Getting Stuck Into VB.NET

by Kieran

I’ve taken some time out today to go over some of VB.NET’s language features and general "dialect".  It’s a very odd language and seems as if it has been patched together from remnants of a shabby past.  There are language features that still exist in it which are both nonsensical and medieval, for example "Sub" which doesn’t seem to relate to anything.  Modules are a way to call statically from a console application, instead of starting the application through a form, yet are more of a deprecated VB6 feature.

Everything I’ve worked with feels to me as if the VB6 developers just really didn’t want to let go of the language after it became a language of the past with competing languages steadily overtaking.  The grammar behind it has been changed into less understandable things based on everything that is taught in the computer science field such as static memory, public, private, and protected access modifiers which are a common grammar amongst many-a-language.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with coding in it, and I’m already getting the hang of it, but it just feels as if pushing .NET on VB was a "last hope" of making the language last another 5-10 years.

Sure, it’s all a part of the .NET framework, so the language doesn’t particularly matter all too much, but I honestly don’t see the big hype around it.  For a start, it’s nothing new, runtime environments were around for years before .NET came on the scene.  The library features just feel like a direct copy of the JDK (another reason why I shouldn’t have much of a problem with getting on with it), and the language itself has just been made to be more understandable, although I believe that’s far from the truth.

Understandability, of course, doesn’t just come from a natural use of language when it comes to software development.  As developers, we’re taught to use a standard set of language features, and these are typically copied over into other languages.  Compare, for example, C, C++, PHP, Java and more.  If you can get on with one of these, then there’s a good chance you’ll feel comfortable with the rest.  Some other languages overstep the bounds however, although it does confuse me greatly, because C# fits into a category snugly with Java.

So finally I have to sum it up as follows:

  • It’s nothing new
  • In effect, it could reduce productivity due to its highly different nature
  • It’s all a part of .NET, therefore language doesn’t have much of an impact, this is down to familiarity more than anything
  • It’s an old language that has been revived

Again, this doesn’t mean I have a problem with it, and I’m more than happy to work with it, and what I have learnt so far is great as I’m feel more comfortable with it.  Perhaps I’ll learn to love it even more so in the future, but I’m honestly shocked at how vastly it is used in the industry today.  In fact, a good four or five colleagues of mine are using it in full-time jobs.  I guess of course, it’s entirely dependant on the application being developed.

A Safe Landing

by Kieran

I’ve always enjoyed watching anything to do with space on TV, especially with all of the Mars landings.  Today the Phoenix craft landed successfully, and after watching the videos on the landing process I was amazed.  It’s quite a futuristic landing using thrusters to come to a halt and then just dropping.  Usually craft of this type just make their landing using just parachutes, but I assume they couldn’t in this case because the probe isn’t designed to move, therefore the parachutes couldn’t get in the way.

The one thing that gets me is that when you see the videos of the probes, you don’t get a real feel for it, especially for their size as they seem so small.  Well, I ran across this picture today showing the real size of it, and it’s a crazy amount bigger than I thought.  It’s "little" digger arm must be quite large.

Stupid Web Payment Systems

by Kieran

I have a serious hate towards web payment systems that fail to load on the final booking page.  It’s happened to me before, then I’ve ended up making two payments.  Tonight I booked our boat trip back home for when I finish university only to find the final page didn’t load up.  After waiting for quite a while it was obvious nothing was going to happen, so I just closed the page.  I then checked my e-mails to see if I had got a confirmation and waited a while to make sure the mail server retrieved everything that was most up-to-date and nothing came through.  Knowing it hadn’t confirmed it I re-booked the trip (they’re not cheap either), which went very smoothly and I was presented with the "success" page for the payment.  I then check my e-mails to find two confirmations, one for the previous attempt, and one for the one that worked without a hitch.

I understand what it’s like to code web systems, I’ve had to do it before, but there needs to be something more rock-solid in there checking against pages which don’t load.  Otherwise, customers have to look at it, know it didn’t complete successfully and either phone up the company they’re dealing with the next day, or phone their bank to see if any charges have been made.  It all causes unnecessary hassle.  Perhaps the web systems should notice payments made with the same details and give the user a warning that a booking under the same name / card has been made in that evening?

Either way, we’re going to have to phone up on a high-tariff line just to cancel a booking which their system screwed up.  These things annoy the crap out of me.

Patents, Why I Disagree

by Kieran

I’m sure we’re all familiar with what patents are, those exclusive rights an "inventor" has over an invention.  Sure, there’s a strict process that must be met in order to file a patent, but anyone and their friend can patent an idea, and some of them are just absolute BS.  I’m going to whack a fork on the end of a pen so businessmen can eat and write at the same time, it’s a great idea, it might help the world a whole lot, but you know what? I won’t let anyone else use the idea unless they pay me lots of money.  (Please note, that IS a joke.  We could always patent "KNIFE WREEEENCH!" - Scrubs rocks.)

I didn’t really think about patents much until a friend of mine shared information about patented shadowing techniques which were widely used in rendering engines.  The idea was nothing new, and had been implemented a great many times before.  Here’s a few reasons why I hate, hate, hate patents.

  • Money grabbing fiends
  • Inhibiting the world from using new ideas
  • Ideas aren’t necessarily new, they’re just patented (look at LZW encoding twenty years ago)
  • Stopping the development of the world

I could sure go on and on, but the more I hear about them, the more I dislike them.  I think the patent system should be abolished completely.  You can still make money from unoriginal ideas, and you should share with the world what you have created.  If you’re really up your own arse about it, then just make some rule such as "slap my name on it if you do release it so I can suck up all the glory".

I should patent patents, that’d mess the world up.

Death, Death, and more Death

by Kieran

I’m not sure what it is recently, but the news has been plastered with just death.  Let’s start out with the individual killings in Great Britain.  One boy, 16, killed in broad daylight over something most probably meaningless.  I saw another one in the paper today about a 22 year old being killed in Oxford street (yes, that’s probably the busiest street in the UK).  Then moving onto worldwide disasters.  I’m sure everyone has heard of the Burma cyclone/typhoon that has killed in excess of 22,000 people (if you check the original story, they said only hundreds… oh how the death toll rose).  Then moving onto China’s earthquake which has killed in excess of 12,000.  And finally, the bombings in India that were mentioned tonight on the BBC.

So, in the last 2 weeks or so, we’re looking at a death toll of just over 34,000 just from natural disasters alone.  Is it only me who notices this? Or are people just glancing over the news recently? Because I’m deeply moved by things like this and it heightens my "we live so ignorantly" sense.  I think as Britons we have become so complacent about the going-ons of the rest of the world that we prefer to kick our feet up, drink our cup of earl grey and watch the death tolls rise on the news.  Either that or we switch over to Doctor Who and the likes.

Of course I do understand that we’re unable to help from so far away, and we’d lead an unhelpful life if we were to just give up our jobs and chase the next disaster that happened.

Colour-Blindness Fun

by Kieran

If you’re colour-blind, you’re going to hate this (click here). It’s the first game I’ve played in a while which is actually quite challenging and really tests your ability, despite its simplicity.

Reformsoft Rebirth

by Kieran

Recently myself and a colleague have been discussing where our future part-time software development should be directed. Although we have many ideas, and have indeed in some cases started work on some areas, we thought it would be a good idea to carry on with reformsoft, which was started some years ago to help groups of us to congregate together to make software. Hopefully with the multiple developers to each project there would be a higher rate of quality in each product.

The idea isn’t necessarily open source, whilst we do enjoy open source, but instead we are planning on working on both free and commercially viable software. Each of us “own” a project within the team, and the rest of the team will be assigned roles to each project. This way, we’re all managers, we’re all developers, and we’re all designers. As for languages and types of projects, we’re not entirely sure, although we do have a heading on where we want to go (of course we’re not revealing any information just yet).

Some old projects will be started up again, and some new ones will begin. The environments we develop in will be quite varied, and hopefully some web systems will be developed also. Personally, though, I will not be working on any commercial products and instead plan to release free software only, and as it’s part of the team it doesn’t look as if it’ll be open source (though that’s okay too).

Hopefully this will give me lots to keep busy with in the evenings ;)

Facebook Overtaking Google?

by Kieran

Here’s an interesting read for the day. The BBC have looked into staff moving from Google to Facebook, and there seem to be a great number of them who are doing so. The article moves on to saying things like “the Google of yesterday” without any clear notion of why. Because employees are shifting from Google to Facebook? Let’s get something straight here. What on earth is similar between the two? They may both be working with the web, but their areas are in almost opposite directions. Social networking versus a large scale search giant providing a multitude of AJAX-enabled web tools to perform desktop-esque tasks. Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t see how the two can be compared, the fact is that there’s still a big load of brains out there in the world that Google could quite easily snatch up.

In spite of all this, there’s still some observations I would like to make:

  • Facebook have acquired Google staff, in what ways will this benefit social networking?
  • How would Facebook possibly take over services that Google provide?
  • If Facebook do compete with Google, surely they will lose the entire point of Facebook and start fanning out to areas they’re really not meant to?

It annoys me when I hear crappy news articles like this trying to compare apples and oranges. What they don’t realise is that staff shift from big company to big company all the time, just because it’s happening to the “hot” stuff at the moment, doesn’t mean it’s not happening elsewhere. When I worked in the industry I personally met some of the big shifters and whilst it was talked about a significant amount, it wasn’t something the press would get hold of, and it wasn’t something the press would have been interested in.

Anyone who thinks Facebook is domineering companies like Google because of their staff acquisition is quite simply misguided.

MacBook Pro

by Kieran

Let me admit something to you. The system I have now is something I bought when I was in college, taking in mind of course that I’m just about to finish my four year degree, so yes, it’s old, and it’s slow. Of course, it’s slowness is only relative to what I do on it, and some things I do are very application heavy. Running Eclipse with some larger applications causes a huge impact on the memory usage. Otherwise, for your general wishy-washy use of a system, it would run perfect. I’ve grown very fond of this system, though for my area of work, and especially the stuff I’m about to get into, it just won’t cut it.

Today my parents revealed to me that they would buy me a MacBook Pro as a graduation present (yes, they are extremely generous, so much so that I don’t quite know what to say other than “thankyou”). Fortunately I get quirks pointed out to me such as the glossy screen, and the new Multi-Touch on more recent models. I’m quite patient, however, therefore I will wait until after I get back to Guernsey most probably before I go and buy one. It’s probably a good choice as the price may slightly go down, and it’ll be more than likely that the newer models are in stock back at home in the Apple store.

I’ll be going for the 17″ screen seeing as though I have the choice available to me. The more space available on the desktop the better really, and the systems themselves aren’t actually that much bigger than the 15″, from what I’ve been told. Plus, it’s rare that I take my laptop out and about, but neither can I justify a desktop as it’s likely I would be taking it out of the house.

What can I say for the transition to Mac OS X? Well, as Mac are so oriented at key usability features (as I’ve previously studied in course content) then I can’t see there being a problem. Sure, I’ll have to learn new shortcuts and the use of the Multi-Touch mousepad etc., but it’s all a learning curve in using new things such as my GIMP woes earlier today.

In what way will it benefit me? Well, I’ll have more speed, but as for Mac OS itself, I don’t really know of any yet, but I’m willing to try, and I’m more than willing to stick to alternatives to what I currently use. MS feels more like bloat-ware every day, and the consumer market feels to me as if it’s being dumbed down further and further to the point that error messages are aimed at a five year old. Don’t get me wrong, MS is just about right for the consumer market, but for me personally, I simply can’t agree with everything.

Furthermore the use of virtualisation is going to be a great benefit as what’s held for me in the future is some lean, mean, cross-platform software development team. I’m aiming at releasing some software (OSS) with its first version being compatible on Mac OS X, Windows, Vista, and finally Ubuntu. Why Ubuntu? It’s all the rage, and I’ll get along with it quite well I’m sure. Hopefully I’ll get some tips, though ;)

Even More Reason to Hate MySpace

by Kieran

Sure, I use Facebook, and I enjoy using it. It allows me to keep in contact with friends without having to use instant messaging, something which soaks up all of my time sometimes, and I try and avoid it at all costs. MySpace was something I used before Facebook, and did enjoy it, until of course the editable profiles were exploited to the point that killer JavaScript scripts were being used to screw the general public over when they wanted to read their so-called friend’s latest blog post. Of course there was then a constant peeping into one’s life with stupid features primarily aimed at acknowledging oneself as the centre of the universe (see bulletins.)

So who was “Tom”? You know, the guy who “invented” it all. The face that spread across the world. The user with the most friends. The user with the most hate groups spawned over and over again in the MySpace world. Tom, as you may know it, is actually a big fake. That’s right, if you’re a devoted MySpace user you’re going to hate this statement. Tom, according to many-a-website, is a big fraud in the sense that you think he was the inventor and sole developer of MySpace. This quite simply isn’t the case.

I need not say anything else when you can simply click on this link to find out more. I found it rather interesting.

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