Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Fri Mar 12

This picture pretty much sums up what I ever thought about all those “Teach yourself X in Y days” books.

Typically, X is any programming language that someone, other than your relatives, would give you money in return for something useful to them made using this programming language.

Y < 3 years spent of real projects for real customers, not your relatives.

Learning to learn a programming language is completely pointless if you’re not actually making software for someone who uses it.

I would dare to make a metaphor, which was almost certainly used before, that making software is similar to learning to cook. “Making yourself eggs&bacon in 5 minutes” is not much of a feat - everyone can do it when one’s too hungry, desperate or clueless. Getting to a point to cook food that many if not all people enjoy requires dedication and years, sometimes even decades. That explains why a great majority of us cook food for up to four-five people, usually just one or two. Winning a Michelin star is a feat work of respect of restaurant chef’s cooking skills, which also indicates that you cannot teach yourself to be a rockstar programmer. On the other hand, imagine learning to be a chef or becoming passionate about cooking just by reading, say, all Jamie Oliver books.

Insert yourself your favorite Yoda or Matrix quote here… ;-)

Next time you better reach for “X for idiots” book series. They’re at least not lying you.

The comic above comes from AbstruseGoose hinted by a BBS acquaintance back then and University colleague Nebojša, who’s using C++ at Google on a daily basis.

Sun Aug 9

Rhonda - 3D sketching

Rhonda is the new sketching tools that will finally allow us to do it as it was always meant to be - in three dee! :-) The author is Amit Pitaru who has been working on this for quite a while (more than you have imagined, but not for more reasons like technical complexity).

In the first two minutes of the video you can see Amit’s collaborator James Peterson’s creating a 3D sculpture that was done in - 2003! The rest of the video contains some of his works from 2004 and 2005. In case you wondered, music in the video is Neil Young’s “Out On The Weekend”. From product point-of-view the project has been dormant since, while it has been capturing far too little eye balls in galleries, museums, festivals and conferences.

In a nice turn of events, two well-known software art engineers (according to Google I coined a new term) have joined the project - Zach Liebermann (of OpenFrameworks, who also took part in Toyota iQ Font campaign I wrote about) and Zack Gage (of synthPond, the spacial sequencer).

Want to be in the know when Rhonda will be out? Follow rhondaforever on Twitter.

Do you want to beta test this baby? Leave your name and email on Rhonda website.

[via Peter Kirn @ Creative Motion]

Sat Apr 25

OpenSocial interoperability with web 2.0 applications

A discussion recently started by Harry Hübner and commented by Christopher Blum in OpenSocial Interest Group I’m moderating over at XING, led me to a conclusion:
Supporting various applications (either web 2.0 or headless server functionality) inside an OpenSocial container can create more traffic (and revenue if they’re commercial) for application’s developers.

(Caveat: the conclusion is currently based on theory alone but sounds perfectly plausible once you read my explanation.)

Here’s my attempt to stand on Christopher’s shoulders and go into more detail. His proposition of “OpenSocial interoperability” by bringing various popular [web 2.0, headless] applications into OpenSocial containers is one of the ways to get more traction and traffic by using OpenSocial, which in turn could improve perceived interoperability.

This kind of interoperability can be best achieved using OpenSocial REST API which enables application’s home server to access selected OpenSocial container functionality. In this case, best-of-breed and widely adopted technologies are used: HTTP protocol for invoking container’s entry points and JSON for encoding data (read or written).

BTW, headless application can be any functionality on some server that runs or can run without a UI. For some examples of headless applications consider a Jabber or IRC server. You can let your imagination run free once you realize that this headless application can also be (almost) any application running in Amazon EC3, Google App Engine and other clouds. I’m wrote “almost” in parenthesis to include only those apps that understand REST, i.e. speak HTTP and understand JSON.

In more detail and related to OpenSocial, the scenario I’m supporting is the following:

using OpenSocial REST API to enable application’s home server read from and write into OpenSocial container to improve integration of application’s core functionality (running on server) by accessing OpenSocial data items like Person objects (e.g. users of XING, Orkut, MySpace, etc.) and AppData objects (which encapsulate all the specific object types relevant to the application’s core functionality). Using Person and AppData objects on home application’s server improves “social-awareness” of that application. Another part of this scenario is:
using OpenSocial Gadget XML and Gadget API to display socially-aware application’s data (accessed inside an OpenSocial gadget

Note that either part of this scenario or both 1. and 2. can be used to improve application’s interoperability.

In using part 1 of this interoperability scenario, the initiative for improving social-awareness of a popular application by using REST API to connect to OpenSocial container is in the hands of the original application’s developers. In the case of open-source application projects, there are less impediments and objective reasons not to connect open-source applications to OpenSocial container and, through it, all the users using the app. This way, data is not only more socially-aware but also more pervasive when part 2 is used.

When using part 2, application data is embedded into a “personalized web panel” running inside OpenSocial container thanks to Gadget XML, Gadget API and different features-specific APIs that are optionally supported by the respective OpenSocial container. The most interesting feature (i.e. OpenSocial JavaScript API namespace) is RPC feature (which stands for remote procedure call) that an OpenSocial container may implement (since it’s an optional API) to provide gadget-to-container, container-to-gadget, and gadget-to-gadget communication.

The final result of this interoperability scenario is better data availability and more convenience to users which can lead to an increased [web 2.0, headless] application’s usage.

The most prominent example of increased usage thanks to implementing OpenSocial (albeit implementing the entire OpenSocial container is more work than previous scenario) is Plaxo Pulse which got an order of magnitude

Mon Apr 6

T-Mobile to Use Google Software in Devices for Home

NY Times reports on a “secret” memo leaked out from one of T-Mobile’s partners which lays out T-Mobile’s vision of bringing Android platform to home devices like home phone, tablet, etc. allowing for tighter integration with devices like phones, photo frames, digital cameras, security systems, webcams TVs.

Since NY Times is a failry reliable source and the fact it’s becoming apparent that Android platform will become pervasive, I can say this is great news and that Android is the space to watch. Back in December 2007, I’ve also written about the possibility of Android becoming pervasive in my initial rant about Android.

[via NY Times and brianjdixon]

Wed Apr 1

Rhodes framework

Here’s another open-source cross-platform mobile application framework I’ve discovered. It’s called Rhodes framework. This one is both very interesting and special because it does not use web browser as run-time environment but it rather creates native applications.

Cross-platform mobile applications are written in Ruby programming language using MVC architectural. This is definitely good news for all Rails developers out there and perhaps an additional push for everyone else considering finally learning the Ruby language and Rails framework as well.

The version 1.0 release a week ago, on March 24th, supports mobile platforms such as iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlueBerry, and last but not least, Android.

Rhodes framework includes the first Ruby implementation for all the mentioned platforms except Symbian which already had one. Cross-platform mobile Ruby code gets translated into natively optimized mobile apps. One of the main components is client-side component called RhoSync which allows integration with web services and, consequently, integration with almost any back-end system or application. Some integrations already available with Rhodes framework are SugarCRM integration and Ligthouse integration.

How does it work? Nice people from Rhomobile explain it themselves:
“In general, developer productivity is much higher in Rhodes than writing to diverse native device operating systems and APIs since most of your UI customization can be done in HTML templates (ERB files). Rhodes also provides access to native device capabilities such as GPS and PIM data via an extended set of tags (e.g. <geolocation/>).”

Has Rhodes framework intrigued you? If so, have a look at Rhodes tutorial.

[via googletechtalks]

Wed Mar 25

What is PhoneGap? The Movie

Last week, in my blog post iFart Economy, I wrote about simple mobile application that can help you earn a lot of money if you’re creative and use universal language.

Many people may feel reluctant to even try programming for the mobile devices. Since there’s orders of magnitude more web developers (ahem, those who know well and use regularly JavaScript, HTML and CSS) than mobile developers, the barrier of entry has been high. An open-source development tool called PhoneGap might help. This development tool allows you to create mobile applications quickly using JavaScript by offering a number of JavaScript libraries that abstract mobile device hardware and make it available through JavaScript.

What’s nice about this dev tool is that, in theory (i.e. I have yet to try it out), allows you to write once and run on many mobile platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry and Android.

Here’s a quote from André Charland, CEO of Nitobi, the creators of PhoneGap:

We’ve been fielding the question “What is PhoneGap?” more and more these past couple months. So we put together this short video to help explain it:)

Get the code and more at PhoneGap

[via

andrecharland]

Thu Mar 5

HOTWO: Developing Android widgets

Wed Jan 28

10 Careers in Demand for 2009 - PayScale Resources

Phew! During 2009, The Year of Recession, being a software developer is still a viable career choice. :-)

Software Design/Development Careers. Companies from all sectors of the economy are looking for software engineers and programmers, says Turnquist. This is because society in general is becoming more tech-dependent - just think of how rapidly cell phones change with each passing year - requiring software developers that can stay abreast of all the changes.
Median Yearly Salary - $72,070

Mon Dec 29

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Here’s a cool indie rock tune for all of your developers and rockers out there :-)

Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton

In case you wonder, the author is not a programmer but a self-proclaimed internet superstar (ever seen a programmer thats’ also a internet superstar?). He has a bunch of geeky, easy-listening songs that you may want to check out and eventually purchase.

Fri Aug 1

“ # Write the test before you write the code # Manage the lifecycle of your objects fastidiously
# Build only what you need now, not what you might need later
# Apply ancient philosophies to software development
# Question authority, rather than blindly adhere to standards
# Make hard things easier and impossible things possible through meta-programming
# Be sure all code within a method is at the same level of abstraction
# Pick the right editor and assemble the best tools for the job O’Reilly - Safari Books Online - The Productive Programmer