Ben’s Blog

Well, muchly stuff has happened lately. I’ve been learning Cocoa (Fun!) which has been entertaining. I have updated my iPod touch to v2.0, and installed several Apps, including the ridiculously difficult, addictive and fun Super Monkey Ball. Oh, and It’s my birthday.

Cocoa really is a lot of fun. It is so much simpler than writing in .NET or anything like that, and the foundation frameworks are amazing. I have now written a speech synthesizer which gets a list of system voices, displays them in a table, lets you choose one, type in a line to say and then speak it.

iPod touch 2.0 is a MASSIVE improvement over the old 1.1.4. The App Store is great, and so are the new functions, like the scientific calculator and push email. DEFINITELY worth £6 of my money.

It’s my birthday! After much thunking, I have decided to get an Apple Universal Dock to stop my iPod getting scratched and falling off the deck when I sync it - quite a nice bit of kit - the main complaints are with the video out features which I won’t use. I was talking about upgrading my computer with the remaining money, when my father said that if I saved up to buy a completely new PC, then he would contribute money towards it if I replaced the family computer with my current one. This seems sensible, so here is a list of components: (mainly for reference purposes)

Vista Home Premium (unfortunately)
Coolermaster CM690
Corsair HX620
Random SATA DVD drive
500GB WD SATA HDD (Plus current 120GB *nix drive)
2GB of OCZ DDR2 RAM
Zotac 8800GT (Yay!)
Asus P5Q Pro
Intel C2D E8400

Comes to about £600 - probably a bit less. I should be able to get it around Christmas, as I already have monitors, keyboards, speakers etc.

I decided recently that I needed to really learn how to code in one operating system. Since Linux is pretty complicated with UIs hard to make, I decided to go for either .NET or Cocoa. Since I hate Mircosoft, I thought I’d go with Apple’s Cocoa, which I have used once before, and was very enjoyable. Also, this will let me write programs for my iphone when I get it *said with crossed fingers*. I’ve ordered a book on Cocoa, and a book on Objective-C. They are Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hilleglass (A professional cocoa teacher), and  Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan.  They look very good.

Last night, I fixed Ubuntu. Gnome had killed itself the week before, but I really didn’t want to fix it because I  had no idea what the problem was. Turned out, the problem was minimal and a sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop fixed it.

Reading a Lifehacker post on Ubuntu, I read about a program for Linux called Gnome Do. It is a clone of Quicksilver, if anyone knows what that is. Basically, I can now press Super (windows key) and Space, and Gnome Do pops up. I can open firefox by typing fx <enter>. Or any other approximation of the name of the program. I can quickly find files, and even tweet, by typing ‘tweet’ <tab> ‘Tweet here’. It really is good, and should speed up my day to day using a bit. Also, I have found a program called mail-notifier which sends you a pop up when ever you get an email. It even works with Hosted Gmail, which is good.

Sean and I are still dreaming of iPhones, but it is getting closer =). Now I just need to secure a Paper round. Joe let me help on his once, and I am confident that I could do it by myself.

I have installed Wordpress on my website. MGBS was fun, but it isn’t nearly as powerful as Wordpress. I am now going to try and get all of my own posts into this blog, which will be fun. Links to all my other pages should be appearing hear at some point, too.

It’s Pi day today! It’s the 14th of March, so if you write it the american way, it’s 3.14!! Because of this, we had a Pi lesson in maths, and I learnt Pi to 32 decimal places. Here it is: 3.14159265358979323846264338329750. That’s off the top of my head, so might have a mistake somewhere. Also, my Father has got a 2GB C2D MacBook from the University, so I can write iPod touch software! YAY! Garage band is very fun, and I may post a track on here at some point.

I have slightly updated MGBS, so now it shows the number of comments that there are. This should make things a bit better.