Random Ramblings

Yes, you heard it here first. I’m joining the large number of people around the world growing a mo during November to raise awareness (and hopefully money) about some of the health issues that affects us fella’s right around the world, namely prostate cancer and depression.

Truth be told I have only just registered, BUT, I have complied with the rules of Movember since the 1st, with the intention of registering and doing a blog post about it.  I will update this post shortly with a progress shot taken a couple of days ago, along with more during the coming weeks.

Having a read of these stats, and it shows why this is an important issue:

• Depression affects 1 in 6 men and most don’t seek help. I personally know a few people who are suffering from it and although they have all gotten help, one of them took an awfully long time to do so.
• In Australia last year, 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer with 2,900 dying from it.  This is equivalent to the number of women who die from breast cancer each year.

We have pink ribbon day, and all of these other foundations and events and such for breast cancer, but as far as I can tell, not much for prostate cancer even though it kills the same number of people each year.  As for depression, well, 1 in 6 is a pretty large statistic.  That’s why Movember is a great project and hopefully all of us that are growing a Mo are able to raise even a little bit more awareness of these issues so that do suffer from these two issues are able to get the support they need, and hopefully in the case of prostate cancer, find a cure.

So, does this sound like a good enough reason to sponsor me? If so, please visit my donation page. (All donations above $2 are tax deductible and receipts are issued).  The funds raised go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue.

Otherwise, sit back and watch as the Mo grows…

Updated on 2008-11-25

As promised, here are the progress shots.

Day 9

Day 18

Day 25

Thanks to some generous donations, my total raised so far is $120, but I would still like more! Go on, donate here.

Since the last blog entry, I have been a rather busy bee doing all sorts of programming.  Here’s a summary of what I have accomplished in the past few months.

I was able to finally place the main software into feature freeze, albeit about a month after I had initially hoped, and with some extra features that have been well received by the users.  There is one change which is reported to be disliked however I am reluctant to change it unless more than 50% of the users actually do dislike it.

I have completed the rostering system, which has been deployed and I believe is working well.  We initially had some bumps with the email function, but I have sorted that.

The backup system is currently undergoing a pilot at one office which has picked up a few issues but I believe is ready to deploy in the next week.  I was originally going to use the SharpZipLib .NET component, however I was unhappy with the amount of time it took to archive all of the files, and with no ability to retrieve feedback from the component as each file was added, I switched to using another component which I acquired thanks to the VB.NET Resource Kit offered in 2004.  Even though the component was built for .NET 1.1, it works happily (so far) in .NET 2.0.  I learnt how to use the BackgroundWorker object too, which works well.  There’s another part of this software, namely the media writing, but I’ll add that to another post shortly as I think it deserves it’s own post.

Which brings me back to the present.  I have revived the web project.  I had a bit of a play around with some javascript modal box components for the login .. wizard I guess you could call it .. but they didn’t really seem to play nicely, so I have shelved that for now.  It was only to try and make the interface look funky, but I’ll work on funkifying the project later on, once I have the process and function of the project working.  At this stage I think it’s still going to be a .NET 2.0 and AJAX 1.0 project, but that is subject to change if I ever feel like it.  I am about to start on the inter-user messaging side of the project so that I can have most of the easy stuff out of the way before I tackle the hardest section.  I find it better to concentrate on the easier items before moving on to the more difficult ones.

So there you have it.  I’ll shortly post about the media writing code, along with anything else I come up with along the way, but until then I’ll be head down in Visual Studio madly trying to get the web project well underway before something happens which causes us to shelve it again.