I truly believe that in most instances, less is more - Minimalistic design in architecture, car design and computer code (Assuming that shortcuts aren't taken and things are done properly). With code, less code = fewer potential bugs. Following the simple mantra reuse, reuse and reuse, we try... but often come up short. This all sounds pretty simple and is preached everywhere but can actually be very difficult to attain. In developing my web application framework for my applications, I've decided to strip away all the unnessesary...
It was all going well... I had the SMS gateway installed and running on my laptop and it could send and retrieve SMS's. So the next step was to transfer the .war file to the remote server, install all the other components and test. Easier said than done...Firstly, I tried deploying straight to Tomcat, but that left me with the problem of not being able to see certain error messages. I know, I should be logging error messages properly but hey, this is still a test. So I then started up Eclipse and tried to run it there only to...
Continuing from the previous research and work, I've decided to build a complete gateway using the smsLib as a base. So far, I've already built part of it and completed the basic design. The system has a web interface which enables user management, gateway creation etc. The gateway management allows adding either a "local" GSM device or a third party gateway such as bulksms or clickatel. Within the smsLib API, load balancing and cost routing can be set. This allows multiple phones to be connected to the system to increase throughput...
SMS'ing is a easy, (fairly) reliable way to get messages to people quickly. Now having a computer program send an SMS could be very handy. Based on the number of "How can I send an SMS from program XYZ..." questions asked in forums, lots of people think so. So I've been thinking of building a set of reusable classes for use in future projects of mine to enable me to inform an admin user when a problem has arisen or send a user information. In spite of lots of people asking these questions, it took me a while to find my answer,...
I've been hearing a bit about mashups and seen a few products out there. For those who don't know, mashups are built by combining various sources of data and producing a new product from them. They are often web service driven. E.g. Combining Google map data, listed shops combined with pricing and a delivery service to provide a totally new shopping product. OK maybe not the best example but you get the idea. The big thing is that there are products available to enable end users with no programming experience build these applications...
I previously mentioned advertising on websites. I checked out Google AdSense since I use many of Google's products including Gmail, iGoogle, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs etc. Safe to say that they've got my life in their hands. (Scary to think...)Anyway I digress - I registered and set up ads. The process was honestly more complex than I realised but then again I had a simplistic understanding to start with. It wasn't difficult but it was a bit time consuming because I wanted to understand everything and yes, I...
I'm finally finished exams and have got two months of "free" time to complete all the things I've been playing with. I was checking out some security/ hacking stuff a few days ago (I suppose your terminology depends on which side you sit) I've been trying to learn a few things on security seeing that I don't want to compromise my system. I came upon a few articles of "Google hacking" which made me realize a few things. From what I can see, there are two approaches to hacking. The first is what I'd call a shotgun approach - basically...
Hmmmm. looking back now, there's been quite a gap between the last post. Not that there were that many though... I just haven't had time to work on this. I haven't been able to decide the nature of my blog and without some sort of guidelines, I suppose this is just a random collection of stuff. Probably not too interesting then. And at the end of the day it would be pretty pointless if there was no interest in it. I've decided to focus on technologies and tech-related news, probably including some of the stuff I'm working on....
The other day something happened and it suddenly dawned on me that I wanted to leave South Africa and start up a life somewhere else. Seeing that I've gone back to studying, I've still got a little while before I can up and leave. Trying to list English speaking countries, only 5 options came to mind - USA, Australia, UK, New Zealand and Canada. Hmmmm I little surprising seeing that it's the most widely spoken language in the world. (I'm sure that I'm missing a few?) Most of Europe can speak English but it's not their first...
My very first blog... Hmmm, no preasure. Well, why do we do this? I supppose it differes from person to person. Some exhibitionists, others to share experiences with friends and loved ones, to share ideas or to meet new people. Mine - Mostly sharing experiences or pictures with friends. We'll see how it goes...
