Slow Slow, Quick Quick Slow

Things have been moving very slowing recently.

At the moment I am still in the middle of transferring my hosting package from a Windows machine to a Unix machine. As a result my domain names are not working and so the images on the blog are still not showing. The images are in a directory on the server and referenced from the blog. Fortunately my email is not effected.

Website Design Progress

I have an initial cut of the website design. It looks great and once the hosting is sorted out I will put it online so you can see how it looks. Might be a few days before that is possible.

This might sound odd but sometimes it is really hard to pay people. The designer that came up with the design has done a good job. So on receiving the design I immediately requested how to pay him in order to reward his hard work. Three days later and another email and still no response. Sometimes it is hard to give money away!

Visual Studio Problems

Another problem I am having is with my development machine. Because it has XP Home Edition installed it means I cannot install the latest CTP builds of Visual Studio .NET 2005.

This is a pain as it means I am developing against a version that might have since changed. I don’t expect many changes to have occurred but I would feel more comfortable making sure I am not writing code now that will definitely have to be replaced.

Another issue is the inability to see my controls at design time. No matter how I try to install Visual Studio .NET 2005 it seems to be screwed up, and refuses to work at design time. So I can only work on the features I can use at run time.

14 Days and counting

Luckily the end of all my problems is in sight. Two weeks from now I expect to have my new PC with XP Professional installed. I will also be able to use Virtual PC in order to install and develop against each new Visual Studio .NET 2005 release in an isolated way. With the domain hosting sorted out by then I will be back on the development fast track.

Still, in the meantime I am beavering away as best I can on the basics of the Navigator control and also a SplitContainer for the free Toolkit package.

Please bear with me as I get these issues sorted out and back to full coding and blogging speed.

Go faster strips

I’ve decided that my 3.5year old PC no long cuts it when it comes to professional software development. It’s like trying to use a mule when you need a thorough breed race horse. So I’ve ordered a new machine that will in itself motivate me for weeks to come. Two 19′ flat panel screens, a 512MB graphics card (so I will be Vista ready and a couple of large RAID 0 hard drives. Nice!

Webhosting Disruption

As part of the plan for the website I have decided to switch from a Windows hosted site to a Unix box. It might sound like treachery when I am Windows developer but to be honest, it just makes sense.

The designer I am now working with on the site wants to use PHP scripts and a MySQL backend in order to have the blog integrated into the website. On Unix this is a doddle. Trying to do this on a Windows machine is a major headache. No, I believe in using the best tool for the job and in this case it is quicker and therefore cheaper to use Unix. Plus I can easily pick up knowledge of PHP in order to modify and maintain the site myself in the future.

As part of the this process of changing over hosting packages the people at Network Solutions screwed things up. So it will be a few days or even a week before my domain names are working again. So images on this blog will be unavailable for a while.

Oh well, back to the 1.5GHz AMD processor for a few more days…

Another Contender Enters the Ring

Just when I thought the concept work for the website was done and dusted another contender throws their hat in the ring. Normally I would not want the extra distraction in looking at another design but as the initial concept looks so good I have to follow it through.

Have a look for yourself by using this link…

Another Concept

It needs a little work but has real potential. I will keep you posted.

The Eagle has landed!

I’ve taken the template as provided by the winning web design and used it to generate the five main pages of the website. These have been uploaded to the server so now I actually have a website. Try it out…

Live Website!

Half an Eagle has landed

Actually you will have quickly noticed there is no content on the site. But Rome was not built in a day and my website certainly will not be either. The next step over the coming week or so is to actually fill in some of the pages with details.

Another Contender

Just when I thought I was only going to get a single designer submit an idea another has entered the contest with a design. This is quite different but also a good effort and certainly worth considering with some changes.

You can see the design using this list.

Second Contender

I instructed the designer to remove the extra design elements like the stop button on the top of the page. It does look a little like a WinAmp design at the moment but by removing those it does have potential.