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HuffPost has 250 Million Comments

Screen cap of my appearance on HuffPost Live to announce we got over 250,000,000 comments.

More info here at my blog post on the announcement at HuffPost.com

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2013 05 19 pav Huffington Post Comments (0) Permalink

Everyone should learn to code

I was on a HuffPost Live segment and got a chance to discuss why learning to code is something everyone should do!

Movement Grows To Cultivate Computer Programming

That’s me on HuffPost Live!

And I have two HuffPost blog posts talking about coding and drawing and why you should learn to do both.

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2013 03 08 pav Programming Comments (0) Permalink

Opps! Errors in Google’s Chrome Extension Tutorials

I don’t know why, but I got interested in writing a Chrome Extension. Yeah, I know, like 3 years too late. I figured it would just take an hour and I might learn something about well designed plug and play component architecture. I quickly found the Getting Started tutorial. The screen shots were a bit out of date but the instructions were clear and simple. After following the tutorial the example extension (kitten photos from Flickr) failed to display images and failed to post any errors to the debug console.

So I went the Debugging Tutorial but I could not get my extension to load in the debugger.

Fooling around I could make text to and images display in the example extension’s popup window but the example code, provided by Google, failed to work. Did the Flickr query API change? Was a bug introduced in a Chrome update? Is my computer broken? A glitch in the matrix?

I love that feeling you get when you’re debugging utterly simple code and completely lost: “It should work and when I figure it out I will feel like an idiot!” (because generally it’s a missing a “}” or some other typo).

But this time it wasn’t me! It was Google’s tech writers.

First, if you want to debug a Chrome extension do not follow the instructions: Right-click the Hello World icon and choose the Inspect popup menu item.

Instead do this: Left-click the Hello World icon so the popup appears and then right-click the popup window! (Unless you are left-handed like me and you have to right-click where the world says “left-click.”)

Clicking with the “other mouse button” (the handed-neural way to say “right-click”) on the extension’s window brings up a context menu that let’s you inspect the extension and load its code and resources into a Chrome debugging window.

Second, if you want to see the kittens, change this line in popup.js:

    req.open("GET", this.kittensOnFlickr_, true);
to the much more effective:
    req.open("GET", this.searchOnFlickr_, true);
The function kittensOnFlickr_ is never defined. The function searchOnFlickr_ is defined instead. The kitten look excellent when they finally appear!
Sometimes when looking through a tutorial I find errors like this and wonder two things: Am I the only one who actually reads and runs programming tutorials? Is this an intelligence test?
Given that Chrome extensions are no longer a hot technology it probably doesn’t matter :(
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2013 02 08 pav Programming Comments (1) Permalink

Bloomberg West TV Interview

Today I was interviewed by Nicole Lapin on Bloomberg West. All-in-all a very pleasant experience. The last question was a bit of curve ball: The topic was “Interactive Election: The Psychology of the Comment” and thus I didn’t expect a Spotify vs. Apple question. Luckily, I am always prepared!

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2012 10 26 pav Huffington Post Comments (0) Permalink

My Huffington Post Blog Posts

I’ve been writing a weekly blog post for the Tech section of the Huffington Post. Here are links to what I have written so far:

I’ve learned a lot from writing these blog posts and I’ll continue to do until our editors lock me out of the CMS. Reading the commentors as they alternately boo and cheer, correct my grammar and spelling, and point out technical mistakes is awesome!

Figuring out what to write about is always a panic. I don’t have time prepare and want to tie each post to something topical. The other hard thing is keeping each post short. Nobody, not even me wants to read more than 1500 words of John Pavley :)

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2012 07 29 pav Blogging Comments (0) Permalink

HyperCard: What Made it Leet

I posted a blog entry on HyperCard yesterday on The Huffington Post: HyperCard: The Original Bridge Over the Digital Divide. From the comments and tweets that I got it was pretty clear that us older hackers have fond memories of HyperCard. But there’s the rub–Us older hacker. Kids today, i.e., people in their twenties, missed out on the whole HyperCard phenomenon.

The children of HyperCard are ubiquitous! Every web browser, every presentation app, and even Apple’s iBook Author tool and Adobe’s AIR environment are Jar Jar Binks to HyperCard’s Qui-Gon Jinn.

But like Jar Jar himself, HyperCard’s children are flawed. All these apps and tools that link, animate, and script are over-specialized or over-complicated.  iBook Author is a great example. It’s a quick and easy (and free) way to create an app that runs on iPhone and iPad but only if you want that app to look and feel like a high school text book. Not sexy!

On the other end of the spectrum is RunRev’s LiveCode. It’s the most HyperCard-like of HyperCard’s successors, allows you to import HyperCard stacks (originally), uses many of the same stack and card metaphors, and provides a programming language very similar to HyperTalk. Unfortunately LiveCode has become a tool for creating serious desktop and mobile apps. It’s become as complex as Adobe Flash/Flex/AIR and almost as expensive. I have to give points to RunRev for keeping the dream alive and they deserve to generate a profit but it’s not about 10-year-old kids and school teachers making interactive lessons anymore.

Here’s my list of what made HyperCard great. I hope someone picks it up and runs with it.

  • You could do a lot but you couldn’t do everything with HyperCard. Limitations are a great way conserve complexity and keep doors open to the general public.
  • HyperCard was a general “software construction kit”. You could create a presentation but it wasn’t optimized for presentations or anything else. In its heyday HyperCard was used for everything from address books to to calculators to role playing games but it always felt a little amateur and frivolous.
  • HyperCard was free, preinstalled, and came with a great set of sample stacks. Some people just used the stacks as they came out of the box. Others noodled around with a bit of customization here and there. A few brave souls created new stacks from scratch. But it didn’t cost a dime (originally) and was easy to find.
  • HyperCard’s authoring tools were bundled with it’s runtime environment. Any stack (originally) could be opened and every script inspected. If a stack did something cool you could easily cut-and-paste that neat trick into your own stack.
  • HyperCard’s scripting language, HyperTalk, was very very English-like. More English like than AppleScript and 10,000 times easier for the amateurs and kids to master than JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or Processing. I’m sorry but “for (var i = 0; i < x; i++)” is just not as readible as “repeat with x equal to the number of words in line 1″ to normal literate humans. (Python comes close, I give it props for trying.)
  • HyperCard stacks looked like HyperCard stacks. You could easily spot a stack in a crowd of icons and when it was running HyperCard stacks had their own visual language (originally). This visual identify made HyperCard authors feel like members of a special club and didn’t require them to be User Experience experts.

Limited, Free, Simple, Open, Accessible, Generalized, Frivolous, Amateur; The characteristics of greatness that also define what is great about the World Wide Web (originally).

Note: The careful reader might wonder why I’m clarifying my statements with the phase “(originally)”. Towards the end of its life HyperCard added complexity and locking and became something you had to buy. The parallels with the closed gardens and paywalls of today’s Inter-webs  are a bit uncanny.

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2012 06 03 pav Nerd Fun
Product Design
Programming Comments (1) Permalink

The Little Computer that Taught Me

The TI 99/4a from Texas Instruments still looks pretty awesome after 32 years!

The personal computer I really wanted to work with back then was the Apple II but as a university student of modest means the big Apple was too much for my bank account to handle. I considered the Commodore VIC-20 and Atari 800, both more popular but they were inferior engines of calculation. The TI 99/4a contained a true 16-bit CPU that might be considered one of the first RISC chips available to home users. But I didn’t know anything about CISC vs RISC or 8 vs 16 bits. I only knew that I could afford it, that it ran BASIC relatively fast, and I could save my programs to cassette tape. I no longer have a TI 99/4a but I still have the matching cassette recorder, which also doubled as an ordinary audio cassette player.

Back then there was a truly great hobbyist computer magazine called COMPUTE! Every month it would contain the source for several BASIC and machine code programs for each of the home computers of the day. I would dutifully type in each program for the TI 99/4a and then modify it beyond recognition. After a few months I started creating my own, original works, that served no other purpose but to amuse me. My TI99/4a started to attract other nerds (I don’t think we had the word hacker back them) and thus began a journey that took me from painting and drawing pictures with brushes and pens to developing real software on serious computer systems.

The simplicity and limitations of the TI 99/4a gave me an advantage that today’s young hackers lack: Focus. There was no question about where to begin and what to begin with. Most importantly I had to type in every line of code myself: No cut and paste (it had not been invented yet) and no code editors with auto complete. All my code was DRY because wet code was too time consuming to type in.

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2012 04 14 pav Nerd Fun Comments (0) Permalink

How Engineers Will Win

Before reading this, you should read Why Engineers Never Win and Why Engineers Should Win.

Ok, now we’re all caught up.

I’m optimistic. Yes, I know the world is hurting. I see how the people trying to do good often make things worse. I can’t claim to be insightful when I observe how we celebrate buffoonery and berate competency. (At least the Romans got bread with their circuses.)

I’m optimistic because engineers have become poets and code has become poetry.

Every age, every culture, every society is measured by the breath and depth of it’s poetry and the brilliance of it’s poets. This poetry can be visual or musical or sculptural or theatrical or even wordy. Sometimes it’s hard to identify the poetry, hidden behind fashion and fads but it’s there if you look long and hard and unblinking.

A month ago I had an opportunity to visit the Louvre for the first time, in person. I only had a couple of hours so I made beeline for the Ancient Greek sculptures. My mature interest in making art, oops, I mean visual poetry, was born from my experience of the Kourus and Kore gradually coming to life from stiff abstractions in the 7th century BCE to expressive examples of humanity in the 5th century BCE. Walking past these sculptures in the Louvre was like watching a culture awaken from myth to science.

And that same transformation is taking place today: The boxy utilitarian desktop computers of the last decade have become light and glassy iPhones and iPads; The awkward and inflexible HTML websites of yesterday have become elegant and animated HTML5 web apps; CDs and DVDs with hard data limits have become unlimited streams.

We are waking up. Engineers are not arguing for a better world, they are not waiting for the next election or for military action or for protesters to start marching; Engineers are writing new poems that express our better natures in code and chips.

Admittedly, things are a little messy right now. Tech isn’t always used for good. But a program or a device that gives an individual the research and communication power of a corporation or government is inherently good.

Already we have tech poetry that is starting to enable individuals to navigate and bypass complex legal and political boundaries. This is true equality: When you can talk to anyone, anywhere, without permission from anyone else. People are talking to people without adult supervision on Reddit, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Ventrillo, and more. And it’s not the end of the world–rather it’s the start of the world, a new kind of unfettered speech.

Poets know that language both enables communication and limits expression. That why they use novel formulations and metaphors: A great poet breaks free of the constraints imposed by his native tongue.

We can’t solve the problems hurting the world with the tools and languages that created these problems in the first place. But engineers will solve them with ideas that can only be etched in silicon and written in RAM.

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2012 03 21 pav Argument
Nerd Fun Comments (0) Permalink

ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0

My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my game. ARC uses annotations and some new key words to manage memory on your behalf. It works very well if you’re doing simple client-side game development and don’t have to worry about backward compatibility with iOS 4.

Here is an example of how ARC changes your life for the better…

In the old days you would declare out your ivars, declare your properties, then synthesize and map them together, and release them in a dealloc method. This little design pattern required 4 repetitive lines of code for every ivar (instance variable) and engendered flamewars about  coding style and where underscore should go (if you thought it was necessary to distinguish an ivar name from a property name).

Pre-ARC Entity.h

#import "cocos2d.h"
@interface Entity : CCSprite {
BOOL isActive_;
NSString * name_;
}
@property (nonatomic) BOOL isActive;
@property (nonatomic, copy) NSString * name;
@end

Pre-ARC Entity.m

#import "Entity.h"
@implementation Entity
@synthesize isActive = isActive_;
@synthesize name = name_;
- (id) init {
  self = [super init];
  if (self) {
    isActive_ = YES;
    name_ = @"Fang";
  }
  return self;
}
- (void) dealloc {
  [name_ release];
  name_ = nil;
  [super dealloc];
}

In this new modern era of automated reference counting I just declare properties, I don’t worry about accessing the ivars directly, and I don’t write my own dealloc. It’s a lot less code in a complex game where characters and objects have dozens of properties.

Post-ARC Entity.h

#import "cocos2d.h"
@interface Entity : CCSprite
@property (nonatomic) BOOL isActive;
@property (nonatomic, strong) NSString * name;
@end

Post-ARC Entity.m

#import "Entity.h"
@implementation Entity
@synthesize isActive;
@synthesize name;
- (id) init {
  self = [super init];
  if (self) {
    isActive = YES;
    name = @"Fang";
  }
  return self;
}

To get Cocos2d-iPhone to work with ARC was really easy: I just replace the NSAutoreleasePool object in main.m with the new ARC friendly @autoreleasepool annotation. (I might not have had to do this but it’s supposedly more efficient.)

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
//    NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
//    int retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, @"AppDelegate");
//    [pool release];
//    return retVal;
  int retVal;
  @autoreleasepool {
    retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, @"AppDelegate");
  }
  return retVal;
}

The downside, as I stated above, is that your app will only run on iPhones, iPads, and iPods running iOS 5 and you need to use Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0. But I think that’s a fair tradeoff. Backward compatibility is a killer of the artistic soul and should be avoided where possible. To Err is human, but to upgrade is divine :)

Check out Ray Wenderlich’s excellent ARC tutorial for all the gritty details!

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2012 01 04 pav Cocos2d-iPhone
Programming Comments (0) Permalink

Personal Music Discoveries for 2011 (Thanks Spotify!)

One of the best parts about working at Spotify is being paid to listen to music. After all some has to do the quality assurance! Actually, our QA guys and gals do a great job… but I can’t help myself :)

This year I’ve spent a lot of time with my old favorites, recapitulating my youth and young adulthood into playlists. You can find all my playlists here: JPavley’s Spotify profile.

But the known is not the topic of this blog post: Today, one of the final days of 2011, I want to tell you about unknown music.

Spotify has over 15 million tracks available in the US and I doubt that I’ve listened to more than 3000 different songs in my entire lifetime. It’s hard to guess but generally as we age our tastes settle and we stick to what we know. As much as I love the familiar I love the thrill of discovery even more! It’s painful for me to think about music that I may never hear yet that I would love if I had the chance to heard it.

Here are my top 10 personal music discoveries for 2011*:

10. Wire – Red Barked Trees Tension and power slowly build up “to find the healing red barked trees”.

9. Harald Grosskopf – VIVACISSIMO CON MOTO – Album Mix Like a mini sci-fi epic Grosskopf’s a great sound track for living in the future.

8. Röyksopp – Keyboard Milk Scary but mentally danceable.

7. Zomby – Witch Hunt Another scary, haunting song with a fast tempo and bonus gun shots.

6. The Cinematic Orchestra – Evolution – versao portuense Slow and relentless and dreamy.

5. Digitalism – Miami Showdown I grok the repeating patterns that ebb and flow around a central beat.

4. 8 Bit Weapon – 64 Gigabit Mario Epic Like something out of a electronic Miyazaki movie.

3. Wye Oak – Two Small Deaths Could be electronic-pattern-based but actually made by Indy humans.

2. Lullatone – My Second Favorite Song In The World I could live inside this song for ever.

1. John Fahey – Sligo Mud Starts out like a blue standard and moves into abstract and concrete bliss.

Each of these artists is new to me. Hearing each track for the first time was more like remembering something that was missing than finding something new.

Here’s the complete playlist: Personal Discoveries 2011

* This is new-to-me not necessarily new-to-the-world. There is a lot of back catalog that I’ve missed over the years!

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2011 12 28 pav Music Comments (3) Permalink