The Disillusioned Developer

WordPress for Android

dizzydeveloper — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:06:12 +0000

Sadly, it crashed when I tried to add a photo from camera.

Disillusioned Developer iGoogle Gadget

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:06:32 +0000

One of the most requested new features for this blog (I asked myself if I could do it) is for an iGoogle gadget to load the contents of the blog into an iGoogle page. So here it is: Just click on this link and you will be taken to the add gadget screen for iGoogle to put the new widget on your iGoogle home page. Of course, you will need a google account

Denied an Adsense activation

dizzydeveloper — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:17:53 +0000

I can’t blame Google for this. They’ve denied my request to activate my Adsense account until they’ve seen what’s on the site. Ah well. Start with something else then …

Website Update : Opened an Adsense Account

dizzydeveloper — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:44:29 +0000

Step 1: I have registered for an Adsense account. Unfortunately there is an approval process, presumably involving someone or something checking out my website, which is clearly a bit of an issue given that I haven’t redesigned it yet. I may have to re-arrange the ordering of tasks…

Website Plans Coming Together

dizzydeveloper — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:25:46 +0000

I’ve been slowly thinking through my plans for the new website in my rare free moments. I’ve decided to come up with a list of technology features that I want to introduce and learn about, then I’ll work out some way of incorporating them into the site. Once the bare bones of the site are up and running I shall start thinking about the aesthetics. Many designers I’m sure would say I have this all the wrong way around, but I’m a developer at heart, not a designer…

Technology List: These are the things I’m going to make sure are incorporated into the site.

Adsense advertising – After all, if I do manage to generate any traffic on the site, I might as well try and make some money from it.
Blog Hosting – I’m tired of working with WordPress on a hosted service. Mainly just because I want to have a bit more control over my page. I’m planning on installing an Open Source blog engine on my shared hosting.
[NOTE: With immaculate timing, the WordPress server appears to be too busy to serve my site at the moment, and the first three attempts to post this have just failed.]
A Mac Sparkle application for download. The other thing I’m learning at the moment is Objetive-C on the Mac.

Right now, that’s all. I’ll probably expand this list shortly.

Website Rebuild – Interlude

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:02:36 +0000

My Parallels trial license ran out today, so there will be a short hiatus in the Website rebuild project while I decide what to do. I would buy the license for Parallels if I thought it was good, but to be honest I don’t see it as a big advantage over the free version of Virtual Box. So I will either go back to using my Vista installation through Bootcamp, or I’m going to wipe it and simply use Virtual Box to run Vista instead.

There is a big advantage to that approach of course. I can keep the Virtual Hard Drive on an external hard-drive or the network, and use it on a number of different computers.

I’ll let you all know what I decide.

dizzydeveloper — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:26:25 +0000

Caterham going to car hospital

After more than 4 years of mucking about I have finally managed to arrange for my Caterham to be sent to the garage for a sort out. Here it is in its current sorry state, battery disconnected, small oil leak and quite rusty in the footwell. Hopefully the next time I see it, the Engineers will have sorted it out for me so that its safe and reliable to drive.

Once that’s done, I can start on the software upgrades…

From Car

Website Rebuild (Part 1) Setting Up The Environment

dizzydeveloper — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:48:53 +0000

For my ASP.NET MVC Website development I’m going to use a slightly non-traditional setup:

Hardware

I’m going to do all of my development on my Apple Macbook and just for a bit more of a challenge, I’ll do it using a Parallels Virtual Machine running Vista in “Coherence” mode. That means that the Vista applications appear almost as if they’re Mac OS applications. Its not perfect, the mouse focus sometimes gets a bit confused, but at least its stable and I can carry on using MarsEdit to edit this Blog post under Mac OS X.

Development Tools

For an IDE, I’ll be using Visual Studio 2008 with all the latest service packs and ASP.NET MVC version 1.0. I tried MonoDevelop running on Mono on Mac OS X. It was a great start and I’m really happy that they’re doing it, but so far its not quite ready for prime-time and its still missing some important features, I will definitely be trying the next version when it comes out.

To upload the website to my hosting provider I’m probably going to use the open source Filezilla package. A multi-platform FTP client which seems to work really well.

Revision control will be done using Mercurial. In the past I’ve often used Subversion, which would certainly have got the job done for this project too, but I’ve been using Mercurial for very small jobs recently and I thought it was worth trying out on something a bit more substantial. I did consider Git, but then I decided it would be too painful

On the up

dizzydeveloper — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:41:09 +0000

My blog stats are looking excitingly upward

8th Of May: 0 Hits

9th & 10th of May: 1 Hit

11th of May : ~~2 Hits~~ (Correction 3 Hits)

If I manage 3 tomorrow, I shall be very pleased.

Thanks for having a look.

Now for something completely different, the most ecologically sound flying you are ever likely to see:

Website Rebuild (Introduction)

dizzydeveloper — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:48:42 +0000

As I am no longer full-time employed by my company (Intraweb Software) I’ve decided that the website (never really nicely designed to be perfectly honest. OK. I HATE my website) needs a bit of a revamp. I’ve decided to do the redesign in the spotlight of my readership and publish a series of blog posts describing the process.

What am I going to do? Well I thought I would learn something new. I’ve been pretty scathing about ASP.NET in the past, mostly because of how unsuited it is to MVC development and because all the UI support is based around the designers built into Visual Studio. Unfortunately if you want to write a real flexible applcation its never supported it very well. Fortunately, Microsoft have realised that it needed improvement, so they’ve recently developed the ASP.NET MVC Framework. I’ve never used it before, so I’ll use the new website to learn it, and I’m going to blog about what happens… Watch this space!

“I’m a Mac” AND “I’m a PC”

dizzydeveloper — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:37:32 +0000

I have been following the whole Microsoft Vs Apple advertising campaign, especially in the US with a great deal of interest. As of a couple of months ago, I’m both a Mac and a PC (and several Linux boxes for that matter).

As a software professional and geek, I think its important to be interested in all parts of the computer eco-system. In England it is said (Mostly by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May: the presenters of Top Gear) that you aren’t a real petrol head unless you’ve owned an Alfa Romeo.

As a geek, I have recently got the feeling that you can’t be a really hard-core geek unless you’ve owned a Mac. Fair enough, in former times the operating system was touted purely on its ease of use and GUI, but Mac OS X 10.5 is a proper Unix like operating system based on an open source BSD release. In fact if you start typing on the command line, it really has the power to blow your foot off. Macs even have some very hard-core geek supporters .

My advice, don’t be a Mac, or a PC. Use the most appropriate tool for the job. Today, that might mean Mac or Linux or Solaris or even a PC. To know which one it is, you have to use and understand them all.

My other advice would be: if you want a laptop that just works, get yourself a Mac Book. Mine’s been working hard for 2 months now and its never had to be rebooted and never crashed. I wish I could say the same of any of my Windows machines …

Yet another new Blog Editor

dizzydeveloper — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:56:29 +0000

I’m very quickly approaching the point where I will have tried more blog editors than I have written blog posts. Since I switched to using a Mac Book as my main machine (About 2 months ago) I’ve tried Blogo and Qumana neither of which has had the power to make me blog. But I really think that MarsEdit might do it.

So far the experience has been extremely easy. Firstly it had no problem at all working out the settings it needed to connect to WordPress.com, which was nice. After it had connected, it also had the good sense to download all of my previous posts and my tag categories: Which was a nice touch. I also really like the way that it does a permanent “as you type” preview of the post, in a separate window.

So, let’s see how long the love affair lasts. My first real post is partly done in the draft folder as I type this. Hopefully, by the end of the day…

BTW: The current author of MarsEdit (Daniel Jalkut) does a fairly regular podcast which seems to be mostly about Mac development and especially, being an independent developer on the Apple platforms. The podcast is called Core Intuition, and you can find it on iTunes, or at http://coreint.org/

blogjet got ousted by Windows live Writer

dizzydeveloper — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:44:02 +0000

I thought BlogJet was OK. The user interface didn’t exactly set the world alight, but it was fine and it seemed to have some nice features, but then I tried Windows LiveWriter and I’m afraid I won’t be going back. Its just that bit cleverer. For example, here’s a view of the part of the french Alps where I spent the Winter of 2005/6. Inserted with one click.

And it just works !! How cool is that ? I think I could really get into the blogging thing, now I just have to start writing some interesting stuff.

Trying out Blogjet again

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:20:59 +0000

It didn’t work out too well for me last time, basically I think because I didn’t try hard enough to actually blog. This time I get more time in the early morning because my son

tends to stay awake a lot… so I’ve got the 30 day trial of the latest version. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Working on Gemini4Smartphone Version 2

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:15:20 +0000

As most of my readers (two out of three) should know, the original version of Gemini4Smartphone tanked pretty comprehensively. Currently I’ve acheived no more than a few dozen downloads and not a single sale. I attribute this to a number of factors, mostly around the quality of the product, especially the user-interface, and the quality of the marketing.

For various reasons I have been unable to improve much on any of these areas over the last year, but from now until the end of February I’m making a concerted effort to get version 2 out. Version 2 will have a whole new feature set and will certainly look a lot better than the original. The biggest single improvement will be that it will support Pocket PC, in fact, I’m not even sure I’m going to do a Smartphone version at the moment, so the name may have to change.

If you are a programmer, or you know one, please read this

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:39:47 +0000

Paul Graham is an angel investor/venture capitalist sort of person who is very influential in the web software world. His company Y-Combinator has provided seed capital to quite a few entrepreneurs setting up in the web world who have gone on to do great things. He often writes interesting articles on various related subjects and his latest one is excellent. If you are a software developer, then it will give you some ideas about how you could be more productive (or why you can’t) and if you have to work with, deal with or live with a programmer it will help you to understand them and what they do (maybe). If you don’t feel up to reading the whole thing, then at least have a look at the last two paragraphs. Enjoy:

http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html

WordPress now available as a Facebook Application

dizzydeveloper — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:06:10 +0000

Its been a very long time since the DizzyDeveloper has put pen to paper (or keys to screen) but my aim is to start up again now. The incentive is the introduction of a WordPress application for Facebook. I’m posting this from within the app. Lets see how it goes.

For anyone on Facebook who is one of my friends and is reading this, you probably won’t get too much out of my writing unless you are a serious geek, except for the odd posting where I try out new stuff, posting pictures, sending video, that sort of stuff. You might want to start your own blog though so that everyone else can see what you’re up to.

43 Folders on Handling E-Mail

dizzydeveloper — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:24:22 +0000

I’m a huge fan of 43 Folders, and I think this podcast is great. Take a few minutes out of your busy schedule to learn how to handler your e-mail better.

You could be getting this Podcast series directly downloaded to your Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone if you had Gemini4Smartphone

Announcing Release 1.0 of Gemini4Smartphone

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:02:40 +0000

Well, its finally up and flying. The first release of Gemini4Smartphone is on the streets. The current version can be installed on any unlocked Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone and we will hopefully be starting certification testing pretty soon so that we can get the code signed for people who won’t or can’t unlock their devices to run our application.

The release version has some feature improvements over the last beta release, especially the new desktop installation package. Just download to your Windows XP desktop and connect your Smartphone over active-sync. The whole thing is much easier than having to download the CAB file to your phone and then run it.

The next release is well into the planning stages. We have some very exciting new features to add, especially the whole twinning with the desktop features, on which the name of the product was based. Keep your eyes peeled for more announcements coming soon.

The press release for the current release is here: File Attachment: press_release_version_1.rtf (14 KB).

Testing Blogjet I wonder how well this is going to work

dizzydeveloper — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 11:21:13 +0000

OK. Lets see how well this works. BlogJet on my laptop so that I don’t have to edit when I’m connected. It even allows me to edit my contributions before I make them, and much easier access to the formatting bits and pieces.