All Geekness Great and Small

Archive for February, 2009

There is a lot of excitement in the mobile development world about the coming of the Palm Pre. Palm’s been doing pretty poorly of late, so the alternate prospects of abject failure (and bye, bye Palm) and glorious success (bye, bye iPhone) has get everyone all of a quiver. The thing is, I’m a big geek… I’m just excited about webOS.
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O’reilly release the first chapter of their new webOS book in the past few days and it has been a welcome island in a sea of tedious rumours. While others may wildly speculate on when the Pre will appear, at least we now have some idea of what it will be running.
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Yesterday, my sister sent me a tweet that posed a good question: “How is Twitter any better or different than an SMS or Facebook?”.

To me, the major difference is intent; intended audience and the intention behind all submissions.
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Lot’s of people have been writing about Bespin, including Whurley, and I’ve got to say, I’m not sharing the general enthusiasm for the release.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea of a code editor which is inherently connected to the web is a great idea, but let’s not get over-excited about what was presented and what has been promised.
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I saw @mhat‘s tweet today about ‘What language should I learn‘  and it got me thinking about the times I’ve asked that question and how I might answer it. So, @mhat, I’m taking your tweet to be a challenge to write an unbiased and ‘unwrong’ post. To do this, I’m going to give you a history of the languages I have learned.
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Like a fair number of people, I have a number of Twitter identities. I have my personal identity (@dancrumb) as well as a number of shared identities that represent events or organizations in which I’m involved.

I use a number of clients to send out tweets, but all of these clients limit you to a single identity. If you want to user twitter.com to send out messages, you need to log in with the appropriate identity before you perform any Twitter functions.

Herein lies the problem. When you’re logged in to Twitter and you navigate to somebody’s Twitter page, there is no indication as to who you’re logged in as. The risk is that you could elect to follow or message someone, thinking you’re logged in as one identity, only to find that you’re logged in as another identity. I did precisely this, yesterday. As luck would have it, the person was my sister and I quickly spotted my mistake, but if  you’re using Twitter as a major communication channel, you need to be very aware of which identity you’re tweeting with.

In order to address this, I’ve written a small Greasemonkey script. You can access it here. You’ll need to have the Greasemonkey plugin installed, of course.

Once the script is installed, you will be able to see who you’re logged on as, in the Twitter navigation bar at the top right-hand corner of the screen, at all times.

I hope you find it useful; I know from experience that I will…

My brother is an IT contractor in the UK and has just completed a series of four articles on his transition from the world of permanent work to that of contractual work. One of the interesting points he makes is that, with the downturn in the global economy, on of the main barriers to becoming a contractor (the lack of job security) has been significantly diminished as large companies start to fail and roll out massive layoffs.

The four articles can all be found at http://www.contractoruk.com or you can click to them from here:

1. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Making the jump
2. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Deciding how to trade
3. Diary of a first time IT contractor – The first day
4. Diary of a first time IT contractor – Lessons learnt

IBM Research have come up with a nice little toy called Wordle. You provide it with the URL of a blog or RSS feed and it generates a tag cloud, with the size of the words representing their prominence. Once the cloud has been generated, you’re free to tweak the word orientation and the colour scheme.

The cloud above represents my blog as of February 11 2009. Some others that may interest you:

BBC News

preDevCamp

The Daily WTF

On a number of occasions this weekend, while I was at the BLI Conference, I was asked the question: “Why are you doing the preDevCamp?” I thought it would be useful to provide an answer here.

With the ever increasing complexity of mobile telephones, we’re now carrying powerful computers around with us every. Unlike modern computers, the mobile phone has remained an arcane platform for programming. iPhone development requires a knowledge of Objective C. If you want to write for the Android, you’re stuck with Java. While these languages are hardly esoteric, they’re hardly an easy environment to use for creating simple applications.

I’m a firm believer that the greatest barrier to innovation should be imagination and not technology. The opening of the iPhone App Store presented the fruits of many a fertile mind; minds that had a good idea and coupled that with a sufficient understanding of Java to turn that idea into an app.

With the release of the Palm Pre, will come a new environment for developers. This environment is the webOS and applications will be based on HTML, CSS and Javascript. The number of developers who are comfortable with this development environment is vast, much greater than the number of Objective C developers. In addition to this, HTML and CSS are inherently visual languages, making te development of graphical interfaces well within the reach of the average coder.

I’m excited at the prospect of preDevCamps, because it’ll be an opportunity to see what developers can do when they are given the chance to spend their mental efforts on innovating instead of creating; the DevCamps will be run all around the world, bringing ideas together from cities ranging from Atlanta to Zagreb. Together, we’ll be able to demonstrate that the Palm Pre is a serious platform for developers and has a real place in market. Already, ideas are flowing on the discussion forums and we’ve only been going a week.

I urge anyone who is event the slightest bit interested in web development to take a serious look at the Palm Pre and joining a local preDevCamp. It’s a real opportunity to take the skills that you honed on the web and learn a brand new way to exercise them!

I spent the past 2 days at the BIL Conference in Long Beach, this weekend. I was, once again, reminded of the value of conferences in the technology arena.

All too easily, people look at technology as an impersonal enterprise, focussing on software and hardware and overlooking the human element. However, attending a conference reminds you of the power of meeting people face to face and talking to them about their ideas. I actually spent very little time sitting in presentation, but I spent a lot of time meeting new people and talking about what they are doing and what I am doing.

  To travel and be away from home, it’s important to feel that the time was well spent. In order for that to happen, you need to take responsibility for how you’re spending your time. I was lucky to be travelling with whurley and so met a lot of people through him. I was also lucky enough to meet a number of preDevCamp organizers and volunteers and was re-assured that preDevCamp is going to be a great success!