As I mentioned before, there is a good reason why I have been writing a bit less on Bitwise over the past few weeks - well, nine good reasons, actually!
My beloved Pyrenean Mountain Dog, Bethan, gave birth to nine fabulously beautiful puppies this April. They are growing at a phenomenal rate and they are taking up a huge amount of my time. Hence, not so much time to write in Bitwise...
Anyway, here’s a picture of one of the pups. She’s called Rose...
I’ve been using my old Hewlett-Packard laptop recently, sitting here on the table in my kitchen. It’s been a while since I used it and its 16Gb disk is no longer quite as massive as once it seemed. How time flies!
It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was sitting here in the kitchen with the same HP portable to look after my new pup, Bethan. At that time 16Gb seemed massive. In fact, that was about four years ago and now Bethan (a beautiful Pyrenean Mountain Dog or ‘Great Pyrenees’) is sitting here surrounded by her own pups and I’m hard pressed to get all the software I need installed onto this ‘tiny’ 16Gb hard disk! It took me a whole day to install all the latest updates to Windows, Visual Studio and MSDN, and by that time the disk had precious little free space left.
The reason for my decamping from my office into my kitchen is shown below...
As I mentioned before, Bethan had her pups a couple of weeks ago. This followed a brief but meaningful relationship with an American dog called Murphy (or ‘Rivergroves Murphy-Goode’ when he’s being formal) back in February.
This is the first time she’s had pups and the first time that I’ve had to cope with them. It’s an interesting, if time consuming, experience. Over the past couple of days the pups have been transformed from helpless squirming balls of fluff into small and mobile creatures with ambitions to take over the kitchen, the house and then, presumably, the world.
Anyway, this all has nothing to do with the stuff I normally write about here. But, what the heck, the pictures are prettier than software!
If you want to see more pictures of Bethan and her pups, go to my Pyrenean Mountain Dog site: http://pyr.darkneon.com. I warn you, however, that it’s entirely possible that I may slip the odd photo into my blog here from time to time, too...
Fan films, like ‘fan fiction’, are not things I generally seek out for my entertainment. A film based on The Lord Of The Rings and which proclaims itself to be “a film by fans for fans” sounds like something that I would avoid like a plague of Orcs.
So I confess that I am surprised, amazed, dumbfounded and, yes, gobsmacked by the trailer I have just watched for a fan-made movie called ‘The Hunt For Gollum’. When I read that this film had been made on a budget of £3,000 (about $4,500), and that instead of filming in the epic grandeur of the wilds of New Zealand, as Peter Jackson did for his Tolkien trilogy, it was filmed in the English countryside, Wales and the popular leafy London dog-walking area of Hampstead Heath, I naturally assumed that this would be an embarrassingly amateurish production which would make me ashamed to be British....
Far from it! If I’d watched the trailers without knowing anything about this film in advance I would certainly have assumed that this was a big budget mega-spectacular with armies of actors, makeup people, cameramen, hairdressers and lighting engineers at its disposal.
In fact, much of the recruitment and film development was done using the Internet. Eventually a crew of 160 people was assembled with 60 people working on visual effects shots over the Internet.
OK, so admittedly the trailer is only 2 and a half minutes long. But heck, the film itself is only 40 minutes long. If the remaining 37 and a half minutes are anywhere near as good, this will be pretty darn’ magnificent. And even if the film doesn’t live up to the trailer, the trailer itself is so good that if I were a movie mogul I’d be getting a contract written for The Hunt Of Gollum’s director, Chris Bouchard, at my earliest opportunity. If the man can do two and a half minutes of this quality with next to no budget, just think what could he do with some financial backing?
Not sure what they will do about the problem of representing Gollum on screen. I doubt if £3,000 buys much CGI. Then again, after seeing these trailers, I’m reluctant to jump to any conclusions in advance.
The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is determined to come to grips with the online world. But to date his exploits online have not been entirely happy ones.
Now, the official site of the Prime Minister has a wonderfully democratic online voting system which lets British citizens start a petition and see how many other people sign up to it. In principle, I suppose, the most popular petitions should be expected to get the Prime Minister’s most serious and active consideration. A shame then that the most popular petition at the moment is this one...
I’ve finally completed my Ruby programming eBook, The Book Of Ruby. This contains 20 chapters plus appendices and index and comes with over 300 ready-to-run sample programs in the source code archive.
While the book assumes no prior knowledge of Ruby, it is not a book solely for beginners. On the contrary, it was written during the design and testing of my company’s Ruby on Rails IDE, Ruby In Steel, and it contains information on many of the twisty byways of Ruby which you might not come across unless you happened to be, well, writing a Ruby On Rails IDE
So, whether you just need a simple reference to Ruby syntax or whether you need to learn about some of the more weird any wonderful ‘dynamic’ things you can do such as creating classes at runtime, you should find something of use in this book.
Incidentally, I will warn you in advance that I (deliberately) do not adopt some of the stylistic conventions preferred by some Ruby programmers for the simple reason that I find them ugly. So, where some people like names_with_underscores I may prefer NamesWithoutThem. And where many Ruby programmers avoid brackets whenever possible, I use them fairly freely. I know this annoys the heck out of some Ruby folk who feel that it is good for the soul slavishly to copy someone else’s preferred coding style. If that is your opinion then by all means avoid reading my book.
The truth is that I have never understood why people get so passionate about naming conventions. You like underscores, I like camel case, I say potatoes, you say pot-ah-toes. In brief, the way you write names is trivial. Language elements such as brackets, on the other hand, are important. Parentheses clarify code and avoid ambiguity which in a highly dynamic language such as Ruby is, in my opinion, absolutely vital (see the index entries on ‘ambiguities’ and ‘parentheses’).
In any case, The Book Of Ruby doesn’t preach on matters of style. I don’t disapprove of other people’s preferred coding style as long as they don’t try to force me to adopt it. If you are interested, you can read some more of my thoughts on programming style in a series of articles I wrote a whole back called ‘Ruby The Smalltalk Way’ - parts one, two and three.
Anyway, decide for yourself. The Book Of Ruby is 100% free, after all.
Regular readers may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here lately. Fear not, I shall get back up to speed soon.
The reason is explained below...
Nine Pyrenean Mountain Dog (Great Pyrenees) puppies!
The mother is my dog, Bethan. She gave birth to her litter between midnight last Wednesday night/Thursday morning and 3:30 on Thursday afternoon (the last pup came as quite a surprise!). Suffice to say, I haven’t had a lot of sleep lately and my schedule has gone all to pot. Anyway, both mother and pups and doing well. I’ll try to get my work schedule back on track shortly. In the meantime, I have a few other things (nine to be precise) to attend to...
Earlier I mentioned the inept conniving of two left-wing Labour party spinners in the UK to counteract the influence of some very successful right-wing bloggers by setting up their own ‘rumour’ blog. I now see that one of those successful right-wing bloggers (Iain Dale) has just written a piece explaining what you should and should not do if you want to write a successful political blog.
Derek Draper is one of the two men involved in a plan to smear top members of the opposition Conservative party in the UK by blogging lurid and unfounded stories suggesting various improprieties, predominantly of a sexual nature. Their plan was found out and their nasty little emails have been filling the pages of the UK newspapers today.
As I said before, the thing that baffles me is the sheer, staggering incompetence of their plans to create a muck-raking blog in cahoots with one another in the expectation that nobody would ever guess what they were up to.
Iain Dale says that he actually offered blogging advice to Derek Draper some months back: “I explained to him patiently the pitfalls of the internet. Indeed, I had to be very patient indeed as his knowledge of online matters was only slightly superior to that of my 78-year-old mother, who has never touched a computer in her life.”
But Draper ignored Dale’s advice. “His blog authors all came from his contacts book. The site contained few articles that could not have been written in Labour Party HQ, and there was precious little grassroots input. He was accused of censoring comments and using the site as a vehicle for his own giant-sized ego.
As LabourList [Draper’s blog] started to tank, he looked for help elsewhere. And he set his sights on Damian McBride, the Prime Minister’s Director of Strategy.”
It is curious that while many of the best newspaper journalists in the UK are left leaning, the better bloggers, with only a few notable exceptions, are predominantly right wing. I am not entirely sure why that is so. I only hope that the shenanigans of McBride and Draper act as a shining example of what not to do and encourage some other writers to have a go. Come on. It really wouldn’t be too hard to do a better job of it...
Sleaze, emails and people close to the Prime Minister
Sunday 12 April 2009.
If you live outside the UK, you may not be aware of the current headline news stories about some pretty nasty goings on close to the very heart of the British government.
In short, it concerns some squalid emails passed between a certain Damian McBride and a blogger named Derek Draper. Mr McBride is (or rather was until he speedily resigned yesterday) a publically-funded government adviser with close connections to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Derek Draper claims to be an independent left-wing (Labour) blogger who comments on the political scene without taking instructions or contributions from the British Labour party.
In other words, he is a left-leaning counterpart to right-leaning bloggers such as Iain Dale and Paul Staines, otherwise known as ‘Guido Fawkes’. In fact, Staines and Draper have crossed swords a few times in their blogs and on TV. One gets the strong impression that they don’t much like one another.
Staines has previously challenged Draper’s claim to be truly independent and has suggested that, on the contrary, Draper’s blog is guided from on high by people in the ruling Labour party. Yesterday, Staines produced some evidence for these claims - he had somehow managed to obtain emails passed from government adviser, Damian McBride, to the ‘independent’ blogger, Derek Draper, making suggestions for stories which Draper might like to publish on a web site designed to undermine the opposition Conservative party.
That alone would have been bad enough. What is worse is that the stories suggested by McBride were rather a long way from the kind of well-argued political analysis one might expect from one of the Prime Minister’s top advisers. Among the suggestions were that Draper should run completely unfounded stories suggesting that the leader of the Conservative opposition had suffered from embarrassing sexually transmitted diseases while the Conservative shadow chancellor, George Osborne, had had sex with a prostitute and posed for photographs “in a bra, knickers and suspenders” and “with his face ‘blacked up’ ”.
Draper responded: ““Absolutely totally brilliant Damian. I’ll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible.”
I won’t go over the full sordid details of the emails. You can read more on the story in today’s Sunday Times. What I find most bizarre about all this (and there are plenty of bizarre things to choose from!) is not the childishly nasty nature of the stories which Mr McBride and Mr Draper were discussing in their emails but the mindboggling stupidity of anyone who believes that a scandal-mongering political website concocted by Labour spin-doctors had the remotest chance of not being found out!
This demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how the Internet operates, I think. Politicians may have been rather good at exerting their influence over the conventional press. But how naive and foolish they look when they let themselves loose on the Internet!
Developing software can be tiring but launching it is truly exhausting.
OK, so this is not The Big Launch. It’s ‘just’ a beta. But even so, tying up all the loose ends, testing all the new features and making sure that we haven’t accidentally screwed up the old features - in short moving from an internal build to a public release - never ceases to be a traumatic business. If you’ve been through this process with your own software you’ll understand what I mean. If you haven’t, take my advice: stay well clear of a software developer on release day!
Anyway, my company shipped the latest version of Amethyst, our Visual Studio IDE for developing Flex, AIR and ActionScript projects today.
New features include:
auto expanding snippets
a dedicated snippet editor
context-sensitive help
IntelliSense and project management improvements
These are in addition to existing features such as:
drilldown debugging
configurable code formatting
code colouring and collapsing (etc.)
If you are an existing Flex developer you can import your projects or ‘convert’ them to allow you to share code with another editor or IDE such as Adobe’s Flex Builder or Flash IDE. If you are learning ActionScript or Flex, you might want to download a copy of Amethyst and follow along with my ActionScript tutorial series here on Bitwise.
