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No Naughty Bits

So it’s a little bizarre. Just fired up the ol man to wave, friction reducing vehicle (ha ha, Surf Ninja’s, you funny movie, rob scneider before he was famous) … I mean, this mornings Inbox contained an email from the Other ads people, saying that my site wasn’t quite right. Now there aren’t any naughty videos/pics that I know of, and the content is right up click-alley. I guess it must be the traffic.

So in a month I’ll try again. Because in a month … TOTAL DOMINATION. I mean … < hem >, Phase Alpha of my plan for the subversing of the Internet Nation will be complete.

Anyway. The planning for the next phase of some kind of plan is well underway. The vision of Dev Dawn is still about community, the sharing of ideas, about Information :: Conduits Of, Interfaces To (heh, man I love that little phrase). More Soon.

As an aside, I’m very keen to implement some form of Comments functionality using the Ajax understanding. I’d love to see other sites which have this working. Not neccessarily WordPress sites, any and all are good.

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Wow, Is It Really Free .. From MS?

Check this out, you can get Visual Studio 2005 Express free, if you download it before Nov 7th 2006. However, from the comments below the story, it seems that some parts are free forever, and some are not.

Sounds like a good time to have a look at what they’re (MS) doing. But then again, with the wealth of Open Source stuff around, and with our own bright (heh heh) ideas, they’d have to be giving me a pretty awesome product that delivered a LOT of stuff that I couldn’t do somehow else for me to change to it.

Then again, who am I compared with the legions that do use MS stuff. I’m me, we’re Dev Dawn, and that’s that.

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The Cycling Santa

At our local Shopping Centre they put up this little Santa dude on a tiny bicycle that travels between two pillars. One end of the wire is fixed, the other on a circular rotation. He just goes back and forwards, back and forwards. So very simple.

Simple. My kids absolutely love it. I mean, every time we pass it they want to stand and watch.

Simple.

And it got me thinking today, as we passed by underneath the jolly fellow.

The construction of the cycling santa is pretty simple. It relies on a lot of outside functionality. Gravity, momentum … physics. These are the building blocks that were already in place. They were the development suite , the 4gl language. All the developer did was put together a pretty UI and a very simple engine.

And it holds the attention of my kids (and me included) long enough for a handy pickpocket to do the rounds. Well … that was a side-thought :) … but anyway. It grabs the attention.

And that is enough. You get the people in. Then, once they’re watching Santa, you need a plan for what comes next.

But that’s for a later post. When my brain thinks it through a bit more. The point of this is that simple systems wrapped around constructs (the physics and absolute truths of our own development worlds) that are already part and parcel with what we do, is a very smart way to develop.

We need to think about what things just are in our world. The Internet, in all it’s forms. Conduits of information. And the Interfaces to that information.

Nice. That’s a succinct little detour-ee thought.

Break down what we do. Conduits of Information. Interfaces to that Information.

Nice.

Anyway, yeah. The Cycling Santa. He reminds me to work very hard at making complex things simple. At using the building blocks that are already in existance. He says to use the simple functionality to draw people in.

Thanks for listening, this has been another Dev Dawn broadcast.

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Guilt, Work and Gaming

This post on Sun’s entrance into the Gaming arena concreted something that’s been swimming around in my mind for a while.

Even now, when I talk about gaming with peers, it’s almost a secretive, under-cover conversation. Because gaming is inherently not work.

When you think about one side, it’s true. Very true.

However, if we look at the coin and make it into a 20-sided die (maybe 24?), then things change. When we develop solutions for problems or needs, we create an application (or more than one) which provide that solution.

The creation of games is the same. Boiled down, it’s all 1’s and 0’s. What is a Clarion App? It’s a nice interface for entering data? What is a game? It’s a nice (very nice hopefully) interface for entering data.

The solution is to capture the data. The need is perhaps a little different. Business needs are for the making of money. A Gamer’s need is to play. Now, then you have the companies that want to make money out of gaming. Bam. The lines are joined together now. Gaming is a business. And, if the above article is correct, then most Business is gaming.

My thinking at the moment is … wait for it … developing business solutions is actually a subset to developing gaming solutions. Or at least, developing a gaming solution allows for a whole swag more materials to grapple with.

With a gaming solution, your mind get’s to travel off in crazy directions … but then … maybe that’s true for a business solution. Or at least, it should be. Google dared to dream of a day when they ruled the world through being the conduit rather than the content. Jesse James Garrett dreamt of coining a phrase, and Ajax was "born". A short time ago, in a galaxy like this one, a boy dreamed up a name … Dev Dawn … and the foundations of the world trembled at the power of the moment. Heh heh.

So maybe we need a change in understanding. To think outside the box, in whatever development we do. Whether that be putting in a new network, or writing the next best accounting package, or making a truly innovative next-gen your-head-will-explode-on-seeing-it game … we need to be able to dream.

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Whaoooot!

Okay. Even though I’m very excited, I only used one exclamation mark in the title. Apparently that’s good gramma. Gramer. Gradnma.

As you should be able to see … the right sidebar now works properly in both Firefox and IE. Very cool. Had to do with the differences in (within the css sheet) using padding: and margin: … fiddled with them both until IE and Firefox worked.

That’s a big hurdle, well … small in terms of code … but big in terms of user friendly-ness. So too all the IE folks that had issues, please come back!

Also, made some changes to the left sidebar. It now contains "Recent …" functionality for Posts, Articles (Pages) and Comments. Resorted the other headers.

‘Nuff Said … well, more later on at least.