Oh, Hello!

So I’ve been away for a little while. I know, and I feel a little guilty, but hey, that’s what holidays are for. I’m now officially getting back to some degree of work, and to that end have created myself a goal with the pretty cool Beeminder to work for at least 20 hours per week on Piemaster-related stuff. Currently no pledge, but it’ll start going up if I start failing. Wish me luck!

So what am I up to now?

The main coding focus at the moment is Buffex, which I still haven’t written much about, despite promising to do so multiple times. Maybe I should write about it first to hash out the scope of the MVP. In any case, it’s coming along rather well, and I’m currently working on wrangling all the data.

In non-programming news, I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple of months cleaning up the garden (it’s been a jungle for years) into a presentable state, and performing some dedicated research into the wonders of aquaponics (see this Practical Aquaponics video for 12 minutes of introduction). I want to write lots about it because I’m kind of obsessed at present, but I’m afraid no one much cares. Once constructions starts in earnest (have to order a few more parts) I’ll get onto it.

I’m also heading back to uni this year and applying for a couple of jobs. One is pretty standard tutoring of relatively simple computing subjects, and the other is a pretty exciting engineering faculty project called MUtopia, for which I may be responsible for developing some kind of stakeholder feedback management system, rather than the actual simulation stuff. Still a cool project to be involved with (if approved), and the role sounds like a great experience (from what little I currently know).

Finally, I’ve had a request pop up to write a few sheets of drum tablature, for which I’ve resurrected the old Taboo! Talk about a blast from the past. Ran into a whole bunch of exceptions since I wasn’t a fantastic programmer back then, but it got me thinking again about my old plans to take Taboo to the web as a JavaScript application. Now that I’m actually using some JS in anger, I may give it a go when/if things cool down for a while.

So that’s me. I’ve been very busy with all kinds of things, but am now getting back to being busy with the right things (from this site’s perspective, anyway).

Taboo Is Here

I just finished moving my Taboo content over from the old piemaster.net, while simultaneously filling in the blank pages. To find out what on earth Taboo is, you could do worse than to check out the Overview page. In short however, Taboo is a drum tablature editor designed by a drummer for drummers who are sick of hacking around with Word and Notepad to put their tabs together. It’s intended to put the relevant tabbing commands at the user’s fingertips to allow fast and easy transcription. It is however still very early in development, and there are plenty of fancy features planned for the future. Just as soon as I get some time…

It’s also free (and super lightweight), so feel free to download it and give it a spin. Bear in mind it will probably throw a few errors at you since I haven’t fixed it up for a while, but it’s safe to ignore them all. Restarting after opening it for the first time helps.

Anyway, it’s just another step towards filling this site up with content which is a little exciting. I’m also transferring the piemaster.net domain over here as we speak, so it should hopefully be much easier to get here in the near future. Hooray!
EDIT: Scratch that, the domain is still registered at GoDaddy for another year, so I’ll just try and get the DNS info to redirect. Same result, $9 cheaper.