Tuesday, January 27th, 2015

	What a strange week!
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This last week since my previous phlog post surely was a weird one.
 
Everything started, when I was browsing my gopher bookmarks and
discovered that echosa phlog[1] is back to some activity. The format 
of the content was however broken - every line was missing some
characters on the end. I contacted the author to let him know about
this problem and after a few e-mails topic changed to the Pebble 
smartwatch, we both have. That's how I found CloudPebble[2], 
a complete online development environment for Pebble, which includes 
editor, compiler and emulator. 
 
I decided to try it and after about 30 minutes I had my first working
app written in JavaScript, that gets GPS position from a smartphone,
calculates Maidenhead locator square and displays it with current
time on Pebble screen. It's just a fancier "hello world", but it will
come handy on my trips with CB and PMR446 radio and probably even
proper HAMs could have use for it. 
   
The weird thing about this is, that I always hated JavaScript (and 
thus online development tools), because I saw it as the thing that 
ruined the web. Now I use development environment written in JS
and even write JS code myself and to be honest - it's kind of fun, 
not to mention probably the only way I get myself developing 
anything for Pebble, because I haven't found time to install native
SDK in last ten months since I bought it.
    
Next weird thing was triggered with Dropbox announcing end of support
for Mac computers with OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (that's for all PowerPC
machines). I didn't expect this, because they made the client 10.4+
since the very beginning. After almost five years I depend on
Dropbox quite a lot, I even have recently bought a camera, that can
upload directly to Dropbox over WiFi. I decided to write an open
letter[3] to the Dropbox team, but since I knew from the very 
beginning that trying to convince big company to support handful
of PowerMac uses is futile, I started to learn Dropbox API and
Python.

The weird thing originates in the fact, that I hate Python. Almost
all really bad I ever met were written in Python. Python has this 
"syntactically significant whitespace", which makes grown Perl 
programmer cry and should be punished severely. But there is
an official Python Dropbox SDK, which doesn't exist for Perl and 
even though the language is as bad as I have always feared,
development is pretty fast and a replacement for Dropbox client
should be possible, even if only a simple one with just subset
of original functionality.

That's for me two new programming languages and two new APIs. Simply
too much interaction with modern IT, something I'm trying to avoid
whenever possible. But - as I said - this week was a strange one.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/echosa/
[2] http://cloudpebble.net
[3] http://tinyurl.com/dropbox-letter