Saturday, August 25, 2007

Learning to code

I've resisted for a while but I have decide to learn to code, ie. write software. I sort of do that today anyway but I am extending my range to PHP and Ruby on Rails. Both open source web scripting languages. I have never been taught at Uni or on a course so I am learning all the basics via excellent blog posts on web. I was going to buy a book, might yet, but I often find the best book is the blogosphere. Not quite as well organised as a book but boasts many more benefits. For example a book is written in one style, however, in the blogosphere you can get different styles or different levels of knowledge. I am two weeks in, one week focused on PHP and one on Ruby on Rails. This has helped teach me the basics of programming. Now I need to focus on one? One of the initial challenges I faced was just installing the correct setup environment and then getting apache talking to mysql and mysql to PHP and Ruby (OK, I use the rails server for now).

I am enjoying the code and not so much the bugs!

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

video will be reborn every time the image quality improves

I capture and publish a lot more video these days. The quality play back on my local laptop is good but most views are via a flash or media players on the web. We upload our content in high quality but that is not what gets published. The service providers still have the original files, so as Moores Law continues to reduce costs with time we will see video services up-grading the play back quality, again and again until the quality that is captured is the same as the quality seen on the Internet.