Introduction Iron.io has a product called IronWorker which provides a task oriented Linux container that you can run your programs inside. If you are not sure what I mean, think of this as having a temporary Linux virtual machine instantly available for your personal but short term use. IronWorker allows you to load your binaries, code files, support files, shells scripts and just about anything else you may need to run your program in the container.

In my Outcast data server I have several data retrieval jobs that run using different go routines. Each routine wakes up on a set interval. The most complex job is the downloading of radar images. What makes this complex is that there are 155 radar stations throughout the United States that take a new picture every 120 seconds. All these radar images can be put together to create a mosaic. When the go routine wakes up to pull down the new images, it must do this as quickly as possible for all 155 stations.

Earlier in the month I wrote a post about using C Dynamic Libraries in Go Programs. The article built a dynamic library in C and created a Go program that used it. The program worked but only if the dynamic library was in the same folder as the program. This constraint does not allow for the use of the go get command to download, build and install a working version of the program.

For those of you who are like me, trying to learn the Mac and Linux operating systems, Golang programming and deployment constructs all at the same time, I feel your pain. I have been building a Go application for a couple of months on my Mac and it was time to deploy the code on a local Ubuntu server. I was having a really tough time and it was turning into a disaster.

If you are coming to Go after using a programming language like C# or Java, the first thing you will discover is that there are no traditional collection types like List and Dictionary. That really threw me off for months. I found a package called container/list and gravitated to using it for almost everything. Something in the back of my head kept nagging me. It didn’t make any sense that the language designers would not directly support managing a collection of unknown length.

My son and I were having fun last weekend building a console based game in Go. I was recreating a game from my youth, back when I was programming on a Kaypro II. I loved this computer. I would write games in BASIC on it all day and night. Did I mention it was portable. The keyboard would strap in and you could carry it around. LOL. But I digress, back to my Go program.

Since I started programming in Go the concept and use of slices has been confusing. This is something completely new to me. They look like an array, and feel like an array, but they are much more than an array. I am constantly reading how slices are used quite a bit by Go programmers and I think it is finally time for me to understand what slices are all about.

I ran into a problem today. I was building code to consume NOAA’s tide station XML document and quickly realized I was in trouble. Here is a small piece of that XML document: <timezone>LST/LDT</timezone> <item> <date>2013/01/01</date> <day>Tue</day> <time>02:06 AM</time> <predictions_in_ft>19.7</predictions_in_ft> <predictions_in_cm>600</predictions_in_cm> <highlow>H</highlow> </item> If you notice the timezone tag, it states the time is in Local Standard Time / Local Daylight Time. This is a real problem because I need to store this data in UTC.

Back in June, Gustavo Niemeyer posted the following question on his Labix.org blog: Assume uf is an unsigned integer with 64 bits that holds the IEEE-754 representation for a binary floating point number of that size. How can you tell if uf represents an integer number? I can't talk for you, but I write business applications. I just don't have the background to quickly knock out an answer for a question like this.

This article was written for and published by Safari Books Online Back in May, I finally decided that it was time to move away from the Microsoft stack to Linux. The cost of developing, licensing, and purchasing cloud computing on the Microsoft stack is too expensive. My company was approved for BizSpark, which made development possible for a small company like mine, but what am I going to do three years from now?