I tried it about a year ago after I eventually got my hands on an invite, and my main crib was that it just didn’t work.

Most people are taking the view that in fact, the problem was there weren’t enough invites so not enough users. The product was in alpha mode and for me that was the problem. Even where I had people using it – and quite a few of my tech/geek/photog mates were there – it was essentially rubbish. It took forever to scroll, it took forever to respond. I got told “ah well it’s better in Chrome” to which I reply “way to go to alienate a lot of users”. I don’t and won’t use Chrome. For the most part FF does what I need; the few things like downloading the odd MS thingie – which doesn’t happen often through a browser – is done through Internet Explorer. Downloading another browser just for the sake of using a product that should be browser independent is a FAIL in my view.

Not sorry to see it gone. Still wondering how Twitter is going to make money since some of its options for advertising platform are gone.

A lot of grown-ups do not understand how computers work, so I suppose if you did ask someone, they’ll have told you something helpful like “I don’t know love, why don’t you ask Daddy” or “Computers are very clever. That’s how they work” or, even more helpful, “Computers work by magic”. I’ll bet that none of these answers really satisfied you. But you’ll be amazed to know that there is a grain of truth in all of these answers…except one. Computers are not clever. We haven’t worked out how to make them clever yet – oh I know that every so often there comes along a supercomputer which beats the great genii of the world at chess. But you’ll have to remember that while a computer might beat a human at chess, it’s highly unlikely that the same computer would be able to make scrambled eggs for the breakfast. It’s a chess playing machine, designed to play chess, and nothing else. I think to call something or someone clever, they need to be able to do more than one thing.

So I said that there might be a grain of truth in the statement “I don’t know love, why don’t you ask Daddy?” and more particularly, in the statement “Computers work by magic.” But first you need to understand what magic is. Magic is more than someone waving a magic wand and crying “Abracadabra”. Although it might look impressive at the pictures when you go to see Harry Potter, magic is really very simple. It’s knowing something extra that most other people do not know. So, when you think about it, magic is nothing particularly special at Hogwarts School. Everyone can do it. Ron Weasley’s mother uses it to do the housekeeping. Magic is only amazing to us Muggles because we don’t know how it works. If we did, would it matter so much? Probably not. So, there’s nothing particularly special about how computers work, it’s just that a lot of people don’t know it. That’s where the magic comes in. We are going to learn the things that a lot of grown-ups do not know and when we know that, we’ll know that computers don’t really work by magic.
There’s a simple question that confuses a lot of people. What is a computer? If you try to describe a computer, what do you come up with? The simplest possible description of a computer which you can probably think of is that it’s a box with a television and a keyboard. Well, the television bit and the keyboard bit, they aren’t very important in understanding how a computer works right now. We just use them to be able to 1) tell the computer what to do and 2) see what the computer is doing. We can forget about them for now. There’s a special word to describe these bits. The keyboard is an input device and the screen is an output device. The real beef is in the box. Once upon a time, those boxes used to be a really yukky vomit type colour – not very nice – and then a company called Apple decided it might be nice if they came in different colours. Black is the most popular at the moment, thanks to Dell Computers – I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements on television – that’s not very exciting either. It is better than vomit though.
There’s nothing particularly special about a box. But we treat computers with a lot of respect. Some people fear them. Some people treat them with love. People have feelings about computers. When you think about it, that’s just a little bit worrying. After all, a computer is just a piece of machinery in a box. There aren’t little fairies and elves dancing around inside in it – and I don’t care if that’s what your uncle Liam told you. Besides, fairies and elves fight. If they were stuck in a small box, there would be a big explosion within a day. No computer would survive very long, although I suspect the fireworks would be good.

Why do people treat computers differently to other machines? Why do people fear computers, but not dishwashers? What’s the difference between a computer and a lawnmower? I’m not saying you need to be afraid of a dishwasher – I’m sure if you check with your mother, she’ll tell you the dishwasher is the greatest invention ever – but dishwashers don’t feature in big Hollywood movies – did you see a single dishwasher in Star Wars™? I didn’t. A couple of robots and computers all over the Star Destroyer but no dishwashers.
What does a computer do anyway? Dishwashers wash dishes. Toasters toast bread. Lawnmowers cut grass. Computers compute, right? What is computing? That’s a nasty question to ask. Computing now means a lot of things and…nothing. But computing used to mean something very specific. It used to mean working out sums. Doing big complicated sums. And right down at the bottom of things, all a computer does is sums.
However, computers don’t decide to do sums all by themselves. Anyway, a computer is stupid. It won’t know what
to do unless you tell it.
Now, if you want to get the dishes washed by the dishwasher, the chances are, all you have to do is turn a dial a special way and then press the button. And some time later, you’ll find a dishwasher full of clean ware. You instruct the dishwasher to wash the ware. Most dishwashers, they have maybe three basic instructions 1) normal wash 2) gentle wash and 3) really dirty pots wash. You choose which wash you want, and then press the button and the dishwasher does what you tell it. A computer has instructions too. Unfortunately, those instructions are nothing like as useful as 1) normal wash 2) gentle wash and 3) really dirty pots wash.
Most computer have about 100 instructions, including “Add” and “Load In” and “Send Out”. But computers don’t understand English. They understand something called machine code and that code consists of just numbers. Each instruction for your computer has a machine code – and to get the computer to do anything at all, we need to feed it the machine code. It understands the machine code.

I guess you’ve seen one of these before. It’s a hopscotch grid. There are a lot of different ways to play hopscotch, but we’re going to look at one of them. It’s the one where you have to jump a different sequence of numbers on the grid.

Let’s say you’re standing at the bottom of the grid, and you need to jump to 10. Well, depending on your luck, you’ll get to jump a simple sequence like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and then 10. If you’re unlucky, you’ll get something like 1 4 5 8 9 10. Two big jumps in there. Not very good if you aren’t tall.
The task you have to carry out is to jump from 1 to 10 and the route you take depends on the instructions like:

Jump to 2
Jump to 3 and so on until you get to ten.

You can shorten the instructions to code numbers, i.e. 2, 3, 5,6. Hopscotch code, if you like.

Machine code is just like hopscotch code. You can feed it in a series of numbers, and these numbers represent instructions for the computer to carry out. At the very base of things, all a computer does is read instructions and carry them out. And it is so dumb, it will not know if the code it gets is rubbish and will just execute it. Execute is a big word – why use a small one when a big word will mean the same thing – and all it means is “do”. A computer does what you tell it to. It executes your instructions. You are the boss. There’s a special thing inside the computer that “does” things and we’ll call that the “Bit That Does Stuff”.

The next question is, how does the box do this. How is the box put together so that it can do what you tell it to? Is it like Calvin and Hobbes and the transmogrifier – which is just a cardboard box with “transmogrifier” written on the side? If you grabbed the box your mother collected the shopping in and scribbled “computer” on the side, would it work?
Honestly speaking? No, it wouldn’t. You are going to need more stuff inside the box.
Think about this. Maybe you have a pet dog and maybe he can do tricks. But for you to get him to do tricks, you need to be able to get him to “remember” an instruction. It will take a while for him to “know” how to sit when you tell him to “sit”. A computer is a little bit like that. Inside a computer, you have the bit that does the trick – that does what you tell it to do – but you can’t tell it to do that directly. You need to train a computer to do this. You do this by placing your instructions into the computer’s memory. Computers have a memory. They don’t have emotions and they won’t love you like your dog does, but they will remember things when you put things into their memory.
Maybe you go shopping with your mother, and she brings a list. A shopping list is like a set of instructions. You arrive at the shop, and your mother looks at the list and the first thing on it is chocolate. So she looks at the list and reads “chocolate”. What does she do? She goes and gets chocolate and throws it into the trolley. Then, she reads the list again, and the next thing on the list is dishwasher tablets. So she goes and gets dishwasher tablets. A computer works a little bit like this. You put the instructions into the computer memory and the bit that does stuff gets each instruction, does it, and gets the next instruction. This is called the fetch-execute cycle – another fancy way of describing things which means “tell me what to do and I’ll do it and tell me what to do next, and I’ll do that too”.

A computer memory isn’t like your memory. You just remember things, right? Well, a computer needs to know how to remember things. When you put something into a computer memory, you need to tell the computer where in its memory you put that thing. Maybe you have a toyshelf and each toy has a special place on the toyshelf. For example, Pooh Bear always sits on the shelf next to your bed, and the Duplo™ bricks are always next to Pooh Bear. And you know that when you are putting the Duplo™ bricks back on the shelf that they are kept next to Pooh Bear. The address of the Duplo™ Bricks is “next to Pooh Bear” or the second space on the shelf counting from your bed. Each space inside the computer has an address too. And addresses in computers are nothing more than numbers. So, for example, Pooh Bear would be at address 00, and the Duplo™ bricks would be at 01 if your shelf was organised like the memory inside a computer. And if you tell a computer what address to go to, it will go there and get what is stored there. This means you can get information from any part of the computer so long as you know what address to look at. There’s a special name for this in computer language and that is “random access memory”, or RAM.

We are just going to look very quickly at how this all fits together. You know now that there’s a bit that does stuff, and you know that there’s a memory and you know that stuff has to get from memory to the bit that does stuff.

The Bit That Does Stuff.

This is the bit of the computer that does what you tell it to. It does this instruction by instruction. Think about the hopscotch code again. You know the first instruction is 1. Well, the bit that does stuff needs to know that the first instruction is 1, so it gets the 1 from somewhere – just give me a moment and I’ll explain where – and it saves it somewhere so it can’t forget what exactly it’s doing. Maybe it has a little blackboard inside and it writes that instruction down so it won’t forget to do it. We call this blackboard the “instruction register”.

The Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory

Now, we have to find a way of getting the instruction from memory and writing it on the blackboard inside the Bit That Does Stuff. Remember I said everything is stored at an address in memory? Well, next to the bit that does stuff you have a bit that sends each instruction individually, say, the feeder. So, when the Bit That Does Stuff has done stuff, it gets the next instruction from the feeder. Try to imagine playing hopscotch with the computer. You have told the computer that the hopscotch code is 1 3 4 5 7 9 10 and you have stored these hopscotch codes in the computer memory at addresses 0 to 6.

The computer can do nothing unless you tell it where the instructions are. You could, if you wanted, try to put the address of the code into the Bit That Does Stuff. The address is 0, right? The Bit That Does Stuff will think “ah, this is the hopscotch code and I must step on to 0”. But there’s no 0 on the hopscotch grid. Clearly, the computer is going to be pretty useless at hopscotch if it tries to do that. So what actually happens is, next to the Bit That Does Stuff you have the feeder which is a Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory. You feed 0 into this and it will go to memory and get the instruction at address 0 and feed it over to the Bit That Does Stuff. Now, you know, the instruction at address 0 is 1. The Bit That Does Stuff will jump onto square 1, and hey, we’re part of the way there.

The Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory could, if we let it, always point at 0, which would not be much use, because the computer would never leave square 1 on the hopscotch grid. So, each time a hopscotch code is executed, the Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory skips on 1. So now, it’s pointing at 1, and at address 1, we have hopscotch code 3. So, you could call the Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory the Bit that Points at the Right Instruction. Actually, it’s called the Instruction Pointer or Program Counter. And the Bit That Does Stuff together with the Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory are called the “central processing unit”, CPU.
There’s just a last bit of information that you need to know and that is How does the Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory actually get the stuff from memory? This is a very good question.

There are two links between the Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory and the memory. They are called buses and they work a bit like real buses. One is the “address bus” and the other is the “data bus”. So the Bit That Knows Where To Get Stuff from Memory sends the address it wants to get information from down the address bus and the data at that address comes back on the data bus. It really is that simple.
This is how a computer works. There isn’t really any magic there, is there, now that you’ve seen it. No need to
wave a magic wand and cry “Abracadabra”

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Some Notes:

1. Harry Potter is a JK Rowling character, as are Ron Weasley and his mother. A Muggle is a member of the nonmagical community, someone who cannot do magic.
2. Star Wars is a trademark of LucasFilms. The Star Destroyer is a battle ship of the Empire, namely the bad guys.
3. There are various ways to play hopscotch. I used the rules taught to me by my five year old niece.
4. Calvin and Hobbes are a six year old boy with a terrific imagination and a very rudimentary knowledge of
   science and his pet (or toy, depending on your viewpoint) tiger.

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this was written by me, Treasa Lynch for a college gig about 5 years ago. If you think you’d find it useful, please…off you go. If you’re going to post it around the internet, all I really want is that you link back to this page. If you want to reprint it anywhere, please leave a comment.

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I’d like kids to be as computer literate as they are tv remote literate.

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This is my contribution (s0 far) to Ireland’s Smart Economy. I will look at designing a printable kid’s version if there’s enough interest.

At some point, you will probably arrive on this page via the image search.

I’m slightly caught between a couple of stools here. I really feel that it should be possible to leverage the internet and technology to create a striking CV and there are some striking CVs on that page. A significant number of them fail in one key area. Many of the CVs where the emphasis is on form completely miss the function. Too many of them are beautiful and too difficult to get the information out of. The over-reliance on strong graphics makes some of the examples look like overdone business cards; the information in them lacks somewhat.

I don’t, however, work in the design front so it is possible that design professionals don’t care about the information on the CVs if the appearance is impressive in and of itself. The comments seem to reflect my opinion however: if your cv is hard to read, it’s hard to read, end of story.

Way back in the days when I was changing job every 18 months or so – and before the internet really took hold – I used to see a lot of CVs. A lot of them had a lot of information in them that was difficult to digest. They were laid out with whatever new toys the applicant had learned in Word. Some of them had really badly printed photographs from the early inkjet technology.

In this way, technology is not being used appropriately and this is disappointing.

The most effective CV I had over the course of my life was a single page CV. Admittedly I was 25 years old at the time and therefore had less information. I did, however, have friends with 3 page CVs on less experience than me. Having looked at modern technology and design and layout tools, you’d assume that it may be possible to leverage those tools more effectively than the historic two page introductory special. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of evidence out there to suggest this may be the case.

I own an iPhone. I buy most of my music from iTunes and yesterday I started digitising a couple of useful to have personal data on the phone rather than in the back of a notebook where I’d been noting stuff for 15 years or so. One of the big successes on the iPhone are applications – or iPhone apps as they’re more commonly known. Little ickle bits of software that are basically iPhone only. I just wonder if the age of interoperability is slowly dying. All my music is played through iTunes at the moment. Given you can’t read some of the older data formats, I wonder how that’s going to work out for me even in 10 years time. I still listen to music I heard first 10 years ago…but anything I bought on tape then I just can’t play any more.

I came across two reports that interested me today, both from Le Monde (note to self, Le Monde really is a hell of a lot better than pretty much every single Irish newspaper on the market). The first one related to market share for downloaded applications. Key information: Apple is the market leader but strangely enough, more to the benefit of the iPod Touch than the iPhone. In fact, the iPhone is nearly neck and neck with the Android and on average, three quarters of the applications downloaded for each of those two devices is free. The report covered two studies and the interesting thing about the second one, which seems to have concentrated on the financial side of things is that on average, Blackberry users spend more money on the applications that they download than do either the Apple or Android users.

The disappointing part of this is that I dont’ have a whole lot of information about the basis of the surveys that formed the basis of that report although the initial one which was carried out by one of Google’s companies  was based on a survey of around 900 people worldwide. It would be interesting to see what the feed back would be if the survey sample was ten times larger.

The second report related to the fact that Apple are suing HTC for patent infringement in Delaware. This interests me in light of what I said about the system lockin that appears to be appearing on mobile devices for the moment.

I have not really had much time to look at it in any great detail apart from getting the overwhelming sense that they are pushing it to compete with C and C++. Its USPS on first glance appear to be “fast compiling” and “garbage collection”. Which is very desirable. After all, from what I remember, ten centuries ago, Java had garbage collection but wasn’t exactly high speed either in compiling terms of, in fact, at run time. For someone used to the roi of assembler, it was a bit pitiful, actually.

However, I need to be realistic and recognise that assembler is an increasingly arcane language to be writing in – ie, very few people actually want it any more – and so I’ve started looking at alternatives like, for example “You know Java, don’t you?” and “I hate php, no really”. I was going to check out the Microsoft Visual studio stuff as well because the last time I looked at the language nerds, they were waxing on about C# and how great it was. I think I might procrastinate and look at Go instead and see if it has any realistic future.

As to the masters, I’m having some serious thoughts about it. I have a bunch of parchments already, and working full time and doing college part time will cut into the free time I have for trying not to damage myself climbing, diving, kitesurfing or taking photographs. Interestingly, the worst injuries I have ever got didn’t ever involve climbing, diving or kitesurfing, but walking and taking photographs. Strange that. I’m trying to find a balance between stuff that interests me a bit (maths) and stuff that builds on what I’ve got already (information technology and applied modern languages) and stuff that doesn’t wipe out my life for too long (which means starting a new BSc is probably not the way to go). Masters take about 2 years on average to get part time. I’m looking at science communication, information technology, forensic computing and something else. Can’t remember what. I live near DCU so it’s the handiest.

The problem is, I’ve also been looking at maths modules part time with the Open University. They have maths stuff which is doable part time (unlike most of Ireland from what I can see) but it’s very expensive.

I don’t know. Lots to think about I guess.