Im Standing in the Elecshun

April 27, 2010 in Politics by CiaranG | 2 comments

It’s not that I’m saying that being able to spell, use proper grammar, and not make countless sloppy mistakes in almost every sentence is a prerequisite for a prospective MP. It might be that someone who couldn’t do any of these things would make a great MP, but in that case if they were touting for votes, you’d hope they’d at least have the common sense to get someone else to proof-read what they publish.

We have an independent, Chris Nolan standing in our constituency. I was slightly interested when I found out about this – at least, more interested than I would be in any of the LibLabCon coalition, who all have virtually the same policies. Via the wonders of modern technology, I found his campaign web site and was put off before I’d even started by the default Wordpress theme. One out of ten for effort, but no big deal. But then came the words. Some examples:

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Seeds and Veg

April 10, 2010 in Gardening by CiaranG | 1 comment

Vegetable Seeds

It’s planting season at last. Although we have enough runner beans saved from last year’s crop to plant out a whole field, there’s not much else, so that meant buying seeds. I put a bit more effort in that last year’s grabbing of packets from the racks in the garden centre, and the first batch arrived in the post recently.

These came from The Real Seed Catalogue, which has a great selection of proper seeds – none of your hybrid leeks bred for supermarket straightness here. Also, all this stuff should, in theory, produce usable seeds for future years. It all looks good on paper, but the proof will be in the eating and we have to wait for that.

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Letter to James Lewis

April 9, 2010 in Politics, Rants by CiaranG | 1 comment

James Lewis is the Labour candidate for Elmet and Rothwell, thus making him, in his words, my “real local choice” in the forthcoming General Election – local, because he grew up in the area, went to school here, and served as a City Councillor for some time. I know all this because he was kind enough to send me a leaflet, printed in far-off Essex, to tell me all about it. It seemed rude not to reply, so:

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Jake the Egg

March 26, 2010 in Chicks, Ducks, Jake by CiaranG | 1 comment

Jake has appointed himself chief egg collector:

egg1

A task he takes very seriously:

egg2

Every day:

egg3

Underage II

March 24, 2010 in Jake, Mia, Rants by CiaranG | 3 comments

I realise I’ve ranted about this before, but I make no excuses for it, and I’ll do it again if the opportunity arises. Just look at this:

Yes, the sticker says “25″ with a line through it, and “Are you old enough?”. And yes, it’s a child’s cutlery set, with a knife you’d be hard pushed to slice off a piece of ripe brie with, let alone stab a rival gang member in a dark alley. Let’s have a look at the back:

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Map Control in C#

March 14, 2010 in Software by CiaranG | 3 comments

I found myself in need of a C# (.NET/Mono) control for displaying and interacting with maps. I’d already implemented the same functionality in my application using an embedded browser, but that’s a horrible hack, so I decided to implement something nicer. I ended up with this:

I can hear the whining sirens of the don’t-reinvent-the-wheel police approaching already, so a couple of points about that. Yes, there are a couple of projects around already that I could have used almost off the shelf. They’re too complicated for my liking. What I’ve implemented does the basics of what I needed straight away in two small classes, contained in one file. I find this much more pleasant that having to wrangle with someone else’s 25-class monster implementation. Sometimes you can spend more time figuring out how to integrate an external module than you would just writing it yourself, and having spent all that time you still don’t understand the underlying implementation. This becomes more important when you start to extend things further down the line, which I will need to do. I’ve even done all this before, about 7 years ago, using tile data sneakily grabbed from various online proprietary mapping services of the day – I could have used that code, but I even rejected my own wheel.

Furthermore, if all you ever do is piece together other people’s ‘wheels’, you miss out on a lot of understanding, and more importantly fun. I don’t advocate reinventing wheels when someone else is paying for your time or you just need to get something done, but aside from that it’s frequently a good idea. So hopefully the don’t-reinvent-the-wheel police have now gone away to annoy someone else, and I can get back on topic…

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SlideType Keyboard and Yak Shaving

March 9, 2010 in Android, Software by CiaranG | 2 comments

Slidetype Keyboard

Something that was bugging me about Android was the touch screen keyboard. I found it impossible to type anything with acceptable speed or accuracy. Unless you have child-sized fingertips, you’re relying on the dictionary guessing to figure out what word you mean, which is crap at the best of times, and useless if you’re not typing dictionary words. A side issue – I’ve noticed that if you *do* have child-sized fingers, it’s hard to get the touch screen to register at all, when you want it to. I don’t have child-sized fingers, of course, but my children do. When they want to press things, they have to hold their finger on the screen for a while, and sometimes it registers, sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, if they approach from behind and stab at the screen while you’re in the middle of doing something, it invariably registers straight away.

Anyway, before I got side-tracked by children’s fingers, I was going to say: But then I discovered the SlideType Keyboard!

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Android FTP Server

March 4, 2010 in Android, Software by CiaranG | 3 comments

Stuart Langridge passed on a great idea that hadn’t occurred to me – running an FTP server on an Android phone. Although my i7500 is pretty much permanently connected via USB when I’m in the house, on account of needing to be sure the battery will be charged when I leave the house, I don’t particularly want to have to mount the USB drive and manually transfer things. Apart from requiring ME to do the work, which defeats the whole object of machines, the computer I connect it to isn’t necessarily the one I want to transfer files to/from. Also, a card can only be mounted to one device at once, so by mounting it to the remote computer, you snatch it away from the Android device, which isn’t always ideal.

Stuart tracked down an Android application called On Air, which he seems mostly happy with. I gave it a quick whirl, and didn’t like it at all. Clearly we’re all different. What didn’t I like?

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Communicating With The Young

March 1, 2010 in Education, Music, Politics, Rants by CiaranG | 2 comments

Ed Balls and a miniature gangster

Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?

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New Exercise Regime

February 25, 2010 in Uncategorized by CiaranG | 2 comments

I’ve decided I’m not getting enough exercise. This wasn’t a problem last summer, when was easy to finish work, eat, get the children off to bed and then take the dog for a long walk and still have daylight to spare. It got slightly harder in autumn, with one particularly memorable walk ending up with me stuck in the dark in the middle of some pitch black woods on account of having to go off-piste to avoid some cows that took exception to the dog.

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