Sunday, May 6th, 2007
Well, it’s been a while since my last post, previously explained in a previous entry. I’ve managed to fix things and found out a thing or two as to why wireless support broke in feisty fawn, while still working properly in Edgy Eft.
It drove me “up the wall” (as we’d say here in colloquial Australia), but I was determined to get my system working and so I did.
Check out these posts for more information - I’ve broken it up so that you aren’t flooded with a big essay on completely different, but somewhat related subject matter:
- Linux RT818X driver crashes 2.6.20.x kernel
- How I got my Belkin f5d6001 wireless card running on Feisty Fawn
Thursday, April 26th, 2007
I’ve missed the routine weekly post as I have been trying to “unf**k” my ubuntu installations (home and work) as I colourfully put it to Neil one of my co-workers and resident IT guys. I guess this is more an apology than anything but here’s a brief rundown of what the current status is.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn is released!
As most (K)Ubuntu fans may know, on April 19, Feisty Fawn was released and after reading many peoples reviews, I thought “awesome! I’m so there downloading the upgrade”. It was easy to upgrade from “Dapper Drake” to “Edgy eft”, then over to “kubuntu”, I thought it would be just as easy to upgrade to “Feisty Fawn”. WRONG!
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Sunday, March 18th, 2007
Well I must say that the past half a year has been a big change for me. after managing and completing my contribution to a large project - TechJobs (Click here to check it out). I’ve moved on to “other things”.
As much as I’d like to jump for joy when completing a project, I’m trying to keep a business as usual attitude just so that my drive stays consistent and I don’t ‘lax out. Keep “rollin’” with it, so to speak. Deep inside however, I’m elated and proud of what my development team has come up with.
The TechJobs project gave birth to the Cubix I our in-house RAD Framework and gave us LOTS of practice since this was the first web project my team and I had attempted to develop together. With many distractions including the departure of Ben Rowe, the arrival and departure of an out of control marketing strategist, we managed to pull things off suffering a small, but considerable delay.
The “other” things I mentioned ranges from refactoring Cubix I, to launching yet another website. The website being Oz Hardware (Click here to check it out).
Also, some restructuring has been done in the way of teams. Soon, I’ll be moving over to the DevProducts department. A most welcome move as the newly assembled team is keen to get things up and running.
Already we’ve got a few projects lined up and with me I bring Cubix II, a framework which is almost “excalibur-like” :) for lack of a better term. Tried and tested through the TechJobs project, I’ve put the framework on a diet and eliminated bloat. I refactored the Cubix framework into a leaner and meaner RAD.
I feel inspired, and excited about the progression of the development team. I’m looking forward to the rest of the year.
“A rolling developer gathers no moss”
:)
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
Surfing through sitepoint, I came across this post by one of the new comers.
“Hi guys, just wanted to ask a question, how should we rate ourselves as php developers?”
I thought it was a rather valid and interesting question. It got me thinking about my very own rating process. Personally, I rate myself on level of code quality, work rate compared to research rate and elegance of the source code I produced to provide solutions.
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Monday, December 11th, 2006
“Quality Cheap Hosting” is slowly becoming one of those marketing buzzwords that no one will eventually believe. Last night was an extremely frustrating, “kill an innocent looking animal” moment for me. I had time to do some things on my Web Site, did some changes messed around with copy and when the time came to view it live, guess what? My site was down. I thought well this is probably the .01% of the time when it’s down. I decided to leave it for a few hours. Tried again, it was still down.
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Saturday, December 9th, 2006
Legacy Code. That which holds auto didactic developers and programmers in it’s paranoid grip (well those that care anyway). The fact that someone will look at your code and see all your failed experiments, spaghetti, odd, and non-standards compliant code is enough to make any of us blush and bury our heads into our nests as a threatened ostrich would.
I went to a small social convention with my former workmates and one of them specifically was left with dealing with the legacy code I left behind. It wasn’t broke at he time I left, but I guess the time came for some changes to be made to a specific application. I found out that I am no different to anyone else who has started their web development sojourn on their own.
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Friday, November 24th, 2006
Perhaps it was just my mood this week, but I am close to dropping another client. In the past year, I’ve developed an online resource management and monitoring system for this company. For a mission critical online app, this has got to be one of the cheapest I’ve charged out.
Anyway, my old contact must have been removed. It had been months since I’ve heard anything from them and well, I was too busy to do the old marketing call and there were very rarely calls for technical support on the app - such is the benefit of creating unit tested applications that do as they should.
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Thursday, May 4th, 2006
Having learnt how to program in a couple of server side languages (ASP1 and PHP) on my own, I must say it had been a very bumpy ride. Lots of mistakes, lots of spaghetti code, lots of questions which the “experts” answered “RTFM” to and lectured you about googling first then asking later instead of “wasting their time” (do I sound bitter? Well I kind of am) .
One small but important lesson that I’ve picked up from my sojourn toward “Professional Web Developerdom” is that it’s not really a matter of intellect in this age of Information Technology, but more a test of patience and attention to detail.
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