April 2010 Summary

Been quite a busy month.

At the start of the month I lost my normal hosting account due to a problem with someone gaining access to my hosting account resulting in suspension of the account. It took a couple of weeks to get fixed. I don't think anyone was to blame just some of my emails saying please unsupend my account so I can fix the problem seem to have got lost or gone unnoticed. It is all fixed now. Thankfully.

This left me pondering the fact that more and more I dislike the idea of looking after web sites. Upgrading wordpress to the latest version, installing templates and so on. Somehow I seems to loose a lot of time just doing this stuff, I think upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress would mean I would fiddle with setting and invariably have a look at different templates.

Having set up a blogspot account and have found I quite enjoy it. It is simple to use and requires no maintenance on my part. I would rather spend my time doing other stuff, like writing posts. I have managed to archive my old posts onto a free wordpress.com site and don't intend on moving back onto my hosting.

I do still need hosting, well I think I do for files or perhaps applets and so on. Any will all be done with plain html as be very minimal. Meaning no maintenance.

Programming wise I released a number of new versions for my DaysUntil app and still have lots of ideas to put into that app. I also gave myself a week or so to write some little personal demo app for android. Basically experiment and figure out how to do things an android. The code example on this blog are some of the results.

I have been drawing up a android game design as well as playing around with a few application ideas I am not sure which one is going to gain traction and get done first. Either way there will be another update for DaysUntil in the first half of May.

Haskell wise I am still playing. It is a good tool for quick calculations and little programs I want to write. I recently wanted to know the yearly return on some of the shares I have been buying. Basically look at how much they are worth now compared with the amount of money I have paid in and give a yearly rate of return so I compare with other forms of investment.

It's complicated by the fact that I pay in money each month, so some money has only been in the system for one month, and the amount I pay in has varied. A few lines of haskell and I have a function that can work all that out. Then a few more line to make quickcheck check my code for me.

I suppose what I am saying is Haskell is gradually becoming my language of choice for my own personal calculations. Stuff that I want for myself that will not get released into the wild.

That just about sums up the month of April. I imagine the posting rate will drop somewhat as I kick off another android project.

Oh and do excuse and errors in this post, It is quite late and I have taken part in a marathon plus driven for about 2.5 hours to get home from it. My body and mind are a bit frazzled.