Not enough to do...
Because, apparently, I haven't enough to do in my spare time, I've decided to work with Os on a NINJam client that runs as a VST. He's got one coded for the Mac and I volunteered to convert ito to Windows.
Start reading
here to learn about VSTs.
But it says in the manual...
Right now I'm working with LeadTools graphic libraries. I must say, they are very nice. However, they have a few quirks. I'm doing annotations - lines, boxes, text, graphics, etc. We are working with multi-page TIF files and each page can have annotations. Unfortunately, LeadTools doesn't seem to support multi-pages natively. So, I have to do some of the bookkeeping myself. They do provide a nice annotation manager. Again, unfortunately, it's got some quirks. If I have more than one annotation automation defined for the manager and I drag something onto the viewer, ALL the automations get the annotation. ARG! I can add an annotation to a specific automation, but the default ones are fucked. We'll see what their support people have to say.
From VIC to PC
After abusing the VIC-20 for a while, I started taking some classes at PCC (now
WVU-P). After fixing one of Mom's FORTRAN programs and not ever having seen FORTRAN, she suggested that I might want to take some classes. So, I did. That was the beginning of the end. It was onto DEC/VAX systems. At some point in there, we got a PC-Jr. Now, I think it was a decent little computer. It got a bad rap because it was marketed as 'Jr' but it had some nice features! Wireless keyboard, 32 color graphics, 128 meg of memory. I got just as sucked into that system as I had the VIC. Being a major geek, I bought some books on Intel 8086 assembly language, some Peter Norton books on the guts of IBM DOS. And had at it. Most of the time I made weird pictures that moved and balls that bounced around on the screen and changed colors and other strange stuff.
While I was at PCC I discovered Pascal. What a huge revolution from BASIC! Holy crap, it was actually FAST! Well, except when I wrote those
Fractalprograms that took all day to run. I had a lot to learn about writing efficient math code. Tweak and tune! But it made perty pictures.
Eventually, when working at DuPont, I dug into C programming and that was probably the biggest turning point in programming for me. It was the perfect combination of high level language, and low level control. The problem with C is that you can fuck up a computer like you won't believe in about, oh, 2 lines of code. Over the years, I moved to C++, then to C#, with some others along the way (Assm, Java, DCL, SQL, Visual Basic.) All of which got me here, writing Windows apps and doing all kinda fun interfaces and database apps and other funky stuff.
In The Dim and Distant Past...
A little history...
Way back in like, um, 1983, we got a
VIC-20 computer. That little sucker fascinated the hell out of me. I spent many nights learning the ins and outs and pokes and peeks of that little system. Ever curious, I'd see what happened when I'd POKE (set) a value into every memory location, one after another. Most times it would do really really weird shit. Screen flashing, screwy characters, hang the system, reboot! But I learned my way around it and discovered that I had a knack for programming. Often I'd have to fix the programs that were printed in
COMPUTE! magazines. They'd have some error or typo and I'd spend FOREVER typing them in just to find that they didn't run. They weren't very powerful, but they were hella fun. 4.5K of memory, tape deck to save programs, hooked up to the TV with an RF Modulator. In order to do anything really cool, you'd have to learn the guts of the thing. I learned a little assembler, but mostly, it was poking and peeking and trial and error. lots of error.
I often think that the young programmers today have missed something by not having to really learn all that blood and guts programming stuff. Ask them about bit masking and shifting, or how memory is organized, or any of the real low level stuff and they just don't know. Don't get me wrong, hell, I love drag and drop and double click and it all is in a pretty WYSIWYG form. But, there is something to be said for understanding how that stuff works under the hood.
I are a programmer
So, I've decided to finally start a programming blog. I'll probably share frustrations, design, tips, tricks... whatever. Give that there are about, 4 people who read my blog, and none of them are programmers... I'm not sure why, but what the fuck. It's fun.
