scott.hodson.blog

I stumbled across this series about old computers from the 1970s and I found the first 2 computers we had growing up in my house in San Jose, CA. Having an electrical engineer for a father made it more likely I’d have access to cool gear like this at such an early period in Silicon Valley’s early days.

My first computer was a variant of the IMSAI 8080. At the time my dad and his other hobbyist
friends assembled these computers together. The Altair was an earlier favorite and the IMSAI was an evolutionary follow-on. I think the one my dad had was a little better because it had the Zilog Z80 chip in it (oooh!). It had 64K 8″ floppy disks and ran CP/M. Before we had an OS on it I would have to enter in a 20 or so byte sequence on the front panel, setting each of the 16 bits of each byte, then pressing the Enter switch to enter the byte into memory. When I was ready to run the program I would push the Run switch and it would allow me to type on the keyboard and see what I was typing in the display. This was my first program! When we got CP/M I enjoyed playing some sort of ASCII Star Trek game and another adventure game where you would type commands like “open door” and it would respond with “The door is open but you can’t go in, a troll blocks its path”. You could call this an all-text precursor to Warcraft.

Then later on my dad got the Interact Model One, at that time sold by Micro Video in Ann Arbor,
MI. This was cool because it had some games and joysticks! All storage was on a standard tape deck. Eventually I got tired of the games and wanted to buy more but they were very expensive ($40!) so I picked up a book that taught how to program BASIC on it and I figured out how to write my own games. Those were the funnest games because they were made by me and I think I was about 10 or 11 years old while making my own games. I remember spending hours into the night trying to figure out how to make images move across the screen, how to react to joystick input and collision detection.

We’ve certainly come a long way since then, but I know my love for technology started at a very young age thanks to exposure from my dad, who gave me the tools to discover how much I enjoyed writing software that is useful and fun for me and others to use.

As we mark the 25th anniversary of the CD some of my colleagues and friends are surprised that such a technofile as myself still buys CDs. These detractors fall into 2 camps: one that believe I shouldn’t pay for it because I can get it for free from P2P networks, and the others just buy all of their music on iTunes or some subscription service.

I’m not any particular supporter of the RIAA, and I’ve been down the P2P route. In fact I used to write software using the Gnutella protocol (R.I.P. Gene) and loved P2P as a disruptive and innovative way to provide network services, which eventually led me to found Ubero as a distributed processing service in 2000.

As far as buying music online, I loved AllOfMP3.com not only because of it’s price, but mainly the fact that it was DRM-free and you could buy high bit-rate versions of songs for a higher price that was still very reasonable. However, Russia wants to get in the WTO so they shut it down, although it has resurfaced as MP3Sparks.

So to not upset Russia, I continue to acquire the bulk of my music by buying CDs. Here’s what I get with it

• All of my songs stored on a physical media that can act as a backup, packaged in a pleasing and artistic manner
• High bit-rate (about 320kbps) versions { CD-quality } of my music
• DRM-free, can be played at high quality in my car, computer, home audio system, or ripped to MP3s for my computer or MP3 player
• Usually $9.99 each from Amazon, tax free, 2-day free shipping (I’m an Amazon Prime member) so the price is the same or better than buying a whole album on iTunes
• CDs usually come with some extras that can’t be had by buying the album online. The music companies are trying to incentivize people to keep buying CDs.

I’m not one to acquire or buy 1 song at a time unless I need it for a specific reason like I want to integrate it into a slide show or something. For those reasons then I’d usually acquire it online. But if an artist I like or follow comes out with a new album I want the whole album, not just the singles they cherry-picked by radio DJs and program managers.

As we look back on the 25th anniversary of the CD many have asked themselves “what was the first CD you bought?” If you don’t know what a CD is then stop reading this blog now. Otherwise, my answer is Love and Rockets “Express“.

This recent article demonstrates what most people know: we are being flooded and overwhelmed by email! If you’re feeling the same way check out this speech at Google given by Merlin Mann about his GTD-inspired “Inbox Zero” initiative. Following these simple steps will help you achieve an empty inbox and relieve the stress of being overwhelmed by incoming email.

• Get a System
• Email’s just a medium
• One place for everything
• Process to zero
• Convert to actions
  • Delete
  • Delegate
  • Respond
  • Defer
  • Do

Last night I went to a Orange County PHP Roundtable meeting for the first time, primarily to learn about CakePHP, a PHP framework that implements MVC and ActiveRecord a-la Ruby on Rails but for PHP. I was impressed with the amount of work that has gone into the framework and the passion of the presenter (Garrett something, President of the Cake Software Foundation). He was there to demonstrate some of the new features coming out on their 1.2 version.

Having developed in PHP for some time I could appreciate all of the pain and agony they are trying to resolve with CakePHP. The problem is that they’re perhaps 1-2 years too late because many disgruntled PHP developers have already moved onto Rails. Also, Cake is Rails-y in its implementation of ActiveRecord, scaffolding, and RESTful service support, but it doesn’t have any unit testing or database migrations features in it. Also, I think the fact that they go out of their way to support PHP 4 only holds them back. And I couldn’t get over the pain of seeing all of those dollar signs all over the code and having the type “new array()” every time you would create an associative array in PHP, which is used often throughout the framework.

The advantage, however, is that PHP is much more mature and has wide community support and is nearly ubiquitous on the Internet as the lingua-franca of website development. People who have large investments in PHP and plan to continue to leverage those investments should take a look at CakePHP.

CakePHP is a valiant effort to prop up the annoying verbosity and syntax of PHP and will extend the life of those teams that have been eating out of the PHP bakery for some time now.