God of the small things.

Sort of, anyway. I now have a homebrew developer system for the Wii up and running on a virtual machine. So far, all I have done is compile the supplied “hello world” application to confirm that it’s been setup correctly. All I need now, is time to have a go at porting some software to the Wii. Someone has already ported SDL , so I’m hoping it won’t be too hard to find some SDL based games which can be ported with only a little bit of effort.

It’s a good score, no doubt about that, but I was gunning for 100% so I’m not happy. I’m pleased that I got all the marks for questions where I most of my efforts into, but not happy that I lost marks in places where I took it for granted I’d get all the points on offer. As a result, even though it’s not due until the end of January,  I’m planning to get my next piece of coursework done before Christmas and go over it with a fine tooth comb. I want 100% damn it!

Why am I being so anal about this? I read last night that you need 85% plus for both coursework and exam to get the top grade, so I can’t afford to be slack or drop points.

This post is a bit late, considering I started the course back in October, but then I’ve only just started trying to get back into writing a blog. I’ve chosen 4 modules all revolving around programming, because I love it and want to be really good at it!

The first is a module giving me a good foundation in the Object Oriented progamming style which, even though I know a lot of it, is proving very useful in improving the quality of my code. Please don’t look at any of what I wrote to support the Access databases I designed! Some of it was good, and some of it was only good because it worked & could have been loads better.

I’ve also taken a module in software design. This was mainly inspired by my boss at my previous role  not being keen on getting me to design and build an application that would be used throughout the business, due to him wanting it to go through a formal design process. Well, after this, I should have a good grasp of UML and that should also improve the quality of my programming.

The other two modules are one that covers relational databases and one that covers the design of user interfaces. Whilst I’ve got some understanding of relational databases, I’m hoping to learn more about best practice when it comes to design and implementation. The user interface course is a whole new area for me and, although I’m sure I will benefit, I’m not entirely sure how. I’m quite excited about that, though, because I know that good user interface design is important.

Things have been complicated since my last post. This is the 1st time I’ve had a regular internet connection in 6 months. As a result of that & other things, my projects have mostly been put on hold, until now.

My Python & GTK experiments will continue, but my DVD project has changed somewhat. A picture tells a 1,000 words, so here’s a picture. The project has morphed into a new one. I decided that I wanted to burn a DVD video from the gnome desktop in the same way you can already burn a VCD. This means, I can just right-click on a film file and choose “burn to DVD”, and it will burn a dvd video disc for me. Even better, a beta release is almost complete. The only thing I need to work on is how to package it into a .deb and make it available to all users.

After that, I want to blog about the the packages that enabled me to make this great tool really easily. I’m sure they can help me do other nice things.

My python & GTK work still goes on, because I believe that getting better with that is going to help me build better programs and tools.