For the past 10+ years now I have been a member of the scouting organisation, this weekend saw the realisation of pretty much what I have been doing for that long. On Sunday I got to meet the Queen and received my Queen Scout’s Award, the highest award in UK Scouting.
Woop.
Well, for a while now I have been working on the coursework project for this year. It is an attempt to create an application to handle mapping the globe from street level. Currently, it is in a private BETA state, which will hopefully not remain in for too long.
It has been a real pain in the ass to get this completed as for the 1st revision it has had a fair few features to program into, however it is coming along quite nicely and by the end of the week I hope for a public BETA, well, as many people as I can pursuade to test it basically. So hopefully that should go swimmingly.
After reading some of David Farnings views on Open Source models and the way defined by a simple set of rules as the project progresses has been very interesting for me. I work on many projects currently and I will continue to do so in the future, although none may be as large as some of the latter stages mentioned in his articles it has been an eye opener.
Thanks David.
Design is a skill I am gradually learning, it’s a slow process and it doesn’t help much that I am immune to choosing nice colours usually, however I think that as I continue to read I am nudging myself in the right direction, finally.
In case you have been asleep recently and have missed Web 2.0 completely, the great buzzword that it is, then you will have noticed the now common idea of distributed, user-driven content. Content that is finally becoming personal, (Timothy’s idea is finally showing), and that is delivered on a users request and not when an administrator bothers to. This gives us great flexibility to do us what we want with the data, present it in any way we wish. Great you think, well yes and no. These sites work well because one of aspect in their design..
Simplicity, it’s visually appealing, they fit the purpose and much like Windows, it just works. They don’t annoy anyone by setting annoying quotas and silly little animations when you do something right, I applaud them because of this.
Anyway, with this revision of my site I tried to find a template to mould that followed some simple design principles, many will work anywhere, but it’s outside these principles that you can play with.
I read a riveting article today about text spacing and about how it affects a users experience on a website. Personally when you look at a page, what annoys you? Well, flash usually is a big one, large imagery and overly fancy sites also get up my nose, also this is why I cannot even contemplate using MySpace. So what you follow?
Well, 90% of the data on the web is in fact… Text. Strange that one, please bare this in mind. Make sure it is readable and most of all the focus of the web site, (unless you are running a picture/video site, which you can now ignore my comments), treat users with respect and make sure they are the focus of the site.
Enough rambling.
With my foray back into OSS recently, I was contacted by one Norman Markgraf, this guy I worked with last year for a few months on OpenDocumentPHP. He is a sound guy and he wanted to try and restart the project, he had noticed that in PHP5.2 there is now ZIP support by default, making our task one hell of a load easier. I was surprised to hear from him and I am now jumping back onto the band wagon when I can.
It’s going to be hard work bringing the OpenDocument Format to the Web, but heck we can try.
For anyone that cares, I have been working on snippets of Ubuntu now for around 3 months. It’s damn interesting, being able to see real-time large scale development. After reading countless wiki entries, trailing launchpad and even reading mailing list archives like a LUGRadio presenter, (which incidentally is a very funny podcast, seriously considering LUGRadio Live 07), I am finally getting to grips with how this process works.
It’s strange that I never really saw it going this way, basically a core team of developers are the only people who can really change the code, but below that it’s really a structured free for all with anyone being able to edit anything, the only boundary is your knowledge. This is really appealing to me, as I know a fair bit about computers in general and Linux now, but being able to learn and work and actually feel like the work I am putting in is actually worth it. Unlike other OSS projects I have worked on, I am not getting tangled in the web of bureaucracy, with administrators and moderators who think they are 10 times better than you because they started on the project years before you, thus it’s their right to live there forever.
But meh, it’s a great little distro, a solid community and one that I actually want to be a part of, one that’s dragging me in, not that I am fighting my way into.
Meh, stupid hosting companies. Whilst doing the updates I have managed to be without email and for the vast majority of the time without FTP access, quickly having to jump on and upload. Hopefully this should be fixed finally.
Thanks Chad.
When 12am struck on the 1st, it felt strange, deja vu if you will, well saying that, I was around at Natalie’s again, with pretty much the same people, but I dunno, it felt a lot like Christmas this year. That it had just snuck up on us. And when I look back at the year I see why, it’s a blur to me, this year has gone so fast that I can’t actually remember much of it, looking back on the blog reminds me, but still, it’s scary to feel like 2005 was only a few days back, when in reality it’s really 2006.. But oh, time to get on with life I suppose.
January, the fun time when exams run riot and everyone that’s anyone is staying indoors and making sweet, sweet eye-love with a text-book, me included obviously. I made the mistake of not doing this last year and failing miserably, thus I am learning like all good brain processing beings. These exams matter now, (like they didn’t before, but meh), and with the approach of actual real, independent life in September/October with my endeavours into University Life and such, this year is probably the most important of my little life. Seems strange to think that this time next year I could be living up north something, studying & partying around.. Just freaks me out a little..
Anyway, that’s about it for now. As for resolutions..
PS.. Anyone else get really fucked off when your Data Drive decides it doesn’t like the file-system any more?
Wow, August was a long time ago and strangely it does just seem like yesterday.
School I suppose should be at the top of the priorities, thus.. (Sorry Nat.)
The last couple of months have flown by, getting to the business I should have started a year back, I am just about on course for my January exams now, I am taking the grand total of 7 exams, comparing that to last year’s 1 at the same time its getting rather stressful. (Don’t worry the other 6 are retakes.)
September was certainly a turning point for me, I suddenly realised, “Heck! I’ve got 8 months now, that’s it..”, actually not becoming what your deepest aspirations are is certainly a great motivator. I guess I am lucky that I do know what I want to be and I have done since such an early age, this means that I have ‘worked’ towards it, well behind the computer desk away from the hellish confines of the school classroom. I am now doing about a chapter of maths work a week and will have to continue this if I have any hope of getting through the entire A-Level in a year, (I am currently doing Core Mathematics 1 & 2 as well as Mechanics 1, for January, then having to do Core Mathematics 3 & 4 as well as Mechanics 2, for June), and taking the places that I have been fortunate enough to be offered.
Brings me nicely on to University, I applied back in October, before I went off to India, (more of that to come actually), about a month later and I’ve now got 6 offers, does quite seem real though that even with my current results I have these, I mean everything is still way up in the air, but I suppose it’s great that they are there and that they are a serious mixture, I will list them purely for archival purposes:
To me those offers aren’t half bad, achievable at that, I have already been to Nottingham Trent, Liverpool and Coventry. The inequality shows my feelings towards each; Liverpool < Trent > Coventry, thus I still have to go to Aston and Loughborough which I should hopefully be doing between now and March.
Suppose that’s about it on the whole Uni/school front, just have to keep on kicking my ass into doing the work for the rest of the year and I may have my foot in the door of my future.
Friends and stuff..
When I arrived back at school in September I noticed something. A few people have left. Going into the common room now is like a ghost town, no-one is there not even people that you know. Last year there was a solid gang of about 30 people that used to hang about most days simply because we could, I did a rough calculation a few weeks about that around half the darn year have got up and left, either that or have resat, moved or now do the social life killer known as Business Studies.
I suppose it’s not quite as bad as I make it out to be, I mean I still have a solid group of mates that I hang about with, people from my subjects that invariably trudge down to the common room at the same time as me, but its not like it was last year; constantly being talked at by Zain, felt up by Jamie and freaked out by Joe. But oh well. That’s life I guess.
Seems strange to say this but its been past a year now with me and Natalie, almost a year and a month now, we went and watched the rugby at Twickenham, (unfortunately England lost, but oh well, cant have everything), then we took the train to Waterloo and I tried to look manly going on the eye. I managed to fail spectacularly. But it was an experience going on it at night and if anyone that’s scared of it during the daytime, it doesn’t get much better at night, I promise you. We then meandered up to Leicester Square and had a meal in the basement of this rather nice Italian Restaurant, was great. Walked back through the streets of London to Waterloo and were back home. Was a good night.
That’s about it for now, I will add a bit more later..
