Yearly Archives: 2006

Dev crazy

In an attempt to vary the type of programming I am doing, out of office I have been working on quite a few cool projects. Outlined a few below – unfortunately none are for download yet as they are still in progress.

KarovaDev Firefox extension
As Karova‘s main product is a hosted e-commerce solution, we naturally have to integrate with quite a few payment service providers. It can be a chore to test our stores with these payment service providers, having to enter dummy or real credit card details everytime. I hate monkey work so I wrote a firefox extension for the Karova developers to help in the testing of Karova stores. It’s pretty sweet, You can edit all the default data passed for each payment service providers, specify the domains or virtual directories (if installed on localhost) to test against. The final test page scans all the user’s cookies and chooses the ones that match the supplied domains etc. You can then choose your site and test to your heart’s content- saving hours of monkey work.
Screenshot of KarovaDev firefox extension
It was nice to work on a beefy extension again. It re-affirmed to me how good the Gecko/ XUL platform is.
Philroche Blog Tool
Most of the C# work I do in wrk is web applications running on IIS. I do some command line apps that run as scheduled tasks but I don’t have cause to develop any GUI apps. Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 express so I downloaded it and gave WinForms a shot… easy peasy to get a nice GUI designed and built. I decided to write a simple RSS aggregator to see how easy it would be.
Philroche Blog tool view feed
I haven’t written the RSS parser yet but I have the tree view and the Mozilla ActiveX control working well. I could have used the built in webbrowser (IE) component but then why would I want to do that.
Philroche Blog tool make post
I wanted to see if I could integrate with the wordpress API too to make blog posts so I turned to Xstandard (the lite version). Xstandard also have a .NET component that you can use. It is really neat and you can bet your house on the markup being valid.

Visual studio 2005 express is excellent and free too (as in beer). Also checkout SQL server 2005 express which I have used on a very beefy project already and it is ace – also free (as in beer).

Mod_Python
Since having a fairly new Dell machine donated to me by my Dad I have been feverishly using Ubuntu. I have Apache and mod_python running and have a nice little app running. Mod_python as a development platform is sweet as it is not as contstrained as TurboGears or Ruby on Rails. It is very hard to debug though.

So all in all I am getting some nice variety in my dev work, I find it can sometimes get stale if you’re doing the same thing day-in day-out, especially if it involves legacy asp sites. Is there anything you guys would recommend trying out as an antidote to work work while still being dev work (if you know what I mean). I do want to look at mono and PyGTK.

Ireland June 06

As I mentioned before, I was in ireland last week at Marty’s wedding and visiting my folks. I now have the photos up – some quite embarrassing but I ahve a rule that if it’s on the camera – it’s going online 🙂

There are a few of note – Peter nearly getting drowned by Bobby, Myself and Gill on our 6th aniversary with the arran islands in the background, Myself and a very nervous Clav – it was a great week

Skype mania

I love Skype and use it for most of my calls. I have a Skype-in number “+44121 288 5321” and I have Skype voicemail too. I recently got my dad set up so we can have free calls.

I was wandering around Sainsburys the other day and was very surprised to see a leaflet allowing you to top-up your Skype-out credit.

Sainsburys Skype-out top up

Then today I was wandering around Asda and saw 2 usb skype phones and a a skype starter package. Skype have one hell of a marketing machine – We can learn alot from the way Skype is growing.

Asda skype starter package

Complete relaxation

I’m over in the motherland for the best part of a week trying to relax and de-stress. We got the ferry from Holyhead on friday afternoon. Stayed at my mum’s on friday night and saturday morning we drove down to Cahir in county Tipperary (It’s a long way) for my mate clav’s wedding which as expected resulted in copious amounts of alcohol. Sunday morning with one hell of a hangover we drove via Limerick and Ennis to my Dad’s place in county Clare. Since then I have been chilling, diving (with Burren Adventures again :)), eating, snorkelling, swimming, fishing, reading and sleeping. It really is nice to get out of the office setting and get away from masses of XSLT and C#. Don’t get me wrong I love my job but sometimes I just need a nice break.

While here I have also set my dad up on skype using the Easy Blue Box which I also have – hello free phone calls :). It was myself and Gill’s 6th anniversary yesterday which we celebrated with a fantastic vegetarian meal in the HolyWell Italian restaurant in Ennistymon, on the way back we stopped at the Cliffs of Moher to watch the sunset over the Arran Islands. I really do love it here and plan on making many more trips this and next year – especially now I have my own snorkelling set (courtesy of the wonderful Lidl).

Pillar with the green-style logo

A text message I received today led to a quite interesting text message conversation –

Stranger: Here today mate?

Me: I am here, where are you?

Stranger: By the pillar with the green-style logo

Me: I still can’t see you, i’m by the fountain

I haven’t had a reply from that one – but it got me chuckling none-the-less.

Update –

It turns out it was Chris Ward who I met last year at @media – The conversation was an attempt to find me (he thought I was there) . I feel like a right prat – sorry dude.