Designerings

We’re off to New Zealand for three weeks touring the South Island. In my last-minute rush, one thing that occurred  might be worth trying is to take a cheap headless GPS receiver to use with the Nokia Maps application on my 6120 Classic. A few minute searching disclosed that I can download the maps in advance (12MB for NZ, 107.4MB for Australia, guess they didn’t think people might just want one state of Australia).

So I grabbed the Maps Downloader v2 application, installed it on my Vista 64 box, followed the splash screen instructions to connect my phone and…..

waiting for device 

Quite an attractive GUI, you understand, with enough subtle animation to make me think it hasn’t actually frozen yet not annoy. Someone spent some time on the appearance, the text is readable and there was an option to skip the warning splash screen in future and it is still waiting for the bloody device that is plainly physically connected and showing up in Nokia PC Suite as connected!

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You see the license plate on the car in front is Z Painter and immediately think hmmm, back to front rendering.

I’ve been doing a huge amount of work recently porting the C++ OOFILE report writer to REALbasic as a complete transliteration, having given up on the earlier report-writer I was writing from scratch.

I’m using REALbasic 2008r4.1 and finding it extremely flaky when debugging. I finally worked out the cause and it’s an interesting trap.

OOFILE was written about 15 - 10 years ago and makes use of lots of inline and non-virtual functions for high-performance in C++. Methods in REALbasic are, of course, all virtual but it also has Computed Properties which allow you to write code as getter and setter functions. These are non-virtual and therefore (presumably) much faster - an ideal and idiomatic match for the inline getters and setters used heavily in OOFILE.

However, there’s one very big gotcha - if you look at an object in the REALbasic debugger, all its getters on computed properties are executed.

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I have added a project at Google Code to host RB2Doxy  in case anyone is interested in a solution to help document their REALbasic code. Currently it’s a bit limited in that it requires all your source to be in a single XML file and doesn’t process anything inside methods, just the class and method declarations. It may also appeal as an example of moderately complex XSLT processing. 

In which Andy proves he really doesn’t know as much about Unix and particularly OS/X as he probably should and certainly wishes!
This is one of my rambling streams of semi-conscious tinkering to get something working. Yes it has actually been edited for brevity but I’m keeping all the weird error messages on here so search engines will help some other poor sod.

At first I thought it was because I was tired but even after a few hours sleep, the following doesn’t make sense:
su -l postgres
Password:
su: Sorry
Why doesn’t that make sense? Because I don’t know the password to the postgres user because it was added during the installation and I am pretty sure I didn’t supply the password at installation. I don’t know the account and don’t know how to change its password.
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I am doing a periodic kick of my awareness of things outside software development by reading the 20th Anniversary edition of Positioning: The Battle for your Mind.

Whilst I haven’t finished the book, just the first few chapters were very helpful in coming up with the content for the flyer I provided for the goody bags at the ACS WA Branch State Conference this week, one of the benefits of being a speaker.

On my not-quite-linearly-growing list of things to do are various items to do with blog and website appearance updates. But, does it really matter? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week I was honored to present at the ACS branch conference and very pleased to attend the full day. The Australian Computer Society is one of the leading professional societies in the world, based on external feedback (not just a bunch of self-satisfied Aussies) and I’ve been proud to be a member for many years and former committee member.

I spoke about the OLPC project and the XO Laptop, including demonstrating both on virtual machines and with my very own laptop I bought via the Give1Get1 project in the USA last year. Apart from discussing the project, social themes and its politics, I talked about the development environments included - Pippy Python and Squeak eToys. In particular, I emphasized the idea of Modeling Literacy - providing visual, interactive models as a classroom and personal tool.

The full presentations are available online, including many presenter notes not made visible to the audience.

• Apple Keynote (original)
• Exported PowerPoint
• PDF with notes

I’m fat and I’m old and my arms are really, really tired and asbestos is incredibly hard to cut!

The day after my first serious Chow Gar training session in a couple of months (back injury + flu + colliding family issues = lots of weeks of missed training) was not a good day to spend literally hours cutting less than 1m of old asbesto sheeting.

In the bathroom I’m renovating with Ceramilite,  when we were busy banging on the wall whilst fitting the sheet over all the shower and bath taps spouts, a nasty trickle of water emerged from behind the wall. Nasty, because the only explanation for it was a leak somewhere inside the wall over which I was about to install some fairly expensive sheeting. So, a plumber was called, ugly hole bashed in the wall and a T-joint of indeterminate age and very moderate quality replaced. During the visit, he mentioned that the material was asbestos sheeting, which is why he’d just bashed a rough hole rather than neatly cutting with a power saw (breaking edges doesn’t generate dust) and, incidentally, left me with a wonderful non-programming debugging problem.

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In another example of Andy finally gets around to using something he bought a book about, I’m using Google Sketchup v6 to work out some dimensions in a bathroom we’re upgrading. This is partly an exercise in saving money, as the Ceramilite sheets we’re gonna use are expensive. It’s also a training exercise for me before modeling the entire library. This lengthy post discusses the SketchUp features I used for modeling the bathroom, complete with pictures.

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A great video comparing the suggested performance in an advert vs the real-world iPhone performance. I’m sure the ad is perfectly legal as the voice-over mentions only twice the performance and whilst the video clip suggests much faster performance, it is a legitimate illustration to show stills or short videos blending into a sequence. The suggestion, of course, is that the elapsed time of the ad is all it will take for the illustrated tasks.

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