Splish Splash

So I bought a Macbook over the weekend.

As a complete Mac noob, I was wondering if any of you wonderful iPeople could recommend me your favourite apps, blogs, websites, tips and tricks.

Charz!

Ok. I cracked. I admit it. I'm weak!

This evening, at approximately 17.15, I sold my iPod Touch to Seyhan, marched into the O2 store and proudly asked to buy an iPhone...

...And by deity it's like Zeus breathed life into a lump of iron and silicon and had Aphrodite and Athena tend to the looks and the workings. It's ambrosia, it's royal jelly - a truly decedant piece of kit. Pert, shiny and juicy sweet like some erotic lovebot from another dimension.

This is the point where the machines surpass humanity on every level. There's more charm, grace, poise, sophistication and innate lovability in this polished electronic case than has ever been housed in a biological frame.

Of course, I'm being silly and going over the top but DAAYAAAMN...

I shan't bore anyone with the details of why it's such a throbbing, shuddering delight. But I will promise you that the hype is there for a very good reason. And fuck the price. Ok, it isn't cheap. But I've bought enough dated, second-hand, poor quality crap in my life. I wanted something new, for once. Something fresh and cutting edge.

It has its flaws, I'll admit. But perfection is always a step too far and you can wait forever for it to come along. The only possible cause for regretting owning an iPhone is that it opens you up to all manner of fuckwits tutting, rolling their eyes, shaking their heads and sighing.

Bollocks to them!

Hoorah! I now own one of the finest toys imaginable - a Lego Mindstorms kit!

Mindstorms NXT is a lego robotics kit which revolves around a 32-bit ARM7 microprocessor, known as the NXT Intelligent Brick. This receives input via 4 input sensors: a touch sensor, a sound sensor, a light sensor and an ultrasonic sensor. In turn, the brick can output to 3 servo motors, as well as its own screen and speaker.

You program it via a graphical interface on a PC (which is actually quite intuitive) but, since the firmware for the brick is open-source, there is a plethora of other languages which have been ported to NXT.

It's lots of fun :-) Here's a short demo of a basic robot I built in the beginners' tutorial.

The robot waits until its ultrasonic sensor detects an object within 20 inches. If one appears, it moves forward until it touches it. It then waits for me to clap before picking up the ball and returning to the start. On the way back, it uses its light sensor (which can detect differences in light intensities and, consequently, distinguish colours) to sense when it reaches the black line. Then it drops it.

It's all still rather linear at the moment but I can soon knock together some programs that use loops and conditionals to vary the behaviour. I'll experiment with a few languages, too. Java seems a popular one but something like Prolog should be rather more interesting... If I can get it playing games intelligently then that'll be quite something.

Overall, I'm thrilled to bits with it :-D It's been a long time since I played with Lego - there were nowt like this when I were a lad! I think £180 is perhaps a little expensive but it is extremely well designed, making it a joy to use. With everything being Lego, all the pieces are modular so creating your own designs is straighforward. The brick, sensors and servos can't all be worth £180 but the general niftiness of the whole concept makes the whole become greater than the sum of its parts.

A must for all those closet robotics geeks out there!

Well, if you can believe it, it gets even better!

Thanks to the nifty Python control software written by Scott Weston, the awesome Motion Project, and a few handy sound effects (cunningly borrowed from Robocop) we now have the ultimate in automated PC protection.

Who needs to bother locking their screens these days when you can have an automated missile launcher on your desk to do the work for you?!

The way it all works is nice and simple. The Python missile controller sits happily in server mode. We hack up the motion config script to call methods in the missile software when it detects motion. The software performs a few diffs on incoming images and deduces the direction it needs to move the launcher in. Combine this with a small response script which plays Robocop sound files at varying levels of threat, and you have a mighty machine.

See footage of a narrow escape here. 

Oh, the absolute joy...

http://sucs.org/~talyn256/FireZeMissiles.avi

Fire Ze Missiles!

Yup, I quit Summer of Code. I'm not proud of it. But, there you go.

It's been pretty rocky for a while now. Inbetween exams eating up the first 3 weeks, visiting my family and sorting out moving house tomorrow, I haven't had the time or the energy for it. I spent a long time figuring out what I was going to do and how I was going to do it but then never quite reached a stage where I felt I knew enough about what I was doing to start coding.

It's a shame to pass up the money but I think I still got a lot of valuable experience from it. What I learnt is this:

1) Joining an existing project is TOUGH. Just figuring out what's going on in the existing code will take many many hours of head-scratching and caffeine cramming.

2) Programming in the real world is not the same as programming in university. I see how little we were actually taught in our design patterns course and how much I still don't know about real programming.

3) Working from home is extremely difficult.

4) Eclipse is an utter memory hog and made me wait for minutes at a time before letting me do anything. CVS is awful compared with SVN.

5) Programming isn't nearly as much fun when other people are telling you what to do and you have a time limit to run from. One should never underestimate the brain's creative side and recognise when it isn't being given enough to do.

I plan to stick with the PyDev project as a part-time contributor and see if I can finish what I started or turn my attention to a different aspect of it. Open source programming can be fun. But I'd rather do it in my time and on my terms.

I'm quite glad I put in an application with IT Wales, now, because I have a full-time job working at Caer Las, a charity for the homeless. Programming in Access and VBA is horrible, but at least the money comes in every week. People at the office seem nice and friendly and my supervisor's a good bloke.

Shame to leave Google, but never mind. It was fun while it lasted.

Ahh, it's nice to finally sink my teeth into a real Open Source project...

PyDev is proving quite a challenge, so far. The main challenge being that there is a LOT of code to read through and understand before I can really build anything on top of it. I think this'll just be a case of time and patience.

The sense of community's very nice in Summer of Code. All the mentors and students are posting to the mailing list on a daily basis, organising local meet-ups, discussing problems, challenges etc

Turns out that half of the people on the scheme intend to buy Macbooks with their money!
I think I'll settle for a dual-core Mini with a KVM. Shiny...

My bike's alive again! After a puncture and an alignment problem with the rear wheel, I can finally roam freely up and down Swansea bay. I rode back from Sara's pizza party on Tuesday night in top gear, pitch-black listening to Kiss's Double Platinum. What a thrill :-D

On a sadder note, this is my last month in Mumbles. It's been wonderful living up here, even though it's a fair distance away. Oh well, at least I have lots of pretty pictures. 

Christmas week statistics (21st-27th)

Large dinners: 7 (3 of which were Christmas dinners)

Presents: 9

Hangovers: 4

Mince pies: unknown

Another Christmas over and done with, leaving me blessed with ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, various bits of chocolate and alcohol and a bamboo statuette of the Buddha which freaks me out massively.

Inbetween overindulgences, I've been playing with a few nice bits of software. Skippy, Linux's answer to OS X's Expose, is a nice little switcher program. It's not as nicely animated as Expose but still pretty cool nonetheless.

A lovely GUI idea (again, resembling OS X) is Sun's Looking Glass project, a nice 3D desktop with some good ideas on organistion. There's an ISO here if anyone feels like playing with it.

I'd be interested to see GNOME using ideas like this in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.

Perhaps I should just buy a Mac. Or steal one :)