I have always loved The Beatles, even when I was little. I'm too young to have known about The Beatles in a cultural sense. I was 5 when John Lennon was murdered, far too young to remember, so to me The Beatles were always just music that existed. While I love their entire catalog I've always felt the White Album was their weakest effort due to lack of editing. Today we're going to fix that.
I'm annoyed that we don't have something like the Amiga anymore. A computer that doesn't give you apps, but instead gives you primitives that you can combine in different ways to be creative and make art. Okay, the Amiga wasn't quite like that, but it had the spirit and desire to become that.
This is the first 360 video test with Jesse. It might make you dizzy.
I purchased an Oculus Go on launch day, but due to other commitments I wasn't able to play with it until today. These are my initial uncensored thoughts. First off, for 200 bucks it's pretty good. You get a standalone device that boots up and lets you do things. It's preloaded with a few apps, and the catalog features a bunch of free demos, videos, and games. I haven't dug very far into the catalog yet, but so far I'm impressed.
Well, I've continued working on my React Native music app and everything is going smooth. I already like using it much better than Amazon's iOS Music App for the simple reason it uses less memory.
Today I received a note from our local recycling company that they can no longer take any plastics except for washed milk jugs. Even the many kinds of hard plastic that claim to be fully recyclable they are unable to take. They say it's because of the international recycling crisis currently affecting the world. I'm a curious fellow, so I did some reading.
Following Blair MacIntyre's lead, I've accepted that the only way to write more is to write more. No more waiting for the perfect topic at the perfect time with perfect editing. It's better to publish something unpolished than to not publish at all.
Yesterday I ran across a post on Hacker News about a new phone. From the website it appears to be a brand new OS with features to help you keep focused and clear away the distractions. While the site was pretty, the lack of good UI screenshots was a red flag. What did this OS look like? How can a new OS possibly be built by a small company and be any good?
I have long wanted to create my own desktop operating system targeting the Raspberry Pi. I believe we should have a hackable desktop environment that is both powerful and lightweight, similar to BeOS and the Amiga. To build this desktop we really need full control over how apps draw to the screen, but still have hardware acceleration. That means we'll need to use real graphics drivers and real graphics APIs from existing Linux desktops. When I last looked at all things Linux graphics five years ago everything was a mess but with some promising signs. Over the past couple of days I've been researching the current state. Here is my report, with both good and bad news.
Creating a great webtool that you want to share with the world is easy. Just follow these simple steps for success.
Is there anything which uses the word nog that is not eggnog? Are there other types of nog? Where did the word even come from? Is it derived from grog or something else? And is there any connection with nogging?
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law. Second, that innovation in desktop operating systems stopped about 15 years ago and the major players are unlikely to heavily invest in them again. And finally, I hope to convince you that we can and should start over from scratch, learning the lessons of the past.
I've spent the last week diving into A-Frame, a toolkit from Mozilla for quickly building VR experiences on the Web. Unlike most other Javascript libraries, A-Frame is centered around declarative markup rather than functions and callbacks. This makes it much easier to get started and learn. Throughout the week I've written down a few notes to share with you.
You should hire an old programmer. It’s true! Sure.. older programmers are not going to work as many hours as someone fresh out of college. They have kids and spouses and mortgages and softball games to attend. They won't hang out at the office playing Xbox and ping-pong all night. They will not work 80 hour weeks and they will actually use their vacation time. And of course they cost more than young programmers. Despite all of those reasons not to hire an older programmer, you still should. For one simple reason: they are worth it. I know this, because I am one.
I'm happy to introduce you to PixelEater, a web-based pixel drawing tool with support for layers, resizing, the NES color palette and downloading images with integer scaling. Try it out here. The source is on github here.
This post is for my friends who live in Oregon.
I have long had the dream of an open source repository of structured data. The data is already out there, but not in computable form. You can find the average weight of a tiger, but graphing 10 mammals weight vs max age requires a lot of manual work. We need a single place to go.We need a collaborative place to suggest, edit, and curate this data. A place where anyone can freely find, remix, and contribute new data items and data sets. Sort of a Wikipedia for data. That's the dream anyway.
This essay is adapted from a talk I did in 2016 at DevRelCon. This is a topic I've wanted to talk about for a while. Sometimes I feel like the old guy from Up. Not only am I old and crotchety and my back doesn't work as well as it used to, but I feel like all of these young kids are getting into the field and they don't know the history of Developer Evangelism. But then I realized, I don't know the history of it either. I just sort of fell into developer evangelism from engineering. I didn't go to school for this. I got a computer science degree and spent many years as a coder and engineer. I came into this field by accident, as I assume many other people have as well. When I joined Sun Microsystems in 2005 I didn't mind speaking on stage about technical topics, so boom.. I became the developer evangelist for my team. So now I'm thrilled to be able to actually talk about the history of our field.
True high level Artificial Intelligence, the kind we read about in novels and hear crazy stories about from futurists, won't be like the movies. There won't be a Her that we fall in love with. There won't be a HAL 9000 who turns against us. When we finally build a true self-learning AI, it won't be anything at all like a human intelligence. This shouldn't be a surprise. We have half a century of results to show this is true.
With over a decade of professional speaking experience, I regularly speak at a number of conferences each year. Recently I have spoken on Developer Evangelism, React, the Realtime Web, and chatbot development. If your company or event could benefit from learning about these or other interesting topics, drop me a line.