Charles Goodwin

Pigeon (C&H Short)

2010-01-28T16:34:00.001Z

The Exceptional Exception

2010-01-18T22:48:00.002Z

Alan Grayson is brilliant. More politicians like him please, in all parts of the world.

The iPhone Phenomenon

2009-09-16T14:30:00.003+01:00

Bye bye Mono

2009-08-18T14:22:00.001+01:00

I've gone sour on Mono, so decided, now I'd settled on a music player other than Banshee, to get rid of it:

Removed:
  mono-core.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                                  

Dependency Removed:
  avahi-sharp.i586 0:0.6.25-3.fc11                                              
  banshee.i586 0:1.4.3-3.fc11                                                   
  banshee-musicbrainz.i586 0:1.4.3-3.fc11                                       
  boo.i586 0:0.8.1.2865-6.fc11                                                  
  gnome-sharp.i586 0:2.24.0-3.fc11                                              
  gtk-sharp2.i586 0:2.12.7-4.fc11                                               
  log4net.i586 0:1.2.10-5.fc11                                                  
  mono-addins.i586 0:0.4-6.20091702svn127062.1.fc11                             
  mono-data.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                                  
  mono-data-sqlite.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                           
  mono-extras.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                                
  mono-ndoc.i586 0:1.3.1-4.fc11                                                 
  mono-nunit22.i586 1:2.2.10-9.fc11                                             
  mono-sharpcvslib.i586 0:0.35-9.fc11                                           
  mono-web.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                                   
  mono-winforms.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                              
  mono-zeroconf.i586 0:0.7.6-8.fc11                                             
  monodoc.i586 0:2.4-19.fc11                                                    
  nant.i586 1:0.85-27.fc11                                                      
  ndesk-dbus.i586 0:0.6.1a-4.fc11                                               
  ndesk-dbus-glib.i586 0:0.4.1-4.fc11                                           
  notify-sharp.i586 0:0.4.0-0.6.20080912svn.fc11                                
  podsleuth.i586 0:0.6.3-2.fc11                                                 
  taglib-sharp.i586 0:2.0.3.2-2.fc11                                            

Complete!

You won't be missed!

There's a party in my pants

2009-08-07T12:29:00.002+01:00

Microsofts long slow decline

2009-07-31T18:01:00.002+01:00

I've mentioned for several years that I think Microsoft is in decline. It's still profitable, it's still a behemoth, and it's not going to disappear, but there have been a number of problems and business decisions that have taken some time to fully manifest within the marketplace. John Gruber goes into a lengthy analysis of some of the factors.

To be clear, Microsoft remains a very profitable company. However, they have never before reported year-over-year declines like this, nor fallen so short of projected earnings. Something is awry...

...I’m not arguing that Microsoft will collapse. They’re too big, too established for that to happen. I simply think that their results this quarter were not an aberration, but rather the first fiscal evidence of a long, slow decline that began several years ago.

Bruno

2009-06-03T15:16:00.001+01:00

"I swapped him... for an iPod."

Brokeback to the Future

2009-05-27T12:53:00.001+01:00

Brilliant!

Vexitris / Vegalib Beginnings

2009-03-22T02:14:00.001Z

Just for fun:

Vexitris Dropeffect Test from Charles Goodwin on Vimeo.

Code is available from here.

Bonsai

2009-02-19T01:50:00.001Z

I thought this Bonsai tree application was a very interesting activity.

To play directly, follow this link.

Getting what you want

2009-02-17T06:10:00.001Z

Obama sure knows how to do it.

Appreciate it

2009-02-17T05:29:00.002Z

Nikki Giovanni when denying that her cancer has made her a better person:

If it takes a near-death experience for you to appreciate your life, you're wasting somebody's time.

Her interview with Bill Moyers is thought provoking at times.

Win to lead

2009-01-28T13:09:00.003Z

Great quote from a reader over at HuffPo:

Bush the Younger demonstrated loud and clear that you don't make the mascot the 1st string quarterback and expect to win the game.

Worklog 20090104

2009-01-05T07:05:00.003Z

Early parts of the day were spent on looking at the workflow requirements for Pulse Cost and making sure that we handle them appropriately. I now need to re-design the system and get Mike to re-import the data so that the demo looks closer to the final application they require.

With the Pulse Cost demo not going ahead (I wasn't ready and they weren't in touch as we had agreed) I spent time tracking down and eliminating the issues reported by Dave.

At the moment the main focus is on the client. There were a lot of little niggling issues that got eliminated in the development version, with the goal of upgrading SolarVenti before the morning.

Also the document viewer now works swimmingly after today's efforts.

Worklog 20090103

2009-01-03T23:02:00.003Z

Not as much time spent working on things as I would have liked. Main focus was on the areas required for the Pulse Cost demo, and finishing off the layout update from yesterday.

Mountains and molehills

2009-01-03T02:14:00.000Z

"If you want to reach the top of a mountain, you have to start climbing - you can't just look up in awe and expect the peak to come to you."
~ Me, a forum, 2008

Worklog 20090102

2009-01-03T01:45:00.000Z

This is a worklog of my contributions to WEBenableIT's flagship software - Emanate.

Today I started merging in several major changes that I've been procrastinating on for some time, as my development branches and stable branches of code were getting too out of sync and I want to show features from the development branch in a demonstration on Sunday.

Some time was spent getting properly set up with Xrandr - now I have a dual screen desktop which makes a lot of the visual work, log monitoring, and code referencing a great deal easier. I also tweaked the colours (xorg.conf values generated by GAMMApage) because lately my laptop had been giving me headaches (even with the brightness totally down) and it's a lot nicer now. Whilst Googling for details and fiddling in configuration files took a bit of time, it was worth it. My concentration seemed to gain a reasonable boost - placebo perhaps, time will tell.

Once that was out the way, the first code related task was a long-overdue change to the align property in Vexi. This has a large footprint on the codebase as a change, but the significant widget changes were more tedious than anything else (a pass through of each reference to the align property and correcting it) and it resulted in a fair bit of cleaner layout code than before. There were also several trivial bugfixes as a result of the pass through the code, and improvements to the way containers work. (Incidentally this was the only blocker on an official Vexi 3.0 release, other than documentation.)

Part way through this, I was notified by Dave (SolarVenti) of some issues, which I resolved in the trunk client. If this is not ready to go live by Sunday, I'll backport the fixes to the b4 branch and update that.

I also focused somewhat on the immediate shortcomings of the form designer - previously only one could be open at once due to the way it interacted with the surface object but, with cloning now working perfectly in Vexi, this is getting solved. With it comes a slew of improvements to the form designer code.

Tomorrow will see a pure focus on getting the demonstration running smoothly on the development branch.

Preview Screenshots

2007-10-31T01:08:00.001Z

Some screenshots of some of the software I'm working on at the moment with my brother. The UI is all in Vexi and the server all Java.

The most impressive thing is that it took less 3 days to do the "GUIDE" (GUI Design Environment) and in it's current state it has some pretty advanced code. I can't think of any other UI platform where this could really be possible without some form of sleep deprevation - and I've slept plenty! ;-)

Electro Guide

2007-10-11T23:39:00.000+01:00

A guide to electronic music?

Interesting...

My Own Domain

2007-08-21T02:39:00.001+01:00

Welcome to www.charlesgoodwin.co.uk - cool. :-)

Success!

2007-07-13T18:02:00.000+01:00

I managed to name a What the Duck comic strip! "The camera never lies." A historic moment. ;-)

Free Gamer gets 2000 hits in a day!

2007-06-22T09:52:00.000+01:00

Free Gamer got 2000 hits on Tuesday. Maybe somebody decided to scour the entire site or statcounter was including some bot that was spidering it?

Anyway, for a hobby that site is doing quite well. I just have 3 or 4 major tasks to complete on it and then it'll be really smart and doing very well - and it serves a community by helping open source projects get noticed.

Drum Machine

2007-04-20T15:29:00.000+01:00

I'd forgotten about this. It's cool: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/drum.php

Locke Speed Art

2007-03-26T15:32:00.000+01:00

I thought this was really, really cool. It shows just how much effort goes into a quality drawing, even with digital help.

Word of the day

2006-01-03T13:25:00.000Z

Insouciant; carefree and unconcerned. Yup, I'm insouciant.