Benjamin Joel McDonald

Updated Calibre Designs website

Ben McDonald — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:01:54 +0000

Over that last few weeks I have been working on the Calibre Designs website, which has been fun to do.

I did the coding but not the design or content. I got a chance to use Amazon S3 while building the website which was interesting and I am looking forward to using it more.

Laconica Patch

Ben McDonald — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:57:45 +0000

The two patches I have been experimenting with for Laconica/identi.ca are more or less working, I’m just hoping there aren’t any bugs I didn’t know about which render them useless.

The first patch 1918 allows the user to reply to any message.

The second patch 1919 shows you the original message when you mouse over ‘In reply to’ links.

They can both be downloaded from Github, 1918 and 1919.

Hacking Laconica

Ben McDonald — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:30:29 +0000

Last night I finally got round to trying to install Laconica on a test server, which turned out to be a lot easier then I thought it would be. I spent less then 10 minutes of install time before it was working and even subscribing to a remote instance was working fine.

Since I got it working, I decided to poke around in the source code and see what I could do. I ended up spending most of the night messing around with the source code and managed to fix two of the things I found annoying.

The first patch allows you to mouse over ‘in reply to’ links to see what was said without changing the page.

The second patch was a bit more complicated and it isn’t fully finished yet. The patch allows you to reply to any message by clicking the arrow link on a message. While it does work, I not sure if it has broken anything else so I don’t want to post the code here yet.

When I have looked over the patches a bit more, I will put them here.

Domain Name

Ben McDonald — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:18:05 +0000

I now have a domain name, which is http://ben-mcdonald.co.uk.

Currently I have just got my blog here but I will get a full website at some point, if I ever get time to make one.

Uploaded Website

Ben McDonald — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:17:11 +0000

I have uploaded a website which I coded for a friend, it still needs a few changes but it’s fine for the moment. It can be view at Calibre Designs.

Now I need to get on with my University assignment which needs to be in tomorrow afternoon.

Firefox 3 rocks!

Ben McDonald — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:02:54 +0000

I just found the greatest feature of Firefox 3; You can finally drag tabs between Firefox windows.

Firefox 3 Beta 1

Ben McDonald — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:09:27 +0000

I just downloaded the Firefox 3 Beta 1 to see how it was doing and I am amazed at the lack of slow down. Normally the slow down I get is enough to make me consider switching browsers, however this time I could open 50+ tabs without Firefox hanging.

My only problem is non-working extensions but his is to be expected really and I’m sure they will all start working again when Firefox 3 gets released.

Kubuntu 7.10

Ben McDonald — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:29:26 +0000

I finally upgraded my computer to Kubuntu 7.10 last night. I enjoy using the new version of Kubuntu each release, they always feels fresh.

The new file manager Dolphin is great, it’s simple to use while looking good. Strigi desktop search looks like it might be handy, unfortunately the gui is limiting at the moment. This is a problem that should be fixed in KDE4. Finally a few programs are at a later version, notibly The GIMP is at 2.4 which brings some new features.

Now I am really looking forward to KDE4.

Arranged Meeting

Ben McDonald — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:34:51 +0000

After talking to the company I will be working with, I have arranged to meet up with them on Thursday after college. Both the company and I have a few ideas about what I am going to be doing and these ideas will be discussed on Thursday.

Once I have some objectives to focus on, I can start working on the project properly.

Programming Fun

Ben McDonald — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:12:47 +0000

University was fun today, I am enjoying using Java and looking forward to learning some more advanced things. The stuff we are doing at the moment is a bit easy due to the large amount of programming I have done in the past but the lessons should hopefully get harder soon.

While I wait for the lessons to get harder, I am thinking about trying to get the Qt toolkit working. Once I have that working, I can remake my pairs game from last year in Java.