1. How old were you when you started programming?By the time I really got into computers around age 12 or 13 my parents old Tandy 3000 wasn’t quite up to date compared to the 386’s and 486’s most of my friends had. I really truly started coding in TI-BASIC on my TI-85. I created all sorts of games, programs and such, which I’d then trade and sell to other kids at school. Around age 16 I bought a custom built machine from a local computer shop. A Cyrix 133 with 16MB of RAM, which I soon upgraded to a Cyrix 200 with 40MB of RAM. It wasn’t long after this that I started coding IRC bots for mIRC and HTML on my Geocities website.My first true coding experience didn’t really come until I started college where I was introduced to PHP by my friend Paul Barton. It was love at first site and the rest is, as they say, history.
2. How did you get started in programming?I really started in college, but I’m sure there was some BASIC and VB stuff for office here and there before that. My first programs were written in TI-BASIC and ASM for the TI-85. 
3. What was your first language?TI-BASIC for the TI-85 calculator is the first programming language I really sunk my teeth into. What a nightmare. 
4. What was the first real program you wrote?Depends on how you define this I suppose. The first program that I wrote that had any use to me was a program that would figure out math equations for my algebra and statistics classes that would show each step of work as it solved the equation. That’s also the first program I wrote that I made money from as there were quite a few students interested in it.
5. What languages have you used since you started programming?I guess that depends on what you mean by “used”. I’ve written substantial lines of code in C/C++, PHP, Python, Perl, ASM, BASIC, TI-BASIC, JavaScript and BASH. I’ve also done quite a bit of work in COBOL and MFC.
6. What was your first professional programming gig?My first paid gig was working on the website for Affordable Computers in Ann Arbor, MI. I’d say my first run at the “big show” was for Care2.com in 2000. 
7. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?Break stuff. Break everything. Poke, prod and explore. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you can’t do something or that you’re wasting your time. More practical advice is that you should learn to know and love design patterns and avoid GUI’s. I have a real problem with people who say they know SQL because they’re well versed with an ORM or a DB’s GUI. Go back and read up on relational algebra and SQL92 before you say you know SQL okay?I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I think people should learn a single environment in and out and stick with it. This might mean you learn Microsoft’s technologies in and out or Cocoa or LAMP. You simply can’t be an expert in an area of computers without picking a single environment and sticking with it. Dabble, sure, but pick a horse and learn everything you can about it.If you choose UNIX read one man page a day until you’ve read all of the GNU utilities’ man pages. You’re not a true UNIX geek unless you’ve typed man man at once point in your life.
8. What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?Oh, I don’t even know where to start. Hacking on PHP3 back in my dorm room, working with Jeremy and Seth on Care2 late into the night, building eNotes’ infrastructure from the ground up and building large scale systems with Ron and Matt at Digg to name just a few.

This absurd entry was spurred on by Erik Kastner. I’m going to give him a noogie next time I see him for this. Because I hate chain posts like this I won’t be tagging anyone as it after this, but if you do carry this on please trackback this post so I can read and reminisce with you.

Warning: Highly Geeky material follows.

I’m currently working on a large database for a customer. I’m actually redoing a crappy version of the database into a normalized screaming machine. I ran into a problem recently in that some of the values are stored as bitmasks. I knew what a bitmask was, but generally regarded them as voodoo magic left to crazy C hackers. Until now. I contacted my voodoo crazy C hacker mentor, Jeremy Brand, and asked him how they worked.

Here’s a quick tutorial:

instead of counting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… you could with powers of 2
instead 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, 2^4, 2^5… (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32…).

When you lable something with one of these powers of two you can
add them to other powers of 2 and then later on divide out what
you started with again.

For example:

apple = 4
orange = 2
banana = 1
———–
sum = 7

The sum of your identifiers is 7 (lets call this $sum).

So, later on you can check 7 to see what is in your basket:

does $sum mod 4 equal 0? (then there is no apple in the cart)
does $sum mod 2 equal 0? (then there is no orange in the cart)
does $sum mod 1 email 0? (then there is no banana in the cart)

Using bitmasks isn’t neccesarily easier to use, but it is fast.
It’s fast because computers already thing in bits. This example
is using 3 bit memory. Typically you’ll have 16 options (like I
have 3 here) because of the size of an integer. If you’re lucky
you’ll be using C or even mysql that can access all 32 bits of an
integer then you’ll have 32 options.

The reason why computers use base-2 to to begin with are because
with storage hardware there is really only two states: on and off.
The more single units that you can store ons and offs the more
storage the device can have.

FYI, you can use google for your calculator:
eg. http://www.google.com/search?q=7+mod+4.

Finally, that makes sense. I’m still completely lost on the actual math that goes into making this work (which irks me), but I did manage to get a proof-of-concept program working, which may help other bitmask deficient programmers out there:

<?php

  // Copyright 2004 Joe Stump <joe@joestump.net>
  // Public Domain
  // Usage: php -q bitmask.php 1 4 32
  //        (any numeric argument will be evaluated - change to whatever)
  echo "Valid bitmask values (up to 16): n";
  for ($i = 1 ; $i < 16 ; ++$i) {
      echo "2 ^ $i = ".pow(2,$i)."n";
  }
  echo "nn";

  $bitmask = 0;
  $values = array();
  for ($i = 1 ; $i < count($argv) ; ++$i) {
      if (is_numeric($argv[$i])) {
          $bitmask += $argv[$i];
          $values[] = $argv[$i];
      }
  }

  echo "Bitmask Contains: ".implode(', ',$values)."n";
  echo "Bitmask Total: ".$bitmask."n";

  echo "nResults:n";
  $arr = array(1,2,4,8,16,32);
  for ($i = 0 ; $i < count($arr) ; ++$i) {
      echo $arr[$i].': '.((($bitmask & $arr[$i]) == 0) ? 'FALSE' : 'TRUE')."n";
  }

?>

The trick is the &. If the result is 0 (zero) then the single bitmask value is not present in the sum of the bitmask. I’m sure this has something with the fact that you cannot add any separate list of single bitmask values and get the same sum twice (ie. 1 + 2 + 4 = 7, 2 + 4 + 8 = 14). Again, I just know “it works[tm]”. I hope this helps someone else out there.

I’m mainly caching this here so the next time my retarded mind can’t wrap itself around bitmasks I can check back to my own site. If you have questions concerning this don’t email me because I still think little green men make this mathematic “trick” work. Damn, I wish I had gotten a Computer Science degree instead of a Computer Info. Sys. degree.

A Slashdot thread about the Psychology of Programming really hit home today. After having my almost zendlike coding state shattered I left work in a huff.

Much like authors and artists, programmers suffer from “writers block” and when they are in the mental state to program it’s a fragile state that should be respected. I know wonder how much productivity has been lost because of such interruptions to my “flow” through the years …

Psychic: Fuckus!
Brodie: That’s what I’m talking about!
TS: She said “focus”
Brodie: Whatever.

On Saturday I did something I had only heard about in fair tales; I conducted a focus group for our new website. To put it lightly it was mind blowing. It was interesting to see how their clicking habits compared to how you had designed pageflow. Not to mention the things that were totally overlooked.

I had them do a few tasks that I needed users to be able to do with little problem (adding stuff to their cart, signing up for an account, checking out, searching, etc.). It was interesting to see where their eyes focused on the page, what confused them, and what path they followed to find products.

A friend of mine turned me onto what appears to be a wealth of information concerning web user interface. I found a few particularily interesting, such as the Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 and Writing for the Web.

I’ve been doing some research on WAP and WML. While searching on how to create WBMP image files I ran across a story, written in 2000, that predicted more than half of all web content would be viewed from wireless devices. Here we are in the beginning of 2003 and I’ve still yet to use WAP for anything more than looking up movie times.

Since I recently purchased a chatboard for my T68i I have become interested in programming my own WAP applications. Mainly so I can read my IMAP email and post to this blog from the road at anytime. While figuring out how to do this I found this superb primer on building interactive WAP applications. When I get things working I’ll be sure to let everyone know. I’d have to believe the blog community would be very interested in being able to blog from their cell phones.

In true Open Source tradition I found a program that did *almost* what I wanted and modified the source to do what I wanted. Once I had it working I submitted the patch to the maintainer.

The program is called BlackHole and does AV and SPAM checking. I use SpamAssassin for SPAM protection so my main focus was AV. BlackHole was made to work with Qmail, but because of my setup I needed it to output to STDOUT. It currently only wrote to Maildir and mbox. With a little modification I soon had it working. Hopefully, someone actually finds it useful.

Everyone knows the coolest way to interface with web services is SOAP. Evidently no one told Google this. They use SOAP for their Google Search API, which is very cool, but decided to use flat tab deliminated files and FTP as it’s interface for Froogle. If you work for a retail shop I highly recommend posting your products there. I can see this becoming a major source of traffic for web stores around the world.