Perl

I started reading reading a great book on Perl this morning in an effort to teach myself Perl to be more productive at work. Perl seems like a great tool that could be useful for automating a lot things that I do on a regular basis. I write a lot of Java stuff for parsing text but it seems like Perl is definitely a better tool for that job.

I'm about half way through the book "Beginning Perl". Having stacks and lists built in to it's core and focusing on what operators are used to use relevant data types based on it's context is great. A day's reading and I think I've got enough to understand a lot of what I'm going to need perl for. I'll be moving on to sub-routines, object orientated programming with Perl, regular expressions and then I'd like to cover some system programming with perl. Standard I/O and network programming will also be useful.

Going to be doing a lot more this evening after the France and Scotland match.

Adding more functionality

I've spent this afternoon getting back in to developing my Driver Tool app having not contributed to this project in quite a while. I would like to get back working on this on a regular basis and try get it published on the android market place so that I can start using it.

Today I completed the functionality of the settings menu, for selecting either metric or imperial as a measurement system. A user will be prompted with this menu upon first installing the app. Once the user has selected their preference they are not prompted upon app start up again. They can access the options menu through the menu button. I've also included the functionality of adding and deleting a car with an options menu which operates more or less in the same way as the transaction adding and deleting functionality. I've give the user the option to enter in the manufacturer and car model themselves when adding a car. I may update this in the future to populate a selection of drop down menus from a database of makes and models. Due to the tedious nature of populating such a database I've left that out for now.

There are a number of things that need to be done still which I'm going to start on. The first of these things is the tyre pressure calculator. I'm going to get back in to OpenGL for this. I'll have to come up with a spec for this part of the app, because I've only a couple of concept ideas in my head right now. I suppose I should probably remove the tab and finish up testing the already implemented functionality to push for a release. One of the other things that still needs doing is to build non-place holder assets for the menus and tabs, and work on the styling of the app. I think I would like to change the background from the standard black.

Update

I haven't had much time to get back coding in a while unfortunately. Life is a bit hectic at the minute, and I always seem to be busy with something else. Hopefully things will calm down soon enough and I'll have more time to spend relaxing and writing a bit of code. I type this now as I fight the urge to fall asleep!