Ramblings of a software developer from Edinburgh.

I have just finished filling in a job application for SELEX Galileo, and just wanted to make a small comment on the length which some applications are.

It has taken me the best part of three hours to complete the application form, which included a few ‘essay-style’ questions. I’ve saved a copy of the completed application, and it’s wound up as a 6 page PDF. This is worrying, partially because my ‘main’ CV is only a page and a half long. To be fair it asked for – and I was happy to provide – a detailed explanation of our third year group projects from uni. It was actually nice reminisce of the ‘good ol’ days.’

Of course, I’m only further increasing the effort by coming on here to make a blog post about it!

In other news, activity on the site has started to pick up again very slowly, back up to a steady 3-6 hits a day. Still pretty pants, but it’s a step in the right direction, and I still get a nice spike of users every time I make a new post.

I’m thinking of simplifying my categories and including some Formula 1 stuff, and some Lord of the Rings Online stuff, as they’re also things that I’m interested in, that hopefully one in a hundred people may be interested in reading about. EDIT: Done!

BufferApp

I’ve started using a web application called Buffer recently. There are three reasons I’m particularly enjoying it. Firstly is the ability to link both my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then post to both simultaneously. This is handy because I usually find myself focusing on one social network or the other, and rarely spend time on both.

This is easily done through their web interface, but you can also install their Chrome extention, allowing you to instantly share a page. Again, this happens concurrently with all accounts you have linked, and funnily enough the way many of you guys might stumble onto this post, when I finish writing it and bash ‘share.’

The final thing I like is that it allows you to queue up different posts. Unfortunately you don’t get as much control over the scheduling as I would like, but I believe that this is something the developers are working on. I would, for example, occasionally like to schedule a tweet for 12:00. Also, at the moment you pre-specify times at which to fire off the ‘next item in your buffer.’ I would love to see a feature whereby you can specify that you want a maximum of six items per day, and it can spread them out randomly during the day.

The reference in the title… I thought of something a bit similar a year or so ago but aimed at Bebo and MySpace (god, that was ages ago). Bonus points for anyone who leaves me a comment on this post sharing props for social networks of yesteryear.

It’s really an excellent wee app… Just thought I’d tell you all about it!

Other than my dabbling with web hosting, I’ve not been up to a great deal else tech-wise. I’ve got my home media server/media center running again. I seem to remember scrapping it because the two hard drives that were in there kept continually crashing. However, having recently tried to (unsuccessfully) flog a Hitachi 1TB drive, I figured I would get the thing set up again. It is nice to have our small collection of media shared across the network so Kimmi or I can access it, and also that it’s nice and easy to watch it on the big screen. I have messed around with solutions such as XBMC for viewing and managing the media, but it just wasn’t working how I wanted it. One thing I did particularly like about it was it’s gracenote-style information retrieval. The series that I have ripped from DVD are pretty well named, but XBMC acquired the DVD covers, set suitable thumbnails for each episode, and a variety of other metadata.

Code-wise I’ve been up to very little. I’ve still been slowly working on Django, and a few other small PHP projects. One thing which I’m particularly interested in is kind of a simulator for a form of solitaire card game. The idea is to lay out cards one at a time, so that they form a 3×3 grid. If at any time there is a visible pair of cards adding up to 11, such as 5×6 or 3×8, then you lay two cards over the pair. Also, if king, queen, and jack are visible, then you may lay cards over all three. The thing I find amusing about this game is that as soon as the cards are shuffled, the probability of winning or losing are pre-determined. There is no skill involved, as no choices are made at any time, the game simply works out or doesn’t. I find this game works particularly often, so I am interested in modelling the game and running some simulations to find out the %’age of games which finish. I’m sure some maths boffin will be able to do a whole load of statistics and probability analysis and work it out, but I’d prefer to just code it!

Well I’ve moved server again. I post messages like this partly to let anyone who cares know about things which are going on, but also so that I can tell when the domain is fully propagated.

For any non-techies reading this, changing where a domain name points to takes time. This is because the change is first passed from the registrar to the root DNS servers, which then slowly passes on the information to other DNS servers.

Essentially, once I see this post appearing (I’m currently posting it to 109.73.x.x) on ruu1989.com, I’ll know the propagation is complete for my ISP, and I’m sure it’ll be processing for other people too.

The other big reason I’ve moved server is I’m now using my own reseller webhosting. I plan on pushing the whole web freelancer thing pretty hard again in the next few weeks, but with a kick this time. I can now – reliably – host peoples websites. This is great, because I think it is important for customers to be able to recieve a ‘complete’ web design experience, without having to deal with multiple companies.

As usual, I’ll keep you posted!

Just a thought about semicolons, spurred on by a hacker news post I read here this morning.

I used to hate semicolons. I openly admit my first major programming experience was Visual Basic 5. As far I was concerned, up until that moment semicolons were only useful to me for joining items in a list where there was punctuation within the items. Then I got interested in JavaScript, and mostly ignored them. They got used when adding them seemed to ‘fix’ code, which generally resulted in a lot of sloppy code and poor practice. At university I was finally exposed to PHP and Java. Semicolons at the end of almost every statement, it took a little bit of discipline, but I finally got there. It eventually became force of habit that almost every time I hit the return key, the humble semicolon preceded it.

Fast-forward to 2012. I ‘m starting to get into Django, and at least every other time I save a file and hit F5, I receive an error because I’ve added a semicolon at the end of a line… The interesting kicker is – for those of you unfamiliar with Python – that the lines in Java/PHP/C you typically *wouldn’t* end with a semicolon, for example opening a for statement, or an if statement, you now end with a colon.

Python

for i in range(10):

print i

PHP

for($i = 0; $i <= 10; $i++) {

echo $i;

}

Clever, eh?

Also, in case anyone is writing Django in Sublime Text 2 (the best text editor, EVAR!), there is a great plugin for it here:- https://github.com/squ1b3r/Djaneiro.