Busy? What?

Ha. It rained. No lawn mowing for me. So I did a little coding. As one does. I've hit a problem with the Smartphone. I think that madness beckons. I wanted to create a splash screen for my program which warmly welcomes the user and gives them something to read while the program fires up. So I did this. Even used threads to make it work too.  Go me.

So next I turned my attention to the cursor. When the machine is busy, it is best if it looks that way. Windows CE devices can be made to display this rotating wheel cursor thing while they are thinking. There is a very simple way of getting this busy cursor, you just change the cursor type to look that way. The thing is that this doesn't work on the emulator (the pretend Smartphone that runs in your PC).  I've never managed to get the busy cursor to appear on the PC. However, on the Smartphone I have a different problem. I can't get rid of the thing. I start the program looking busy as the splash screen loads, and then stay looking busy as the program runs. Even if I turn it off. Wah!

There is something nicely symetrical about this of course, but only in a very annoying way. If I figure out how to fix it I'll let you know. If you know how to fix this, let me know and I'll buy you a (virtual) beer.

Recreational Programming

I write programs for fun. Don't ask why. I suppose it is better than fishing, or making kits (incidentally, one of my major ambitions is to go to Paris, buy around 1,000 little statues of the Eiffel tower and then make a model of a matchstick with them).

Anyhoo, at the moment I'm making a little Smartphone application which I can use to track my time. You give it a buch of categories and activities and then it lets you add tasks which have an activity, start time and duration. I got it working last week and now I've started fiddling with it. I've added XML save and restore and I'm thinking about linking it up with a web service so that you can upload your activities and it will print out a report (or even an invoice for your time). And the boss can read web pages to find out what you have been doing.

I'm not sure where this will lead, or even if I'll get it all going, but it has brought home to me just how easy it is to use modern tools to put these kind of things together. I've also learnt some intresting things about using XML which I'll post over the next few days.

But this evening I've got to mow the lawn, so no coding for me tonight...

Blogging Interface

I teach programming. One of the things I teach is interfaces, which are a really neat part of Java and C#. An interface is a bunch of methods which a class can implement. Essentially it is a list of things that the class says it can do. This goes a bit further, in that if a class implements an interface it can not only do those things, but you can regard instances of it in terms of this ability, i.e. if an object implements the ICanPrint interface you can not only ask it to print, but you can regard it as an ICanPrint thing, rather than a Receipt, StockItem, Invoice, Chicken or whatever. This makes things like printer queues easy to manage, in that they simply contain "things that can print" rather than particular kinds of widgets.

Some students have problems with this, although as humans we do it all the time. Talk to me on the phone and you are using my "talk on the phone" interface. Ask me to drive you somewhere and you are using my "driver" interface. As me to tell you a joke and you are going to get my "awful comedian" interface. I can't juggle, so as far as I'm concerned the "juggler" interface is not implemented.

So, what has this to do with anything? Well, I've been wondering about which blogging environment to use in the future, my old, steam, one or this new, spiffy, spoke thing. I can see benefits in both. I like the control that my old blog software gives me, but I love the community aspects of spoke.

It occurs to me that what I need to do is implement a new interface "write blogs for spoke" and have done with it. So that is what I'm going to do. If I think it is too silly for spoke, it goes in the old, steam, blog. If I want to re-write history (which is the ultimate power - believe me) it goes in the old one too. But if I want to talk about computers stuff, and get comments back, spoke is the one for me.

New to the Spoke

I'm kind of auditioning blog hosts at the moment. I'm trying to find out which is the best one to move www.robmiles.com to. At the moment all my innermost thoughts and feelings come courtesy of a little program I downloaded and a small amount of free web space I get with my broadband connection.

The problem is that I've nearly a year's worth of stuff on there to move, and I don't think I'm allowed to blog into the past with Spoke (although I intend to try).

However, The Spoke looks kind of cool, and the people here are neat, and I like the idea of community. So we shall have to see....