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 […]
Useful links for C programmers
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 […]
Potential new home
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 […]
Back in Bury
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 […]
Property hunting
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 […]
Pub Gateway update
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 […]
Facebook Puzzles Solutions
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
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 […]
quackjson
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 […]
Charging for freelancing
In the past a number of people have asked me how I charge people for freelancing, both in terms of the amount and how I calculate it. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but should provide a rough guide of how I come up with prices. Per project: If a project is fairly well-defined and has […]