The Bolt

11 Year Old Game Development: Happy Cats

Ever since my daughter decided that she wanted to develop an iPhone game, she's been wracking her brain for ideas. Then after she comes up with an idea, there is a rapid-fire question and answer period with Dad (me). Here's her idea for "Happy Cats".

]]> One Saturday afternoon I walked by as my daughter was furiously drawing with pencil and paper. When I asked what she was doing, I was amused to learn that it wasn't homework, it was her latest iPhone game idea.

"It's my new game, Happy Cats".

"Oh," I replied, "how does it work?"

"Here, let me show you Dad!"

This was the picture that she turned to show to me while she explained:

"So remember when you told me that I couldn't just copy Angry Birds?"

"Yes."

"Well this isn't a copy, it's the OPPOSITE! See? Angry becomes Happy, and Birds becomes Cats. Happy Cats!! And then the Angry Birds guys won't get mad at me because I'm not stealing their idea."

"Oh."

"But - and here's the good part - I still get to use their name in my description! See? I can say 'If you like Angry Birds, then try Happy Cats' and then I still get to mention Angry Birds so that people who are searching for 'Angry Birds' will also find my game!"

"So this is all about marketing..."

"Of course! There are so many games now, how else will people find mine?"

"You got me there. Do you think your game will be fun for those people?"

"Sure! See, here's how it works...." She then proceeds to tell me more about the game mechanics, which as it turns out are actually pretty funny: you collect birds to throw into the cat's mouth, and the cat eats up all the birds. Then the cat is happy.

While this is going on, her little sister overhears our conversation and runs to her room, coming back with a piece of paper in hand. She thrusts the paper at me, "Dad, look at my game!"

Here is the diagram from my younger daughter:

After hearing the explanation of how this game works, my older daughter turns to the younger one and says, "well that's not bad, but nobody will buy your game, because they won't find it. Happy Cats is better because people will find it."

Then they get into heated discussion of whether it's more important to concentrate on game play or marketing. I don't think there was ever any agreement on this.

The Cloud Brought Me Back Down

In 2005 I wrote an article How Do Normal People Survive With One, in which I outline all the benefits of running multiple computers. In just over six years, it seems that everything has changed...

]]> I no longer run multiple computers. We have one computer only, and it's a Mac. Of course I switched to a Mac years ago, and haven't had any reason to switch away since.

This one Mac, combined with Windows running in VMware Fusion, does everything that we need it to do. Even more interesting, though, is the slow evolution to "cloud computing" we're making. I would call it baby steps. One thing at a time, and only if the benefits outweigh the cost and/or risk.

Here are the things I talked about in 2005, and how I'm solving them today:

1. SENDING LARGE FILES TO PEOPLE

I rarely do this any more. I used to send and receive most pictures via email in the past, but now I and most everyone else are simply posting them online (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc) and then sending people the link (if they haven't already been notified by virtue of association).

2. BACKING UP MY DESKTOP COMPUTER

I use Time Machine, which came bundled with a Mac OS X upgrade a while ago, to back up my computer to an external hard drive. I also use BackBlaze to back up that same data. This two-step approach (with one step being off site) has made me feel a lot better than even doing my own backups to a local server.

3. EASY UPGRADES OF MY DESKTOP COMPUTER

Last time I upgraded it was a breeze - Mac OS X came with some kind of "move your stuff to a new computer" program, and I used it. It was painless. But even if there was a problem, I knew that BackBlaze was there to save me.

4. RECORDING TV SHOWS FROM REMOTE

I love our new solution to this one: we don't watch TV. OK, we watch a tiny bit, but it isn't conventional broadcast programming; we do not have cable or satellite. We have an Apple TV, and we do stream YouTube, TED talks and such - but there is no Saturday morning cartoon watching around here. Our daughters don't seem to be traumatized by the lack of television, so I think it's going to be like this for a long time.

5. UNLIMITED EMAIL ALIASES

I switch to using HostGator for web site hosting, and discovered that their web site control panel allowed unlimited email alias creation. I still do create a new email alias for each new web site that I sign up to, so I do have over a hundred aliases now. Apparently you can also do something similar with Gmail, but I haven't tried it.

So all of the reasons I gave years ago are now no longer relevant. And all of the new solutions are related to cloud service providers.

There are two more benefits: we no longer need to consume space for multiple computers, and there is no longer maintenance costs for multiple computers. I gave all of my extra computers and computer parts away a few years ago, and haven't looked back since.

Christmas Morning Flasher

This is one of the lesser-told stories from my Dad. Early one Christmas morning, my Mom and Dad went out for a walk along their street. It was December 1968, three months after they were married.

]]> According to my Dad, they were out walking in the snow, enjoying the crisp winter air and the peaceful moments of their first Christmas as a couple. A couple of blocks into their walk, they happened to pass in front of one house with a very large living room window. My Dad glanced over, and there in the middle of the window in full view was a woman. She was stretching as a cat would do, with her eyes closed and her arms fully extended.

Completely naked.

My Dad stopped walking, and so my Mom stopped and glanced over too. By the time the poor woman finished her morning stretch, there were two people on the sidewalk outside her house, stopped and staring. The woman in the house opened her eyes and then immediately went into panic mode, covered her chest and ran away.

Dad says that they laughed about it all the way home, and then again when they told the rest of my relatives the story.

I heard that story when I was young, but then when I was about 30 that story came up again, and my Dad was telling it with much the same patter. However, now that I was older he added one final detail: "Son, to the day I die, I will have the image of that woman burned in my memory."

Cheers to the Christmas Morning Flasher!

Lavender Blue

In the fall of 1985, I was listening to a cassette tape of Misplaced Childhood by Marillion. I'm pretty sure I stretched the tape by playing it so much.]]>
One of the tracks "Lavender" was particularly intriguing because it was a song within a song. In it, the singer is talking about a song that some children are singing:

I was walking in the park dreaming of a spark
When I heard the sprinklers whisper
Shimmer in the haze of summer lawns
Then I heard the children singing
They were running through the rainbows
They were singing a song for you
Well it seemed to be a song for you
The one I wanted to write for you, for you

Lavenders blue, dilly dilly, lavenders green
When I am King, dilly dilly, you will be Queen
A penny for your thoughts my dear
A penny for your thoughts my dear
I.O.U. for your love, I.O.U. for your love
[...]

Ever since hearing Lavender, somewhere in the back of my mind I've been wondering about the origin of the song within the song. It was supposed to be a children's song, but it wasn't one I grew up with. I admit I never did any kind of search, nor did I ask anyone else about it - I just wondered.

Fast forward from 1985 to 2011. I was rummaging through some boxes in our basement, looking for some Christmas music for my daughters to play on the piano. We've just moved into a new house, so I had to go through a number of boxes before finally stumbling on the right one.

In one of the boxes that I searched along the way, I discovered some old sheet music. My grandmother had played the organ, and a collection of music books and sheet music was given to me after she passed away. I had never gone through it in detail. Tonight, after the girls went to sleep, I looked at everything in the pile, and there it was: Lavender Blue, in sheet music, dated 1948.

I thought immediately of the Marillion song, and at the same time I wondered how close the original song would be to the one encapsulated within Marillion's Lavender. Here are the lyrics from the chorus on the sheet music:

Lavender blue, dilly dilly, lavender green,
If I were king, dilly dilly, I'd need a queen:
Who told me so, dilly dilly, who told me so?
I told myself, dilly dilly, I told me so.

However, the top of the score indicates that the music is from the movie So Dear To My Heart. Hmm, that seemed suspicious - I couldn't imagine that this song was originally written for a Disney movie. So I went searching in Google - finally - after 26 years, and darned if this isn't an old and very well known English folk song.

Looks like untold scores of children in England knew what took me 26 years to stumble upon.

For comparison, here is Lavender by Marillion:

And here is Lavender Blue, sung in the folk song style:

They Call Me Beef

Childhood nicknames are a wonder. They range from insightful to cruel, from flattering to confusing and beyond. They can be based on the person's real name, their hair color (or some other physical feature), their favorite sport... the list goes on. There is one nickname I never could figure out, though...

]]> Randy was one of the guys that I hung around with in elementary school and then high school. I don't think our friendship was too close, but we got along just fine. It was more like we both had friends in common, and ended up being at the same gatherings together.

Randy's nickname throughout school was "beef". I wasn't around when he earned the name, and I couldn't figure out how he got the nickname. I did ask him about it once, but he wouldn't tell me the story, and gave me an excuse like "you had to be there". I accepted that, and in general I called him Randy instead of using his nickname.

There was one hilarious incident where someone else tried to find out the origin of his nickname. We were at a party, and one of the girls at the party, Lois, came up to Randy and started talking with him. Lois is probably quite different these days, but back then she could have been the poster child for "innocent and unassuming". In the middle of their conversation, someone else referred to Randy as "beef".

Lois then turned to Randy and asked, "why do they call you beef?"

Without missing a beat, Randy replied, "do you wanna see?"

Lois turned a very deep shade of red, turned, and walked away as fast as she could. At that time, it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that Lois had never actually seen a penis in real life.

A decade later, after we had all graduated and moved away, I happened to meet up with Randy again. It was early summer 1998, and Randy was tending bar at the campus pub. I was walking through the pub, recognized him, and said hello. We talked a bit about the ten years that had passed, and then I asked him if he was going to go to our high school 10 year reunion.

"What? No fucking way. But while you're there, you can tell those bastards they can all go to hell."

That wasn't exactly the response I was expecting. I was so taken aback that I didn't ask for him to elaborate, I just laughed nervously and said that I'd try to remember that.

Once again I never did get the full story out of Randy, but I can only guess that high school was harder on him than I ever knew. Perhaps the nickname had something to do with it, perhaps not. But if it did, and if he truly didn't like the nickname, then maybe it was a few years of silent torture.

Good luck Randy, I hope you've found happiness.

On Every Street

I'm usually living in the present (or these days, the future), so it isn't often that I'll reminisce about a past relationship. Sometimes a song will remind me of a specific time or event...

]]> but there is one song that drives me straight into melancholy and curious thought every time I hear it: On Every Street by Dire Straits. It reminds me of previous paths in my life that could have been taken, and the question of "what if". This isn't a painful exercise for me, it's more of a scientific curiosity, or a case study if you will. If there were some way to look at me, the person I am today, and compare that with me, the person I would have become if I had chosen a different path - how do they compare? Would I still be much the same, or would I be a stranger to myself?

In that respect, I am wondering about the other person in the case study (my ex-girlfriends or past friends). What has become of them? Because I'm pretty sure that they're still alive and living their own respective lives - but where, with whom, and what are they doing?

There's gotta be a record of you some place
You gotta be on somebody's books
The lowdown, a picture of your face
Your injured looks

The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And it's your face I'm looking for on every street

"Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete". Wow. Mark Knopfler, what a superb choice of words. Because for each of the people no longer in my life, they are somewhere, in someone else's life and making an impact.

It seems that the protagonist in this song continues to actively search for his lost partner, however I've accidentally run into some of my ex-girlfriends over the years and it is usually just plain awkward. Running into a "past friend" can be even worse. So if there were a way that I could be an omniscient third person in their lives, without actually running into them, it would be interesting. And not in a voyeuristic or peeping tom kind of way. I don't want to friendstalk them on Facebook.

Since I'm not all-knowing and ethereal, I'll have to settle for hoping that they're all leading the lives that they want to and are finding happiness.

Someone Saved My Life Tonight

I was driving home after a game of curling tonight, traveling the same route I always take home, around 11:30 pm. I was sitting at the first controlled intersection, waiting on the red light to turn green...

]]> as the opposing traffic lights turned amber and then red, I stopped re-playing the curling game and zoned back into the task at hand. My light turned green, and I started into the intersection.

Now here I have to admit that I didn't punch the gas pedal like my 20-year-old self may have. Instead, I eased off the brake and slowly accelerated while at the same time cautiously looking left and right. As I looked right, alarms started going off in my brain that something wasn't right.... so I eased off the gas. Probably half a second later, I heard these words going through my head:

"DO YOU WANT TO BE RIGHT, OR DO YOU WANT TO BE ALIVE?"

They were the words of my wife. Words that she had repeated to me on more than one occasion in the past, where I had been driving aggressively because I knew that I had the right of way. Here again tonight, with the bright green light staring me in the face, I knew for certain that I was supposed to be going through the intersection - I was supposed to be making my left turn, and happily speeding up toward home.

However, the danger that my scan had picked up was a car off to my right approaching cross-traffic to me. This car was speeding, probably doing 80 km/hr in what was a 50 km/hr zone. The car was still about 2 seconds away from the intersection, but there was no way it was going to stop in time. So I braked without panic, and I honked my horn. As the other car sped through the intersection and the other driver was caught like a deer in my headlights (only a few feet in front of my bumper), the look on his face was somewhere between total surprise and sheer terror. I didn't see his look of relief and guilt that surely followed, as he was still speeding away, perhaps still in shock and unable to do anything other than continue on his path. If I wasn't driving so defensively these days, it would have been an ugly accident scene.

So I arrived home safely tonight, all because the wise words of my wife sunk into my thick head for once.

Sand Sharks, Alligators and Penguins

This is the sixth summer of sand sculpting for me. How time flies. The weather was awesome this year, the sand was clean, the wind was perfect - and inspiration came easily.

]]>
This started out as a dragon, but we couldn't get the head to stay together and my daughter also figured wings were required and I knew I wasn't up to doing wings. So it became an alligator! This alligator was quite large and detailed and was a hit on the beach. People were coming up to me for the next three days talking about it.

I asked my oldest daughter what we should carve, and after thinking about it she settled on a penguin. She did about half of the carving - I would carve a section, and she would carve the corresponding section on the other side. Although his feet are awful big, he was cute enough get more than his share of attention!

I was trying to make a decent looking Grey Cup totally from memory; I think I came close. After it was done, one of the actual Roughriders cheerleaders happened to be on the beach so he came down and asked if he could take a picture of it! Very cool. Of course the Roughrider logo isn't engraved on the side of the real cup, I was just trying to throw them some good luck.

Here are two pictures showing the evolution of a Memorial Lake sand sign. The first picture with the group of us behind it is before all of the carving is done.

This second picture shows the same sign after much of the excess sand has been removed and the letters start to stand out by themselves.

This sand shark was very fun to carve and ended up quite pleasing to the eye with his slender fins and smooth lines. The space under his pectoral fins worked out quite well, giving him the appearance of swimming or flying through the air above the sand. A friend of ours hilariously dropped in and posed for the picture just before my wife clicked the camera. :)

Just One Day

I stumbled upon this song "Just One Day" by RJ Chevalier and really liked it. However, it didn't include the lyrics. Here's my attempt at transcribing them...]]> Gone are the lonely days, I thought, my dear
Taking away all of the solo years
I thought you were the one - that felt so clear
Now I don't know whether to trust or fear

I thought I knew your name, finding the truth and now feeling ashamed
I thought I knew your way, hearing your words that I just can't obey
I thought for just one day I would give in and start walking away
I thought I had my say - that I'm in love and I don't want to stay

Gone are the sorry eyes, I thought, my dear
Wiping away all of the lonely tears
I saw my life begin, it felt so clear
I thought you loved me back, it felt sincere

I thought I knew your name, finding the truth and now feeling ashamed
I thought I knew your way, hearing your words that I just can't obey
I thought for just one day I would give in and start walking away
I thought I had my say - that I'm in love and I don't want to stay

Just One Day ft. Deni Hlavinka by RJ Chevalier

I wasn't sure on a few of the words, but I think I'm pretty close. Any corrections are welcome, please leave a comment!

Photo Credit: Mitya Kuznetsov

Vote For The Song A Day Album Tracks!

Jonathan Mann is asking for our help - he wants people to listen to the 30 tracks he created in June and vote for the ones that should be included on his album: http://vote.songatron.com/

I encourage you to vote when you have more than just a couple minutes, since it will take time to listen to the tracks. I think at least half an hour is needed since you probably want to listen to a minute or so of each track. It's pretty fun, try it out!

Voting is only open until the end of July 31, 2011.

Welcoming The Cloud

I just figured out that I am suddenly in favour of "cloud computing". I have switched my opinion 180 degrees on this just today. Here is my revelation...

]]> Up until now I have been against the cloud computing catch phrase in principle, because to me it seemed like the same services that people have been offering for years under a new industry catch phrase. So to even mention the phrase left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I do not see cloud computing as a new paradigm - in fact, it reminds me of large mainframe computers and dumb terminals from decades ago. I'm not against cloud computing itself - I'm quite in favour of using the right solution for each problem, and some times that's a locally installed application, and some times that's a remote service. Either way, I was just against the new catch phrase.

(As an aside, what ever happened to the "B2B" catch phrase from the early 90's?)

Anyway, today as I was driving in to work it hit me: I love cloud computing. I love it not for the name, but I love the service and what it means for ME, a person who is not using any cloud services. It means that my future problems with Usage Based Billing (UBB) might be solved for me!

Here's the deal: as more people sign up for these cloud services, and they move more of their business off site and into remote data centers, then that means more network traffic between them and "the cloud". More people signing up for Apple's iCloud, or Microsoft's Live@EDU, or Netflix, means more people running into their usage limits. More people running into their usage limits means more unhappy users.

Some of the unhappy users will complain to the ISPs. Some of the unhappy users will complain to their cloud service providers. Some of them will simply upgrade their data plans - but even those users will eventually hit the ceiling again, and then they will also start to complain. A whole new batch of people who will be fighting against UBB and not even realize they're doing so!

The users who complain to their cloud service providers will eventually translate into some very large service providers complaining to the ISPs. The ISPs, I assume, won't want to budge on their unfair billing practices because it would mean a loss of revenue. Eventually the large cloud service providers, who are much larger than the ISPs, will lobby government. It will take time, but this will eventually mean a forced change for the ISPs.

I love it.

Bring on the cloud computing - death to Usage Based Billing!

Song A Day Streaming Entertainment

I first heard about Jonathan Mann some time in the summer of 2009, around the time that his video for Bing Goes The Internet was spreading from geek to geek.

]]> At that time, like many other videos that are sent to me from friends and co-workers, his song #202 "Bing Goes The Internet" was on my mind for about two minutes. I didn't watch any other videos by Jonathan - his video may as well have been a dancing hamster or a lolcat. Just another funny two minutes to break up a typical work day.

About a year later - 359 days if his numbering scheme is correct - song #561 "The iPhone 4 Antenna Song" was sent to me. Another 2 minutes of fun. However, this time I remembered seeing his name previously, and twice is often enough to pique my interest. I searched and read up on him, and finally understood his mission: to write one new song a day, every day.

I went poking around to see what other songs he had shared and if I liked any of them. I didn't have to look far, because the immediately previous song #560 The Little Man already told me enough: this guy had talent, and this song was good! I could easily imagine a studio production version of this song on the radio.

And a couple songs more back in time, I found this gem (song #558 When The Sun Goes Down), which I particularly enjoy:

In April 2011, I heard about Jonathan's Kickstarter Project, and decided to take the plunge. I became a Kickstarter! I pledged support for his project and helped fund it. It felt great! I was really very excited for Jonathan, his project sounded like a lot of work but a lot of fun too. Little did I know at the time that it would be such a great investment, which would return so much to me later.

On June 1, 2011, when Jonathan and his friends started streaming live video, I was there. I tuned in. I chatted with other people watching, and was fascinated at the glimpse we were getting into the creative process. At times I felt like I was right there in Norman's garage in Berkeley, California. His very first group songwriting effort was catchy, and I had "song song, songaday songaday" in my head the rest of that day from song #882:

I was hooked. I have tuned into the live stream every day - 15 days so far and still counting. And my infectious interest has spread to my two daughters! I had the live stream up on our computer at home the weekend of June 3rd and 4th, and they asked what I was watching. I explained it to them, and of course the mind of an 11 year old girl trying to figure out the world comes up with good questions:
- why is he doing this?
- when did he start?
- when will he be done, and how will he know?
- are any of the songs good?
- does he make any money doing this?
- is this all he does, or does he have another job?
- how does he come up with his ideas?
- who are all those people, and is he paying them?
- is he famous?

I spent at least an hour answering questions to the best of my ability while the three of us went digging through his videos on Youtube to see if there were any that they liked. So far, their favorite is song #884: Johnny Tumbleton, The King of the Elves:

When I originally backed Jonathan's Kickstarter project, I had no idea that the entertainment value from watching him and his friends make music would be so high. I've enjoyed it so much that I sent them another unsolicited donation, with the note "to be used for donuts!" Who doesn't like free donuts. :)

Thank you Jonathan, and good luck. I have no doubt that this will be an extremely rewarding "once in a lifetime" cosmic experience, full of good memories for everyone involved.

Canada's Federal Budget Versus Political Party

Leading up to another Canadian federal election, I thought it would be interesting to update the graph that I made in 2009 showing Canada's federal deficit against the ruling political party.

]]> The historical data hasn't changed, of course, and neither has the current political party (the Conservative Party of Canada). But in the last two years, our budget surplus/deficit has gone from pretty good to very bad:

Sources: Public Accounts of Canada and Parliament of Canada

Attributing budgets to any one party during a transition year can be difficult, so there is a bit of room for negotiation - given the way that our federal budget cycle works. However, we can see that when Conservatives are in power, we generally can expect deficit budgets, so the country is going deeper into debt. And when the Liberals are in power, we can generally expect surplus budgets, where we end up paying down our federal debt.

The interesting question in my mind is what would our federal finances look like with a party other than these two in power? Have the two of them just been playing us all along the whole time? Covering up for each other while letting just a bit of financial scandal to leak out after every change in federal party, so that we're lulled into thinking that they're keeping each other honest?

Canadian Subsidy Directory Spam

Some spammers will just never die, sadly. Incredibly, I've been receiving roughly the same spam email from this company yearly since about 2005, as far as I can recall. I say that because I've deleted email from then long ago. The first year or two I tried to contact the company to be removed from their mailing list, but it never worked. So here's what I'm going to do this year...

]]> Since they list their toll-free number 1 (866) 322-3376 I thought I'd give them a call, and string them along. Ask them all kinds of questions about their product, but never purchase. But certainly after a few calls like that, even if I can spare the time, I'll probably tire of it. So tomorrow I'll call, but likely just twice.

After that, I see that another person has written a letter to the privacy officer, complaining about Canadian Subsidy Directory Spam. That's a good idea, and I'll do the same this week. Note to self: I need to verify the mailing address and recipient name, who knows if we have the same privacy officer still.

Then I see that the Quebec Better Business Bureau has a page where we can complain about the Canadian Subsidy Directory Spam. I have already filled out the complaint form. Hopefully if enough others fill out the form, then at least their record will be marked as "poor reputation" instead of "this organization has a satisfactory record."

I have a strong urge to contact a friend of mine in Quebec and see if Michel Goyette can be tracked down personally, but I don't know what the proper in-person punishment is for a spammer....?

And finally, if you are just some normal person trying to find out if you should purchase the information that this company is attempting to sell you, the answer is NO, you should not. If nobody EVER buys from them, eventually they will need to stop. Instead, use the internet to find all of this information and more for free! Here is one link to get you started:
http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/smallbusinessgrants/Small_Business_Grants_Canada.htm

Is this business a scam? That depends on what your definition of "scam" is. Definitely spam, possibly a scam.

My History of Programming

I started programming computers in the summer of 1983, so I'm closing in on 28 years of programming. It has been an interesting journey so far - programming for fun, then for school, then for work - and now back to fun again...

]]> It all started with...

1983: Ti-99/4a BASIC. The first computer I ever touched was a Texas Instruments Ti-99/4a that belonged to a family that lived just down our street. I babysat for them, and after their kids were asleep I got many hours of programming. There was no external storage, so once the computer was turned off the program was gone!

1983: Commodore BASIC. The Commodore VIC-20 was the first computer my parents bought for me. I made games that my friends and I would play, distributed on magnetic cassette tapes. Too bad I didn't have any business savvy back then, because many of my games were as good as what was on the market at the time.

1984: Commodore BASIC. This time I was programming on the Commodore PET. My grade 9 teacher told the other students to type in the programs that I wrote on the chalkboard. I also made large text adventure games that rivalled Scott Adams. My first exposure to a database was to dBase-II. I didn't really understand the value of a database back then.

1985: Pascal. School computer labs were starting to be used, but only for computer class at this point. They were all full of Apple IIe computers. My computer teacher tried to warn us that GOTO was evil and to be avoided at all cost, and hence introduced us to Pascal. I carried a case of 5.25" floppy disks around almost all the time.

1987: Assembly. I now owned an Apple IIc computer, and some of the graphics and sound routines for the games I was making needed to be programmed in assembly for speed.

1988: FORTRAN. One of my undergrad computer science classes introduced us to FORTRAN. The language seemed stuffy and rigid to me.

1989: C. 1989 was a glorious year, not only because university was one big party, but also because I loved the C programming language. Most of my computer classes were switching over to C, and assignments were easy to code and mostly fun.

1993: Pascal. I thought I was done with Pascal from high school, but it reared its head again in university.

1994: Prolog. At the time that Prolog was being taught to me, I was wondering what was stranger: this idiotic language, or the fact that it was being taught for credit. I knew there was no way I was ever going to use this language once I found a job.

1994: C++. Is there anyone who learned that didn't learn C++ inheritance by example of circle class being derived from point class? :) C++ promised a whole new world of Object-Oriented Programming bliss, but I think I just ended up with hundreds more lines of code.

1995: Java. I decided to teach myself Java, because although none of the classes at university had adopted it yet I thought it would be an important language in the future.

1996: Visual Basic (VBA). Not purely Visual Basic, but VBA - Visual Basic for Applications. Namely, Microsoft Excel. At first I deplored this language because it seemed to go back on years of learning "the right way of doing things". Later I learned to do some very powerful things in Excel that I probably never could have done outside of it. So I appreciated it for what it was, and for years after that I had side jobs programming Excel macros for small businesses.

1998: Tango. This is the first year I started working as a university employee, and so started getting paid to program. Tango was an integrated development environment that was years ahead of its time and way ahead of its competition. Unfortunately, the technology was purchased by a company that killed it.

1998: PHP. PHP 3.0 was a thing of beauty, considering the alternatives that existed at the time. I installed it on a server at home, and was compiling in copious quantities of optional modules like crazy. Generating dynamic images and charts on the fly seemed magical back then.

1999: SQL. I started using SQL against MySQL as part of the LAMP stack. I also dove deeper into C programming and Linux system programming.

1999: MIPS Assembly. I was a sessional lecturer for three years, teaching second year university students how to program in the MIPS assembly language.

2000: Perl. My introduction to Perl was on RedHat Linux. I fell in love with this language right away! Regular expressions are still a thing of programming beauty.

2001: Javascript. The web sites that I was developing at the university started getting more complicated, and client-side form validation was the new thing that everyone was rushing to do.

2001: Java. I went back to Java and started programming games that could be run as applets on web sites. This was very fun. I recently checked, and some of those games still work today, although they aren't online any more.

2003: C and VAX Batch Files. I quit my job as a lower-level IT Manager, and moved to a new position in central IT at the University. I was then introduced to the inner workings of a home-built Student Information System. It was a pretty solid system, but some of the tools used were showing their age.

2004: PL/SQL. I was introduced to functions, procedures, packages and triggers on Oracle 8. This was a whole new world of database power not available in plain old SQL.

2005: Pro-C against Oracle 9i. Yes, this was a throw-back. I was making patches to code that was originally created by the software vendor in 1983 and survived through many upgrades.

2005: Actionscript / Flash. I took the plunge and invested some time taking three classes on Macromedia Flash. Although Actionscript itself was easy to learn, the whole concept of Flash was quite foreign compared to what I was used to. It still seems like a very different programming world.

2006: Cold Fusion. I think this is the first programming language that made me throw up a little every time I had to use it. After a while I stopped trying, and anything given to me in Cold Fusion got re-written into some other language before I was done with it.

2009: Objective-C. Or at least I tried to get into it. The syntax of this language leaves something to be desired for me, so although I understand it, I can't claim to be proficient at all. I tried to learn Objective-C in order to develop iPhone applications, but then discovered Titanium.

2010: Javascript. My development of iPhone applications really gained momentum after downloading Appcelerator Titanium. This product has made programming exciting and rewarding again!

2010: Scratch. One of my co-workers who also has young children told me about Scratch, so I downloaded it and started playing with it with my two daughters. It's quite fun! It reminds me of Flash, but with a paradigm that's much easier to understand (for young and old alike).

2011: Ruby. In the true spirit of cross-platform development, not only am I now developing for multiple mobile platforms, but I'm using multiple cross-platform tools (Rhomobile Rhodes being the latest addition). Masochistic? Most likely.