Mike's Musings » Programming

theCloud Blog

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:35:02 +0000

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.

New Theme

admin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:58:32 +0000

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.

REST API Test Utility

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:54:27 +0000

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.

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:

http://mlowen.com/svn/ratu/trunk

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.

gIDE Build System

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 12:58:19 +0000

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.

As always the latest changes to gIDE can be found in trunk of the svn repo at http://mlowen.com/svn/gIDE/trunk.

Weekend Coding

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:23:38 +0000

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:

Needs

Find/Replace
File Rename
File Move
Build System

Wants

Move from vte to vtemm
Document Split view

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.

What happened to Cuttlefish?

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:03:14 +0000

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.

This is not the post I intended to write today

admin — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:23:45 +0000

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.

gIDE Update

admin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 04:22:59 +0000

The new Create project dialog I mentioned earlier this week has hit trunk as of about 5 minutes ago and everything seems to be working fine as always the svn repository is http://mlowen.com/svn/gIDE/trunk.

Before I get back to adding new features to gIDE there are a couple of more overhauls of the current system that I want to do, the parts I want to look at are:

Configuration system.
Add file dialog.
Remove file dialog.

The configuration system doesn’t need much more than some tweaking and at the most is a nights work. I’m also thinking about doing away entirely with the remove file dialog as it just seems clunky where a right click menu would do the trick. The add file dialog is the only one that I’m not overly sure how to approach as of yet, originally it was a quick hack to get the functionality in there (much like the create project dialog) with the intent of replacing it later. Well the time has come to do away with the quick hack but I’m just not sure what the new dialog should look like, all I know is I want something different from what I currently have which can be seen in the screenshots below.

Default add file dialog.

Adding a new file to a subfolder of the project

As you can see these are pretty bloody horrible, will probably brainstorm tonight and post some design sketches tomorrow or Friday.

Latest gIDE Progress

admin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 05:01:00 +0000

Recently I finished the new Create Project dialog in gIDE which integrates with the project template system I wrote earlier, for those who saw the previous one this is a marked improvement. The new dialog is similar to create dialogs in most IDE’s where the user chooses the language they want to work in and the project type. Given that information gIDE will get the appropriate project template and creates the project. It is currently using a placeholder image for the Project Icon, I want to make this configurable in the project template and replace the placeholder image with a different default image.

This first screenshot shows gIDE when the create project dialog first opens:

This second shows just the create dialog with some random choices made:

Finally just to round things off a screenshot of gIDE in action working on another project I’m hacking away on:

The working create dialog has not been commited to svn yet as there is one or two small bugs I’m trying to track down but it should be up within the next day or two.

gIDE News

admin — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:52:27 +0000

A while ago I announced that I was working on gIDE an IDE for the GNOME desktop enviroment. Due to university, work and trying to have some form of a social life I have not gotten gIDE to the stage where I feel comfortable making a release. The svn repositry is still publicly available so people are able to check out the latest copy of the source tree. Now that university is over I hope to have more time to dedicate to gIDE and have the 0.1 release out before Christmas.

To tide you over until I am ready to make that release I am offering up two gIDE sub-projects for you to play around with. The first is a small python script which will import a project from a directory and create a XML file which gIDE is able to load. I do plan to eventually turn this into a plugin once I get a plugin system up and running in gIDE, but at the moment that looks like it might be some time in the future so for now I am releasing the script instead. My hope is with this script more people will use gIDE when it is released becase it will be easy to transition existing projects to work with the gIDE. You can download it from here.

The second sub-project sprang from the recently completed template system for gIDE. Once I finished the system I thought it would be useful for people to have some way to test the templates they have written and so this application was born. Just a note that this is the first iteration of the template system and as such it is reasonably rough, it has yet to integrated into the main development branch of gIDE as it needs a lot of cleaning up first. However all of the functionality of what is going to be in the copy that is merged with gIDE is present in this copy. You can download it from here.

Both of these items are released under the GNU GPL, so you are free to do with them as you wish within the boundries of the license. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.