Saturday, August 10, 2013
Open Source and .NET Development.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Cell Phones are the personal computers of the future
Friday, July 17, 2009
Learning GTK+ with C++
Living with the iliad
Thursday, May 14, 2009
My First Week with the Iliad
I've been meening to update this blog for some time.
My first week with my iLiad was eventful. I learned how to reflash it the hard way and I started using the community OS on the device.
I've been reading about the iLiad OS project on MobileRead Forums for some time now. this was one of the things that made the purchase of the iLiad a win. I like the fact that it's based on Linux and the commuity was taking on the coding for iRex.
I decided one fine day to start the move to the iLiad OS. I started the flash by backing up. This took forever. I want to stop now and say this is a warning sign but I didn't know it. I came home from work and said hell the backing up should be done by now must be an error in the script. I'll check it out later and keep moving to the reflash of the current OS and then it'll be ok and hell I'd love a new keyboard. A day later I attempted to boot my machine and A day after that I was reflashing back to the standard OS. Yea it took that long because I was stupid and detemained.
I wrote the forums a couple of time and what I found was I had 2 gig's of the same files over and over. I removed my MMC card with my programs on it. OOps. Reflash to the iLiad OS took minutes. I loved it.
I plaied with all the toys and new stuff. I can open CHM files. and cbr files. I have a full screen Ipdf. Really cool.
Good stuff here.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The Iliad is Soooo Coool
This is a review of my first few days with my iLiad by Irex. I opened the device and just knew it was cool. I just seemed to work right out of the box. I felt the same sense of inspiration that got me to buy the device.
I found it contained all the original equipment that's in a iLiad V1 box minus the shoulder bag. It had the single stylus,the old travel hub and the universal ac plug with it's parts. I also found the leather Irex book cover. The screen had some artifacts from it's long period of non-use.
I plugged it in to get some power on it. I wanted to see how eInk looked and play with the electronic paper. Just as I read the books left by the previous owner I noticed the ghost images disappeared and it was just like paper.
I played with the controls and attempted to add books and my own content. I ran in to some none documented issues. I came up with a work around and my books where on the machine in no time. I was how ever creating my own Manafest.xml files. I did some light research on the issue day 2 and I learned how to create my iLiad content.
I downloaded and installed the SDK. This allow me to create my own programs and installed 3rd party applications. I'm yet to install 3rd party applications or start coding projects.
I'm happy with this cool new device
Friday, April 17, 2009
Agile Development and .NET
The first thing I like about agile development is the self documenting code. This is accomplished by use of discriptive function and veriable names. Good comments that are not misleading. Short functions and methods.
All that sounds like a tall measure but it's really not that big. Just consider how easy it is to refactor. I like to refactor as I use some source control system to make my small and well named classes. I also add comments at the end of the code. I use long names for my fuctions.
I wrote a function and I named it PopulateShippingInfomationFields(). This was done after I used the refactor function to remove the code to a function. I also removed the parameter that was passed to it and placed it in the method. So the addition of time to the project was about 5 minutes.
Ok so I created this function and took 5 minutes. The 5 minute part is pushing it. I admired it for a time , I took a swig of Coke and thought about the correct name. This 5 minutes bought me hours later. All the code that I wrote gets redone and changed at some point and later I feel I may need to look for this function and I can find it and it does only one thing. It was also made easy with Visual Studio.
Test Driven Development is also something made easy with Visual studio and a little plug in called. TestDriven.NET is my plug in of choice and my nUnit just fires up in my Visual Studio. I like this I don't have to stop coding to test.
I can make a test project in the same project like eCommerceWebSiteUnitTests. This will get checked into my source control with my main project. I again have a name for this project so I know what it is. It can reference the pieces I need and I can refer back to it months later and make my changes in my code. Test Driven Development is easier with smaller chunks of code. Does this code spit out the bits and pieces I need to fill the shipping information on this page? does this return a valid name. Good stuff there.
I think Agile came from the java world were the tools aren't nice enough so you can be lazy and not factor. Our tools are nice and our GUI is good and we can simply refactor and do something wonderful.