Happy New Year and I hope everyone is having a great 2010 so far!

If you know me through any medium such as my blog, Twitter, Facebook, email or through events like the Edinburgh TechMeetup you probably haven't seen me update or communicate for a while.

Well over winter I pretty much went into hibernation mode. I've been playing a lot of Eve-Online and not doing any freelance work - pretty much ignoring anyone and everyone who has been in contact. But I had my reasons.

2009 was a bit of a crappy year to be honest.

In the whole year I never had a proper holiday, I was overworked and underpaid and this meant no chance to just unwind and de-stress.

So at the end of the 2009 I decided to take the time to just do this.

Between things like my girlfriend being diagnosed with penetrative Crohn's (they said it was cancer at first) which meant her going through major surgery - to my laptop breaking and not being able to afford to replace it (and I still haven't as of yet) - it just felt like everything that could go wrong, did.

But now we're just over half way through January and I've decided it's time to finally come out of the cave of despair, get back into working and look forward to 2010.

So as of now I'm contactable again. I'm actively looking for some extra freelance stuff - especially PHP or Android development - so I can afford to get myself a new PC and look at saving up for a holiday this year.

I've had enough of Google Apps email downtime and since I've taken out Webfaction hosting, I have checked out their email system and I must say it was rather simple to set up and seems to be working well.  I haven't read anything bad about it either.

I'm migrating another email over in the meantime to have a temporary one (which I'll post later once I know it's working) - then I have the task of first migrating out all my emails and finally switching over the DNS.

Update: Well looks like I've started moving at the right time! GMail is down again.  Now, at the moment I'm still waiting on DNS changes so at the moment - like many - I can't access my email at all, but I have managed to move all my email over.

In the past couple of months I haven't been doing much Android work either so it's been even more difficult now to keep up and really do anything with it.  I had put out a call to the community to help with contributions - but I got the total sum of zero replies.

So, with all of this in mind I have decided I can't really run it as a separate site any more.  One of the reasons I started a blog back up though was I do want to share my experience with everyone out there who is interested in technology and programming so what I am going to do is put more stuff up here.

I had a quick look over the examples I had and I do need to update them slightly.  Some due to API changes and some because - well they are crap.  The current examples are up on github but will I can't guarantee they will still work in Android 1.5.  In the meantime I am pointing the URL back to this blog.

The first example I am going to re-write is the gallery tutorial and I should have it up soon!

Wow...Just. Wow.

This means that in your jQuery-based code you can now support events such as swipes and orientation changes.  So far it seems to support the iPhone best, which is fair enough as it seems to have the best events system in the mobile browser space but hopfully we'll see improved Android support soon.

If you've never heard of it before - it's a dialect of Java that is aimed at creating artistic visualisations by providing a pretty full API of functions for doing graphics, maths and event handling.

If you've never checked it out before, I recommend having a look over at openprocessing.org to see some of the great stuff that has been released by some really creative people (and some crap from me).

The download comes with it's own "IDE" that allows you to code and test your programs in - but as it's implemented in Java you can also import the jar files into Eclipse to write you own Java-based implementations which is the next route I'll be looking at.

Over the last year or so, I have been keeping myself very busy and up until now haven't had the time or consideration to do a blog.

But after thinking about it, with the amount of stuff I have been doing over the last while, I decided it was time to fire one back up and start sharing some of the goodies I have learned over the last year, as well as just generally prattle on about stuff.

I'm in the middle of moving all my stuff about just now, so I full expect my email to break and other stuff while I do this...so I better crack on!