Flipflops.org

My Wordpress Gallery plugin is almost ready. It is still not quite ready forpublic consumption, but it is up and running on the new version of the site I built it for (http://www.jcameron.org website of my friend James Cameron a seriously up and coming photographer) - you can see the new version here at http://experiment.flipflops.org - we are just messing around with the last bits before we launch.

Flip-gallery is will be a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage online photogalleries and uses the Thickbox script to make it beautiful. The basic premise behind the plugin is that it is very easy to use and doesn’t mess with anything else, your blog remains the same, Thickbox remains the same.

The work that remains is to finnish the WordPress options admin page - so you can set the whole thing up without having to manually edit any files and to do a bit of customisation of Thickbox to allow you have AJAX pages that also make use of the rel attribute (to use next and previous buttons) and which also resizes the images (like it does in image mode).

 So not long now… I hope.

This morning whilst driving to work, I listened to Tunng. Mistake.

You’ve all heard of work safe music - well there is also car safe.

Car safe is self explanatory - if you listen to techno whilst driving, chances are you are driving like a twat - if you listen to Tunng paranoia will ensue…

The trouble is there are a lot of weird noises - I would not recommend that you listen to it in your car as you will suffer from the fear that your car is about to die in a bad way. We’ve just bought a new car - diesel - so it sounds like a tractor anyway.

Check out Tunng - they are great.

Yesterday I was talking to someone who asked me how I went about picking up a new language (we were talking specifically about ColdFusion). I’ve never done anything with ColdFusion but naturally I am aware of it both in the sense of a Programming Language and of friends doing dangerous free energy experiments…

So I replied that the first thing I would do would be to find a decent book, read through it, then start working through a few tutorials to get my hands dirty. So far so good, but this got me thinking the trouble with tutorials (both on the web and bound and printed on paper)  is that they tell you the easy stuff. They rarely tell you the stuff you need to know, they skirt over and avoid difficult areas, areas where a particular language gets a little lumpy.

Now all languages have a particular slant, an underlying ideology if you will. I suppose that this partly to do with the constraints in which it is designed to operate and partly to do with the design philosophy of the original authors of that language.

Clearly languages also evolve over time, take PHP(the ubiquitous embedded scripting langauge which I am currently most familiar with), it started off as a set of scripts written by Rasmus Lerdorf for his own website, it was then taken up by a pair of Israeli programmers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans. It has evolved over time from something small and handy into something complex and powerful, changing direction and picking up things like Object Orientation along the way.

How about Ruby…

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

[ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/ ]

If that isn’t a staement of intent, I don’t know what is. Or Flash, once upon a time, a simple animation tool now… well now it simply is (everywhere).

I suppose when I started writing this, the point that I wanted to make was two-fold:

• Good books are hard to find.
• Everybody needs to find a way of working that suits them.