Categories
process programming rights

Croydon Central Library Code Club

As you can see from the large hole in my post history, I’ve been a little busy for past couple of years. Of course, this is no excuse. I’m just as busy now, if not more so. But I’m going to put more effort into regularly updating this blog.

Code Club is one of the reasons for this extra pressure on my free time. About two years ago I set up a club in our local library. And last week I was asked to answer some questions for a Code Club blog post.

Categories
programming

Croydon Tech City programming surgery

On Thursday, I started a new monthly Croydon Tech City event. I’ve scheduled this event for 19:00 to 21:00 on the last Thursday of the month at Matthews Yard. The programming surgery is a chance for local programmers to get help with their programming problems from local professionals.

Categories
programming

XPath and the default namespace

I’ve been working on a make script that extracts the files it needs to build from a Microsoft Visual Studio project file. The .vcxproj file format is XML so I imagined it would be easy to use a command line XML processor to do the job. However because the project file declares a default namespace this was not as easy as it first looked.

Categories
Internet

Importing .eml email to Maildir

Recently, while reconciling my company accounts, I found I was missing an email receipt. I was able to retrieve a copy of the email as a .eml file, but to store it with my other emails I needed some way to import it into my email system.

Categories
politics video games

The importance of education

We have a new young chancellor and it was his first budget this week. He made at least one schoolboy error. Did you spot it?

He forgot that profit = revenue – costs.

This is an important accounting concept often used when making accounts, financial plans, and budgets.

Categories
politics

The politics of apathy

A while back I wrote to my MP. A few days ago, he wrote back. This is only the third time I have written to my MP and the first time I’ve had any reply whatsoever. It was negative but at least I got a response.

Many of my friends consider writing to their MP a waste of time. And they have statistically significant reasons for thinking that way. But is this a self fulfilling prophecy? I am coming around to the idea that in the system we pass off as a democracy many things stagnate through plain stupor.

Categories
process programming

That’s not what I had in mind

I’ve recently noticed that I frequently hold nonsensical ideas in my mind. Often these are pure contradictions. Merely attempting to describe these is enough to discover the problems. But there are also times where only the realisation of the ideas can break the illusion.

Categories
process video games

Gnothi seauton

While playing Assassin’s Creed a couple of days ago, I realised that whenever I pick up a new game I first learn the limitations of my game character. In a way I get to relive childhood for a short time and truly experience what it is to know nothing.

Categories
Internet video games

PS3 compatible video

After much searching I’m unable to find a simple reliable method to get video into a format that the PS3 can recognise and play. But I do have a recipe that works in the majority of cases.

Categories
Internet process

E-mail collection

For a long time I’ve wanted a better home office e-mail system and I finally had some free time to set it up. It took a while. The information and tools are all freely available. But they are distributed in many different places and it’s difficult to find stuff when you don’t know what to look for. So I’m documenting my set-up here for future reference.