Matthew Walton’s Blog

Lots of people don’t blog often enough for my liking. Alex does most of the time, but Alex doesn’t and neither do Graham and Chris and Carl and most certainly not Ross or Rob. Blogs are an excellent (supposedly) way to keep up with what people are doing, and stave off the help-me-I’m-sinking-in-Cambridge kind of feeling I get sometimes.

Not that I’d feel any better in Nottingham perhaps, but at least I’d be able to go to Wagamama whenever I wanted. Come on, build one in Cambridge! Must go to Dojo, see if it’s an acceptable substitute.

Back to people who don’t blog often enough: I don’t either. Nigel has reminded me of this on numerous occasions, but since he doesn’t blog at all her’s perhaps not in so much of a position to comment. I know he could have a blog if he wanted one, I’ll even host it here for you if your server’s too full for it, Nigel. I’m sure nobody else on wonky would mind.

So I need to get back into blogging more often. Perhaps that’s a good thing to do just about now, I don’t know.

The big problem at the moment is that while the world’s coming rapidly out into springtime (unless you’re in the southern hemisphere of course), the weather’s warming up, I can cycle to work without a coat on increasingly often, the tulips are coming out and generally things are great. Springtime is a good time, probably better than summer, because in the summer things tend to get a bit lazy and slow and far too hot.

But while all this is going on, Nana’s become extremely ill, and Mum’s spending a lot of time with her instead of going to work, and it’s really rather concerning. If the worst happens, are we going to remember this spring every spring from now on? I have to put my trust in the doctors and the nurses and that they’ll pull her into hospital if they think she needs it, and sort her out. I know perhaps it doesn’t qualify as extremely ill if you manage to avoid going to hospital, but she thinks she’s extremely ill, which is perhaps just as bad, and she’s been on the verge of being admitted a couple of times now.

May the Goddess grant that it’s not Nana’s time yet.

Work proceeds as normal, although things feel a little different because we’re actively trying to hire another developer. When we get a fourth member of the development team in it’s going to be very strange indeed, as Jim and I won’t be the newest developers anymore, but it’s likely that the person they do hire will have a lot more experience than either of us. Still, hopefully whoever it is will settle in and we’ll get used to each other and start churning out some excellent code. There’s a lot of good stuff waiting to be written, if the company can last long enough to give us a chance to write it. Another developer perhaps gives me the chance to work on some more ‘cool stuff’ but then again it’s entirely possible the cool stuff will go to someone else and I’ll get stuck with the drudgery.

Still get paid though, so ultimately it’s not that important. Doing cool stuff all the time is something of a pipe dream even under the best of circumstances — I doubt even the programmers at Google get to work on whizz-bang new features all the time. Probably because they have to keep defending their search algorithm against TrackBack and other such bloggy things.

Hear that, blog? We’re breaking Google. Should that be illegal?

As for programming cool stuff, ultimately I can do that at home anyway. I don’t get paid for it there, except in satisfaction, and that warm glow that comes when someone actually downloads and tries one of my Open Source projects — which basically means Towel at the moment. I’m planning a new version of GuidePost, but we’ll see how that all goes. I may use it as an excuse to learn Python and write it using PyGTK, which should alleviate most of the portability headaches that will result from writing it in C++ with gtkmm, which would be good but given my core audience is on Windows, perhaps misguided. GTK+ on Windows isn’t the best toolkit there ever was, but it’s good enough and I’m familiar with it, and the TextView control should provide me with the necessary functionality for a new GuidePost without all that much pain really. Fingers crossed! I’m a much better programmer than I was when I wrote the last version, so with any luck the new version will be a lot better. And it won’t be written in Delphi this time. Capable enough language I suppose, but not really up to scratch when it comes up against C++ or Perl or Python.

Should’ve learned Perl years ago. Someone gimme a Perl 6 compiler!

Hell, someone gimme a Perl 6 language definition.

Oh, Germany photos are up, go look. I see the view count on the gallery is very low, go make it bigger. Just to help you along, I’m going to stop writing now.