Rhonabwy

It’s probably no surprise that there has been a deluge of folks asking “Hey, what’s the best way to learn to program the iPhone”. Since I set up and run the Seattle XCoder’s group, I’ve been getting my fair share of those.

Some folks have traditional programming/CS backgrounds, and it’s easy enough to redirect them to some good resources to learn. It’s the folks that have little or no programming background, but who want to get into the game anyway that I’ve been finding harder to help. Much as we’re a great bunch of folks to ask questions and get tips, Seattle XCoders isn’t a tutorial house.

I’ve had several folks come to me with a programming background in javascript and nothing else. Javascript is clearly the new “BASIC” - probably has been for a while, and I haven’t been paying attention. I actually think that’s really cool on a bunch of different levels, but it makes explaining Objective-C, C, and memory management quite a bit more difficult. For a lot of those folks, I’ve had to punt - not much to help them. I suggest that they get a basic course in C programming and build up from there. I don’t think that’s really doing the whole setup justice, but it’s the best I could wrangle out.

As of yesterday, I might have a new tactic. Uli Kusterer has put up a “Learning C on the Macintosh” tutorial site called Masters of the Void. Uli’s done some really great things in Mac programming, and definitely know’s his stuff. Way better than me, definitely - and quite a bit more in depth than many I’ve run into. That being the case, I’m hoping it translates well into a tutorial on C for the Macintosh. The examples, details, and so forth in the site all point to using Xcode. I don’t know that it takes anyone beyond strict “C” programming, but it’s a hell of a jump start, and freely available.

So if you’re hunting around for a start on programming for the iPhone and you haven’t ever touched C, I’d say start with Masters of the Void and build up from there.

Okay - this is too cool: real time log visualization. I’m going to have to try this out and see how it works for myself. For something really interesting, check out the movie of the site that hosts this project getting Slashdotted.

Word is that the a version of the code review tool that Google uses internally (called Mondrian) on the Google App Engine - called Code Review. I remember first seeing the Google tech talk on Mondrian and thinking that was pretty cool - then later hearing about ReviewBoard on the Django users mailing list.

I’ve since starting using ReviewBoard (and even contributed a few bits back) and have been very pleased with it. I’m curious to dig into what Code Review offers in comparison, but I already know that I’ll continue using ReviewBoard. For one thing, my office wouldn’t take kindly to code and code reviews happening beyond the constrains of the fire wall. But I am seriously jazzed about Code Review in the hopes that it’s very easy to set up. If it’s an easy, low/no-cost solution for open source code… well, that’d be pretty damn cool. ReviewBoard, for all it’s goodness, can take some time and effort to completely install.

UPDATE: Since I wrote about this, I found the Google project that Guido has used to make (and now share) CodeReview - the project is rietveld. Guido mentions that it’s meant to showcase how to do a webapp using Django templating and views with the Google Application Engine.

The news spread about yesterday - the previously hypothesized 4th fundamental electronic circuit component has been found - and used. The memrister joins it’s compadre’s the resistor, capacitor, and inductor.

I first read the news on Wired, but really got quite a bit more out of the article today at Ars Technica: Maintaining Moore’s law with new memristor circuits. Maybe if my head was still flooded with the knowledge I had in college with my EE degree, I’d be able to work out the impact of this advancement quickly. That ain’t so anymore - it’s so fundamental that it sweeps through things, and I expect we’ll be seeing advances in technology and circuits for years due to this find. The only thing that really sprung up in my head was the idea that this find was a fundamental breakthrough and was “seriously going to change some stuff”. Not much for specifics… About the only real thing I remember in that respect from college was that the professor thought the memristor was an academic pipe dream and couldn’t exist. So much for the all-knowing professors, huh?

The Ars article outlines one of the immediate advances that HP Labs made was to create a dense memory. They cite putting 100Gigabits of memory onto a 1cm die and offer the comparison that modern flash memory is about 16 gigabits in the same space.

I’m back, slept, showered, and clean after the mighty B4[0] conference: Brent’s Birthday in Vegas. I’ve got to tell you, that’s one damn crazy city.

I’ve been through Vegas, but I’ve never really been IN Las Vegas before. For all intents and purposes, this was really my first time wandering through casino’s on the strip, and seeing the sites. Well, OK - I’ve seen the Bellagio in pictures, but that doesn’t really count.

The first thing that struck me was the thought “You’ve got to be kidding” when I walked into the Paris Casino friday evening. It won’t surprise anyone who’s been there - but it’s this monstrous room that has been thoroughly done over to make it actually very difficult to tell if you’re inside or outside. The entire ceiling was painted to look like a sky at twilight, an ambience that the Casino had wether it was 8am, 2pm, or 2am. I can completely see why some folks call Las Vegas “DisneyLand for Grown-ups”. It has that same almost-there theme-park-reality about it. The interior of the Paris is an incredible example of it.

I didn’t even get to all the various places that I thought would be interesting to see. Friday night lasted, well, until well into Saturday morning. I don’t remember what time we went to bed, but I wasn’t moving Saturday afternoon until 1:30pm. Fortunately, the casino’s are well prepared for this eventuality and serve breakfast pretty much any time. Saturday I took it into my head to wander through Ceasar’s Palace, the Bellagio, and some associated shops nearby.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as close as it seems in Las Vegas. The scale of the buildings is outrageous, and it completely confuses the senses. I think Mary, Gus, and I (we did our saturday afternoon touring together) clocked in maybe 7 miles of walking just between those three casinos. At least according to my pedometer. Mary even has some pics up on Flickr of that (and other) parts of this amusing venture. I’m just waiting for her (or was it Gus?) to put up the picture of me posing like one of the statues in Ceasar’s Palace. She’s got a good one entitled “The Gus of David” in front of the replica of the statue of David.

The other thing I wasn’t quite prepared for was how dry the air was in the casino’s. I’ve been told that they pump in extra oxygen to make the whole environment seem a little peppy-er. I completely believe it. Fortunately, I only ended up with one nosebleed in the whole trip.

I think the one of the most memorable (and publishable) moments in the trip was Gus stopping Mary and I in Caesar’s Palace, holding out his arms and singing “Ah-ahhhh” - in perfect harmony with the tones of the slot machines. I hadn’t realized that instead of a cacophony, they’re tuned these sucks to have this kind of continuously rising melody/tonal thing that you’d normally think of when someone says “Ta-da!”. Once he pointed that out, it was noticeable everywhere.

The evenings were the social highlights of the trip. I think we had 20 to 22 folks all there for Brent’s birthday - some I’ve met previously, some I met there. Friday and Saturday night were both late nights (although I conked out early on Saturday night) and a hell of a lot of fun. I don’t even think I’m going to try and detail them out to any length, cause it just wouldn’t make sense. I’ll leave it at they were great social events ranging all over the place and with a ton of great folks.

Photo sets from the trip:

• Sheila’s
• Mary’s
• Marks’s

To end this up, I’ve got to say that Las Vegas is one damned outrageous place. Oh… and I’m really glad that WWDC is six weeks away so I can recover a bit!

ps: The ceilings in Caesar’s Palace win my vote for most amazing, even though I spent more time commenting about Paris’.

Okay - so this is mostly for the family. I think you guys will enjoy it.

Last weekend I went and got my haircut. I then immediately became very ill and spent all of last week at home sick. It was unfortunate and unhappy and all the rot, but I’m on the mend. The doc gave me some antibiotics because of a lingering congestion and no doubt ear/sinus infection.

Since Karen hasn’t seen me in weeks, I thought she might enjoy a picture of my “new do”. Of course just taking a picture would be boring, so I played around with photo booth and ultimately sent her this picture, which I think she found amusing. “That’s my joe!” was her comment.

So with the haircut, an arctic low front also came and sat over the whole of puget sound. Gus even had snow (quite a bit, actually)! We saw some hail here on Queen Anne, but mostly it’s just been darned chilly. Like 40 degrees - every day. Needless to say, my “summer” planning was a bit ill timed.

Only I’m going to make that up this weekend, when I’m attending “B4″. B4 is a once-in-a-lifetime conference held in Las Vegas - it had various meanings as we were coming up to it, but really it’s Brent’s 40th Birthday Party - spread out over a weekend. I’ve heard that the temperature is supposed to be up to 90 degrees there, so I expect that I’ll be staying inside - but at least my haircut will have finally been validated with the heat! I’m not really sure what to expect from Brent’s party weekend, but I’m staying at the Paris and sharing a room with Gus - and I’m on antibiotics, so that should keep me from anything too terrible. Now as most of you know, I suck at gambling - so that’s going to be strictly limited. No sense just throwing the money away I guess, but I do intend to check out the buffet’s and follow the merry B4 crowd about the evenings. Who knows - I may not even see daylight if this goes like one of our very late night XCoder’s after-meetings. Yeah - Mac Programmer Geeks on the loose - look out. Not everyone there is a Mac Programmer Geek - Sheila (Brent’s wife) is reputed to even be planning for “heels and dresses!”.

So with that I’m sleeping a lot this week, and not doing much else - not even iPhone development right now. Getting better, so I can waste it all away this weekend, is the entire plan for the week. Sounds good, eh?

I’ve been told that while Karen’s been away, my blog has been boring. Ah well, what do you expect? It’s been busy with Karen not being around. She’s due to come back in 3 weeks or so, which I’m looking forward to. I kinda wish she was back here now - but that’s just because I have a touch of the flu at the moment and I’m feeling a bit whiney.

What have I been doing? Well, lets see… fiddling with programming on the iPhone. That’s been fun - although with the NDA in place over the development kit, it means you all haven’t been treated to me revelations and accomplishments there. I have two applications pretty advanced, although neither are complete. One is for calculating the tip at a restaurant (which I need, badly) and the other takes advantage of the iPhone’s location awareness and some local web services provided by Wash U/ Seattle Transit to report when the next buses are coming to your stop. (another application that I wish I had).

Somewhat ironically, I saw last week in Craigslist a job listing for Metro that was looking for a middleware software engineer to help provide the “next available” reporting at bus locations around the city and other “consumer reporting” systems. Sounds nice - I’d sort of hoped that Seattle would build something like that for ages, but so far it hasn’t. I’ll be happy if they just provide the raw data effectively at this point - I’ve got my application coming along nicely for the rest.

Along similiar lines, I recently became aware of a neat web application (Mashup) that Adam Parast has done: http://students.washington.edu/adambp/index.html. It’s a map of all the Seattle bus stops with a link to the tracker information to look up the coming arrivals. The lookup component is the same service that I’m using in my application. Pretty cool, huh?

I’m sure that anyone into Django will either see or hear about this before they catch my blog post, but it’s too neat a story not to write about a comment on.

Tonight, Google released AppEngine - an elastic computing environment specifically set up with the idea of developing web applications in python. They’ve pushed up a copy of the transcript from their announcement if you’re interested…

It may come as no surprise that the back-end of AppEngine is/was heavily influenced by Django - and in fact the SDK that you can download comes with Django 0.96.1 embedded within it. That’s not to say Django is your only choice, but it definitely it mine.

To that end, there’s an excellent article up at their site on using Django with AppEngine - which basically boils down to: “Don’t use Django’s models, because we’ve got our own back-end datastore thingy, and it works similarly, but from different, than Django’s models and a database. I haven’t looked at the HQL datastore API they’ve got enabled, but I’m going to guess that some Django core developers likely will before too long to see what the potential overlap is for making it more directly usable with Django’s model system. (That guess is PURE speculation, I don’t have any insider knowledge there)

I wasn’t speedy enough on the request to get into the initial pool of folks who can use the beta - but I’ve tacked into the waitling list. It’s not like I really need another cool technology to go spend a lot of time on, but I’m really curious… especially with the idea that hosting some amount of your application might be available for free. Not quite sure how that is going to make sense long term - but I’ll take it while it’s available.

One thing for sure - this is certainly going to bring a boon of new attention to python web development, and likely Django as well.

It’s hard to write about what you’ve been doing when most of the time it’s been involved with an SDK from Apple that’s buried under an NDA agreement.

So… I’m not dead - I’ve just been head’s down with coding. I’ve found a few bugs, filed quite a pile (mostly enhancement requests), and have written a pile of toy programs trying out the new pieces and parts available.

The two bugs that top my list are (not surprisingly) duplicates. radr://problem/5789981 is so obvious… a forum for discussing NDA products where developers can share notes on what they’ve got working and what they don’t. It’s surprisingly frustrating to not be sure if you’re just missing something or if there’s an actual issue that others have run into. That’s the original bug number, by the way - not my bug report for this “issue” with the SDK.

The other is a crashing problem with the development environment. radr://problem/5795236 is apparently the master issue - I guess several folks have been talking about this issue on forums and such. It’s annoying, but hey - it’s beta software.

Without getting into specifics, the SDK is clearly got some serious traction and attention. It is a wonderful bit of code made available, and one of the easiest mechanisms I’ve ever experienced for getting code onto a mobile device. Granted my other experience is hacking in linux and related software on to an HP iPAQ handheld at a previous job - it involved an unholy combinations of tftp, very specific network settings, and carefully timed physical buttons presses.

The folks who’ve been working on this project have done an incredible, bang-up job with it. I’m really looking forward to the next steps in the beta program, and the additional pieces and tweaks that come along.

I haven’t posted again about the madhouse chili because, well - frankly, I screwed it up. It was bad to the point of pitching out the whole batch.

I got the ingredients to have another go, and this time I’m planning things a bit more. The failure mode was overcooking. The aroma was good, but the flavor had leeched a bit, and worst of all - the meat had been cooked to the point where I had this terrible chalky flavor and texture across the whole batch. It was teh suck. It was also the excuse for some pizza this past weekend.

So I’ve got another chunk of meat, more BAKON!, garlic (OF COURSE!), and other goodies (namely 3 kinds of beans) - so I’m ready to tackle round two. I’m not sure which evening or morning I’ll start the process though, because it’s shaping up to be a busy week, but it’s in the plan.

And if I screw this one up, I’ll never admit it.