Mike Roberts: transMorphic - tech

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:50:43 GMT

CruiseControl .NET source on SourceForge

We moved the CruiseControl .NET source tree to the CCNet SourceForge project. We have a few little niggles to sort out, and another stab at some documentation to do, but then there should be a 1.0 release published.

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:14:55 GMT

Calendars

I've been thinking about calendars recently, specifically of the PIM kind. Mozilla now implements the 'ical' open standard, as does Apple's (rather annoying named, IMO) iCal. I don't have a Mac, but I can drag Moz's ical file onto the correct folder of my iPod and sure enough the calendar appears on my mp3 player (!)

This is all very nice, but since we are looking at a 'lifestyle app' and my lifestyle is a particularly lazy one, I have some rather more demanding requirements. Here are some 'stories':

I would like to be able to add, edit and view my calendar entries wherever I am. So this means probably on my mobile phone when I'm out and about (including when I don't have any signal coverage), on any one of my computers when I'm at home, on a laptop (probably disconencted from the internet) when I'm travelling, or via a (secure) website when I'm at a client office.
I would like any of these devices to be in 'sync' with the actual state of my calendar if possible when I use them, and the amount of effort I need to keep devices in sync should be trivial.
I would like typical Calendar view / manipulation behaviour on each device, e.g. filtering by cetegory; viewing by month, week, etc (and all entries, linearly); alerts.

Here are some 'nice to haves' :

I would like to be able to have some of my calendar entries to be viewable publically on a website. I would like to be able to specify which entries these are from any of the devices above
I would like to be able to load external calendar entries from other sources into my calendar (e.g. with ical you can import a file for all your public holidays, see http://www.apple.com/ical/library/)
I would like to be able to sync with existing systems, e.g. Outlook / Exchange.

OK, so now some implementation ideas for these. Backing all of this needs to be some calendar domain model. Ical may be sufficient, but I don't know enough about it. Someone told me it didn't have a 'location' field and if that's the case that sounds a bit of an oversight.

The whole 'syncing' thing would work really nicely for a mobile phone using one of:

Syncing over internet (exactly how would be dependent on the phone client software, but say we were to use a SonyEricsson P800 we could write our own Symbian app that synced over http, using GPRS underneath that)
Syncing over bluetooth whenever I walk into my flat.

Its fairly obvious that we need a publically accessable server somewhere to store the state of my calendar. Keeping it simple, I don't see why this isn't just a plain web server. It will probably need funky dynamic behaviour for viewing, but as a start for syncing purposes it could just be a static web server with some (probably XML) content on it. The client app could then use http to request content and FTP or SCP to upload changes. This isn't a scalable solution, but I have introduced a story for that yet. :)

These ideas also extend to other PIM activities like address books and task lists, and there's probably scope for integration with email too.

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 00:06:54 GMT

Shuttle Spacewalker, Windows XP and putting the PC in the lounge

I've had a bit of a spending spree and bought myself a new PC - a Shuttle SN41G2. Shuttle make brilliant, tiny barebones PCs (case + motherboard) and this one, their latest AMD offering packs a punch too with on board Geforce 4, LAN, 5.1 sound, plus there's 3 firewire ports (useful for my iPod)

I've also upgraded to Windows XP with this new machine. I'm doing a lot of .Net work now so its worth spending time on Windows rather than Linux (I'm sure the cheque for my soul is in the post ;) )

So far, I'm pretty impressed with Windows XP. Boot-up time is very impressive, and there's a few small things I like, such as the ability to effectively have multiple people logged on at the same time.

I also bought a cordless optical mouse and keyboard. I have the shuttle sitting next to my TV and am using the S-Video TV out to allow me to use my machine from my sofa. The resolution on the TV-out isn't brilliant (I'm using 800x600), but for basic things it works fine.

The PC effectively becomes as much as part of the lounge now as the HiFi or the PS2. I got this idea from a mate who has done exactly the same thing (albeit with a nice projector rather than a 32" TV.) The XP shared logon feature is good since my flatmate and I can have our own users on the machine and not worry about killing the other's applications.

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 12:59:58 GMT

Little web app tip

When to use 'get' and when to use 'post' in web pages? As a rule of thumb:

If the request will cause a change of state on the web server, use 'post' (its safer as it avoids replay conditions caused by bookmarking or web-spiders)
Otherwise use 'get'

But why use 'get' at all? Because if you have a lot of links on a page that are not dependent on form fields, it saves overhead on using form code (You can just put full parameterised links in the href's instead). Also, it means users can bookmark (e.g. useful for searches)

The wonders of pairing with Joe :)

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 20:27:12 GMT

iPod Heaven

I bought an iPod last week (I don't have an Apple Mac, but there's a 'PC Version' now). It's brilliant. I can put all my CD's on it and carry it around anywhere in my back pocket. Definitely recommended.

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:42:21 GMT

'Treesize' - Free windows tool for directory sizing

http://www.jam-software.com/software.shtml

I first came across this tool years ago when I wanted to find out how much space I was 'wasting' with the old FAT16 cluster size problems on Windows pre NTFS and FAT32. Its still a useful tool today.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:47:29 GMT

Tech considered categorised

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