Exams are over, school holidays are about to start and the prize giving thing is soon. Things are looking great in my world! (Some people call it conceit, I call it telling the truth) Now that exams are over and everything I’m going back to work on my client. Not gonna give up so soon on it. Saw that new protocol documentation out but first going to concentrate on getting everything properly working on current version of protocol. Going to posting updates here again soon.

Oh yes. I made it in the final!!!! Just felt like putting it in here for the heck of it. Wish me luck people! (Everyone besides the rest of the finalists because that would just be weird and confusing)

Can’t believe my little proggy made it. I’m so proud of you proggy :’(. I’d like to thank my family…friends (especially Faaria, Yasmeen and Aziza lol you guys are legend) for supporting me -stops and chokes-. Thank you… -walks off imaginary stage-.

Just realised that in the heat of the moment I sent the wrong version of the client in for judging… That’s what happens when you hand something in 5 minutes before the deadline in a panicked state. Will upload a proper copy of the client next week or so. Want to first make installer work properly and am studying for exams and what not

Ok I handed it in. I’m actually really dissappointed at my result. I could’ve improved on so much things very simply. I think it a matter of laziness on my part. Not only that but plain stupidity. Which could have been avoided by planning better in advanced.

I was using incredibly weird container classess to pass around global variables. Really retarded and the cause for many bugs. 

I’m using two different gtk gui descriptor formats (both in XML) libglade and gtk.Builder. For some reason gtk.Builder wouldn’t let me create menus. I only found out about an hour ago that that was because I was using an old version of Gtk. (Just btw this is my first time using gtk if you gonna make a weird comment). Because I was using libglade I couldn’t use py2exe to create a windows executable. I actually have working code that I just made now like 20 minutes ago that has a installer and uses just one of those libraries but I couldn’t hand it in because I haven’t tested it yet.

This whole thing has been an awesome learning experience.  First time I write a program of this size in python, first time working with the Gtk toolkit (I don’t really like it. Going to have a look at Qt). 

I wonder if MXit will ever run a competition of this nature again. However considering that they wouldn’t need any other applications that run on the PC I’m kinda doubting it. Wait wait! How about a MXit server development competition! K, maybe that not such a good idea what with all the security issues and what not.

Anyway [possibly]  going out for good (gotta go study afrikaans, competition just keeping me up)
Safe

I wrote a 3 hour IT exam today. It was hilarious! Compared to the stuff I had to do for the competition the programming quiestions was like preschool. I finished the whole thing in about 45 minutes and spent another half an hour trying to figure out why my output wasn’t looking the same as the one given on the paper. Turns out that the paper was wrong! I learnt something today though….playing minesweeper makes time fly.

Last night I was busy working on the update profile routine. I was busy testing it on my own personal MXit account and the whole thing just crashed. Turns out I forgot to add the deprecated argument right at the end. Now I’m locked out of my MXit account and the Sim card I used to register the account is broken (stupid cheap virgin mobile sim card). I emailed MXit support and they just suggested that I should do a Sim swop as they can’t give out the passwords to any of their accounts. Right now I’m really pissed off as I have just lost the only contact I had with really old friends.

When testing the update profile window I changed the password on my personal mxit account. I can’t get the pin back because I don’t have the number anymore. Even worse when testing the invite contact, add contact, add group etc I kept on getting error 99 codes from the server. If it continues like this I won’t be able to hand in tomorrow. What a waste of two months worth of work…

I started getting really weird and random crashes yesterday. It was actually scaring me. Especially due to the fact that this thing is due for tommorrow. Managed to fix it after a while. I had to remove support for multiple chat windows though, really dissappointing.

There are still many things I have to do before I hand in tommorrow and I don’t think I’ll be able to get through them all. Looks like I’m going to have to leave out group chat and encrypted messages. I don’t have enough time to get through it all.

On top of all this I’m writing my first exam tommorrow. At least it’s IT prac gonna fly through it since I’ve been getting all this practice!

I still have to create the installer before I hand it in. I don’t have a windows machine to work with to create the installer. This competition was at a really bad time for me, what with exams etc.

Anyway best of luck to everyone handing in tommorow.

After struggling to figure out GtkTextView I’ve decided to take a similar route as bedlamp, marcb and them use HTML to render the ChatWindow. Gtk doesn’t have a buildtin renderer but I found an implementation of one ontop of GtkTextView written by Gustavo Carneiro. It can be found here