Trip...

So, It seems that I am off to Tanzania for two weeks. After that, I am to return for 3 weeks to finish things up in SA, then go back to Tanzania with my family.

Going up alone at first makes communication with loved ones back home a proirity. Not yet sure how easy it will be, but I am trying to be as prepared as I can.

With that in mind, I have tricked up my little Samsung phone with:

Skype.
Blogger :-)
Regional offline maps for Google Maps.
Tripcase, a handy flight management tool.
Panoramio uploader (I intend to coat the landscape in photos!).
Facebook app.
Dropbox.
Evernote (used for a while, but could find particular use here).

Other tools might also be used. We'll see. The phone also has Gmail pre-installed which helps.

And we will see how it goes...

Some More Programming

I seem to be on a Coding Kick lately.


It is turning out to be significantly more fun than I anticipated. In the last year and a half I have learned (and am able to write apps in):

• Python
• VB .NET
• PHP

I have also started to discover:

• Java (for Android)
• Bash shell scripting (something I was always "sorta" aware of but never proficient with until now)

I have seen signs that Unisa might expose me to AJAX next, which will tie in nicely with PHP of course.

Not sure what I should call my favourite yet, but I can say that I have had great fun creating :

• A Host Monitor, complete with visible alarms (Python, with  a PHP frontend)
• A sniffer that finds "banned" materials (such as mp3 files) on the company network (Python)
• A podcast puller that gathers the latest episodes of my favourite podcasts (Python)
• A tool that tells me which server a user is on (Windows commands with a Python frontend)
• A tool for finding errors in the Backup logfile (VB.NET)
• A tool that send me a message whenever a website changes (Python)
• A register that I use to manage the Toner/Ink stock cabinet (Excel and VBA plus Python)

OK, so maybe Python is emerging as something of a front runner. However PHP is GREAT fun, and I have yet to find my feet with Java. Anything can happen :-)

Latitude

After a year and a bit, I have finally ended my experiment with Google Latitude.

All in all a very useful service. Unfortunately (as with most modern services online) not fully useful unless your mates also pitch in.

Still, I found it interesting. Some features are still beta, and it still (after a year) misidentifies my place of work as "out". With a bit of polish, it could be a killer app. As it was, the feature I used most was export to KML, which helped with those mileage estimates.

Maybe Google should consider G+ integration. Then, if your boss appears in your circles, he could schedule and move employees across a map. Distance workers and consulting firms come to mind.

For now, I have signed out, concluding an interesting yearlong experiment.

Of web design and opportunities

So, my studies are progressing and my confidence WRT application development is climbing. Especially so after I really started to understand PHP.

 

Powerful stuff.

 

My mind can’t help recall some of the JavaScript stuff I did in my first year. I have to wonder what wondrous things I could create if I were to combine PHP on the backend with JavaScript on the frontend.

 

Now I have already started to use some PHP stuff at work. The Python host monitoring script I created before is already outputting data in CSV format, which is then picked up, formatted, and displayed on a web page via PHP. I added some nice icons which turn red when a host goes down. Not much, but I cannot help feeling a little clever J

 

Next step is to involve some SQL, as well as some end-user eyecandy and features using JavaScript of course. I need to dig out my old JS handbook from wherever I stored it and take a crack at it. Time is my big problem though, since I also need to use this stuff to pass an exam or two, and revision-time is around the corner. Not to mention three assignments I still need to hand in.

 

No wonder I’m feeling a bit tired lately.

 

 

Adventures in Python code.

My Unisa studies have led me to the Python programming language, as mentioned before. Since then I have endeavoured to apply my knowledge on as many fronts as I can.

 

One of the first things I have done is to create a very simple host monitor.

 

Of course I could do this without Python, but where’s the science in that J ?

Python has a nice feature that allows you to run an OS command and write the results back to a variable. If I am not mistaken many other scripting languages have similar features.

 

So I do something simple like:

variable = os.popen(“ping hostname”).read()

 

This was the easy part. The parts that kept me busy were things like parsing strings for certain characters, saving results to external files, loading previous results and doing comparisons with them etc.

It’s still a work in progress, but it works.

 

The final bit was to import the results files into Excel to give me a visual of hosts on my network, which worked like a charm! Set the links to update every few minutes, schedule the script to run in the background, and you have a live view of your network!

 

I won’t put the entire set of scripts here since it is really basic stuff (and I would be showing how amateur I still am), but maybe later I’ll consider it J.

 

 

 

 

Study time again...

So, back to the old routine of getting up real early in the morning
(3:00AM) to further my studies.
The studies are fun, but dragging my tired body out of bed when decent
people should be sleeping most certainly isn't. Coffee stops helping
after a while.

It's amazing how many typos your Python code contains at 3:30AM. Even
more amazing is the reduced ability to understand why the code won't
run.

Strangely however, this still works better than trying to stay up late
for studies. Performance (and the will to continue) is worse at 1130PM
than at 3:30AM.

Strange but true.