Arduino Sunday MkII

I went to the Arduino day at Nottingham Hackspace on Sunday again. Generally it was more of the same although I probably got a little more out of it this time as there was less time spent being confused. It was a chance to give the netbook (Dell Netbook) a good run for its' money and it did pretty well. I am beginning to more and more annoyed with the ubuntu netbook remix however. Its' inability to use the built in 3g model is annoying, there a several weird bugs in it and it occasionally freaked out whilst just trying open a menu. On the plus side, the size of the laptop is such a boon it makes it all worth while. I wouldn't relish having to lug my other laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000) about.?

The day was good. I didn't see many new projects from the last time but some brilliant progress has been made on the hackspace itself, with some interesting chairs from a cinema, some good desk spaces and some other additions. One of the founders Dominic (indeed another Dom!), was looking for new members. I must say I am always tempted. The rule is that you pay however much you think you should pay but just don't take this piss. It's hard to know how much I would actually go down to the place though as my time is so so limited anyway. It's something I will continue to think about. Once my course is over for this semester I may consider it. I might even consider it just as a place to go and study in peace and quiet.?

Anyway, the pics from Sunday are worth checking out.....

Comments

Making your domain less mutable

This happens regularly to me (and from my anecdotal investigation everyone involved in large / old projects). We need a new piece of functionality. I write it, it's beautiful and I win the internet. I have estimated 8 days (or 22.23 lol-points depending on how you live) and it's only taken 4 days. Ah, but then a very small; mostly ignored and very unimportant detail rears it's cruel head. You need to make it work with the code that exists already. This is normally in the form of saving to some pre-existing entities. Oh dear. You save everything through the various management / service classes that exist already and nothing works. So begins the next couple of days of horror. You find that you didn't set the work = true . Most of my woes in this area are caused by modifications at layer further down (or the stored procedure it finally ends up in) changing the object that I was trying to save or not saving part of the object because of some rule. So many errors

IIS Administration using Microsoft.Web.Administration using F#

A friend had mentioned his joy at using Powershell. I guess this is pretty cool and I don't mind Powershell. I sort of missed the boat a little with it because I haven't done any Windows Administration since I used to look after Windows Server 2000 machines (and possibly a couple of 2003). At that time I had a different arsenal to cause untold woe on my fellow colleagues....VBSCRIPT!!!! Boy could I cause trouble with that. With a combination of that, VBA and SQL I used to love creating spider webs of pure madness, once written the apps were tied together so precariously; one false move and the entire thing would explode.... anyway that's a different story. Back to the Powershell. He was using it to automate IIS (or else I heard what I wanted to so I could try and push F# onto him, who knows?). I have heard various stories of extremely large platform automation scripts being written recently (for example .net rocks interview with Steve Evans ) and whilst they seem to be g

My home office upgrade wish list.

My home office is almost due an upgrade. I have been holding off until my youngest daughter is out of her cot as then we can finally dispatch the enormous monstrosity of a cot out from the kids bedroom and the drawers that are in my office can be banished giving me better access to my wonderful whiteboard. My other improvements will be purchasing a new, larger monitor. I currently work from a single 22ich Samsung which just doesn't cut it anymore, I did have two at some point but I can't recall what I did with it. I really enjoy using a touch screen so I think I will go for one of these 27inch Hannspree models that I have used before. I put a lot of hours in at home and whilst I have a reasonable chair I still tend to suffer with some back problems, so my next port of call will be to get a Varidesk for home. It works an absolute treat at work and just lets me switch stuff up when I feel like it. they take a reasonable amount of desk space up but I tend to leave my desk fairly

Dominic Finn

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