It is hard to believe that it was almost 4 years ago that I started university. In that time I have learnt a lot more than I expected to, especially on the placement, so thanks blubolt, making it actually a really good experience.

Next week is graduation. It is one of those events you hear a lot about, especially as one of my housemates for the past few years graduated last summer, but I really don’t know what to expect. Is it true that the chancellor really is boring? Will everyone look really silly in academic dress? Who will actually be graduating and have remembered to ask for seats?

Still, should be fun.

In the mean time, I need to do lots of applying for jobs, some coding for MyFC and a variety of other things. And every time I go online there seems to be another thing I need to sort out.

Shall we see how long I can keep updating this blog for this time?

A couple of days where one thing after another goes wrong. What more could anyone want? That is basically what has happened with me over the past few days.

Let’s start off with my iPhone. I installed Vista on my desktop over the weekend, which meant I had to reactivate iTunes before I could sync my phone with it. Would have been nice for someone to tell me that before trying to sync it, because somehow in the process half the applications I have were deleted from my phone with no warning, resulting in the loss of some data. Luckily for me the applications I have installed are all free, so they could be replaced with no problem, but the loss of data (not that it was important data) and the fact it happened at all surprised and irritated me.

As I had just installed Vista, I was having a look around it and getting used to it all when I noticed that iTunes likes to store all the configuration data for playlists in C:\Users\username\Music, or the default music folder as it is more commonly known. I want to be able to synchronize my music collection over several computers (most of which don’t have iTunes or the capability to run it), and having that folder on them all just seems like a massive kludge.

One of the other things I ordered recently was a cover for my iPhone, so that it does not get scratched. The one I ordered was the Marware Sport Grip from play.com, a shop I have used many times before and who I have always been happy with. This would be fine, but so far they haven’t managed to send it, and it is really starting to get annoying given how risky it is to have a smartphone without some kind of protection for it. To their credit, they did send the other thing I ordered very fast, but I would rather have had the iPhone cover.

All of this was topped off with what happened on Tuesday. After doing lots of work on one specific file during the day (an update script) the text editor or link between the computers I was working on resulted in the file I had been working on somehow being empty. As it was a brand new file, I didn’t have a backup of it, meaning I had lost half a day’s work. Luckily after quite a while trying to recover the file, I eventually managed to get most of it back by grepping the hard drive for a string I knew was in the file, storing the output of grep on another computer, then using ed and grep to get all that was left of the file, including the bits that took the most time to develop.

When I lost the data I was exceptionally annoyed, and one thing I tend to do when annoyed is put on some stupidly heavy music (in this case, System Of A Down). For some reason that tends to make me much more relaxed and generally happier, although I really don’t know why.

Three days of woe – hopefully that won’t happen again for a while.

I appear to have a working iPhone 3G, to replace my aging (not always working) Samsung SGH-X100.

My first impressions are quite good – the phone does a lot of useful things that my old didn’t. It really is nice having a phone that doesn’t crash 6 seconds into a phone call, has Internet access, and is generally nice to use.

Having used it for a few days, there are only a few annoyances. The lack of copy and paste has been fairly widely reported, and it generally hasn’t been an issue for me, until I wanted to track an order on the City-Link website, when I had the tracking number in an email and SMS.

The other annoyance has been the thing that replaces what you have just written with what it thought you were writing. One thing it likes changing in particular is dro to fro, making my email address much harder to type. Having said that though, I am writing this on the phone (using the WordPress application) and the text replacing makes writing large bodies of text much much easier. Maybe just working out how to add “dro” to the dictionary would be enough.

It claims to have what is basically a built in iPod, but I have to say that the sound quality really isn’t as good as some other manufacturers – in particular Creative as I was comparing it to their Zen V (using the same headphones to make it a fair test). Also, the headphones that come with the iPhone are not at all comfortable and an annoying shade of white.

To conclude, the iPhone in general seems really nice, with just a few fairly minor things letting it down. Writing this took longer than it would have on a computer, but was quite a nice experience and is certainly up to the job for dealing with emails and fairly simple web browsing. Now I just need a case for it…

As mentioned in my previous post, MyFC has undergone many changes over the past month.  We are on to version 4 of the site, which involves mostly similar functionality to v3, with the addition of groups.  It also includes a new design, and numerous existing pieces of functionality being redeveloped to fit in to a more widgetized design, while also cleaning up the code for them significantly.  The biggest change in that respect was the messaging system, where the code was just becoming exceptionally hard to work with due to the complexity of it, and the various design changes it has seen.

The other major change, from a user’s point of view, was the addition of moderation for new topics on the forums.  It was getting to the stage where you couldn’t read anything on the forums without finding something exceptionally negative to do with MyFC – lots of criticism but almost none of it constructive.  By moderating it, the most provocative threads now don’t make it through, meaning our lives are easier and hopefully encourage more people to use the forums.  Along with that, we removed post counts and the rating system for posts, which caused so many problems and arguments.

And after that we carried on developing various new pieces of functionality.  Nothing really to say here.

That brings us to the past week.  About a week ago I worked out that the entire site has in the region of 170,000 lines of code.  this is a massive amount (less than I expected, but still massive), and so I started trying to clean it up – there are many files that were used in previous versions and aren’t any more – and also fix various bugs or errors that have popped up.  This is something I will carry on with next week, along with (hopefully) making some significant changes to the forum, which have the honour of being the second worst part of the site from a code perspective.  Seriously, are over 100 queries needed on each page load?

The past month has been stupidly busy.  Aside from working for MyFC, with many major changes going live including version 4 of the website, I have also had to contend with writing a report about the placement I did at blubolt, as well as sorting out various other requirements for the placement.

I did most of the placement stuff in the past week, and as I am on my way to hand in about 64 pages of stuff, you can probably imagine how much I wanted to write anything at all, which hopefully explains why this hasn’t appeared for a while.

As I am writing this, I am on the train to Bath to hand the report in.  First chance I have had to do anything in a while.

Parts of the report and related documentation were exceptionally hard to write because they are really tedious and just generally a waste of time, meaning that after almost every sentence written I got distracted by something.  This wasn’t helped by my plans to buy both an iPhone (or similar) and a new computer.  (Some sections of it I could see a valid reason for having, but the others were irrelevant to my placement).

There are two companies I don’t like.  Microsoft and Apple.  Between them they have popularised computers so much that there is at least one in almost every home, but the products they make are insanely expensive, and with Apple their practices with regard to replacing parts, etc is just shocking.  That makes me reluctant to buy an iPhone, but having had a look around, there is simply not other phone at the same stage with regard to usability, functionality and availability, meaning if I want the features (which I do), I will have to pay over the odds for it.  At least it is possible to jailbreak it, meaning I can use a modification of debian’s package manager with it.

As an aside, the company behind ubuntu have said that OS X, although widely regarded to have the best user interface (which I disagree with – never liked the thing), is starting to lag behind, and so within the next two years, ubuntu should have a much better user interface than any other operating system on the market.  I can’t wait.

The computer I want will naturally be ordered in parts and assembled by me, but so far I keep changing my mind with a number of components on it.  I am happy with the case I have picked (Thermaltake Armor Jr.), CPU (Intel Core 2 Quad 6600), memory (4 gb of decent Corsair stuff), and I know that I don’t want a graphics card as I have one already.  That just leaves PSU and motherboard (CPU Cooler is a fairly simple choice, HDDs depend on prices at the time of purchase).  So far I have switched between the Asus PQ5 Pro, PQ5-E and a Gigabyte one (they have really weird naming schemes for their products, so I can’t remember what it is at all while on the train).  Hopefully I will order that all within the next few days, along with some software to test the system (Guitar Hero 3).

This post seems have become fairly long.  I was going to write about MyFC in it as well, but I can see that being a similar length, so probably best to leave that for another post.

Doing a placement was brilliant, but it had to come to an end at some point.   And when that happened, I had a choice. Stay with Blubolt or work for MyFootballClub.

You can probably guess what I decided by the image to the right.

MyFootballClub is the owner of Ebbsfleet United, and gives members the opportunity to make key decisions for the club, and (soon) pick the team that will play in matches.

The work at Blubolt was good, and the people better, but I felt it was getting to the stage where I needed to move on, to both expand my experience even more (MyFC is a very different environment from Blubolt due to the differing nature of the businesses), and also because some of the work was just getting very irritating, and ended up with a lot of the stuff that we ended up making not being entirely to the specifications, largely due to the specification changing without our knowledge or it being incomplete, and us having to change it with a bunch of kludgy fixes.

MyFC is different.  As part of the team, there isn’t a client who’s word is law.  I actually get an input in what I make, and get to put my own personal touch in.  Invariably there are issues with the membership, who for one reason or another don’t like what we do, but that is to be expected with any project with over 30,000 users. There haven’t really been any of those yet, with the exception of one incident which I won’t go in to.

Since starting at MyFC, there has been a lot of work to do, especially as we have phase 4 of the site to build, which has a lot of major changes from the current site.  As such, I haven’t had as much spare time as I would like (especially as whenever I do have free time, my brother just wants to play Lego Indiana Jones …) , meaning I haven’t had a chance to blog or do a number of other things I have been wanting to do (or need to do – damn uni stuff).

Although I only started three weeks ago, one of the main things I have noticed is that when things do go badly, the web team stand up for each other ferociously.  Nice environment to work in.  And the people are nice too.

Also, some people post too much on the MyFC forums.  I have 16 posts at the time of writing, which although low is still reasonable.  The highest is over 10,000, which shows an insane amount of site usage.

Still, lots of plans for the next few weeks, and it is very busy.  I might try to post fairly regularly, similar to Leyton’s weekly update from the web team.  Don’t have a clue what I will post about though … suppose that will be defined by the events of the week.

And I have failed.

It has been about 2 weeks since I last blogged, which was never my intention.  The main reason for it though has just been because I have generally been too busy.  I have about a week and a half off work now, so I should hopefully have enough time to write some more stuff (writing this on the train back to Reading).

There are several things I would like to blog about, mainly my general feelings having been in proper full-time work for 6 months, and a number of less professional things like computer games (been playing a few recently) and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and I am sure I will come up with a number of other things.

So, that is that for this brief post.  The only things stopping me writing about other stuff are those pesky placement logbooks we have to submit every month …