Dev Dawn

Welcome to the revised Interview with Russ Eggen!

I’ve divied up the good part (removed the static, crazy sounds) into 6 parts, each about 10 minutes long. Now .. again, apologies for the errant talking and wotnot .. i’m still struggling to get past the newb stage of Interviewer-Skilz .. but Russ was a very good Interviewee, so thankyou Russ, again.

Here tis, for your enjoyment ..

Part One
10:26 minutes

Download Link
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Part Two
13:53 minutes

Download Link
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Part Three
15:37 minutes

Download Link
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Part Four
11:35 minutes

Download Link
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Part Five
10:06 minutes

Download Link
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Part Six
12:50 minutes

Download Link
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I’m in the process of putting together the first Dev Dawn Podcast.

One of the segments, if it flies, will be DevEx, Developer’s Experiences.

The first theme for experiences is Installation Woes.

So send in your experiences! Nothing is too small, too trivial, too large, too gargantuan. All tales, all experiences are welcome and looked for.

You can contact me a few different ways.

email
sandrews at devdawn dot com

gtalk
theunguru at gmail dot com

clarion irc channel

• server : irc.cw-talk.com
• channel : #cw-talk
• username : Stu

or,
You can use the Contact link above.

—
Edit (2):
Have discovered more .. it seems that the header.php page is definately the culprit. Javascript calls, wp_head(), and some links all contribute to the long load time. Will set about cleaning it up when I get some time.

Edit (1):
After some preliminary testing, it seems whatever is initiated in the header.php and footer.php files is the major culprit. Take those away, and we load in about 1.2 seconds.

Of course, no css (and whatever else) means it’s a plain looking site.

More later.
—

Not sure if it’s my pc. I don’t want to think about the possibility of my new hosting being the problem.

But.

Dev Dawn is having issues.

I’ve been trying to clean up the front page, so that it loads faster. I’ve removed a bunch of stuff out of the Sidebar. It should theoretically work.

The problem is, that I can make changes immediately to the database, which should show up, or even to the files themselves, via ftp, and it takes a long time to show.

I’m contemplating going back to basics.

Dev Dawn today has taken an average of 10 seconds, or thereabouts, to load. That is woeful.

More on this later,

.. Put my skillset to the test!

Last week I created a Demonstration Movie of my logistics/freight software for a prospective client.

The Archer Freight System, Initial Demonstration.

Wink was my capture software of choice again.

This time, I opted for a point-and-click method, as opposed to voice-over and no input. So the viewer has some interaction with the movie, and for non-techo people, it’s also probably a little easier to see the flow of the demonstration when they can control it.

I chose to use “Input Driven” capture, as opposed to “Timed”. This was purely on a whim. Essentially, as the name would suggest, it takes a capture whenever keyboard or mouse input is detected.

At first, when editing, I ruled it a mistake. I was having trouble understanding why the program would just skip ahead. But then, as I began adding in frames to slow it down, I realised that for this kind of movie, it was actually a good choice. No voice, so you can directly control what gets added.

Of course, there’s quite a few issues with the movie. But it got me the client, so I’m happy for that.

Too, I hadn’t driven the system for over a year and a half. So my understanding of how it all worked was a little rusty.

Anyway, have a look at the video, tell me what you think.

Cheers,

First attempt at an “Aside” post .. we’ll see what it looks like.

Changes are a flowing. I’ve redone some of the code on Dev Dawn, and in the process, jigged some of the content, visuals, etc etc.

Feeling a little grumpy, because I just discovered that my Archives page is on the flunk. Man alive! When did that happen?

Anyway, will get onto it asap.

Edit ::
Archives should now be up and running

It’s a mammoth piece of soundbytes. Even split three ways.

Welcome to the next Spherical Phoke Interview.

Russ Eggen is a Clarion Developer of great reknown. He worked for Topspeed (deader than a doornail, once Developer of Clarion) and SoftVelocity (very much alive, and current Developer of Clarion). He attends and speaks at Conferences and Galas (okay, made the Galas up) all over the world. And you know what .. to use a bit of aussie slang, he’s a top bloke.

The Interview has been split into three parts. They are quite lengthy, and I will give a quick summary now.

Warning ::
Part One is of a really, REALLY, bad quality .. see the last point for reasoning. There is a fair wack towards the start that is just unbearable, with pops and clicks .. so please feel free to skip and dance past it .. you’ll feel free anyway, but i wanted you to know that i’m okay with that, heh heh.

Part One

25:35 mins

In which we talk about, amongst other things ..

• Aliens, Tom Cruise and L.Ron Hubbard.
• The good qualities of MS Visual Studio
• The better qualities of Clarion 7 (predicted sure, but i’m voting for in the bag)
• Thusly, Clarion 7 being KING OF THE WORLD
• .. I realise that my headset mike wasn’t plugged in, and proceed to plug it in, resulting in a wonderful chorus of hallelujahs as the really bad quality of pops and crackles and background noise is muted instantly.

download link

Also, I experimented with putting music at the start of Part One, and at the end of Part Three. It’s possibly way too loud.

Part Two

40:27 mins

In which we talk about, amongst other things ..

• Topspeed and Softvelocity, The (Some) History
• Sticking up for Frustrated Newsgroup Posters
• The latest Clarion Video
• Aussie Seminars

download link

Part Three

34:34 mins

In which we talk about, amongst other things ..

• Pimping Clarion as another Tool in the Skillset
• Experiences Presenting to Big Companies
• Clarion in Universities
• Comparisons between Sydney and Melbourne
• Bringing a Spycam into the SoftVelocity Offices
• I sound like a twerp trying to talk about Rugby Leage & Union
• Bumping into InnQuest

download link

There you have it. Cheers, Thanks and Regards to Russ for his time. I understand it’s quite expensive :), so I’m very thankful that he was able to spare an hour and a half to chat with us.

‘Nuff Said

When using Tortoise SVN and want to get a copy of an svn repository somewhere, it’s easy (apparently not for me .. took me a few searches of forums to discover this).

• Create a directory (easy-peasy).
• Right-Click and locate the Tortoise Menu (again, easy).
• Choose the Export option.
• Enter address of repository.
• You’re good to go, things will start downloading.

Now, you’re rightly wondering just what point this little tip has. Well ..

I kept choosing Import. It made sense, I want to import to my directory from their directory. And I kept coming to a username/password deal that had me stumped.

Of course, it’s the opposite. What you are really doing is exporting from their directory to yours.

p.s. First post on new hosting. Whaaaahoooo.

I’m moving Hosts .. the current Borg Masters suck .. to put it mildly. Have been having a lot of problems with them, and the stability of their servers.

I’m going to be the proud hostee of HostGator, who allow me a great deal more than my previous masters.

What this means is that the site could be down for a few hours .. so please, bear with me, and hopefully soon we’ll have a better Dev Dawn experience for everyone.

Well. After a few hours last night, and less than one this morning .. it’s done.

The quality (take that as you will) is terrible. I recorded this on my laptop microphone, which is good enough for chatting, but nothing much more. The pickup in my acoustic is busted, so this is the only way i can record at the moment.

Grainy, statiky, some stumbling over chords and words, and a couple more bugs.

But it’s done.

For The First Time .. Dev Dawn brings you ..

Spherical Phoke

- The Song -

download link, apart from the heading.

Welcome One & All to my first demonstration movie.

Edit:
I’m going to steal what I wrote for a post on the Clarion newsgroups .. a little bit of fiction.

Gather round and let me tell you a tale.

One fine rainy day in Sid-en-ney Ozstrayla, a boy found a magical piece of
software. Of course, it had it’s fair share of breakdowns, but magic still
permeated it’s core.

And so the boy knew he could wield this weapon to bring about a crushing
blow for the Kingdom of Clarion, where the Knights of Rapid Development
roved the lands, seeking out Peasants and Lords alike with the
ProblemsNeedFixing curse.

They were valiant warriors, given to slaying the Dragon’s of Mikerow Soft
Mountain, and rescuing the fair maidens .. Ms’s Custo Meri Sright, Bo
Bzisool, Thed Ebugg Errulz, and the Queen, Dontar Guewit Hsuccess.

Visit http://www.devdawn.com/ to see the fruits of the boy’s labour.

It’s not perfect, but for me, there’s a little bit of magic in the air ..
something is astirring ..

Last night I set about finding out just what screen-capture (demonstration making) software existed. After looking at a few, I settled on Wink. It’s a fantastic piece of freeware. A great deal of features, you can capture and edit under various different scenarios. You can add a lot of functionality. Some of the demo movies I watched last night actually had me feeling like I was in the driver’s seat. Very nice.

Anyway. I have played with it for a bit, and realised there was one issue which you will hear while watching the movie. That’s right, there is a sound problem. Not a great big one .. but enough to warrant checking out some of the other software.

However, for the moment, I have gone ahead with this demonstration of the Clarion Debugger (a very VERY quick one) using Wink.

The movie (.swf) is just under 4 megabytes large.

Here’s the page link to the Clarion Debugger demonstration movie.

Unfortunately, as I’m a complete newb, the movie size is far greater in size than the Dev Dawn page width. It’s 1169*823 .. so many apologies. I have tested shrinking the movie .. but it really screws with the quality. Quality of the visuals, not the bloke yapping on :).

Notes:

• Making a demonstration, even a short one, takes some preparation. At least the first few times. You have to have a concrete purpose in your head, or you just ramble. I must have done half a dozen or more takes on this demo. Even now, there are a lot of problems with it. So ..
  • Have a clear purpose
  • No ummmms
  • Don’t be afraid to talk slowly
  • End the movie before you get Kapture Kreep (a distant cousin to Feature Creep)

Of course, I broke all of these, and all other rules I don’t know yet, along the way .. so take the notes with a large white crystalised grain of salt.

I hope this will be of some assistance to .. anyone. I’ve only been using the debugger for about a week, if that. And it’s just so impacted my development life that I had to spread the word.

Stu Out