Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged programming
Internet Explorer 6…My Nemesis
Jun 25th
As I've been mentioning over the past couple weeks, I've been working on redesigning my friend's website ( http://www.wassyart.com) and I've entered the stage where I break out the design elements and create it as an actual web page.
Everything was going smoothly right up until I decided to see how horrible it looked in internet explorer 6. I freaking hate IE6. It's a non standards complaint piece of crap that should never have been released and now that better alternatives are out there should be left behind like the sack of garbage that it is.
Now only about 4-5% of the visitors to her website use IE6, but that's enough where I'd want it to be at least functional… So that's what I spent the evening doing. I got it all mostly working. Couple annoying issues but I'm almost ready to call it "good enough"
And then the fun will begin. It should move along pretty quickly once I get the basic layout done. Not much change in content, more of a facelift.
Randomly Walking Through Nature
May 11th
It's been another good weekend for me, and as per usual lately, I forgot to write about it. I'll try to get back into the habit of keeping this up to date again. I started doing it then the move happened and I didn't have time and I never got back into the habit… Ah well, time to start again.
Anyway, the Friday party was a success. Lots of relaxation type stuff happening when it was much needed. Some City of Villains being played, some Rock Band and Guitar Hero. And much unhealthy food and drink was consumed.
Which is why I decided that on Saturday, I'd head back to the gym to try to get a habit going again, especially now that I have my iPod Nano. I had a good workout but I realized that I would probably need to get an armband thingy. The Nano has the headphone jack on the bottom and it makes it hard to set it down on machines while I'm exercising.
After the Gym, most of the day was spent up in the office working on my C# programming. I ended up doing a lot of good work on FrostBot, my AI chatbot project. On sunday I actually got it talking…sort of. It needs some improvements, but it actually works!!
Returning to Saturday though, Guitar Hero: Metallica came in through GameFly…a game that I was waiting to play. Wassy and I played some of that in the evening. It's a very very good game. All the songs I played were fun, the atmosphere is awesome and it even has the orchestra in it! All together, I think I'll be buying it. I'll play it enough to make it worth while.
Oh yes, I also started restocking my 20 gallon fish tank on saturday. I went out fish browsing with the intent to research things out, but the fish store had 2 bleeding heart tetras in stock and I had a school that was severely lacking in members, so I bought them. They integrated well with the existing fish and now I have a little school of 4 tetras swimming around in there. I want to get one other school of stuff before I'm finished.
Sunday, aside from finishing off FrostBot, my friends and I wandered around in search of a good place to walk. We ended up stumbling upon a local town park that has a really cool nature trail that isn't too far away. Win! We'll be going back there for walking frequently through the summer I think. It's a nice walk through the woods and it even runs along a creek for a little ways. The creek has a ton of tires and crap it in it…but it's still a creek!
That's about it for the weekend. Like I said, I'll try to write more frequently if I can. Hopefully I can at least get back to at least a couple posts per day.
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A Very Welcome Weekend
Apr 27th
Last week was pretty darn crappy, so the arrival of the weekend was very welcome. A chance to catch my breath a bit and do a little relaxation (while still getting some work done) was needed.
The fun started on friday when Wassy hinted she was working on a little art related project for me. She had just gotten a set of Copic Sketch Markers and she wanted to try them out on something. So she took one of the sketches she had been working on for an upcoming piece for me (using the markers) and did a ink and marker test run with it. Of course she didn't tell me that right off the bat. Just hinted she was up to something and made me guess what it was. I'm really impressed by how it ended up looking using the markers. I'm looking forward to the full piece and to seeing more copic colored pieces in the future.
It's just really nice to have a crappy week end with a little gift artwork. I really appreciate it because she was extremely busy with her school work and other commissions, so to take that much time out of that stuff and work up something for me means an awful lot to me.
Techy paragraph time: I decided this weekend that I wanted to learn C# and .NET. I never really got around to looking at .NET seriously and C# seems to be in demand these days, so I figured it was time to update myself. If you're into software development it's really necessary to update your skillset every couple of years to keep up with the ever advancing march of technology. So I figure it's time to get on the bandwagon and check it out. Went out to the store and picked up a hefty book and I've been working my way through it pretty quickly. It's a cool language and I'm starting to see why people like using .NET so much.
In less techy news, my friends and I were going to have this braised chicken recipie and I was sent in search of the fresh vegetable type ingredients on friday evening. I had some trouble finding a chili pepper though. I've never had to go buy one, you see, and when I went to the store nothing was labled correctly. I ended up getting two peppers, neither of which ended up being the correct peppers. We had no idea what they were, so naturally, we made Jay try them out. He's got a high tolerance for spicy foods, so we figured this was the best option.
He took one bite out of the first pepper and was fine. Then one out of the second pepper and was fine again. And then…he took a second bite and dove for sink for a glass of water. It seems that this pepper was "really f'ing hot". I thought he was kidding for a second there, but then realized that his eyes were watering…oops. I do feel bad about it, but it was EXTREMELY entertaining. I need to bring more random peppers home sometime…
Overall, a very nice relaxing weekend.
Settled In? Maybe?
Apr 4th
It seems like we're pretty much all settled into the new apartment. We've got some wall decorations going up now around the various areas. I need to do some more organizing in my room and in the spare bedroom/office but we've got a fully functional apartment now. I'll try to take some pictures once the wall decorations are more finalized.
It's weird. It feels like we've been living here for longer than a week. But this past week seems to have gone by very quickly as well. So…time is just all screwed up in all sorts of ways.
Last night we had a little party deal to celebrate being settled in. We broke out the Rock Band and played through Perl Jam's Ten album which was purchased for the evening. And a late night abandoned game Trivial Pursuit (we started it a bit too late and then ran out of energy about an hour in) rounded out the activities. A fun and much needed evening of relaxation.
This weekend I want to finalize my room and get some of my various art stuff hung around the apartment. I also want to get some work done on my C++ chatbot that I'm making. I finally got the basics working and now I hope to actually get it to do something resembling actual chatting soon. Hopefully this weekend. But first, the cleaning.
C(hibi) Programming
Mar 3rd
Apologies for the lame heading, but it's early and you get what you get.
Last night was a very productive evening for me as I continued to dive into my C++ learning again. I'm reviewing classes now and working through all that fun object oriented stuff. But more on that in a minute.
Wassy sprung a neat little gift on me last night. She needed a little break from what she was doing so she sketched out a chibi version of Frost and sent it to me late last night. Very cool, and very cute. I do enjoy it when she springs random gifts like this on me. And, like I told her last night, there's not many (reasonable) styles left for her to be drawn in. Unless you want to do a abstract frost or impressonist frost.
Back to the programming…it's really coming back to me as I go through it so I looks like I just needed a refresher. I'm really itching to start working on some networking code a bit because that's something I only brushed with and was never really comfortable doing. I think I might start by writing a little chat client or something, which will give me experience with threads and network progamming all at once.
But we'll see what I actually write when I get around to writing it. I seem to change my mind an awful lot.
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The Weekend. Encapsulated
Mar 2nd
This weekend was pretty low key from the activities standpoint, but very nice and relaxing.
I, as usual, went over to do some hanging out with my friends this weekend. We wanted to get out and about a little bit so we decided to pay a visit over to the local art gallery and browse around for a bit. The last time I was there half the gallery was closed for renovation so it was nice being able to get into the places where I wasn't able to go before.
After that we wandered back to their place for some hanging out activities which were quite fun. We did some City of Heroes again, watched some TV…you know…basic friends hanging out sort of stuff.
Sunday was more of a working day. I got in some work with jQuery on Wassy's website doing some back end, administrative stuff to make the images in the gallery a little easier to manage. I really, really enjoy the way jQuery works. It makes Javascript stuff so easy to do and a lot more understandable for a Javascript newbie such as myself. Looking forward to playing with it more. I also did a little more C++ work and I'm starting to really itch for a simple yet expandable project for me to start poking at. I had the idea for an AIM chat bot type thing but I dunno if I'm nearly as interested in that right now as I was. We'll see what I do…
In any case, it feels good to be back doing more programming for fun.
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jQuery…Why Didn't I Do This Earlier???
Feb 25th
Geeky post warning. This is programming related.
I finally got around to playing with jQuery last night and I'm left wondering why the heck I didn't look at it earlier. jQuery, basically makes javascript programming so much easier. I had always been a little hesitant to leap into javascript because I never really got the hang of it which limits me somewhat when it comes to web development.
But now, I think I'm going to take the leap into learning more about this stuff because jQuery takes a lot of the scary out of javascript. It makes it a lot more managable and takes care of any potential browser bugs. I was playing around some last night and doing things I couldn't even begin to figure out when I last tried to do something with javascript.
I'm hooked. I need to find a good book. jQuery rocks!
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Long Weekend Wrapup
Feb 17th
Here in the US, Monday was president's day which means that some people have a 3 day weekend. And this year for some strange reason, I was one of those people. We usually don't get president's day off (at least I can't ever remember us getting it off) so I was a bit surprised when they came up with the holiday list this year.
So my 3 day weekend started by going out to the movies with my friends. We went off to see Coraline in 3D and it was very good. Excellent visual style, engaging story and very nice use of the 3D factor. There were no old people talking like the last couple movies which was a very, very good change of pace. And it was a nice non-thinking type movie after having the brain work overtime while watching Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Highly recommended.
I also received an omelet lesson on how to make them all fluffy and good. So that should help my breakfast for dinner aspirations.
Sunday was a half relaxing half working day where I did my chores and a little bit of C++ programming and then I did some relaxing City of Heroes playing. I also spent a good portion of the day watching episodes of Firefly on DVD. Wassy mentioned Sci-fi had Serenity on the other day which made me want to watch Firefly and Serenity again. Which I did.
Monday was intended to be a programming day but instead of working on C++ stuff like I had intended, I ended up spending a good portion of the day (while watching firefly) moving Wassy's website from one host to another. It took about 2 hours longer than I expected it to take, but it ended up all going smoothly in the end. After that I was pretty much programmed out, so I just relaxed for the rest of the evening.
Hoping I can get through another chapter in my C++ book this week and maybe get started on a small little project with practical applications.
*shiver*
Feb 5th
Ok, that's it. I'm tired of winter. When you wake up in the morning and it's -4F, it's time to take drastic measures. I quit winter! I'm done.
…
Ok, so that doesn't work real well…but man, I wish canada would keep it's cold air up there and not have to shove it down here every other week. It's their air, I'm more than happy to let them keep it up there where it feels safest.
There's been nothing much of interest to report over the past couple days. Work has been extremely hectic as our billing cycle and some reports that the upper management needed converged into the same time period and I had to do a lot of running around. As far as personal stuff goes, I've just been spending a lot of time working on my C++ programming and a little bit of time playing Mass Effect on my 360. I believe I'm almost done with Mass Effect, so expect a post with a really late review of that coming soonish.
Time marches onwards to the weekend, which I am looking forward to eagerly.
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Geeky Post Nobody Is Probably Going To Care About
Sep 25th
I just feel like writing something kinda geeky, relating to programming, so I'd imagine that this is going to be uninteresting to most of my blog readership. But I'm going to do it anyway. So, er..take that people!
I've never used any sort of version control system when I program. For any of my normal readers who have bypassed the warning, a version control system is basically a setup where every change you make to a file (usually a file containing program code) is logged which lets you step back to any previous point in time if you need to (say you screwed something up a month ago…you can go back and return things to the way they were then). It also allows multiple people to work on the same file at the same time and handles merging their changes together. And it's also handy for multiple version (like branching out a release version for bug fixing and then merging those changes back into a actively developed version.
Probably a byproduct of working in the unorganized environment that I do. Not much I can do about that. But in my efforts to make myself more marketable in my chosen profession, I decided it was about time to fix that problem. So I scouted around yesterday and settled on Unfuddle.com to start with. I was going to set it up myself, but in the end, having it off site on the internet somewhere made more sense since it also can serve as another point of backup.
I went with Subversion because it seemd to be popular and also works with Xcode which is what I'm using for my C++ stuff. Last night I tried to get it working with my wassyart.com files and I eventually did (after much silent cursing). It's pretty neat. I won't be using it to it's full potential since I'm only one person, but it provides enough benefits where I think I'll keep it up. Unfuddle is nice because it also allows me to have a bug tracking system so I can keep track of things I'm working on and such.
Anyway, geeky post over. I'll return this evening with a picture of my couch…
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