LWP Progress

Made a lot of progress with Local Web Path today.

Here's a screenshot of the document maintenance page:

Also, updated my Raspberry Pi to get around an overload issue when doing things which cause high levels of network traffic. Should solve the problem I saw the other day when the Pi kept freezing when I was using AirPlay.

My netbook has been upgraded to Windows 8 and is so far performing well with it. Going to have a play with it now and personalise it a bit.

That's all for now.

Geeky lifestyle

This sums up the geeky side of my life...



And this...



And this... Being able to not only accurately but completely knowing and predicting the results of this hand written SQL query:


And after that and a very stressful week, I've had a nice night of drinking whisky with good friend Alex W.

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Location:Home

Three kinds of Work and Fireworks

It's been busy lately...

Lots of nights out, Spanish lessons, a new Crew Calendar website design to get on with, Local Web Path and two huge clients to try to keep happy at work (along with the other clients who have had to take a back seat!).

Work
I've been working with Europe's favourite Orange airline lately on a huge project to help capture email content. From a technology standpoint, the project is now almost complete and it's looking good and performing well. I'm pleased. This week is deployment week and I'm feeling the pressure. I hope the users like it and don't find any major flaws. I think I'm going to need a lot of patience this week but hopefully on Friday the first campaign will go out and everyone will be happy!

Then I'll most likely get drunk...

Fireworks
I went to a Fireworks night last Monday and thoroughly enjoyed myself with "the gang" pictured below. As you can see, it was cold night!

Local Web Path
Local Web Path (localwebpath.com) has had to take a back seat over the past few weeks due to the amount of work I have on at "Actual Work". That has been eating into my evenings and, other than Spanish, has pretty much taken up any other time.

However, Alex and I were busy working on it today and you can see our temporary office (my dining room table) below:

Alex has done a great job of sorting out the online shop, taking payments and invoicing. We have our first invoice to go in the post tomorrow! Exciting.

I've been coding up a new module which will allow the sites to be able to store documents (e.g. website newsletters, brochures, information packs etc) and let people download them. The structure is in place, I just need to add the functionality to upload a document now!!

Crew Calendar

My good friend and excellent Creative Designer, Davey, has designed Crew Calendar's new site. It looks really good! I've just got to re-create every page and make the whole thing look consistent now.... ouch.

Bread

I also made some bread today... it looks good. I hope it tastes good too.

I'm definitely in love with the iPad mini. I hope I get one for Christmas......

Command Centre

Working away at LocalWebPath.com.

There are now three example websites:

• demo.localwebpath.com
• stpauls.localwebpath.com
• sensationails.org

Got quite a "Command Centre" as they call it in Die Hard 4.0 - an environment perfect for software development (and something that a few of my friends are jealous of)! 

LocalWebPath.com has gone live with two customers now. A great milestone to achieve. The customer Control Panel looks as follows...

To see more, become a customer!

Completed my tax form this weekend as well... officially the close of my business Big Shot Productions. End of an era in a way although the business closed a while ago, I just made it official today.

Crew Calendar and LocalWebPath.com, learning Spanish and not to mention my full time job keep me plenty busy though!

October already

Today is Sunday. Saturday was hectic: DIY, Hair cuts, food shopping and...

meeting some awesome friends, Charlie and Suz. Charlie wanted to educate me in Star Wars (as I'd never seen them before!) and Suz wanted to cook me her home made Fajitas.

So we did just that... with a scary looking Halloween Pepper:

Here's Suz Cooking:

The Degu's are doing well, as usual. Harry was taking it easy on Sunday morning:

This afternoon brings Alex to mine for our regular LocalWebPath.com meeting. Things are moving very quickly with us giving access to the system to two customers this week! Now time to get our marketing materials together such as the website, marketing brochures and business cards etc. Then the financial side becomes Alex's latest headache with things such as invoicing and billing top of the agenda.

What with all of the above and 50 hour weeks at work, I'm enjoying my sleep at the moment!

I'm currently trying to determine whether the Nexus 7 tablet is a big enough tablet for it to do everything my iPad does. My iPad is an iPad 1 and is fairly dated now. It's still very functional for things like browsing and music however is falling behind and can't do a lot of the things the iPad 2, 3 and Android tablets can do. iOS6 was the first iOS which doesn't support the iPad 1 as well... so it's now behind in terms of operating system. No rush though... we'll see what Windows do, what Apple do in terms of an iPad mini and see what happens around Christmas.

In November, I'll be looking at buying a Motorbike...... can't believe we're already at October!

Pi Pride

Minor Rant
Pride... firstly a small rant. I am proud to be British and I'm proud to be part-Spanish. Always. I'm not proud when we have unnecessary and violent riots in London but that doesn't mean I'm not proud to be British, I just don't like to be associated with the yobs in London... So it annoys me, when people say, "proud to be British right now" because we won a gold in the Olympics. I'M ALWAYS PROUD! Just say "I'm really proud to be British" and drop the "right now" part.

Done.

Anyway, been busy as usual lately. Week off complete and much Beach fun had. Went to a house party last night and I was very tame compared to my usual party self. Stayed at my friend Alex W's house afterwards and we spent some time with our Raspberry Pi's today.

Technical Part
We wanted to create ourselves a media centre client. Alex has ambitions of multiple Pi's linked up to multiple TV's. I might get there but initially I wanted a Pi to hook up to my HDMI switch so that I can play the output of it to either my living room TV or Office TV (or both simultaneously).

So we start with an install of RaspbMC to an SD card. A nice simple windows installer is available (had my netbook with me so I'm not sure about OSX but I'm sure that's easy as well).

Once that's installed (it doesn't take long). Start the Pi and the rest of the install completes. I then had XBMC installed. XBMC is a media centre solution which is free and has a fair few addons available for it. Those guys have worked really hard on it and have produced versions for Windows, Linux, OSX, Apple TV, Android (may not be released yet)...

Anyway, after hours of playing around, we had ourselves not only a media centre client which could stream content from the MacBook we were using for the experiment but also it could airplay from my iPad.

Came home and started setting mine up. I am now very pleased to say that I can AirPlay my iPad and iMac to either my living room or office (again, or both). Had Gavin and Stacey playing in iTunes on my iMac in the office but playing out via HDMI in my living room. I installed the XBMC remote app on my iPad and could control the output through my iPad back to my iMac... hope you're still with me!

I haven't configured all of the sharing I want to configure yet for the XBMC to be able to read any of the media files from my iMac without iTunes airplay but it's certainly getting there!

Does more than an Apple TV, at a third of the price and much more configurable. So I'm happy.

Great day.

If you know of any good ideas for things I can do with a or my current Pi, please let me know! I'm a geek and love geeking out!

Other Stuff

In other news, back to work tomorrow. It's been a good week off so I'm not dreading going back as much as I typically am on a Sunday night. Not that I hate work, but it's always nice to have a day off!

Watching the Closing Ceremony of the Olympics as I type this. It's incredible. We've done such a great job with the Olympics and the people responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies have done such a great job. Proud (but always proud!).


Yesterday, I spent far too much money on silly items such as clothes, trainers, shoes and a shirt. Came home and found myself sitting in my apartment thinking "It's a gorgeous summer day" so took myself out for a walk and a think for an hour and a half. Beautiful Hampshire countryside around here. After that, house party and too much cider.

That's all for now, signing off.

Programming

Watching The Social Network whilst programming... maybe some form of motivation.

Dual screen, Mac OSX, php, apache, MySQL - I'm sad to say that equals a good night. Don't worry, I do have a social life!

Here's a picture of the setup tonight:

And of the Raspberry Pi temporary setup last night whilst I setup SSH connectivity:

LocalWebPath.com is the subject of my focus this evening and I am starting a late night programming marathon (usually the time I produce my best code - no distractions).

And on with the code...

Promotions

What a crazy few weeks its been!


Gigs, promotions and celebrations, Pi to name a few!


Gigs
Lets start with Ultimate Power... a Gig in London held once a month which plays 80's power ballads non-stop for hours. It's great fun and the great group of people I go with all dress up. We went in a limo this time and loved it. Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIZKLbM_lhQ


Promotions and Celebrations
I received a promotion at work this week which is fantastic! Always nice to be rewarded for the work you put in and I'm not Senior Product Consultant. Very excited. I have a week off work now and couldn't think of a better way of start a holiday!


A group of us went out for a curry at the Punjab restaurant in Covent Garden and I ended up stumbling home at 4 this morning... So yes, I celebrated.


Pi
I have purchased a Raspberry Pi. Details here.
Not entirely sure what I'm going to use it for, but it looks cool once connected! Think I need to use my time off this week to play with it a bit...

I have a day at the beach planned for Tuesday but it's forecast to rain, so we'll see what happens...

Oh and the Degu's have been pretty cute too...

Game on

Just given my good friends Joe and Laura the challenge of finding this blog...

Can they do it?

Hola!

That's right, I'm learning Spanish. First lesson is next week, we'll see how it goes. I'm so jealous of people who are bilingual and I can either suffer that jealousy my whole life or I can try to do something about it...




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Location:Kirby Dr,Tadley,United Kingdom

Rehearsal

Work and play are nicely balanced at the moment. By work I mean my own projects. All of my websites have been moved to a new hosting provider and the only major issue was with Crew Calendar which I expected as the most complex site and with multiple domains/sub-domains. All sorted now though and more secure.

LocalWebPath.com is the new site to watch out for! Alex B and I are working hard on that, although productivity has fallen for both of us since we got back from Portugal but that is to be somewhat expected.

So a mixture of working at Responsys, working on Crew Calendar, working on LocalWebPath.com and playing football, going to the cinema and seeing family. Busy but good times.

I received an email today informing me of my rehearsal time for my presentation at Interact 2012, Responsys' big annual conference. Rehearsal! Shit this just became really real! Clip on mics and everything. Looking forward to it though.

If there are any pictures, l'll post them on here.


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Location:Bramley

Freedom and Portugal

Ah to be free. Free of work for 13 blissful days. Don't get me wrong, I like my job but I'm glad to have a break from it.

Off to Sunny Portugal on Monday, after another hectic weekend. At some point I'd like to fit some programming in, putting together the complex social feature I've been longing to add to Crew Calendar for such a long time.

Good news in the Crew Calendar world though, not only did I receive sign-ups to the service today, but I also found out, and tested, that my SEO has improved and CrewCalendar.co.uk is now top of the list in Google when you search it! Great!

Also, need to keep in mind and develop my new business, name to be revealed soon, with Alex. Things are progressing nicely with that and we should have a lot of work done after Portugal.

I also had some great news at the beginning of the week in the form of a website I've been writing being signed off and uploaded as a live site. Always a proud moment and nice because that means... you guessed it... I get paid!

As if my life wasn't already busy enough, last weekend was "Podcast Recording" weekend. The podcast has been edited and will be live from 1st June. JAM Podcast on iTunes or jampodcast.co.uk for more info!

The weekend starts here

I don't want to rant so I'll make this short... There were two teenagers on the train home tonight. Probably about 15. The bloke is flirting outrageously with the girl and they're having one of those "it's a private conversation but we are secretly acting up to the whole train so we'll talk really loudly" conversations. It really wound me up... Mainly because the guy was a bit of a twat.

Anyway, I think the website project I've been working on is finished now, just waiting for any last minute changes and then it can go live. Quite pleased with the site, very corporate.

I've been speaking with Alex B about the next business venture. We are close to deciding on a name now so from Tuesday onwards we can start focussing on the real work.

My brain is starting to focus back on the social aspect of Crew Calendar as well now... I need to crack on with that.

Busy Saturday coming up. I plan to ride my bike, go shopping, record a podcast, go for a meal and then go clubbing. A long but enjoyable day hopefully.

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Location:Kirby Dr,Tadley,United Kingdom

Buried

I'm in Bury... Manic week this week. Spent the day in the office today (Tuesday), drove from Hampshire to Bury this evening, spending the day with a client tomorrow then heading back tomorrow night before spending the day in London on Thursday. At least I'll sleep well.

One thing I really hate is two faced people. I think everyone is two faced at some point, its hard to avoid it really, but people who do it knowingly and sometimes intentionally really drive me mad. I've realised lately that I work, sometimes closely, with people like this. Fortunately none of them are in my team.

Looking forward to spending some time with my friend Alex in Portugal in less than two weeks... Expect lots of references to this over the next 2 weeks. I definitely need a good break from work. I've done camping and spent time at home but hopefully Portugal will really allow me to relax and forget about work.



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Location:Rochdale Rd,Bury,United Kingdom

The Social Network

I'm trying to come up with a future proof, feature rich, technologically sound, intelligent social system for Crew Calendar.

Sounds simple enough... Yeah right.

Features should include likes and comments. These need to appear anywhere and be quick.

Then there's the question of how it ranks... By number of likes? By number of comments? A mixture of the two?

I have a vague idea of how this will work but it's going to take a day sat in front of my computer to figure it out and that's before it goes into Crew Calendar.

If I can get this right, it adds a whole new dimension to Crew Calendar and should, in theory, make it a much richer platform.

Then finally, the matter of adding the feature to mobile and making it easy to use. The smarter the phone, the lazier the user. Fact.


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Location:On a train home from work

Unfogging the future

Unfogging the future is a book reference from Harry Potter. A book within a book if you will... Well I'm hoping that my future will become a bit less foggy soon.

So many things cloud my mind at the moment that it's a nightmare to think about what's coming up. At work there are so many projects that I'm relying on the Outlook reminder system to keep up with things. I have no idea what's next, I just wait for the reminder.

At home, I have Crew Calendar, another project with a friend, my podcast with Joe and Alex and designing a website to keep track of. That as well as trying to remain sociable and domesticated.

I'm not moaning... I'm always more productive when I'm under pressure, I could just do with a little less of it.

I do need to keep one thing in the back of my mind though. I was advised by an airline (which is pretty cool in itself) to add a social feature to Crew Calendar. Sounds simple enough.... Yeah well I'm still thinking about the architecture of it all.

Right, Sunday night, the Degus are asleep so I should do the same.