Posts Tagged nerd
Ah, Rejection
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 29th, 2009
Oh well, apparently due to ” minimal user functionality” my phonewhale app doesn’t pass muster. Sorry Apple, I figured that in a world where there are how many metric tons of apps based solely on your ‘level’ example that minimal might be OK. I get it though. PhoneWhale was mainly about amusing my collegues, and learning. I’m gonna work on a few more ideas, something a bit less minimal.
First app submitted to the app store.
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 25th, 2009
W
ell, PhoneWhale has been submitted to the app store. It’s a simple application, little more than a hello world. It consists of a whale, drawn by Julianna, traced to vector art by me. You touch the whale, you hear a foghorn, you touch her mouth (trust me, it has to be a female, or should I say feWhale), you hear a groaning appology. Pretty simple really. It’s free, and up for approval. I’d like to enhance it with more sounds, animation, and maybe a feed of stupid stuff other people say, but for now it’s out there. I bought PhoneWhale.com, which is an extremely simple site, and will probably always remain so.
I’ve got an asp.net mvc app I’m working on, as well as another few iPhone apps I’d like to write. Also, the format of this blog changed, I’ve consolidated all my hosting under one account.
Man I never blog…
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 14th, 2009
So, what the heck has been happening in my life:
- I’m still happily married, still have two kids
- I still work at Toolbox.com, still digging it
- I twitter a few times a day, and post here a few times a year. that’s bad. I should work on that.
- I have been getting back to working out two or four times a week, but haven’t been on a bike outdoors in way too long.
- I read In Defense of Food, a really interesting look into the ‘Wester Diet’ that I’m trying to follow. Probably a blog post in its own right.
- I bought an iMac.
- I just signed up for the iPhone Dev program.
Yeah, those last three are pretty significant for me technically. See I’ve been a windows programmer my whole career. I’ve written CA-Clipper dbase apps, Win32 apps, MFC, Atl, console, .Net C# winforms, Asp.Net, etc. I’ve dabbled in php and perl, but by and large, I’m a windows Dev. So why the switch?
Here’s the thing: When I come home, or when I get a call from my wife, I don’t want to worry about who clicked on what email in outlook, or surfed by a hacked site with drive by download code. No thank you. I’ve played with Apple hardware before, my dad has had them, and I’ve had the odd g5 or mac book pro on my desk at work from time to time, but never as a primary box, and certainly never to code on.
This Mac flies. The simple tasks that should be simple, but aren’t in Windows, are simple on this. All my usb stuff works, the backup utility (time machine) is actually fun to use, safari and Firefox work great, and Parallels emulation actually runs windows vista and my quicken install faster than my previous three year old Dell, and lets me code windows apps when I want to. The Dell has been re-purposed as an edubuntu / ubuntu running a proxy/filtering/firewall solution, sitting in my daughters room. It runs ubuntu a heck of a lot better than it ever ran windowsXPMCE.
So tonight I was working on an iPhone app that uses the built in accelerometer, but the iPhone simulator, while really useful in other respects, doesn’t support simulating the accelerator. So I applied for the developer program. Yes it’s 99 dollars, and yes, I probably won’t see a profit on the next great iPhone app (although given what sells, maybe my stupid ideas aren’t that terrible). But I figure getting a bit of skin in the game will make me committed to actually developing something saleable, and at the worst, I’ll have a cost of doing business to use at tax time.
Picking the right technology
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on December 22nd, 2008
So we’re at the mall, and they have these vertically oriented plasma displays rotating ads. Or normally they display ads, but at the height of the commercial season, they’re showing errors. If I worked for that company I’d do three things:
step 1: change the desktop background image to a static image of my most important client’s ad.
step 2: put a global exception handler into my program.
step 3: fix it.
Honestly, why would you pick Windows, and .Net to develop a mall kiosk application? And if you did, wouldn’t you run some tests? Granted this isn’t life or death software here, but it is the life of this business.
The error up close
Mall Advert Fail
Monthly? update
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on November 12th, 2008
Looking like I never post, I’ve actually been pretty busy in my work life. I’ve just been to Microsoft’s PDC., which I journaled extensively in my it.toolbox.com journal. Hey, they footed the bill for that, so they get my meager writing skills. As a followup to playing with some of Microsoft’s newest stuff, I’ve got a work laptop running windows 7, with Visual Studio 2008 installed. To come up with a way to give away all the vendor t-shirts and related swag, I wrote a raff;e web app using ASP.NET MVC talking to a db via ADO.NET Entity Framework. Gotta say, so far I’m not loving the EF. It is nice not having to write DAL code, but the resulting entities are tightly bound to the EF, and don’t support nHibernate staples like lazy loading, and caching. (Yes, I know there are work arounds. and EF is headed for PI Nirvahna, but till it’s ready, it’s just not gonna be my favorite.). I am really diggin MVC, once I got my head into that space, and I also found jQuery to be a joy to get. Fluent interfaces are a lot of fun.
Anyway, sorry for the short rambling post, just wanted to blog something. anything.
Does this wii make me look fat?
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on September 22nd, 2008
So me and the misses picked up a wii fit the other week. These things have been selling like hotcakes, and we finally capitulated and picked one up. I’m the only one to give it a shot so far. The out of the box experience is pretty good, although it thinks I’m overweight, since it has to go by bmi. Granted, I could drop 15 lbs, but my bmi will probably always be on the heavy side, since riding bikes and lifting has given me a little muscle mass. Anyway, given a busy work schedule, it’s nice to have another excercize outlet, since leaving for the gym at lunch doesn’t always work. The excercises themselves are a mixed bag, some seem too easy, some are quite hard, like planks, side planks and push ups. The yoga poses are cool in that the balance pad quantitatively measures your balance. I’ll see if it holds my interest.
NHibernate and Asp.net MVC
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on September 8th, 2008
warning: contains nerdy content
This blog is currently running in word press, which looks pretty (due to someone else’s competence in web design), but php isn’t my forte, and I went with a paid hosting environment with the goal of writing some actual code in asp.net/c#
This weekend, amidst parental duties, I managed to sit down for 2 or 4 hours and play with NHibernate and the asp.net model view controller . My goal is to replace the output generated with wordpress with an mvc web application, using nhibernate as an object-relational mapper. I went with NHibernate over linq to sql or the new ado.net entity framework stuff because I wanted to use the MySQL database that wordpress is sitting on. That way I can rewrite the front end of the blog while continuing to use the composition and plugin possbilities of wordpress.
I got as far as a running nHibernate mapping reading from the wordpress db (all local to my home machine), and rendering it using a controller and view. It’s a bit of a mind bender coming from webforms development, but I like how simple it makes every component. The nHibernate side was really nice as well. The database details are all mapped out in xml configurations, and the objects that get loaded aren’t in any way tied to the persistence model or the presentation side, which makes them very easy to test, and simple to write and read.
I tried to upload this last night, but go-daddy’s hosting environment wasn’t playing well with a few mvc required assemblies. I’ll post more when I’m able to actually run it in a hosted environment.
Movin around
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on August 31st, 2008
Every year my registrar forgets to bug me about renewing this domain. Sick of missing out on email and leaving my numerous readers (hey, 1 is a number) without my blog, I decided to move to hosting and registering with a bigger entity. So now I’m hosted and listed at godaddy, running wordpress instead of letting blogger host. I want to write my own site in asp.net, but till I get around to it, this is really handy. I’m typing this post on my iphone using the free wordpress app. Feels pretty good so far.
