The Ringtail

Am making some changes to my web presence for the new year, and courtesy of the folks at SWBroadband. Keep tuned.

I really like Evernote. It’s a great concept, but the actual app itself leaves me a bit overwhelmed as it has far more features than I really need. The real kicker is that there is no easy way to get your data out if you want it. Not too much of an issue with ~20 notes, but I’ve just started to make the investment to move all my notes in and, as I get closer to 200 notes in, I realise that I am making a decision to stick with this software if I go any further. Lock-in scares me every time.

So I am going to sketch up a new web app to try myself. Key features:

• notes stored as text files in a folder structure on the file system
• folders and notes create a hierarchical structure of notes to browse
• clicking a note title shows the note
• clicking in the text opens the note for editing (via JQuery)
• notes that begin with a ‘_’ character are secure and need to be unlocked to view or edit
• notes that begin with a ‘>’ character are public and show up visibly (blogging lite)

Will start this tomorrow and see how it goes. I have three apps on the go now so really do need to sort out how I can get other folks involved to test and provide feedback.

I have been thinking recently of studying for a second degree with the Open University. As I have a 5-hour round trip down to work at least twice a week I reckon I could make good use of the time and get most of my studying done on the train. The question is – what to take?

I took two years of Maths at Uni, but without the grounding I missed at school (crappy O-level pass and no A-level) I always found it hard and didn’t really ever ‘get’ it. I’ve always said I would return at some point and go through a full Maths degree so maybe this is the right one?

I am a hobbyist programmer and would like to have a deeper understanding of the nature of programming, especially as it relates to free software. However, I’m not really interested in learning vocationally (i.e. I don’t want to be in IT in a large corporation) so perhaps the OU route is not the right one for this subject; it certainly seems to be skewed towards practical application rather than science.

On the other hand, I did a Science foundation course with the OU many years ago which I really enjoyed, and I’ve always had more than a passing interest in Physics. Given that I would need a fairly solid Maths grounding to do advanced Physics anyway, and the fact that there would be lots of ‘hobbyist’ programming opportunities along the way, perhaps a Science degree is the way forward?

Sounds like a plan…

I’m working through tasksapp and making sure I am fully covered by my unit tests, ready for refactoring. I’ve already spotted a lot of optimisations I can make and I’m quite looking forward to getting stuck in and doing them now.

One interesting one is that I hade written all my database queries to grab results, package them up into arrays of raw database information and return them to the calling function to do with what it needs to. I thought this was a good, general way to do it at the time, but with hindsight, I’ve had to introduce lots of fudges and unnecessary functions to work with these arrays. Refactoring to return the database results as arrays of Action objects makes things much easier and actually provides better separation of tasks across the whole application.

You live and learn.

This is a test post from a command-line program called Charm.

I am still using Linux Mint and will not be talking about switching or swapping ever again.