Went to geekUp Leeds last night. Had a lot of fun and met some interesting people, although I've forgotten all their names.

There were a lot more people than I expected. Who would have known there were so many geeks in Leeds. Guess we normally hide away.

I wasn't able so stay long, so I didn't get to chat to most people. Hopefully I'll get a better chance at the next one.

In my drive to sort out my development processes there are a few things I want to do. Top of my list is proper automated testing and creating automatic documentation.

Doing these steps every time I compile my site (or application) will add a lot more steps, so I thought it would be better to learn how to automate the build process first.

I'd heard that NAnt was the tool I should be using, but I found it a little bit overwhelming.

NAnt is a program that follows a list of instructions in an XML file called a build file. These instructions are used to do a series of tasks like the following: …

In my first job out of university my assigned mentor Alex always had a copy of The Mythical Man Month on his desk. He urged me to read it and said that the world would be a better place if everyone in charge of projects had read it.

That was almost six years ago, and I've just got round to it. I went through a period after uni where I'd had enough of reading text books. I've recently felt quite a strong urge to learn more, and this book seemed like a good place to start.

The author Frederick Brooks talks from his experience of working for IBM in the 1960s. In some ways this book is timeless. …

I wanted to pass a list of user IDs into a stored procedure. What I really wanted was to be able to pass an array, but you're not able to do that because it would be too easy. It took me quite a while to figure this out, but now I know how, it'll be easy next time.

There's a nice set of functions that allow you to get values from an XML string and treat the set of values like a table. Just what I wanted from arrays really.

Here is the XML string that I used:

<users>

<user id="24" />

<user id="27" />

</users>

And here is the relevant part of the stored procedure I …

In my last job I worked with a team of about 50 other developers all working on the same project. A senior developer had set up a source control system that allowed us all to play together without overwriting each other's code.

When I moved to my current, much smaller team there was no source control system. We didn't seem to need it, except the few small times a month when we did. None of these moments seemed big enough to warrant setting up a proper source control system. However, when you add them all up, we could have saved ourselves a lot of heart ache.

I decided I wanted to fix this, …

I've just recently started leading another art project. This time I'm working with the adult group from Pyramid of Arts. The BBC have very kindly leant us some sound recording equipment. We've used this to record some sounds and we're going to splice them together into something musical.

We spent the first few weeks of the project exploring sound. Making it, listening to it, drawing it and recording it. We've just got back from a sound recording trip to Thwaite Mill. We recorded a huge array of sounds made by the mill and pretty much anything else we could find that made sounds.

So, now we' …

This isn't really a project, but it's been a problem that's bugged me for a while. When I download lots of pictures from my camera, how can I rename them all to something more suitable than IMG_0564.

I like to give my camera pictures a descriptive name followed by a number if it's one of a set. I've wasted a lot of time in the past renaming them all by hand. This morning I finally got round to working out a better and much quicker way.

There will be lots of ways to do this, but I've wanted to try a language called Powershell for a while. Powershell is an extension to Windows and is like DOS, …

I wanted a place to bring all my projects together and I also wanted to create a small web application in ASP.NET. So, I'm starting this blog using a blogging package I'm creating called gBlog. It would have been easier to use someone else's, but I wanted to learn something from doing this.

This blog will be about all my projects, plus other stuff I'm up to. Some of my projects are quite geeky and some are more arty. This brings them all together.

I'm also going to add some of my old projects that I'm pleased with. Anything you find listed before this post was added later really, but with the …

For a long time I've felt the Easter eggs you buy in the shops were missing something. There's never enough chocolate, and when I was a kid, the chocolate treats used to be inside.

This year I decided to make my own. I made a mould out of paper mache and cling-film and coated the inside with chocolate, a lot of chocolate. The finished product was fantastic. It looks a bit like a dinosaur egg, which wasn't quite what I intended, but I think it adds to its charm.

Next year, I might try and perfect the mould to get a smoother outside. I might also try and make it twice as big. Mmmmmmmmm, …

It's six years since I did my university final year project, but I'm still quite proud of it. I've meant to get around to publishing it online for a while. There is a copy in Leeds University Library, but I thought this would improve my readership.

I might put up my source files at some point, but for now I'm just including the report.

I developed a genetic computer algorithm that mimicked evolution to evolve small virtual robots that chased each other.

Summary

This report details the methods and results of a set of experiments into evolving virtually intelligent agents capable of displaying …