math is fun
August 24th, 2008 @ 3:36 pm 4 commentsI figured out what was screwed up in my math for the rotation of the element in the flash thingy from the last post. below is the version (with a different graphic) that does not suck as bad
Posted in Flash, I am a retard
Cue Drew Carey for the first bit.
August 10th, 2008 @ 11:04 pm 0 commentsI'm going to be in cleveland, Ohio later this week. I don't know why anyone aside from people directly involved in my personal life would care, but that is kind of the theme of this website anyway, so screw the rest of you.
When I was in college, there was a time (about two years) where I lived with some other guys in a rented house. One of the guys (danny), after about a year, decided to move to cleveland where he proceeded to research brain stuff and cut up mice brains (probably related to the brain stuff, but who knows with this guy). It was really awesome living in that house (at least as long as danny lived there. not so much when my boss from kmart lived there later on, but I am half responsible for the problems because I myself am a jerk-ass asshole sometimes).
Now that we have jobs that pay reasonably well, Chris (my other roomate from that time) and I go up once a year and hang out with Danny and his girlfriend and have a good ol' time for a few days. This will be trip number three and this time our friends Jon & Tommy will be attending. Jon and chris normally drag their families to this event, so at least Danny's girlfriend is not completely bored.
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I have been learning flash and actionscript when I can stand to be on my computer after I get off work. Below is what I've done. It was inspired by one of the tutorials at gotoandlearn.com, which is a danged good site for learning flash.
It isn't done yet. You'll notice the icon only kind of rotates when you move your mouse. The aim is to get it to rotate based on your mouse position, but I got the equation wrong cause I can't remember trig. Blast. I still have my old calc books so I should be able to work it out.
Posted in Life
Gabe The Web Developer talks about boring things
July 6th, 2008 @ 12:01 am 0 commentsMy latest excuse for why i haven't said anything on the website is that I have actually been working on the website, but not anywhere you would immediately see.
I actually built this website by hand from the ground up. I could have installed wordpress and just have been done with it, but I don't like letting other people do things if i can do it myself. The only reason I pay other people to change the oil in my car is because compared to cost of the parts, disposing of the old oil, and burning the shit out of my hands, paying someone else to change my oil isn't such a problem to me.
My job as a developer of websites gives me new ideas to mess around with all the time. I recently wrote a reader that reads specific websites formatted in a specific way and stores the data from those websites in a specific way. In order to do that and make it easy for me to edit each part seperately, I decided on a plug-in architecture that uses a different object depending on the action chosen by its user. What I ended up with was something I can actually be proud of because:
- It's easy to add to. If the client calls up and says there's another site they need the system to be able to read, I just need to write another class (with a certain required function to make it happen correctly), make an addition to the database, and presto. The entire thing takes about 1-2 hours depending on the format of the site's data.
- If one of the sites gets a redesign, it's not a major thing. Because the code for each reader is encapsulated it's pretty easy to alter the code and make it work again.
While that sounds like all gobble-de-gook to most people, to me it's great because when I get an email from a client that says "the reader isn't working anymore" or "we need a new reader", it's not a big deal to fix. Many systems put a bunch of conditions into their programming that makes it difficult to trace the code's problem down, and a plugin architecture is nice because if it's happening on 1 reader it's the fault of the reader and if there's a problem with all of them there's a very good chance that the problem is with the controller.
Systems like the aformentioned blogging software Wordpress are similar in that it too uses a plugin system. Not to the same ends, though. wordpress uses functions that format your blog in a certain way depending on options that you enter into your blog. My actual experience with wordpress is pretty limited (so far i've only actually signed up to wordpress in order to take advantage of an anti-spam system called Akismet), only second-hand, so I may just be talking out of my ass. Nevertheless, I've come up with several applications I could really use a plugin system for. Gallery integration, code highlighting, "Crap" section integration, etc.
I've also been working on a back-end redesign so when I'm updating my website I don't want to completely retch. It's pretty gross back here and I think I spent maybe 1 hour making it look like something other than simple default HTML. I'm a programmer after all, not an artist. I just make things work good.
Posted in Web Development
The Truth
May 29th, 2008 @ 5:14 pm 0 comments
Posted in Internet Madness, Web Development
huuuuuuurrrrrgggghh
May 5th, 2008 @ 2:38 pm 4 commentsYesterday was probably the strangest day of my life. I was working away on my computer (i.e. "Playing games and looking at online comics"), and I have a faint recollection of planning on starting some work on a game idea I have been throwing around in my head. I sort of remember it being about 4 or 5 pm, and then all of a sudden I wake up and it is 10 pm, and I am still wearing all my clothes and my shoes. My blood sugar was pretty low (around 52), and I wasn't really thinking straight. It took me about 30 minutes to remember that I hadn't eaten dinner yet and that I was hungry as hell.
I'm pretty sure it was a diabetic episode, and that kind of scares me. What if something like that happens at work? All my co-workers know I am diabetic, but if I had the sense to get into bed (although everything that had been on my bed at the time had been haphazardly pushed aside in such a way that the pile of crap had pulled my alarm clock off the shelf it sits on), if I were at work I may have the sense to curl up under my desk or something equally as insane. Then everyone would walk past my office going "Where's Gabe?". What if something like that happens in some public place? If my first instinct in a hypoglycemic stupor is to crawl into bed and go to sleep, what would I do if I were no where near my bed? Kind of hilarious if you think about it, and makes me wonder if I need adult supervision.
Posted in BLARGH, Diabetes, Fall-Out Boy is Dumb « Previous Next »