2006; A year in Review

So 2007 is almost here, and i thought, what is the best way possible to look over the past 364 days. My only conclusion was a good ol' fashioned blog post. So here it is, 2006 in my humble opinion.

Highlights

• Getting my first Programming Job


• Paying off my university debt


• Becoming truly independent for the first time


• Buying my first Mac (aka the Blackbook)


• Remembering all the poetic crap that i wrote (Trust me theres a lot!)


• Meeting my current batch of uni friends, especially one...


• Going home at Christmas knowing i'm going back to uni


• Meeting David Isaacs in a club in southampton


• Writing my first real program, Hold On


• Becoming a real programmer ^_^


• Watching the entire Godfather trilogy


• Being the best man at my Brothers wedding


• Giving away an entire computer

Low points

• Being asked to redesign Myspace sites That stuff is below me!


• Not taking certain people out on dates


• Leaving Uni to come home


• Being unemployed for a month


• Getting C&%$ blocked, when i had a hot Swedish girl in the bag (not that i'm bitter)


• Staying in Southampton for a week after everyone had left for home


• Going back into my old Sixth form (the weirdest thing i've ever done!)

Overall, as an outside observer can see, this year as been fairly average. But i must say that getting my Job at DSGI was most definitely the highlight of the entire year for me. All i can do is thank God and the nice folks at Kelly's Hemel Hempstead, for getting me that.

On the regrets side of things, nothing serious i liked a couple of girls, who in traditional fashion, i said nothing too, and allowed them to travel down their own merry road, into jonathan-less bliss. On second thought, that was the right thing to do. Besides, i'm some sort of player apparently.

For me 2006 was a year of maturity, become more of a man, and less of child. I still openly refer to myself as a child, rather than adult, or even young adult. I believe this to be i don't want to get ahead of myself. In my eyes a man is seen for what he is in another persons eyes, not his own.


Quotes of the Year

Dave Chappelle "They should have never given you niggers money"

Jumoke "I think i my laptop screen is broke"
Me "Whats up with it"
Jumoke "The screen stays dark"
presses the brightness button "Nah, it's fine"

Tunde "Hows the wife?"

Me "How old do you think i am?"
Numerous sources "24","28","22"
Me "Actually i'm 19, thats ok"

Jaimini "I spend more time with you than anyone else"
Me "Really, never noticed"

Teacher "Have any of you done any programming before?"
puts hand up
Teacher "Have any of worked with arrays"
puts hand up
Teacher "I'll just assume for the rest of the year, that you've done all of this before"

Me "Dalrymple is just my slave name"
Elle "Slave name? i don't get it"
Me "Well about 300 years ago ..."

Japhet "I don't appreciated being called monkey"
Me "You mean, just after you finished labelling me one?"

Lester "I went to get something out of my wallet, and there was this random girls driving license, i have no idea how it got there!"
Me "I need to go out with you guys!"

Nik/Nic "New rule, when we are out we don't talk about our course!"

Nik/Nic "All the people on are course are freaks"

Luke "He said he hates me, thats a strong word. Who hates someone?"

It's been a fun year


Happy 2007 everyone

Programming Syndicate

As my journey to become an elite software developer continues, i've reached another milestone, and it's come a bit late, but its better late then never. I've starting using CVS, or Controlled versioning system. which automatically stores copies of my code, allowing better control over it.

Syndication, one of my new programming projects, has got to the stage where it can open and display a text file. Not a super feat in the grand scheme of things, but from idea to implementation in less than a week, thats not bad.

Next up on the coding hit list is Diggr, a lot of the stuff i'm learning on these other projects is moving my knowledge of OOP on by miles. However the whole VB thing is killing me, seriously it's a horrible language when you go back to it from C like syntax.

The work goes on, i can't sell what doesn't exist, this is tiger telmatics you know!

I heart Xcode

2007 will be a year of milestones for me, As i speak/type i've got three projects, planned for release next year.

Two Desktop apps, and one palm app.

They are as follows

Isolation :- Background Local HTML page Proxy (Multi-Platform)
Diggr :- Handheld Digg Client (Palm OS)
Syndication New!:- RSS Template Builder. (Multi-Platform)

Isolation and Syndication, should form the backbone of my commercial apps. Diggr will be my last big Palm OS project. Hate to say it, but it looks to me as if the platform is dead. Plus i'm starting to really hate Visual Basic. This Java + Swing stuff is just in a class of it's own.

As for release dates, well thats another thing. Diggr is at the most advanced stage of development, however it's held back by a couple of Libraries that i still need to complete and test (HTTP Client & XML Parser).

Isolation, has come a very long way, in a very short time, i started it last week, it's got a gui and a working server, and client.

Syndication, i "invented", and started in the last 3 hours.

But the real story here, is My Blackbook it's amazing. Incase you didn't know it apparently has auto sensing Ethernet ports, so need for patch cables here! Not that the last fact is important, just very cool. But seriously Xcode, best programming IDE i've used. I can see where Aptana gets some of it's zest from, heritage is quite clear in this case. The Battery life is pretty good, 5 hours with all the radios off. Speaking of radios, i'm starting to scare myself, i carry 6 radio transceivers on a regular basis! Two in each device 5 2.4 GHz(Wifi x2 Bluetooth x3) and 1 1.8/1.9 GHz(Cellular). I should really start wearing a tin foil hat.

Finally I'll be heading home to nice old Hemel on sunday, I'll be very busy over Christmas, mainly because i got to try and ship product. Companies with vapourware don't do very well in this modern economy. Plus if anyone remembers all those random people women i often blog about, scrap them i've replaced them all with a single person hot young lady, No hints She's all over flickr!. 2007 should be a good year, professionally and personally. Oh and before i forget, i've lost the password and login to my flickr account, so no new pictures for a while At least till i recover my windows partition ^_^.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year - Jonathan

Mr. Moon

Merry Christmas, nothing heavy this morning. Just to put this in context, it's 20 to 6 in the morning, I've been out at Diva, since 10-ish. Yesterday was my staff Christmas party, from which i dont actually remember some bits. Currently i'm in my bed listening to Jamiroquai.

What is this post all about? Nothing i guess it just one of the random things to do. That and think about pretty girls who aren't here, apart from that nothing else.

Plus Black Macbooks although infinitely cool, suck when it comes to finger prints, this thing looks like it's owned by someone who exclusively eats crisps!

Quote of the Day

Luke "My dad knows this guy who helps him get his money back when people don't want to pay up"
Tunde "Yeah, thats called a heavy"
Me "And that thing where he goes to ask for the money is called a shakedown"

Luke doesn't want to admit it, but we believe his family to be part of Bournemouth's organized crime circuit

New Project: offline proxy

So my new Macbook is the best thing ever created. However it lacks something, offline web browsing. Now before you go off on one, i'm not going crazy. With the benefit of highspeed internet connections + larger hard drives, what is there to say that we couldn't have a system that stores several hundred pages of the web, for you to explore at a latter date. Plus it also has the benefit of possibly increasing your download speeds on (non-binary data at least).

So far in my head here is the plan.

a proxy server written in java. your os would point to the server, the server would get the requested data, keep a copy for itself, and return a copy to the requesting service/application.

So far that is very similar to current web browser caches, where it differs a little, is in the use of pre-fetching, lets call it dynamic pre-fetching. The server, downloads additional pages which it thinks might be used by the user, taking a maximium number of additional downloads into account to insure that it isn't killing the poor remote servers bandwidth for no real reason.

Now, on top the above, we use scheduled content refreshing, so every hour or so, we do a checksum on the remote, and local files to ensure that we have the most upto date files in our local repository. Plus have gui where the user can specify that they wish to update the content.

Now in what is a departure for me, this isn't a palm os application. But rather a platform independent java app, with next to no, gui component. I want it mainly to run on my mac BlackBook. But it has other uses, like when the nice old fog in southampton screws with my laser based broadband!

The only thing left is a name for this pretty little thing...

"disconnected", perhaps or "isolate", the later sounds like a good name. Anyways thanks to my wealth of experience with the http protocal, most of the research for this project, is already done.

The language of choice is java in this case, for a couple of reasons.
a} memory leaks would be a constant problem in application like this where i'm dealing with large amounts of data in the background, using managed code instead of a standalone deal like, C++ makes debuging a little less painful.
b) java is the courses language of choice, plus this is basically disertation material, which is always good.
c) I can run it on my nix box, and on my osx sexy book, i mean mac, plus all you windows people can enjoy it too.

Lastly, this one isn't going opensource, at least not the whole thing. I'm looking at going commercial here i need to earn back my £860 for this sexy black thing sitting next to me. So hopefully this should be a launch product for the firm, when it starts.

Anyways that was a long enough peice, time to do some ground research for this thing, catch ya later.

Quote of the Day

"Where Mrs. Lawman"

You ever get the feeling that your mates enjoy taking the piss?

Blackbook software list

I complete list of mac software thanks to "ls", bare in mind that some apps, like rapidweaver, i'm just trying.
--------------------------------------------------

7zX.app
AMSVisualizer.app
ASCII Viewer.app
Address Book.app
Adium.app
Alarm Clock.app
AppleScript
Aptana
Aquamacs Emacs.app
Audacity.app
Audio Hijack Pro.app
Aurora.app
Automator.app
Azureus.app
BSNES.app
Big Bang Board Games
BonEcho.app
Boycott Advance.app
CSSEdit.app
Calculator.app
Camino.app
Chess.app
Chicken of the VNC.app
Comic Life.app
CoreDuoTemp.app
CrossOver.app
DVD Player.app
Dashboard.app
Democracy.app
Dictionary.app
DiggUpdate.app
FinkCommander.app
Firefox.app
FlightGear.app
Flip4Mac
Flock.app
Font Book.app
GarageBand.app
Generator.app
Genesis Plus.app
Gimpshop.app
Google Earth.app
Google Notifier.app
HTTPScoop.app
HamachiX.app
HexEdit Fat
HexEdit.app
ID3 Editor.app
Image Capture.app
ImageWell.app
Inkscape.app
Internet Connect.app
Locomotive2
MAMP
MD5.app
Mac Pilot.app
MacLibre.app
Mail.app
Microsoft Messenger.app
NeoOffice.app
Net Monitor.app
Netfixer.app
OmniOutliner.app
OnyX.app
OpenBase
OpenOffice.org 2.0.app
Opera.app
Pacifist
Parallels
PhoneAgent 1.3.1
Photo Booth.app
Ping.app
Pixen.app
Plucker.app
Preview.app
QuickTime Player.app
RSSOwl.app
RapidWeaver.app
SMSRotateD.app
SQLEditor.app
Safari.app
Seashore.app
ShakesPeer.app
Sherlock.app
Shiira.app
Skype.app
Smultron.app
Songbird.app
StableWindow.app
Stellarium.app
Stickies.app
StuffIt 11
Switch.app
System Preferences.app
Taco HTML Edit.app
TextEdit.app
TextMate.app
Themes Creator.app
Thunderbird.app
Tomato Torrent.app
Translation Service.app
Transmission.app
UnRarX.app
Utilities
VLC.app
VM2Go.app
Vine Server.app
VirtueDesktops.app
WMV Player.app
Wcode.app
WhatSize.app
You Control Tunes.app
aMSN.app
eclipse
ecto.app
gDisk.app
iAlertU.app
iCal.app
iChat.app
iCyclone.app
iDVD.app
iMovie HD.app
iPhoto.app
iRooster.app
iStat.app
iStumbler.app
iSync.app
iTheater
iTunes.app
iWeb.app
iWork '06
img2icns.app
jEdit 4.2
sixtyforce.app
smcFanControl.app
synergy-1.3.1

-----------------------------------------------------

Also note, that i've tried really hard to stay away from power pc apps, and i use mostly open source stuff, actually this is my Dock

Damn this thing is sweet

When the core 2 duo Macbooks first hit the scene, never did i think that it would be as sweet as this.

This thing(i'm using it now) is so amazing, that i've fallen in love with it. Plus you know how all those people rave about mac OSX, and apple products in general. Well they have good reason too. This stuff is the very height of modern computing. Anyone who thought about buying a mac, don't wait, just buy the damn thing. But what ever you gotta do, don't get a black one, those are for me only.

Anyways, thanks to a "bit" hardcore configuration think days, i finally got mine to a state, where i'm proud to call it mine.

It's completely loaded with open source software and freeware. The only commerical program on here is parallels, with enables me to run windows xp in a window.

I use synergy to enable to use my main keyboard and mouse, with it.

Heres the convoluted setup.



Well until another day or time when i feel like being a loser by writing a blog that no one reads ^_^ , Blackbook, i mean jonathan signing off.

.
Quote of the Day

Random Guy "Can you get me MS office 2003?"
Me "What makes you think i can get that?"
Random Guy "You just look like the kinda of guy that does that kinda thing."

Now bear in mind that we are in the same class (internet Computing), and i was working on my Blackbook at the time, still interesting that i look like the kinda guy to get pirate software from, didn't he ever hear of Open Office, or better yet Neo Office!