Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

Checking in…

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

My first semester back at University is almost complete, only two assignments (both completed) to hand in and then I’m done!  This semester has been quite easy, I’ve had to do 6 assignments in total, 4 in Java and 2 in .Net.  All the projects have been to create some kind of application, be it for a company who’s employee hierarchy resembles a pyramid scheme but overall nothing too hard.  At the end of it all, I can say I know Java, which opens the way for some Android development when the GooglePhone/Nexus One comes to the UK.

A couple of posts back I said I would learn C++ whilst learning Java.  I can honestly say this never happened, however I don’t see learning the language a challenge anymore.  One day I will finally get to program something in this language but I wont be going out of my way to do something in it.

A new year has forced me to get back into a exercise regime again.  So far I’ve been good and eventually I might be able to report some losses or gains.  My goal at the moment is to try and stay the same weight but lose some fat in exchange for muscle.

Onto work… The new year saw me working from home for the first time thanks to the weather (constant snow since Christmas).  A very different experience compared to working in a office (how do people work from home?) I will not miss it.  We have started a couple of new projects, both based in PHP using SOAP connected to a MySQL database, Good fun!.  Negotiated a pay rise over MSN :) and a bag of holidays left to take.

Thats it for now.

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Perl & Spam

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Another week flown by! Not sure why weeks are going so fast at the moment but before I know it its Friday again. Not so much a bad thing?

This week I have been doing some work on Trap25 – a spam system which has been created by 3DPixel.net for their customers. From personal experience, Trap25 is already good at preventing spam to the point where I do not get spam at all!

I have been using Perl (which is still fairly new to me) to upgrade the existing system to become more robust and (thanks to Perl) faster than the old system which was created using PHP. The system has also been migrated from using several files located on various servers to one central database – without going into detail and boring you, this ensures the servers handling mail can still function should a server go down.

I’ve done some other work (in Perl) which monitors the amount of spam received into the email system and displays them in table organised by country. There’s also a fancy chart which was a pain to configure! Have a look here.

I have used other languages in various enviroments but theres something about Perl I like. I think, the fact that its fast, has endless functions available via CPAN and the amount of well documented examples on the interwebs makes this a good choice of language – yet people say its a dead language? Each language has its place, but just compared to PHP it seems a more structured language – I say this because I still have to check the manual to see what comes first, is it the needle or the haystack? Maybe im a noob!

I’ve also started looking into Python, hopefully a project will come along so I can play more with this language :)

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