Voyaging Mind

So over the past week of so I have been putting together a new website for voyagingmind.com . At the moment it is a googles sites website and looks pretty awful to say the least. It is possible to make nice google sites web sites but in the instance I have failed. After much searching and trying out I have settled on using Wintersmith static site generator. For the type of site I want to create there is no need for something more dynamic. The idea is to put stuff on there - yep that simple stuff I make or write will just go on there. I am planing a few articles and where appropriate I will probably hook in Disqus to get commenting on there. Honestly I am not really sure how this is all going to turn out. It could be it ends up not being maintained or it could be I get really in to it. I guess it depends on how productive I am in making stuff... One thing I would like to do is practice my longer form writing a little bit, So there will be some articles, probably about programmin

It would be fair to say I have been going thought a bit of a reboot as they say in the film industry when remaking the same comic book stories just in a grittier way. Last weekend I managed to get a couple of nights where I slept for 11 hours, this compares with my more normal 7 hours. That was a sure sign things were not quite right. My productivity at home was nearly zero. In the UK it has been pretty sunny so we have been hitting the beach, body boarding a fair bit. We are also in the process of trying to move but that did not really take account of my lack of motivation. A reboot was needed. First I signed up for a half marathon in a few months time. This has kicked started my exercise routine, I had been on a bit of a rest for a few weeks but really needed to get back into it. I seems to get more done when I am exercising a quite a bit. The next thing was to take stock of what I have been developing at home. I realized I was attempting to create things I thought people mig

Over the years I have used a fair number of text editors and IDEs, from Emacs to Eclipse and all those in between it is fair to say I have been round the block when it comes to dev environments. I have gradually settled on Vim. Although when I do Java I do use Eclipse. So why have I settled on Vim, I thought about this a fair bit and even though about showing some of the great things it can do in the world of text manipulation. The truth is that is not the reason. It is highly configurable and that lets you slowly grow what is effectively your own custom text editor. I was recently fortunate enough to use vim without my customization and it was a frustrating experiences. If you are new to vim don't judge it until your vimrc file is a few hundred lines long. Again that was not the reason. I use it because it is different from other editors and IDEs. It is not some weird desire to be different rather a desire to make my coding at home not feel like coding at work. Even though

Over the month of June and partially for the month of July I did a small experiment into Time boxing. I do admit that I like the idea of time boxing so I approached it with enthusiasm. Of course no plan survives first contact and it became clear that the idea of using time boxing to managed some larger projects was just not really doable. I had planned to have three streams but switching between streams 3 or 4 times an evening just did not really work out. I originally planned to start creating a game targeting the android platform while at that same time working on some simple HTML5 games as well as boxing of some time for learning new things. Switching between the two game dev projects was just a little bit too much. I found myself only really thinking about one or the other for an evening even when trying to focus on the topic at hand. The learning new things went a little better, practicing drawing and improving my inkscape skills did happen and was relatively easy to flip in