NickTelford.net

I’m no artist and when it comes to design it usually takes me several attempts to get it right. This is where rapid prototyping comes in handy. Being able to quickly and easily produce a design, twist, turn and tweak it or simply throw it away and start again is a vital process to any application design.

Step up Glade

Glade is probably one of the most underrated development tools for Gnome. It makes prototyping an interface a sinch, with no need to worry about typing out laborious GTK+ code; move everything around, add and remove features from your design and mess around with settings quickly and easily until you have something you’re happy with.

Once you have your final UI design, you have two options. Either use libglade to set up your application UI or convert the glade UI in to real GTK+ code by hand.

The former is far simpler, but the latter adds more flexability, removes redundant widgets and a dependancy on libglade and increases performance.

Converting the Glade XML by hand isn’t as much of a chore as it sounds. Widgets in the Glade XML only define options that have non-default values so you simply need to arm yourself with the GTK+ documentation, run down the XML and implement each widget, adding children where necessary.

Guest starring: Anjuta

While Glade is great for prototyping a UI, testing your UI (Glade appears to render slightly differently to GTK+, so it’s a good idea to run the prototype properly), converting it to GTK+ code and of course, writing the actual program code is a necessity. While gedit, vim and emacs are all fine for the job, creating a source tree and build system for your application can be a bit of a nightmare.

There’s nothing worse than spending more time debugging your build scripts than your program code.

Anjuta makes it all easy – while it may not generate the most optimal build scripts – it does a good job of providing you with a source tree that will build without the need for any tweaking. Which is perfect for testing your UI prototype quickly and without fuss.

I’m just starting out with GTK+ programming and, in fact, C; but I’m already finding tools that make the learning curve so much less steep.

There is a decades old stereotype of students. We party, we drink, we sleep and generally do as little work as possible. The Young Ones depicted a comical view of student life on the breadline, but it seems that many people have forgotten just how little money students really have.

The goverment appear to think that students have a lot more money than they do, made evident by the introduction and steady increase of tuition fees. They say this helps poorer students by subsidising them, while charging students from a wealthier background. However, as with most tax systems, the middle class end up paying a premium they cannot afford.

This misconception goes further than individual students. The Evangelical Christian Union at the University of Exeter have recently filed papers against the Students’ Guild in the High Court and are demanding that the Students’ Guild pay their legal fees, which are apparently in excess of £10,000.
The reasoning must go something like this:

• Students have money
• Student unions are made of lots of students
• Therefore student unions must have a lot of money!

Of course, this simply is not true. £10,000 would be a massive blow to the Students’ Guild and would detrimentally affect all students across the Exeter campus. Ironically, since the Evangelical Christian Union are partially funded by the Students’ Guild and their members use the many Guild facilities every day, they would suffer as much as the rest of us.

Recent research has shown that with inflated living costs, increases in duty on alcohol and economical victimisation of students through schemes such as tuition fees; student drinking and partying has declined significantly, the number of students in part-time employment has risen significantly, as has the average debt level upon graduation.

The decades old stereotype of The Young Ones is beginning to disappear, being replaced by a student population that is working around the clock to pay the rent and too penny-less to party. I think it’s time to give students a break.

I remember going to school and knowing, without a doubt, that the teachers knew what they were talking about. After all, that’s their job. This feeling of security continued throughout secondary school and college, but after just one term at University, I had lost faith in the entire higher education system.

I’ve been at University for a year and a half now and, ignoring the social aspects, I have to say I feel cheated out of my money. I think that my three years here will be the longest pause in education of my life.

Before University, I took a year out doing contract work using my somewhat limited knowledge of PHP. The fact that I had a job doing something I knew little about forced me to learn more than I ever thought possible. This, along with some very long train journeys and some excellent books on design patterns, allowed me to learn more about PHP and object-oriented programming than some learn in the 3 years it takes to get a degree.

Of course, this should not be. My time in higher education is supposed to be a rewarding experience (that reward being a degree). So what’s the point of a degree if you don’t actually learn anything useful?

I know several people who would shoot me down, saying I am too complacent and should attend more lectures. This may be true, but people who actually do work still come out of their final year with a poor understanding of the subject.

Some good has come out of this. Inspired by authors, both electronic and in print, I have recently become quite keen to go in to lecturing myself and hopefully publish a book or two to help future generations of students graduate with more than just a piece of paper.

It’s also a great opportunity to take a few years out of my life, kick back and relax. After all, what else is a student loan for?

1. Work for a large organisation
2. Pretend to represent affiliated organisations
3. Repeat

Apparently professional journalists these days are becoming sloppy in their ability to sniff out the truth. Either that, or they just don’t care unless it involves late Princesses or Z-list celebrities.

Since October the ECU issues that have arisen here in Exeter have begun to hit the news everywhere. Not in a big way, but generally appearing as small articles in papers or deep in websites. Being in charge of the Student website here has opened my eyes to the ineptitude of journalists around the country, not only in researching the facts but also in attaining quotes.

In almost every publication covering this story you will find a quote from “Emma Brewster, CU worker”. Only thing is, she isn’t who everyone thinks she is.

Emma Brewster isn’t and has never been a student at the University of Exeter. So how can she be a worker for the (E)CU here? Simple, she’s not!

Google her and you’ll quickly find that she’s actually the South West regional representative for the UCCF (Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship), an organisation that the ECU here are affiliated to.

So, given that she doesn’t in fact represent the ECU, but instead the UCCF, how can she make statements on behalf of the CU claiming to be a worker for them and implying she’s a student here?

Further more, is the current action being taken even the will of the Exeter ECU? After all, with Emma doing all their talking for them, how can we know what it is they really want, especially since the President of the ECU stated to the student newspaper Exepose that “we will respect the decision of the student body that we should be called the ECU”.

Sounds like the UCCF are starting a fight no one here wanted in the first place, lets hope the ECU do the right thing and tell them where to stick their wholly unchristian, anti-democratic bully tactics.

On the flip-side, the UCCF and ECU aren’t entirely to blame for the cock ups of the countries media. Sure, they may have purposefully mislead them, but its the responsibility of journalists to check their sources and get the facts right, otherwise, how can they expect people to believe them? I’m seriously considering sending a letter to all the news organisations at fault with nothing more than the dictionary definition of “research” written on it. After all, it couldn’t hurt.

The Evangelical Christian Union have this week filed a “Letter before Action” with the Students’ Guild of the University of Exeter.

My position within X-Net (for those who don’t know, the online student media for Exeter University) has forced upon me the pure facts surrounding the issue. This is essentially a good thing as it has meant that our News team has been able to cover the story without bias, however, other news websites have not been so fortunate.

Interestingly, it seems that almost all of the websites covering the story are Christian news sites. Not particularly unexpected, however, it seems that almost all of the reporting of this story by Christian news sources either manipulate the facts or get the story almost entirely wrong.

In fact, the most balanced and in fact correct coverage I could find on this issue, beyond X-Net of course, was the BBC News coverage.

Not only are news sources getting the facts wrong but the Exeter ECU themselves don’t seem to know what’s going on. During the recent referendum over the final name, the president of the ECU, James Harding, was interviewed by our News Editor, Kathryn Nott. Some of his initial statements were flat out lies; at one point stating “It is a myth that the Christian Union are affiliated to the UCCF”. After phoning the UCCF, we confirmed that they most definitely are affiliated. To which we got an apology and an excuse: “I forgot that we were affiliated to the UCCF”.

Yeah, we believe you.

Couple this with the inaccurate reporting of various Christian news sites and I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that large Christian organisations will only promote virtues such as equality and morality when it benefits them. So, just like any other organisation really.

I for one sincerely hope that the Students’ Guild don’t buckle under the legal pressure being mounted on them by the ECU, after all, it should be fairly obvious to them that they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.

I’ve now moved by blog over to Mephisto, a powerful new Rails blogging platform. Generally, it seems to offer a fair amount more flexibility over Typo and is a lot faster, although I need to use it for a while longer before drawing any real conclusions.

I very much doubt that I’ll get much on here in the coming months, University and in particular, X-Net, are keeping me very busy. Hopefully I’ll be able to write the odd reasonably insightful entry here and there, but frequent updates are a few months off at least.

I’m hoping to come up with a half-decent non-default design at some point in the next few weeks, Mephisto seems to make theming fairly painless so it’s not something that’s likely to demand too much of my time.

In other news, I’ve discovered that our VPS host Adiungo, has finally upgraded their virtualization software to allow the 2.6 series of Linux kernels to run. It’s about time.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to backup and reinstall everything on the server right now, a task made more complicated by the two people I share it with. Still, we may get around to it eventually, hopefully then we’ll be able to see the back of Fedora Core 2…