with the site don’t hesitate to report a bug over at the mlowen.com bug tracker.
One of the things I enjoy most about being a programmer is the fact that when you can’t find a tool to do what you want you can write it yourself. Generally I’ve found that these applications tend to be quite simple and stick to the unix philosophy of ‘do one thing and do it well’ which as a software developer I think is a good philosophy to live by. The most recent occurrence of this happening to me was at work not to long ago where we are currently writing a REST API I needed an application to make a HTTP call to a URL. After about 5 minutes of looking around the web I couldn’t find anything, at that point I had the choice of either continuing to search for an appropriate tool or I could write my own. As you might have guessed I wrote my own, it took about 10 minutes to implement the basics of what was needed.
Over the next couple of weeks the tool continued to evolve to better fit the specifics of the project we we’re working on, but in the back of my mind I kept going back to how other people must have this problem as well. Eventually I decided to re-implement the core of my tool. Having finished the re-implementation a couple of weeks ago I’m finally getting around to releasing it to the public under the GPL, below are the links to download the 0.1 release.
[download id="1"]
[download id="2"]
For those of you who would like to grab the latest source and stay current with any updates (which may be buggy broken code) you can check out the subversion repository which is available at the following URL:
In other news I have signed on to be a contributor to lounge media a blog about digital media in the home, hopefully I should have a post up there soon – once I figure out a good subject to start on.
I decided upon lookiung through the documentation for the latest version of libvtemm that the running of the build commands needed a revamp. Previously the build output just plowed on regardless of whether the previous command succeeded or failed. This as you would guess is bad, you want to find out things have fallen apart as soon as possible without the follow on errors that are caused by an early command failing. Lucky for me the latest version of libvtemm (0.20.2) makes this very easy to do.
While stopping the build from running is a good start there was still more to be done, namely some way to indicate to the user the status of the build. To deal with this a bit more of a serious refactoring was required, this substantially changed the code of the build output class to such a degree that it no longer inherits from the same widget as it did before. Thankfully though it allowed for non-obtrusive place to add feedback to the user. With this in mind a progress bar was also added so that a user could tell how far along the build was at a glance.
Perhaps the most sane part of the change to build system is that now when the a build is initiated the if the build output is not visible it will be made visible, something that is should have been doing from the start. Finally a couple of pictures to show how the new build system looks in various states.
As I mentioned earlier tonight here is my coding related post, since the 14th I haven’t really worked on gIDE until today. I finally got the build system all finished and integrated into the rest of the application. You can now happily define and run the commands needed to build your project. The following images show gIDE building a test project and the other shows the dialog for defining the build commands. I am currently not very happy with the properties dialog but am yet to think of anything better so what I have will have to do for now.
I’m happy to have finally gotten this finished as it was the big feature I wanted done before I would eat my own dog food and use gIDE to develop gIDE. I also took this oppurtunity to port gIDE from vte to vtemm which made the task of the code to set the commands a lot easier than a previous attempt I had made with vte, this does mean however that there is now a dependency in gIDE that is to the best of my knowledge not included in any distrobution. I do not see this as being much of a problem however because the primary audience for gIDE is developer most of whom would know how to build a library from source.
So lately I’ve been doing little to no work on gIDE, which while it is not unusual it is a little disappointing as I had hoped to have made at least one release by now. With that in mind and the fact that I don’t have anything planned for this weekend I sat down and listed all of the features that I needed and wanted to have before I made an initial release. The plan is to sit down this weekend and knock as many of these things out before the weekend is over and make a release, will I hold true to this? I do not know, my track record of promises similar to this (which you should be able to find in the archives of this blog) is not stellar. Heres hoping I follow through on it this time. Now onto the important part of this post the lists:
Of the things that is on these lists the one that I am not really sure about is the moving from vte to vtem, while vtemm would fit in better with the rest of the application it is currently not packaged with any of the major distros. This leads to the problem which is more important the design of the application or the ability of people to run the software? I’m sure I will have some comments about this in the next couple of days.
All going well I should hopefully make a blog post after I finish each feature, or for a couple of less screenshot worthy features I might just save them until a screenshot worthy one is finished before making a posting.
Close to a month ago now I wrote about what I got up to on my holiday and I said I had started a new project Cuttlefish – a syntax highlighting text box for .Net. I also said that I would post about in more depth later, so far that hasn’t happened. This is mostly because I haven’t actually finished cuttlefish and I haven’t a lot of time to code lately. The other big reason is I recently picked up a copy of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries and found that my little project needs a quite a bit of refactoring to be compliant with these guidelines. I hope to get started on the compliance work tonight, once that refactoring is done it shouldn’t take to long to finish it off. With all that in mind it hopefully won’t be to long before I am able to show cuttlefish off.
I’ve been back at work a couple of days and once again settling back into the daily grind. I had originally decided to make a series of posts once I got back from holiday called ‘Holiday Hacking’ which would detail the coding that I got up to during my time off, as it happens there was just one small hitch in that plan – I didn’t do much coding in my time off. It would seem that I choose to relax these holidays rather than try and chip away at my to do list for gIDE. While I didn’t work on gIDE this holiday I did however start a new project: Cuttlefish. I plan to go into this in more depth in a later post so for now just let me say that it is a syntax highlighting Textbox component for .Net written in C#.
I have been doing a little bit of work around the site as well, mostly involving integration with my facebook account (which I’m intending to give more attention to this year). For those that haven’t noticed (or read this via rss) a link to my profile now appears in the in the sidebar and all of my posts should hopefully be appearing on said profile. This has the added side effect of some of my friends who hadn’t noticed it before get to see how truly geeky I am. For those who are interested the two plugins I am using for the integration are Wordbook and Facelook.
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