Rogue Tory

Geek Walks

Paul — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:31:59 +0000

A few weeks ago I asked on Twitter if anyone would be interested in getting the train to somewhere outside Manchester and going for a walk, followed by a pub lunch. The response was more enthusiastic than I expected, and so I am pleased to announce Geek Walks, the first of which will be taking place on Saturday 5th May. Full details can be found on the mailing list archive, and you can also subscribe to receive emails about future events.

Voluntary activities and politics

Paul — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:59:25 +0000

Now that my house is finally sorted and hopefully requires no more immediate work, I’m looking through my volunteer commitments for things to do in my spare time. At present my only major commitment is chairing FLOSS UK/UKUUG, but that will come to an end at some point this year because I want to start the handover process well in advance of me stepping down from Council in September 2013.

One thing I would like to do is get involved in politics again—as in party politics, not an NGO which focuses on political campaigning or lobbying. The difficulty is finding a party where I agree with most of the policies—total agreement is both unlikely and boring. I did enjoy my time in the Conservative Party, but they were a bit too extreme on issues like immigration, human rights and law and order. Ideologically I probably fit somewhere in between the Tories and the Lib Dems, closer to the former on Europe and to the latter on equality and liberty.

Useful links for C programmers

Paul — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:14:28 +0000

Recently I’ve re-learning C, partly for fun but also in case I ever need it for work – at my current job or a later one. In the process I’ve come across some articles which may be of use to others who are already programmers but not C experts.

CERT article on why your compiler might optimise away security functions
Stackoverflow thread about whether using SecureZeroMemory() makes your program more secure
Setting pointers to NULL after call to free() – Stackoverflow thread on avoiding dangling pointers
Open source development using C99
Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t support variable length arrays (and other parts of C99)
Top 10 Ways to get screwed by the C programming language
What is C For?
Writing Insecure C, Part 1
Writing Insecure C, Part 2
Writing Insecure C, Part 3
Linus Torvalds on Why C++ is a horrible language and C is the only sane choice (not sure I agree with everything he said, but it’s an interesting thread)
A response to Linus Torvalds on C++

Feel free to leave a comment if I’ve missed off any particularly useful links.

Update: Jon has suggested www.python.org…

Potential new home

Paul — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:28:01 +0000

After a few weeks of house hunting, I have found a property I like enough to put in an offer (which has been accepted by the vendor). It’s near to my parents and grandparents, on a reasonably quiet road and with elderly neighbours who keep their gardens in top shape and are unlikely to have late night parties. It needs a new boiler and a rewire, but there are no other major jobs which need doing before I move in.

I’m hoping to be in by Christmas, although that depends on everyone involved moving at a reasonable pace. I’ve also moved house often enough to know that nothing is certain until you actually have the keys in your hand (even after exchange of contracts, someone can still pull out), so I’m still keeping an eye on other properties should this sale fall through.

Back in Bury

Paul — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:48:48 +0000

As some people will already know, I’ve now moved back to my parents’ house in Bury. Partly this is because my flat was too small to live and work in, but also because I’ve decided that I’d prefer to buy a three bedroom semi on a nice estate in Bury than fork out for a one or two bedroom flat in Didsbury for the same price. I know how stressful moving is, so I’d rather jump straight into a house than buy a flat and then have to sell it a few years down the line when I’ve outgrown the space.

In terms of house hunting, it’s been a mixed bag so far. I saw one property which had a lot of potential on a good estate for a reasonable price with no chain, but unfortunately someone else got in with an offer before I could go back for a second viewing. Another property was far too small and a third had been taken off the market because the owners decided to rent it out instead of selling (they had already signed a tenancy agreement, so it won’t come back on for at least six months). On the positive side, there’s a good sized dormer bungalow with room for extension within my price range, and I have five other properties to see today which look promising from the initial descriptions.

Property hunting

Paul — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:47:34 +0000

For the past six months or so I’ve been seriously looking for a place to buy. Although there are no major problems with where I live now—the rent is reasonable and my landlord doesn’t give me any trouble—I’m starting to outgrow the space, especially as I work from home. There’s also the financial implications, if I bought a flat roughly the size as the one I’m in now, my monthly mortgage (repayments, not interest-only) would only be a bit higher than my current rent, and probably lower than the market rate.

So far my success has been mixed. I’ve more or less given up on buying a house in Didsbury, as the prices are outside what the banks will lend me, even if I can comfortably afford the repayments. I’ve looked at a few flats, one of which was a grotty student place with damp throughout, one was in reasonable condition but in a huge block mostly inhabited by students, and the other was similar to what I’m currently renting—albeit in Fallowfield. I’m considering putting in an offer on that one, although I need to scout round a couple of other areas which contain houses but might not meet my ‘desirable neighbourhood’ criteria.

Pub Gateway update

Paul — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:58:11 +0000

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on Pub Gateway, a guide to pubs within the British Isles. I’d spent too long attempting to create a perfect setup, trying out all the PHP frameworks, as well as Django (Python) and Catalyst (Perl). In the end I figured out it was quicker to put together my own PHP code than learn how any one framework did things—particularly because most of them make it difficult to bring in code from other sources (e.g. if I used symfony I’d also want parts of Zend Framework).

There’s still a lot of features to be added, such as pub ratings, a ‘find pubs near postcode’ feature (mostly done, just need to build the interface), forums and many more. However, the basic functionality of the site (register, suggest pubs, add comments) is done and ready to go.

I also need to find someone to produce a design and logo for the site, as a piece of paid work—please drop me a line if you know someone who is UK based and able to do this.

Facebook Puzzles Solutions

Paul — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:25:29 +0000

I’ve recently been having a go at the Facebook Puzzles as a way of brushing up my skills in languages other than PHP (which I use every day at work). As I go along, I’m putting my solutions on GitHub, along with all the other code I’m releasing, in case anyone is interested.

Release of FormFillFlatten

Paul — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:56:36 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the release of FormFillFlatten (FFF), a RESTful web service which allows you to submit a PDF with form fields and the values you want those fields to have. FFF will return a PDF with the form fields completed and ‘flattened’ so that they can no longer be edited. It’s a bit rough round the edges and needs some more documentation, but the code works as-is.

I initially wrote FFF as we need this functionality at work, although I had to put it together out of hours so that there were no issues with releasing the software under the AGPL. However, I would like to expand the functionality as a separate project over the next few months so that more of the iText functionality is available as a web service.

Before you ask: no, I couldn’t be bothered thinking of a more imaginative name.

quackjson

Paul — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:16:53 +0000

As part of my efforts to learn Python, I’ve started a small project called quackjson, which is intended to be a reimplementation of qUAck using the uaJSON interface. As with qUAck, it uses curses for writing output to the terminal, which is not too bad once you get used to things like having to manually call refresh() when you want the screen to update.

Currently the software allows you to login, view folders and individual messages, and supports a simple configuration file using JSON.

The code also includes a UAClient class, which could be inherited and used to implement a different interface, such as uaHTTP (this is on the TODO list).