So, my code is bad right?

I thought I’d give a short demo of how to get serial output from a Raspberry Pi, as I just did for mine. This is useful for boot failures before you start getting graphical output as usually the UART is initialised before the OS even starts booting (this is true for other boards, but I have no idea if this is true for the funky bootloader magic that the Pi has). More importantly for me, serial is also easier to work with, as it means I don’t need to unplug the keyboard/screen from my development machine in order to interact with the Pi. This way the whole board operates with just 2 wires plugged in, both of which I can feed back to my development machine.

Note!
If you choose to follow these instructions, you can risk breaking your board – don’t do it unless you’re confident you understand what is going on, and the risks associated with it. I take no responsibility if you damage your Raspberry Pi in any way after following my instructions. This is not best practice, it’s my personal hack so if something I say or show looks dumb, apply common sense and don’t do it!

That aside, lets get down to business!

All you need is the following:

• Your Raspberry Pi
• An SD card with a valid OS image on it.
• A micro USB cable or standard power supply.
• A 3.3v FTDI board such as this one: (link)
• 3 wires to connect the FTDI board to the GPIO header on the RPi.
• Some needle-nosed pliars.
• A mini USB cable for the FTDI board
• A serial client such as putty: (link)

Ok, so you do actually need quite a lot, but never fear, it’s actually rather simple. The first thing you want to do is not kill your Pi. Make sure your FTDI board is a 3.3v version, or you’ll probably regret it. The second thing which you’ll need to watch out for is that the wires connecting the GPIO header to the FTDI Basic board don’t touch each other (or any other GPIO header pins). This is a simple hacky way to get the serial up and running, if you intend to use it long term, you may want to consider a less risky way of connecting the FTDI board to your GPIO header. Accidentally shifting it and allowing wires to cross might break your board, so I only recommend it for short term use, and in an environment where the board wont be at risk of being moved much at all.

So, with those caveats taken to heart, take a look at this page to get information on the GPIO header: (link). What we’re really interested in here are the GND, UART0_TXD and UART0_RXD pins. Also named 0V, TX and RX on that page. Tx and Rx stand for “Transmit” and “Receive” respectively, it’s important to note that “Tx” on the FTDI board should be connected to the “Rx” on the Raspberry Pi, and that logically “Rx” on the FTDI board should be wired up to the “Tx” pin on the Pi. (While GND keeps it simple and just connects to GND.)

Leave your Raspberry Pi unplugged from your power supply for now. Take your wires, and strip insulation from both ends. Try to limit how much you strip from the ends you’ll attach to the Pi, for obvious reasons. Leave enough that you can grip the end of the wire in your needle-nosed pliars and wrap the wire around the end. This will leave you a nice loop of wire to slide onto the GPIO header. Leave the end that is to attach to the FTDI board straight. You can tighten the loops in the GPIO end of the wires to prevent them touching other GPIO pins by squeezing them a little bit with your pliars. You should ensure that the wires sit tightly on the GPIO headers so you get a nice stable serial connection to your development machine. At the end of all of this, you should have something remotely resembling this:

You can then plug the straight ends into the correct location on the FTDI board, remembering to match Tx->Rx and Rx->Tx. Which should look a little bit like this:

It should then be possible to plug in the Mini USB cable and link it to your development machine, in my case this was running on Windows 7, and it promptly recognised the USB Serial device and installed the driver:

I was then able to connect putty, setting the baud rate to 115200 and turning off flow control (and leaving all the other settings at default). In my case, the Serial port attached itself to the Windows “COM3″, so I told putty to connect to that. In Linux this will possibly attach to /dev/ttyUSBX. Regardless, putty should be able to open the serial connection without the Pi being powered on, and it should wait patiently for some data to start being sent down that link.

You should then be able to insert your SD card (if it’s not already in the board!) and power it on. If you haven’t short circuited anything, it should spring to life, and text should start being spewed out by putty. Once the device finishes booting, you should be able to use the keyboard on your devlopment machine to log into the board and start interacting with it.

Enjoy :)

And since the block had tabs that held the content, it needed to be hidden.

Edited: To clear up any confusion (there has been some on Twitter), the majority of this client’s userbase is anonymous. In fact, the only people with accounts are the admins. Therefore, it’s not possible just to set the block to be visible to only authenticated users. The block itself has tabbed information – it holds most of the information on the page… so while it’s generated in node/xx/edit, it’s not actually the node, it’s a block outside of the node … and yeah, basically this was the only solution :)

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I spent an hour trying to work out how the heck to go about it, but couldn’t find any decent reference point online anywhere. So here I am – Drupal saviour to the rescue – woo!

First things first: set up the block

My first port of call was to check the standard block visibility settings. Unfortunately, “show only on published content” wasn’t one of the options. So under the “Show block on specific pages” option, I picked “Pages on which this PHP code returns TRUE”.

Excellent, time to start coding :)

The next thing was to think about what the code was going to do. Pretty straightforward: check the user ID to see if the user is anonymous, then check the node status to see if it’s published. So straight away, I wrote this:

<?php
if (($user->uid == 0) && ($node->status == "0")) {
  return false;
} else {
  return true;
} ?>

Ta-da! And done! …right? Apparently not. That didn’t work for me. So on to the next step.

Grab your global

I’d forgotten a key bit of code:

global $user;

Which was kinda stupid if I’m honest. How I didn’t realise I’d missed that sooner, I don’t know. Let’s just blame the, um, weather or something.

That gets slipped in after the opening <?php bracket.

But still no dice: it really didn’t want to work. Cue half an hour of scratching my head, trying to work out why the heck my if statement wasn’t working, why the block was either not showing at all for users who were logged out regardless of published status, and so on and so on. Then all of a sudden I had a lightbulb moment. I’d grabbed the $user variable … but where was $node->status coming from? …D’OH!

Add the node information

It all seems so obvious now!!

$node = node_load(arg(1));

So use Drupal’s node_load() function, use the first argument from the URL, and we’re golden.

Just for reference, the URL runs like this:
www.example.com/node/111
So it grabbed 111, which is the node ID.

Now the code knew to look for the status of the current node, and then all of a sudden, the code started to work. Excellent! That got slipped in after global $user; and I was away.

All together now

<?php
global $user;
$node = node_load(arg(1));
if (($user->uid == 0) && ($node->status == "0")) {
  return false;
} else {
  return true;
} ?>

And there I had it: a nice tidy little piece of code to hide a block on a page if it was unpublished and the user was logged out. Whew.

Yesterday Opera announced it will begin supporting -webkit- prefixes. Excellent! Actually, according to most of the web, not so excellent. Personally I’m sort of on the fence about the whole thing.

Let me start by saying I don’t like using vendor prefixes. They are messy, they vary from vendor to vendor, and they just add unnecessary bulk to a CSS document. That being said, I do appreciate why they exist – so that different browsers can implement different versions of what may be a working draft of a specification. And while I don’t like using them, in the interest of a decent browsing experience and making the web available to all, I’ll always include both the prefixed and the non-prefixed versions of rules.

For example, for the new iteration of the Herbal Jazz layout, I’ve got transitions on the links. You hover, they fade to the new colour, you leave and they fade back. Pretty! So how would I go about doing that?

a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:focus {
    -webkit-transition: all 0.15s linear;
       -moz-transition: all 0.15s linear;
        -ms-transition: all 0.15s linear;
         -o-transition: all 0.15s linear;
            transition: all 0.15s linear;
}

So that’s a prefix for Webkit, one for Mozilla, one for MSIE and one for Opera, as well as the non-prefixed version for when vendors drop support for the prefixed versions, as Firefox has recently for border-radius. (It has in a recent version of Nightly, anyway. That caught me out and made me realise how sloppy my coding was even a few months ago, when I included only prefixed versions of rules. BAD Sophie! BAD!)

Now raise your hand if you’ve ever visited a site in Firefox, or on IE or Opera for that matter, and something that you know should transition prettily – because it did when you took a look on your iPhone – doesn’t, because some designer or another has only included the -webkit- prefix. Hell, it doesn’t have to be a transition. It can be a gradient background, or a transition, or the text has vanished because they set the colour to transparent with a text-outline, or …

Yeah … it’s probably happened to all of us.

So now Opera are taking things into their own hands and, rather than making a stand and removing the vendor prefix altogether – which is something that a lot of designers are vying for – they’re adding support for -webkit- prefixed rules. Better? Or worse?

Why not just get rid of vendor prefixes?

Simple! Perhaps the best case I can think of off the top of my head is CSS3 gradients. Let’s take a look at some code generated by the Colorzilla CSS Gradient Generator:

.gradient {
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1e5799), color-stop(100%,#7db9e8)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
    background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1e5799 0%,#7db9e8 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
    background: linear-gradient(top,  #1e5799 0%,#7db9e8 100%); /* W3C */
}

I’ve removed the superfluous declarations for now, and left it with the -webkit- and non-prefixed versions.

And would you look at that: the webkit syntax changed. To start with, it was different from the specification draft. Now, what happens if everyone was implementing the same rule – just linear-gradient – but each browser interpreted it differently? What would happen if the spec suddenly changed and everyone was doin’ it wrong? It would get awfully confusing, trying to debug why your gradient looks wonderful in webkit but goes backwards in gecko, even though the code is identical.

Vendor prefixes are annoying and a pain in the arse but they make life that little bit easier until features become standardised. And until all vendors group together and start working on moving the web forward as a group (yes, MSIE, I’m looking at you too), we’ren ot going to have a chance nor a reason to get rid of vendor prefixes.

So why support -webkit-, not -moz-?

Let’s have another hands up. Who has an iPad, or an iPhone? Who uses Safari on those devices? Okay, now who uses Chrome on a desktop? Or how about Safari on your iMac or Macbook (because nobody, nobody in their right mind would use Safari on a Windows machine)?

Yeah, that probably covers most of you. Now hands up who uses Firefox (that’s me), or how many use IE (hopefully none of you)?

And a final question: who only implements -webkit- prefixes?

Again, that probably covers a fair few of you. You might throw in a -moz- prefix too, just for giggles or so you can say it’s cross-browser and futureproof (^TM), or perhaps you genuinely looked up the rule on Caniuse.com and found that Firefox supports it. But I bet a lot of people out there will just do the -webkit- version because you run Chrome and you’ll sort out the other browsers if people complain. Perhaps.

Really and truly, it makes sense for Opera to implement -webkit- support rather than -moz- support, because of the sheer volume of people who automatically, without thinking, add a -webkit- prefix where appropriate. Why add -moz- support when Firefox is, in this day and age, almost a secondary browser to Chrome (as much as it pains me to say it)?

But they won’t get more users!

No, they won’t get more users, but those users they have – as Bruce Lawson said in his reply on the .net article, all quarter of a billion of them – will be privy to a better browsing experience. Things that are possible in Opera already will start appearing: gradients, transitions and so on … they’re all possible, with an -o- prefix, but that prefix gets overlooked. Now, if someone’s already got a -webkit- prefix, it’ll automatically display.

And honestly, how can that be bad? You can argue that it’s making the web a more closed place, but really it’s expanding the enclosed features of the web to a wider audience. You can argue that vendor prefixes are bad but we can’t do much about that until, like I said above, the vendors all start to work together. Perhaps you can argue that Opera should have just dropped their vendor prefix but would that really have solved the problem? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.

I’ll end this by saying that I don’t use Opera, except for testing, but it’s one of the loveliest alternatives to Firefox that I have on my computer. It is a little backwards, but it’s got a wonderful interface, it’s fast, it’s open, and the inspector is far nicer than even Firefox’s built-in inspector. I use Opera Mini on my phone, too – it’s the best browser I’ve found for mobile browsing. And now, when I do use either browser, I’ll have more of the web open to me. That’s surely a good thing. Right?

Further reading

Opera’s supporting of the -webkit- prefix by Niall McMahon

If you think Firefox is better than Chrome or Safari, there’s something wrong with you.
— Luke Jones (@lukejonesme) April 10, 2012

I shan’t bother with the comments that followed, but needless to say I was a bit hacked off by this tweet. My initial reply was lighthearted though, a simple jab to point out that I am a Firefox user, but the conversation sort of slithered into the realm of “my browser is better than yours and let me count the ways”.

While there were a few people who “defended” my corner (that there are reasons to use Firefox), Luke had a pretty strong stance that Firefox users were somehow lesser beings than those who use Chrome or Safari. Perhaps that’s not how he felt, but that’s how he came across to me, at least. For the most part I decided to stay out of it after that, while accusations and swear words (from obvious sources) were flung left and right, but it still made me wonder. Perhaps I’m being bold in making this comparison, but really: in a society where racial tolerance is encouraged, in a community where it doesn’t make a difference if you’re gay or straight, why are we still so prejudiced over a user’s choice of browser? What happened to tolerance?

Perhaps I’m just being overdramatic, but it really does make me wonder.

But it’s okay, I reasoned, because I had one thing up on them all. I had this one thing that allows me to sit high and mighty above everyone else and grin down at them in a superior way like some sort of smug cat thing. Yes, for once I was secure in my knowledge that I am better than all of them. And why is that?

Well, it’s simple. I have my browser, and my browser is the best browser out there.

Gasp!

No, honestly, it’s true. I use Firefox, currently version 11.0, and I use a few addons. At home I’m using Firefox Nightly, and on my laptop I’m running Firefox 10.0 because I have yet to upgrade to 11. I use Firebug and ColorZilla, Adblock Plus and Tab Mix Plus. I use Stylish for Tumblr and have the Web Developer’s toolbar installed. I also have a Persona installed to make my browser look pretty, and I use XMarks to sync my passwords from one machine to the next. I have an up-to-date version of Flash and Java and even Adobe Reader installed, and I use Greasemonkey scripts to make life easier on certain sites I play.

I’ve used Firefox since it was version 1.0, when Internet Explorer contracted a virus of some sort and kept popping up ads, rendering the internet unusable. I used Netscape for a very short amount of time before it was discontinued, switched to Flock at the recommendation of Netscape, then moved to Firefox from there. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.

From hideous creations like this (admittedly a screenshot from my friend, but using the same browser I was at the time):

To the slightly better-looking things I create today, I’ve stuck with Firefox. Through the ups and downs and through its memory leaks and bugs, I’ve stuck with Firefox. I’ve grown up with the browser, and as I’ve discovered new and useful tools for web design and development, I’ve added them to my standard list of “things to install when I update my OS”.

Now there’s Chrome, which is a lovely browser and useful to test in. Recently it’s had a few bugs but it’s okay. I don’t like the inspector, though. It took a long time for me to actually start using Firebug, and now I’m using that I don’t want to use something else. Chrome’s inspector is annoying and Opera’s is worse. I avoid using IE’s at all costs. Firebug does what I want it to do, and it does it well. I don’t even use Firefox’s built-in one (I disabled that entirely!).

Chrome is fast, but I’m a patient person and I accept that Firefox doesn’t load at the snap of my fingers. I don’t mind that. I can tolerate it. It’s not a perfect piece of software. Safari on Windows is unusable. I can’t even scroll using the wheel of my mouse. I refuse to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary. Opera is nice enough, and in some respects it’s nicer than Firefox, but I just can’t get to grips with it. The toolbars and context menus are backwards. I’m used to Firefox. I laugh at IE. Simple as that. IE has improved a lot but it is still awful.

My browser is the best, and it’s better than all of yours because it is my browser.

And I’ll thank you all to remember that next time you accuse mine of being inferior.

P.S. I apologise for not blogging a lot recently. I wrote a 2,000-word blog post a few weeks ago that somehow got wiped by WordPress. It was a post that was close to my heart, and I was discouraged from writing for a while. I hope I can change that soon.

It seems right now I’m just moving backwards.

Before I go any further, a couple of notes:

• I’m just on placement. I work in a small development agency and we don’t get huge clients coming to us. A lot of our client base is made up of charities.
• I don’t do the design work. We hire someone else to do the designs, we just code them and add functionality. Most of the time, I’m the one coding the design and making it look nice (effectively online prototyping).

Right, so bearing that in mind: one of our clients at the moment wants certain things in their navigation. That deviates from the pretty good design that we had given them originally. In itself, that’s fine. But the way they wanted to change it was not so fine. It meant that they’d have five areas of navigation on a single page – and on some pages, six (depending on the user context menu). In order to make space for it, they chose to remove the search box. Great.

I made it very clear that I wasn’t comfortable with doing that,  and my colleague made it very clear to them that I wasn’t comfortable with doing that, but the client made it very clear to us that that was how she wanted it done. So that’s how it’s been done. Because that’s how she uses the web, so that’s how other people will, too.

Over the last few months there’s been a lot of discussion about responsive web design and whether or not that’s the “right” way to do things. I saw quite a good tweet the other day that summed up my feelings on the matter. Unfortunately it seems I was stupid and didn’t favourite it, but it ran something along the lines of “what sort of industry is this if people who are new to it immediately get told that they’re doing things ‘wrong’?”

And that’s fair. There shouldn’t be a right and wrong way of doing things on the web. You shouldn’t need to have arguments about vendor prefixes or responsive web design or whether PCs or Macs are better. (PCs, obviously.) As much as I hate to admit it, I think that article in the Guardian a couple of days ago was a pretty good one. Not that I agree with him by any means (I think graphic designers make the web a beautiful place to be), but the reason I use to the web is to find out about things – to find information. There are few sites out there that are designed for the sake of being designed.

So information, if it’s what you’re looking for, should be prevalent on a website. Make it look pretty, by all means – after all, the example cited in the above article was just awful – and make it functional. Code it well, and you won’t have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. But then add your quirks to the top. Then add your vendor prefixes and your responsive stuff and your JavaScript fallbacks for browsers that don’t support them. Get your information across first, get the basic design right, then play around with it.

That’s why I’m not enjoying working for this particular client. They seem to be forgetting that users are going to come to their site looking for information, and their five areas of navigation and lack of a search bar is going to make it extraordinarily difficult for them. And that’s not even going into their convoluted submenu system.

So where should you use those pretty things you’ve picked up? Well, where you can show them off. If it’s not client work, or if it’s not essential to the work at hand… then go ahead and play. Portfolios, app pages (of your own creation, not for a client), CMS pages and so on… in my opinion, that’s where you ought to be playing. Of course, I’ll still whimper if you tell me it’s webkit-only (because I use Firefox), but there’s your playground, there’s where you can move the web forward. It won’t affect your clients’ websites. If you’re one of those lucky people (those so-called “elitists” … you know, those people who have worked hard to get where they are), then go ahead and charge clients for the privelege of having those things on their sites, too. Bigger clients should get those choices.

But a simple charity website doesn’t need those things.

So if the client doesn’t need them, should you spend the time faffing over them? No, I don’t think so. Lower-end clients aren’t going to ask for a mobile-first design that has glowing borders on the search box that has an AJAX dropdown because lower-end clients quite often don’t know what any of that stuff means. They just want to log onto a website and use it and leave again. Remember, these people don’t even know which version of Internet Explorer they’re using.

Finally, a note to myself: draft your posts before you start writing them, Sophie, because this was all over the place and didn’t make much sense. Also, get more sleep if you’re going to try blogging. That really doesn’t help.

When I say it’s old, I mean it’s relatively old. One of my harddrives is nearly a decade old, and the other gave out during my first year of uni. I only upgraded from DDR2 to DDR3 RAM sticks just before Christmas last year (or was it just after we came back? Dates get a bit fuzzy sometimes). None of the components are spectacular, although I do have Richard’s old motherboard, graphics card and CPU, which he bought for gaming only three years ago. They’re not great, but they’re not fabulous. But they serve my purpose.

Unfortunately, one of the things I’ve always had to rely on with this piece of – well, I say junk lovingly – was the network adapter. Yep: I’m oldschool and I use a cable to connect to the internet. Why? Twofold:

1. I don’t trust wifi. It can be flaky. It doesn’t always work. Besides, a cable is faster. It, like, goes straight through and doesn’t get intercepted by the air, or something. (I’m not a huge techy person, can you tell?)
2. I don’t trust our wifi.

I think it’s that second point that’s the most valid here. Like a lot of people in Bristol, we’re on Virgin, and we’re supposed to get 50Mb connections. Again, I don’t know the details, I’m not hugely techy. But I do know we don’t get those speeds, that we aren’t expected to get those speeds (because we can only get “up to” 50Mb), and that neither my laptop, mobile and desktop, when connected over wifi, can get anywhere near the speeds we’re meant to get.

I know that the wifi just drops out spontaneously. I know that the speeds are dreadful and if I so much as breathe in the direction of my wireless adapter then I can forget about connecting to the internet for a week.

It didn’t seem so bad when my network adapter gave out on Thursday, because Richard brought a wireless adapter around in its stead. That worked for a short while, on Friday evening, but then it stopped recognising the network altogether. Possibly the card’s fault? At least, that’s what I assume, since I can still connect to the internet over wifi on my laptop, even if it is a tenuous link.

So I’ve had to resort to using my laptop for a while. I’m lucky enough that my beautiful, darling Dell laptop has a …. an ethernet port? Is that what it’s called? Yeah, it’s got one of those, so I can just plug my cable right in. It makes for a rather messy desk, not to mention the fact that I don’t have the space to put my tablet and do some drawing, and I have to have my computer on simultaneously to listen to music (as I need the soundcard on the mobo in the computer to use those speakers).

On the plus side (again), Richard then went on to order a new network adapter for my computer. That’s currently sitting on my desk here, at work, in a box that I can’t open because I don’t have any scissors (d’oh!). So I’m assuming it’s what I want it to be. He says I ought to try and plug it in myself, but I don’t have any screwdrivers of my own, I’ve never done it on my own before, and I’d rather do it with him there to say “DON’T DO THAT YOU’RE GOING TO EXPLODE THE UNIVERSE” or something.

And before yesterday, he would probably have scoffed that I wouldn’t do something liket hat. But I did kinda throw our dinner all over the floor yesterday afternoon, so hey, anything can happen.

In the meantime, I’ll just stick to my laptop, and use the cable with that until Friday. There are worse things that I could get lumped with. I could be using that stupid Vodafone 3G stick in the hospital again. Or I might not have a laptop at all. (A laptop that has the samei nternet speed when I’m sitting right next to the router as when I’m sitting in my bedroom upstairs.)

I might not have the internet. Then where the heck would I be?!

But what happens when you join a company that works as a unit to  create a website? What happens if you’re a developer, or a software developer, and you can’t say “look at this” because people won’t “get” it?

That’s what I’m facing at the moment. I’ve done a fair amount of work on several websites in the last few months while I’ve been working with Circle. I’ve created a custom module, but it’s on our intranet. I’ve rethemed several sites, but I’ve just done the coding and not the design. Can I put that in a portfolio? Someone else did the design, someone else did the  content, I just put it all together.

How do you go about building that sort of portfolio? How can you showcase your talents if you’re just a part of a team? (Not to say “just” a part of a team, mind: I mean a part of a team as opposed to working on your own.)

Maybe I’ll just take screenshots of the pages and the code and see where that gets me. What do you guys do?

Right now, at GCSE level, IT courses include information about how to do mail merge in Word, make websites in PowerPoint (!!), create a leaflet in Publisher, a spreadsheet of prices in Excel and a database in Access. Yes, they’re all Microsoft Office products. No, I don’t think we should be making websites in PowerPoint. Yes, those are some useful skills to learn. Wait: what?

Well, riddle me this. How many people who use computers do coding, high-end stuff like web design and development or software development … and how many use them to browse the internet, write an essay in Word, and write an email to their mother with pictures of kittens saying funny things?

And then you get into “how many kids end up doing computer stuff versus how many do business” – and while I don’t know the numbers, I can take a pretty good guess that most of them do business rather than development and therefore most of them are going to need business skills, like creating leaflets and databases in Publisher and Access, rather than technical skills.

If the new curriculum is useful, then this is great news: j.mp/zLxidV

— Peter Gasston (@stopsatgreen) January 11, 2012

Today the education secretary announced that the current ICT programme is to be scrapped, though, and a new, “open-source” one is to take its place. Is that good, or bad? Well, yes, I agree it needs changing, but does it need changing so much?

Consider: if we teach every kid the ability to code a basic website, will they all leave school thinking “yeah, I don’t need to hire someone to make my site because I can make it myself!”? That’s a very basic way of looking at it but for a long time that’s what I battled against. My peers could put a site together in Front Page and voilà, they had a website. They didn’t need someone else to do it for them! And there’s plenty of examples out there of people who have taken up web design as a hobby that they can teach themselves. Is that the right way to do it? A quick course at school, some open-source options online, and there you have it, “anyone can be a web designer who wants to be a web designer”? Isn’t that a devaluation of our profession?

It’s  a little tricker for computer development, but the point still stands. All those people who go out and study for four years at university for a degree in software development, who learn all the theory behind it and why you should do it this way, and who learn why code is written like that and so on – for them to be undercut by someone who can write software in half an hour using a do-it-yourself program that you got to use in your computer science GCSE… well, it’s a devaluation. It’s not fair on them.

If these things are available to learn at GCSE and A-level, we’re going to see a lack of people going to university for these subjects. There’ll be thoughts of “why should I spend £12,000 (now up to £36,000) on a course when the person in the year below me is going to learn it for free?” Even I think that and I’ve been at uni for two and a half years (kinda). I shouldn’t be doubting myself like this.

There’s always the argument that “well, if people want the right thing to be done, they’ll pay extra for someone to do it professionally” but come on – in this day and age, which are you going to do: pay £1,500 for a website that’ll look great and have all the features you want, or pay £500 for the son of your old college friend to do it because he learned to do it at school? Sure, you’ll have a half-assed job and you’ll probably have to pay extra to get it fixed later, but when you’re hard up and just starting up a business and so on which are you going to pick? It’s hard enough as it is. Don’t let’s make it harder.

I do, however, believe that some fundamental ideas should be taught in schools. This is the C programming language, you use it to write programs that run your set-top box. It is different from C#, and different again from C++. Java is not JavaScript. Try it out, write a “hello world” program in each. Maybe do a short exercise in each. But we don’t really need to take it further.

When I first came to uni one of the things I noticed was that a lot of students don’t want to do the work: they want to be fed the answers. They have no desire to go out and learn for themselves. “We don’t get taught everything on our course!” cries one of my peers regularly. “It has a lot of holes, and we don’t get taught X or Y, but we should.” Well, then why don’t you go out into the big, wide world and do the research yourself?

@Tawreh The most important job of school is teaching kids the ability and desire to learn throughout their lives. /cc @foamcow @robhawkes

— Alex Hardy (@alexhardy) January 11, 2012

To me, school should instil in young people a desire to learn, to go out and discover. That’s the attitude they take in university: they give you the basics, you go out and learn. Why can’t that happen in schools? Why do we expect the schools to give us everything on a silver platter, and leave us high and dry at uni? For many students, university is horrible because they don’t get the answers. It’s a culture shock. So let’s start it in schools.

So teach them the basics, give them some links to visit and some books to read. Build up their general knowledge of computers, computing and how to be safe on the Internet – which I think is more important in this day and age than learning the basics of programming or design in your ICT lessons. (Re: design, I think that ought to be taught in graphics design lessons rather than ICT: keep them separate. But that’s another blog post.) Do we need change? Yes, of course we do. Do we need depth? Not so much. Teach the kids to want to learn. Don’t hand it to them on a plate.

Now I’ll go back to burying my head under the sand and not talking about politics. Sorry, bad habit of mine.

Christmas this year was lovely. I went home to visit my parents and family for the first time in almost six months, and it was great to have a week off from work to just sit back and enjoy myself. Although admittedly there wasn’t much of that involved – for the most part I was running between my house and the boy’s, which was most hectic at the start of the holiday when we managed to stuff ourselves with two Christmases: one at his house on Christmas Eve, and one at mine on Christmas Day.

The time spent at my house was punctuated by my reams and reams of siblings visiting, a trip to the hospital and a visit to my aunt and uncle’s house on the same day, where we saw most of my dad’s family. It was a great day, but so busy, and so many small children. (I think I successfully insulted one uncle by refusing to hold his baby daughter, though. Oh well.)

Not to mention the wonderful day I spent with my three closest friends, two of whom I haven’t seen in over a year (and the other one not for nine months). It was so nice to have the opportunity to catch up on everything I’ve missed and just spend some time with them again, which I haven’t really been able to do since I was 18. And yes, the Italian was pretty scrummy, too.

Then back to Bristol we came on Monday, and back to work yesterday. No rest for the wicked but I’m sort of glad that I’ll be getting back into some sort of routine: my body clock is all messed up and I’m absolutely shattered from getting up at 6.30 for the last two mornings (I still haven’t caught up on the sleep I lost when I stayed up til 2.30am twice last week!). Give it a week or so and I’m sure I’ll be fine, though.

As far as work is concerned, but again keping to the personal level, HJ will be receiving an update in the next couple of months. I’m actually going to do my portfolio (shock! horror!), rewrite the layout (with some new textures and updated, cleaner code) and play with little bits of the layout (I want to display tags and so on more prominently). I also need to rethink some of the content, and fix my permalinks (not very good for SEO right now, even though I’m not bothered by that so much, but it’d still be nice to have decent links).

What about New Year’s resolutions? Hmm, I’ve only made one this year – and that’s to improve my art. This year I vow not to leave any sketch uncoloured, and to start blocking in shades as I go in an attempt to brush up on my digital painting skills. That good enough for ya?!

So, lots to look forward to. Lots to do! Here’s to a happy 2012.