dan's blog

A friend lent me a Raspberry Pi B last week - he was curious how powerful it was, and if it might provide sufficient computing power for him to use with his 3D printer business. Wow, those things are cool! I've only dabbled in a few things so far, but I am so impressed.

I just found a drawback to using a wiki for documenting all the steps and issues with software and stuff...  Usually when I am documenting the process and steps I am doing, I have the wiki page open and document as I go - otherwise I risk not docucenting everything, missing steps, or even not going back to document what I did. Just like when you are documenting your code within a program - you have to do it as you go because you never go back and doucment everything once you're done..

I just stumbled across something amazing. Some file managers (like Konqueror on Unix, and Finder on OSX) support FTP/SFTP directly! I was tired of using the command-line sftp client to upload complex directory structures (and not wanting to just tar everything) so I was looking at recommented clients (incidentally, FileZilla appears to still be highly recommended).  I notice that the Konqueror tool was listed. So i tried it:  in the folder path, just enter: sftp://user@servername.com

CodenameOne (www.codenameone.com) aims to be a write-once-deploy-to-any-mobile-device tool. I've just started using it, and so far so good. Steve Hannah did an introductory hourlong webinar showing the complete development of a social-media type application. As well, the CodenameOne project has a number of tutorial and sample apps. 

Things never stay constant as a computer consultant; we need to always stay fresh, and learn new technologies and approaches. As one project winds down, it's time to find more work, and that means getting back up to speed on a whole new set of technologies. Sure, having been in this business for many moreyears than I care to admit, learning new stuff is pretty easy - as long as I let myself. I've seen colleagues fall by the wayside, saying they were too old to learn new programming languages. I hope I never feel that way....

Work has thankfully slowed down a bit; after many, many months of hectic work building to the "GoLive" event, reducing my working hours to what is normally called "full time" seems like I have tons of spare time. The famly appreciates it. With all this free time, though, I have found time for some other projects: one new tool that has got my attention is CodeNameOne. I'll try to blog about it more later, but it purports to be a 'write once, deploy to many different mobile environments' thing. It sounds really interesting.