http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/site/index/ en pauldunlop@gmai.com Copyright 2008 2008-02-17T11:00:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/been_a_while/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/been_a_while/#When:11:00:00Z Yes, as always, it’s been ages since I’ve bothered to post anything here. Always the same, finding the time to sit down for 10 minutes and write down some info. Since the last time I posted, I’ve discovered the wonderfulness that is Tumblr, and I have been making an attempt to keep that updated a bit more. To that end, I’ve decided to split the functions of these two pages. This site, for now at least, will be a more technical, professional page. In that, I mean it’ll be more work related. Whether or not that actually ends up being what people would consider “technical” we’ll have to wait and see. I doubt it somehow. On the other side, we’ve got Tumblr, which the URL is Nakedchops.com. Why that’s the URL, long story for another time, but I like it, despite it’s negative imagery So yes, as I’m sure I’ve said before, hopefully we’ll see renewed posting on this site in the near future. And likely some design changes to reflect it’s slightly new funciton. 2008-02-17T11:00:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/all_set_up/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/all_set_up/#When:09:43:00Z Well, the new iMac is just awesome. Fantastic machine, fast and gorgeous, and so glad to finally have an awesome desktop machine to work on again. The extra nice surprise was that I found my website design actually looks pretty sweet on a high-res monitor too, so kudos to me for accidentally designing something that works nicely on all screen setups! Now if only I could find the time to actually finish working on it...... 2007-08-26T09:43:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/back_in_manchester/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/back_in_manchester/#When:16:35:00Z Well, for the second week running, I’ve come back to Manchester to visit family. This week is a little bit more business related, having to install a new hard drive into one my dad’s work machines. Not too hard, just takes time. So it’ll only be a short visit while I get everything back up and running, and make sure everything is running smoothly. Good chance to get a free feed too I don’t mind coming back home too much, but it does take up the whole weekend, and when it’s something like this, where I’m having to spend my time installing software and checking backups, etc, it does get a bit boring. I enjoy computers as much as the next geek, but I also enjoy my weekends. Somehow, I rarely get a quiet weekend where I can just sit back and focus in my own projects. It would be nice to have a bit more often. Now that I’ve got my new iMac, I’m going to try and make a more conscious effort to keep time free at weekends. I’ve got a lot of personal projects, for myself and friends, building and designing websites, etc, that I’ve had to ignore through a lack of spare time, and I’m hoping to try and get back to them soon. The fallout from our new kitchen still needs to be dealt with (the house is a total tip) but once that’s out the way, I hope I’ll have a bit more free time at weekends (without having to deal with hangovers) to focus on these projects. 2007-08-18T16:35:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/new_imac/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/new_imac/#When:17:57:00Z I guess I’ve been a bit lax in my blogging duties as late. I guess that’s the way really, you have a big flood of activity, and then it drops off as real life gets in the way, and steals your attention. Well, thanks to some fairly extensive kitchen remodelling going on in my house at the moment, I’ve had some spare time to catch up on the more important things, so thought I’d try and get back into a) blogging more, and b) finishing off the site. I hope that once my brand new, metal clad, 24-inch iMac arrives (hopefully by the end of the week, TNT gods permitting), I’ll been in a much better position to do regular updates, as well as more design work. I love my MacBook, but it’s just not conducive to doing long periods of work at. Hopefully this’ll change with my iMac. We shall see! 2007-08-14T17:57:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/multi_touch_malarky/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/multi_touch_malarky/#When:21:33:01Z So, just about everyone and his dog knows about the iPhone these days. The lucky Americans have even had the chance to own them for themselves now. One of the things I keep reading is how fantastic the multi-touch functionality on the phone is. Essentially, how awesome it is to be able to flick your finger to scroll, pinch to resize items, etc, etc. And they’re right, it’s totally awesome. But a bizarre number of people have said how fantastic this technology would be if it could replace the mouse, and become the standard interface for using computers. I can certainly see where they’re coming from, it’s definitley got the cool factor, and for the most part, it does make certain things much easier and intuitive to do. Things like, as I just said, scrolling, arranging items, resizing things, etc, but it’s a technology that also has significant limitations over the current mouse and keyboard input methods, and this call by people to see it widely adopted across desktop and laptop computers just seems stupid..... and something that anyone that suggests it clearly hasn’t thought about for more than 5 seconds. Microsoft is in the process of developing a similar technology called Surface. Surface is aimed at a slightly different market. It’s not being pushed as some fancy desktop computer replacement tech. It’s more of an interactive.... furniture, for lack of a better description, technology. So, you can have bar tables where you can order and pay through. Mobile phone shops where you can compare phones. Home coffee tables where you place your phone or camera on top of, and magically all the contents come spilling out. So, fairly basic functionality, nowhere near the level of complexity and sophisication of a desktop computer, and yet, when you look at the demo’s they’ve put out, you can instantly see a myriad of issues with the proposed implementation. OK, given, it’s just a publicity demo to show the kind of concepts the technology can realise, but still, just sitting there, watching these demos, thinking about how awful it would be to handle photo organising once you get more than.... 20 photos, you just can’t help but wonder how long it will be before someone actually looks at this technology and finds a way to bring it, in a usable form, to desktop computing. I suspect not for a while. And that’s really what I find interesting. Apple has used the technology in a great way, to bring simplicity and ease of interaction to a fairly simple device. Microsoft is looking along the same lines. Try and apply these technologies to more flexible, multi-purpose systems, and it’s hard to imagine quite how it could be implemented. Some of the most basic concepts, such as copy and pasting, become immensely more difficult in the current multi-touch implementation. Basic things like dragging work fine, but what about when the system requires dragging, while performing another action, as MacOS frequently does, in examples such as Exposé. It all starts to get a bit fiddly, and that’s only some very basic concepts. Contextual menus and other systems that rely on secondary inputs become an issue, how does a system tell one hand from another. OK, so yes, there’s multi finger detection, but then you have to be able to seamlessly handle multi-finger inputs along with accidental multi-finger inputs, which is obviously going to happen a lot. And as we’ve seen in all these current implementations, the normal concepts of windows, menus, document folders, etc, all start to fall apart. And there-in lies the problem. In order to bring proper multi-touch to the desktop market, you have to create a whole new interface paradigm. And not only that, but it’s a paradigm that can’t be developed and evolved as time goes on, with both input systems. The system that works with mouse and keyboard totally fails with multi-touch, and visa versa. So a company must be willing to take the leap, and switch over their entire user base to a new, totally untested and unrefined interface paradigm in one go, no slow migration, no evolution and development as has happened over the past 30 years. And it would take one bold company, bolder than even Apple I would guess, to make that kind of leap. Yes, you can see other ways of this developing, other paths that suggest the concept of a general purpose desktop will be replaced by more specific, dedicated devices, designed to handle a smaller away of more focused tasks, but I honestly can’t see something like that happened. It seems like a step back to have to have several devices to achieve things that previously could be done with just one. I guess only time will tell, but it’s an interesting issue, and I look forward with excitement as to how it develops. But for now, anyone suggesting that multi-touch on the desktop will be the next big thing to change the world.... well, maybe, but give it 20 years. 2007-07-08T21:33:01+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/maybe_next_time/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/maybe_next_time/#When:14:27:01Z Ah well, Lewis Hamilton didn’t win the British Grand Prix. As much as I’d hoped that it might happen, the signs were there all weekend that Raikkonen was going to run away with it, and he did, although the surprise for me was probably that Alonso was right there behind him the whole way. Suppose there’s always next year, eh! 2007-07-08T14:27:01+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/a_brief_note/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/a_brief_note/#When:17:14:00Z Just to let everyone know, I’ve now enabled the archives on the site. Seeing as I’ve actually posted enough stuff to get past my 5 most recently, thought it best to include a way to get back to older posts. So there you have it. Archives..... available now! 2007-07-07T17:14:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/csk_whats_in_a_name/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/csk_whats_in_a_name/#When:10:16:01Z CSK (site here - having some issue at the moment), for those that don’t know, stands for the Commerce Starter Kit, a very neat little open source commerce package put together for anyone to use. It’s written in .Net 2.0, and makes use of SubSonic, which is a very sweet implementation of what is basically Ruby on Rails for .Net. The package itself installs as a Visual Studio 2005 Project type, so you can just come along, create a new base project using the template, compile and run, and you’re off. It’s that simple. And straight out of the box, you get a fully functioning eCommerce store with full PayPal integration, and lots of other extremely nice features, which I won’t go into now, just read the website for yourself. Anyway, the CSK is pretty highly regarded by most of the people on our development team for two main reasons. One, it uses SubSonic in a great way, to reduce the workload and hassle normally associated with writing and maintaining a Data Access Layer (DAL). Obviously for all web based apps these days, there’s no escaping this, so SubSonic removes that chunk of the workload (for the most part) and let’s the developer focus more on the end user experience. Again, for anyone that knows Rails, it’s exactly the same thing. Get your table schema done right, and away you go! So, we develop and maintain the online store for a big UK based airline, and while on the face of it, it looks like a very nice, well laid out, well written store, behind the scenes it’s a mess beyond compare. This has mainly happened because the customer has no idea what the hell they really want, and frequently ask for big changes that the current system they use, ePages, just can’t handle. On top of that, it’s an old store, written by a variety of people over the years, most of whom have moved on, so when it comes down to it, we don’t really know what everything does in it anymore. And the final nail in the coffin is that the whole thing is written in Perl, which is the spawn of the devil, and should die in the most painful, yet quick way possible. So, the situation has really come to a head with this, and we’re trying to pitch a full rewrite to the customer. The store itself isn’t massive, and doesn’t have any particularly special requirements, so the CSK fits the bill wonderfully. It’s free, it’s already half done, it’s makes use of some of the latest technologies, and it’s built in a way that will allow us the freedom and flexibility to expand it quickly over the coming years. Put on top of that the fact that CSK is still actively under development, so new features are added all the time, and it has a very active and helpful support community, and it looks like the perfect package. Or so you’d think. Try telling your Managing Director that you want to use something call the “Commerce Started Kit” as the base for a big clients main online store, and suddenly issues start to arise. And it’s not technical one’s, it’s not internal politics, or any stuff like that. It’s the fact it’s a free product with the words “Starter Kit” in the name. And I guess to an extent you can see where that impression comes from, despite the fact it’s totally inaccurate and unfair. While I wasn’t involved in any of this directly, it’s been a nice little saga I’ve been following, and I think for now, the MD has been swayed. But the words “Commerce Started Kit” cannot be uttered again in our office. So we’re now calling it the Subsonic Commerce Framework. Totally unnecessary, totally ridiculous, but I guess what’s in name really does make a difference! 2007-07-07T10:16:01+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/claudis_gone/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/claudis_gone/#When:09:08:00Z It’s going to be weird over the next two weeks. Claudi’s gone back home to spend some time with her family and friends. So, I’ll have more spare time to kill. I suspect I’ll just end up spending it all on my XBox, like I usually do. You never know, I might find something more productive to do with my time. On top of that, my housemate leaves for New Zealand on Saturday, so I’ll have the place completely to myself the a good week or so, which is weird. I’ll likely go into one of my “must have a major clean” modes. And it needs it! Still haven’t really cleaned up from having the new boiler and heating installed, so the place is covered in dust. Not exactly the most hygienic state of affairs. But it’s two guys living together, what’d you expect 2007-07-03T09:08:00+00:00 http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/mums_birthday/ http://www.pauldunlop.co.uk/index.php/entry/mums_birthday/#When:09:01:00Z So, I got back late on Sunday night from Mum’s. I went down after work on Friday night as it was none other than her 50th birthday that Sunday. I hadn’t been able to get any time off work, having used nearly all my holidays earlier in the year, so it was going to have to be a brief weekend visit. It was nice to be back home for the weekend. Didn’t really do a hell of a lot, just enjoyed the weekend. I took Mum out for dinner on Saturday night to a really nice Indian restaurant she’d picked out in Altringham. It was one of these modern Indians, doing all manner of nice things, like Mussels in a spicy tomato sauce, etc. Was a really nice meal, and although it was a day early, I gave Mum the necklace I’d bought for her when I was over in South Africa. And much to my delight, she really liked it. I’d been thinking about not giving it to her after dear ol’ sis made me think she wouldn’t like it, and it wouldn’t fit. But all was good, and I’m glad that the money I spent on it didn’t go to waste! Claire got back home late Sunday lunchtime, so we met up for Dad, who took us all, Mum included, out for dinner at The Frozen Mop, next to his place. Was really good, will definitely be back there next time I’m home! Then it was a quick dash to the airport to get the last direct train. All in all, a good weekend. Although the train was nice and empty, I don’t think I enjoy getting back at nearly 11pm, with work the next day. Will have to find a better way to deal with that next time.... making sure I’d done my washing BEFORE I leave would definitely help! 2007-07-02T09:01:00+00:00