Having written our first program, Lesson 15 delves further into what writing basic applications are all about, looking at the API and its organization and focusing on an essential: messaging. Also included in this lesson are the finished sources for those who don’t want to mess around with typing the project out.
Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 15 Lesson 15 Project Sources: ClickMe.zip
At least it can finally log into Facebook. Not that I am a fan of Facebook, but I realize how important it is for WebPositive to be able to log into that site. Some other seemingly random crashes have a good chance of being fixed, too, since I was able to track down a memory corruption bug that was caused by different parts of the code being compiled with incompatible defines. Unfortunately this took a bit of experiementing until I was finally on the right track. Today I hooked up my quad core machine to temporarily replace my regular Haiku work machine, which is CPU wise a bit underpowered. The insane rebuild times were really getting on my nerves. Even with the quad core it took quite a bit of patience, but to be absolutely sure to compile everything with the right defines, I had to compile… well… everything. Many times.
It’s about time: our first program which does more than print stuff to the Terminal! Now the real fun begins! Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 14.
It was a few months ago that on a lazy Sunday afternoon I found myself to be in Brussels at the FOSDEM conference, where François organized a very successful Alt-OS development room, filled with all sorts of presentations on the world of the alternative operating systems. As probably the only non-computer science person, I got a slot as well and I decided to give a presentation with this same title. Now just imagine, I was scheduled on the last day, nearing the end of the conference (around four or five in the afternoon) and knowing the visitor group, I did not expect much. As such, I decided to prepare a discussion session for the ten or so people to show up. Now about five minutes before I was scheduled to go, people started trickling in. And to my pleasant dismay – if ever such a thing is possible – I ended up having a full house. Now why would a large number of computer geeks or – more nicely put – Open Source fanatics be interested in what a silly humanities guy has to say? I started to think about that, and I realize that this is in fact a very central question to everybody that donates time or money to these projects: what will be its future? Or put in another way, how can we, as actors in the always changing, always new information technology sector determine a path? That is the problem I would like to give a stab at in the coming twenty minutes.
This contains the text and the slides of a presentation I gave on the 11th of April 2010, at BeGeistert 022 in Düsseldorf. You can get the slides and a printer-friendly version of this text.
BeGeistert is nearly on us, with the long awaited return of the ColaCoder™, and of course I must be there.
I didn’t commit much recently since I started doing a Ph.D and it’s, well, time consuming, so left Axel and Ingo alone in the race.
I won’t be able to attend the coding sprint as well this time, but because I’ll attend the EuroSys 2010 conference (a really highly ranked research event about computers), and I’ll have the honor of doing a demo about Haiku at the poster session (my poster was selected in the best 5 btw), and of course I had to get googlefs working again to show it.
Today we’ll be diving headlong into the murky depths of C++ programming: classes and inheritance – struct’s with fancy tricks aplenty. It’s also our last lesson before writing our first windowed Haiku program, so get ready and study well. Enjoy! Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 13.
Hah, you wish! These blog titles are getting way ahead of the progress I make with WebPositive. Or let’s say the title is truthful in some ways, but on the other hand perhaps suggesting more substantial progress than what was made. I did turn my attention to fixing a lot of little annoyances and bugs that were reported via various channels, the comments section of this series of blog entries being among the important sources of feedback. So keep the good feedback comming, it’s very useful for me!
Everybody has already heard about the famous metaphor “Reinventing the wheel”. It’s most of the time a good advice. However, what happens if your’e not reinventing a wheel. But let’s say… a wing.
This would be the only time I will capitalize on a really bad Britney Spears reference. I promise. ;-) This lesson introduces us to the wonderful world of C++ and Object Oriented Programming. It’s not terribly code-heavy, so this might be a good time to look over past lessons to make sure you understand concepts pretty well – it only gets bigger from here. :-)
Also, there is now an archive of all programming lessons at the redesigned version of my old website, now titled DarkWyrm’s Library.
