By Gaz under Programming
It’s
been months since I received a Meme Tag, so I decided to invite myself
to take part in a Meme from Aaron Feng.
How old were you when you first started programming?
Now, that really would be telling and would give away my age. Let’s
just say that I was lucky enough to get a Sinclair ZX81 for Christmas
1981, and never really looked back.
How did you get started in programming?
All my friends were getting Atari games console’s, but I got a
stinking ZX81 with 1K of memory… actually a bit less than that,
since a few hundred bytes were reserved for system variables, and had
to write my own games.
What was your first language?
Afrikaans. Followed by English, and then Sinclair BASIC.
What was the first real program you wrote?
Mars Mining Corporation. After 6 months of typing in other peoples
BASIC code from printouts in magazines, I acquired a 4K RAM Pack for
my ZX81, and wrote a fun text only simulation for making money out of
running a mining company on Mars.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
Chronologically, as best as I can remember:
Sinclair Basic, Z80 assembler, BBC Basic, 6502 Assembler, Amstrad
BASIC, Pascal, LPC, MUF Modula-2, APL, Forth, C,
YACC, Oberon, Occam-2, Modula-3, C-shell, C++, Prolog, Bourne Shell,
sed, Emacs Lisp, AWK, M4, Scheme, Tcl/Tk, Cobol, PCL5, D,
Brainfuck, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, SQL, PHP4, Lua,
AppleScript…
And then there are a whole slew of XML based and inspired languages
I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with over the years:
SGML, CSS2, CSS3, XHTML, XSL, Glade XML, YAML, RDF, DAML+Oil, JSON,
DTD, RSS, Atom, SAX…
Plus some proprietary languages I can’t remember the names of, and
quite probably several more languages that I’ve forgotten about.
What was your first professional programming gig?
My first job after graduating was fixing bugs in support software for
Independent Financial Advisors, back in 1994.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
I would have started sooner if I’d been able to talk my Dad into
buying a PDP-11…
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Study other people’s code. Free Software is an education!
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?
Libtool, obviously. How could I not enjoy writing M4 code that
generates portable Bourne Shell code on the developers machine, which
in turn runs on the users machine to generate C code to interact with
code libraries? I was meta-programming before I even knew what it
meant 
Who’s next?
James Urquhart
By Gaz under Announcements, Writing
I am
still alive! Thanks for sticking around through the quiet period.
Even though my posts here have been, ahem a little thin on the ground
since our Tennessee road trips a few months ago, I’ve been
active on twitter and I’m now blogging professionally for the
Haxor Network since the beginning of this month. Please, do
have a look at Mac Haxor and Linux Haxor and vote for my
Mac and Linux tips! Ogle at the sexy lady screenshot. Sign up
for the rss feeds etc etc.
If you’re interested in being paid to post, or guest blogging for the
Haxor Network, Pavs is still searching for contributors, so head
on over and express an interest in the comments. The site gets over
15,000 page views per day, so posting there is a great way to raise
your profile!
Although I’ll be posting shorter Mac and Linux tips and news articles
at least twice a week for the Haxor Network, I’ll continue with
travelogues, martial arts commentary, opinion
pieces, personal productivity items, and the occasional
more in depth article on computing here at Azazil.
By Gaz under Announcements, Technology
The funny thing about Twitter is that as much as I kept reading how you either get it, or you don’t — I never really believed it. I joined up about a year ago when the craze first swept across the intertubes, and made a couple of experimental tweets; I found a few interesting looking people and began following them; I installed twitterriffic (still free, despite appearances) and watched with feigned interest as those same interesting-seeming people droned on about the boring minutiae of their day. And that’s how it stayed until just a few weeks ago.
Twitter for those who don’t get it
Much as I had vainly cast aside the notion that I just didn’t get it the whole while, everything finally clicked for me when I started following people who were referred to by others I was following. @bynkii posted a tweet for the benefit of @flargh, so I followed @flargh and so on. Before long I was watching a little network of people commenting about their day, and about each others’ days. People weren’t casting their 140 characters into the void without reason after all, there was interaction!
With hindsight, my problem was that I had been thinking of Twitter as blogging in the small. But with no followers, there was no-one to read what I was writing, and thus nothing to engage me to take part in it actively. Twitter isn’t like blogging at all it’s more like instant messaging… if I had set the @Replies setting in my twitter profile to “show me all @replies” sooner, I would have certainly noticed these little pockets of conversation and started following the people being addressed. And some of them would have reciprocated. And I would have being taking part instead of watching, bemused.
Twitter for those who do get it
And now that I have some followers to read my tweets, and occasionally tweet back at me about them, I not only mention the minutiae of my day to the annoyance of everyone else who doesn’t get it yet, but I take part in conversations with other people who are following me. It’s kinda neat!
Now that’s all very well, but I want to incorporate my part of the twitterverse into my online life. I want to build my blog readership by tweeting when I put up a new blog post. I want to build my twitter followers by engaging my blog readers enough to be interested in what I’m comment about with other like-minded people at twitter.
I thought I’d found a great way to do all of that (and more!) with [Alex King]’s Wordpress [Twitter Tools]. I have it set up to automatically tweet new blog posts on my behalf, and to collect summaries of my tweets into daily posts. Except that having my blog posts drowned out incessant trivia and my half of various out of context conversations is more likely to drive you, gentle reader, away from my blog that to turn you from a twitter don’t get it into get it over a few days.
The problem is that twitter conversations are essentially throw away, and don’t generally have enough substance to generate further blog comments. Essentially they don’t belong in a post. I think what I really need is a way to show my last handful of tweets in the sidebar. Any pointers much appreciated!
Over the next few days, I’ll delete the Twitter daily summaries, and search for a wordpress rss widget to integrate into azazil, so as to try to pique your interest in Twitter. I might even write a post to try and persuade you to sign up for a free account and follow me at twitter. I’m one of the many people who will reciprocate the follow bit on anyone that follows me, especially as I’m now painfully aware that twitter just doesn’t click until you reach a critical mass of followers to pull you into the never-ending twitterverse conversation…
By Gaz under Bikes & Cars, Travel
After sitting up way too late last night, it was only the promise of missing breakfast that got me out of bed before 9am today. After breakfast, shower and packing we didn’t hit the road until after 11am 
With a short stop at IHOP (couldn’t resist!) for a very late lunch, we had a very tedious 300 mile freeway ride covering half the remaining distance back to Orlando. The scenery from I-75 is flat and very much the same right the way through Georgia, except riding through the maze of exits among the skyscrapers in Atlanta.
I’ve never seen so many people pulled by the cops, we saw at least half a dozen cars on the hard shoulder with a red and blue interrogating the driver. Just south of Atlanta drove through the first speed trap I’ve seen in the States, with a cop pulled onto the central reservation pointing a radar gun into the oncoming traffic. It’s almost like being back in England! Having said that, the speed limit is 75 along most of the I-75, and the country isn’t awash with Gatso cameras every few miles to fine you £40 if you’re a touch over the limit…
We reached headed right for another Howard Johnson hotel in Ashburn, arriving just before 6pm. It was sunny throughout the whole day, and neither of us needed any of the cold weather gear we bought on the outbound journey 2 weeks ago (timewarp post forthcoming ~Al). Even so, 5 hours of squaring off the tyres at 70mph we were pretty tired by the time we stopped.
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- Day 1: Cherohala Skyway
By Gaz under Bikes & Cars, Travel
So, that’s it for our trip to Tennessee. Two weeks gone in a flash. For some reason we booked a condo in Orlando from tonight, but even with the best will in the world it is going to take us 3 days to ride back to Florida.
Luckily we had packed everything last night since we were supposed to check out by 10am, and I didn’t wake up until 9:12am. D’oh! I guess I should have hit “snooze” instead of “shut up, I’m still tired” on my alarm at 7am. With some running around, brushing of teeth while getting dressed, and skipping inessentials like breakfast, we managed to make it out by a hair…
The last couple of times we’ve ridden into the mountains this week, it’s almost induced hypothermia. Thankfully, the weather has held out for us today. Even though we needed a full complement of jackets and gloves, it was actually pretty warm in the sun.
As soon as we pulled out of the resort, first stop: Gatlinburg Mountain Grill, for a hearty ham and eggs late breakfast to see us on our way through the days riding. We were fed, watered and finally saddled up and on our way proper before 11am.
The first part of the route through the Smoky Mountains National Park and into North Carolina was all the better for being in daylight, with brooks and creeks at the roadside peppered with an occasional waterfall from the rock formations. The roads actually weren’t quite so scary now that the ice had melted, except in an occasional tunnel or a deep valley (that made my butt clench heart skip a beat a couple of times today!). Cherokee and Bryson City, however, we had seen before when we rode back from Deal’s Gap last week (March 3rd, timewarp post forthcoming ~Al).
We crossed back into Tennessee and started the gorgeous ride along Cherohala Skyway around 2pm. Unfortunately, we kept stopping to take a zillion photos of the panoramic scenery along the way, so we didn’t reach the first pit-stop at the other side for almost another 2 hours!
I don’t know where Tave has gone in this picture… but perhaps 4 hours without a toilet break was torturing her unnecessarily 
We’d secretly hoped that we might make it into Georgia today, but we had been told not to miss the Cherohala Skyway by: the staff of Gatlinburg Harley (a weird dealership — it has no bikes!!); barstaff at the Hard Rock Cafe; ShawnKing; not to mention various bikers we’d run in to through the week, and we certainly weren’t disappointed. 7 hours and 168 miles later, we decided to call it a day at the first hotel we reached on I-75.
We can makeup the shortfall on mileage tomorrow when we hit the interstate. Here’s hoping we can miss the traffic through Atlanta.
Related Posts
- FL 2 TN Day 1: Sunburn Injuries
By Gaz under Personal Growth
In April of last year, I made a belated entry into Dave Seah’s Ground Hog Day Resolutions movement. Along with Dave and some of his disciples, I decided to do something similar again in 2008, but with some twists of my own.
Last month I resolved to start each week with a timetable of how I planned to spend time for the coming week.
How’d it go?
Right after I wrote up the resolution, I got caught up in trying to get ahead of myself with paid work so that I could comfortably take a week off to move house again. That was two weeks of pure work, eat & sleep with just enough time in between to take a shower. The next week went into packing up all my worldly possessions in Manila, traveling across the international date line via Guam and Hawaii back into Florida. It would have been nice to take a day or two to recover from the 14 hour time difference, and unpack into a new apartment, but first of all we had a 5 day bike ride through 4 states… more about that in another post.
Result: FAIL
What went wrong?
In short, I didn’t even plan a timetable, let alone try to stick to one. Bah.
What to do about it?
Next week — when things are settling down again, and I’ve actually got some kind of chance of setting up a routine at the beginning of the week that I’ll be able follow for a week or two — I’ll actually write up a timetable.
So, next month, I’ll have something a bit more interesting to report…
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- Ground Hog Day Resolutions Redux
