Online Tool(s) of the Month – For Finding Lat/Lng

I’ve recently been engaged by a client to write the mobile applications for his website (more on that in later posts) which plots ‘points of interest’ on a map. That probably sounds a little familiar as I have already developed the FillLPG for Android application which displays the location of LPG stations around the UK – and increasingly into Europe.

Working with mapping applications is always a challenge, but an enjoyable one for me as I find maps such an engaging medium. One recurring challenge for me is that I don’t speak ‘Latitude and Longitude’ so when I need to test my code, e.g. load the map for a certain location and perform a ‘nearby’ search, I have to determine some suitable coordinates.

A New Freelance Project – and a Chance to Use .Net Core on Linux

I was recently approached by a website owner, who had seen the FillLPG for Android application and wanted a similar mobile application, i.e. an app which displayed a number of points of interest on a map and allowed it’s users to select a location and have further details displayed.

With my experience with FillLPG I was happy enough that I would be able to create applications to render the map with the points displayed in the appropriate location. The big question is – where is the data coming from?

Taking control of my Domain

Some time ago I was watching a Pluralsight course called ‘Master Your Domain’ where Rob Conery explained how to break your reliance on the major service providers for email, source code, blogs and file-sharing and create your own domain to host your data.

Following the course I started hosting my own Git server, Blog and File Sharing service but Email …. well that was too big a step for me to take at that time. However, times change and when I started experiencing issues with my email that was the trigger for me to take the plunge.

Online Tool of the Month – unixtimestamp.com

As developers we know that one of the biggest problems when working with data is handling dates. It’s such a simple thing surely yet many of us fall foul of formatting issues and time zone offsets – and that’s when the date is actually human readable!

I remember when I first encountered a Unix Timestamp in the ‘LastUpdated’ column of a database table and thinking, ‘what the hell is that?!’.

Bear in mind that this was back in the days before the internet and before I had any real experience with Unix/Linux systems – every Windows application I had seen prior to this had it’s dates stored in the DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm:ss format.

Being faced with something like 1519571567 was a bit confusing to say the least – unless you know that this represents ‘the number of seconds since midnight (UTC) 1st January 1970‘ where would you even start to know what this meant?

The Personal Encryptor 1.0 Released

Following on from my post about the UK Governments campaign to erode our privacy by demanding that tech companies put back doors in their encrypted products, I have created a simple utility to demonstrate how easy it is for a reasonably competent developer to create their own using standard development tools and libraries.

Now, I’m not expecting the UK Government to take a blind bit of notice but the fact is that encryption is out there, it’s only mathematics after all, and it’s not going away. You cannot feasibly make maths illegal – although the US did classify encryption as a weapon until 2000 (and to some degree still does).

Anyway, following my commitment to watch at least one Pluralsight course a month during 2018 I opted for Practical Cryptography in .NET by Stephen Haunts to give myself some suitable background.