Succumbed
Casa de Schwuk gained a new occupant over the weekend – an Xbox 360. I resisted getting one for the longest time – mainly due to a lack of decent titles at launch – but as time has gone on my resolve has crumbled.
Thanks to Amazon – great price, great deal on games I actually wanted, and delivered in under 24 hours! (ordered before lunch on Friday, on my doorstep 07:30 on Saturday) – I’m back playing on Live again.
For £10(!) Amazon gave me Crackdown (great fun), Gears of War (beautiful, but haven’t cracked online play yet) and Prey (still in its wrapping, may find it’s way onto eBay), and LEGO Star Wars II was purchased for schwuklet #2.
If anyone out there is on Live and wants to play against me, here’s my gamer card.
The job is dead! Long live the job!
It’s finally here!
Today marks the last day of my employment with CSC. After 9 years (originally a freelancer, then the last 4½ years as a permanent employee) it is time to move to pastures new.
On Monday I will be joining Canonical as a developer on Launchpad (any comments about (open|free)ing of said product should be directed to Matt).
The best bit? Getting to work with a passionate group of people who believe in what they’re doing. The worst bit? Having to explain to non-technical family and friends what Canonical do. The best bit of the worst bit? Starting to explain it to the schwuklets, realising who I’m talking to, tell them they help make Ubuntu and schwuklet #2 (who is only 5 years old) knowing exactly what I’m talking about! 
Of course every silver lining has a cloud, but you have to take the (dog) rough with the smooth. (I’d put a 
in here, but you know how much he likes those…)
Introducing WebDev Control Panel
Once upon a time there was a little project called the XAMPP Control Panel. An associate of mine had a hankering for a similar application to control specific services used for web development on his local machine, so I looked to adapt Jono’s project to his needs. However, as is often the case in these scenarios, I ended up scrapping the vast majority of his code and starting from near-scratch.
In a very short space of time a working result was achieved, but said associate no longer had a requirement for due to a change of platform. Rather than let it languish, I started adapting it to be more generic and removed some additional (and not fully implemented) functionality to create the WebDev Control Panel.
A project which promptly vanished into the depths of my hard disk and was mostly forgotten about. I fetched it out from time-to-time and tweaked a bit here, changed a bit there, but overall it sat collecting dust. I fully intended it to be released as Free software, but was loath to release in its current form.
Jumping forward to a couple of weeks ago, I needed to re-acquaint myself with Python, so I dusted off the project and started polishing it. I made the code more object-oriented; I converted it from a fixed list of services to a dynamic one (controlled by a config file); and finally I made it ready for translation.
Finally the time had come, and I could find no decent reason for putting it off any longer. I had to release it.
So, after that long introduction, here is the WebDev Control Panel. Enjoy.
look good