Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Working without an office has been slowing me down (too many distractions at home) so for the last few months I have been searching for an office. Well, the search is over, I finally found an office for Irie Tools Limited and moved in at the beginning of this month (i.e. May 2009). The office is a room that I lease from an Engineering Company (Foreman, Chung & Sykes Consultants Limited) in New Kingston. I’ll post some pictures when the company sign goes up.

The address of the office is as follows:

7A Barbados Avenue, Kingston 5, Jamaica

Consider this your invitation to drop by if you are ever in the area.

Quick update: Irie Pascal 3.0 will support Unicode!

So what is Unicode anyway? Well, here is a paragraph from the Unicode home page that can serve as a short definition.

The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages.

You will probably agree that being able to “interchange, process, and display written text from diverse languages”, sounds like a good thing, but you probably don’t want to have to worry to much about the details. So the plan is for Irie Pascal 3.0 to follow the example of other programming languages like Java and C#, and use Unicode internally for all strings and convert as necessary when reading strings in or writing strings out.

The Benefits

The benefits of supporting Unicode are:

• Easy processing of XML and other text on the web.
• Programs can be written in any language (you will be able to use any language for variable names, comments, etc).

Learning about Unicode

I spent the last few days at the Unicode home page (the official source of information about the Unicode standard) learning about Unicode. What did I learn? Well, Unicode is complex, and the Unicode standard was not written to be easy to read or understand. I did learn enough to know that supporting Unicode is going to be both interesting and challenging.

I Ordered a book (about Unicode) from Amazon

I ordered this book, Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer’s Guide to the Encoding Standard, from Amazon. It looks good, hopefully it will be helpful.

The recent takeover attempt by Microsoft seems to have really scared the living daylights out of Yahoo, they are introducing new products as fast as they can.

Yahoo just introduced BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) which, as the name suggests, allows you to build a customized search product on top of the Yahoo search platform. Check out this TechCrunch article, Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS, for more information.

This is the third and final post in a series that previews what is planned for Irie Pascal 3.0 (the next major release of Irie Pascal). This final post previews my plans to release the source code to some parts of Irie Pascal 3.0.

Some parts of Irie Pascal 3.0 will be released as open source and others will be kept proprietary. The idea is to release the source code for those parts of Irie Pascal 3.0 where it is obvious that this is likely to benefit both the customer and Irie Tools. For example, the source code for the application run-time engine will almost certainly be released. Why? This allows customers and third-parties to port the run-time to many different operating system platforms without having to wait for me to do it. The customers will benefit from having more choices in operating system platforms to run their applications, and I get to focus on improving Irie Pascal 3.0.

The earlier posts in this series are

1. Irie Pascal 3.0: Pascal programming for the web.
2. Irie Pascal 3.0: Operating systerms supported.

This is the second in a series of very short posts giving a preview of what is planned for Irie Pascal 3.0 (the next major release of Irie Pascal). This post’s reveals which operating systems will be supported.

The dominance of Windows on the desktop made it an easy choice as the operating system to support for developing web applications. The only question was which versions of Windows to support. The plan is to support the three latest desktop versions, Vista, XP, and 2000.

The choice of the operating system to support for deploying the web applications, once they are built was more difficult, and came down to the following:

1. Windows Server (2003 and 2008)
2. Linux (Red Hat Enterprise)
3. FreeBSD

The decision that Apache will be the only supported web server pretty much eliminated Windows, so the choice was then between Linux and FreeBSD. Right now the plan is to support only Linux (probably only Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5).

This is the first in a series of very short posts giving a preview of what is planned for Irie Pascal 3.0 (the next major release of Irie Pascal). This post’s preview is that “it’s all abot the web”.

All about the Web and nothing but the Web

Irie Pascal 3.0 will be all about programming for the web and nothing else, while it may be possible to write non-web programs in Irie Pascal 3.0 this will not be supported. The idea is that it will be possible, and even easy in many cases, to write real production quality web programs using the Pascal programming language.

Today, I take a detour into politics. I read this story in today’s Gleaner, J-FLAG not supporting Canadian ultimatum, but the issue doesn’t affect me directly and this blog is not about politics, so didn’t occur to me to write about this issue here. After I read this post, Canada’s Queer Ultimatum, I was about to comment on it, but then it occured to me that this is a good opportunity to talk about wider issues of justice in Jamaica. Are our laws just or unjust?

First off, let me say that I find it very irritating that people from abroad could even think that they can demand that we change our laws or run public service campaigns. Besides, a public service campaign to change people attitudes on this issue:

• Would not work (and may even backfire and make things worse for homosexuals).
• Would be political suicide for any government (you usually don’t get anywhere by demanding that people to commit suicide).

However, putting my personal irritation aside, the really important issue is. Are our laws against buggery, just? Is it justice to imprision consenting adults for what they do in private? If the answer is, yes, then we should not allow threats to change our position, but if the answer is, no, then we should not wait for foreigners to demand we change our laws? I regularly see Jamaicans on TV chanting, “we want justice”, but of course, the chant is always about justice for themselves. I don’t see many people (Jamaicans for Justice is a notable exception) concerned about justice for other people. I strongly believe that the best way, to protect my rights, is to protect the rights of everyone.

How do we protect the rights of everyone? The first step, it seems to me, is to make sure that our laws are just, but what makes a law just or unjust? In my opinion, justice must be based on principles, and not preferences. We can debate what these principles should be, but to me, there is no question that the principles come first, and that the law must be based on the principles. Luckily people are very good at coming up with just principles. My personal favourite is

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

The problem is that people are not very good at living by their principles, especiecially when these principles become inconvenient.
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I just found out about a fascinating website, thanks to this post, Chris Anderson Explains TED on Jim Grisanzio’s blog. The website is for a conference called TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), which it described as follows:

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

I spent the last few hours, on the website, watching videos of some of the talks at the conference, and I was amazed. The speakers, giving the talks, obviously believe strongly in what they are doing and it shows. I highly recommend that you check out the TED website for yourself. My favourite talk so far is this one, Patrick Awuah: Educating a new generation of African leaders. This talk changed the way I think.

Amazon really irritated me when they introduced the Kindle (their new eBook reader). There I was all ready to buy a Kindle (practically drooling if you want to know the truth), only to discover that the only way to buy books for the Kindle is to use Sprint’s national high-speed (EVDO) data network. How am I supposed to do that when I live in Jamaica? It just seems like an unnecessary slap in the face. Why not allow the use of a Wi-Fi network as an option?

Anyway, I stopped buying books from Amazon after that, and not just because I am irritated with them but more importantly because I don’t want to buy the same book twice. I figure that when I eventually get an eBook reader, I am probably going to end up buying eBook versions of many of the books I already own.

Well, today, I finally broke down and bought some more books from Amazon, see the list below:

• Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand
• Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works (Interactive Technologies) (Interactive Technologies)
• Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites
• The Copywriter’s Handbook, Third Edition: A Step-By-Step Guide To Writing Copy That Sells

They should come in handy when I do the (long overdue) redesign of the Irie Tools website.

I was looking through the statistics for this blog today, and I noticed that someone had done a search on Google for “Irie Pascal” vista. So now seems to be a good time to apologize for the delay in updating Irie Pascal, and explain a little bit about why this is taking so long.

The main reason for the delay in updating Irie Pascal is that I have been working on a consulting project for the past few months. I am hoping to finish most of the work for this project by the end of this month (there is likely to be remaining work with integration, customer acceptance testing, and documentation for a few weeks after that). However the actual update to Irie Pascal should not take more than about two weeks, once I start.

Let me apologize again for the delay and ask everyone to bear with me a little longer.

See these earlier posts, Updating Irie Pascal for Windows Vista and Update: Irie Pascal, for more information about the coming update to Irie Pascal.