On The Fence Development

I'm currently working on an Android application which displays points of interest on a map and allows the user to see additional details by tapping on the associated marker. This sounds like a straight forward requirement for an Android application and so you would have thought that there would be a wealth of resources on the web to guide a developer on his way - but that's not been my experience.

So at work we had a need for a Wiki of some description and after evaluating a number of different systems we decided to go with ScrewTurn. This is written in C# and was initially installed on a Windows Server under IIS - and all was well. At the same time I was evaluating the Statusnet microblogging platform - which we then also decided to implement for internal communication (Yammer and Twitter were deemed as not being suitable).

Ok, so it's no secret that I'm not impressed with the Broadband service from TalkTalk; the connection speed is pretty good but it is unstable - dropping sometimes dozens of times a day. This is just too frustrating for words and the TalkTalk Technical Support is frankly a joke! Anyway, one day I  was trying to download the Ubuntu Lucid Server ISO and was having numerous connection drop outs when a Sky salesman knocked on my door. Now normally I would not entertain these intrusions into my evenings but today was different.

I have a reseller account with my hosting provider which allows me to manage multiple domains (this being one of them) and also provides email services for each of them. The thing is that the two webmail clients it provides, Horde and SquirrelMail are [frankly] clunky and long winded to access - the latter being an issue with the implementation rather than the applications themselves.