AngryMen.org

My 10-year-old brother recently asked me to teach him how to program computers. Not sure how to approach the subject, and not wanting to teach him the first language I learned—BASIC—I went looking for programming languages designed to give children an introduction to programming. I found a few, but for one reason or another none of them quite did what I wanted. I then looked into creating my own, and realized that, although implementing an interpreter for a simple programming language may be easy, implementing an educational framework to support it was not.

I don’t know if I will ever undertake such an endeavor, but I wanted to post my notes here in the hopes that they would inspire others working on the same problem or create discussions about the problem and its solutions.

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My BTLSockets framework has been updated to version 1.1.1. This version fixes a few bugs which prevented it from working on 10.5 and Intel machines. Version 1.2, which will focus on improving performance, is coming soon.

I opened a Twitter account the other day, mainly to spite my friends, who keep pressuring me to join the social networking revolution by creating a proper Facebook account. I have found that it’s a nice way to keep up to date with a lot of OS X development related topics. I promise to update it at least every other day or so.

This post introduces a converter for megahal.brn files which converts files created on big-endian machines (e.g. PPC Mac, Amiga, SunOS) to files usable on little-endian machines (e.g. Windows, Linux x86).

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I have finally relaunched this blog. It’s been a while, and I haven’t had much to write about. I have been very busy with school and various projects. I have thought very carefully about the purpose of this blog, and have decided to make it the means of delivery for my software development output.

The programs I develop tend to fall into three categories. There will be, of course, Apple-specific programs and AppleScripts. There will be software relating to tech support, which is my current job. Finally, there will be discussion (and perhaps software) related to the project which consumes the majority of my free time: Operation Purple Poodle (or OPP for short).

OPP is a 2D platformer game that I and a few others have been working on over the past few years. It is a cross-platform game written in Objective-C. It makes extensive use of SDL and a few supporting libraries in an attempt to be as compatible as possible across different operating systems. It is quite an ambitious project, and has taken a lot longer to get off the ground than I originally anticipated.

Most, if not all of my projects should run on OS X. Some will also run on other systems, and will usually be written in an interpreted language. Because of the nature of tech support, some of them will run on OS X, but will really only be useful on Windows systems. As such, I expect that I will inevitably have some users running Internet Explorer on Windows, instead of the OS X users running only Safari/Firefox/Camino/OmniWeb/Opera. Because of this, in designing the page, I was forced to fall back on HTML 4 and basic CSS to ensure that the the page would work on Internet Explorer with little testing and debugging. Since I do not have access to a Windows computer most of the time, I have very little chance to use Internet Explorer. Even worse, I have very little time to spend on things like Web design. (I’m not sure if the contact page even works. It was slapped together in 5 minutes.) Still, this AppleWorks-inspired design should serve its purpose.