My twelve year old son want’s to learn how to program. My first idea was to teach him Ruby or Python, but I decided to go with Arduino. It’s C-based so that’s a good start I think. Were currently planning a couple of projects but so far he’s managed to get some LED’s blinking. A good start.
Everytime (well, last night actually) when I need to do something with Applescript I shudder with horror. The syntax is actually something you forget all the time. There must be better alternatives for Apple to use as a scripting language. I agree with this article, but Python or Ruby would be a better alternative I think.
I just put up a new version of JackenIAX. Added Applescript support, URL dialing (currently only via Applescript), DTMF tones when dialing etc.
So it’s finally time to release my IAX softphone for Macintosh. It’s still very much in beta, but I need feedback on how everything works. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m adding that didn’t make it into this release. Have a look here.
I haven’t had time to update my blog for a while. The last couple of days has been spent trying to hunt down an annoying bug in my IAX client I’m writing. Sometimes when dialing in, my program would not get a notification from the Asterisk server that a call was in progress. So I have tested all sorts of things to try to find the bug. So today I finally used tcpdump to see exactly what kind of packets I got from the server. And the problem was that I connected from the inside of my firewall, out trough and back again! So it was just an miss-configuration, the program has been working all along. Isn’t the Darwin award coming up soon?
I have had a bit of a snag in my program Im writing, so to do something else for a while. So I tried to install Ruby On Rails, a much talked about web developer framework. And after reading all the hype, I just had to see what it was like. So off to Ruby By Rails homepage to read up on it. They have a presentation area that has a couple of Quicktime films demonstrating Rails programming. And rails looks good! But another thing caught my eye, the guy managed to write code fast and easily it seemed. And the guy doing the demonstration was doing it on a Mac OS X machine. The speed and the way of working with text really blew me away. But nowhere could I find the name of the text editor. So I had some googling to do. And I found it. It’s called TextMate. So I wanted to buy it so I could use it to program my new VoIP software client. But I don’t have much money to spend on software right now, being totally broke, but after seeing the price €39 I bought it immediately, you can’t complain at that price. The integration with XCode looks good. I haven’t had any problems so far. It’s nice to see that you can find great software from small firms and download and buy them directly. ...