This blog is now defunct. I’ve started a new one at Blank Slate to chronicle my creative and design activities, and all future posts will show up there instead. (It’s too much of a pain to migrate past posts over, though, so they’ll stay here.)

So, I’ve decided to rechristen this blog. I don’t write often enough about programming to really justify having a separate blog for it, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But what I do have a huge itching to start writing more about is design. Not graphic design, mind you (I have BenjaminCrowder.com for that), but all the rest — industrial, instructional, UI, you name it. It’ll be the same thing I’ve done over on my Beyond blog, just with wider scope. (Everything except genealogy. :))

As a quick sampling of what I’ve got in mind, here are some of the topics I’ve got floating around in my head: ebooks (how to make them more palatable), kitchen designs, map design, and information design theory. And my inspirations include Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, Edward Tufte’s books, and the TED talks, so that’s the sort of flavor I’ll be getting at.

I’ll have the maiden post up in the next few days.

This next month is going to be a bit of a crunch, with several large projects to finish at work before I leave at the end of August. I guess that’s why I haven’t blogged here lately, but that’s kind of dumb because work is coding and it should spawn more blog posts. Oh well.

So, after working in Ruby on Rails for a while, going back to ASP.NET is paaaaaainful. I can’t wait till I’m done with these projects so I can spend all my coding time using a language I love. Soon, my precious… :P

Technorati Tags: Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET

A new blog warrants a bit of background, methinks — the tale of my life as it were. My family’s first computer was a 286 with a monochrome (orange-tint) monitor, running DOS on some 5 1/4″ floppies (no hard drive). The only program we had was WordPerfect.

When I was seven or eight, I was watching The Voyage of the Mimi on PBS. I don’t rememember much about the episode other than that the characters were visiting a Mayan archaeology site. One of them wrote a program to convert Mayan number glyphs to our numerals and showed it to another character. My interest perked up, but yet I didn’t quite know what it was I was interested in. I went to my mother and explained what I wanted to do, asking if I could do it in WordPerfect. She smiled and told me that it was called programming, and that no, I couldn’t do it in WordPerfect, but we could go to the library and get some books on it. And so we did. I came home that day with four or five books on BASIC programming. I didn’t realize till later that all of them were for obsolete computers (TRS-80s and Commodore 64s and such), but thankfully BASIC was homogenous enough across platforms for me to get started.

We had a friend of the family show me how to get into the BASIC interpreter (BASICA.COM — only later did I discover GWBASIC.COM and QBASIC.EXE). I played around a bit, typed in programs from the books, tried things out, got frustrated, tried again, and eventually learned how to program.

Being a young boy, I was naturally interested in programming games, like those I saw my friends play on the Nintendo (Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, etc.). But none of the graphics commands in the books worked. After several weeks of frustration, I discovered the SCREEN command, which let me change to the various graphics modes. (SCREEN 0 was the standard text mode; SCREEN 1 was the 320×200 black-and-white mode; SCREEN 2 was a 640×400 mode which always looked skinny to me; and SCREEN 13 was the 320×200 mode with 256 colors which was to become my favorite.) PSET and CIRCLE and LINE actually worked now, much to my delight.

A couple of years later, a friend gave me Turbo Pascal 5.5 for DOS. I quickly learned it and found out how to do graphics (ah, BGI graphics bring back memories… :)). A few of my friends were heavily into Pascal programming at that time, and through them and bulletin board systems, I became fairly proficient.

Then I discovered assembly language. I never ended up learning it very well, but I did use it for high-speed graphics routines (mostly plotting pixels and setting graphics modes and such), which I placed inline in my Pascal programs. I began getting interested in graphics libraries and attempted a few of my own.

Two years after I had begun Pascal, a neighbor offered to teach me C. I took lessons for a month or so. A few days after starting, I finally found a free C compiler online (the Small C Compiler, I think) and was very excited when my “Hello, world!” program actually compiled and ran. For Christmas that year my parents bought me Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS. I think Windows 3.1 was released by this time, but I was still using DOS. I began high school a year or two later and signed up for the AP Computer Science class. C and C++ were my languages of choice for the next few years.

Back in August 1997, I discovered Linux. I’d built my own computer from scratch, and so I downloaded Slackware 3.4 onto a horde of floppies (half of which went bad and had to be replaced), printed out an installation guide (onto a full ream of paper!), and began. When I finally got it installed, I sat there looking at the shell, wondering what on earth I could do, other than moving around to different directories and ls-ing. It would’ve been easy to give up at that point and shun Linux (and all other Unices), thinking them too hard or user unfriendly, but I’m very, very, very glad I persisted. Over time I grew to love the shell with a passion that far exceeded anything I ever felt towards Windows. And as a shell fiend, Vim (vi) was my friend. I used it for everything. After the (steep) learning curve, my productivity skyrocketed, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever gotten by without it.

Then, in 2002, I went on my mission. All the computers in Thailand, with very few exceptions, are Windows boxes. ‘Twas painful.

Got home in 2004, bought a laptop, and installed Linux on it first thing. Seeing that beautiful wordsmith:~ $ prompt was heavenly. Coding in Vim was like Christmas all over again. Mmm.

A month later, I’d grown dissatisfied with the laptop hardware, and some friends had shown me their luscious Powerbooks. Since OS X is built on Unix, I converted. To tell the truth, I felt like I’d betrayed my “family,” but it didn’t take long before I realized just how great Macs are. They’re beautiful and stable, and I have my terminal and Vim to keep me happy. In retrospect, the Windows XP interface looks like a Duplo set, and the X Windows window managers look…amateur. I’ve been pampered. :)

Anyway, to wrap things up, I’ve mostly done web development these past five or six years. I’m currently learning Python and Ruby, and I like them very much. And this post is way long. The End. Sorry for the rambling. :)

Technorati Tags: Linux, Mac, Unix, Vim, Python, Ruby

Digital Bridge used to be my computer blog, but I didn’t like the name very much, so I’ve created this blog instead. I’ll mostly be writing about programming (Ruby on Rails, Python, Lisp, Getting Real, etc.), Web2.0 (Ajax, etc.), and other geek stuff (Macs, vi, usability, and more). And posts like this are boring (or at least this one is), so The End.

Wait. I may as well explain the name here. It’s pretty self-evident: think outside the box. Be creative. Innovate. Coding is art. Ugliness is bad. There’s a wide frontier of possibilities out there.

Technorati Tags: Ruby on Rails, Python, Lisp, Mac, vi