Clarion Debugger Quick-Demo, Wink Wink

Welcome One & All to my first demonstration movie.

Edit: I’m going to steal what I wrote for a post on the Clarion newsgroups .. a little bit of fiction.

Gather round and let me tell you a tale.

One fine rainy day in Sid-en-ney Ozstrayla, a boy found a magical piece of software. Of course, it had it’s fair share of breakdowns, but magic still permeated it’s core.

And so the boy knew he could wield this weapon to bring about a crushing blow for the Kingdom of Clarion, where the Knights of Rapid Development roved the lands, seeking out Peasants and Lords alike with the ProblemsNeedFixing curse.

They were valiant warriors, given to slaying the Dragon’s of Mikerow Soft Mountain, and rescuing the fair maidens .. Ms’s Custo Meri Sright, Bo Bzisool, Thed Ebugg Errulz, and the Queen, Dontar Guewit Hsuccess.

Visit http://www.devdawn.com/ to see the fruits of the boy’s labour.

It’s not perfect, but for me, there’s a little bit of magic in the air .. something is a-stirring ..

Last night I set about finding out just what screen-capture (demonstration making) software existed. After looking at a few, I settled on Wink. It’s a fantastic piece of freeware. A great deal of features, you can capture and edit under various different scenarios. You can add a lot of functionality. Some of the demo movies I watched last night actually had me feeling like I was in the driver’s seat. Very nice.

Anyway. I have played with it for a bit, and realised there was one issue which you will hear while watching the movie. That’s right, there is a sound problem. Not a great big one .. but enough to warrant checking out some of the other software.

However, for the moment, I have gone ahead with this demonstration of the Clarion Debugger (a very VERY quick one) using Wink.

The movie (.swf) is just under 4 megabytes large.

Clarion Debugger Demonstration

Unfortunately, as I’m a complete newb, the movie size is far greater in size than the Dev Dawn page width. It’s 1169*823 .. so many apologies. I have tested shrinking the movie .. but it really screws with the quality. Quality of the visuals, not the bloke yapping on :).

Notes:

  • Making a demonstration, even a short one, takes some preparation. At least the first few times. You have to have a concrete purpose in your head, or you just ramble. I must have done half a dozen or more takes on this demo. Even now, there are a lot of problems with it. So ..
    • Have a clear purpose
    • No ummmms
    • Don’t be afraid to talk slowly
    • End the movie before you get Kapture Kreep (a distant cousin to Feature Creep)

Of course, I broke all of these, and all other rules I don’t know yet, along the way .. so take the notes with a large white crystalised grain of salt.

I hope this will be of some assistance to .. anyone. I’ve only been using the debugger for about a week, if that. And it’s just so impacted my development life that I had to spread the word.

Stu Out

500 Giga-Whooseys?

Was just pointed to this article on a 500GHz chip.

It’s a short and clear article. If it’s on the money, then these supa-nerds (used in a heroic sense) have jump ahead many lightyears.

I’d like to quote the whole article, but since it’s short, here’s just two bits.

At 500 gigahertz, the technology is 250 times faster than chips in today’s cellphones, which operate at 2 gigahertz. At room temperature, the chips operate at 350 gigahertz, far faster than other chips in commercial use today.

Second, for the prediction that is sad, but most probably true:

Mr. Olds cautioned, however, that the technology was far from finding its way into commercial products any time soon, considering the performance leap it represents. Today’s performance-hungry computer buyers, for example, are buying machines operating at about three gigahertz, he said.

Not sure how to take the actual article. Sounds like a quick jotting down of facts given to a reporter. I’d like to know more, investigate a bit more, ask some questions of the people.

A New Look For Mr. McGuire

The Channel Nine website has had a facelift. It’s gone all Rounded and Smooth. Looks nice.

How annoying is yellow? Well, at least, that particular yellow .. the song is awesome.

The problem with the site, and it’s not going to be something they can get away from easily, is that there’s just too much on the page. I imagine they’ve got a bundle of commitments that have to be there, and these are fighting each other for the viewer’s eye.

The viewer becomes frazzled, unless they specifically ignore those elements and travel directly to their intended location .. for me, it’s pretty much always the TVGuide .. although of late i’ve been using TVGuide.com.au a lot more. Neither are perfect mind you. But that’s another lame and boring story for another far far far away time.

What’s the deal with these websites? They’re in limbo land, at least, that’s what it seems like to this black duck. Trying to make money. Make money offa the web. How to do it? Hmmm, how to, how to. And yet, they fail to miss the important points, which have dogged most sites for a long time. What is the importance of content? Too much and it’s watered down, too little .. and well, you don’t get traffic.

But is traffic the All Important Goal? And further, is our chief end to be Money, Mammon, or more appropriately, our lusting after it?

Edit:Don’t get me wrong. Capitalism is cool, and commercial success is a fair goal. I was just in a particularly acerbic mood just now.

Edit on the Edit:And apparently I am not having a good wording day .. two just‘s in one sentance. BAD.

There’s an excellent article floating around today, Zen and the Art of Classified Advertising, where the author talks with the man behind craigslist. It’s a pretty cool look at a different thread, a group of people treading a different path. It’s not the only way, for sure, but it’s nice.

Of course, the little voice (crazy little voice) inside does whisper that perhaps there are hidden motives. But of course there are!, there usually always is. It might be a personal tragedy that drives the person on, or a collective goal to dominate a facet of the market.

I’ve been influenced today by lack of sleep .. and by zefrank and his Show.

‘Nuff Crazy Talkin

Changing What We Know Of Coding

Live Coda 2006 has happened, and I only just found out about it.

For those who don’t want to follow the link ..

Teams of two, three or four programmers will compete during the evening to solve a simple task (basic input/output and array manipulation) in the shortest time possible.

With each programmer on a separate machine working on a single shared program source projected onto Loops 23 foot screen.

Prizes are awarded for fastest solution time, so team collaboration is going to be more important than pure programming ability.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like a blast. Getting to combine, not just solo, with other programmers to achieve a very time-restricted goal. It’s like an episode of 24 .. except each ep is ten minutes long.

This kind of exciting take on development is awesome. It really is. To sensationalise the world of programming. Sensationalise in a good way. I hope we see more of it.

Wow, Another Gear Grind, Supa

Okay.

First off .. this is not about Development, not really. It’s just a good old fashioned gear grinding session.

Second off .. (that phrasing doesn’t really work the second time around) .. my recent influx of postings is a joy to me, because I’ve come out of some kind of lethargic stupor regarding interacting with the web.

Third off .. no. It just doesn’t work :).

Ahem.

A couple of weeks back, I had to return a WAAAY overpriced Serenity dvd (I know, I should have just kept it, but I can’t see how Joss Whedon is getting the extra money this particular store was charging for it) .. and the store didn’t do refunds (of which I’m dubious of, but don’t know the aussie law that well) .. so I got a swap. Ended up getting Family Guy Season 4.

Edit: Can I just say, to erase any misunderstanding .. the store referred to in the previous paragraph is NOT EzyDVD.

Haven’t had any problems dealing with EzyDVD, and they do great specials.

I can remember watching the first season long time back in about 2000 when it first hit aussie screens. It was at about 10.30pm at night. Silly Aussies didn’t pick it up, or the networks didn’t want to really show it .. but the next memory comes in about 2002 (or thereabouts) when the Season 1 dvd was on sale in a Tamworth Grace Bros/Target/?? for about $16.

Bargain.

From then we bought the next two seasons as they appeared.

So, although we’ve started cooling on season 4 (it’s been on telly lately), I thought, why not. Pick it up. Watch the eps that haven’t showed yet.

As you can see from the afore-typed link (to the EzyDVD item, it’s the picture, at the top of the box), there’s a big title that says Complete Season 4 Collection.

Bollocks.

Not. Funny. At. All.

Talk about anger management issues. I opened the case.

Hmmm. No little guide as the last three have had. Okay. That’s a little off-putting but .. WAIT.

WHAT THE!!!

There’s thirteen episodes in the whole entire case. Possibly I should have been more careful and read the back of the dvd better, it does actually say something about 13 episodes.

But I can guarantee you there aren’t 13 episodes in the season.

So I do a little digging.

It seems there’s quite a bit of confusion about just what makes up Season 4.

If you check out the episode guide on the Family Guy Website (it’s flash, so you have to select it yourself, can’t link to it), there’s 30 episodes in the season (3 of which comprise the Untold Stewie Griffon Story, a dvd that was released earlier this year, so possibly that takes the tally down to 27).

EpGuides listing currently has the count at 17, which seems a little wierd. However, looking at the TV.com listing it’s got 30 episodes.

All in all, I’d say this is a money-making scheme. I’m pretty sure that the guys who actually do the show wouldn’t stoop that low. They don’t have to. It seems out of character. But there are plenty of other people in the whole creation of the dvd loop that would.

So .. a ballsup. I hope someone calls Fox, or whoever actually did this.

I’d like to get my extra 17 episodes .. so that I have the Entire Season 4 Collection.

‘Nuff Grinding .. Babbled on way too long today.

Leaving The Nest

I imagine it would be easier to leave Microsoft now than it was ten, even five years ago. The cosmic forces have shifted. But not entirely. There is still a great deal of prestige and weight behind the big guru, and walking away from a high-profile job would leave behind a lot of wonderful opportunities.

Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) has left the building.

Opportunity is what he did it for though. To keep excited. There’s a great little exit-interview (Microsoft Watch) that popped up today, well, technically yesterday for us yobbos is ozland and all counterparts.

It’s good to read about a guy who has made blogging into something important in a business sense. And by that, I don’t mean breaking through and getting ten thousand dollhairs a month from Google Adsense.

I mean, he’s made businesses actually put time into researching blogging, making it part of their overall plans, their strategies, etc etc.

It’s healthy reading.

Nuff for now ..

Newspotting

Okay. Just gonna do a generic news posting. Well, probably not generic.

Net Neutrality is a big catchphrase zooming around the internet at the moment. It’s interesting to find out about, not because I’m worried, or even pretend to know the depths of both sides to the argument (if indeed it’s just two sides). I’m interested because it could be the place where historians in a hundred years time point to as the start of something. A spread. A break. The Breaking.

Something like that.

It could be. It might not.

There’s a good article on the E-Week site, mainly focussed on Google, but it gives a good concise explanation of what Net Neutrality is about.

If you’re a dedicated Lazy Programmer (here, here, and here .. man I’m longing for the multiple-link tag, a javascript-ee menu thingy that would give you a list of links from a single a href tag .. anyway), I’ll summise.

Using a pipe analogy, Net Neutrality is about whether the companies that own the pipes can dictate what goes through them. Control. Give precendence to.

That’s my initial understanding of the matter.

Of course, the initial thought is BAM .. that’s some massive possibility for evil. You can have our nice supa-fast piece of pipe .. while you on the other hand, here’s a pile of plastic to see if you can get some water through.

That’s definately on people’s minds.

Anyway. I’m not pretending to have any insight into the matter. Just relaying the news.