Category Archives: Programming

Ruby On Rails and a Woolies Queue

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I’ve been spending some of my copious free time learning something new, Ruby On Rails. Before everyone gets excited and says “Oh no not another blog about RoR and how wonderful it is…” this is not one of those kinds of posts, in fact its got nothing to do with RoR actually.?

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about RoR and trying various things out with it to see what can be done, how easy it is and is it actually something that I should try learn. I’ve got a few crazy ideas for some “web-enabled” applications and am looking for an easy way to rapidly develop the applications.

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Java on Pocket PC / Windows Mobile

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I need some help, so I’m asking the internets…?

Anyone gotten Java apps to run on PocketPC’s/Windows Mobile devices? I need a minimum of J2ME support (MIDP 2.0) but I would really like some a bit fancier, say with Swing support? Anyone know if this is possible??

I’ve done some searching and so far I haven’t found much online other than people asking the same questions.?

My awesome/crazy idea is to develop a application that runs on desktop machines (Windows, Linux Mac OSX and anything else that’ll run Java) and that will hopefully work on PocketPC’s too with minimal changes. I’m hoping for the mythical… “Compile Once, Run Anywhere” sales pitch that made Java so cool in the beginning.?

So far I’ve found this open source JRE for Pocket PC – Mysaifu JVM but I’m not sure how good it is, I plan on trying it this weekend.

I’ve also heard that there is one by IBM called J9 but that you have to pay for, I’m ideally looking for something that doesn’t cost money, so my future users don’t have to shell out even more cash.

Update: So it turns out after a little searching that PhoneME (a open source project to create a J2ME JVM) is now available on Windows Mobile too. I’ll have to try this one out over the weekend too.

Google Notebook API

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Anyone know if there is an API to access notes in Google Notebook ? I’ve been using the notebook alot lately, as I’m normally on one of 4 computers (sometimes 5) and its nice to have a central place to put all my notes about stuff or sites I want to visit etc.?

The other day though I came up with a crazy idea for a little application that I would love to link to Google Notebook (essentially I want to read & write notes) but I haven’t found an API for it yet. I guess I could perhaps reverse engineer the Firefox plugin ??

If anyone knows where to look… leave a comment.

EDIT: I was really stupid 🙁 Typed “Google Notebook API” into Google and I found this only problem is that the official API only allows reading of the public notebooks.?

Would it be possible to impersonate a user in a browser to read/write notes? Or is that just too complicated?

Web-based Timesheet

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Anyone know a good web-based open source timesheet application?
Before I re-invent the wheel, I thought I would ask the Internet about this one. I tried asking Google but I couldn’t find much there.

I’m trying to find a good, easy to use, open source web based time sheet application. I don’t need all the fancy stuff of the project management applications out there. I just want to be able to select a Customer and Project, put in a date, start time, end time and a description. At the end of the day/week/month I would like to be able to get a report with a list of everything that was done.

Extra points if I can put in KM’s for travel and have one or two other fields. It should be able to easily export this info to various file formats (CSV, XML, XLS or something) and look nice and pretty. It should preferably have a database backend and support multiple users. Would be really nice if its interface had a bit of AJAX behind it to make it nice and snappy and an integrated task list would be cool too. The web interface should at least run in Firefox and IE (not as important) and perhaps Safari, would be awesome if I could use Opera Mobile from my phone to access it too.

If you know of anything leave a comment, Thanks.

Communication and Customer Service

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Joel @ Joel On Software has a post up about Customer Service and how important it is that you have good customer service.

I have to agree with what he’s written, Customer Service is important, very important but it’s also important how you deliver that customer service. I get to deal with a lot of companies and it’s true that the ones I recommend to everyone else and the ones I constantly use are those that provide good customer service.

Let me tell you a true story about something that happened a few weeks ago that should illustrate my point.

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Bug in VBA in Excel?

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Excel VBA ScreenshotI’ve been spending a lot of time in Excel’s VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) editor and I’ve found an odd bug. In the main code editor window the scroll wheel on my mouse won’t work. I didn’t realize how much I use that scroll wheel while I’m coding, until it didn’t work.

I’m also pretty sure that the intellisense is buggy or perhaps just not that intelligent.? That’s the problem with getting so used to IDE’s like Visual Studio 2005 and the new Netbeans, is that you come to rely on intellisense and auto completion and those cool drop down box’s too much. Maybe I should go “hardcore” and use emacs or VI or cat, mmmh would have to be notepad on windows…
This is all in Microsoft Excel 2003.

Generics, Reflection and Threads in C#

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So I’ve been messing around with Generics and Reflection in C# this week. I’m busy writing something that’s going to support a plugin system so that the same core can be used for multiple clients.

But my question is where can I learn more about this kind of stuff? While the basics can easily be picked up from the net and through a bit of experimentation. (I’ve found the best sources of info to be many of the msdn blogs…) I’m not sure how to solve weirder issues in my design like what happens if certain parts of the application become multi-threaded? I’ve got to come up with a way to process more things “at once” in the system so a multi-threaded solution seems to be the best way to go. This is very hard when you have a 40hour time scale to complete and test the whole “core” system.

So any suggestions of where to look for more info would be greatly appreciated along with any hints on slowing down time and no sleep less is not a good enough as