Saturday, January 26, 2008

Quiz

Trying to get the war web pages to work.

Flex

Finally finished laying out the quiz/response panel.

I moved all the Panel code and removed it and just used Labels. Too many containers makes it confusing and it didn't need a Panel. It needed a 1 HBox, and two VBoxes in it. Then I listed items in the VBoxes.

Friday, January 25, 2008

UI Layout

Finishing out UI Layout via Flex. I got to refactor the classes not to use Panel. It's a product of taking something that was Java and moving it to Flex. But I really need to start removing a lot of code to clean this up. And that means removing a lot of the Java code that I used as a template, and refactoring the names of the methods.

Got this done.

Is there a weird thing with JDK startup times?

It seems to me that Java 1.6 has a 60 second startup time. As opposed to Java 1.5. It drives me nuts.

Flex code

Need to finish off layout of the quizzing / reporting area.

Licensing issues:

I need to revisit the licensing issues in my code when it comes to clustered servers. Also there seems to be an unreasonable sensitivity to newlines at the end of the licensing. This needs to be addressed.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Flex Builder

Wow I lost my blog entry. that sucks...


Anyway gist of it is ... using Flex Builder more.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Facebook API

So trying to create a facebook app. I have an idea for a game to play and maybe it will get me tons of hits on the website. So this should be fun. Let's try it.

:)

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Damn you web.xml

OMFG

I had bad web.xml ... I've been having problem's deploying a war file and I couldn't figure it out. After hacking around with my build.xml (the creator of the war file), I started wittling down my web.xml ... *BAM* it was the:


invoker
/servlet/com.*
/servlet/*


Oh well ... thank god that's over.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Passion and Art

There are fundamental differences between soem art forms, some people think programming is an art, because it's so dependent on how the programmer interprets the problem that he's facing. Supposedly no two programmers should be able to tackle the same problem alike.

From my experience though there is a cookie cutter way to a solution. Something that other people expect.

Maybe ...

Well most programmers have their way of doing things. Their comments, the way they make function calls, and the way the make their variables. Everybody after a while has their own style and signature in coding that its like a finger print.

Maybe that's the art.

After a lot of thought, I found myself disillusioned by programming becuase of my situation in my job. I stay at the same company for years looking at the same code. I watch my other coworker who was a good mac programmer get burnt out enough to not code at all, and that's where I was headed. To coding burn out.

Luckily my boss, gave me something new to look at, and even though I'm not looking at it with the fervor of my youth, it interests me enough that I want to keep working on it.

I'm not sure about programmer burnout but it must be a big thing. Even though there are programmers out there that are passionate, managers tend to work them into the ground. The all nighters like it was in college, the heavy handed deadlines, etc. etc etc.

What can you do though ... but with all things that your passionate about. The passion can fizzle when you find out that thing your passionate about can also make you miserable. The talent you have can be exploited.

Just hope you get what you want out of it fast ... because if you don't you might end up ... lost burnt and up in smoke. And that's when you become a manager ... which is fine ... becuase like a google lawsuit has pointed out ... when your old ... your ideas as a programmer are bad.

Age discrimination.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

eclipse work space is in use

This is irritating. Eclipse crashes and leaves me with this.

http://help.eclipse.org/stable/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user/reference/ref-8.htm

The solution.

rm workspace/.metadata/.lock

For the windows users just go to your workspace directory and .metadata directory and delete the .lock file.

Oh if that doesn't work and it says that the file is still in use. Look for the javaw.exe or java process and kill it.