Learning new programming languages (by alaric)

I program computers for a living, mainly. This involves writing programs - instructions for the computer on how to do things, written in a "programming language".

There's a lot of programming languages out there; mainly because it's easy to create new ones, and an interesting exercise to do so. But if you browse a programming jobs site, you will see a lot of people who say "I am a Java programmer". Or PHP or Perl or C# or C++ or Python or Visual Basic. This means two things: that a few programming languages hold the majority of the "market share" and that people consider "their language" an important part of their identity.

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Crickly Country Park (by sarah)

Ages ago now - about six weeks or so my perants came up for the weekend and we went for a day outing at Crickly Country Park - there is geology, archeology and lots of wildlife there so it was lots of fun. I was also impressed with the visitors centre! though it needs a little cafe/shop thing really and the loos were a bit - hmmmm.

Jean loves collecting rocks!

Alaric decided he'd roll down the hill I can't remember why - this was on the back were the old Roman Hill Fort used to be.

Dad spent alot of time drawing cats and the like and reading all the notices - he was especially enamerred with the fossils and models at the visitors centre.

Jean became jellous of other children she found as they had hats and she didnt - this was how she ended up wearing Alarics fold-up hat!

I kept trying to photograph this poor creature but everytime it felt safe enough to venture out some one with a dog or small child would come walking through and scare it away again - hence no good pics!

The visitors centre had a giant snakes and ladders with velcro attatched to the wall and big cloth dice - Jean loved it though we did have a minor tiff about returning the dice to the little room were the game was!

Structured Streams (by alaric)

I read this today:

Structured Streams

It looks like somebody's implemented a stream protocol that lets you create substreams at will, sharing congestion control information with the parent stream but having their own redelivery queues, so missing messages will only stall the one (ordered) stream they pertain to.

Good to see that great minds think alike. When I get some time, I'll read their results in more detail, and see if there's anything useful to be learnt for MERCURY 🙂

Bus Fare Stupidness (by sarah)

I decided to go to Cheltenham on the bus becuase we thought it would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the van - it may be more environmentally friendly but it certianly is not budget friendly.

It is in fact twice as expensive for me to get the bus in than to travel in by the van - if Al is dropiing me off and going straight home then it costs the same.

THIS IS STUPID!!!!

So this places public transport into the catagory of the thing you only do if you can drive or get someone to drive you, rather than the more sensible - this is the cheaper slightly scuzier option.

To be fare they do have a weekly £9 ticket which I shall look into as there and back is over a fiver! It is ludicrous - and it appears to be in a viscous cycle - no one uses the buses so the costs have to be met by the few who have to use it but becuase it is so expensive fewer and fewer and fewer people will use it.

Grrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

STUPIDNESS - again.

Internet Fear (by sarah)

I keep finding myself in the strange position of having to explain internet publishing, blogs and author popularity.

This is what I get for trying to get the lituary world to get their heads out of Edwardian Britian and into the real world with real market pressures and heaven forbid real people and concepts (though weather a concept is real is something that I am not going to tackle).

Last night I found myself definding the exictance of blogs, some of the people hadn't even known there were such things as blogs before I started and then onto stupidly innane comments about - but people could just copy it!

Well yes and they could just copy things from books too! I explained I would make all the copy write stuff obvious on the site etc... and therefore it would exactly like if the people were copying it from a book - 'but we wouldn't know if they copied it would we if its on the internet?' I pointed out that you wouldn't know if they copied it from a book and that they would still be breaching it.

Then to the fact some don't want to have their work on the internet as their collegues and family could find it - in which case as someone else pointed out it should go under a psudonim (I personally think if thats the case it probably shouldn't be published in a book!).

The I find myself arguing about things I know very little about really - I suppose that becuase of my science back ground I'm used to the concept that you write a paper to get academic aclaim or for people to notice you, your project or the institution in the hope that a) what ever it is you are doing will be furthured by this, b) new collaborations will be formed and c) you will at some unspecified date (being hopeful here) get funding to continue.

For me writing is about sharing information so that ideas perculate and grow and form new ideas, or purelly as self expression and craftmanship which I want people to read - I want views and feed back - I need that to keep writing the creative stuff other wise it stagnates and without an audience I think whats the point - now obviouslly I mix all the things up but I'm trying to make things simple here - maybe so that I can understand what I've just been arguing about.

For people who want to get their writing careers off the ground I found these attitudes peculiar - why should I put something up for people to read without getting anything for it - erm.... to get yourself known and read and maybe just maybe then people will want to read more of your stuff?

Now I did a bit of research into this for myself - being as I am also trying to launch a writing career (hence I've ended up making websites and starting blogs for writers) and all the reports say that peoples sales went up when they put free stuff, sometime the entire book they were selling, on their website.

We ourselves have copies of such books becuase we like reading books (and I get headaches trying to read bulk txt on screen), we have Tom Reynolds book and look how well thats done and you can just down load for free!

If people know your name they are far more likely to actually buy a book by you. Even in the 'paper' publishing world you are advised to get your name out there even if some of the early stuff is for peanuts or for free (ok thats not entirely true as there appears to be two schools of thought on this but from my personal noising, getting yourself noticed seems far more important than being anal about pennies).

The poor lady who wanted the site - it was such a good idea - but the negativity about the internet in general from the group was horrendous. I live immersed in a world of information sharing and computers so it was a bit sobering to see what middle aged, middle class britian actually thinks!

Sigh - rocks were so much more straight forward :/