That's me.

I would of course be delighted to hear from you about positions you may have available - As well as via Geekzone I can be contacted at call 027 258 1355,
and by email at kevindaly AT xtra DOT co DOT nz (apologies for my crude attempt to evade the spam spiders).

My CV is available at http://kjdaly.com/docs/kevindalycv.doc

Regards,

Kevin Daly

 

The latest update to Diarist for Windows Phone is now available - If you've never installed it and would like to try it, the Marketplace link is here.

This release fixes some bugs (including a lack of input validation. Ahem) and adds the ability to associate a link with a text string rather than having it just dropped raw into the middle of your post (in other words, what the visitor to your blog sees is some hyperlinked text).

Two of the bug fixes may be of particular interest to Geekzone users wanting to use this app. Both of the bugs in question related to how Diarist behaves when you are configuring blog details (username and password, and the address that is used for programmatic access to the blog engine).
Many sites make use of an RSD (Really Simple Discovery) file, which is a file pointed to by a tag in the head of your home page which (among other things) tells blog clients where to find the address they need to interact with your blog. When this file is present it is not necessary for you to provide this information yourself, only the URL for your blog.
There were two bugs in particular relating to this behaviour:

• If no RSD file could be found, the progress bar continued to be displayed, giving the impression that the app had hung.


• If values were entered for both "Blog address" and "Remote posting web address", the logic to search for an RSD file would be initiated, even though it serves no purpose when "Remote posting web address" is provided (since ultimate purpose is to find that value).

As mentioned, these errors are both corrected in this release.

Geekzone bloggers specifically should do the following:

• Enter username and password in the fields indicated


• Don't bother entering anything in "Blog address" (although it won't hurt if you do) 


• For "Remote posting web address" enter: https://metaweblog.geekzone.co.nz/metaweblog.axd (note that it's https)


• Hit the Save icon on the application bar and once your details have been validated with your blog site they will be saved (obviously you don't have to keep entering them. I'm not that sadistic).

Also, when posting to a Geekzone blog it is necessary to select a category - and only one category (that is, for Geekzone it is not valid to select either no category or more than one category. This is a requirement of the site itself).

This post is a test of a fix for the unfortunate behavior identified earlier.
So far, so good - here's hoping.

Diarist blog configuration searches for an RSD file on the home page if the home page URL is provided.
On Geekzone it seems to get hung up on this part. Needless to say I am looking into this.

- Posted from Diarist, BTW

Well, I finally did it, and I decided to make it free (when I have to deal with the nuisance of paying provisional tax again I want it to be for something that more than a handful of people are likely to use).


Today a Windows Phone version of my blogging application (Diarist - a name that has nothing going for it other than not including the non-word "blog") was published to the Windows Phone Marketplace.


I blogged about some of the background (and a handful of tips) here.    

From Google's Eric Chu: "Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29
countries, with today’s additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil,
Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand,
Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan"

Good news, that.

 

Between Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone, it just may be possible to make a living.

I certainly hope so.

 

 

Test...the category errors are getting on my nerves

The first sentence above was sent from the iPhone simulator. My first blogging application for the iPhone OS just reached a milestone (I managed to post to my Geekzone blog). I encountered a little hiccup earlier in that the Geekzone implementation of the MetaWeblog API returns an error if you don't provide a category - annoying, but given that MetaWEblog isn't a particularly well-specified API there are lots of quirks out there that client software has to allow for, so that was actually a good test.

I've still got a lot of work to do, but by now I pretty much know how I'm going to handle everything.

Actually, having to approach everything afresh (for a new platform) has been a very useful experience - some of the necessary re-thinking will feed into what I do for a future Windows Phone 7 (or whatever it ends up being called) version.

The slides and demo source files for the presentation I gave at the Wellington .NET User Group on Wednesday (19/08) are available on Kirk's blog: http://pageofwords.com/blog/2009/08/19/WindowsMobile65WidgetsWithKevinDaly19Aug09.aspx

I've recently arranged new web hosting, so I'll post them there as well once the site's up and running (I'm developing the site from scractch using the ASP.NET MVC Framework rather than just putting the old one back up, so I've got a bit of work to do).

As I was adding links to the slides beforehand I was embarrassed to notice that the MSDN widget documentation has the same title as I'd used for the presentation, but "Developing Widgets for Windows Mobile 6.5" is a title that pretty much invites itself, so I decided not to change it.

There were two demos: the first was intended partly as a backup in case there was a problem with the second (since the second required internet access), and also was simple enough to be allow me to code it on the spot and demonstrate a minimal widget configuration.

The second was actually a widget version of the Geekzone Friends (yeah, dorky name) Pocket PC application I wrote several years ago to display Geekzone friend statuses. I actually added a little bit of additional functionality in the form of linkification, which I'll retrofit to the .NETCF version if anyone's interested (you probably aren't so I probably won't, but you can't say I didn't offer ).

As fate would have it the second demo did originally fail to work...that is until someone pointed out that I'd neglected to plug in the network cable. I think we all know what Homer Simpson would say at this point.

(I was originally planning to document the development of the Geekzone widget in a detailed blog post, but I was delayed trying to sort out icon resolutions for Windows Mobile Standard, which I haven't yet resolved to my satisfaction - at least to the extent of getting the icon to appear on WM 6.5 Standard, and yes I did include .ico files - and in the end a presentation seemed a more useful way of getting the information across. With the added benefit of free beer and pizza).

PS. ...and yes I'm still open to job offers. Although if people just want to give me all of their money because I'm a Living Work of Art or to salve their tormented consciences for a lifetime of evil deeds that works too. Just saying.


Have a good day folks.

Hello people.
Or person. Frankly Scarlet I don't give a damn.


Update: I was wrong about the the 2.1 update (See comments below). My unreserved apologies to Apple (I know this will help them begin the healing process after my half-cocked criticism...)

First on my list of annoyances for this week: Apple's upgrade policies for the iPod Touch.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a brilliant device, and I have every intention of buying one once I've worked through my priority spending list of travel, guitars, and the abuse of alcohol.
What I think shows considerable cheek (and exactly no concept of fairness) is that Apple is charging iPod Touch owners for the 2.1 update.
There is nothing new about this: Touch owners have been charged for updates since the beginning. Previously however (especially not being an actual Touch owner at this point) I've been inclined to shrug it off...without knowing who is subsidising what I didn't feel strongly that there was necessarily anything wrong with charging Touch owners for updates that iPhone posers owners received for free.
With 2.1 however the situation is different, however, because this release is just a set of fixes for bugs in the initial 2.0 release.
When I Twitted my opinion of charging for service packs Mauricio rightly pointed out that Apple don't have "service packs", but my careless use of terminology aside, I think my original point stands. You should not expect people to pay for the privilege of having what they buy off you do what it was supposed to do to start with.
If you make a mess, you clean it up, and if you release buggy software you should not charge extra for the fixes.

   My second whinge also concerns bugs. I'll start with my own incompetence and then move as swiftly as possible on to other people's.
The day before I left for Tech Ed I uploaded an update to my web site (introducing at long last category feeds...which a couple of days later at the bloggers' dinner Scott Hanselman advised us not to use...sigh. I'll leave them in for now and make up my mind about about that one later. But I *am* in the process of adding support for comments. But none of that has anything to do with what I'm talking about here).
As fate would have it I also accidentally uploaded an outdated copy of the Twitula CAB, so a couple of people who downloaded it during the week encountered bugs that had me scratching my head until I got home and realised the nature of my cock up.
So I re-uploaded the correct version...you can imagine my chagrin when I noticed that the "People I Follow" option was still not working, because the relevant call to the Twitter API was returning a status 404 "Not Found". I checked the issues list for the API and sure enough other people were having the same problem. Somehow the authentication for this one function has been broken. I documented my experience of the problem. More and more people added theirs. Time passed. Time passed a bit more, as is its wont. And absolutely nothing happened. Nothing decided it had got onto a good thing and continued to happen.
It seems very likely that this would be an extremely easy fix, but to date it appears that no Twitter developers have even bothered to check it out. While it's likely that workarounds can be implemented by doing a bit (or in my case, probably quite a bit) of extra work I'll leave that to those developers who have the inclination and/or financial incentive to reward bad behaviour by cleaning up after people who can't be bothered fixing their own mistakes.
Personally, I'm giving up on Twitter and looking for other avenues for my development efforts.

Grizzle grizzle whine. With extra bitching (at no additional cost).

I wasn't planning on doing more work on Twitula this soon (there are other more interesting things to work on in .NET land these days), but with Tech Ed '08 coming up soon I thought it would be handy to be able to filter tweets by the #tenz hashtag while I was there, and then since I was adding hashtags it wasn't much work to include word search as well.
As always, you can get it here.

If you have any problems just use the contact form and let me know.
(Clarification: You'll need to be more specific than "it doesn't work" . Just thought I'd mention that).