Archive for the ‘.NET’ Category



PHPness

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I know what you’re thinking, and that’s this post’s title seems odd, and out of place on HD911, a contemporary glance at the state of neo-napoleonic faecal art in 1930′s France.  Errr, somethign like that.

As I’ve said before, since leaving my previous position as a C#/ASP.NET minded monkey, I’ve been tooling, (or should I say battling), with the infamous choice of script kiddy and billion dollar social network empire, PHP.  It truly lives up to its meaning as the Palace of Hedonistic Pleasure, and continues to be an outstanding joy to work with, and you know i mean this in a completely non-sarcastic way.

That’s not to say its hard, it just seems to open the void between what is right and wrong a lot more than other languages I’ve worked with of late.  Think of it like riding a bike, there’s a right and wrong way to ride a bike, and once you learn, it’s usually smooth sailling.. You can either keep speed and move forward (right), or fall off (wrong).  PHP works in much the same way, but provides the stupid (me) with many many more ways to fall off.  And from what i’ve seen so far, it doesn’t take much to end up over the handlebars, face planting into a wall with the still-spinning front wheel grinding away at what little is left of your thigh, tummy or scrotum if one is that way inclined.

After an lengthy conversation discussing (bitching) how easy falling off the proverbial bike is, a colleague at work, said, “That’s the way it works, you take the good with the bad, it’s a state of PHP-ness.”

At which point I cracked up laughing, and forever more when I cringe at some of our code base, a smile will peel across my face.

p-h-p-ness  (pee-h-p-ness)
n.

1. The state of pure ecstacy when faced with the occasional horror of PHP madness.
2. Philosophy The ethical doctrine holding that positive good things can come out of what may otherwise seem as pleasant chewing glass.
3. Psychology The doctrine holding that behavior is motivated by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

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Web2Msg

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Web2Msg

I needed to send a friend an SMS back home (Australia) the other day, and my phone had run out of batteries, again, though I did forget to charge it the night before.  That was when I remembered Web2Msg.com, which allows you to send free SMS messages to any Australian mobile phone (or cell, if you roll like that).  The best thing is, there’s no signups required, no annoying popups, and no forced advertising in the sent messages.

So, if you’re a bum, and you can’t afford a mobile phone battery, or credit for your prepaid phone, give it a go!  And best of all, it’s a feat of .NET programming.

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An update on the work and extra income situation

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Things appear to be going well so far, slowly, but in a solid direction.  Since speaking the last time, I’m just starting two freelance lots of work, boosting up my personal work and starting on a joint venture with a mate from back home.  One of the freelance jobs is making simple front end changes on a photography webiste for approximately 10-30 hours, and the other is an going data access/manipulation wrapper for an accounting application but should be a nice chunk of cash in a couple of months or so.

Adventure

The venture with Rusty is for a project/website or group of sites comprising of tech related goodness.  I can’t say much now as its still most definately in its infancy, but if all goes to plan could quite possibly be a good startup, as I’m 90% sure it hasn’t been done quite the way we want to do it before.  It all comes back to that old notion that if you can’t think of something to do, take a previous idea, build on its weaknesses and make it better, much better.  And that’s the plan.   It should be great to have a partner for once, as this should provide motivation to get more and more done and slowly but gradually fill it with content.

I’m sure (hoping) everything will click into place, and in a year from now I can look back and see what kind of changes have been made, its not even necessarily about the money, just the name and satisfaction from doing something properly.

So the first part of the Out with the Old  initiative is well on its way, not that I’ve actually accomplished anything yet, but the groundwork has been laid and between Beer, Red Wine and Irish Coffee its about all I can think about.

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A fork in the road, an HD911 expansion?

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

A fork in the road

Just a quick one tonight, but I’ve been considering expanding on my blogging at HD911 by starting a new blog with just work, career and tech stuff to go along with my recent push toward doing more personal work to try and build a name for myself. Obviously, I can’t let anything happen to Curious Perversions in the UK, what with the rave reviews from the BBC’s Mashed, Independant reader reviews at wordpress.com and the recent surge in activity and traffic from Digg, so I’ll endeavour to keep this level of brain fart up and possibly improve on both the quality and frequency of future posts.

Obviously, the idea with this is to seperate the serious content from the joke/satire/bulls**t, we’ll see how it turns out eventually anyway..

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Full Steam Ahead

Friday, November 16th, 2007

Motivation

Or should I say, Full Steam Ahead at Home, Two Mighty Steps Back, at Work….

On one hand I’m happy as hell, I’m making huge progress on one of my home projects which is great for a few reasons.  Firstly, I’m actually getting some personal work done, which is good as I’m creating a hobby, as opposed to the endless nights spent downloading new TV shows to watch while drowning myself in wine (and cognac).  Secondly, I can just feel already, this last week or so of doing approximately two hours work a night has already started in the process, improving my self motivation to do these things that I really want to do, but never get around to it.

Building on from my previous post where I spoke about doing extra work at home (both personal, and freelance), I’m hoping to eventually establish myself, and in doing so, get my name out, make some more money and hopefully generate some passive income on the side.  That’s the plan anyway, now I just need to put these thoughts into fruition and get it out to a point where I can provide a service for others.

Unfortunately, the workload at the office has dried up slightly for a week or so, so I’ve taken (what I consider) a step back and am working on a PHP application.  This is marginally annoying, as I haven’t done any PHP work for what must be approximately five years now, and also because I didn’t particularly like it in the first place.  But like all things, I’ll use it as a bit of good experience, and may even enjoy myself too.  A chance to branch out slightly, perhaps, and should definitely kill the inevitable boredom of doing the same work day in, day out.

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Freelance – A new journey through DotNet Hell (Possibly)

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I’ve recently got my foot in with a London based photography firm who need a few error fixes done to their web site and the application behind it.  I’ve always wanted to start getting a little bit of work on the side, and this might be a good oppurtunity to knuckle down and start doing it.  At the moment its only twenty or so hours work, but it should help with rent and bills moving into the new house and Christmas coming up as well.

Having started on the work tonight and getting a good look at the inner workings of the site, I was shocked to see that I’d possibly just landed work which suffered from the same few issues that I’ve been battling for the last six months at my job.  It’s much, make that loads, better than the original state of the work at the office, and I’m thankful for that, but the spaghetti mess (albeit a neat mess) is not my best idea of a good code base to work around, and build upon.  I’ve got to get involved in a big enterprisey application at some stage and really learn something, that would be a good move toward improving my work/career.

Baby steps Shannon, baby steps.

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Life Lesson: Be a little more assertive at work

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Back in June I posted about my first contract as I set down in Little England.  The job was advertised as an ASP.NET role, and whilst the underlying code was written in C#, its been written in spaghetti style, ala ASP Classic.  At the time, I was brought in to fix a few things up (initially this was nothing to do with the front end, UI), to get it ready for production and as such didn’t think it was my place to comment on the obvious short-comings in the code (and the percieved abilities of the guy before me), and that in NO way was it ready for production at all.  I also didn’t want to diss my pre-decessor as it usually doesn’t make for a healthy workplace. But, I think in future I’ll speak my mind sooner…

Wind time ahead three months and while I was away on holiday they’ve got a new working on the same project.  Whilst a lot of the administration and back end programming is secure/up to date and bug free, the front end still has blaring holes (most certainly because of the fifth or sixth new front end design being dropped over the site in the timespan of about 2 months).  Anyway, he’s spoken up and I’ve now come off looking like I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the last 3 months.  Turns out everythings all good still, anyway, but I still can’t help feeling like I’ve been put on the spot a little.  Of course, nows a better time than any to get things fixed up and ready for shipping I’m just torn between when to be an ass-hole, and when not.

I’m taking this a life lesson, stand up for myself a bit more and speak my mind when I’m not happy with things.

What is the correct course of action in this case, do I play the cocky prick and speak my mind straight away, or leave things as is (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it kinda attitude, even if its not quite the right way of doing things) .

I’m sure there’s a mature responsible way of handling this situation.  Ah well, next time!

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Hell in Pseudo .NET, surrounding a nice big ball of ASP-Classic

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Obviously not me, but the sentiment is there!

Have you ever started something and wished you’d thought about it a little bit more and started something else? A bit of foresight would be nice in these situations, to be able to know what was involved in the journey you were just about to embark on. In a way, its similar to buying a beat up old shell of a 70′s Corvette to restore to perfection, only not knowing that every part is either fanastically expensive, or just too rare, making parts of the project next to impossible. Well, not exactly, I’ve no idea whats involved with restoring an old Corvette, so I’m not really in my right to comment on it.

Anyway, this is how I’ve been feeling about my new contract recently, it was advertised as an ASP.NET (C#) 2.0 position. Just my area, work I’m used to, and I really wanted to get into a Position where I’d be doing some high level stuff thats been a bit more challenging that work I’ve bee doing of late.

It’s not exactly what I expected, my predecessor seemed to know his stuff (to an extent), and the application as it stood was solid and error free, but that’s about it. Things I’ve discovered so far:

  • The only thing .NET about this application is its server side code is written in C#, apart from the code itself all pages are written ASP-classic style:
    • embedded <% %> tags strewn all throughout the code in true ASP spaghetti styles
    • no concept of viewstate, postbacks, code-behind and not a single ASP.NET control was used (I know, Gridviews are the scorn of the devil, but I miss Controls, Masterpages, Repeaters, etc etc)
    • extremely mediocre classes with no concept of code reuse (A quite well written SQL wrapper class, the only problem is its been repeated about 20 times on different pages). (App_Code, anyone?!?!)
    • Not to mention, is missing out on all the nice things that I’ve grown so accustomed to, that were mainly available in ASP time too like Sessions, Caching, Compression, Collections, etc..
  • And various problems with security. I’ve been doing this for a fair while now, and in the web world I think (what I understand is a common thought) security is imperative. Joe (we’ll call him that), must have had no concept of SQL injection at all as there’s no use of parameters, or even simple string escaping and type checking.

So anyway, it seems I’ve got quite a job ahead of me to get this project up and web ready (secure) by August. Heave Ho!!!

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