Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

Time is a funny thing, a day can drag out and feel like an eternity, but a year can pass in a blink of an eye.

I’m about 8,395 days old today, that’s roughly 201,480 rotations of the hour hand of your clock. Remember how long it takes for that hour hand to drip by while you’re in yet another boring meeting? I’ve had over 201 thousand of them.

That all equates to 23 years old, which isn’t too bad I suppose.

It’s not often I talk about myself. I have a lot of opinions, but I generally keep me to myself. On this occasion I’m going to give myself a pat on the back.

I’m pretty proud of myself.

I have no qualifications, I have no A-levels, and only a few GCSEs. I am completely self-taught.

One thing that I’ve learnt is that only you know yourself. If somebody says you can’t do something, fuck them. Who are they to tell you what you can and can’t do? Prove them wrong.

I was told that programming is hard, and it’s not something you can learn in your bedroom any more. I was told I’d not be earning more than £14,000 by the time I was 20. I was told there was no chance I could get a job without any formal qualifications. Two jobs down the line, too many languages to list, and more money than sense - I think I proved them all wrong.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to learn how to learn. It’s the one thing they don’t teach you in school. Since I learnt how to learn, I’ve gained so much knowledge.

Don’t concern yourself with the details, learn the techniques, learn the principals. It can be mistaken for arrogance, but I’m so confident in my ability to learn, that I can safely say that I can use any programming language, any operating system, any technology, ever invented and ever to be invented.

I am not scared of change, of new technologies, and I’m not afraid of being left behind. I can adapt, because I can learn.

It’s been a crazy ride so far, I look forward to what the next few years bring.

Ever get the feeling that you’ve missed out on something big? I never got to see Star Wars at the cinema*. I missed out on the start of computers, the ASM, the BASIC hacking and what-not. I discovered most of my musical taste way after the bands were gone or going, so I never got to see them in show.

None of those are my fault, of course, because they were all before my time; in fact, most were at least a decade before me. That still doesn’t stop me from ocasionally getting the feeling that I missed out on something big.

One more. One that’s pertient to our industry: Smalltalk.

Smalltalk is one of those languages, possibly the most prominent example, that has been idolised over time. It’s often touted as having an excellent programmer experience, properly object-oriented, the source of refactoring, great tools, and a solid virtual machine behind it. It’s one of those languages that people are proud to say they once worked with it. A language that people nosalgicly look back on. It’s also got an air of betamax about it (yeah, I missed that one too), people were sure it was better, but it still didn’t become mainstream.

We Smalltalkers used to think the advantages of our language were so significant that it would take over the world. We had a huge productivity advantage over C coders. Then C++ came along and gave C coders just enough to let them improve their productivity and their ability to write larger more complex systems. It still wasn’t as good as Smalltalk, but it was better than C, and much more accessible to most programmers than Smalltalk.

-Josh Susser via Raganwald

So where am I going with this? Just like I can make myself feel a bit better by watching Star Wars on a large TV, or listening to the Rolling Stones live albums. I’d like to see what all the fuss was about with Smalltalk, by giving it a go.

I’m not sure where to start on this, or how long it’s going to take, or even when I’m going to do it; however, one day in the not too distant future I’m going to do some programming with Smalltalk.

* Although I actually did get to see A New Hope when they did the re-release special edition, which made up for it.

You should now be receiving this syndicated content from my new(ish) website http://www.jagregory.com. I’ve finally moved away from the .Text powered blogging system I’ve been using for the past few years in favor of Typo, a Ruby on Rails system.

I have a few reasons for doing this but the main one is that my blog as well as my personal website both validate to XHTML 1.0. On top of that, with the dynamic nature of Ruby on Rails, I can make changes to the layouts without having to recompile.

Please drop me a line if you spot anything out of place.

After being inspired by Kevin Cornell at Bearskinrug I finally decided to try a drawing tablet, one of those magical designer tools. I bought a Trust 1200-V2 Wireless Scroll Tablet from Amazon for a fairly reasonable £40, which was an absolute breeze to set up, windows picked it up without the need to install the drivers, which is always nice.

My main complaint with it is that I was unable to (logically) get the tablet to map to anything less than both of my monitors, which was rubbish because that meant the tablet was being stretched horizontally; so you couldn’t trace anything without it becoming distorted. I say logically, because last thing yesterday I somehow managed it, so my tablet maps to my primary monitor and my mouse continues to work across both - it’ll take me a bit of time to get used to swapping but it’s definitely worth it. I will try and figure out how I managed to get it working, so I can at least make a note of it for next time.

Now all I need to do is learn how to draw… I’m currently at Rory’s standard of drawing, which of course is amazing!

Recently, while working on my website I’ve become exposed to the Behaviour JavaScript library, which I may say is absolutely wonderful. Very simple and straight forward, completely removes the need for those cursed script tags appended to the bottom of a page; something which I’ve never liked doing but became a bit of a necessary burdon! In short it allows you to execute arbitrary code on elements in the DOM using CSS selectors; so, for example, you can apply a onclick event only to elements which match form fieldset div#items a.add¹, very handy indeed!Outside of the web I got my hands on a copy of Star Wars: Empire at War, which is easily the best Star Wars RTS game I’ve played (which isn’t hard). Very entertaining, if a little samey after a while. Definitely worth playing though.

Even further outside of the web — in the real world — Sara and I got tickets for the Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age and Motörhead show in Hyde Park, London. That should be an entertaining night and it’s a very good excuse to get ourselfs down to London again, a city we really enjoyed last time.

¹ Any anchors with a class of “add”, within a div with an ID of “items” that itself is within a fieldset in a form tag.

If there is still someone out there who isn’t on the Live Messenger Beta test, drop me a comment here and I’ll send you an invite. I currently have 3 left.

I’ve just got back from two holidays, with a three day gap between the two. While it is, of course, nice to have holidays. It’s always a royal pain in the arse when you get back and find that you have a pile of bugs to fix that people found while you’re away. It also doesn’t help that the launch of our biggest website, Swift Leisure, landed two days after my return from my second holiday. So you could cut the tension with a knife when I arrived. Luckily everything went just about to plan, the finished product is at http://www.swiftleisure.com.

For my first holiday, I went down to Cornwall with my girlfriend Sara. Lovely, lovely place and we had gorgeous weather too. Stayed on a nice little converted farm called Badham Farm, really quiet and relaxing. We were only about 20 minutes from the coast and near by towns and only a hour and a half from Lands End too. We visited the Eden Project which is absolutely amazing, unbelievable that they’ve been able to achieve it all. My favorite little excursion was to a cider farm, where you could see all the workings of how they produce cider and various other alcoholic drinks (brand, wine etc…). We brought back a fair few bottles to say the least.

The second holiday was 4 days in a field at Leeds Festival. Once again, fantastic. The bands were varied but mostly good. Iron Maiden were fantastic, as were the Pixes, Queens of the Stone Age and the Foo Fighters. Not really into the “newer” bands that were there though I’m really annoyed I managed to miss Death From Above 1979. I can’t praise those two guys enough… If you haven’t heard of them, get their CD! NOW!

I think this is possibly something that everyone goes through at some point in their life, the desire to be more cultured. To me and most people this means going out and buying a lot of “classic” books and giving them a good going over. If you had tried to get me to do this a few years ago there would have been no chance of it happening, but it just so happens that I’m starting to get really into reading so this is a natural extension of things.

I’ve got my self the following books, anybody with any suggestions feel free to drop me a comment or e-mail.

* Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
* Heart Of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
* Animal Farm (George Orwell)
* Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
* Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
* Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

For something a little different I also got The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, a slight change of pace.

I’ve nearly finished reading Heart of Darkness, not taken long really. Not surprising considering it’s only 100 pages long, I can’t say it’s had a huge impact on me. I may be missing the point completely but nothing really seems to have happened and I’m onto the 3rd chapter (of 3). None the less the point is that I’ve now read a piece of history and have an informed opinion of it rather than just hints of what it’s about from what I’ve picked up listening to other people.

Since getting my new job I’ve been rather quiet on the blogging side of things, mostly do to the fact that I’m actually doing something with my time rather than just sitting around tinkering. Strange I know, but you get used to it.

As you’d probably expect, I’m not really supposed to talk about what I do for security reasons of course. It’s mostly working for the Swift group (caravans, motorhomes) doing their internal systems and web sites. Other things as well, but it’s mainly that. It’s all very interesting, a big change from serving customers in a supermarket thats for sure. It’s a really strange feeling actually going to work and learning something, I generally come home every night having picked something new up.

Since I started the job I’ve learnt that my coding abilities are much better than I thought they were, having being subjected to the woes that are legacy code. Definetly a nice feeling, it’s always rather hard to rate your abilities when you have nothing to compare them against. For better or for worse I’ve been developing in VB.Net, something I tried to stay away from when coding for my self but haven’t been able to avoid recently. Not my cup of tea really but it’s another addition to the CV. Speaking of legacy code, there’s been some serious Daily WTF material lying around. A prime example was this beauty:

Sub Function GetTime(ByVal hours, ByVal minutes)
    Dim hours
    Dim minutes
    Dim yHours

    yHours = hours * minutes

    GetTime = (yHours / minutes) + (hours * minutes)
End Sub

Really interesting! Note the lack of any variable type declarations as well! It hasn’t all been like this, but there certainly a lot of amusing things.

One resource I’ve found invaluable since starting to code professionally is Scott Hanselman’s utilities list, there are so many handy little tools there that I can’t believe I’ve managed to live without! Some perfect examples are Lutz’s Reflector and Jeff Key’s Screen Ruler. A tool for “reverse engineering” compiled .Net assemblys and a floatable screen ruler respectivly.

Hopefully I’ll be getting back into this properly soon, until then, have fun.

I’m outta there, finally free from the bounds of a supermarket job. I’ve been taken in by Evolution Interactive, a web/multimedia design company.

I’m now a ‘New Media Developer’, nicer than ‘Checkout Assistant’ if I do say so my self. It’s very strange to be in a real job, doing something that I actually want to do (and like doing). This is going to take some getting used to…