Software

Most of the software I have developed over the years has been released as open source and is freely available in public repositories over at GitHub.

There are 5 Major Applications that I have developed so far. One is recent, the rest developed several years ago. The older ones do have supporting concepts in separate repositories. I won’t mention them here; the reader is encouraged to visit my GitHub account and explore what is available.

The intervening gap has been spent developing, in my spare time, a private application for my existing client - converting the existing Microsoft Access Application, which they fundementally pay me to maintain, to a new Web only application- sharing the same SQL Server Database. I will refer to it and the technology it uses in Blog Posts, but due to the nature of the software and its purpose I cannot make it public.

So the key applications are

• Air Hockey This is a full simulation of an Air Hockey club the core of which is a table at which matches can be played. This is surrounded by a ladder system which ranks members according to their performances at the table

• AKCMoney This is a Money Budgeting program that I use for my own personal and business finance management and have been doing so for over 15 years. It consists of three main concepts:-

  1. Domains which hold Accounts we wish to manage.
  2. Acounts which hold money in a particular currency.
  3. Transactions which move money between accounts (or between a single account and the outside world).

  Multiple currencies are supported, although there is normally a Default Currency Specified, and can use exchange rates that are initially estimated, but which are then corrected when the actual value of the transaction is known. Each side of the transaction can be assigned an Accounting Code which belongs to one of Costs, Revenue or Assets (depreciated over three years), Balance (items such as expenses and their re-ebursement which should end up at zero) and Offsheet (items such as Profits and Dividends).

  Data is held in an sqlite data making it easy to backup and move around.

• MBBall is an American Football results picking sofware allowing an administrator to run a yearly competition to all plays to pick results. Melinda’s Backups started to run this competition on their communinity forum using spreadsheets. I wrote this software to support this process and host it all on their site.

• MBChat is a multi-purpose chat program developed for Melinda’s Backups. It was originally so the leadership team could meet in real time rather than in psuedo real time using e-mail, but went on to become a more general meeting place for all members.

  Early versions relied on clients polling a database, but later versions relied on a server which managed and passed on messages which was woken up by the first particpant into the server and terminated on the last person out.

  These days Server Sent Events or even web sockets would be used, but video chat capabilities on other platforms make this software someone antiquated. However there are some interesting techniques (such as allowing a computer intensive operation of generating an RSA key pair in the client run without locking the browser (maybe now replaced with async and await along with promises)). I leave the software then as an example of some of the ideas.

• Pi_record is designed to record audio files from USB connected Microphones on a Raspberry Pi. As part of a plan to handle recording videos of me playing by Grand Piano, I planned to mount an iPad on a small tripod and use the built in Cameras to record the videos. However to improve the sound quality I have both a Blue Yeti usb Microphone and a pair of Rode M5 microphones which connect to a Scarlet 2i2 pre-amp and computer interface. One or both of these would be plugged into the USB interfaces on a Raspberry Pi4. The idea is that a Web Client would have a screen to control the recording or otherwise of these Microphones.