Tag: ham radio

Electron is Awesome

I finally got the current version of Netlog, my program to help me create logs of the ARES Training Net, moved over from being a web app to being a desktop app in the electron framework. I had to require jquery and schedule the init function to be run 100 microseconds in the future instead of depending on the apparently non-existent onReady event of the document. Figuring this out took me several minutes but it really wasn’t that difficult at all. I suspect that getting it to run as an app on windows and linux will be even easier. I wouldn’t be surprised if getting it to run on Android and iOS wasn’t fairly easy as well.

I suspect there will be a bunch of applications that work this way in the near future. I might even get them to let me write an app in Coffeescript at work. I doubt it. It’s a little bit too free wheeling for the corporate environment. I guess that’s my main problem. I’m too much of a rebel to excel in the corporate environment.

I spent all of my time yesterday learning about photon and electron and forgot about writing my blog post. Well, in the spirit of moving on, here is my blog post for today. Tomorrow is another day. I hope I can get my momentum back and post again tomorrow.

Cyberspace

As I read my email and watched some of the YouTube videos on channels that I subscribe to this morning, I realized how different my life has become in a very short amount of time. Back in the early 90s I worked in a Virtual Reality lab at a large corporation. We were trying to determine if and how we could use immersive virtual reality to do things better, cheaper, faster, safer, etc. We were chasing the holy grail of cyberspace, that place that is everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. As I exchanged comments with fellow YouTubers in North Carolina, Liverpool, New York City, Florida and Arkansas, it struck me that cyberspace has become a lot more subtle than Neal Stephenson and William Gibson ever imagined. There is no immersive virtual reality, for which I am thankful. I used to get motion sickness from wearing the VR helmet. The glue is the virtual places that we congregate online, through the web or email or the telepresence of our webcams.

I used to scoff at the term social-web. I was convinced that what we were experiencing was a variety of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). What I’ve realized lately is that the social-web is CMC of a very intimate variety. I probably have as many friends on line as I have in “real life”. I hate the term “real life”. It implies that my online friends are somehow not real. I tried using “3d space” but it is just a little too geeky for me, and I consider myself a geek. I don’t know what we should call it but I’ll recognize it when I hear it.

I recently upgraded my amateur radio license to Extra Class (the highest class possible). I now have privileges to talk on the part of the radio spectrum that propagates around the world. I haven’t got a radio yet but I am shopping around and thinking seriously about building a low power transceiver. I realized as I was thinking about cyberspace this morning that the allure of ham radio has always been the magic of talking to someone far away as if they were right here with me. I haven’t been on the air in years and I haven’t been on the air in the HF bands ever so I don’t have any radio friends yet. But I am sure that they will be just like the YouTube friends I have made.