Last year, amidst a mood of indecision, I decided to move my expired phone contract to the UK's budget MVNO 'Giffgaff'. It's cheap, user-friendly, 4G, and cheap.

Then, eventually, I started to compare my data speeds with others on different 4G networks, and the rot set in. 'Slow' is the order of the day.

The company I work for grabbed a very tempting mobile discount scheme from their new provider, but I looked around for a more customer-(wallet)-friendly alternative.

My deliberations bear fruit tomorrow; my new contract SIM arrived at the weekend, my current number will be ported between networks sometime during Wednesday.

I had a test of course. The uploads are 3 times my current network's, the downloads 10 times faster.

And I'm getting 3 times the data for the same price.

Which is nice.

"Developing an application is not easy."

So I said earlier today, at a time I really couldn't see an end to the failures cascading through my application. It's the weirdest feeling, knowing there's nothing wrong with code; code that resolutely fails to work. And when it does work despite a total absence of things that should make it work, it's the weirdest feeling.

It feels like that scene in 'Men In Black', the one where we're shown to be an utterly-insignificant part of a hopefully more-advanced-than-us civilisation…

For providing the opportunity to exercise my brain, thanks must go to Jason Irwin – creator of the 10Centuries social network! My life would be a lot simpler right now without 10C. Incidentally, I have invites available if you want to have a social change!

Links:

My application.

10Centuries.org

I am @bazbt3.

Assembling a new, glass-shelved TV stand is very much like making love to, er…

The hardest bit isn't assembling the stand, a thing with pictogram instructions only – which suggests 2 people would be better at it than you.

The hardest bit isn't manoeuvring the TV on top of it from the old, plainly-incompatible stand rescued when the previous, mammoth, CRT TV eventually met its maker (figuratively!)

The hardest part isn't assembling the anti-tip safety strap behind the telly – which has been moved into a temporary but awkward-for-this-stage location.

No, the hardest part is figuring out which cable should be where to minimise the clutter from the myriad of modern device connections – clutter now painfully-obvious through clear glass.

I'd prepared, obviously, by disconnecting everything and laying it out around the room…

Useless.

So, in the time-honoured tradition of the British male when face-to-face with a certain defeat, I resorted to an anagram:

"Oh duck it, it's goof enough!"

I made a conscious choice to develop my 10Centuries.org app (10cbazbt3.py) in Python 3.x. Python 3.x was introduced in 2008, 2.x updates ended in 2010; 3.x seemed a logical choice.

If only I'd read a little deeper.

Even developing a trivial Python app to run on Google's Android OS requires Python 2.7. That's requires. I don't have a Mac or a daily driver iPhone so cannot develop for OS X or iOS. An interesting recent development though (thanks for the tip @jmreekes) is that the iOS Pythonista app is being updated (parallel app development) to support Python 3.x.

Why do I care? Mine is a personal project, right? The very earliest stages of development, right?

Yeah, about that…

It's good when someone shows an interest in a thing one's created. But to be unable to use it because their workflow is based entirely around a deprecated version of the language one's working with…

It's understandable; when even Google continues to use it because to not would introduce massive compatibility/update issues, why rock the boat?

But there are further obstacles to overcome before my thing is anything other than a post-only 10C client:

• Making sense of the API JSON so that a user can interact without the needing to read through pages of 'gibberish',
• Cross-platform compatibility,
• And other stuff…

Aaah… Dunno.

I decided early to add comments to the code I'm putting together for my early-alpha application for the 10Centuries.org social network.

I've now also begun to document the install and first run, the basic usage of the application, and spent more time cataloguing and resolving security, usability and efficiency issues.

In addition to a sense of directed purpose it's surprisingly absorbing.

Take a look here:

https://github.com/bazbt3/10cbazbt3

I still have 10Centuries invites available, if you're interested in clearing out your social networking cobwebs. The site's web interface kills my thing, easily!

Conversations tbere are heading healthily away from discussing the network and towards real-life stuff.

Does anyone like coffee?

print ("Hello World")

What’s the next step into my journey towards learning some Python programming language?

Creating an application to authorise, authenticate and then post to the 10Centuries social network.

Baby steps.

Yeah.

(I gave up on bash shell scripting early.)

Not maths as such, more precisely pseudomaths:

endhour == 23

starthour == 7

uploadpayload == 24

dayspermonth == 30

bandwidthused == (( endhour – starthour ) – 1 ) * uploadpayload * dayspermonth

bandwidthused = Oopsie!

Miscalculating the amount of data I was uploading to my web host would have totalled 6 times my monthly bandwidth allowance. As it happens it was lucky I caught it early; the 24MB included an early version of the entire folder contents I expected to upload – off by three times my expectation!

Felling silly.

Fixed? Well, I temporarily stopped the uploads prior to changing the routine to run every 3 hours – which may still exceed the allocation but I'm betting on…

I hope I can figure out how to transfer only changes to my site repo. I'll really need to closely monitor my sh*t.