The Omnigeek

I should be writing a blog post on http://www.robmiracle.com about today’s Kentucky Derby Festival activities. But I can’t. Go see my photos from Dawn at the Downs here!

No I can’t blog now, I’m in major jubilation mode. The Carolina Hurricanes just slapped the New Jersey Devils right out of the play offs in a stunning fashion, 4-3 in game 7 in Jeresy’s own Prudential Center.

Not only did the Hurricanes pull off a stunner in game 4 putting the game winner in the net with only 0.2 seconds left to play, but the Devils held a 3-2 lead with 1:20 to play in the game when Brodeur’s armor came undone and the Canes put two past him within 0:48 of each other to stun the Devils with Eric Staal picking up the game winner with 31.7 seconds left.

The Canes have to deal with the Boston Bruins in the next round, but for now, Canes fans can rejoice in playing some of the best playoff hockey.

GO CANES!!!!!!!!!

Once basketball season ends in Kentucky, life turns towards Kentucky’s other sporting passion, Horse Racing. Kentucky is known as the horse capital of the world, known for its picturesque plank fenced horse farms sprawling over rolling hills of Kentucky Blue Grass.

In Kentucky, horses are raced, trotted, shown, jumped and danced. Horses of all breads and pedigree can be found on farms all across the state. There are however two major concentrations of Equine activity: Lexington and Louisville.

Lexington’s sphere of influence includes Keenland, a popular thoroughbred racing track and home to the annual Yearling Sales, where the best 1 year olds are auctioned off from the breeding farms to the owners who will eventually race them. The Kentucky Horse Park is located just north of Lexington and while a state park, it is home to various major equestrian events and has hosted the US Olympic Horse Trials and will be hosting the FEI World Games in 2010. Lexington is surrounded by horse farms. The major equine research facilities and horse database companies are located there as well.

But this time of year, the attention turns to Louisville when the greatest of horse races is run on the 1st Saturday in May, the Kentucky Derby. Ran at historic Churchill Downs in the center of Louisville, the Derby is led up to by a two week festival for the race.

My wife and I have traveled to Louisville to participate in these events and today, we chased hot air balloons during the “Great Balloon Race”. You can read about the chase at http://www.robmiracle.com. The chase carried us to an area with several horse stables north east of Louisville.

One of our missions this week is to photograph horses when and where we can and well, I had a camera and there were horses. With the Balloon race over, and before having to travel two hours south to visit with my family, it was horse photo time. Strapping on my telephoto lens to shoot horses at a distance, I snapped a few shots of a group of horses in one field. I then moved to a small black plank fenced field that contained a couple of horses, one white, one chestnut.

Immediately, the white horse took attention to me and decided I was interesting, perhaps it was my bright red Carolina Hurricanes shirt (I write this from a sports bar watching the Canes play the Devils) or perhaps it was my movement, or the horse was naturally curious or a camera hog.

He got within petting distance and turned his left neck toward me, obviously wanting petted. This horse has spent a lot of time around people. I obliged, petting his neck for a few seconds and as I pulled my hand away, he turned his head toward me and nuzzled me square in the face with his big and very wet nose.

I had been slimed . . . by a horse.

I was stunned for a moment as this came completely out of the blue.

The only thing I could think of was “Lucy” from Peanuts and the dog kisses Snoopy laid on her over the years: “Oh horse kiss. Gross. Bring the disinfectant.” Sherry, my wife was laughing hysterically at the scene and retold the story dozens of times to family and total strangers as the day progressed.

The white horse and his stable mate stayed near by. I regained my composure, switched over to a wide angle lens and shot the horses close up.

We wanted to see some horses and this was definitely “seeing” some horses.

As some of you may know I’m traveling to Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby Festival. You can read all about it at http://www.robmiracle.com.

Normally, my wife and I prefer to take I-40 from Raleigh to Knoxville and then catch I-75 north. When visiting my side of the family first, this is the best route. However for time and distance efficiency its better to depart I-40 at Winston-Salem, take I-77 north until it turns into I-64 which will zip us straight to the Hurstbourne Road Exit in Louisville. It trims a good hour off the trip which is about 60 miles or so which at $2 a gallon saves us $17 which is several trips to White Castles for “Sliders”.

North Carolina, if you can forgive their sports arrogance is actually a nice place. Yea, its got a few ugly spots, but for the most part you see more beauty than ugly when traveling about. In our preferred way to go, we have 5 of the 11 hours in North Carolina. Kentucky is also a beautiful place. That leaves about 2 and a half hours of Tennessee. The stretch from the Pigeon Forge area west to Knoxville and north to Jerico is a balanced mix of good, okay and ugly.

Well in this economy $17 is important and we want to make sure we get to Louisville for a festival event today, so we are taking the short route which means visiting the Virginia’s.

Now you wouldn’t think it, but there is a world of difference between the two. Virginia is reasonably pretty in the spring. Most of the trees are turning green. The Red Buds and Dogwoods are blooming.

But then comes West “By God” Virginia. This has to be the ugliest place on the planet. Like any state it’s going to have some bright spots. But a measure of a states beauty is its balance of beauty vs. ugly and West Virginia is . . . well . . . ugly.

The southern stretch of I-77 south of Beckley isn’t too bad but as you head into Charleston and pass through Huntington I just want to close my eyes and dream of a happier place.

Dark brown trees, carved and weathered rock, strip mines, rusted roofed houses all just adds up to ick. My wife exclaimed as he drove “Look the river is pretty”. A glimmer of hope among the sour.

John Denver sang about West Virginia in his song “Country Roads” where he talked about it being almost Heaven. But he wasn’t writing about the train yards in Charleston.

And this trip isn’t all about the lack of eye candy either. Its a hard trip. Mountain driving is difficult. Long curved hills filled with tractor-trailers and police on every down hill slope making sure you don’t make up any time stresses the driver. Its challenging.

Of course there are mountains and curves going through North Carolina to Tennessee, and though the curves are sharper, they are shorter and your in and out of them after a few minutes instead of the long duration of fighting a 6,000 pound vehicle.

We will be through it soon enough.

Side note: We are stopping in Marmet for lunch. On either side of a busy street, two women, dressed in sundresses that look like towels were trying to walk into the road handing papers out. My wife said “Idiots!”. I responded “Where are you?” She said “That answered everything”.

I Heart West Virginia! Not!

Twitter. Tweets. Tweeple twittering. Its all over the place like the yellow pollen covering every inch of your car and house. You can’t escape from it. Twitter (wikipedia) hit the mainstream and is no longer just some silly geek toy with a silly name.

In the past couple of months, Twitter has gone from geek-stream to main-stream in a big way. It literally has exploded into its own mass-media.

Get used to it folks. Twitter is here. And you need to join in!

WTF are you talking about? What is this “Twitter” you speak of?

Have you been under a rock? Okay, perhaps you have so here is a little background. Back in the day when you had to walk to school in the snow uphill in both directions, if you wanted to be heard on the Internet you had to play on mailing-lists or forums. You used sites that other people owned and managed.

Then the blogs came.

You now had the ability to have your own site and deliver your own content rather easily and others were permitted to comment on your content telling you how much they love your work or how stupid you really are. The later part, called “Trolling” has been around since there was anonymous Internet communication.

But blogs were still a bit of to setup and maintain and they didn’t handle the mobile world very well. So we needed something new. So in 2006 the world was gifted the wonder’s of Twitter. But it was obscure and people used it to connect friends together and let them share what they were doing using messages that worked with cell phone text messages, which means they are limited to 140 characters (plus overhead to make it into a 160 character SMS message).

Now you could blog, albeit short posts, in a very simple to setup and manage service. So now anyone can share their thoughts and read everyone elses going ons.

Well 140 characters doesn’t let you say much and its early utility was for friends to keep up with what they were doing:

Bill: I’m at the Coffee Shop, come on down!
John: I’ll be there around 10am!
Jill: I wish I could make it

Well it served a niche, but it was of limited utility. But people started using it to share real information and eventually breaking news:

jkrums: There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. http://twitpic.com/135xa

And its utility to report breaking news came to fruition. So now every one is using it to get news, tell news, share information and with the addition of good search features, its now a strong research tool.

Thats a Nice History, but why do I want to be involved?

Frankly, if you’re not into using the Internet for socializing, you probably won’t get the maximum benfit from it, but if you have found MySpace or FaceBook, then Twitter is an obvious expansion of your resources.

Twitter is very similar to Facebook Status updates and in fact many people use utilities to post their twitter posts to FaceBook. But the utility of Twitter over FaceBook is that FaceBook updates are limited to your friends. Twitter status updates go into the public where anyone can see and search for them.

FaceBook is driven about finding people you know personally, friends, workmates, your high school crush, etc. Twitter of course lets you network with friends and such, but Twitter makes it eash to network with strangers who share common interests.

I’m not into social networking

Well don’t run away yet! Twitter can be useful in other ways. You don’t even have to participate either. Its more fun if you do, but twitter as become a great resource for finding things. You can go to http://search.twitter.com and put in something you’re looking for like say “coupon“. You will get a list everyone who has twittered about coupons lately. Many will have links to coupon sites or great deals. Just as we would use Google to find things, Twitter becomes another resource.

Now if your into a hobby like couponing, you can then use this search to find people who are posting things you like and then you “follow” those people. You don’t have to contribute (its better if you do). You can just be a consumer.

Twitter is a great resource for news too. Your local newspaper or TV stations likely has an account that they publish breaking news to, so you can follow your newspaper and keep up with that’s going on. Maybe you are not interested in news so much, but you want to keep up with your favorite sports team? You can find people who post news stories and commentary about your team or the enemy team!

Some sites even create specific twitter accounts for special events, such as Myrtle Beach’s Bike Rallies

And a natural extention from this is the Celeberty traffic. What to know what’s going on with Coldplay? Brittany Spears? You can follow them and read about their day to day musings, concert information, etc. Even Oprah is now twittering.

So there is plenty of content being produced on Twitter waiting to be consumed.

Still twitter wouldn’t be as powerful as it is with out its members creating content.

Okay, I need to check this out. Where do I start?

Thats easy. Go to Twitter’s Web site and click on the green “Get Started – Join!” button. You will need to enter just a little bit of information: Your real name, a “Twitter” username, a password and an e-mail address and you’re all set.

Next, you can explore around Twitter’s “Find People” option to find friends who might already be on twitter, find the popular celeberty and information accounts, etc. Then to find people who post things your interested in, go to http://search.twitter.com and find people saying things your interested in and follow them.

You follow people by going to their twitter page, by clicking on their photo associate with each tweet, then read about them in their profile, and click on the “Follow” button to add them to the list of people who you are interested in.

Then you visit Twitter’s Web site, login (or stay logged in) to visit your profile page. There you will see a list of messages your followers have produced and you can read to your heart’s content.

Getting Involved

At 140 characters, some messages will be a little terse and maybe your have a question or want to get more details. Maybe someone says something you know to be wrong or that you have better information on. Its very easy for you to contribute. You can reply to someone easily. When you move your mouse over a tweet you will see a small curved arrow. Click on that and your status bar the top will have the person’s name with an @ sign in front of it. This is called a “Reply”. Type what you want to say to them and click the “Reply” button.

Twitter replies are public. They are searchable and anyone can see them. Think of it as standing around the water cooler at work and replying to something somemone said.

Twitter allows you to send private messages directly to someone. You do that by typing the letter “d” and their name at the beginning of the status, then your reply, and click reply:

d MiracleMan Thanks for this blog post, its really helpful

would send that message to me and me alone. My twitter is also setup so that direct messages also come to my Cell Phone as text messages.

Eventually, you may want to say something of your own and you use the status block to post your own message.

The power of Re-tweets

Lets say you follow me and I return follow you. You will have a group of followers and I will have a group of followers, but they are likely to be very different and not have a lot of overlap. Lets say for instance that I have 200 followers and you have 100 followers. You post something I think is of value to my followers, I can “Re-Tweet” it and now my 200 followers will see your message as well, so its now going to be seen by 300 people. Then if one of my followers passes it on to their 500 followers, in two actions, you’ve communicated your thoughts to 800 people.

To Re-Tweet, you type RT in the status bar and cut and paste the message into the status form and click reply.

RT @MiracleMan Thanks for this blog post, its really helpful

The RT doesn’t do anything magical, its just a short “code” for people to recognize it. You always want to give the original poster credit for their tweet.

Stepping it up

When you first create your twitter account, it is very basic. You provide a name and nickname that’s publicly visible. They provide you with a colorful twitter blue bird themed background and you have an “Avatar” or small icon/picture that you can use to represent yourself. At a minimum you should upload your avatar photo. The default brown block with light blue circles is a signal to people who would follow you that your a “n00b” (newbie or new user) and can be a turn off. It doesn’t have to be a photo of you, though many people do use pics of themselves.

Secondly, you can visit your “Settings” and fill out the rest of your profile. There is a place to put in a web site address. This could be your FaceBook page, your personal blog or any other online presence that you have. If you don’t have one, you can leave it blank. There is also a “One line Bio” where you have 160 characters to let the world know who you are. It could be something as simple as “Coupon Queen” if your into couponing. Or you could put “Father of 2, Hockey Addict” or whatever describes you to those who would want to follow you.

Enjoy!

Twitter is a fun, educational and informational environment that you can take advantage of regardless of technical ability or experience in social networking. Go try it and ave fun!

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/MiracleMan.

Geek’s are notorious for “hacking”. In their defense the terms “Hacker”, “Hacked”, etc. have gotten a bad rap because its been associated with people who do bad things using “Hacks”. Its like the old saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The truth is, hacking isn’t bad, its bad people who use them that give it the negative connotation that the mainstream stream media uses.

Lets look at what the term “Hack” and its related terms mean.

A “Hack” is simply using something in a way that it wasn’t intended,  to achieve a desirable outcome. Outside of computing, the most famous “Hacker” that you probably know is the TV Character MacGyver. He was notorious for taking a paper-clip and a belt and a french-fry to save the day.

In computing, telephony, and other electronic arts, there are plenty of opportunities to use programs and code libraries in ways they were not intended, to create something new.  A lot of times you hack out of necessity because you have to solve a problem and the tools don’t do what you need.

Now most geeks’s electronic toolkit is packed with all the right tools. Much like when you go to the autoshop, you can expect the mechanic to have all the right tools. However when it comes to geeks and the non-electronic world, generally you won’t find well stocked tool kits and frequently they have to make do with what they have. Its a term we like to call:

Field Engineering

Traditionally field engineers are the MacGyvers of the real world. They carry the parts most likely to be the problem but will resort to non-standard techniques to solve a problem. I remember clearly my freshman year in college and our heater wasn’t working. The gentleman from the Physical Plant Division came in, whacked it with a hammer and it started working. Over the past couple of weeks, my son’s car’s starter is starting to go. A whack with a hammer restarts his car. So our first infinitely useful tool is:

A Hammer

Hammer’s come in many varieties, but the most common is a claw hammer. It has a flat “hitting” head on one side, and a curved set of forked teeth on the other. You can hit things. You can hook and pull things. You can dig with it. It can even be used to cut items and poke holes. It can strip wires and of course be used for self defense.

There are a lot of claw hammers. They come in a variety of weights and handle materials. A medium weight hammer is the most flexible as you can balance the need of mass and velocity for optimum force. As for the handle material you will find fiberglass, wood and steel. There are probably high tech composite handles available today as well. Fiberglass seems to be the best handle choice as wood will break and the steel handles are hollow and subject to bending.

But regardless of what hammer you get, you need to get one that is well balanced. Take it and sit it on a flat surface upside down. The hammer should stand up with the handle near vertical (say 90-75 degree’s from the surface). It shouldn’t lean to either side, or rock too far from vertical. A well balanced hammer is your friend.

Drop Cords

A good, heavy duty “drop cord” is also vital to getting things done. These are the industrial weight electrical “extension cords”. They come in a variety of colors and lengths and are rated either in “gauge” or “amperage”. Gauge is how thick the wires are.  The smaller the number, the bigger the wire.  Most drop cords are in a 12-16 gauge range. However, the amperage rating is probably more important as it tells you how much electricity can pass through. A medium to heavy duty drop cord (or cords) can be real life savers. You want a long one (50′ or more) and perhaps a shorter 25′ footer.

How can they be used? Well mostly they are used to deliver electricity to some place you don’t have it and that itself can be useful. But lets not stop there. It can be used to tie things up. You need to hold a couple of pieces of fence together? Bind it up with the drop cord, affix your repairs and you’re done. You can tow with it. Someone falls overboard on a boat? Throw them a life line. At the end of the day, its about power: to your tools; to your computers; anything that needs juice a long drop cord saves the day.

Wire

Drop Cords above are a class of wire, but due to their thickness, it limits their utility overall, but a nice spool of wire can do wonders. My honey-do list today has me raising a lamp suspended by a decorative chain. I’ll go grab a short run of wire, make a loop and tie it off, creating a way to tie two chain links together. Wire can come in many sources that you don’t commonly think about like bread ties.

Your wire should be sufficiently large enough gauge to be strong enough to not break under reasonable stress and it needs to be small enough to fit into small holes. It shouldn’t be so thick that you can’t reasonably bend it into shape. It can be used for binding, poking and connecting things.

Gaffer’s Tape

Most people know the utility of duct tape. There is even a book that has nothing but projects to do with duct tape. It is probably the penultimate infinitely useful tool. Have a table with a short leg? Fold up several layers of tape and put it under the leg. But a better all purpose tape that few people don’t know much about is Gaffer’s Tape. Gaffers and Duct Tape share many common properties and almost all duct tape projects can be done with Gaffers. So why Gaffers?

Duct tape’s non-sticky side is glossy. Gaffer’s is more of a cloth which can give it a different resistance to movement. Duct is kind of sticky on its non sticky side. And sometimes having a less tackiness is useful. Gaffers tape also tends to leave less glue residue after use, yet its almost as sticky. With its cloth base, it can tear into easier to manage strips that have smoother edges. Duct tape is more water resistant. Your tool box can’t go wrong with either or both.

Flat bladed Screw Driver

Referred to as a flat-tip or slotted screw driver is a great tool that when combined with a hammer and pliers creates the base trifecta of minimal tools. A screwdriver is useful for turning screws, its purpose, but its useful for poking, creating holes. It can act as a lever. You can use it for gardening in place of a trowel for planing plants. In a pinch it can be used for cutting as well. It can be a wedge or a chisel. Its a beautiful must have tool.

What about pointy screw drivers (they are called “Phillips” BTW!)? Most screws that need a Phillips head screw driver can be turned by a flat tip as well. The big problem with a screw driver is you need a variety of sizes to cover the range of possible screws. But looking for a medium length, medium head can cover most uses.

Pliers

There are a billion variety of pliers. This tool is highly customized for a specific usage. There are two more general use pliers that will work in many circumstances. Both are called “Channel Lock” pliers. The one in the photo to the left has the grip perpendicular to the handles and the other has it parallel to the handles (more like scissors).

Pliers can be used for gripping, pulling and twisting things. Don’t have your screwdriver handy? Use your pliers to turn the screw. Need to beat on something and don’t have your hammer? Pliers can make a great make-shift hammer. Many pliers will also include wire cutters and stripers built in.

Hockey Sticks

This is my personal favorite. Being around 5′ long with a curved blade on the end has many utility uses around the house and elsewhere. We had a large snow fall which had turned into an ice pack on the roof. I used the hockey stick, opened the windows in the bonus room and used it to push the ice off the roof. I’ve used a hockey stick to clean the gutters. With a small notch cut in the tip of the blade, its great for hanging Christmas lights on the trees. Any time you need to reach something, like the hanger that fell behind the dryer.

Need to kill a spider on the ceiling? Use some wire and a paper towel, wrap it around the butt-end of the stick. Poke the bug, getting the goo on the paper towel, then remove your towel and dead bug and away you go. It can be used as a rake, a hoe, or an extension to your hammer or screw driver.

Summary

You can always find utility in the strangest of locations. But when you need to so something and you don’t have the tool, perhaps you can find something around the house that will get your job done for you. Of course you could always go to the tool store and pick up your specialty tool.  You can never have enough tools.

What are some of your tools?

Leave a comment below and let us know about a tool you use in a way not intended?

Thank you for your patience with all the Sports-Geek posts of late, but its a subject near and dear to my heart. To make up for it, lets go really geek and deal with computer programming.

I am a programmer. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at.

Now I’m old school and its really hard for old programmers to learn new tricks. As you age in this field, it becomes harder and harder to adapt to new concepts. I first observed this phenomena early in my career as I watched my boss, who grew up in the punch card / batch processing world have trouble adapting to a world of PCs and interactive systems. He was eventually promoted out of the way. I now see the same thing happening to me. Though I pursued moving from a Support Developer to a Product Trainer, I’m now in a similar position where I’m letting the young’en’s do the programming, letting the new technology pass me by.

I can clearly identify where my downfall began. Object Oriented Programming.

I learned programming in the days of procedural programming. That is we designed our programs using sub-routines and functions. These blocks of code performed specific functions. Data was kept separate for most parts and in things called structures. Life was easy.

A new model developed where code and data kind of merged into things called “objects”. So instead of having a string data type and having functions to get the length, find a chunk (substring), etc. as separate parts, you now have a string object and not only does it have the data for the string, it has the different methods of manipulating it. The object contains the length method or substring method. It was a different way of thinking.

Now I fully understand the idea behind object oriented programming. And I can work comfortably with objects in JavaScript, Perl, C++, though I feel I would be hard pressed to build a major project in an object oriented environment.

One of the big limitations for me is the terminology. There are so many new terms and this old brain doesn’t want to learn them. Which leads me to where I am today.

This week I had a chance to participate in an iPhone application discussion. I’ve had a Mac for almost two years, and beyond some web code, I’ve not written a single Apple app. Not a drop of Applescript. I had Xcode, the Apple Development environment loaded all most the entire time. But real life has kept me from getting down to learning this new environment.

So with this opportunity to mess with an iPhone app, I decided this was a good time to get in and wrap my hands around this and try to upgrade my skills a bit. This is where I hit a major brick wall:

Objective C

Now I can write in the programming language ‘C’ in my sleep, even though I’ve not had a serious project in it in years. ‘C’ is an old language that came out of Bell Labs in the late ’60′s as part of their Unix environment. It became the most dominate language throughout the mid ’80-s through early the 2000′s. Its cryptic. Its powerful. It produces great machine code.

With ‘C’ being so popular, many of the modern languages are derived from it. ‘C’ had a major short coming. Its a procedural language. It knows squat about objects. The Object oriented programming crowd had some languages to use, like Smalltalk.

With ‘C’ being so popular, there were several attempts to objectify it. This produced ‘C++’ which is ‘C’ with objects. Java, is a very ‘C’ like language but it was constructed with Object oriented programming in mind. As web browsers needed a scripting language, we got JavaScript, not that related to Java, but its more of a scriptable ‘C’ with objects. We got PHP for webside scripting which had objects rammed into it later in its life. Flash apps use a ‘C’ / JavaScript like language, ActionScript as its scripting language and is fully object oriented today.

Around the same time that C++ was being worked on, another group was creating Objective C which involved adding some key features from SmallTalk into C. Steve Jobs after he left Apple to Form NeXT, licensed Objective C as the native language for NeXT. Apple ended up acquiring NeXT which lead to the modern OS X operating system. Objective C is tightly embedded to anything Apple today.

I know ‘C’. I don’t know Smalltalk. Objective C is ‘C’ for most stuff, Smalltalk for the objects. So when I went to learn how to write an iPhone App, I was immediately thrown for a loop. What was this alien syntax? I thought my head was going to explode.

Now this project was part of a monthly development practice where everyone takes an idea and tries to produce something that day. It gives developers a chance to work on things that normally wouldn’t get a chance to work on; a chance to make proof-of-concept; etc.

As a product trainer, I would not normally participate in this practice, but we wanted to see if there was anything that could benefit us in the training department. So I took this opportunity to participate. I went and got the iPhone SDK and installed it and dove in.

The first thing any good programmer is going to do is build the traditional “Hello World” program. After about an hour of struggling with a tutorial to build “Hello World” and dealing with this strange syntax I was running around screaming:

“I long for the days of
10 PRINT “Hello World”
20 END”

No, this huge project was loading in all kinds of framework and was creating models, views, and controllers and passing messages. While the code I had to create wasn’t that much, it was quite a bit to see the words “Hello World” show up on the iPhone simulator.

I didn’t quite understand everything. There was a lot of new terminology: Bundles and Delegates to name a couple. Now I was feeling pretty good about things because I managed to get one of our website’s mobile sites loaded into a compiled iPhone app after an hour of modifying “Hello World” without a lot help. Then it tanked. My next task was to determine my current location from the GPS and find the nearest business unit to the phone and show it.

By the time I left, I was still having it crash trying to get it to connect to my webserver to request the location information. Most of the day was spent trying simply construct the URL by converting the Latitude and Longitude to a string. Hours. Oh, yea, the String object can’t be changed, you have to use a Mutable String if you want to change it. Why can’t I simply call sprintf() and be done. The simple task of appending two strings together is a pain in the rear.

Now to put this in perspective, I developed a simple web service that when passed your current location, it returns you the business name and website URL, written in PHP in about 30 minutes. For this simple service I didn’t need to make it database driven, just an array of values, but it was working, tested and debugged in a very short time.

Admittedly my biggest hurdle was the Smalltalk syntax. I’d eventually get delegates and views and such figured out. But the square bracket syntax and variable passing was really confusing to read.

Well today, I spent a few minutes, going back to square one were I was reading the Objective C beginner’s guide when I came across a passage.

Objective C supports “dotted” notation.

Dotted notation is probably the most common way, ‘C’ like languages deal with objects. Wanna work in Java? C++? JavaScript? They all use the standard “dotted” notation. That is:

object.instancevariable = value;

or

value = object.method(parameter);

instead of:

[object instancevariable:value]

or

value = [object instancevariable]

So what the frak are people doing using this non ‘C’ syntax in a ‘C’ language.

Alas, if I’m going to write Apple code, I’m going to have to conform since all examples are in square bracket syntax.

I have to admit after spending some time with the beginner’s guide today, the square bracket syntax isn’t that hard and I think if I spend some time with it, it will be a quite capable language. But that shouldn’t surprise any one who’s used a Mac with OS X.

Maybe this old dog can learn something new!