4th February 2010
Nearly a month
Hello loyal follower(s)! And welcome to my latest update. To be honest I don't really have a lot to say here. So... I suppose I'll start with an apology.
Sorry for not having my comments box up yet! My website back-end is going to be a part of one of my major projects (See 18th Jan post for details) and I really haven't had a lot of time to work on it recently. Also, sorry for not having a better layout yet, but as I said: it's all down to time.
Now.. on to the little bit of news that I do have. I have bought my guitar. It's a Fender Squier Stratocaster in Natural Wood. If you're on facebook there's a pic of it in my gallery. It cost £210, including Amplifier, picks, strap, leads and a case. Which wasn't a bad deal.
As you have probably (not) noticed, Apidya.Net / BinoXBlog.com has been back for nearly a month now and so far I've been keeping up with the blogging. So far so good!
Well, really out of things to say now. So I'll shut up for another week.
BinoX
Work, work, work
26th January 2010
Hey everyone! I'm a little late with posting, so I think I'll change my posting "schedule" a bit. I'll now be posting once in each week. That means there may be up to 13 days between posts, but it should usually be around every 7. (i.e. one week I could post on Monday and then the next week I may not post until the Sunday) Hopefully that example makes sense, because I can't think of a better way to explain it.
Anyway... On to the main blog post... And this week it's a proper "blog" not just an update on what I'm doing.
Work sucks! It's as simple as that. I spent most of the afternoon drilling holes and running cables ready for someones new office. ` When I'm 1 hole away from finishing I get a phone call from Frank (Assistant Network Manager / Work Buddy / Friend). He phoned to tell me to stop, because the head of the school has decided that it's not going to be done now. (I work at a school for those people that have forgotten) I mean... damn it! As much as I actually enjoy running cables (I really do!), I really can't stand doing a lot of work for no reason at all! I really need to get a new job. Where I am now I feel under appreciated and I KNOW that my skills are being under-used. My main responsibility these days seems to be uploading files to a website and putting a link in. COME ON! Give me something a little bit challenging to do! I seem to go through every day doing really mundane and boring tasks. The other thing that annoys me is the total technological ignorance of the staff at the school and how much they exaggerate timeframes! Today is another good example of this! Last thing yesterday we had a phonecall saying that a teacher's computer hadn't been working for "weeks". Upon checking the logs we could tell that she had logged on to it on Thursday. So "weeks" turns out to be Friday and Monday. So I went down there first thing this morning to fix it. Can you guess what I had to do to fix it? no? I had to PLUG IT IN. Someone (probably her) had unplugged it from the power socket. You would think that someone left in charge of 32 children at a time and is trusted to educate them would be able to plug something in.
OK.. That was a bigger rant than I had originally intended so I'll stop here (although I could easily continue).
In other news... I have started to learn to play the guitar. I doubt I'll ever be very good at it, but for some reason I thought it was a good idea. If I can ever play anything on it I'll let you all know.
Time for me to head off now, I've probably bored you all enough with rantings for now.
BinoX
Projects Going Well
18th January 2010
It's another update, and it's been less than a week, only just, but I am trying to keep the update momentum going. I've been busy working on my many projects and still haven't done anything at all to the website backend. I promise that I will have something done properly before the end of February though!
Now for project details... The first project I am working on is an application that sends text (SMS) messages from a cellphone (or GSM Modem) connected to the machine to another cellphone. The front end for this program will make it easy to send mass text messages whenever you need to. There is a built in address book and I will add support for external address books as I go. Other features of the software include setting up text groups so that you can send a text to an entire group with the click of a button! I won't go into much more detail with that one because it's a relitively simple program to the user, but it's a good exercise in modem control. This program should be available on Windows, Linux, MacOSX, AmigaOS4 and MorphOS. AmigaOS3.1 may be done depending on the AmigaOS4 version popularity.
The other project I am working on I am going to call a "Workflow Manager", because that's what it's for really. In more complicated terms, it's a mix between a website content management system, data organiser, calendar and task preparer. The website bit is self explanatory and will be used for the backend to this site once it's done. The data organiser is a little special though.... With this organiser you can upload one file and place it in multiple folders without duplication. Every file has a unique ID that is reference from a folder index. This can be useful to allow people to have permissions to certain folders only but still have access to a file that would normally need to be stored in a more secure area. It should also stop file duplication which will enable better use of storage space and prevent data inconsistencies. You can also do the same thing with data as well as files, allowing for web links and free-text to be entered instead of a file. The calendar is just that, a calendar. Although it will be a bit more complex than just that. There will be a global calendar for all public dates and personal calendars which you can have your own deadlines etc in. The personal calendars can also be viewer/edited by any other user that you give permission to view or edit. I am hoping to do exchange syncronisation with that too, but that will come after v1.00 is completed. The task preparer allows you to take any of the information from any section of the application and allocate it to a set "task". For example: If you were going to make a task for building a car engine, you would make a task called "Build Engine" and in it you would allocate out any relevant resources for it. You could allocate a set of calendar dates to it for when you expect to start and finish or when you expect parts to arrive. Files and weblinks of technical manuals could be linked in to it. And you could link it in with a few pages in the CMS to update people with your progress as you are going. This project will be written in perl.
I've bored you enough with projects for this week. I doubt any of you would have read down this far! Do let me know if you have read it all. :) ` I may have some more "blog-like" entries next time, detailing things that I am actually doing for fun, rather than just listing off basic specs of projects that I am working on. I'll try and implement some kind of comment system soon though so if there's any comments or suggestions that anyone wants to leave then they can.
--BinoX
My First Update
12th January 2010
Hello again everyone. It's been less than a week and already there's an update. See, I told you all that I'd keep it up to date.
And now it's good news/bad news time.
First the good news... I've got quite a few small projects on at the moment. Each one will be put on here as they begin or end. They're all software projects, but anyone who reads this will probably not bother to use them or even want to. (Unless my boss happens to check this page)
Now for the bad news... I haven't had time (because of all these projects) to make a database backend for this site, which means updates still won't be as frequent as I would like. But I will attempt to update once a week.
Take Care,
BinoX
Welcome To The New Website
6th January 2010
The new Apidya.Net / BinoXBlog.com website is now open! I apologise for the layout not being great, but it's more of a technical exercise for me than anything else. You may notice that the site has a fairly clean layout, which is a new one for me. If you look a little deeper, you may notice that I haven't used any images in this layout at all. I thought I'd have some fun and put a drop shadow in as well, still no images mind.
On another note, I won't be updating very much for the next couple of weeks, because the site isn't finished. I just have here the front page, tiny bit of php going on at the top to check which site you are visiting, but that's about it. There's no fancy database backend or any other pages, just this page and the css file. There is nothing else on this server. I hope you've enjoed my little introduction. I'll be blogging properly soon :)
If there's any sections you would like me to add on the left, please drop me a message on facebook, using email or via instant messenger. If I can't think of anything to put on here then I may remove the "Projects" section and put each project there as seperate links. If you don't like the grey, I don't care :p It's a little boring I know, but it's easiest to work with when you're not using images.
BinoX