Friday 2 August 2013

A look back to the future

Anyone interested in the future of programming should watch this great talk: http://vimeo.com/71278954

Phil sent me the link and has also commented on the talk here: http://smartdisorganized.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/the-future-of-programming.html

I agree with some of Phil's comments about why we've ended up where we are, but I also think Bret's point was meant to be less specific and more inspirational. It was more of a wake up call to try something new and it certainly encourages me to keep going with this project.

Thursday 30 May 2013

Simple multi-platform build

Over the last couple of weeks I've finally been able to get back into the code that I had developed over two years ago.

One of the first tasks has been to connect the rudimentary SSP Agent code to some kind of cross platform UI toolkit so that I can start building a UI to help test the on-going development. In the end I've picked wxWidgets as it seems to have the basic features I require without making the build process too complex. The other obvious contender was of course Qt which is very tempting, but involves a more complex build process. Later down the line, when I get to the stage of building the UI engine for Semprola itself, then maybe I will need to revisit this decision, but for now wxWidgets is totally adequate.

I have also extended my Eclipse based build setup so that I can compile for Linux (Ubuntu 12) as well as for Win32 and Mac OS X from the same codebase. Just today I have successfully completed a very basic build of the SSPAgent as a static library linked into extremely simple wxWidgets application on all three platforms.

So, now I'm finally ready to start some new development of the actual codebase!

Thursday 17 January 2013

It's been two years!

Wow, I've just seen that it was exactly two years ago that I last posted anything to this blog. This year my focus will be shifting back to this research project. Main main goal for 2013 is to release an early beta of Semprola that other researchers could play with. I'll post more about my plans as they develop.