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Woweee! A day or two ago Aaron registered Yardsnap with Companies House, so now I am one of three legal directors for Yardsnap Ltd. along with Aaron and Shazz. Exciting stuff (I just have to make sure the guys keep the Inland Revenue happy and it’ll be fine. ).

The super-duper brand new shiny website is coming along. It’s nice to see it finally take shape and work as a whole instead of being a mishmash of random components. Still a lot of work left, but with 5 weeks to go before I enter the world of full time work I think I can just about squeeze it in.

Today I implemented the first stage of the shopping cart using phpgcheckout. For those of you who don’t know, phpgcheckout is an “Open Source PHP Google Checkout Toolkit”, that is, on the whole, very easy to use.

The second stage is implementing a GC callback web service that can receive messages from GC and update our database. This is going to be harder. phpgcheckout has all the code available to use, but it’s pretty poorly documented and I could only find one example online which was a bit hardcore. When I figure it out I’ll post an example here for all to see.

Watch this space.

Just a quickie. Picked up some more machines a few days ago.

Anyone got any ideas on how I should house these?

This weekend marks the end of the second year for me and many others. On Thursday to commemorate it, Chris and I took a night time trek to Whitstable from Canterbury. Why? Because we’re mad cheeky students!

Starting at 10.30, loaded with supplies (Red bull, Doughnuts, Mars bars - the essentials!) we set out to Parkwood on our epic quest. Upon arrival we battled back wave after wave of nostalgia before finding the path that would take us on our way.

The aim of the walk was to get to Whitstable beach, sit around for a bit, have a Red Bull or two and feel good about having just walked through 8 miles of dark wilderness. We arrived at the beach around 1am and did exactly that. However, we didn’t stay long. The sea air was cold and in the distance we could see flashes of lightning which were a helpful premonition of things to come.

The walk didn’t hold too many surprises for us, but what the hell is with these creepy signs!?! Coming across one of those in the dead of night puts hairs on your chest, that’s for sure (however, my chest is still relatively hair free).

The walk back seemed to go pretty quickly although our choice of footwear left something to be desired along the stony paths. Two days later my feet are still sore and Chris has a little fracture that he keeps moaning about. I think we covered about 18 miles that night, not bad going.

We hobbled through the door very sore at about 3.45am like two nackered old men, physically exhausted but buzzing. We got a little wet too when it started raining but I think we missed the worst of it.

Overall, a huge success! If anyone has ever been on the walk they will know that it’s great fun, but probably more enjoyable in the sunshine. Also, for all those living at UKC it’s right on your doorstep so go check it out!

So here it is, I finally got my ass in gear and bought a shiny new VPS to host my blog and various other sites I’m working on. I don’t really ever expect anyone to come and read this, but through the power of Facebook and their “import blog” tool I can force what I’m writing down peoples throats. Hurrah! I have high hopes for that feature, so hopefully it will meet expectations.

Exams are over and Summertime is upon us; I can finally get working on projects that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I really have two biggies, a rather large property website and a Linux Cluster I want to build.

The latter came about when I managed to get my hands on three P3 800s from a friend. Combine those with an old machine I had laying around and the makings of something were there. Two major decisions need to be made: What do I run this cluster on and how do I store it? Being a fan of Gentoo Linux I’m considering installing that, but Parallel Knoppix looks very easy and I haven’t decided how much of a headache I want to develop yet. Storing it is more of a problem as each P3 came in a massive ugly beige box which I ditched almost immediately. I now have two more choices: build my own custom shelving unit to house my motherboards / hard drives / PSUs or look to buy something that fits my needs. Now, I would buy something in an instant if I could find anything, but I don’t really know where to look and the things I have found aren’t suitable. Ideas anyone?

The other project is a collaborative effort between myself and two other guys from uni. I’m not going to give too much away but it’s called Yardsnap (the current website can be found here) and it deals with helping students find property. We have some very interesting ideas in the pipeline and hopefully by the end of August it’ll be up and running in its new form kicking some ass and helping students everywhere find a place to live (for a small fee, of course!).

In August I embark on my Industrial Placement at Sun Microsystems as part of my Computer Science course. Hopefully my projects will be complete by then and I’ll have found a place to stay in Camberley! My Official title is “.Sun E-Business Web Engineer” and I think I’ll be supporting existing applications they have there, mainly to do with their UK Store so no doubt I’ll be busy!

Other than that not sure what to mention for a first blog post. If you have a blog and want to do a link swap then let me know. If you’re reading this through Facebook then my real blog can be found at mikelaming.com/blog.

Peace out, bitches!