Trying out new programming languages is fun, building Io on Windows is not. The Io language is developed on Mac OS X and it shows. There are no binary builds and you need a fairly standard *nix based system to compile it. Here are the steps to get Io running on Windows (and why you might want to).

update (11/8/2011): If you want to get started right away, there are now up-to-date binaries available so you don’t need to compile anything (although it’s a nice exercise)

If you like to try out new programming languages, there are many options. Io is a language that is certainly different than most of the others. Its prototype nature (everything is an object, no classes) makes you think a little different about many programming issues. And the absence of syntactic sugar is a nice contrast with language such as Ruby.

Unlike many smaller languages, Io can hardly be called experimental at this point. It has been around since 2002 and is in use by a growing group of enthusiasts. The main disadvantage for me was the lack of any kind of Windows support. Now, I absolutely do not hold this against the author (Steve Dekorte). I’m sure he has much better things to do than support whiny Windows users.

So let me show you how you can get started with Io and Windows (Windows 7 in my case). You’ll have a working installation that should at least get you acquainted with the language. My current build isn’t 100% correct. The correctness test failed on deleting directories and I haven’t really researched the reason why. If deleting directories is important to you, you might need to do a little more work to get started.

I’m going to assume you know Windows pretty well (adding stuff to your path, using the command prompt). If you don’t, I don’t think you’ll have much fun trying out Io.

1. Getting the Tools: MinGW and CMake

I initially tried to build with Cygwin. That didn’t work out very well because Cygwin includes a GCC that is terribly old. You could try upgrading the GCC but it looks like people have had mixed experiences with this. And really, why bother, MinGW does have a modern GCC.

For MinGW: follow the getting started instructions. The GUI based installer worked fine for me. Make sure to install GCC and I also added the developer tools (I believe “make” is in there, although I’m not sure). Afterward, add the MinGW bin directory to your path. In my case that was C:\MinGW\bin

Next up is CMake. I didn’t know about this tool, but it looks like something very useful. It worked great for me. I went with the Windows installer that can be found on the downloads page.

2. Getting the IoLanguage source

Now it’s about time to get the source for Io. There are two ways. You can download it from the Io homepage or get it straight from GitHub. You’re getting exactly the same thing, so pick whatever you like.

On my local drive, I created a directory C:\Io. And I put all the source files in C:\Io\sources. Next I also added a C:\Io\build directory where I will be building Io in the next steps.

3. Configure the build

Start the CMake gui, pick C:\Io\sources as your source directory and C:\Io\build as your build dir. Well duh.

The next step is to click the “configure” button. This will load the makefiles and scan for variables that need to be filled. But first it will ask you which generator to use. Pick MinGW:

This will take some time. But you now should see a long list of name – values. Most of them in red. You’ll notice that many values were not found. I’m going to guess this means this functionality will not work. I’m not yet far enough into my Io experiments to know for sure. So I’ll probably return to this part later on.

I did change one value: the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. This is where Io will be installed. I changed this to C:/Io

After installation, you’ll have a C:\Io\bin and C:\Io\lib with all binaries installed.

When you’ve changed the install prefix to your liking. Click “configure” a second time.

Now the “Generate” button will be available. If you’re happy with the configuration, click it. This will generate the MinGW build files in C:\Io\build but it will not yet build Io. That’s next.

4. Building Io

This is the good part, it’s also probably the easiest:

• Open a command prompt
• CD into C:\Io\build
• Execute mingw32-make
• Wait

If everything went well, you might see a few warnings, but you’ll have a fully built Io.

Now you can run mingw32-make install to install all the files in C:\Io

5. Finetuning Io for Windows

There are just a few small changes left to make your life easier:

• Add C:\Io\bin to your path
• If you want to run the dynamically linked version of Io, you also need to add C:\Io\lib to your path (I don’t think there’s a difference between the two if you don’t install extra addons)
• In Windows explorer go to C:\Io\sources\libs\iovm\tests\correctness and double click on run.io. Windows will not know how to open the file, so choose “select a program from list”. Next click on Browse and select io.exe. The test should run but will probably give a lot of warnings and (for me) one error when trying to delete the test directories.
• You can also run from the command line: Open a command prompt, cd to C:\Io\sources and run “io libs\iovm\tests\correctness\run.io“. You don’t even need to specify the Io interpreter “libs\iovm\tests\correctness\run.io” works too. Oddly enough, those give me different results, I’m not sure what’s going on there.

Currently the tests give me the following result:

C:\Io\sources>io libs\iovm\tests\correctness\run.io
..E...................................E...............................
......................................................................
.....................
 Exception: error removing file 'testDir/testSubDir'
 ---------
 remove                              Directory.io 143
 Directory remove                     [unlabeled] 0
 List mapInPlace                      [unlabeled] 0
 List map                             DirectoryTest.io 124
 Call relayStopStatus                 A4_Exception.io 24
 Call delegateToMethod                A0_List.io 176
 DirectoryTest tearDown               UnitTest.io 74
 Date secondsToRun                    UnitTest.io 65
 Call relayStopStatus                 Date.io 18
 TestRunner run                       UnitTest.io 113
 DirectoryCollector run               run.io 18
 CLI doFile                           Z_CLI.io 140
 CLI run                              IoState_runCLI() 1

As far as I can interpret the results, this means there are at least two errors with Io core functionality. At least directory removal doesn’t work, I’m unsure what the other error is.

Help needed

Most of my initial experiments seem to work fine on this build, but clearly there are some issues that still need to be resolved. If you have any tips or ideas, please let me know and I’ll keep updating the post until we have a proper Windows build for Io.

It has finally happened. Streamhead now has a Facebook page. The idea has been growing on me for a few months now, but yesterday I reached some kind of threshold and just got on with it. Very fashionably late.

Why now you wonder? And how did it work out? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Although I just saw The Social Network, that was fairly unrelated to my decision. Attending Devoxx and watching a bunch of my friends, I noticed how many people carry Facebook with them. It’s their source of news and where they spend their time. It’s a good place for a site to be if you want to be discovered instead of searched for.

I tried publishing the Streamhead posts to my own personal page, but there was a huge mismatch between the content I usually like to share there and my blogs content. So after a few posts, I turned this off.

This is exactly why I created a page. It allows me to aggregate all Streamhead’s posts and related news without disturbing my friends who are probably not interested in the latest Java features.

Creating the Streamhead page itself was a little more complicated than I expected. First of all, I was unable to find a “create page” button. I’m not sure if it exists somewhere, but eventually I found a link in the help center.

The help center was a very useful resource. It’s pretty well-organized and contains answers to most questions you might have. It was a pity that some answers were outdated. For instance, I was unable to import my blog via the Notes application. Maybe I missed something, but the instructions seemed to deal with a previous version of the Facebook interface.

Setting up the page itself was a breeze. Although I really have no idea why Facebook is so scared of lists. The only way to go back to your page is via the search box. I don’t understand why I can’t just get a list of pages I administer.

Other nice things I’m experimenting with:

• The Facebook widget is now on the right side of the blog. Although it looks pretty good, I personally think it’s way too large, but I’m going to wait and see for a bit how people interact with it.
• I’m still experimenting with the Mailchimp application. I couldn’t have done it without their tutorial because it isn’t very straightforward. Next, I still need to change the signup form to something more sexy. But it’s a start.

I will be tweaking the page, so click on that “like” button now to keep up-to-date. I will also actively maintain the page and post something extra from time to time, so I can get a good idea if a Facebook page is worth the effort.

(image credit)

I can understand how the creators of Monkey Island make a lot of money. The game was there, they “just” took the game and ported it to the iPhone platform. They did it perfectly. The mouse interface has been elegantly replaced with a pointer and default double click action to speed up adventuring. LucasArt might also going to reuse the code to port other games, so there’s an economy of scale here.

But how does an independent developer do? Well, I tried to guesstimate what developing a very smallscale adventure game might cost you. Basically I started from a situation where you already had a pretty good idea of the game itself, ie. you had the story pretty much figured out and most of the mechanics.

From there, I calculated 2 weeks for developing the concept and a prototype to figure out if the game was feasible. If this is your first iPhone game, you’d probably need 10 times the time. From this forward, I think 2 months development time will be the absolute minimum. Furthermore you’re going to need graphics, sound and possibly music. Graphics are usually what sell iPhone applications, so I wouldn’t try to cut corners there. You might be able to get away with a little less effort on the sound.

I put this data in a Google Spreadsheet to get an idea for the numbers:

Or if you want a direct link to the economics of iPhone apps spreadsheet.

If you want to actually make money with an iPhone app, you’re either going to have to be very lucky and become popular, or you’ll need to launch an additional marketing effort to get about 45000 buyers. Not an easy feat.

Many people have undoubtedly tried to start their own small business on limited budget and limited time. I couldn’t find any numbers, but I’m pretty sure only a few have succeeded. Even fewer share their insights in an honest, no-nonsense way, that’s why I really value the following two businessmen I’ve been following:

• Patrik shares his MicroISV on a Shoestring experiences on Kalzumeus. A few key quotes I liked:
  • “That is what scares me the most about this job. Like most people, I have lived an entire lifetime conforming to schedules. They exist like the Greek gods: you didn’t ask for them but they are there, there is no negotiating with them, and prolonged association means you are likely to get your dignity violated by a bovine.”
  • “Let’s get this out of the way: are you a small company dependent on technology?  You will have downtime.  You will wear a communication device twenty four hours a day for the next several years, and respond with alacrity if it goes off.  The purpose of the rest of this blog post is to minimize downtime and have that communication device do as little damage to your relationships and sanity as possible.”
  • “Instead of doing either of these, build time assets: things which will save you time in the future.  Code that actually does something useful is a very simple time asset for programmers to understand: you write it once today, then you can execute it tomorrow and every other day, saving you the effort of doing manually whatever it was the code does.  Code is far from the only time asset, though: systems and processes for doing your work more efficiently, marketing which scales disproportionate to your time, documentation which answers customers’ questions before they ask you, all of these things are assets.”
• Brian Armstrong explains how to start a business on StartBreakingFree. And another 3 choice quotes:
  • “But just like restaurants, there is a market for countries. You choose to pay money (taxes) to a government in exchange for some sort of services (military, roads, health care, etc).  And if you aren’t happy with the service, you can always leave and choose to patronize another country with your business.”
  • “This is one of the toughest moments for entrepreneurs (especially engineering types) when you realize that building the whole thing was the easy part.  Now it’s actually marketing the damn thing that is going to take a while.”
  • “If anybody wants to take a crack at making this thing [a gun] send me an email, I have all the CAD drawings which you can use for free. Twice I had a major manufacturer lined up that fell through. Ultimately, I had to let it go for a variety of reasons.”

What’s your favorite small business blog?

Read on to know what makes these products worth their money (and if you care about that kind of stuff: no affiliate links)

There are a few reasons why you might want to do stuff yourself and not outsource it to other people. Most importantly, because you want to know how it works and it’s cheaper if you do it yourself. I’ve always known that there is another side to that coin: doing something you’re not experienced in takes time, lots of time that you might want to use to do something you are more productive at.

A few examples:

1. The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers is something I’ve been willing to create for a long time. I’ve collected many links and articles and even tried to start a summary at one time. If you hurry you can still get the scorecard for $9.97 you’re getting exactly what I wanted to create. Only it’s here now and you can dive in right away. No need to create summaries, it’s all there. Even at $29.97 I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
2. WooThemes creates and sells premium WordPress themes. I never thought I needed one until I saw the work that went into Delegate and all their other themes. Not only do you get a detailed and very attractive visual theme for your site, there is also a very detailed back-end to the theme. It allows you to configure virtually any aspect of the theme without the need to write PHP code. For $70 you not only get this theme, but you get to choose 2 more. There’s no way, you can’t create this yourself for that price. Not even if you’re an experienced theme developer.
3. Get Satisfaction is a “social support application”. It allows you to centralize all support and feature requests in one central place. All your customers have access and can even answer questions of other users. Get Satisfaction greatly simplifies the support process and that is why I’m considering a starters plan for a new site I’m working on. Currently I’m trying out the free plan, but I feel this service is worth every penny.

What services and products are you happy to pay for?

Many little boys dream of going to space, watching the earth from up there and floating around in zero gravity. Thanks to the Internet, it is now possible to get closer to their dream than ever before. In a case of brilliant marketing, or just plain too much money, NASA is really in the loop when it comes to reaching their target audience.

Not only did Nasa recently release a moon exploration game, but they are also putting out tons and tons of interesting and detailed materials on all their missions, such as this 35 minute tour of the Internation Space Station or their iPhone/iPod app that contains an overview of all missions.

Without the Internet there would be no way we’d get to see footage like this. For some reason the general Belgian public has lost all interest in space exploration, so most television channels never show this kind of footage (not even when there’s a Belgian up there). Luckily on the Internet even a small audience is a huge audience, so we get those looks and insights into things we’re probably never going to experience in our lifetimes.

It’s yet another win for the long tail.

Enjoy the tour.

(image credit)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned my new way of tracking my budget and also figured that there’s one gaping hole: importing bank statements. This is part 1, where I create a simple parser for bank statements provided by my bank in CSV format.

The exported statements follow a very easy format that, I presume, mirrors the more common OFX format, used by Microsoft Money and others. The CSV file has its data ordered in 8 columns and even includes a (Dutch for me) header, so there’s no possible confusion. The format looks as follows (I removed any identifying items of course):

"JAAR + REFERTE";"UITVOERINGSDATUM";"VALUTADATUM";"BEDRAG";"MUNT V/D REKENING";"TEGENPARTIJ VAN DE VERRICHTING";"DETAILS";"REKENINGNUMMER"
"2010-0245";"12/07/2010";"12/07/2010";"-9,99";"EUR";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX";"REMOVED TO PROTECT MY INNOCENCE";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX"
"2010-0244";"12/07/2010";"12/07/2010";"-100,00";"EUR";"DIRECT DEBIT";"REMOVED TO PROTECT MY INNOCENCE";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX"
"2010-0243";"12/07/2010";"10/07/2010";"+100,00";"EUR";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX";"REMOVED TO PROTECT MY INNOCENCE";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX"
"2010-0242";"12/07/2010";"11/07/2010";"-5,00";"EUR";"CASH WITHDRAWEL";"REMOVED TO PROTECT MY INNOCENCE";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX"
"2010-0241";"12/07/2010";"12/07/2010";"-1000,00";"EUR";"OTHER";"REMOVED TO PROTECT MY INNOCENCE";"XXX-XXXXXXXX-XX"

Depending on your bank, the header will most likely be in another language and could be slightly different.

The parser looks like this:

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#!/usr/bin/env python3
# www.streamhead.com
 
import collections
import sys
 
ID, EXECUTION_DATE, VALUE_DATE, AMOUNT, CURRENCY, COUNTERPARTY, DETAILS, ACCOUNT_NUMBER = range(8)
SEPERATOR = ';'
 
Transaction = collections.namedtuple("Transaction",
                "id executionDate valueDate amount currency counterparty details accountNumber")
 
def process_line(line):
    fields = []
    field = ""
    quote = None
    for c in line:
        if c in "\"'":
            if quote is None:
                quote = c
            elif quote == c:
                quote = None
            else:
                field += c
            continue
        if quote is None and c == SEPERATOR:
            fields.append(field)
            field = ""
        else:
            field += c
    if field:
        fields.append(field)
    return Transaction(fields[ID], fields[EXECUTION_DATE],
                       fields[VALUE_DATE], fields[AMOUNT],
                       fields[CURRENCY], fields[COUNTERPARTY],
                       fields[DETAILS], fields[ACCOUNT_NUMBER])
 
def print_transactions(transactions):
    for transaction in transactions:
        print("{0.id} on {0.executionDate}: {0.currency} {0.amount} for {0.counterparty}".format(transaction))
 
def main():
    if len(sys.argv) == 1:
        sys.argv.insert(1, "data\\TEST.CSV")
    filename = sys.argv[1]
    print("loading file {}".format(filename))
    transactions = []
    for line in list(open(filename))[1:]:
        line = line.rstrip()
        if line:
            transactions.append(process_line(line))
    transactions.sort(key=lambda t: t.id)
    print_transactions(transactions)
 
main()

By default it will take a testfile I have in a “data” subdirectory, but it can also get the filename from the command line. And that’s really all there is to parsing in Python (I suppose it can be made even simpler, by using the csv module, but this is a Python exercise for me).

Next up: actually doing something with the data.

(image credit)

Today, I have a number of news items that have caught my attention over the last month: YouTube finally evolves out of the computer room, NASA uses yet more tricks to get us excited about their missions, making money with Flash and JavaScript everywhere (this last one is for techies). It’s just a small sampling of what’s happening.

YouTube Leanback

Finally, finally, a pretty nice way to watch YouTube from the couch, without the need for specialized software or hardware. Just browse to YouTube Leanback, go fullscreen and you’re ready for hours of entertainment (your mileage may vary).

They already have YouTube XL, but, in all honesty, I don’t think any one ever liked that interface. Even the YouTube programmers themselves. Leanback has a slick UI, a minimal interface with just the right playlists.

I’m not sure what took them so long, but the imminent launch of Google TV might be related.

Moonbase Alpha

“If the American army can do it, so can we”. That must have been what NASA thought when they started developing Moonbase Alpha. Just like America’s Army, this game is a simulation. So don’t storm in expecting to discover aliens that need to be killed.

Probably not the cheapest solution, but it’s a great look at what NASA is all about.

Moonbase Alpha is available through Steam, right now.

Making money with Flash

If you’re writing any program in any language, at some point, you might want to earn a little something with that program. Flash programs are notoriously difficult to monetize. Most probably because there are so many options unknown to many developers.

The July issue of the Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine has an in depth look at the different possibilities: from protecting and selling your Flash program to add networks.

JavaScript for the server

It’s been around for a while now, but it appears frameworks like NodeJS are finally getting traction. As all webframeworks, they want to make it easy to develop web applications. What’s special is that you program the web application in JavaScript.

I can’t tell you which framework is the best, but here’s a list of why you might want to give RingoJS a try. You’re probably going to find similar lists for NodeJS. So why not give both of them a try?

(image credit)

You might not notice it, but this is the first post written on the 3.0 version of WordPress. The fact that you’re not noticing, is testimony for how smooth the upgrade went. Obviously I didn’t upgrade to keep the exact same blog. There are some big enhancements that will enable a bunch of ideas I’ve been wanting to implement.

It’s now possible (or at least, much easier) to customize how individual posts are displayed. You can define custom post types with a dedicated custom template. Or you can keep it a little easier with custom backgrounds and headers. It’s a feature you’re probably going to see here pretty soon.

There are also an extreme number of enhancements for developing themes and plugins. The list is so long, I’m going to have to take a day just to go through it and see what I might want to use.

The full list of changes is right here.

… is to write a program. So in my quest to study Python, I was looking for something to create. Enter JayIsGames’s Casual Gameplay Design Competition, previously mentioned and much loved. Sadly they only allow games that run in a browser, but that’s not going to hold me back. I’m going to jump that hurdle when it comes to it (I’ve already seen some possibilities)

And otherwise, I can always enter the PyWeek challenge. Some great stuff was already created for this competition (check out Kite Story) so I’ve got my work cut out.

PyGame should get me started quickly, but I might first need to study a little more than data types.

More news soon!