Those are brave men. Let's go kill them.

As someone who likes to spend the majority of his free time in front of a television consuming television and playing video games, I've had a surprisingly active couple weekends. Last week was the epic warehouse move of doom at work, in which we had to pack all the whisky in the known universe into vans and relocate them to a larger facility. This resulted in me and many other vigilant "volunteers" spending most of Friday and all of Saturday carrying a metric shit tone (an officially recognised weight) of whisky of vans and onto shelves.

It wasn't all bad though, there were some laughs to be had as the professionality of the operation fell the more tired we became. Below is one of my favourite images from when myself and Mike (pictured) had to move a packing table across the building. It would have required four people to carry it, so we came up with a more creative solution that I could move single handed.

Having recovered from that fake weekend, yesterday was West Hill Karate's twelve hour sponsored bag session to raise money for St. Michael's Hospice. It's not as bad as it sounds, I didn't actually have to hit a bag for twelve hours. Instead there was a single punching bag that had to be hit for the twelve hour period, with people taking fifteen minute shifts. I showed up for the last three and a half hours of the event, hit the bag for thirty minutes and held it for forty five minutes. It was a lot of fun, although I did make quite a mess of my hands. Its not like my career depends on them or anything fortunately.

Of course all this frolicking in the wilderness hasn't stopped me doing some loafing. The folk at work got me into watching Breaking Bad recently. I'm two episodes into season two and absolutely blown away by how incredible it is. So far every episode has been greater than the last and from what I've been told it just gets better and better. It's shocking how methodical, drawn out and realistic the show is and I'm pretty surprised someone hasn't tried to cancel it yet. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't heard of it.

The last TV series I really got into was Game of Thrones. After the season finished I really wanted to check out the book series it's based on as I'm a fairly impatient guy, but gave up on both the ebook and the audiobook. I dumped the ebook due to fear of eye strain (I look at screens for most of the day and didn't want to add additional reading) and quit the audiobook pretty quickly because the person reading it is simply god awful. For my birthday I got the physical books which seems to have stuck, as I'm almost half way through the first tome. It certainly feels good in this modern day to read a good old fasion book. Whoda'thunk it huh?

Finally in video games, I've been on an old school Zelda kick in anticipation of the new game. I completed the original NES Zelda for the first time about a month ago and I'm a couple dungeons away from the ending of Ocarina of Time, which I've also never completed. I'm a terrible Zelda fan I guess, but I'm trying to correct that. On the more modern side of things I've been playing Gears of War 3, which is a fantastic co-op experience. I played the entire campaign with three other University / Karate chums and it was a blast. The game is a pretty evolutionary upgrade from Gears 2, but simply playing that game with four people is such a fun experience. We also completed an epic fifty waves of horde together and yesterday did all twelve waves of beast mode on insane. It's great stuff indeed.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so

Don't panic.Salut world!

Wow, my last post was on Monday, sorry about that. This Tuesday was the first day back at Uni and Karate, and Wednesday was the first day back at work for the new year. When I wasn't doing one of those three things I was busy rushing to get the documentation for my Flash assignment done before the deadline on Thursday. The week in general has been a pretty draining experience as I tell my body I can't follow the daily cycle I had over the Christmas break.

While I've not produced a lot more planning documentation for my project this week, I have made some great progress. While at work on Wednesday I had a meeting with my client where we discussed how the app should work and went over my interface designs. The feedback to the designs was very positive and he signed off on them. There were only a couple of suggestions for changes, which were:

• Make the app UK only initially (and for the duration of my project) to remove shipping complexity.

• Change the way accessories work to a screen where you add accessories to a product (rather than select accessories in a drill down menu for each product).

• I hadn't planned how to handle user login. For now we will keep this the same as how the current website works and have the user create a login after submitting an order. This also removes some complexity.

The rest of my time has been spent filling in the last few holes in my Object-C / iPhone programming knowledge. There is no doubt much I still need to learn and many things I will discover as I develop the app, but I'm trying to hit the key things I know I will need before development begins.

Two of the things I've been reading about that are crucial to the app are web services and data storage. Many of the apps I've looked at that contain vast information about whisky have no backend support. When you download the app its a massive 400-500MB file full of data and images, and if they update it to add new items you have to re-download the whole thing.

One of the neat things about the app I plan to develop is it will have the full support of the current websites backbone, including the massive database of products. I'm going to use a web service at the initial launch of the app to download the simplest version of the product range (name, price, ABV and image url most likely) for the list views and then request more information on a particular product when the user selects it. On future loads of the app I can then do a similar call to sync any changes, such as a product being removed.

The good news is it seems very easy to call and parse data in Object-C, so long as I keep to single level XML. For some reason there is no tree-based XML parser in the iPhone SDK, and I don't intend to spend my time implementing my own. Following the book I've produced a simple app that pulls the top ten songs in iTunes from a RSS feed. My next step here will be to put up my own web service and try retrieving data from it. I need to decide if I should use a SOAP or RESTful service, as the SDK supports both.

The other thing I've been reading about today is data storage. The iPhone actually has four options here:

Technique	Pros	Cons
Archiving	Allows ordered relationships (arrays, not sets). Easy to deal with versioning.	Reads all the objects in (no faulting). No incremental updates.
Web Service	Makes it easy to share data to other devices and applications.	Requires a server and a connection to the internet.
SQLite	Can fetch lazily. Incremental updates. Full power of SQL.	Requires more code than archiving or Core Data. No real ordered relationships.
Core Data	Lazy fetches by default. Incremental updates.	Versioning is awkward (but can certainly be done using a NSModelMapping). No real ordered relationships. Much of the power of SQL is inaccessible.

Credit: iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide By Joe Conway & Aaron Hillegass

Obviously I'm going to use a web service for syncing data with the mother ship, but I don't plan to rely on it the whole time. Archiving involves saving out my objects to a file in the app's sandbox. As it says above, this doesn't allow you to update individual records and is certainly not suitable for a database with over 4000+ products. So my choice really comes down to SQLite and Core Data. So far I've covered SQLite which seems pretty great, but I will withhold judgement until I have seen how restrictive Core Data really is.

So thats a project update. In other news I took my first run of the year with a couple guys from karate. I intended to make this a weekly thing near the start of last year but didn't have much luck at doing it more than once a month. Hopefully this year I can really keep it up. This, along with karate three times a week, should hopefully get me a bit fitter. I was particularly happy with this run as it's the first 3+ miles run I've done in a long time without stopping. Lets hope this keeps up.

Oh, and my MacMini died Friday…

It had been booting slower and slower (12+ minutes) and became quite crashy over the last week or so. I even got my first kernel panic. I tried all the usual things like fixing permissions, checking the disk, resetting PRAM and initially they seemed to help, but it eventually got too much and I decided to try a re-instal. That got very close to finishing before displaying a massive yellow warning triangle telling me the instal had failed and asked to restart the machine. When it did the instal disk could no longer see the hard drive, so I believe the technical description for where I am I completely fucked. Fortunately its under a year old and is covered by Apple, but for some reason their support line closes at 7:45 on a Friday and doesn't re-open till Monday.

So I got that going for me...

One cabbage slug could destroy the entire eco-system

I really should shave...Ahoy world!

It's only been three weeks since my last post so I believe I should receive some sort of award or accreditation by now. I know I previously promised regular posts for realz this time, but then I was awfully sick for a couple weeks and Christmas kinda just happened. Thankfully for my nose, lungs and wallet, all that is now beyond us. I do have a couple updates before we continue though!

Just over a year ago I failed my second brown belt (1st kyu) karate grading. There are many reasons why I failed, most of which I'm sure I can blame on the economy. The good news is just before I fell dreadfully sick a couple weeks ago I took it again and passed! That's right folks, I levelled up my ninja skills. Seriously though, it was a horribly difficult and lengthy ordeal and I can't thank enough the other brown belts who graded with me for keeping me motivated throughout.

Skipping past my bout with the plague, Christmas was a scrumptious good time for all. There was much family, many friends, lots of gift giving and far too much food. It was so enjoyable I think we should perhaps do it again next year? Just sticking that idea out there…

So enough updates. What's happening right now? My inconvenient near death experience put a bit of a hamper in my plan to plan my project for four weeks so I'm going to be working on that quite a lot over this next one. I also need to complete my individual flash game. 

I will write more about those in some later posts, but what I really want to talk about this second is daily! From this post forward I plan to post something to this blog every single day. The idea behind this is I can be incredibly lazy about being motivated to get things done. To give you can idea, after receiving a PlayStation 3 for Christmas I completed the original Assassin's Creed within three days and am already invested into it's sequel. I binge on this stuff and it's probably (but not yet proven!) not good for me. 

So the theory is if I have to post something every day I will at least get something done, even if it's a simple mind dump of my current thoughts. It's not really for anyones benefit but mine, but if you are reading this I hope it's at least somewhat interesting. I have used the word "something" this entire time mind, as I reserve the right to simply post a picture that somehow represents that day.

How long will this continue? Who knows… But at least it should put an end to these update posts that are continually looking back rather than reflecting on current events and projecting forward.

I will make a decent blog out of you yet!

It's like a new years resolution, except I have work to do and can't wait four days.

Knitting isn't good for you

Everyone loves snow!Hey world!

It's December now so I really do owe this blog another update. I know I keep committing myself to updating it on a more regular basis, and then totally forgetting about it for four months but this time I think we're on to a winner! More on that later. Firstly some other random shit that has happened since my last post…

Remember how I aced my driving theory test, only to totally flunk the practical on the grounds that I'm unsafe? Yeah, we all laughed then, but then I totally took the test again and now I'm totally legally allowed to drive! I don't own a car or anything, but the point is should the need arise I now have a license to run over all the grannies I want. That was the whole point of the exercise right?

After that long old placement year I moved on and returned to the University life. I don't know if it was the year out, all the brain cells I've killed or that this is just what final years are like, but I certainly don't remember this shit being as hard. They actually want me to do quite a lot of work. What's up with that? One of the things we need to produce this year is two games in flash (one single player, one multiplayer). My single player game is about eating pie, while avoiding celery (because vegetables are bad for you). It's quite a way from being done, and I don't take any pride in the home made graphics, but this should give you an idea of where I'm going (ignore the score which is going up on its own and your inability to actually interact with the food).

Meanwhile, some rapscallions burned down Hastings Pier. See some of the awesome pictures my dad took here.

I also seem to have become annoyingly accident prone lately, or I'm just having a bad month. About five weeks ago I kicked a strapping chap at karate and injured my foot in the process. Initially I didn't think much of the pain (thinking I had just done a bad kick), but it continued for weeks. Eventually I visited the doctor and they x-rayed it thinking it might be fractured, but it turns out I just had severe internal bruising. It's not quite as impressive sounding, but at least it seems to be getting better.

Much worse however was my accident a couple days ago where I succeeded in stabbing a very large knitting needle into the palm of my hand. The dog knocked a laptop of the arm rest of a chair and in my failed attempt to catch it I jammed my hand straight down into what turned out to be a basket full of wool and knitting needles. Unlucky for me a single needle was pointing up out of the basket and firmly imbedded itself deep enough for me to raise my hand up and have the needle fully support itself. I instinctively yanked the thing out immediately, resulting in much pain and blood. It looks like a pathetically small scab now, but for a couple of days it was too painful to use the entire hand. The irony of the whole thing is the laptop landed on the ground perfectly fine...

Oh, and over the last week it snowed. A lot.

So thats me up to date. Back to the subject I alluded to at the beginning, the reason I will soon be blogging much more often is my final year project. I plan to develop a social whisky iPhone application for the folks I worked at during my placement year and to aid me in producing all the crazy documentation I need to do I’m going to blog the whole thing. The final deadline for my project is Friday 29th April 2011, so between now and then expect to see a lot here about my project's progress, plans, ideas and the successes and failures along the way. It should be fun, and please feel free to give me comments, advise and feedback along the way.

Once more, with feeling!

So this happened...Hey world! It's me again...

So that april resolution thing didn't exactly kick off as I had intended, but I have high hopes for August. I mean, I'm only eight months into the year. As it would turn out having a job is a lot like working and not having a lot of free time. Whats up with that?

So let's summarise whats happened since April, then move on with our lives.

I passed my driving theory test! I got a face stomping 49/50 in the multiple choice section and a respectable 65/75 in hazard perception. Rather curiously they don't tell you what you got wrong, so there is apparently one very crucial rule of the road that I got completely wrong and never will be corrected on. Fantastic! To be honest though, the whole test is one hilarious joke. Some questions seriously involve what type of glasses you should wear in blinding sun, and one of the answers is "half mooned"...

I found out that one of my wisdom teeth had grown right up against the back wall where I couldn't physically clean it. This resulted in a lot of bad things, and long story short a nasty old man had to rip the bloody thing out of my head. It turns out that being a dentist can be exceedingly barbaric at times, and I found the whole "I'm going to hold you down and yank part of you out of your skull" thing to be a pretty awful experience. But hey, I got this awesome picture to show all my friends!

The folks at work had a hog roast and beer hunt. That was pretty awesome.

Two of my bestest best friends from way back in school were going to have a baby, but tragically lost him about five months into the pregnancy. I attended my first funeral, one of the most horrific moments in my entire life. I try my best to help them cope with their loss, but sometimes you feel like there is nothing you can truly say or do that will make it better for them. I just hope to never experience something like this ever again.

I completed my placement year and took a month off to relax. You'd have thought I would have been more productive during a whole month off and oh, I don't know, post something on this here blog, but I didn't. It just shows how much I truly enjoyed it!

Commiseration present.I failed my driving practical test. The thing was going swimmingly until on the sixth stop and start (where you have to pull over at a safe place, then drive away again) I pulled over on a down hill and in the time it took me to look and pull out some jerk (clearly speeding) appeared over the top of the hill and had to slow down as I pulled out. Apparently this was unsafe as I caused him to slow and I got a serious fault that failed me. Unfortunately due to a new part of the test they are bringing in in October everyone is trying to pass now and there is a ten week waiting list to retake it. That time is almost up however and I retake my test next Tuesday! The folks at work also sent me a rather kind commiseration present.

I completed all the bullshit the British Computer Society want you to do to recorgnise your placement year. Pro tip for anyone planning to do somthing similar at University; actually do your documentation while on placement. Being the A+ procrastinator that I am, I left it until six days before it was due in and completed it with just hours to spare. Go me!

I finally got back into this exercise lark. After the first few months of my placement year all the commuting and work wore me down pretty bad and I pretty much gave up attending karate sessions or doing any exercise at all. Thats all changed now, as I'm back to training 2/3 times a week plus doing weekly 3 mile runs with some friends. I hope to finally grade and get my 1st kyu in December. Wish me luck!

I got a job! So after putting up with me for a whole year the folks I worked for decided they just couldn't live without me, so they offered me a real bonified job gosh darn it. Obviously I still plan to go back and do my final year at University, so I'll only be working part time with them come October, but holy cow, someone actually hired me for realz. I fooled them good and proper!

So that's the status of me! Wasn't that fun?

Let's hope I don't come back in another four months and have to do this all over again...

Hey mum, I'm on the internets!

Will build databases for food!!!It's been a while hasn't it?

I decided to make a fresh start with this page and moved it to a better platform (check 'em out here) with the intention of actually keeping it updated. I've been pretty bad at this over the last year, but I'm pretty sure it will work out this time. Let's call it an new years april resolution and never speak of this subject again.

So what's the haps chicken wing, as the hipsters would say? Well I've been working at this place since June and by Jebus has it been a train ride and a half. Among the many things I intend to talk about on this blog is the stuff I've been working on there (shameless shelf promotion if you like), but as a general overview it's been a blast. The peeps that I work with are highly motivated, great fun and I've learnt so much. It's certainly put a lot of things into perspective that you can't get in a lecture theatre and I certainly don't regret doing this placement year.

If you've come across this page without prior knowledge of me I guess I should provide some background so that you can become a better stalker. I believe everyone should have at least a couple quality stalkers and I don't think mine are up to snuff... I'm a guy from a little ol' town called Hastings (you may remember us from a famous battle that never actually happened in the town of it's namesake) in the UK (that places under the ash cloud of doom). I have a BTEC National Diploma in Computing and am currently studying for a BSc(Hons) Internet Degree in Computing at the University of Brighton (they conveniently have a campus right here).

As well as being a "web developer" (does that even mean anything these days? It's such a vague title... I don't really like it) I do many other things. To combat the issue of sitting at a computer all day I run when I can and train in the art of Kyokushinkai Karate. To resolve the issue of all that exercise I also love video games. They give me a chance to sit in front of a TV all day when I'm not at a computer.

Well this has been fun, maybe I'll update this page again before 2011! 

Only time will tell...