Time For A New Pc
I have been on the lookout for a small computer case to replace my aging cube case. The front panel had stopped working, so using it was somewhat awkward wh...
Most of the software I have developed over the years has been released as open source and is freely available in public repositories over at GitHub.
There are 5 Major Applications that I have developed so far. One is recent, the rest developed several years ago. The older ones do have supporting concepts in separate repositories. I won’t mention them here; the reader is encouraged to visit my GitHub account and explore what is available.
The intervening gap has been spent developing, in my spare time, a private application for my existing client - converting the existing Microsoft Access Application, which they fundementally pay me to maintain, to a new Web only application- sharing the same SQL Server Database. I will refer to it and the technology it uses in Blog Posts, but due to the nature of the software and its purpose I cannot make it public.
So the key applications are
AKCMoney This is a Money Budgeting program that I use for my own personal and business finance management and have been doing so for over 15 years. It consists of three main concepts:-
Multiple currencies are supported, although there is normally a Default Currency Specified, and can use exchange rates that are initially estimated, but which are then corrected when the actual value of the transaction is known. Each side of the transaction can be assigned an Accounting Code which belongs to one of Costs, Revenue or Assets (depreciated over three years), Balance (items such as expenses and their re-ebursement which should end up at zero) and Offsheet (items such as Profits and Dividends).
Data is held in an sqlite data making it easy to backup and move around.
MBChat is a multi-purpose chat program developed for Melinda’s Backups. It was originally so the leadership team could meet in real time rather than in psuedo real time using e-mail, but went on to become a more general meeting place for all members.
Early versions relied on clients polling a database, but later versions relied on a server which managed and passed on messages which was woken up by the first particpant into the server and terminated on the last person out.
These days Server Sent Events or even web sockets would be used, but video
chat capabilities on other platforms make this software someone antiquated.
However there are some interesting techniques (such as allowing a computer
intensive operation of generating an RSA key pair in the client run without
locking the browser (maybe now replaced with async
and await
along with
promises
)). I leave the software then as an example of some of the ideas.
I have been on the lookout for a small computer case to replace my aging cube case. The front panel had stopped working, so using it was somewhat awkward wh...
How I found a way to help
Pi Record is an application to record audio files from microphones. I am developing it primarily to record from a Blue Yeti USB microphone and from a Focusri...
I had always planned to replace the feed on the front page of Hartley Consultants web site with a summary of recent posts from this blog. I had previously s...
I have installed the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin to allow me to post snippets of code to my blog. However (as far as I can tell) it does not natively s...
As you can see, I have now managed to make this site go live. Copying from the system running on my desktop, to the production version couldn’t have been eas...
One of my known stumbling blocks to converting my site to WordPress was how was I going to manage to incorporate gitweb so that its output appears within the...
Introduction
As will shortly become apparent as this blog goes live (I am currently editing posts on my test system, but intend to include the posts I am making whilst I ...
I was trying to type a copyright symbol (©) in Gimp in order to add a watermark to a photograph. I found this quick tip which I would like to share.
I just read a post on Slashdot asking the question of how to keep personal data safe. The questioner had just returned from Mexico with lots (he said 16GB w...
In a web application that I am building I need to use a multiple selection <select> list. Because screen space is limited I decided I would set the si...
Not being much of a user of Windows – my desktop is running Gnome under Linux – I came across a strange Internet Explorer 8 bug last Friday. I was setting up...
In the previous blog article I discuss a process which would take several seconds to run. Obviously it is started as soon in the load process for the initial...
I have just re-installed my Debian MythTV server now that I have bought it bigger disks. In fact, with two new 1TB (ie approx 1000 Gigs) disks, I have put th...
MB chat is an Ajax chat application that I built for Melinda’s Backups. It was originally so that the leadership team could hold meetings without resorting t...
It has been a while since I last made a blog entry. Over the past couple of weeks I have been re-instating my web site and collecting the old blog entries an...
AKC Money is a personal finance management application. It allows users to create accounts, and transactions to and from these accounts, maintaining a balanc...
I have been considering the architecture for a web based real time game between two players. It doesn’t matter what the game is, any game in which there are...
I have been playing with Google Analytics over the past few days to try and understand better who actual access to my web sites are happening.
This is just a quick blog entry to note that I now have a working environment of a local telephone system, including three telephones inside the house and tw...
Asterisk is the Open Source PBX software that can manage telephone lines. As well as the classical hardware phones, more importantly for me, it also manages ...
Last night I updated the underlying server for this web site from Tomcat5 to Tomcat5.5
As the last article hinted, I had hoped to move forward with the web site. The next stage is an update to my UserMgr application.
I just came across Aaron J Siego’s post in his blog about the difference between free as in beer versus free as in freedom, and how the open source community...
I just saw the article In Search of the Holy Grail about how to get a three column site to work reliably in CSS.
It was just yesterday morning that a light came on in my head and I understood just what the index file was for in git. It seemed to strip away the fear that...
Today is the day – my new blog has been made live
At work I got my new laptop last October. But I couldn’t get my Palm Pilot to Sync with it, so was getting increasingly worried that my data, particularly my...
I was curious as to the relative speeds on Java versus PHP. So I created a couple of simple applications (see below).
For those that have been following the “Taking the Java plunge” series, you will note that I have chosen iBatis as the framework to use with the database. By...
Well I made it. It was early in the weekend that the code was working, but its taken a couple more days of struggle to get it so I could put it into producti...
After some hard work at getting my ideas together and then some marathon debugging sessions, my application is almost working. It has taken me a lot longer t...
It has been a while since my last entry, but here I am sitting in a hotel room in Instanbul, and discovered that it has a wireless lan capability.
It has taken a my about 3 weeks of exploring to know what my next step in taking the Java Plunge should be.
Thats it – I just have to start it. 5 years after adding it to my TODO list for my home computer network I have started my first java web application. I want...
The state of Massachusetts is defining that all government documents should be in an open format. Quite right too. Any government department should ensure th...
I have several computers at home, and it is important that they are properly backed up in order to not lose data. I want to show an example of how this is do...
As I start to write this article at the end of March 2005 I have in my head a partially formed vision for how to improve the usability of the Personal Comput...
Since man first invented the wheel, society moves forward technologically by inventors standing on the shoulders of those who came before. This advance in ou...
I have just been reading an article in which Bill Gates is justifying the introduction of digital rights management into Windows Media Centre. In essence he ...
About a month ago I decided the time had come to find out why, when I attempted to blank a cd in my cd rewriter, cdrecord (the program I was using to do this...
I was thinking the other day about the way we produced documents in the mid 1980’s. It was kicked off by hp setting up a competition to find the oldest laser...
It may seem strange that someone who has made his living for over 35 years in the software business, with at least 15 of those years in charge of a product f...