We thought it would be a nice idea for all you good folks out there to get some idea of the people behind the RunRev company, so we have invited our team members to start making blog posts here. This one is from David Williams, our newest member.
Hi! Since this is my first blog post for this, I guess I should probably introduce myself. My name is David Williams, and I have been working as a software developer for Runtime Revolution for a little over 9 months now. I personally have a huge interest in programming and computer-ish things in general, but my other interests include playing bass guitar and guitar, music in general, and gaming. Recently, I have been working on a project to deliver educational apps to children in Malawi, using mobile devices such as the iPod Touch.
The whole team has been back from the conference in California for some time now, but it still seems like we only arrived back yesterday (probably due to the mountains of work I’ve been working through since getting back). It was a great experience for me personally, and I met so many interesting people doing so many fascinating things, it seems a little odd all of a sudden being back in ‘sunny’ Edinburgh. The trip back was fairly smooth, apart from the loss of several random pieces of baggage (since returned), and damage to a G5 desktop tower that looks like it was caused by being dropped from several storeys up, then subsequently used as a landing mat.
On the bright side of being back, and returning to some semblence of a normal routine, there has been a little more time for gaming. I have spent pretty huge amounts of time recently playing and running a Minecraft server. I had a problem however, in that it was quite awkward to keep an eye on what was going on on my server while doing anything else. So, I decided to write a program to deal with this by displaying me a real time feed of my server log, and giving me growl notifications when anything interesting happens (thus making me Big Brother, and therefore the winner).
I achieved this by setting up a quick irev script on the server to copy the relevant log out of the password protected server area to a place where I could grab it with one line of code in LiveCode, for processing. After an hour and a half, the code came to a grand total of 81 lines (with whitespace), and worked pretty perfectly. Well, apart from the occasional wall of growl notifications when it decides to notify me of the contents of the entire log file, but I’m pretty sure I know why it does that now.
