Announcing Student Veggie – my new food microblog
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 27 May, 2010
Today I’m launching a new microblog hosted by Tumblr but found at food.georgenixon.co.uk. As a student I don’t have much time to cook or many fancy ingredients in my cupboard. I’m a vegetarian and I know how easy it is to get stuck eating the same old things when your local shops don’t offer a great variety of meatless foodstuffs (love that word! food + stuff = foodstuff??).
This microblog will basically be photos of things I’ve knocked up in the kitchen, so it’ll be simple, quick tasty and occasionally nutritious food, and a little blurb about why the dish is good and how to make it. If you make a wickedly simple yet delectable dish, send me a quick email or comment and I’ll have a go, and post the results! But please, no meat! Fake meat, such as Fake Bacon, or Facon as I call it, is fine.
Java Demo – Twitter App
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 21 April, 2010
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Since I use this blog to show off some of the things I’ve been working on at well as post useful tidbits occasionally, I got permission to put one of my recent pieces of coursework on here.
We were asked to create a desktop Twitter application in Java. It’s not fully featured due to time constraints, so I wouldn’t recommend using it in place of your usual Digsby or Tweetdeck clients, but it lets me demonstrate my coding style etc and maybe it’ll be useful to anyone planning a similar project. If you are, I recommend the Twitter4J library, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
I’ve uploaded it in both source and distribution (just unzip and run the .jar – requires JRE) versions, as well as the report I prepared highlighting some of the features I was proud to have completed.
Update 28/4/10: Not to blow my own trumpet too much here, but I’m proud to say that I got my marks for this coursework back today, and I was astonished to find I’d been awarded 100%! Out of 60 or so other students, the next best grades were 92% and 90%. FYI, I’m still hunting for a 12-month work placement to do as a sandwich year, if any prospective employers are reading! Draig Technologies will now be benefiting from my immense talents 
Update 24/6/10: Twitter say they won’t be supporting basic login requests from the end of the month, and as far as I can remember, this is how my application works. Enabling OAuth would be a quick and easy fix if you do use this code, but I’m not personally supporting the app in any shape or form. It’s provided As Is!
Summer placement required!
Posted by George Nixon in General on 6 April, 2010
Update 26/5/10: I’m proud to announce that I will be starting a 12-month-placement with Draig Technologies, Bangor, North Wales as soon as my exams are over. I’ll be working as a software developer, providing support and squashing bugs to begin with, and later working on all aspects of the development life cycle. It’s a tremendous opportunity for me to prove what I can do in a challenging environment, and is especially valuable to my future career because by doing it I will be one of the first people in the country to gain an e-skills Internship qualification, a placement scheme not to be fully rolled out nationwide until the 2011/2012 academic year!
I’m looking for a summer placement for 2010 with an IT company in-and-around the Cardiff or Yorkshire areas. I’m a very motivated mature student studying Computer Science at Cardiff University, and have achieved an average grade of over 80% in this second year of my degree – well above the standard for First Class honours, and as a result of which I may be receving a scholarship in the near future.
Spending some time working in a real IT environment would be not only be a great opportunity for me to prepare for graduating a year from now, but I would also hopefully be able to give a lot back to whomever took me on. My areas of speciality are database-driven PHP websites (see my showcase) and Java programming (examples coming soon). At 26, I have acquired a broad knowledge in many other areas of computing and business too, so please get in touch if you think you might be able to accommodate me!
Update 18/4: Based on offers received, I’d now consider a full year placement too, anywhere in the world depending on visas etc! I’m very committed and have years of programming experience in all kinds of languages like Java, PHP, Javascript, OpenGL, Ruby on Rails, Perl, C/C++ and more. If you’re looking to cut your development budget, taking me on for a year would be a lot cheaper than hiring a graduate, and I’d give it my all.
Friendly anti-virus software?!
Posted by George Nixon in Links on 20 January, 2010
I just had something quite good happen, and I thought I’d mention it here. Whenever I’ve had a virus crop up previously, anti-virus software like AVG have tried to make it as jarring an experience as possible: sirens and massive exclamation marks on yellow backgrounds, that kind of thing. I guess maybe it’s the equivalent of hitting a dog on the nose with a newspaper. “Bad boy! Don’t bring viruses in here!”
So it was a very pleasant experience just now when instead of frightening the life out of me, my background AV scanner, Panda Cloud, just popped up a big green tick and a message saying ’1 virus neutralised’, and disappeared again after a few seconds. I didn’t even know there was one, yet it had already been dealt with and I had the all clear! It felt like my computer was being protected by a guardian angel, instead of the usual gruff bouncer.
Basically, I’m very impressed, and I think this would be a good direction for computing and pc-human interaction generally. We should move away from the formality and strictness that has been traditional since computers were only in the hands of businesses, and move towards friendly and helpful ways of presenting information for everyone. It’s so fiddly trying to write error messages in the most formal way possible, when a more colloquial way would be more useful to the user and more natural to write for the programmer.
It’ll take a gradual shift, but I’d like to see computing become genuinely friendly, not just ‘user-friendly’.
Button Hero – Can YOU press a button?!
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 23 December, 2009
Button Hero was a strangely fun little thing I made quite a while ago that got me a small amount of internet attention. I noticed it’s had a few visits lately for whatever reason, and I thought I’d move it from its old home at 110mb.com, a free hosting site, to this one. Two reasons, one it might help with the old SEO for this site, you never know, and two I think some people found they couldn’t access it at 110mb as that site is sometimes blacklisted as a haven for naughty internet practices like phishing.
Anyway, to make up for any inconvenience, I swapped out the now-defunct Last.fm player for a Grooveshark widget playing some songs I like and thought would fit. Grooveshark is a site I heartily recommend, particularly if like some of my friends, you can’t find a Spotify invite. Let me know if you’ve got one to spare and I’ll pass it on with much thanks
Thompedia! – a wiki for the Thomson DTI 6300
Posted by George Nixon in Links on 14 December, 2009
As I’m back home using my Thomson PVR, a Thomson DTI6300-16, and needed to look up some stuff on rejigging the remote control for a new telly, I was reminded of Thompedia (link below). It’s a wiki for the fallible but popular (not with its users!) Tivo-style device written by chris6 from Kafkas’ World, home of an unofficial Thomson support site I’ve frequented whenever the damn thing stops working. Ages ago, I took it and did the formatting to make it a proper wiki site. I’m just giving it a shout-out here in case it boosts its traffic slightly, as it’s a useful guide and doesn’t look like it’s had many updates lately, indicating a lack of visits. Either Thomson finally fixed the thing (unlikely) or it’s not getting the visitors it deserves, so without further ado:
Thompedia – help, support and useful links for the Thomson DTI-6300 Top-Up TV TUTV digibox
PS: This is my first post in six months – I’ve not had much to say as my second year university stuff wouldn’t interest many people. Perhaps when I have free time to work on my own projects, that’ll change. We have all these interesting books in the library on extra-curricular topics like Ajax that I don’t usually get time to read, so I might try some out and have some updates for you over this break, between revising for my exams. No promises though!
How to Mute Adverts in Spotify
Posted by George Nixon in Tips and Tricks on 6 July, 2009
I realise I may be shooting myself in the foot, revealing this tip – if word gets out, I’m sure the Spotify team will patch it immediately – but I’ve found a way to quieten those pesky commercials.
If you’re not aware, Spotify is a free music streaming service that you browse with a super-fast, proprietary media player. It boasts millions of tracks and many thousands of albums, playing at high quality and with instant access. The price you pay is occasional adverts, which are significantly less frequent or annoying than those on commercial radio. They are still quite annoying though, nonetheless. And, cleverly, turning the volume down actually pauses the ad, so you’ve no choice but to listen to it. Until now.
So here’s what you do: when the advert starts playing, hit pause. You can then turn down the volume on the player and press play, and the advert will resume playing silently. You can watch the little timer to see when it’s done, and then just turn the volume back up. I haven’t tried pausing and then using the system volume to turn down the sound, so I’ll report on that soon.
Before I go, I’d just like to plead with Spotify to open-source the software, so people like me can start making add-ons for it, just like with Songbird. Your service has rocketed in popularity, leaving a small team to service over a million users. Right now, all we want is an equaliser. Oh and a lyrics plug-in. And not to mention…! So open-source the player and we’ll fill in the gaps. Come on, you know it makes sense.
edit: this article used to be titled “How to Mute Adverts in Spotify – July 2009″. However, as of April 2010, this technique still works just as well as it ever did – Spotify have taken no actions to close this loophole. I’ve taken the July part of the title out in order to make it obvious that the article is still relevant today.
Open In Songbird added to Softpedia
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 20 May, 2009
I just received an email saying my Open In Songbird add-on for Firefox has been added to Softpedia. I don’t know how much of an honour this is as they seem to have pretty much everything on there, but it’s something!
Squeaky Xbox 360 Controllers
Posted by George Nixon in Tips and Tricks on 18 May, 2009
Just a quick note to let anyone out there who’s just bought a brand new Xbox 360 and shock! horror! the control pad thumbsticks and triggers squeak. Mine did, and I was worried that if I didn’t return it and get another, I might be stuck with noises every time I navigated a menu. Anyway, my message is: don’t fear! After a few weeks of infrequent use, the noise has gone completely. I guess that whatever was causing the friction has worn away enough to make for smooth movement now.
Open in Songbird add-on for Firefox
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 8 May, 2009
Tools menu after installing the Open in Songbird add-on
Songbird is a great piece of software – a halfway-home between media player and browser that turns the web into a playlist. Since version 1.1 added the possibility of opening a Songbird tab from Firefox through a special ‘songbird:’ protocol, I’ve been meaning to try to make an extension that does just that, and in a user-friendly manner. Having never made a Mozilla add-on before, it also seemed a relatively simple project to get help me get my feet wet.
Skip much head-scratching and cursing and here is is: Open in Songbird for Firefox. It adds what it says on the tin: an ‘Open this page in Songbird’ option to Tools, right-click and toolbar menus in the browser. If you want the toolbar button, you have to add it manually after installation, as Mozilla try to prevent users’ virtual real estate from clogging with each new extension by hiding buttons by default. Just click ‘customize’ and drag the Songbird icon to the toolbar.
I’m no artist so I’ve re-used the icon file that comes with Songbird 1.1 in Windows. If this is a problem I am happy to change it, but as it is I’m hoping this extension could be of use to the Songbird faithful. Props also to Chris Castiglione for this post on using bookmarklets to achieve similar results as my extension – it’s a simple operation behind-the-scenes, but Open in Songbird should make it a lot more pleasant for those lacking the requisite javascript know-how.