Recent Accomplishments. Stuff I have been doing!

Its been a bit quiet on the geekery front the last week or two. I have been listening excessively to episodes of The Instance as I go about doing my job, but I thought I would put a summary of some of our activities here :)

1) Web design: My business site is now up: Frozen-Monkey Web-Design. (albheit still under construction.) The site of my first customer is also up - RCS Wind Services. I am enjoying doing the web design work, it can be fiddly - but I have done enough websites between hobbies and uni now that I have some experience and am building up a portfolio.

2) Jam Making: Me and the Mrs took the kids to local(ish) fruit farm and got a metric f-ton of strawberries, and decided to make the into Jam using our Kenwood Bread Maker. I must say, yummier jam I haz a tasted not!

3) Wine Making: Were turnin into a proper Good Life family here... Jam... Bread... now making our own wine. We picked up a starter kit from Tesco to brew 6 bottles in a week, aswell as slapping a batch of strawberrys together to ferment to make some strawberry wine for christmas time. Its quite entertaining. We have a lot of brewing stuff that has been passed to us from family - we are quite keen on putting it to use - there are a load of brewing websites about - although finding an actual brewer shop to get supplies from in person is a different matter...

Oh yeah, I have also been playing lots (too much?) of Transport Tycoon... Ive not been allowed to play WOW because its too time consuming, but we both tend to collapse on the couch in the evenings regardless and do nothing, so I have just been playing this... Pretty easy once you get the hang of things... (assuming you let building whilst paused be allowed...)

-V

Course... approaching... end! So much still to do :/

So - the last handin is due tomorrow, then its FREEDOM! - at least until the exam diet starts in May. So much to do in that time!

The latter half of this semester has been so dominated by assignments I have not attended many lectures at all, and have a LOT of studying to do before the exams. In addition to this, after last Friday's Hack day, and chattering with Christian Heilmann ( @codepo8 on Twitter) and Rowan Murray from Yahoo uk - I have been in the process of trying to arrange flights to the Bucharest open hack - which should NOT be so complicated...

My choices are British Airways - which involves getting to London somehow then paying over £400 round trip to Bucharest and back to London, then get back home to Dundee again. The alternative is fly from Edinburgh airport with KLM for about £300 - but have a stopoff in Paris on the way there, and Amsterdam on the way back - and the whole trip totals in excess of 26 hours when its 3 hours either way... thats 20 hours sat in airports for a weekend away... MADNESS!

I am also in the process of trying to set myself up as a business for contracting and web-design purposes. This is quite a lot of work and is pretty time consuming. Liability is the scariest part of it all. I feel competent, but will someone that is paying for services that run into an issue going to be accepting or monsters? Oh well! As an aside to the business - I have been tinkering around with Google Ad-sense as I would aim to have one or two placed on the websites I design - but as far as I have seen - its relatively pointless as they are rarely ever clicked on. I do notice I have got a habit of reading them on other peoples websites and viewing anything that  interests me!

Oh, I am also twiddling my thumbs waiting for news of an Internship I had an interview for yesterday. Hopefully I am taken on as it is a pretty sweet deal, with the added bonus that because of my computing background, the degree I will be qualified for when I start as well as my electronics degree, and 9 years employed as Electronics Engineer and RMSS engineer they are looking to extend (hopefully to the full 12 weeks so I qualify to have the summer placement be graded) the placement and have me do various other items of work for them.

Hmm... much to do, back to this report I go!

-V

Joys of Web-Design

My biggest project on the go at the moment in university is to develop a Fault Reporting system. The website will use .jsp web pages, java servlets and connect to a mySQL database, hosted on the university system.

The assignment was handed out over a month ago, and is due in less than a weeks time... thankfully with some help from a classmate, I started to push some progression on the task last night.

So far I have achieved the following:

• Created the web-pages (primarily html for now, but as the servlets come into play there will be java script aswell.) 
• Designed the database tables and uploaded them to the mySQL server with the use of mySQL workbench.

After a coding session last night I now have working servlets for:

Logging in, Registering a user and the fault-report form. There is no existing connection to the database yet, although I think I have a session script set up and working for the user log-in that will help with logging in and out.

Ill spare the details of coding it all up for now, but Im taking notes as I go and may make a post as a sort of guide/reminder as I plan to do a lot more of this in the future...

Here are some images from my front end.

Its a... uh... work in progress... the actual design is a bit shit, but I had a theme in mind, just not the skills to do it yet :p

-V