Category Archives: Tech Stuff

New Phone …… New Posts

by AdminTim

Time passes and tech rolls on. My little HTC Touch Diamond has just been replace by a nice new Nokia N900.

Over all It’s been quite a nice experience, a perfectly acceptable little keyboard some nice little apps and with a switch from Orange to T-Mobile RECEPTION AT HOME !!!!

I’ll post some more as I go on.

The best laid plans

by AdminTim

Well, if the intention of getting this little eee pc is to post to this blog more often, then I guess it’s a complete waste of money. In practice it’s kinda turned into rather an evening hog. Yes it’s small and I have mange to use it while up in bed without too many disparaging remarks from Mrs Grepppo, but in all other respects it’s taken up quite a bit of evening time to get where I am now,

And where is that, I here you ask….

Well so far I have:

1.configured a proper KDE desktop (easy)
2.got a new SD card to run apps off, found that the limitations of FAT mean that was impossible, then had reformat it to ext2 to make this possible
3.installed java jdk

This latter took most of the time and was painful. I guess I’m more used to Solaris and Red Hat forks (well Mandrake/Mandriva) so I thought that setting up a jdk would be just as simple as untarring the file, setting the paths and permissions. Bob’s your aunties live in lover …JDK.
Well it appears it’s not that simple, and Debian forks (such as Ubuntu and Xandros) expect thiing done in a certain way. Unfortunately the way I wanted to run the JDK off the SD card didn’t really fit in with this,

Well, I eventually managed to get my repositories to pull the jdk 5 packages via apt-get onto my precious hard drive space. So it works, but it still leaves a bad taste.

Next up, Postgres or MySql, and this time no apt-get.

Things I am playing with at the moment

by AdminTim

Like most tech-boys I normally have about 3 or 4 projects that I’d like to be doing if I had the time to do them, access to a PC at a reasonable time.

So far the this list consists of:

  1. Playing with QuickFix/J, I won’t say exactly what, as I have been sitting on this project for ages.
  2. Tinkering with this blog. I must say I am hugely impressed with WordPress. It’s all very slick and just works. Even more impressive that it’s all done in PHP which is generally the spawn-of-the-devil to code/debug
  3. Do some coding work on Formatted Dataset API. This is useful little library written by and old Sybase Consultant, which hasn’t had a new commit in 3 years. I recently had to Maven-ise it for a project I was doing here, and I would be nice to add that back to the Sourceforge trunk. I’ll have to check with the owner for CVS/SVN access.
  4. Pick up a new language, I’ve been flirting with Ruby/Rails, and forcing myself (with little real enthusiasm) do plough through a C# book. Other candidates are JRuby (duh), Groovy (unlikely) or one of the new breed of functional langs on the jvm (Scala or Clojure).
  5. A little app for my wife’s card making habits. This I’ll probably tie in to the picking up a new lang. Possibly building out the back end using Rails, with an FXRuby front end. It amused her no end last night when I started gathering requirements and sketching out a schema while watching Heroes in bed.
  6. Re-read my Spring book. That seems to be taking off over here.

Of course half this stuff will never get done, but it’s still nice to have a list.

Freeing Comments

by AdminTim

As this is log is a bit like Robin Bloor’s opinion of C++, i.e. write only, I don’t suppose anyone has noticed that I had to set the commenting to registered users only because of comment spam.

We’ll I’ve just installed one of those nifty Java script and cookie spam-bot blockers and opened the commenting up again.

I’ll see how well this one works….

Open Government ?

by AdminTim

Nice little bit of news here that HM Government is looking to go into Open Source…

UK government backs open source

Obviously they are looking at the “free as in beer” aspect to save a few pennies after shelling out huge amounts to various banks.

I’d be curious if they take this any further, as my understanding is that if a piece of GPL/LGPL/APL? software lands on a Third Party clients environment, all of the source code should be available to the Third Party, including the bespoke IP.

That is if you get to use a Government application which lands a piece of Open Source software on your PC, you have the right to see the code of the whole thing.

To be quite honest, developers being developers, I’d be utterly gobsmacked if this wasn’t the case already, but it would be interesting to see if they’ve thought through the implications…

BTW if you reead the BBC article,? it’s nice to see Ingres getting a mentch. I’ve always had an affection for it, esp as it’s the first relational database I used in anger….