alflatters.co.uk

Re-factoring unsuccessfully

Sleepy — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:06:10 +0000

PHP IDE done right!

On doing some PHP work for a calendar sync system with a mySql database the code was getting rather messy and not very well laid out what so ever but to able to fully make this reusable I did some re-factoring with lots of testing of code to make sure it still gave the same results (which it wasn’t doing till approximately 30 seconds ago after working on it for 2 hours) but finally got it working and all because of a simple ‘$’ before a variable name… that’s what I get for trying to remember too many languages at once! But good practice for my up coming attempt on the coursework which still not sure weather to do ASP (totally new to me so good practice) or to do PHP (which I know and love but find quite simple when I’m not making stupid mistakes.

Which language would you go for a challenge or to try get a very high grade with little learning?

Fantastic start to Easter holidays

Sleepy — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:53:04 +0000

With winding down after a very busy semester two in second year tonight with emily’s birthday today, we are having a night of party and relaxation with kinect games and guitar hero as whole band set. With plenty of beverages off to spiders soon to complete the night but been one fantastic but hard work semester this time around! Plan: do all remaining Acw after recovered from tonight!!

Hope everyone else is having a good end to this semester and fantastic holidays planned as down time before exams!

Kinect SDK

Sleepy — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:35:20 +0000

With going to see Rob Miles today about my final year project I got playing with the SDK for Kinect tonight.

With playing around with the games (Shape Game) which was rather amusing for a while I got playing with the speech recognition which works very well on recognizing long sentences with light variations but seemed to struggle if there was a word required within a sentence for example if you don’t know what commands you can say you could say anything with “news” to able to bring news onto the screen would be good. But at the moment still don’t know how to do this.

While dealing with the Kinect it seemed to only works with WPF and Windows Forms which is unusual since with it coming from the Xbox I thought that XNA would be default but can’t seem to find a tutorial on able to do this. But hey good practicing if I get that project from Rob but still looking into other projects and keeping a open mind at the moment.

Rackmount cases

Sleepy — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:58:31 +0000

So on Friday we took it upon ourselves with permission obviously to rackmount one of the new virtual machines base computer into a rackmountable case. As currently they are normal desktops from the lab rooms which are across the desks which doesn’t look very professional also kinda bad if they get unplugged and vms go down! The case we got for this job was the departments old game server, this had packed up with one core not working and since was xeons we couldn’t afford to replace this so upgrading a server case from a full size server motherboard with old harddrive connections with only molex power to a new quad core AMD machine with sata was a challenge. Getting it out was the first challenge with no decent screwdriver (till we aquired one from Adam (thanks)). There was so many screws holding the thing down but we striped it right back to bare metal eventually allowing the motherboard mounts to move to more suited locations. With no back plate for the harddrives we had to wire them in manually in the hot swap bays as a new back plate would cost about £60 which we couldn’t justify with still wanting a 24 port gigabyte switch (managed if possible) anyone got one send it my way! But anyhow most things went without a hitch still got more fans to wire since out of the 7 case fans only one works from lack of fan ports on the motherboard but hopefully a molex adapter will sort this as we had to do with the sata power also. We had some rewiring to do also as the old board was 2 physical cpus so had a 8 pin power to the CPU so we hacked one off another CPU and joined a nice 4 pin onto it, rather a good job but Ash said he will solider it just to make sure on Monday. So that’s another server nearly done. Now just need another 3/4 cases to do the rest!

Guitar tuning

Sleepy — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:18:27 +0000

With Emily winning a guitar at spiders night club a few weeks ago I thought I would have a look at it and see if I have any musical talent left after my many years music practice. Working out quickly that it was massively out of tune I decided to download a Android app to help me do this but as constant volume and pitch wasn’t my best thing since never played guitar this was interesting taking about 2 hours till I was happy! But it is a beautiful guitar just no amp but good enough to play around with and who can complain for £1 of raffle tickets! Not me!

Pancake day

Sleepy — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:51:52 +0000

So today was pancake day me and emzi have eaten sooooo many today but was gorgeous!

Pair programming

Sleepy — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:29:19 +0000

Working on the Raywell website we was designing the code behind the booking checker system which turned out to be rather simplistic code but unfortunately not so efficient in due course from the standards where using doesn’t allow masses of manipulation before we download it onto the server to be processed.

If that’s all gobble-goop this post probably isn’t for you.

But as I said we were coding the system which we have chosen to get from Google calendar into MySQL for processing quickly on the server (once it’s there). Aftereq a few issues in permissions between calendars made on domains and normal @gmail.com accounts in linking a @gmail.com with full edit and management positions it allowed us a private feed go ical (which domain users don’t get for security reasons … seemly correct me if I’m wrong)

So the basic principle of our code was to take iCal format from Google calendar services for each building which is formatted like:

Variable:data

Just a new line for a end of lime character for them all. They also are split into sections but use the same implication as above.

So with all this we made it a array which then checked the database if it was deleted (not there anymore) updated (using timedate and new to insert so this synced MySQL with ical. This now means making the user interface for queries a doddle. Just need to clean up the code so a method can be made just to plonk a iCal feed for each building in an all! But progress is good for now!

Network

Sleepy — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:16:32 +0000

Network for anyone who doesn’t know is the oldest section in Scouts 18-25 year olds which is the section I’m presently part of technically. When at the merger meeting for the Hull districts we met up with the county commissioner who we first met at Raywell management, she then introduced me and Emily to the network who are trying to expand with the new district merger, at present I’ve still not attended a meeting as their meetings are on the first of the month but looking positive to able to meet them outside of another meeting!

Raywell Park

Sleepy — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:11:15 +0000

This year at university I made the decision that I wanted to get involved in scouting once again as I had a year off in effect of going to university. This took a bit of time to able to follow the trail around the districts since currently they are going though a merger between three districts (similar to us but we only had 2 of 3 merging). But my contact came from Raywell park which is Humersides county Campsite as getting involved by advertising myself to get involved with there website which after two months since our initial meet I’m getting to know rest of the team and getting really positive vibe of growth and going up in the world with Raywell. As like Blackhills it’s hitting a bit of a dead spot but with new organization and team work between work force and management this seems to be massively improving the site with big plans for the future also. (No pictures in this post as on mobile might add one later)

Slacking

Sleepy — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:02:58 +0000

Norway Troll Active

Ok so going on my own blog which haven’t done for a while got to be honest I was shocked I ain’t updated this since Norway, I had said I would do alot of blogs then never did since recently been hecktic. Think I’m going split these down into different posts to stop massive text wall on my homepage though, will try blog more as its a diary that never gets used at the moment but with people on the other end to leave feedback.