Welcome to SoftwareMonkey.org
SoftwareMonkey.org is home to a number of free programs, code extracts, and articles on programming.
Most of the code is written in Java, but any discussion of the techniques involved is presented in a language agnostic form and applicable to object oriented programming in general.
Although it has nothing to do with programming (except perhaps to emphasize that programmers should have some sort of balance in their lives) I also showcase some of my photography on this site.
Why Software Monkey? In general the term "monkey" is applied to a junior level and inexperienced person in a particular trade or discipline. I use the term self-deprecatingly to remind myself that every 5 or 10 years I look at my old code and think how much better it could have been done. In a sense, I believe we all remain "monkey programmers" our entire careers - there's always something new to learn, constant advances in computer programming with which we are not yet familiar.
About The Monkey
I have been writing code since I was 12 - I started with BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20. The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX-81 on which I progressed to programming Z80 assembler by the time I was 13, to speed up my games. My next computer was a ZX-Spectrum with a massive 48K RAM and 16 colors! I still fondly remember the hours spent designing bitmapped graphics for our games by redefining the character sets, one pixel at a time. Life was so much better after my best friend, Rodney, and I wrote a program to let us cursor around an 4x4 grid of 8x8 characters (each character representing one pixel) to design our graphics.
Most of my professional experience has been programming in C and Java primarily in the networking and communications arena. But in the early years there was Pascal and COBOL (the horror!), and for the last 15 or so years there has been a fair amount of iSeries CLP and RPG.
On the markup side of things I have had to learn a working knowledge of HTML, CSS and a multitude of XML dialects.
My hobby programming activities are mostly in Java, but I enjoy experimenting with Haskell and JavaScript. My other hobby is photography. Between these two things plus family and work, my time seems to disappear like ice-cream at a kids party.
Even though I am an "old school" programmer who memorized the powers of two through to 65536 as a pre-teen, over the years I have become frustrated with the disparity and confusion cause by using binary applications of Kilo, Mega, and Giga as opposed to the decimal SI standards. So as I matter of principle, I am forcing myself to adjust to using the SI standard unit definitions and prefixes for powers of two (realizing this will make me unpopular with some readers). My personal opinion is that it's past time to end the confusion and use of the decimal SI multiples and prefixes is already firmly established as powers of 10 in every discipline & industry except computing; something has to give, and the something needs to be the incorrect use of decimal SI units for binary multiples.
| Factor | Name | Symbol | Origin | Derivation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 210 | kibi | Ki | kilobinary (210)1 | kilo (103)1 |
| 220 | mebi | Mi | megabinary (210)2 | mega (103)2 |
| 230 | gibi | Gi | gigabinary (210)3 | giga (103)3 |
| 240 | tebi | Ti | terabinary (210)4 | tera (103)4 |
| 250 | pebi | Pi | petabinary (210)5 | peta (103)5 |
| 260 | exbi | Ei | exabinary (210)6 | exa (103)6 |
For more detail see the NIST government site.
About This Web Site
All pages on this web site are annotated with a revision date in the footer. This date pertains to content update not typographical and spelling corrections.
The font sizes on this web site are set assuming a base font size of 16 points. Although this is contrary to the documented CSS specification, it is apparent that the majority of the sites on the internet make this assumption because that seems to be the default font size for the major browsers. Consequently, it seemed best to design this site to work best for the majority of end-users rather than resist the status quo solely for the sake of being more "technically correct". If you are one of the minority who have set their browser font to something other than the default, you have my sympathy and apologies - remember: Ctrl+ and Ctrl- are your browsing friends.
The current title background photo was shot by me at the Wellington Zoo in New Zealand. For the record I do know that a chimpanzee is an ape, which is not technically a monkey, but I use the image taking some liberty with the definition of the word "monkey".
Initial web site template was provided by Free CSS Templates.
This page has been viewed 955 times.
