BlackBox

Yeah, I know. I’ve been doing quite a bit recently. I started working over at the University of Arizona Main Library as a Application Systems Analyst. I have been trying to get a job at the U. for a while now for several reasons, full benefits, including health, retirement and vacation, and also including tuition reduction. Considering I am still trying to finish my degree this is a big plus for me.

Aside from all that my iBook’s display finally died on me 2 weeks ago, a friend let me borrow her old g3 powerbook and I did a hard drive swap, but I still don’t know how much it is going to cost to get the iBook fixed. I miss my iBook.

Now that I am getting settled into my new routine I will be back to blogging and coding more. I have already started working on a project I have been putting off for a while called Magma. Magma is basically a PHP code generator to ease my contractor woes. What I have been looking for is a light-weight PHP app builder, but haven’t yet found one that suits my purposes. Basically I decided to go the route of Torque/Turbine. I will blog more on this in a separate thread. I also need to get back to working on Hedwig.

Other changes coming soon:

• Blog Updated to blosxom 2.0 with plugins
• Add in the RSS feeds link for the different categories
• More content, like pics and audio
• New design, based on stylesheets rather than tables and graphics
• Some new categories and sections will be added to the site

Some of the CMS I’m already aware of:

21e2c3faa52174310558d3380ed453c2

If there are others that output (publish) as static HTML files please let me know .

Don’t want to toot my own horn or anything like that, but I teach classes over at the Extended University – which is part of the University of Arizona. And I was thinking of how I could be more engaging to my students. When I get excited about a subject I am very engaging, but if I have gone over a subject with someone over and over I loose my own excitement which is bad for teaching.

So, I had just finished dropping off a movie I rented the other night and was thinking about this subject as I was driving home. I had decided that I was going to write up some of my personal philosophy on programming and use it to spice up my interactions with my students.

Here’s some of what I came up with:

There are primarily two emotions involved when programming, joy and frustration. Joy when you finally get something working or you discover something that changes the way you think about things. Frustration when things just aren’t working the way they should, or at least the way you think they should. I work through the frustration because I know that there will be joy at the end…somewhere.

Now, you can’t teach joy and frustration (well maybe frustration , but I remember some of my first moments of joy with programming. Initially it was in my Engineering 101 class where we had to take Pascal as part of it. But more so was when I actually had an assignment that I had to do on my own and actually completed it. You know the feeling, you’ve been working on something for 2 – 3 hours and finally all the pieces are there, and it Works!

Unfortunately the first thing I remember about programming is the frustration. You see the first computer I had was a TI-99 4/A which came with a Basic interpreter. You could actually get at it by starting it up with no cartridge installed. I had the reference manual on Basic so away I went. I don’t think I got anything to work the way I wanted it to except for some basic print statements and gotos. Then of course came the magazines with pages and pages of code, which I would dutifully type in and hit “Run”…they never did. That was my first experience of debugging, trying to track down an error in someone else’s code. But at least that didn’t deter me too much from continuuing on.

So, here’s my question to those who are listening, why do you program? What do you love about programming? What got you started?

And, of course, if anyone has tips on reaching students please share!

I want to thank James Duncan Davidson for posting a little snippet about Enkoder. This is a cool little tool that generates a JavaScript script to encode your e-mail address. I have put this on my site as well. This has several nice features:

• It completely hides your e-mail unless someone is using JavaScript, and if they look at the code all they will see is very unreadable arrays
• You can regenerate your link and it will look completely different from the first time you did it (using a genetic algorithm)
• You can use the Web or native OS X version (I prefer the native of course .

Next up is a nice little tool called TigerLaunch from Ranchero, makers of NetNewsWire (an RSS/RDF news aggregator, gotta love it). TigerLaunch allows you to have a Toolbar item for quickly launching your apps. When you first run it it will go through and find all of your apps, then you can configure it to drop the apps that you don’t use that often. A nice little bonus is that if you have a projects folder in your home directory (/Users/me/projects or Projects), it will add that right next to the tiger icon.

Now, this is OpenSource so anyone can download the code and play with it (I plan to in the near future), but here are some features that I would love to see:

• Ability to move items up or down in my drop-down list (I thought this worked, but then couldn’t get it to happen after the first time)
• Ability to create a sub-folder for groupings (like graphics, Java programming, OS X programming, PHP programming, HTML programming, Fun, etc.)
• I don’t know if this is possible, but it would be nice to be able to tell it where in the toolbar I want it (right now it appears to the left, so Eclipse will force it off because of it’s many menus)

I will be playing around with other tools as time permits and will pass any cool ones your way

Alright, so now that my blog is online and I have been reading through Sam Ruby’s for quite some time I decided to do a little investigating on REST. Sam mentions this quite a bit, so I was curious as to exactly what REST is.

So, long and short of it is – REST is a way to describe an application through a Web interface. Rather than say here’s how we edit something REST says – To edit we use a GET verb, followed by a POST verb, with the item’s ID number specified.

To start your learning, the RESTWiki is a good point to start with. However, what brought it all together for me was Joe Gregorio’s RESTLog application. His explanation of the interface was really what put it all into perspective for me.

One of the interesting points of REST is the fact that the underlying technologies could change without changing the way the rest of the world interfaces with it.

So, does this mean that Taos Community Tools will be a REST application? I’m not sure yet, Hedwig may be a REST application, at least on some levels.

This package is based on the original sUnit (Smalltalk Unit) framework. You can grab it here. And I found what looks like a good article on how to use it (for those of you who have previously done Java stuff this helps here.

Some of the things I would like to add to Blapp include:

• Setting up a drafts directory, so that those entries don’t get uploaded to the server until ready
• Interpreting entry plugins so that I could use things like Textile and actually see what they will look like
• Maybe add in some Blosxom management features, to manage plugin variables, the main Blosxom installation and adding new plugins as well as configuring them

I also had another idea for my first OS X app – Collections Manager. The idea behind this is that it would make it easier to manage collections of things and to blog about those collections. Things like books, movies, cds, whatever. So, the idea is simmering. I want to make it through all of Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for OS X before I start. Maybe even pick up James Duncan Davidson’s Learning Cocoa with Objective-C.