Blog Solution

May 25, 2006

I think that this WordPress thing may be just the thing I need. I am involved in alot of different things technology wise, and too many times I get stuck on a problem that someone else has solved, hence I tend to Google alot of errors I get in my programs. I wanted a way to give back to the community of people who have helped me solve some difficult software problems. Some of them involve .NET stuff, but some involve things like ActionScript programming and just Web Development in general. So me in all my brilliance pondered a way to post to multiple blog sites from one application. See? Brilliance. However my coworker pointed out to me that having multiple categories was easy enough. LOL sometimes that guy amazes me with his simplicity.

A while back I was doing a mockup site for a client and they had a WordPress blog and I have seen alot of them pop up lately. I was very impressed at how easy it was to install and customize it to the users liking. This new WordPress is simply amazing. You can host your blog on wordpress, or host it yourself. Also with tons of bells and whisltes such as Feed Aggregation, Search Engine Submission, AJax style menus, collaborative blogging, and much more. It definitely my one stop blog shop solution.

Posted in Personal, Uncategorized, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

AS3, haXe, and other thoughts,

May 25, 2006

I am really excited about haXe. It is a new web language recently released by the fellow who developed MTASC. (For those of you not familiar with MTASC its one of the best AS 2.0 compilers out there and its open source). Anyways the users of MTASC were worried that there would be no support for ActionScript 3.0, and lo and behold haXe is announced.

Haxe looks like it will be the one stop shop for web development. Similar to .NET. With haXe not only can you write ActionScript Code, you can also do server side scripting, similar to PHP and Perl all in the same language! To sum it up here is what haXe can do:

  • create Flash SWF files using Flash APIs for Players 6,7,8 and soon 8.5
  • generate Javascript code using Browser DHTML API, so you can create AJAX web applications
  • generate Bytecode that can be used on the Server side (using an Apache plugin) or packed into standalone executable

Each of theses platforms have their own API, but they share the same programming language and the same standard library, so if your classes are pure code (using no platform-specific API) then they can be compiled and used everywhere, depending on your needs.

Also, haXe make it easy to interoperate between theses different platforms, by providing common protocol libraries. Please note that it’s still possible to use haXe on only one platform if you want for example keep your current working code.
– Taken from haXe.org

I am pretty excited about this, having multiple functionality in one language sounds pretty enticing. I can't wait to start using it for some my projects!

 Edit also another thing that I noticed which will be awsome in ActionScript 3 is E4X syntax. This is awsome due to lack of support for E4X in some browsers.

For those of you unfamiliar with E4:

E4X means "ECMAScript For XML". It is a standard extension to ECMAScript.

So in real life E4X means "JavaScript for XML". from http://www.w3schools.com/e4x/default.asp. 

With E4X you can declare XML as a simple variable.  Ex:

var x = new XML()
x=
<note>
<date>2002-08-01</date>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>

 This will make writing RIAs much easier, besides using one of the AJAX frameworks, or Atlas 

Watch this space!  

Posted in Actionscript/Flash, Game Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

My Thoughts on going away to school.

May 24, 2006

I think that going away to school can be a blessing and a curse. For me it was that because I had never been around so many different people and view points. Sometimes I tend to latch on to the wrong ways of thinking, well… I shouldn't say wrong but moreso unhealthy. The college years are an important growth stage for people in general I believe. Its good to start habits that promote productivity and wise choices. I feel that I established alot of bad habits during those years, and now I am working to correct them. I am still pretty young and have a long way to go before I get to where I want to be.

I look at others who have stayed close to home when going to school, and some of them seemed more focused than what I was. I just acted like I was in Disneyland. They continued to work hard and realized their dreams sooner than I had even begun to think of mine. I think I was in a dream and graduation was my wake up call. Bleh maybe I should have stayed home and went to school. Probably would have been alot better off.

TJ 

Posted in Personal, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Welcome to my wonderful world ….of toys!

May 23, 2006

Sorry, I really like toys. Anyways my name is TJ, you might find some things here interesting I am involved in a couple of things. First a little about me, I just got out of school a year ago with a B.S. in Computer Science. Sadly my school taught me only the tip of the ice berg on the wonderful field and I was left to fend for myself soon after graduation.

During that summer I had to come to grips with what the real world was like. I had partied for a bit in school and I was for a rude awakening. The job market sucked, not to mention me not being … well "marketable". I became very frustrated with my current situation. Later I found out how little I know about the IT field and still how limited my knowlege of it is. I began searching for ways to get money and or move out of my parents house, the situation had got rough between them and I. They had spent all this money on me to go to school and I was not producing the results expected.

Fall rolled around and I could not see myself sinking deeper into debt and demolishment. During this time I had recieved some small contract work to develop a document management system for a small consulting firm. This was pretty good however the money never came on time, if it came at all. I also started taking MCSD.NET courses, training for the certification. However things got worse as my funds were rapidlly depleting. I got involved in an ecommerce reseller gig, which was cool however my hosting company squeezed every penny they could out of me….:( still payin for it. I thought I could show my parents that I could make a dollar my own way and intended to do just that.

To bad running a buisness requires more than just a vengeful attitude. I failed miserably but it was a lesson learned. Also being driven into one of the worst winters ever was no good.

By winter I had made many desperate moves to get myself out of my house. My faith in others dwindled as most of my friends refused to contact me. I was burnin so much money on the reseller thing that I couldnt pay the overhead anymore and was constantly loosing money. My new teaching job also was not paying me on time, and come to find out later one of my checks got misplace in my own house. Thanks Mom, thanks Dad. LOL just kidding. Everything happens for a reason. My parents turned out to be very "double-faced" at the time. In addition to having lost faith in friends I lost faith in my parents. By lost faith I mean that they were more like enemies to me than parents.

As the holidays rolled in things all these things compacted and compounded my life. I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. There was only one thing I could turn too and obviously that being God helped me through the situation. Which in reallity it wasn't that bad at the time. I say that because around that time alot of family members were sending me money.

And then it happend…

somewhere around December/January I came to the realization that I had been wasting a vast portion of my life on things of little importance and of destructive consequences. This hurt me big time because I know that I am smarter than that. I was just acting like I had no sense. Realizing that you have really been doing nothing for the past 3-4 years is heart wrenching. Luckily I had two very important people in my life to help me through this terrible revelation. They neither judged me or said hurtful things. They both were friends from school and they always told me the truth about things.

So after I realized that my life was going no where I decided that I was going to make something happen. My MCSD class was finishing and I was back in the market for a job. January 2006 I began to get many interviews for various developer positions. It felt so good knowing that my time was comming up and that I would soon be employed. Sadly some did not believe in me long enough to hold on and ended up abandoning me. But that did not deter me at all.

I got a job at the one of the best ISV's in the city of Chicago. This was the most amazing thing to happen to me. I had bounced back from a serious slump right were I needed to be. And darn it… it feels good!

Happy Reading.

Tj

Posted in Personal, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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