Category Archives: Work

Summer

Posted on by

Is over, yay! My favorite time of the year is here.

So over summer I should have been working on my University project, I did some.  I have instead, taken residence at a local creative studio writing loads of code and sipping lots of coffee, good times!!

I have been focusing on my iOS development and as a result have done 5 news apps.  Heres the bad news, one got rejected! its nothing special or bad, just a poor attempt at an app.

Heres the list…

Big Brother 2011

Yes, Big Brother has returned so why not?  The initial version was pretty shocking cosmetically, but that was addressed in the latest update.

Check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/big-brother-news-2011/id446685894?mt=8

This has been pretty successful thanks to having the market to myself.  Channel 5 did have word of releasing a iPhone app however none have yet appeared.

The celebrity version has just finished and the normal version is about to begin so there is life yet in this app.

F1 Rumours

Formula 1 is one of my favorite sports, so it made sense to do this.  This contained the same source code as the Big Brother app above but used a different data source.

Check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/f1-rumours/id445282041?mt=8

X-Factor

This has been a very poor performer, partly thanks to the free and official app.  Again, as with F1, BB, this has the same base source code.  I have not updated this app, so what you see here is what the initial versions of BB and F1 looked like.

Check it out here http://itunes.apple.com/br/app/x-factor-rumours/id446693498?mt=8

And finally….

As my time with the University of Bolton is coming to an end.  I have about 2 months remaining and should I complete my project, I will graduate.  I decided to give something back.

I created a simple iPhone app. This is still waiting to be released on the App store but should be available soon.

It’s pretty basic at this stage but shows both university and student news from the website, shows the university twitter account. And a cool feature, allows you to view your timetable from within the app.

Here are the screenshots.

The Parts Crawler

Posted on by

I had an interesting project which involved a CD-ROM containing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Piaggio/Vespa/Aprilia parts, one of these part catalogues nicely wrapped up in some kind of stand alone Java web application, Jetty I think it was.

The task, to extract all data and images from the CD, after looking through the file system of the application I concluded the application was using a Derby database and the images appeared to be wrapped in a .res file.  I had no luck in extracting the images from these files with various tools around on the internets.  I wasted too much time trying to get the data out of these files, so I gave up.

There had to be a better way of doing this and as with most things, there was.  Some years ago, I created CraigsCrawl – an awesome project which crawled CraigsList ads and extracted data (sorry CraigsList).  Since the parts data was presented in a web interface out comes C#.

Once I targeted the information needed, I automated the whole process extracting all the ranges, catalogues, parts and images from the CD.  All data was then stored in a nice MS SQL database and the images named and saved to a folder which linked (by filename) to records in the database.  Creating the application to crawl the parts data took roughly 2-3days (on and off) and countless cups of fresh, ground, fruity coffee. The extraction only took around 3 hours.

I mainly used the WebBrowser object to extract the data and the HttpWebRequest object for some of the data which hidden behind Ajax post calls.  The coffee was sourced from Sainsbury’s, the fresh fruity beans that need grinding up.  Nice stuff.

Update:

The total number of parts that were extracted for 3 brands came to 210k! Could you imagine the time it would take to manually extract that amount of data?

Checking in…

Posted on by

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.

Perl & Spam

Posted on by

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 :)