so that was Christmas...

Well it was fun, with lots of food, presents and excitement.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I didn't get the app that I was building to sort out the cooking the Christmas lunch finished.  I'll continue working on this, but with the urgency now removed I've decided to take a break.  After all this is supposed to be fun and it's something I'm doing in my spare time so taking a bit of a pause should be fun.  On that note I managed to not touch a laptop for over a week over Christmas which was a nice break.

As a surprise Christmas present I was given a pebble for Christmas, it's been lots of fun playing with it. I've also had a few frustrations, I think this deserves it's own post so I'll write one up and put it in after I've finished this.

I'll also try and sort out an interesting things post later today.

Over all I've had a fab Christmas and today is back to work, let's see how that goes...

the story so far... II

I've not spent as much time as I would have liked on the 'lunch project' this week.  The idea is to create an app to help me with Christmas lunch.  To say I'm cutting it fine is well... true.

What I've done

• I've decided to make an app to aid in the cooking of Christmas dinner
• I've created wireframes
• I've started to build the app using meteor
• I've had some fun with DNS which has now been fixed.
• I've added adsense to this blog

Where I am

• You can now see steps and add new ones to the app
• I've fixed the dns for ben.best (so that it ends up here you may need to clear some caches if you've already tried this)
• I've also got to the point where the times add up.

What I'm hoping to do

• By Thursday (25-12-2014)
• Get something working that I can use on Christmas day.  The next big step is sorting out dependancies.
• On Wednesday (24-12-2014)
• Write a how to post similar to the how to set up a mailing list one
• On Friday (26-12-2014)
• Write "friday's interesting things III" based on "friday's interesting things I" or "friday's interesting things II"
• On next Monday (29-12-2014)
• Write another "story so far post" admitting what I didn't get done from the above list.

marking things as done (and not doing things!)

Well it was an interrupted couple of hours but it was a couple of hours...
I have added the ability to mark steps as done (or to undo said marking).  I've also added some "beautification" and started to get rid of some of the css that had been given with one of the tutorials.

I'm quite pleased with where I've got to, it's going to lead nicely into tomorrow's playing with dependencies (or at least hopefully tomorrow).  If you want to see the new functionality it is (as ever) at lunch.ben.best you'll need to be logged in to mark things as done / undo them.  There are a few bits that I'm not really that happy with:

• The layout doesn't quite feel right, mostly the second part that will contain the details of the dependencies.
• The button labels: "done" and "undo", better suggestions are more than welcome
• Logged in / not logged in bits not quite working as I would have expected.
• I thought I'd added a deny rule that I would have needed to change to stop me doing exactly what I've done.

Of the these it's the last one that concerns me most, however I need to do quite a bit of playing with the security and ownership bits so I'm sure it'll all come out in the wash.  Overall I'm quite pleased with the progress I've made over the last couple of nights.

In other news I now know what I'm cooking meat-wise for Christmas lunch - a 2 kg turkey crown and a piece of topside.  The topside is being provided by my parents in law so I'll not know exactly the weight of that until they arrive on Friday.
For posterity here's a screen show of the current look:

To the things not done, I made a deliberate decision to not write a "so you want to..." post tonight, I was in the mood for keeping going with the lunch project.

was that really necessary...

I've continued down the path that I was taking and my latest bits are in github and on lunch.ben.best you can now create your own steps (you'll need to login first).
I have now done a load of bits with this and I'm hoping that what I've done so far will help me to get the app to a point where I can start turning it into the app that I'd like to be.
I've ended up with a few bits that aren't quite right and I'm looking forward to culling them.  I'm going to ignore the previous statement of 'Later equals never' and go with a quote that I've heard before of 'make it work and then make it pretty'.
I'm pretty sure that what I'm going to do now is get to a stage where most things were working but the layout is wrong (probably end up with the add new step starting on a new 'page' for example).
If I can keep working at the rate I have been I hope to be at that stage by next Wednesday (but we'll see this is for fun, not work after all).  If I do manage that then I can start looking at where I can get to by Christmas.
I'm really enjoying this, but think that I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew, we'll see. The DNS for ben.best is still not working, I'm sure I'll get that fixed eventually, but it's not there yet.

innovation days, mailing lists and scheduled tasks

as expected I had a couple of nights off, but now I'm back.
Some interesting things have been happening at work, from next year we'll have "innovation days" these are days we book through the holiday booking system that we can take some time to look at something interesting and to prepare to present it to the company. I have a couple of plans for this that I'll go through at a later date.  I think it's supposed to resemble the 20% from Google and is a really interesting path for us to be heading down.  I'd like to see if I can bring something from the Christmas lunch project into it but we'll see how that goes.
I was also asked my advice on setting up a weekly mailing, which I've responded to (http://blog.ben.best/2014/12/managing-mailing-list.html), but I'll put my thoughts into a blog post (so that next time I'm asked it's easy to find the details).  I'll have to make a couple of changes to the details to protect the innocent but I should get that up later today or tomorrow.
I'll be back on the lunch app later today, I've also had a couple of ideas for little apps to do after this one is finished.  I'd like to do a house buying / selling checklist tool and maybe make it generic enough that it can also be used for other similar things (registering a birth / death etc.). I suspect / hope that I'll eventually be able to merge them into one thing with an idea of templates so if you're cooking a Christmas lunch or buying a house it's the same underlying tool, but you use a different set of templated steps.
Finally I realised I hadn't put up a screen dump of where I am so far with the app:

It's a start (do not use these timings for your Christmas lunch)

checking out some of the tools I'm going to use to build Christmas

So I've already said I'm going to be building this using meteor that's a javascript platform for building apps.  I've played with it a little before and am quite looking forward to the idea of building something using it.
I've been meaning to get my head around sublime text for ages, so I'll be writing things using that or brackets which I've played with before and quite like.
If I'm using meteor I'm going to end up with bootstrap which I've used a little before but as with the other tools mentioned never actually got something from start to end with it.  I'll also admit my wireframe was at least a little inspired by bootstraps panels which I'll be using plenty of I suspect and I think the panel with footer may solve my issue of showing which items need to be completed first.
That's all for now as I'm off out to see some Christmas lights after work.

starting on christmas

I started on the Christmas dinner application (see earlier post)
So I have spent a couple of hours this evening putting together some wireframes...
I started with pen and paper

A very quick scribble

I've used a pile of wireframing tools at work, but for this I didn't have access to them without paying or turing on the work laptop and at that point I'd end up working.
So I thought I'd see what I could find for free.  Typing "wireframe tool" into google found me wireframe.cc I played with this for about 10 minutes before I gave up on it.  I just couldn't get it to do things like adding text, so I looked for something else.
Here I found moqups.com I really liked this, it was intuitive, easy to use and I managed to put together something that I'm quite pleased with.

Hopefully I'll be able to start working on this tomorrow night but realistically it will probably be over the weekend before I do any more.

Mouth watering

Here's a link to the wireframes in their current state:
https://moqups.com/nebbie/YUdqPsW5/
If you can see anything that you think really won't work (or an obvious improvement) please shout below.

christmas dinner

So I'm cooking Christmas dinner this year for an increasingly large number of folks...
This is going to require a little more planning that a usual roast dinner, so looking for some help I sought out an app to help with the timing.  What I was after was something that I could put in a number of tasks into, how long they would take, when I wanted the last one to finish and it would provide for me a list of when to do everything.
Something like:
Prep Turkey                12:00
Turn Oven on               12:20
Put Turkey in Oven         12:30
etc.

Having searched through the google app store and Apple's and the found nothing that did this (I even looked at some project management things) I thought I'd knock something together in excel (I even looked for existing templates I could steal).

Then I thought well if I'm going to do this, why not have some fun with it...
I've been playing with meteor for a little while and although this isn't really something that it's meant for it's definitely something that could do it.
So that's my plan for the next few evenings or so, build something that I can use to project manage Christmas dinner.

Obviously I'll let you know how it goes.