Geeky

I’d like to start by first talking about software engineering itself, and whether it can legitimately be called engineering.

I needed this function this morning so I thought I’d share it in case someone else does too.

It’s taken nearly a year for me to become angry inspired enough to blog again. The culprit this time is ASP.NET poster boy Scott Hanselman.

Like many programmers, I’ve come to love Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange network. Its unique Wiki / Blog / Forum blend creates a fantastic platform for knowledge sharing.

I’m working my way through The C Programming Language at the moment, and so far I’m loving C’s purity and leanness.

Really! And, quite frankly, I’m sick and tired of programmers talking about them like this (not all programmers, some are worse than others, and all the usual disclaimery stuff applies).

Here’s a mockup of the main window for the upcoming Tubecaster 3. The release will include support for multiple downloads at once, playlist download support and built-in media conversion tools. Stay tuned!

I just had a situation where I was trying to filter the queryset for a ModelMultipleChoiceField based on the currently logged-on user. I was going crazy trawling through the Django docs and eventually Google.

Following on from the wildly successful Stack Overflow programming questions and answers website, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have launched Server Fault, a questions and answers site following the same format but now for “system administrators and IT professionals”.

I’ve just launched a new website for Tubecaster. The new site was created with Django, with which I’m extremely impressed.

The wonderful folks at Balsamiq have graciously donated a license for their Mockups user interface design software to the Tubecaster project to help with future improvements.

Yesterday I was looking for a Python source code line counter to give me a summary of some source files, but I couldn’t find a free one that would do the job as I wanted. So I created one.

I’m pleased to report that Tubecaster 2.0.1 for Windows is now available for download. Click here to go to the downloads page on the Tubecaster homepage.

In the latest version of Tubecaster I’ve come to the point of needing to give users the option of storing passwords on disk. Needless to say the very thought sent shivers down my spine.

I’ve been playing around with trying to pass HTTP connections through a proxy server requiring authentication from Python and after a few hours of hunting around I’ve managed to find enough bits of information to cobble together into a working example.

I’ve been doing some reading on artificial intelligence (AI) today as it’s the time of the year again when the Turing Test is performed on a handful of selected artificial intelligence systems.

If you’d like to try an early version of my port of Tubecaster to Linux, you can download it here. Please see the readme file within the archive for dependency details.

I’ve just created a Python script that will take a filename on the command line and convert all of its tabs into the given number of spaces (2nd argument). Click here to download.

Whilst digging through some of my old backups this afternoon I came across some old renderings from about 2004 (the same year I gave my 3D graphics presentation to CLUG) that I did in Blender.

I’ve spent the last few days with the final release of Canonical‘s latest offering, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS aka Hardy Heron and overall I am impressed.

The latest Ubuntu release, version 8.04 codename Hardy Heron, has finally arrived!

I just wanted to share my excitement at the latest Ubuntu desktop release. Fantastic!

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox from a website called “Uptodown.com” informing me that they had tested Tubecaster and thought that their visitors would find it useful.

I’ve been doing a lot of research into design patterns lately, Model-View-Controller (MVC) in particular.

I’ve just released a new version of my Tubecaster application which allows you to download YouTube videos and converts them to MP3. Get it from the Tubecaster homepage.

I started using Linux in 1999. At the time I was sorely frustrated with the state of Windows, as are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people every day.