Technology Bytes Radio

Allright. I mentioned last week that we had some more birthdays coming up.

Our first birthday is for something that caused quite a stir about a decade ago. You come in contact with it every time you touch an ATM or use a credit card. Guesses? Well, it was fifty years ago that Rear Admiral Grace Hopper saw her idea that computer programs could be written in a human readable language like English, rather than the zeros and ones of machine code, manifest itself in CoBOL. That’s CoBOL, the computer language, not Cobalt, the element. CoBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language and is all about moving data in and out of ledgers, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. The name was selected at a committee meeting on September 18, 1959.

Micro Focus, the world’s leading provider of CoBOL development products, recently did a study in Australia that showed that people still use CoBOL at least ten times throughout the course of an average working day. Only eighteen percent of those surveyed had ever heard of CoBOL. CoBOL would have probably stayed behind the scenes if not for the Y2K scare. The issue here was that in 1959, computer storage was expensive and the change to the next century was a long way off. After all, if we were all zipping around in flying cars and jet packs, surely we wouldn’t still be using this language in 2009, right? Right?

D’oh!

With over two hundred and fifty billion lines of CoBOL in production, there are still a number of CoBOL programmers out there. I know that I took the last CoBOL class that the University of Houston gave in 1995 or 96, and some of my classmates went on to work on the Y2K problem here, then found work in poorer countries that couldn’t afford to update their non-Y2K compliant code until the premium on programmers went down on January 2nd, 2000.

With all the extra post-apocalyptic time these CoBOL programmers had on their hands, they were able to extend the CoBOL standard to include support for object oriented styles of programming, resulting in the COBOL 2002 Standard. It would have been funner if they had just called it CoBOL Oh Two.

Anyway, the next birthday belongs to the offspring of Ken Thompson, who was a programmer at AT&T subsidary Bell Laboratories in the summer of ’69. When his wife and young son departed for a month in August of 1969, he did what any young man in the summer of love did. He spent it in front of a keyboard and knocked out the Unix operating system. So while that’s not quite what every other guy was doing that summer, it still landed him an offspring that has gone on to spawn hundreds of little starnix operating systems all over the world. Unix didn’t really begin to take hold until it was ported to the PDP-11 minicomputer, a more powerful piece of metal than its previous home, the PDP-7.

Thompson soon teamed up with Dennis Ritchie, and, I’m going to steal a quote from ComputerWorld because they kinda nailed it with this:

“Thompson and Ritchie were the consummate “hackers,” when that word referred to someone who combined uncommon creativity, brute force intelligence and midnight oil to solve software problems that others barely knew existed.”

OK. So that’s the definition of a hacker. Crackers are different. If you’re good with accents, you can tell the difference.

I don’t know if there are any local geek birthdays coming up in Houston this month, but if you’re a geek and you have an October birthday, be sure to come out to the October Geek Gathering where the cast and crew of Technology Bytes will let you buy yourself a drink for your birthday, provided you’re of age. While the drink may cost you, Wifi connections to the web and general tech snarkyness are free for those celebrating a birthday this month or any other.

To gather with your fellow geeks, you’ll want to head to The Coffee Groundz at 2503 Bagby at McGowan this Friday, October 2nd. Parking is pretty open at seven, when people first start to show up, and gets a little more crowded after eight. There’s plenty of street parking, just make sure you don’t do it in front of the Coffee Groundz on McGowan, as they tend to tow. Just ask in IRC. Geek Gatherings are a place for people like us to get together to share news, ideas, stories, or sometimes just space, within comfortable reach of food, caffeiene, wifi and a solid assortment of adult beverages.

Laptops and gadgets are welcome, but not required. I’ll bring along some different incarnations of the Arduino for those who want to get their hands dirty with physical computing. I don’t know if Jay has messed around with his Arduino kit yet, Jay, but you could always bring it along in case anyone wanted to see what one looks like before its born.

Check our website, www.geekradio.com for details and directions to October’s Geek Gathering, as well as for some great pics of last month’s event.

If I get lucky with UPS, I may have an oscilloscope kit on hand that we can help bring into the world… Even if it doesn’t, I’ll still try to find an excuse to mix molten metal with general geekery, pending any applicable fire codes. I guess we’ll see this Friday.

Either way, that’s it for the birth of a language that just won’t die and that’s that for BarretTime.

You are invited to attend the Technology Bytes monthly gathering/meet-up. We’ll be descending upon at The Coffee Groundz, located 2503 Bagby, in Houston, TX.

The Coffee Groundz offers a diverse menu of coffees, teas, beers, wines and even well drinks and most important of all, FOOD AND FREE WI-FI!!!.

This month we’re joining with the Tiara Happy Hour crowd so it should be EXTRA fun!

This is an all ages event, so please bring your family and friends and enjoy an evening hanging out with the hosts of Technology Bytes along with many of our friends and fans.

The event starts around 7:30 and goes until ?

You don’t have to be a geek to attend. Heck, you don’t even have to be a current listener of the show. This event is a casual meet-up for anyone interested in technology or social media in all its forms and a great opportunity to just hang out with like minded individuals.

The Geek Gathering has been happening the first Friday of the month since February of 2002 and is always a good time.

No need to RSVP, but there is a Facebook event posted if you care to do so!
Click here to RSVP

We hope to see you there!

Photo by .imelda used with permission via Creative Commons license.

First off, we have a couple of birthdays in the house this month. That’s Hizzy or hiz-ouse for Dwight.

H.G. Wells 143rd birthday hit earlier this week, and may have slipped under the radar of many an Internet user if not for Google’s doodle’s the last few weeks.

If you haven’t had to search for anything on the web lately or if you’re one of those “bing people”, then you may not have noticed the recent outbreak of crop circle activity and alien abductions on the main Google search page.

In addition to arranging an alien abduction of the second O’s in the Google searcg page’s main drawing or doodle, as they’re officially known, Google sent out a Twitter containing a string of numbers that, when swapped for letters in the English alphabet, stated, “All your O are belong to us.”

Which is the perfect segueue into our second birthday of the month, the 1989 side-scrolling Japanese arcade game, Zero Wing. The original release date is a little fuzzy, though many speculate that it was earlier this month. What we know for sure is that the PC Engine port of that game was released on September 18th. I’m taking a little license with the original birthday. Google did it first, though, so it must be OK.

Someone else turned 50 this year, though I’ll save that for next week’s BarretTime. A hint is that they have more lines of code in financial institutions that just about anyone else, and they caused quite a scare a little under a decade ago.

So, with that said, this Saturday, September 23rd, plays host to the 2009 Houston Tech Fest at the University of Houston.

What is a Tech Fest?

First off, it’s by and for the community.

TechFest’s are about the community at large. They are meant to be a place for developers and IT Professionals to come and learn from their peers. Topics are always based on community interest and never determined by anyone other than the community. It’s also always free for attendees. The organizers understand that many times people can’t leave work for a day or two to attend training or even seminars. The beauty of the TechFest is that they always occur on weekends.

Another Tenent? TechFest uses community developed material.

The success of TechFest is that it is based on community content. All content that is delivered is original. All presentation content must be
provided (including the presenter’s code and any slide decks). The organizers state that, “If you have content you don’t want to share or provide to attendees then the TechFest is not the place for you.”

Now, this sounds a lot like a code camp. What’s the differece, you ask?

A Code Camp is strictly focused on the Developer where our TechFest is all about Technology, any technology. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a lot of talks aimed at the code slinging masses. It just means that if you can’t crank out a Hello World in CoBOL, there’s no need to worry.

Surf to www.houstontechfest.com to see the specific goings on of the day and be sure to register if you plan to attend.

Also this Saturday, the Houston Linux Users Group is having the second of their two monthy meetings at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located ever so conveniently close to Microcenter on the West side of the 610 loop. The presentation starts at two, with things wrapping up at four. I’ve never attended anything short of a good presentation at this groups meetings, and have always taken something away from it.

Hit www.hal-pc.org for details and directions.

That’s it for this month’s Birthday Bash and that’s that for BarretTime.

This Saturday, September 19th, the Houston Area Apple Users Group will host a talk by Apple’s Dreaux St. Marie on OS Ten dot Six, aka Snow Leopard. This month’s meeting will be held at the Bellaire Civic Center, located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas.

Special Interest Group Meetings run from nine AM to two PM, with a break at eleven for the main presentation.

One SIG name worth mentioning is the Green Apples SIG for new Macintosh users who have switched from another Operating System or who have never used a computer before. Hit www.haaug.org for details and directions.

And not this weekend, but the next, is the Houston TechFest at the University of Houston. TechFest is more of a tech conference than a tech show. Meaning that if you attend in hopes that booth babes will be showing off the hottest new tech gear, you’re setting yourself up for some serious disappointment. The point of this event is to confer with other people in the tech industry. So unless you find automated builds and continious integration sexy, this may not be the show for you.
If you do fancy those things, there’s plenty more where that comes from. There will be Test Driven Development, Practical Inversion of Control and a track called Making Productivity a Priority from President to Peon. If any of this floats your boat, you’ll want to head over to www.houstontechfest.com for details and registration information. (Registration is free, by the way.)

The Houston TechFest takes place on Saturday, September 26th at the University Center at the University of Houston. Registration and check-in starts at eight am, with the keynote taking place at nine.

And if you’re a Houston Web Developer or Designer, then there’s a meetup for you, too. The Houston Web Design Meetup Group will be getting together for the fourty eighth time this coming Tuesday,

September 22nd. The group devotes itself to all thing web. Interactive activities with a good chance to learn and participate are halmarks of the groups’s meetings.

This month’s meeting gets started at seven PM. If you attend, you’re invited to bring your laptop, as attendees will getting a chance to work with 960 Grid and Blueprint, two popular CSS frameworks. You can find details on the meetup at meetup.com slash web design dash seven seven.

And finally, there are those that say you have to wake up pretty early in the morning to get a leg up on the crew of Technology Bytes. Well, according to HAL-PC, you just have to wake up early enough to attend the 9:30 AM PC Upgrade and Trouble Shooting SIG at the HAL-PC Headquarters this Friday morning. www.hal-pc.org for details and directions.

That’s it for this week’s wakeup call and that’s that for BarretTime.