“Project Cooper” launch pencilled in

RemObjects have added the SDN's October 2011 Software Developer Conference (SDC) in Zeist, Netherlands to their events page. The events listed on that page are conferences and events that feature sessions and material on RemObjects products, such as Delphi Prism and the W.I.P. “Project Cooper” (a Delphi Prism-like tool for building, debugging and deploying Java and Android applications).

I mention the SDN Conference in particular because this is where “Project Cooper” will be officially launched. On the evening of Monday, October 3rd I will be delivering the launch presentation, currently entitled: Presenting: Project “Cooper” - The Oxygene Language for Java and Android.

On Tuesday, October 4th I will be giving another two “Project Cooper” sessions, looking at specifics of Java and Android development. These additional sessions are still being worked out and will be made known closer to the conference date.

Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 Post-Event Update

The Trailwalker event eventually came on the weekend of the 16th and 17th July after months of training walks. This post gives a write-up of the event and allows me to extend another heartfelt thank you to all our generous sponsors who have contributed to the great causes we were fundraising for. At the time of writing we have raised a splendid £2873 (or approx. £3482 with Gift Aid factored in). This is tremendous news as we were originally aiming for £1500.

MonoTouch and Mono for Android are back

This post is a little tardy in relation to the news it brings. But in case you missed it, Xamarin have now taken over the MonoTouch and Mono for Android products from Novell/Attachmate and have them available from their site store – so this changes the questionable status over the products that the Attachmate acquisition of Novell brought about.
I guess I’ll have to update my MonoTouch intro tutorial and in-depth tutorial and my Mono for Android intro tutorial, to correct all the links etc.
But it’s great to see Mono development available again for the mobile platforms.
[Edit]
I did indeed update the MonoTouch articles and also update the Mono for Android article.

Microsoft Press free eBooks

I recently bumped into some free eBooks from Microsoft Press covering these subjects:

• Programming Windows Phone 7 – Charles Petzold
• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 (10 chapters) – Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (10 chapters) – Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner
• Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (6 chapters) – Mitch Tulloch
• Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft (8 chapters) – Katherine Murray
• Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 (9 chapters) – Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker
• First Look Microsoft Office 2010 (14 chapters) – Katherine Murray
• Deploying Windows 7: Essential Guidance (10 chapters) – Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet

Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 Training Update 2

• Oxfam Trailwalker event page
• Blood, Sweat & Beers team page
• Endurance walk – previous post from 3rd April 2011
• Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 Training Update – previous post from 27th April 2011

Ok, so we’re nearly there.

The Blood Sweat & Beers team has just completed the last of its big training sessions for the Oxfam Trailwalker 2011 endurance walk challenge on July 16th and 17th. We are now in ‘taper time’, keeping active, but doing no more big training sessions.

We will be attempting to walk 100 km (or 62.5 miles) in a little over 24 hours in order to raise funds for Oxfam’s poverty relief work and to support ex-Gurkhas. A while back we set our fundraising goal to be £2000, which delightfully has been met through generous donations, but we are still looking to improve on the total and will appreciate any additional sponsorships.

This post is the final pre-event update to show how our training has come along as we prepared for the big weekend.

“Project Cooper” Mandelbrot set calculation

I’ve had a couple of people ask me on separate occasions to show some “Project Cooper” code. I’ve not posted any thus far, as the product is quite early in its beta cycle and very few people have access to it. When it has matured and is in more hands I have plans to write lots more on the subject, but since I’ve been asked, I thought I’d post a simple project.

The ever-popular Mandelbrot set is the subject of this little demo, and it’s just a simple console application, completely bypassing the Android support, just building an app that runs on the Java VM.

A dictionary of new words (kind of)

English is a massive language. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition has about 600,000 words in it and that doesn't include the similar number of technical and scientific terms that aren't listed.

In the early days of the language's evolution the mass of words was helped along by England having an influx of peoples and languages from many lands and this helped grow the number of different terms for the very same thing.