I tested the CSV reader component yesterday and except for a few minor bugs (which were fixed almost immediately) it worked beautifully 🙂 Of course, the CSV reading functionality is rudimentary at the moment since the component is capable of reading values separated by commas but would probably choke on something which is enclosed in quotes and contains a comma inside. Currently I’m employing some of C#’s built-in string tokenizing functionality but I will eventually have to write my own parser so that I can split up a CSV record according to my own logic. I’ll probably do that today since I kind of like this project even though it probably will not go anywhere further than this since I have not heard from the people who wanted to sub-contract me for a while now. Ah well – nothing lost really since I came out of it with a new ASP.NET component that I know I’ll end up using somewhere or other 🙂

Not much else going on – I know several people said that my last layout was “workable” <g> and I should probably be working on it but too many other things going on at the moment. I really should be getting back to coding as well but there are problems there too – I really haven’t come to like Delphi 7.0 and running Delphi 6.0 and 7.0 alongside of each other is causing certain problems on my system. I probably should either switch to 7.0 completely or decide to stick with 6.0 for the moment. I probably should do the latter since I know that all of the components that I use currently work with 6.0 but there is one hitch – I can’t work on Scope under Delphi 6.0. There always has to be problems – guess that’s what makes life interesting :p

Thanks to all who wished me luck – and Collin, it took a *lot* of whining to get here and to stay here :p Actually, the new job (or the sub-contract rather) might not be materializing after all since there’s suddenly been a cessation of communication from the other end – of course, it could be just because of the weekend or it could be that they decided to go some other route. If it’s the latter, cest la vie 🙂 I did complete work on the CSVReader component but ran into problems in testing it out because for some strange reason, none of the Visual Studio .NET webform components show up on my machine at home. Of course, I’d upgraded that machine to Windows XP SP1 recently and had installed Visual Studio .NET after the fact and have not done any Windows updates on it since then (I’m on dial-up from home, what do you expect? :p) and so that might be the reason. I intend to take the code to work and see if I can make it work there since that machine has had Visual Studio .NET installed forever and has had all Windows updates applied except for Windows XP SP1 and IE 6 SP1 :p So I might be able to pinpoint where the problem is … I am already aware that I’ll probably need to do some debugging on the CSVReader component since I don’t think it’ll work right off the bat and so want to get this problem sorted, get the component working and then I’ll be done – unless I get the subcontracting job of course :p

Haven’t done much more in the coding-line since I’ve been busy with other stuff – since I prefer to keep this journal to just coding related matters, I guess you’ll have to go over to SM to see what else I’ve been up to :p

I am working on something pretty interesting at the moment – at least interesting for me, you might not think so :p How it came about is thus – I’ve been applying for jobs at various places and this week I suddenly heard from one of the places I applied at. They wanted to know whether I knew ASP.NET and when I answered in the affirmative, they said that they were still starting up the company at which I applied for employment but that they had a client who had an urgent requirement that needed to be met now. They wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking up the job and I said yes. From what I’ve gathered so far, the client wants a specialized ASP.NET component which reads and extracts data from a variety of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files in a consistent manner. It’s basically a method to import data from a variety of PIM’s (Personal Information Managers) in a standard manner.

While we have not come to an agreement upon the terms for the project nor received the go ahead from the client, I decided to spend some time working on the base class upon which the subsequent component that the client wants will be built. This way, I’ll actually know what’s possible and what’s not possible before I start work on the actual project because I hate saying that something can be done without actually having done it before and while I do have Visual Studio.NET and C# experience, and have even worked with CSV file access before using C#, I haven’t done something *exactly* like this and I am always wary of something unexpected cropping up :p So, I have been working on the base class which is simply a CVS reader component which can access any CVS file, figure out the number of columns and then output the data record by record in a manner consistent with other database access mechanisms. I am part way through with the code now but am actually getting the crucial bits at the moment and once it is all done, there still remains the testing :p

But my hope is that I will have a prototype to show the client when the go ahead is actually received and the client can confirm or deny as to whether this is what they had in mind. If the basic component satisfies the client, then I’d have made a head-start on the project and if it doesn’t, I’d then know what was wrong and be able to start the project with the necessary information and *know* that I had the correct input – so that I won’t lose much time. So either way, I guess it won’t hurt. Of course, there is the possibility that they might decide not to go ahead with the project but even then nothing would be lost since I would have come out with a CSV reader component that I can use in some other project :p

I’ve put up yet another layout :p This time it’s water-based as opposed to the sand-based one I had up before 🙂 Incidentally, while I see the validity of Duane’s comment on the layouts not being professional, I really don’t see this site as a business :p To me, my software is something I enjoy and something with which I can help people – so I do it but I’ve never thought of it as a business and I probably won’t either since I have no plans to sell any of my stuff. So this site is at best semi-professional and at worst, just a guy trying to strut his stuff online :p I don’t want a layout that is clean-cut and efficient, I want one which is functional, aesthetic and also reflects a little bit of the personality of the site (hence that guy with the laptop who keeps on popping up all over the new layouts <g>). I know I’m not hitting the mark exactly with any of the layouts so far and that is why I keep on doing new ones. I probably like the latest one the best but the falling water effect isn’t really obvious in the frame that I did and so I’m not too happy with even that :p

In development related news, I finally managed to access the SourceForge CVS yesterday (incidentally, if anybody has problems with committing to SourceForge with WinCVS and Putty, you can now ask me :p) and committed my changes for QBoard. I haven’t heard from Joel since then and so I don’t know what he thinks of my changes. Either way, I’m probably done with that project since something new has just come up – a job to create a custom component for ASP.NET – so I’m probably gonna work on that one for a while. I really should stop messing around with so many development languages, shouldn’t I? :p

I’m still having SSH related problems with the QBoard stuff at SourceForge. I was hoping that I’d be able to commit to CVS yesterday but turns out that my SSH public key that Putty (the SSH client that I was using) generated was invalid – or rather that it was valid but not quite in the format that the SourceForge system expected when I entered it into their system. So I had to redo it yesterday and since that means another six hour wait, I couldn’t do anything yesterday either. I’m kinda getting fed up of the whole thing and if I can’t commit today either, I might simply opt to send the source code to Joel and get out of the whole thing since the work seems to be totally disproportionate to the end result :p

Speaking of end result, I totally agree with DeViLbOi’s comments about the new layout – it really is missing something 🙂 Hence the reason I put it in the test folder and asked for people’s opinion. I just don’t know what is missing but it just doesn’t seem to fit right. But I’ve since had another idea to modify that one (again) and so I probably will put up the modified layout again in a day or two (depending on how soon I figure out how to implement the new idea). My biggest problem seems to be to try to figure out how to execute a given idea – for instance, I want a falling sand effect within the space of about three pixels and I’m not sure I can achieve that .. I’ll probably end up with blotchy patches of brown and then opt to go with a full sand effect (as opposed to falling sand) and that would probably just look like a brown line :p Ah well, if I knew how to do everything I want to do, I’d probably be a graphic designer instead of a coder 🙂

There is an irritating problem with my hosting server that’s beginning to annoy me – it always seems to be down in the mornings around the time I either collect my e-mail, send out replies or try to publish this journal. I’ve noticed this for about three or four days running and it’s beginning to become a problem. I don’t relish another move but if this continues to be a problem, I might have to move. I guess I’ll wait and see. In the meantime, KuhnDog told me yesterday that he was moving his domain to his own box and that he would be able to host my own domain since he didn’t know that I’d got hosting – that was really nice of him since he’s not getting anything back from me at all in return except for loss of bandwidth. I’m beginning to realize how much of a drain my site must be on his server since now I can actually see the bandwidth stats for this domain :p

I had quite a bit of fun yesterday trying to upload the QBoard project changes that I’d made to SourceForge CVS :p First, I had to checkout from CVS and the network at work was so abysmally slow that it took about two to three hours to simply do a checkout. I then tried to do a commit of the changes I’d made and couldn’t since I kept on getting an error message about not having write access. I’d worked with CVS before while doing the LiteStep project but not with SourceForge and so I went back and did some reading and it turns out that SourceForge gives you write access only if you have SSH authentication and that meant installing an SSH client. I did that and then found out that SourceForge takes up to six hours or more to update your account with your public SSH key and that meant that I couldn’t commit to CVS yesterday. Oh boy, that was a trip and a half but I did learn a lot of things in the process :p

I also worked on the latest layout idea I had for this site. I still am not totally satisfied with it the way I was with the layout for SM and so it’s again here. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I was sort of in the zone yesterday :p I sat down at my computer around 7:00am, turned the music on and started coding and the next thing I know, my Mom is asking me if I wasn’t going to have breakfast. I looked at the clock and it was 10:30am! So I go downstairs, eat breakfast and come back and start coding again and my Mom’s again calling me and this time she wants to know if I want lunch and I look at the clock and it’s 1:00pm 🙂 I guess time sure flies when you’re having fun. I did manage to get all the changes I wanted to implement (well, almost all the changes – I think I might add a few more today that I was too lazy to put in yesterday) for the QBoard system done yesterday and I think I tested every aspect of it to make sure that it does not blow up. Of course, since the development and testing was done on my machine, on my webserver, I am not 100% sure that it is OK and so I’m going to upload it to my domain (where I already have it running using a slightly older version of the source) and test it again. If it works out, then I guess I’ll commit to SourceForge and then switch over to using the system for my own tagboard.

Of course, the system was designed to provide not just a simple tagboard for your domain or your site but to provide a remote “tagboard farm” for multiple users. I don’t know if I want to open up my server so that others can use the tagboard system too since that’s going to use up bandwidth and generate a lot of traffic. Joel (who is the main developer on the project at SourceForge) tells me that the system grew so much on his server that it was swamping everything else and I neither want nor need that. So, I am still debating about the whole QBoard thing – I do want to use it personally since I love the features it offers but I don’t know if I will open it up to the public. Maybe to a few friends but probably not generally .. at least not till I know what kind of traffic my site generates per month so that I have a rough idea as to the cut off limits :p

I probably will be home for at least today or maybe even tomorrow as well since I am not feeling too well. Of course, I knew this bout of sickness was on it’s way and so I went into work yesterday and downloaded PHP Triad. Who or what is PHP Triad you may ask? It’s a cumulative installer which installs the Apache web server, mySQL and PHP on your machine – and it’s for the Windows platform. Since I’ve been working on the QBoard project, this seemed like the perfect development environment for me when I’m at home since then I won’t need to be online to test out my changes. I installed PHP Triad yesterday evening and it seemed to work well enough but the default PHP Triad installer comes with PHP 4.0.5 but I wanted a later version since my host server runs PHP 4.2.x. Fortunately, I’d also downloaded PHP 4.3.0 as a separate download and it was the work of a matter of few minutes to replace the PHP 4.0.5 installation with PHP 4.3.0 and I was all set.

I still have not started work on actual QBoard development from home but I did bring the source with me and Joel (who is the guy who originally coded QBoard and released the source and put it on SourceForge) wrote to me today to tell me that I’d been added to the SourceForge project and that he was waiting for me to finish my changes so that he could get a new release out that has a built-in installer. So I guess I should better get cracking :p

OK, the new layout for this site’s just not coming up the way I want it to :p Maybe I should give up on the layout ideas and go back to coding as I should be doing (especially since there is this BOB related problem that a user is waiting on but for which I can’t seem to find a straight answer since he’s running BOB off a CD-ROM) but I am not happy with the current layout either. I know it is nice and it has served me well over the years but the site is now expanding and growing and I feel that the front page should provide easy navigation to all sections of the site. So I guess I’ll work at it a little bit longer but admit defeat if I am still stumped :p

Speaking of the site growing, I have ideas for two new sections 🙂 One I would like to call “hookup” <g> and is to be a help site along the lines of the GroupHug mailing list – basically a bulletin board where people can ask for any sort of help – not just my application related help. It might be that they have a problem with their Windows (the software – not the glass paned ones <g>) or they might want to change a window (the glass paned one <vbg>) and are looking for somebody to help. If somebody can help, then they can offer to do so. Of course, most of it will be remote access kind of stuff but I’m hoping that it could even lead to people in the same area assisting each other. What do you think? Workable? Too unrealistic? Too idealistic? :p

The idea is along similar lines but for writers – I want to set up a site which can be used by small cells of authors to work on stories. At the moment, I”m thinking of using MT for it and the initial user who wants to set up the cell will have to be registered as an admin for a new blog by me and then they can add new users for their own blog. At least, that’s the way I’m looking at it though I don’t know if MT works exactly that way. If not, I guess I’ll just have to look around for something which works that way. This idea actually came up because Edward and I want to collaborate on a story – and Edward actually has been doing a lot of work on the story whereas I’ve done nothing except say “I’d like to collaborate with you” – but then again, that’s me – all ideas and not enough execution :p

I think the verdict is in – nobody (as well as nobodyspecial – sorry internal joke :p) likes the new design for The Developer’s Corner :p But then again, I didn’t like it either since it seemed just not to fit in – unlike the SM design which I liked as soon as I completed it – hence that being up and the design for this page being in the test folder. Oh well, I’ve had another idea for a layout for this site so you might see something again up in the test folder or simply see the layout change depending on how it comes out :p It’s again going to be blue-based but I want to make it a lot more subtle. However, I seem to be stuck with this idea of frames like I used in SM, and so I keep on feeling the need to use graphical frames around the text here too but I am not sure that will come out the way I’m thinking of it. Ah well, the only way to see is to do it 🙂

In the mean time, I’m thinking of hosting a few people here since I have a lot of space and am hardly using any of it even after trying to several CMS installations and moving over all the bits and pieces from other sites. So if you are interested in being hosted, let me know and I can set up a sub-domain for you. So many people have been kind enough to provide me a space on the web in the past and the least I can do in return is to pass on the favour. I’ve already asked a few people but I think I should be able to host a few more. Oh yeah, there is a catch – my hosting company does not want any multimedia (audio or video) on their servers even if it was created by you. It’s in their terms of service and so I cannot have MP3, WAV, AVI files but other than that, it’s all fine. So if you are OK with that, I can host you 🙂

There is one further thing going on sitewise at the moment but that’s a bit ugly and personal. So I don’t want to discuss that here but expect a later post today on SM all about it …