Getting started with Arduino / Rainbowduino
I recently bought some Arduino microcontroller/prototyping boards and components. The plan is to rediscover my childhood interest in electronics and familiarise myself with these tools so that maybe in future I can help teach some of this at schools. This is because I believe that its the practical stuff that can integrate with other school lessons that can give young people the best start at programming.
The great thing is that actually, with only a little knowledge, doing this stuff is really easy. The Arduino board designs and software are open source, which is a good thing. However as usual this means the docs can be problematic.
The new 4OD web player is shit
Tonight my wife and I wanted to catch up with Misfits on 4OD. The result can only be described as being shafted by bad business choices, bad design and bad code.
The joy and singular terror of mushrooms
For the first time in years my family and I had a wonderfully successful fungus foray in The Forest of Dean. The kids are just now old enough to tolerate a couple of hours of walking and searching in the woods.
I’ve been picking mushrooms for about 15 years now, though not that regularly. We were blessed with finding a good amount of Ceps and a lot of Wood Blewit this time, along with some Blushing Wood Mushroom and some small Horse Mushroom. Just before cooking my wife asked me to confirm the young white Horse mushrooms were what I thought and I said yes of course. I’m experienced after all. I know how to identify Agaricus species.
Resources 1.1(.1) plugin released
After a frantic 12 hours or so of coding and debugging, I managed to release version 1.1.1 of the Resources plugin for Grails today.
It was meant to be 1.1 but there was a bug that needed fixing immediately after releasing so 1.1.1 is where we’re at. This version is tested with Grails 1.3.7 and Grails 2.0 RC1 which is set to drop this weekend.
What’s new in this release of Resources?
Well aside from some useful bug fixes there’s a few interesting changes:
- If you forget to include r:layoutResources tags, you will get an error in the console. The error may or may not display in the browser currently depending on whether you used site mesh layouts or not. We may be able to improve this in future. This means that people who wondered where their JS code was disappearing to after installing Resources into a 2.0 app will now get an error telling them that they need to add r:layoutResources.
- There is now support for laying out arbitrary dispositions by passing a “disposition” to the r:layoutResources tag. This means you can position sets of resources wherever you like in the output, using multiple dispositions. Currently this is only relevant for JavaScript but in future we should be able to support images so that you can e.g. have a bunch of “preloaded” images that are hidden in the page somewhere.
- The integration with Grails 2.0 has been “finalized” now. The ResourceService has changed to a “grailsResourceProcessor” bean, and all g:javascript invocations result in called to r:require or r:script as necessary. The default layouts in 2.0 now use layoutResources and a default “application” module exists in new projects.
There are still some outstanding important bugs that I will endeavour to fix soon, as well as improving the error reporting on all fronts.
Enjoy!
The web is doomed. Native will rule. I’m not alone.
A great piece by Joe Hewitt, who writes far better than I. This is pure killer:
The arrogance of Web evangelists is staggering. They take for granted that the Web will always be popular regardless of whether it is technologically competitive with other platforms. They place ideology above relevance. Haven’t they noticed that the world of software is ablaze with new ideas and a growing number of those ideas are flat out impossible to build on the Web? I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows, and becomes a footnote in history. That thing we used to use in the early days of the Internet.
As those of you who read my previous post on the possibility native could eclipse web on the desktop will know, I could not agree more. It’s not something I want, but I believe it may be inevitable. Even if Joe’s mooted guardians/CEOs of “the web” materialised, there’s no guarantee they would produce something compelling enough for the average user to use in preference to native apps.
Joe’s piece is bang on, in that the web geeks of the world are in complete denial of this and the dead weight of design-by-committee that will forever drag the core web technologies down.
Also ties into a tweet that I saw today:
@hnshah: “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” Jef Raskin
There are a couple of ways to interpret this, but mine is “customers don’t give a shit how you implemented this or what your constraints are”.
What they see, feel and experience in front of them is what they care about.
Web devs who deny this is the case are just sticking with what they know, and companies sticking to web development are doing this purely for cost reasons that make not one jot of difference to the customer. Seriously, who wants to learn Objective-C, code Android, or Windows or OS X when they can already do HTML + JS? You can see the logic – it’s “cross platform”. It is however self-interest, and this does not drive the software market. The customer does, and the customer is rarely happy in the long term with lowest-common-denominator UX and functionality.
The web offers no gain for the customer whatsoever vs native. The converse is true for native vs web.
Yes I make a living from making web app stuff. For now at least.
