When I started this blog I wanted to put miscellaneous things, rants, opinions. But I also wanted to go into a bit of coding every now and again, but that isn’t fun for everyone (though I do love it).

So, I introduce to you my other blog: http://devblog.whoisfrancisgilbert.com. The tagline might need to be “this might not be for you”. It’ll be a lot of stuff to help me and others with issues and tips on coding. Hell, if you want to join the group, come on in! The world needs more programmers and scripters.

I’ll finish here, it’s quite a thing re-learning stuff you learned at school roughly 16 years ago. Looking at ohm ratings for resistors, but the fun is all there! Just a nice little hobby to pick up, start from the start and then be able to get some decent little projects going once you’re a bit better at it. At this point, it’s just me and the learning curve.

Arduino was built to be a simple device for artists to build cool installations. More recently, developers have become more aware of it and have created projects like Baker Tweet from the tech team at Poke and the singing sock puppet (see below).

Singing Sock Puppet & The Meters – Blues in F from Matt Brown on Vimeo.

I’m excited, very excited. I was pretty damn good at circuits at school, so something like this is potentially a dream come true, in a very, very geeky way, which is what I love. Come on Mr Postman, deliver me my board!

Media Temple have stepped up now. The URL for my blog is now http://blog.whoisfrancisgilbert.com/ though everything should still work as with the old URLs, thanks to some confirguration magic.

For you it should all be the same, for me, it is very exciting!

Anyway, it isn’t hacking as in cracking machines and making them do your bidding, this is the old style hacking. It is, however, taking every day objects such as a sock to platforms like the web and making them do something. You get an idea, get a team together and work through the night eating sweets, drinking beer and listening to music. I feel like a bit of a fraud as I was one of the guys who went purely to watch the talks and see people like Rasmus “I wrote PHP I did” Lerdorf do talks. Next year I will try to get myself in gear, find a team, and get the hack on! Why not!

And if you want to see some truly happy geeks see: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=openhacklondon&w=all&s=int. I’m in there somewhere.

Nowadays it is all Object Oriented, high level languages based on rapid development principles. Lovely, but where is the innocent fun? The 10 print “Hello” 20 goto 10? I was shown yesterday that it still exists. Microsoft have decided that we need these innocent, simple, low level, not very powerful languages.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Small Basic!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

I actually have no idea how serious they want this to be. It is based on .NET so it could potentially be incredibly powerful. But it only has 15 keywords.

Keep the dream alive!

1) Beg, borrow, steal, buy, fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck (bathtub variety)
2) Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it, if that’s all right.
3) Explain to the duck what you code is supposed to do, and then go into detail and explain things line by line
4) At some point you will tell the duck what you are doing next and then realise that that is not in fact what you are actually doing. The duck will sit there serenely, happy in the knowledge that it has helped you on your way.

Interestingly, I have been doing this for some time unknowingly. I do have a rubber duck that was given to me a few years back. His name is Baxter. Baxter sits on my desk and ponders life. He rarely leaves that spot, and sometimes gets lost in paper and thought. Until I get some work that requires some brain power, at which point he becomes my sound board.

I actually think this is a fantastic thing. So many of us internalise our thoughts, which is fine. But sometimes saying them aloud just helps. I’d recommend anyone to do this with anything that requires thought. I think Baxter might become my therapist now. Here’s to Baxter.

I’ve seen this kind of quote quite a lot. And it’s an acceptable thing to say, it is in beta. However, Google have changed the meaning of the word Beta. Back in the day with traditional software development, an application would go through Alpha, Beta, Release Candidates then final or something similar (it still does, and will for years to come). Alpha and beta would be for testers and those who dared to install and potentially destroy their machines.

The reason Google use “Beta” is the platform has changed. You don’t install web applications, you just use them. If it gets upgraded, they do it and you reap the benefits. This also means the software isn’t ever final. It can be updated as much as daily, and they don’t even need to tell you. Conversely, for desktop applications, you will probably install once, maybe update the software once a month at most, but even then you have to give permission and will probably not even install the latest version especially not if it is a test version of the software.

Beta has lost the “test version only, use at your peril” badge for web applications. However, Google Chrome, Google’s web browser, has had to come out of beta, it is a desktop application, and all the other browsers out there ask for only testers or the fool-hardy to use beta versions.

So, the term Beta on the web, has a slightly different definition, it just means “this application is being improved constantly” rather than “don’t use, this is just not reliable”.

I always put C down as the old thing you learn in computer science. It was certainly the first language I learnt and is a good base to start (albeit quite hard to learn as it is a little more low level than the Java and C#s of this world). I’m also guessing they encompass C++ and objective-C when they say “C”. Objective-C is making a big growth since the iphone’s applications are written in this language.

But I’m excited. I’m excited because low level programming languages allow good things; like the speed of them can be phenomenal if written correctly. They are tough to write partly for this reason. Memory management is not done for you. Scripting languages like PHP and Ruby have taken a slight tumble because of the C revolution. I’ll be interested to see where this goes in any case.

I really think since Microsoft Windows 7 is shaping up to be a slick (comparatively) little OS where they concentrate on performance and Apple’s Snow Leopard OS is doing the same, the next few years will be more concentrated on speed of an application rather than adding more features. This is exciting because no one likes to wait for things to load, or have to buy more RAM to upgrade to a new version of software. Slick and quick is, well, lovely.

Using C badly though could cause slower applications, and bugs that could cripple memory. Let’s hope people are writing wisely. Assembly anyone?