Download Visual Basic 3.0, VB3 Install

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If for some insane reason you are looking for Visual Basic 3.0 (perhaps you need to read some very old VB software source code) then it can be downloaded from here:

http://vetusware.com/download/Visual%20Basic%203.0/?id=3657

You will have to register on the vetusware.com site first which is straightforward enough.

This is handy if you have some old VB3 code that you need to read as the VB files themselves aren’t very readable with normal software editors. There is no installer all you need to do is unpack the RAR and run VB.EXE

vb3_ahh_bless

Writing a Software Engineering Spec.? Ditch MS Word for an easier life.

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I have been writing a lot of Software Engineering Specifications of late – requirements and functional specs and the like. Microsoft Word has been just driving me mad, it is the most infuriating piece of software ever written and seems to only get worse as time goes on.

I thought to myself, “Why am I putting up with this when there are so many other options available these days”, so I switched to LibreOffice Writer and I am much much happier and productive now.

So my advice to anyone struggling with the modern MS word – just give up and move to a better place! :)

The things a Software Engineer must sometimes do….

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Today I am busy installing Windows XP (professional) and Visual Studio 6(!) onto a virtual machine, don’t ask…… I was sure I had seen the back of VB6…..

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Integrating Intercom to cloud App keeps me out of trouble… (ARM NEON)

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I have been busy over the last few days integrating Intercom into a client’s cloud app. I have integrated quite a few SaaS systems of late (and written not a few REST interfaces myself) and I am quite enjoying this integration as the data model is good and the REST interface is reasonably easy to use!

So far so good, and at least it keeps me out of trouble, the specific trouble I have in mind is to attempt to implement a visual programming front-end for the ARM NEON SIMD instructions using the very exciting noFlo Javascript library!!

The ARM NEON instructions are very powerful SIMD instructions that are very useful for optimising image processing and computer vision tasks on ARM devices. They are however quite difficult to use as each instruction has so many variants for the different input and output element types. I reckon it could be a problem well suited to visual/graph flow programming and as far as I can see the most capable people at those races are those in the noFlo team – I am getting seriously excited about their work!

Anyway back to Intercom for the moment!

Pipedrive Integration – What’s the deal?

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Today I am working on the software integration of a client’s cloud app into Pipedrive. Pipedrive is a cloud based lead and sales tracking app, it exports a nicely designed REST API – but it can make make ones head spin at times!

One rather annoying/amusing thing is that pipedrive seem to have taken it upon themselves redefined the word ‘all’ to mean somewhat less than the ‘all’ we are used to, so querying ‘all’ deals on their Web UI doesn’t show all of the deals but subset of non ‘won’ deals etc.

Annoying at first but then amusing when you get used to it….

RidgeSolutions – Short Mench in Yesterday’s Irish Times

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Ridge Solutions was mentioned in a short article on the Greenhouse browser plugin in the Irish Times Yesterday:

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/greenhouse-effect-lets-us-voters-see-political-funding-1.1853040

The software’s the easy bit, I think that ‘Open Government’ has quite a ways to go in Ireland yet! ;-)

Spotted – First Raspberry Pi Prototype at Trinity College Dublin

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While wandering around the Fail Better exhibition at the Trinity Science Gallery I spotted the first hand-built Raspberry Pi prototype!

raspberrypi prototype

Prototypes are great!

This one sports an Atmel processor. Now I would love to see the protype software that ran on this early raspberry pi, anybody?!

Interesting article about which software development technologies will be hot in 2014

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Here is an interesting article detailing which software technologies will be hot in 2014 (in the author’s opinion). I have been especially interested in AngularJS of late, I hope to use it soon to great effect on an HTML5 UI for a smart camera.

http://java.dzone.com/articles/dev-tech-will-be-hot-2014

What backend technology does WhatsApp use?

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News today the Facebook is buying WhatsApp for an obscene amount of money got me interested in which software technologies they use at the back-end, my interest was further increased due to a FB post from Microsoft BizSpark saying that WhatsApp is one of their start-ups, could they possibly use MS technology I wondered?

Well after a bit of searching it seems that WhatsApp uses erlang on FreeBSD!

Erlang is one of the more interesting languages that have become popular of late as it was originally based on my all time favourite – Prolog!

http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2012-whatsapp-scaling.pdf
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2011/09/one-million/

Interesting group ‘Code for All Ireland’ setup as Chapter of Code for America

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Recently a very curious new technology and software centric group called ‘Code for all Ireland‘ was set-up. In their words group aims to:

Code For Ireland develops apps and services to solve community challenges and problems to assist government / public sector bodies become more open, transparent and efficient.

From looking at their website, it is a little hard to figure out exactly who’s behind the group and what their strategy is for making government more open and efficient, but they have been set-up as a chapter of the more established Code for America group whose website is informative contains this Ted talk:

Anyway its an open group and their next meeting is to be held on Saturday 24th. of Feb. so if we want to find out more we should go along!