Tech | Steve Bremner Online

Open Source: Good or bad for learning?

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under General, Tech

Many years ago, my now wife went on a night out with the girls. It meant I was home alone until the early hours of the morning; so instead of buying handfuls of Columbia’s finest export and drafting in a few high class ladies of the twilight hour, I decided to geek out.

At this time I was quite into dabbling with graphic design, I had my copy of Macromedia’s Fireworks and Adobe’s Photoshop; however it didn’t really grab me. So I decided to look into this web design malarkey. So I trawled the net for HTML tutorials and learning material. Armed with notepad.exe, a bucket of coffee and an insatiable thirst for learning off I went. Within the first few hours I had coded basic wee pages, by the end of the night I had moved onto CSS and I was properly hooked! I got a buzz from sitting down and coding a page, and looking at it in my browser! Soon enough the buzz of staring at my beautiful creations on my own 14inch CRT bad boy just wasn’t enough; I needed to let the world see my awesome skills. So I did the only thing I could think of, I turned to Geocities.

Keep in mind I was brand new to this whole publishing content on the web malarkey, I set about making myself a wee site; a few hours later I publish my first site. Words couldn’t explain how chuffed I was! Something I had made all by myself was online for the word to see! Ok it was only a few basic pages of HTML about me, but it was still my own creation. From that point on, I knew I was hooked totally and utterly.

“But Steve, what has all this got to do with Open Source being good or bad for learning?” Shhhhh child, all in good time, all in good time.

One of the guys I used to work with at the time had his own wee mobile DJ business on the side, and as a result he had made himself a rather funky wee website (looking back it was utterly horrible, but to someone like me it was like looking at a Picaso). He pointed me in the direction of a company that were uber cheap for domain name and hosting packages. I can’t remember their name but they were proper terrible, I had to pay for CGI/Perl access and for individual e-mail addresses. At the time though I thought that this was the pinnacle of my very young web career. So I published my first site, it was great fun digging deeper into HTML and CSS, then Java script came along.

As was the fashion at the time, damn near every site had scrolling titles, floating menus and damn near every imaginable piece of Java script in there to make the page look awesome. Now I had tried to learn a wee bit of this magical mystical coding base, however for some reason it just didn’t seem to stick. This frustrated me somewhat, so I started looking for more tutorials on Java script, and came across www.dhtml.com; this was the beginning of the end for my creative juices. dhtml.com back in the day was a bit of a Mecca for us Java script junkies, you had a search about, copied and pasted the code snippets and you were off! I could have all the shiny shiny Java I could get my grubby hands on without ever having to mess about with coding! YAY! This was my new buzz. Soon my site became a massively bloated mess of various Java scripts, but I didn’t care, all I needed to do was find the cool new feature I wanted, copy and paste and it was live! Soon after I started getting lazy with the designs, I found www.elated.com and their pagekits. I downloaded all of em, and reverse engineered them to fit what I wanted. So my site now consisted of absolutely nothing original at all, I hadn’t designed the site, I hadn’t coded any of the extras; but I didn’t really care.

At the time I was a member of a forum called thedude.org. This was the very first forum I had ever joined, and I loved the idea of running a forum! So instead of going back to learning, I went straight to open source. The first forum I ran was called Cutecast and it was made by some guys over at www.artscore.com. This was written entirely in perl, so I had to go back to learning so that I could set it all up and configure it. After a few hours (yes hours) of uploading (dial up 56k zzzzz) configuring and tweaking, my new forum was live! It felt awesome! Totally amazing that I was now the administrator of my very own forum! Little did I know, this was the beginning of the end. My thirst for learning had done a bunk with the Postman and my new Open Source addiction was here.

To cut a very very long story short, I jumped from open source application to open source application, installing bigger and better scripts to waste my time with. I have never considered myself a designer of any sort, sure my graphic skills have gotten better with time, and I have picked up some skills while working with the applications I have come across, but I’m by no means a real designer or coder. In a way I’m quite gutted that I bailed on learning so easily and so early on, I wish I had just stuck to it a little longer and taken the time to build my skills. Instead of the buzz I got from being creative, I got it from finding plug and play solutions to my problems.

This brings me to today. It got me thinking, did open source “ruin” my learning path? Well no, no it didn’t. I got a different buzz from using open source, and because of it I strayed from what had gotten me into the scene in the first place. I don’t regret it, I have been able to help so many people set themselves up online using these Open Source applications and the knowledge I have for tweaking and customising them, I have found a new passion for the dedicated coders and designers out there. I have been able to pick up on newer skills and coding languages. So after many many years of being lazy with the learning aspect of web design, open source has led me back to it. I feel the need to learn and code again, all because open source software has shown me what can be done with time, patience and bucket loads of skill.

So instead of web design, I have started a new journey with application design. Ok I’m virtually back at square one picking up on the likes of PHP and MySQL. Hopefully I don’t get side tracked again and start being lazy again!

Read more | Comments (2) | June 22nd, 2010

HTC Hero gets ready for Android 2.1 OTA in UK

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Tech

Waaaaaay heeeeeeey!

About time too HTC! Talkandroid.com last week wrote about the 2.1 update possibly coming to the UK a little over a week ago. Well apparently good things come to those who wait. HTC Europe has begun pushing out groundwork for the 2.1 update OTA to Hero owners today. If your phone receives the update, you will see a notification on the phone and all you have to do is press OK to accept the update, which will download via your data connection or wifi. After installing the update, you can verify it installed correctly by checking the Build number.

From the Home screen, go to Menu -> Settings -> About Phone -> Build Number. Once there, the new Build number after the update will be 2.73.405.93; 2.73.405.94 (Nordic) & 2.73.405.95 (Greece/ Ireland).

I’ll be keeping my beady little eye on my handset today! I can but hope!

[via HTC]

Read more | Comments (0) | June 16th, 2010

Wake up HTC!

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under Tech

When I decided to take a foray into the Android market, I chose the HTC Hero as my companion. Solid reviews coupled with a very good deal from a friend that manages a Three store (biiiiiig managers discount, good times….) seemed to make the Hero the obvious choice. I wish I did some more research.

The phone isn’t the problem; quite the opposite the phone is great! I have been using the iPhone as a comparison, there are a few features I’d like to see available on the Android OS that’s currently native on the iPhone, but these things are minor.

What really bugs me, is the shocking speed in which HTC work on implementing the new OS versions. Android is currently sitting on V2.1 (I think but don’t quote me!), and all us poor old HTC Hero chumps are STILL on 1.5! The myriad of features on the newer versions make me wish I had just manned up and spend some cash on a Desire instead. The new Google Maps has turn by turn GPS introduced, and this morning the guys over at the Firefox mobile site released a pre-alpha Fennec build for Android! The only problem, both require 2.0 as a minimum. There are hundreds more awesome apps out there, none of which I can use.

Is this perhaps the idea from HTC? The Hero was a great way for HTC to introduce a handset to the Android market, now they have a good foot hold, fuck the poor Hero chumps; we’ll only actively work on upgraded OS on new models. Is this a ploy to make us upgrade to new shiny handsets? They haven’t given us any other reason to support any other logical conclusions. If they had turned round and said that there were compatibility issues, or some kind of hardware conflicts, then I’m willing to bet the community would have rallied round and helped work towards a resolution. The Android OS is great that it has a dedicated developer user base, why not use that to your advantage when developing and working on compatibility for your HTC hardware?

HTC have said they will release a prerequisite update in June, once the new Éclair OS goes live, then the networks here in the UK will have to fuck about with them to keep them relevant to their network protocols. This is a promise HTC have been making for some time now, I’d be surprised if we see 2.1 for the Hero anytime before October…please PLEASE prove me wrong HTC.

Read more | Comments (0) | April 28th, 2010

Cest-la-vie!

Posted by Stevieb | Filed under News, Tech, Web Links

Well about a year ago, a setup a new site to take over the function of running the firewall bypass.

However this was not to be. The proxy scripts worked well, the user management scripts worked well, however they didn’t work well together. I was out of my depth and couldn’t resolve the problem. Unfortunately neither could the script developers solve the issue. So rather than run a half assed service I decided to give iunctio.org the boot.

So, I will take on new proxy connections on a request basis. So if you want one, drop me an e-mail via the contact me link above and I’ll hook you up.

Read more | Comments (0) | March 16th, 2010