Archive for April, 2009
Week seven review
Apr 25th
A pretty good week productivity wise. I have gotten a lot of work done on this new application in fact am slightly ahead of schedule. I have also been doing some planning for another application I am working on in partnership with a friend. Details will come on these soon.
Due to my change of financial position I have had a bit of a rethink about the most effective way to get started. I am quite happy with the approach I have come up. It is low cost and very focused on investing in only a few individuals.
Two main issues are left to sort out before I can start. I need to approach some of the organisations I have been talking to to ask for some referrals. And I need to find a building where we can work from.
I may – in fact I hope to end up working out of our church building but that has not yet been aquired and may be June before it is. In the meantime I am not 100% sure what I am going to do. Looking likely right now is that I keep working on my projects and try to build a revenue stream and also do a little youth work during this time.
Developing for the cloud
Apr 22nd
The project I have been working on will be living in the so called cloud. Eventually it will be hosted within Amazon EC2 but I am not quite at that point yet.
I have been using Amazon S3 and SQS however. I am developing in c# so went looking for some libraries that would make things easier. I am not so keen on working with SOAP or dealing with http calls, especially if someone else has already done the heavy lifting!
For S3 there is ThreeSharp it has a very nice API and thankfully uses an interface that can be mocked. One of the nice things about it is that you don’t have to provide an actual file to upload to S3, you can just provide data that can be loaded into the stream. This makes it really easy in tests to load it up your bucket with data. I now have a nice suite of end to end tests that work directly with S3.
The next library I found was Amazon.SQS as with ThreeSharp it has an interface that can be mocked. The API is fairly straightforward, the only thing I had trouble with was figuring out how the Queue Url worked. When you create the queue the url is returned in the response object and from then on you need to pass that url around when you make requests.
I was expecting it to be easy to work with these services and so far I have not been disapointed.
Week six review
Apr 18th
Most of this week has been spent working on my secret new application. It is coming along well and I think I have a realistic timeline in place. I have started using Redmine for managing features and timelines. It is very cool, much better than trac. I haven’t managed to get SVN intergration working yet though.
I also spent a day playing with Alice. I was using it on Ubuntu and could get everything set-up but I couldn’t get playback to work. So I ended up using it in a windows vm which worked ok. I am not sure if it is the best introduction to programming though, it is kinda cool to see objects move around the screen and to change camera angles but it is quite a bit of work to get that going and I am not sure if that is suitable as an intro. I have come across another game building app called Game Maker so am going to give that a go. Also I think Alice might be a bit abstract. There doesn’t seem any real purpose for it, whereas with Game Maker it seems pretty clear that you are going to build a game. I think purpose is important here and I am sure building games will appeal to teenagers!
Other news is that I found out my tax bill is going to be a LOT less than I initially thought. This is going to give me a lot more freedom and I am going to have to have a rethink about how I approach the next few months.
Switching development to mono
Apr 17th
Last week I started writing a new application using FluentNHibernate and ASP.NET MVC. Initially I was working on it in my windows vm as I was having trouble getting the latest version of MonoDevelop to work. That is all fixed now so I decided it was time to checkout the code and see if it worked.
So first thing does it compile. Yes!
Next I tried to run my tests. Nup didn’t work. I get the following exception “System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for NHibernate.Cfg.Environment”.
I spent forever digging around to find out why. Another lib I am using is MvcContrib and I am using the TestControllerBuilder class. It turns out that if you create an instance of this class BEFORE configuring NHibernate then you get the exception, create it afterwards and it works fine. Argghh. Frustrating. I took a look at the TestControllerBuilder class and I can’t see what it is doing to cause that.
The next problem was that SQLite doesn’t work so well on Mono and you need to use Mono.Data.SQLite instead. This required writing a custom Driver for NHibernate which is no big deal – but another step nonetheless. I have submitted a patch to the NHibernate team here and the FluentNHibernate team here
Ok so run the tests again and everything is working now.
Yay, it is kind of exciting to get this working. I am going to try and do all my development on linux now.. MonoDevelop is not as nice as VisualStudio + ReSharper though so I am not sure if this will last!
Week five review
Apr 11th
Well a short week this time and not so much to update with, The most major news was that the application to Learning Launchpad was not successful. Not a problem though there are plenty of other grants to apply for like this one which is all about inspiring young people, sounds like a perfect fit to me.
Other than that I have been working on an application I am going to sell online. It is going pretty well so far and at least it now seems much more feasible. I am hoping to have a version ready for private testing by the end of April.
I haven’t done any billable work this week which is a shame but I have been fielding a lot of calls from agents, so I might pick up a contract for a while. That will relieve some financial pressure and make things a little easier while waiting to see what happens with funding.
Week four review
Apr 4th
Another fairly good week, didn’t do as much as I would like but it has been pretty good nevertheless.
After a marathon two day editing session and with a lot of help from my friend Sara, I finished writing and submitted my first funding proposal to the Learning Launchpad. I will find out in a couple of weeks whether or not I get through the first stage of screening, if so then it is off to interviews which will be fun! I normally like interviews but that is usually job interviews. We will see how this goes!
I also got a big chunk of work finished for Simon. More excitingly though I have been working on some ideas for products to launch. One idea is pretty much complete and am going to start work on it this week, the other I am still talking with a friend about but could be quite an interesting!
