Minor Update and Internet Rewilding
Today I modified my JSON Converter tool so that it parses boolean values, something it wasn't doing up until this point.
I've been looking at a few of the quirks around binding in WPF and getting a little annoyed at how unintuitive they are, appearing to work in a way that's almost like magic.
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Published on 12:47:34 18 Apr 2025Gaussian Elimination
I've recently been taking an interest in linear algebra, the following post is me working through the process and attempting to understand the process of Gaussian elimination using the example provided on the wiki page. It also represents a handy way of testing a new blog feature to allow mathematical notation.
So, to start with we have a set of linear equations, that we can represent as a matrix.
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Published on 12:47:11 15 Apr 2025Latest Update: A Bivariate Ordinary Least Squares Calculator
So, for the latest update to this site, I've dusted off some of my old stats textbooks and written a simple calculator to do an Ordinary Least Squares calculation and plot the result on a graph.
For those who aren't mathematically inclined that basically means taking a bunch of data and calculating a best fit equation based on that data using a method called Ordinary Least Squares. The overall result gives you something like this.
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Published on 09:14:31 14 Apr 2025NuGet Preview Generator and Other Work
I've been a bit quiet on here recently, but I have been busy in the background so here's an update on what I've been doing.
The main project I've worked on is a little utility called Nuget Preview Generator a little Visual Studio Extension that allows you to create a preview NuGet package in your local Nuget Repository. Allowing you to debug any NuGet packages you create a little more easily. I'm intending to do a video blog explaining this utility and how it works in the near future.
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Published on 13:20:46 07 Apr 2025Example: A Visual Studio Extension Command Targeting a Solution Explorer Project
This is a post to explain how to write a simple Visual Studio extension for a menu command that targets a project in the Solution Explorer . The idea being that you right click a project in Solution Explorer and you get a menu item.
This example was written in Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022, Version 17.13.3. the code for this example can be found in this repository on GitHub. It assumes that you have the Visual Studio SDK installed.
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Published on 21:02:58 23 Mar 2025And a Final Addition..
This one in the form of something very simple but really quite useful, and that is the ability to do bold text italic text and even bold italic text.
So, with a trio of new features added it's probably worth writing something that actually uses them.
Published on 13:28:03 22 Mar 2025Another Quick Addition: Ordered Lists
Another quick addition that was missing until now was ordered lists, not something I'd needed up to this point but certainly something that will be useful quite soon.
So here's a variation on the first introduction to computer program many people in my generation wrote:
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Published on 14:40:39 20 Mar 2025Latest Addition Code Tags
I've spoken before about how this website is my own concoction written using a combination of a zip file and pages written in a markdown script to generate a static website. As such, it's evolved in an agile way according to requirements set by me as the ultimate end user.
This means that while I do have a working piece of blogging software, there are gaps in the functionality in places where I've simply not needed that functionality. One particular bit of functionality that was absent up until now was the ability to include code snippets. This post represents both a test that this is no longer the case and an announcement of the same.
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Published on 11:21:53 20 Mar 2025The Evolution of the Nuget Automation Thing
My last post was about my new plan for a command line utility to automate some of the work around creating NuGet packages. I had some success with this approach, but it occurred to me that a better way of implementing this kind of tool might be as an extension to Visual Studio.
So, after a quick look at the Visual Studio documentation, that's what I decided to do. Initial work has been a little harder than I'd hoped as there are a few issues with the documentation, but I've managed to at least get a working proof of concept put together.
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Published on 11:17:52 19 Mar 2025Latest Tinkerings: Nuget Automation
It's a fairly common problem I think, but not one I've found many obvious solutions to. I have two sets of projects LibraryA and ApplicationB.
LibraryA is a set of fairly generic functionality (think functions like logging, http calls, security and so on). Functionality that will be used across a variety of apps. I don't know exactly what I want in LibraryA yet, I've got a few ideas but a lot of the time what I put in LibraryA will be determined by my work on ApplicationB. I'll often come up with an idea of something to go in LibraryA as I work on ApplicationB.
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Published on 11:16:53 12 Mar 2025New Site Update - Cookie Warnings and Privacy Policy
The latest update has been to add a cooking warning and a privacy policy to this site. It's not strictly a necessity at this point but it's quite likely to be needed in future evolutions of the site. I don't particlarly intend to use this website for anything other than advertising myself and maybe sharing a few nice things I wrote with the world, but I think it's better to err on the side of caution.
In addition, I decided to write my own as I don't like many of off the shelf implementations and I wanted something that doesn't detract too heavily from the user's experience. I decided to implement the change as a pure Javascript process which led me to dusting off an old Javascript test framework I wrote a few years ago. It seemed to work surprisingly well for some code I last looked at in 2013. The only real problem with it was that it felt like it had been left behind by technology advances. Writing pure Javascript served as a useful reminder of why so many developers prefer to work with TypeScript these days
Published on 13:08:49 05 Mar 2025Latest Achievements: Arch Linux
So, my latest achivement is setting up an Arch Linux machine on a VM. Setting up Arch has been a far more difficult experience than setting up a friendlier distribution such as Ubuntu, instead of a nice simple GUI to guide you set by step your dumped in the command prompt with a link to the Installation Guide on the Arch Wiki.
I wouldn't say it was an easy experience, but certainly a learning one and thankfully the documentation pretty thorough. As a result I've managed to get an arch instance running, this includes a GUI in the form of GNOME and even a copy of VSCode
Published on 17:22:25 02 Mar 2025Latest Update: New JSON Viewer Features
Another few days, and another few updates to some of my software. This latest update is to my JSON Viewer and Converter, in that it is now also a JSON editor.
For the moment it's pretty basic, just edits to the existing text and value fields but depending on how it goes I may expand it and add a few more features.
Published on 18:02:54 26 Feb 2025Latest Project: A JSON Viewer Converter
So, as I write this I've just completed my latest project which is a JSON Viewer and Converter which you can view by clicking the link. The project was written using React and TypeScript with VSCode as my editor of choice.
The initial plan was to use JSON.Parse, but this didn't really prove up to the job so I created my own JSON parser. After that I constructed a frontend aiming for something that wouldn't be too hard to integrate into my site generation tool.
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Published on 17:24:10 24 Feb 2025A Productive Day
Intially I thought the last two days had not been all that productive. Reflecting back on it though, I've actually achieved more than I realised:
- I've set up an Ubuntu box running SQL Server, not sure what projects I'm going to use it for yet but it's been a useful learning experience.
- Refactored the WPF app I use to maintain this site. It's grown beyond being an initial quick and dirty maintenance app and the code has started to become messy. So I've embarked on a small project to refactor the application separating out the display and the control functionality.
- I've added a delete feature to the maintenance app.
- Fixed a bug prevening proper page titles on some pages of this website.
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Published on 17:21:37 18 Feb 2025A Musical Interlude
As the previous post mentioned, I'm looking at expanding the functionality of this blog software by allowing the embedding of video within posts. So, as a test, here's a bit of Yo La Tengo:
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Published on 19:36:38 15 Feb 2025Todays Update: Work Still in Progress
So today's update is a pretty major one, major enough that it's not going to be done today. This site is maintaned by a series of markdown documents that use my own parser to convert the markdown content into HTML.
The parser has up to this point met my needs quite nicely, but I've decided that it would be useful for me to be able to post video content on this site, and that would require some modifications. So the current project is to add functionality to parse a limited range of HTML content as part of the parsing process.
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Published on 14:51:14 14 Feb 2025An IT Great Depression?
Imran Peerhabi, a developer at Microsoft wrote a recent post contrasting IT hiring around 2009 in the midst of the Great Recession with hiring now he uses the example of UW Seattle noting that hiring at this moment is a fraction (20%) of what it was in one of the largest recessions in recent memory.
Obviously, this is just a single example, but all in all it seems to match my own experience since the end of my most recent contract. Once upon a time, simply putting my CV online and would cause my phone to blow up with opportunities. That's no longer the case, it feels like a ghost town out there.
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Published on 19:28:13 13 Feb 2025Today's New Feature: Automatic Deployment
Another day of changes, today's change is to add an automatic deployment feature, if all goes well it means that I can deploy new changes at the press of a button.
It's a minor update, but a really useful one. The first attempt did have some teething issues, though these turned out to be caused by an entirely different issue.
Published on 17:32:24 12 Feb 2025More MAUI
Today's work has largely been about understanding .NET MAUI. I'd had some early success with this a few days ago and I thought it worth expanding.
From what was an initial simple single page app, I've created a tabbed view that lets user's see the Articles, Pages and Drafts that are available on the site. In addition to this I've created an edit feature that allows the opening and saving of said Articles, Pages and Drafts. All in all a productive day.
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Published on 17:48:59 10 Feb 2025More Feature Updates
This blog already had a rudimentary drafts feature that worked well enough, however it was rather buggy, the main problem being that it didn't delete the draft items once they had been published. If you're reading this then that particular bug has now been fixed.
Additionally, I've started to add features in to edit stylesheets, templates, custom pages and Javascript files.
Published on 18:24:05 07 Feb 2025Today's Achivements RSS and Some Styling Improvements
As the #opentowork tag on my linkedin indicates, I'm currently at a loose end, but I think it's important to keep stretching my coding muscles, so I try to keep working on little projects and I've got a few in the pipeline.
Today's main exercise has been the addition of a simple RSS feed for this blog, a scondary exercise has been improvement to the WPF application that I use to generate this blog, although that one's obviously not something I can really show on the web.
Published on 17:19:42 06 Feb 2025A Success!
In yesterday's post I mentioned that I was going to attempt to write a UI for this simple file based blogging platform using the Microsoft .NET MAUI today I'm able to report what is at least a partial success.
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Published on 16:56:31 05 Feb 2025Free Time is a Rare Commodity
It seems my attempts to regularly updating this site keep hitting obstacles. First among them is free time, I have two young children and they place a pretty serious demand on my attention. The second is my own stupid fault, in that instead of deciding to go for a standard blogging platform I decided to write my own. I'm quite proud of what I've produced, but as I write this article, it's sti;ll only partially complete.
For those interested in the nerdy details, this blog runs on a platform that takes a series of markdown files and turns them into html pages. That way, the actual content of the site is pure HTML with no server side complications. That was then modified because maintaining a directory full of markdown files seemed a bit bulky, so now the system uses a zip file containing the necessary materials to generate the website.
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Published on 16:54:12 04 Feb 2025A Return to Writing
Sometime between my last return to writing on the internet and now something went wrong with the blackvoid site, I'm not sure why but I suspect that the security settings for my ISP changed in such a way that it broke the .NET platform I'd created to host it. So, I rewrote the software in such a way that the actual hosting element became even more primitive and the .NET element simply generated the raw HTML pages I intended on publishing. We'l see how this trial run goes.
My AWS learning proved very useful since it turned out my next contract made quite heavy use of AWS in what it did. I've been thinking about doing a bit more writing on two subjects in particular.
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Published on 14:20:10 25 Aug 2024Another Brief Moment of Peace
The boy's asleep, which means I get to enjoy another brief moment of peace. I'm still looking at AWS security features. Currently, I'm looking at Amazon Secrets Manager. Looks like a potentially useful bit of kit, though I'm left a little unsure on how rotation of secrets works based on the material I've seen.
I'm unfortunately taking a little longer getting through the material than I'd like, running around after a small child has been straining my concentration so there's only so mental energy I have for watching demonstration videos so I have to tackle them in bite sized chunks.
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Published on 20:45:37 09 May 2023We Are Live
And we're partying like it's 2003. This the first post on the blog side of my website, I certainly hope it won't be the last.
Today I've had a peaceful day, so I've had a chance to expand the functionality of this site. I've been expanding my knowledge of AWS, specifically user access functionality (IAM, Cognito etc). Unfortunately, as I write this I hear my wife and son entering, so I fear today's peace and calm is now over.
Published on 10:42:00 08 May 2023