My new HP Touchpad

So I’ve been very quiet on here for quite a while. I’ve gotten so busy at work that I haven’t found much time to do anything here outside of work hours as I’ve been spending a lot of time doing reading on unit testing and design patterns and other things like that.

Yesterday my new purchase arrived. An HP Touchpad. I’ve got it dual booted using Cyanogen Mod 9 to run Android Ice Cream Sandwich. As you may have already guessed this is what I’m using here to test the keyboard and how responsive it is and how accurate I am on it. Other than the space key not always firing, I’m finding it pretty good. The corrections are pretty good too. Seems a lot better than my phone which is also Android, running 2.3.5. In fact using this is making me want to root my phone and get ICS on there too!

The battery life is pretty good. I used it a lot yesterday (obviously, it’s my new toy) and the battery lasted until early afternoon today. Having this is also making me want to start doing some Android development. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and now I have the perfect excuse 🙂

I am hoping I get some time to do something useful enough to warrant a post on here. I will definitely try! I hope all of you that are finding your way here through Google find some of my older posts useful. Please feel free to leave a comment saying hi and how any post has helped you!

Belated statistics for 2010

This is a little late but I still wanted to post my 2010 stats up (even if just for my benefit 🙂 )

In 2009 I had 4,229 unique visitors to my blog. I am happy to announce that in 2010, that number rose to 6,403 unique visitors! As I said last year, to some people this number isn’t exactly staggering. To me however it really is. I started this blog to keep a note of all the little code snippets I thought may be useful instead of relying on my memory and reams of post it notes! It’s brilliant that it helps other people and in 2010 (end of the year excluded) I really started trying to make sure my posts could be found via search engines by trying to use tags properly and trying to write the posts so that other people could understand them!

So thank you for visiting, I really hope my blog can help you. I generally do check my comments regularly (again end of 2010 excluded!) so if you want to ask any questions about my code, need some help getting it to work or give some feedback on the site, leave me a comment and I will try and get back to you as soon as possible.

Stats for 2011 are looking good so far so lets hope we can top 2010′s stats! Bring on 2011…I should probably get writing some new posts!

It’s been a while…

So here I am, apologising again for a lack of updates to this blog! I started a new job in November and moved house at the same time so it’s all been a bit manic really. I hadn’t done any admin with the site since late November so I came back to over 500 comments to moderate! There was a large amount of spam so if I accidentally trashed someone’s genuine comment then I am very sorry. Please post it again and I will approve it.

On the subject of comments, my general rule when moderating is to look at the name provided and the e-mail address provided and see if they match in some way. For example if the name provided is Sarah then the e-mail address is martin@someemailprovider.com then chances are it will get trashed. I also look at the URL’s provided. If there is one there, I look to see if it looks genuine and if it is, I check it out. I wish I could remove the comment moderation but there really are so many spammers out there!

Anyway, what I plan to do from here is to get back into posting regular content. I’m planning to do a little stats summary like I did at the end of 2009 (for my benefit to look back on really). I’ve also been looking into some SEO techniques at work recently so might start posting a little about SEO bits and also trying some things out on the site.

Another thing I’ve been considering is maybe getting a guest writer on to write some posts for the site. A similar sort of thing to what I do, general hints and tips for programming etc. If you’re interested please leave me a comment and I’ll get in touch with you.

So sorry again for the lack of new articles. I plan to spend much more time on it from now on when time allows!

Just a little thank you…

Having just got back to work after my Christmas break I decided to check my blog stats. In 2009 I had an amazing 4,229 views! Now this may not be staggering to some people, but to me that is a huge amount. I initially set up this blog as a place for me to collect my thoughts and code snippets as I kept losing all my little pieces of paper and got fed up of trawling through lines and lines of code to find things again!

So I hope I have helped some people out with some of my snippets and information I have posted. I’ve been a bit quiet recently as the project I have been working on is quite specific so there hasn’t been a lot I, or possibly anyone else could re-use in other ways. However this project is almost complete and my next project will hopefully mean I can post a few more useful snippets.

So once again THANK YOU! 4,229 view makes me a very happy little coder, even if I am back in work after 3 weeks off 🙂 Here’s to topping that figure in 2010!

Trying out Windows Live Writer

Ok so something I was reading about recently is Microsoft currently encouraging the use of their “Windows Live” set of tools, especially with the introduction of Windows 7. So I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at them and this is basically me having a play around with Windows Live Writer.

So far I am liking the idea of having a piece of software on my machine that allows me to gradually write blog posts and save them locally before publishing them to the web. Setting up the blog was extremely easy. All I had to do was enter the web address, username and password and it did the rest in about 15 seconds. It also makes it easier to add rich content to blog posts. There is a button in the top left corner for publishing the post, and on the right there is a control panel that provides me with links to my blog and the dashboard for my blog and some shortcuts for inserting rich content like videos, maps etc. I also like the Microsoft Office style spell checker, as I often forget to spell check when I’m writing blog posts via the web interface. Picking a category, adding a new category and adding tags are also just as easy to do as they are on the web.

I also like that you have the Macromedia (or Adobe now!) style “Edit/Preview/Source” tabs. The “Edit” view is what I’m currently writing this in. It gives you a little page, but the font, size and area to type in is the same as it will appear on your blog. The “Preview” view shows you exactly what it will look like on your blog. The “Source” view is the HTML code behind what you are seeing on screen. The only thing that I’ve noticed on first go is that there is no way to highlight selected text and format it as code. This is obviously something I use a lot. Although on the toolbar you are given a drop down box listing different styles allowed on your blog “theme” such as “Paragraph” or “Heading1”, “Code” is not present in this list. It is however possible to go into source view and use the <code></code> HTML tags. This isn’t a deal breaker in my opinion. It just would have been nice to have had it in the toolbar with the other styles, or even a button that would do the formatting. Who knows, I might find something, I have only just opened this piece of software for the first time!

So all in all, I like it so far and will probably continue using it for a while and see if I continue to like it!