Recent Articles
Popcap takes a leaf out of Evony’s book
Aug 14, 2009 Miscellanous 2 Comments
Many of you who surf the internet daily (mostly on gaming sites) would more than likely have come across advertising for a certain online game called Evony.
While starting off as rather innocent, the advertising gradually became more and more risque, and people started taking notice (mostly by laughing) the ridiculous attempts to attract their main target market to play their game. Mainly by sticking a woman on the image, showing a bit of flesh, and adding a few “insinuating” taglines. Just see for yourself how hilarious these ads have evolved.
Google 2.0
Aug 12, 2009 Articles Leave a comment
With the release of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine and the Yahoo/Microsoft deal, its no surprise that Google is starting to feel a little heat. This can only be a good thing; nothing like a bit of good healthy solid competition.
The result? The next version of Google 2.0, as reported by Mashable.
It is evident that Search is the foundation of all of Google’s online strategy, and in order to stay profitable it has to stay on top. And now Google has generously allowed the general public to preview the development build of its dominating search engine.
While searching for me, there are no immediate differences in the results. I did, however, notice that the previous version of Google could not find my facebook profile (rather strange, I think), where as the new version had listed me under an expandable list of results from Facebook.
Regardless, it is an exciting (and often scary) period to be involved in the development of the internet as we know it. Be sure to hop over to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and give it a whirl!
IE Team Meddles in HTML5
Aug 11, 2009 Articles 1 Comment
Just saw a post over at Ajaxian mentioning some involvement from the IE team in the HTML5 discussions.
Personally I feel a little mixed about it. Obviously, any interest in the specifications from the IE team should indicate some level of consideration towards standards compliance, which is always a welcome sign. However, judging by some of the feedback given by Adrian Bateman I can only feel that the IE team continue to fail to understand what I feel are some of the goals of the HTML5 specifications.
Read More..
Windows 7 – First Impressions
May 17, 2009 Articles Leave a comment
So, after a long wait, I’m finally working on a totally new setup! And all for the low cost 700AUD. And to top it all off, I got a copy of Windows 7 RC1 to put on it.
I must say I have grown extremely biased against Microsoft products, but it is hard to dismiss their continuing relevance in our everyday use of our systems. I still cannot drop Live Messenger to keep in contact with friends, nor can I stop using Microsoft Office for documents despite all the rave reviews about Open Office. Similarly, I still cannot get rid of Windows as a result of my work.
This does not mean I’m a total pushover when it comes to what I need. I was not pleased with Vista, just as I was disgusted by Windows ME. What is strange, though, is that most of the time, it is hard to identify the things I disliked about either of them. But most people still manage to express either positive or negative impressions despite being unable to elaborate on their position. This is my attempt.
Papervision3D: Materials and Collada
Jan 19, 2009 Articles 5 Comments
Today I spent a little of my spare time playing with Papervision3D, in order to participate in a Papervision3D Competition. I quickly ran into a problem, to which I couldn’t find the solution the usual way (i.e. Google). However, I finally got it working, and I’m glad to write up my findings here for those of you who might face the same problem.
The Problem
The problem I faced was simple. I downloaded a few Collada files from Google 3D Warehouse, expecting it to work in my project out of the box. It did work, but it gave me a completely untextured model, like so.
After a little looking around, I spotted a post which suggested looking inside the DAE file, to check if its materials are pointing to the right locations!
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Do you use WordPress.Com Stats?
Jan 14, 2009 Articles 4 Comments
I’ve been trying to show my most active posts on my site (for the purposes of driving more traffic) for the past few days, and the plugins that I tried just didn’t seem to work.
That is when I realised I had already installed the WordPress.com Stats plugin. Unfortunately, the plugin is purely for the administration area (consisting of a widget and a full section), so I decided to hack the code to leverage on a plugin I already had.
The Hack
The code I wanted is found inside “stats.php”, where you find the code that displays the admin widgets and page statistics. From there it was just a short search for the function in question (in this case, we need “stats_get_csv()”). Once I figured out what the parameters meant, I was able to integrate it into my page.
The Code
<ul>
<?php
$active_posts = stats_get_csv( 'postviews', 'days=7&limit=5');
foreach($active_posts as $post){
?>
<li>
<?php printf('%s (%s Views)',
'<a href="' . get_permalink( $post['post_id'] ) .
'">' . get_the_title( $post['post_id'] ) .
'</a>', number_format_i18n( $post['views'] ) ); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>
</ul>
In the code above, “stats_get_csv” simply gets a list of Posts, and we can simply use them to display the information that we want.
Hopefully this might be helpful for anyone out there who is using WordPress.Com Stats, and don’t wish to use another redundant plugin.
Windows 7 in 2009?
Jan 12, 2009 Articles 2 Comments
Ed Bott over at ZDNet seems fairly confident that Windows 7 is scheduled for a release before August 1st, 2009. This comes from a single line in the Beta release notes that says,
When the Beta expires on August 1, 2009, you’ll need to reinstall a released version of Windows to keep using your computer.
While this is purely speculation, I would definitely support such an early release date, but only if it was guaranteed to be stable, secure, and able to encourage adoption amongst customers. If it achieves that, at least I will still have a job for a while yet, and thankfully be able to skip past Vista.
“Doing it Right” vs. “Getting it Done”
Jan 5, 2009 Articles 5 Comments
I am in the beginning phases of familiarising myself with an internal project at my company, and what I saw really shocked me. It certainly isn’t your typical “Student Project”; in fact, it would probably fail the more advanced courses.
In some sense, I feel quite disillusioned: surely what I have learnt (and in most cases, taught) in University would see some application in the real world. However, it seems that what I have learnt in uni is “How to do it Right“. In many real-world projects, including this one, the focus is on “Getting it Done“.
The project I am current assigned to is an excellent example.
The System
The System is a relatively featureful Time Tracking System. Employees log in, log the number of hours they worked on a specific project, and log out. Yet for something this simple, the System itself is broken is more than 1 way:
There is a list of “projects” on the left, which Employees can click to add a particular project to the current week’s timesheet. However, “projects” can also be sorted into “categories” and “clients”. Since the list control treats every single item as an item, Employees were able to add “categories” and “clients” as projects as well. While not exactly a critical issue, it is obvious that this is not the intended behaviour of the System.
Another problem was the “comments” mechanism that was built into the system. Aside from entering in the number of hours worked (into a textfield, no less), a small input area is overlayed next to it, allowing the Employee to enter in a small comment about that particular entry. However, the Javascript involved is strictly IE6 only. Meaning, it broke on all the other browsers that employees wanted to use.
Lets Be Realistic
This is not the first time I have experienced this “mentality” in my company. When estimating deadlines for a project, it is done with the intention of keeping cost low (cost being calculated as a rate by the hour). Thus, the mindset of the programmer is always to “get it done as soon as possible”. Is this what you’d call “Agile Programming”? Or is this just irresponsible coding?
Or perhaps it is simply impossible to “do it right” in the real world.
Learning C#: Early Impressions
Dec 21, 2008 Articles 3 Comments
For the last couple of weeks, I have been spending time learning C# (the mongrel offspring of Java and C++, as I like to describe it). So far, I haven’t had much trouble, thanks to my strong background in Java, and I think I have done enough in a week to be able to compare the two languages and talk about the parts I like and the parts I don’t. Perhaps these will grow on me in the future, or it may not.
This is not a rant about ASP.NET, which I have also been learning at the same time. That will come in time. Read More..
Looking for a Job: Personal Experience
Dec 9, 2008 Articles 1 Comment
Not to long ago I was searching for an Internship position as part of my degree requirements. I have since been offered an opportunity at a relatively small company, which I have great impressions of so far. This article talks about the experiences I’ve gone through in my search, which I hope will provide any insights to any who read this.
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