Daryl Teo’s Blog

Part of my current course requires me to learn Assembler, which is basically the 2nd most basic level of coding (after Machine Code). Gone are the luxuries of parameter passing, return values, classes and primitive methods, and your best friends are Bytes, subroutines, and branches.

As I do more and more of it however, the more I begin to appreciate how much high level languages do for us. Things like control structures (for, while loops), conditionals (if, switch), and other simple methods like getting the length of a string are all tedious coding tasks in Assembler (getting the length of a string in Assembler would require some 10-20 lines!). Things that may seem simple enough in high level languages(like parameter passing) require fiddling with stack pointers, and memory allocation. Now that I think of it, learning C should be a walk in the park compared to learning Assembler (And I plan to do that soon enough)

So next time you pass parameters to a function, or declare a variable, just remember… things could be much much much harder!

Yes I am well and truely alive. Still settling into life here in Melbourne, applying for jobs (and not getting them, not surprisingly), and concentrating on studies. Meanwhile, Flash CS3 has launched, and I don’t have enough money to get it. What a bummer. Also, Patrick Mineault of AMFPHP has announced he has retired from the project. Aral Balkan releases a new solution that could possibly replace AMFPHP.

So what are my plans now? Uni definately comes first. I have a couple of game ideas I want to realise, and I also run a course-notes site for my course. Portfolio, and site are also on the list. And a job.

But hopefully I will get back into the groove of blogging (and also have things to blog about!). See you guys around!

Decided that a Wordpress Blog wasn’t going to cut it. So I might design a site from scratch, or use Joomla. So I’ll take it offline for awhile till I set it up. In the future, all content will be found at this blog. The official site will be focused towards the program, and not the development of it.

The site for my work on AMFPHP and Wordpress Integration can now be found at

http://darylteo.com/amfWP/

I have a strange coding habit.

Sometimes I need to create a class. Say I need to have a dog. So I create this dog class, and make it bark. Then I think to myself, what if I wanted to create a cat? How would I do that. Throw in an Animal class, and subclass it, making sure that each animal will have a correct sound. And since I’m doing that, I better make sure that I can define whether the animal is domesticated, 4 legged or 2 legged, big or small, or what colour it is too. All inside a fully versatile package, together with all the error detection anyone would ever need, and custom functions.

But all I wanted was a dog that barked.

Does anyone ever suffer from this “compulsive versatility” your applications or classes must have? When all you wanted was something that does a specific thing, and instead you build a full encapsulated class brimming with methods and functions that you probably won’t use, but others might?

I bring this up because, as some of you may have noted, I’ve been working on using Wordpress as a CMS, for Flash and AMFPHP. And Patrick Mineault of 5etdemi, and developer of AMFPHP, asked for volunteers to create a package to integrate Wordpress and AMFPHP. Now, as much as that sounds good and all, but for my purposes, I don’t need a full package, and I probably won’t finish it. Maybe its my self-perceived quality of work doesn’t seem up to scratch.

Well, hope I can keep at it. The other bad habit I have is losing steam really quickly.

Successfully moved. Nothing seems broken yet, but if you see anything please email me or leave a comment! Thank you!

Domain is still shaky. Not sure if its the hosting, or its just random instability.

Furthermore, I will be migrating over to Wordpress 2.1 soon. So I’ll have to make sure nothing breaks. Wish me luck!

Spent about 15 hours offline today, thanks to DreamHost suffering from an apparent DDos attack. Had to resync my feeds (again), and check everything is working as it should.

On a separate note, Wordpress 2.1 has been released! This was a mixed blessing for me: it comes at a time when I am working towards a Flash/Wordpress integration, so while I get to make sure it works with the latest version, I had to double check that all my work had not gone to waste. Thankfully, most of the database structure stays the same, except in the case of Links.

Instead of Blogroll having its own table, it now has a simple table of links, which are referenced by a Category in the categories table.

In other plans, I might start this blog from scratch, using Wordpress 2.1 . The more I post here, the more I have to migrate.

Shall fiddle around with flash some more. Many apologies for the downtime.

To my 2 loyal RSS Subscribers, if they should ever return, please re-update your RSS Readers to reflect the change (it seems that I forgot to change my Feed target in Feedburner, and it was still linking back to the original host)

Many Apologies!

If this is the first time to my blog, you might not know this, but DarylTeo.com now runs on DreamHost servers!

Things will be a little unstable, while I get everything back up to speed, install the required plugins and such so rest assured I’ll be posting here again eventually.