Reviews

Somehow I managed to catch a cold last weekend so I couldn't really do much. I'm pretty sure it happened because I left the fan on one night. Anyway, it was like four days of lying in bed and watching TV. But I also took Monday and Tuesday off. During that time I had more time to play with my G-Tablet, mainly because I really didn't want to go onto the computer. It was pretty messed up finding out I couldn't play most Flash videos anymore. I think they might have updated their players on Youtube and this required me to update the Flash on my tablet to the latest version. Unfortunately Viewsonic hadn't updated the software on my tablet since December. It was still running Android 2.1. And there wasn't an update for Flash on Viewsonic’s version of a Market, which was more like a website. I Google’d for any updated versions that I could install but there wasn't any. I decided it was time to wipe the OS and install an updated Rom. I went with the VEGAn-TAB  GingerEdition Rom. Once I updated the bootloader for the tablet installing the new Rom was pretty strait forward. This updated Android to 2.3.3 and I got Flash 10.3 installed which made all the problems I was having watching YouTube videos in hi def go away. I installed a couple of video players to handle all my videos needs and found an app called UpnPlay that let me stream divx, avi and other videos from my ReadyNAS Server. I use Winamp to manage my music library and a WoW app to keep up on the latest news going on in that universe. What's really cool is I have a Terminal Emulator app that I use to connect to my dedicated server through ssh when I need to make changes on the command line. Now I don't have to configure my laptop to bypass the firewall every time I need to do something like that. I haven't had a chance to test out the USB port but hopefully I can this weekend. The differences between the old Rom and this new one is like night and day. I'm finding that I'm using it a lot more now. I wasn't able to find an Acrobat Reader app, but there's an app called Quickoffice that's similar to Open Office and it can read PDF files too. It also has the ability to jump to certain pages in the PDF file which the Acrobat Reader I was using previously could not. This is a major plus. I'm waiting for VEGAn-TAB to come out with the new Honeycomb addition that will update Android to 3.0.

Work has been crazy. Trying to get each version of the vmware.com website onto the net from Interwoven has been mostly a frustrating experience. Not only does it break CSS and Javascript, but it has a habit of converting HTML code to their ASCII equivalent. A lot of it has been because of out dated coding. A lot of problems come from developers hard coding tag elements into the Javascript instead of using the DOM to create the tag element and populate it with the attributes and events that you want before adding it to the page. Interwoven chokes on stuff like that. But if that wasn’t bad enough, Interwoven’s Teamsite application crashes multiple times each day. It’s really annoying when you aren’t able to do your job and you are expected to work weekends because the CMS has so many problems.

So I decided to work Part-time and help out a startup my friend Jim helped to start. He had been wanting me to work there for almost 2 years but wanted to wait until they had the funding to pay me. But they got 2 more investors recently so now have enough money to stay afloat for another 2 years. I told Jim, I’d be happy with 90k plus medical and options, but I think the CEO is trying to figure out a way to pay me 110k all because I told him I made that much at VMware last year. Well that was with the help of working 5 hours overtime each week plus selling stock options. I didn’t actually mean he should pay me that much too. Originally I had planned to work there fulltime and quit VMware, but then I had my review last week and my manager managed to get me a 15% pay increase which restored my pay plus. After that, I couldn’t just up and leave. At least I shouldn’t leave so soon after getting the raise. Besides working part-time at the other company will give me a feel for the company but also allow me to work on more PHP Projects as well as Android development. There is more opportunity for me to learn new things at the other company so I will most likely end up working there full-time eventually.

I finished another Shaman PvP video for World of Warcraft. This video features clips in Rated Battlegrounds and Arena with regular Battlegrounds during the ending credits. Since this is the first year doing Arenas it was a new experience. But the main reason I finished it now was because Season 10 will be starting in a couple weeks and I thought it would suck to try so hard to get the current season Gladiator gear for the first time and not make a video out of it. However since the clips were taken from 2 days of playing, one day Rated Battleground and this past weekend Arena, there are not going to be spectacular clips. But hopefully it will still be interesting to see none the less. I upgraded my monitor and video card to the Asus VG236H 3D monitor and EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti video card. Now I can capture at 1080P. Playing WoW in 3D is totally amazing.

Kaia is doing well. It amazes me how much she has grown. She’s pretty much half Maes height at 3 and ½. In a couple weeks she will go to a child development class that will be 2 days a week for 2 months. I’m mainly doing it so she can learn how to interact with other kids. Even though she does pretty well now, that experience would be good for her and I know she will have a lot of fun hanging out with other children. Hopefully this year we can go to the Philippines, because she always wants to see her Uncle and family on Skype and talk to them.

Just Busy

The president gave a pretty interesting speech last week and outlined his proposal for the 2012 budget. I’d have to say its miles ahead of the Paul Ryan proposal. Ryan’s proposal was just a joke. He wasn’t really serious about balancing the budget. And it makes no since that it would take almost 30 years before the budget was balanced. I was happy to hear Obama wants to cut defense and Medicare and redo taxes while trying to invest in Education and infrastructure. This makes a lot more since then what Ryan wants to do which is to cut Medicare, healthcare and entitlements like education but still give tax breaks to the upper class. It’s difficult to understand the Republican thinking. It’s almost like they are trying to run our country off a cliff. It’s hard to believe they were willing to shut down the Government over things like Planned Parenthood and then try to reverse the argument saying it was the Democrats that are arguing over it. I’m sure there will be people that will believe them, but intelligent people will not. I’m actually hoping Donald Trump will enter the race just so I can see him get beat down by Obama. Once Trump decided to make Obama’s birth certificate the center of attention, I lost all respect for him and don’t see him as ever being anybody serious enough to consider.  But we really need to do something about our debt. With Japan in the situation that they are, it’s doubtful they will continue to buy our debt and from what I hear China reported a deficit. I personally thought the spending cuts when to deep with the 2010 budget they just passed. But it turned out most of the cuts they made was money that would have gone back to the government anyway. I think it turned out to be a little over 3 billion in cuts. I didn’t like the cuts they proposed because it only focused on the 12% of the budget that would help the people. It didn’t cut anything from Defense, Medicare or Social Security so it really didn’t mean anything. Republicans only seem to want to reduce taxes, mainly for the upper class and cut services, mainly for the lower and middle class. Democrats and Independents want to let the Bush Tax cuts expire for the upper class, I prefer for everybody, revamp taxes, cut defense, means test Social Security and I guess address Medicare somehow. The problem with Medicare is it’s mostly used by the Elderly which are expensive. If Medicare had more young people, the costs would be more balanced since younger people don’t need as much care. It looks like Obama plans to include some of the proposals made by the Deficit Commission. His goals seem pretty clear, but he can’t put this proposal into law himself. Congress and the Senate need to do their and work out a compromise that will help the country. Hopefully it will be quick.

It’s nice to see the economy is improving. Unemployment is slowly dropping and in California unemployment is around 12% now. If you’re in Information Technology it shouldn’t to difficult getting a job. I put my resume on the net late last month and it was pretty amazing the responses I got. I almost took a job with a Company called William’s Sonoma but ended up turning it down. It was pretty hard to turn it down even after being offered $60 an hour but it still didn’t match what my currently salary is when you include stock options, tuition reimbursement, sick pay and vacation pay. And this was a contract position. I’m sure I would have done well enough to become permanent but I thought it would be better to finish school first before going that route. But if William’s Sonoma decides to hire me full time I would most likely take that. And I can see a lot of ways I could help improve the website. I ended up taking my resume back off the web a couple weeks later.

It's Tuesday

It’s been a busy month and a half. Work has been pretty crazy. I’m still working on our Interwoven project, trying to migrate our US website onto Interwoven. Frustrating would be putting it lightly. We had a consulting group come in and build the infrastructure to our specifications. Knowing once this project is done I will end up spending the rest of the year restructuring the content and understanding what they did and why gives me a headache. I’m just glad my review is coming up soon so I can have a better idea how the rest of the year is going to go. One big problem is I’m not currently doing any programming while working on this project, just repetitive tasks. But I was lucky enough to get a couple of “urgent” projects come through that gave me time away from Interwoven. One project was an issue with the world wide region selector page going into a loop when you selected a country, in IE. I found it odd that the page had been up for 250 days and nobody noticed. As it turned out there was a bug in a plugin a previous JavaScript programmer wrote that he never fixed. Since I couldn’t modify that file, I ended up just putting in a fix to look for the bug and work around it. The other project was a PSD to HTML conversion. I tried to stretch that out as long as I could but it was a simple page and they just wanted strait html since it was going to be imported over to Interwoven and Interwoven seems to mess up with Flexible Content Elements coming from Typo3. Most likely it’s just the ways it’s being imported and the custom script needs to be modified.

I finished the E-commerce portion of my website. But now I decided I would add the multi user support now rather than later. This took a lot of thought because these are pages registered users would access to create their own galleries. These pages couldn’t have the same functionality as the Admin section. I already created a page to list the logged in users collections. For the most part the page where the user will create new collections is pretty much finished. For the uploader I decided to try SWFLoader. SWFLoader is pretty cool. It basically acts similar to Facebook’s file uploader. I was able to get that part working as well as create the method for handing the images and moving them over to the correct location. Since I was able to use Joomla’s classes most of the information necessary to do that remained in house. For now once each image has been uploaded, I will just populate a select box so the user will be able to select a thumbnail. Later I’m thinking about creating some kind of Shadowbox popup to display all the thumbnails, or a pagination page so the user can choose a thumbnail for the collection. Hopefully this will all be finished by next week and I can do a final test and release it. I have a few people waiting to purchase it.

New Year

Today so far has been a pretty slow day. In fact I spent all morning just checking email and talking with friends. I have a meeting with my manager in about 15 minutes so maybe she has some work coming through. I’ve been procrastinating starting the project of styling VirtueMart to match my website. I went to the VirtueMart teams website to see if they changed their way of managing their templates and also to answer a couple questions. The response I got from one of the moderators basically said the reason why they don’t use Joomla’s templating engine and decided to use their own was because they didn’t want to make Joomla overly bloated. That didn’t make since at all, but the moderator never responded back after I posted a response to him. I wonder if that’s also the reason why they mix html with their backend programming logic… I’m also thinking about scrapping my current template and creating it again, if I can find the original PSD. My XMovie component was unpublished from the Joomla website over the weekend because of an LFi vulnerability found. Unfortunately the Joomla team didn’t tell me where the vulnerability was found, but there was only one place I could think of where the problem could have been. You’d have to be an admin to exploit it but it was a pretty quick fix and I put out an updated version a couple hours after seeing the notice. It’s been 3 days and they haven’t responded, typical Joomla Team response time. Hopefully they hurry up, because it’s currently listed as a popular extension even though it’s only been available for a little over 3 weeks. There have only been maybe 3 or 4 emails from people having problems setting up the component even though the component had been downloaded over 1800 times at last check. Most of the problems though were people not reading the documentation or help icons. Hopefully this means there’s very few bugs in the component.

I spent most of my week long vacation, last week, playing World of Warcraft. I don’t know how long it’s been since I really played. The first night was pretty crazy. It seemed like everybody wanted to gank me but after a while of fighting people decided to leave me alone. The most annoying thing was having some lvl 85 come around and kill me. I guess they couldn’t kill anybody their own level so they decided it’s easier to kill someone 5 levels below them. I wasn’t able to capture any of the first or second night activities because of issues with my Fraps capturing program, and I missed a lot of good fights until I finally decided to just leave the program recording the entire time I was playing. I started creating a new video out of the clips but only have half the movie finished. Since I’ve reached 85 already the second half of the video will be game play at level 85. Hopefully it will turn out to be a good video.

Day before Friday

This week has been for the most part slow. I thought it would be busy, because last week I had four projects that came my way, though they all came in on Wednesday. Had I known I would have taken my time working on them. One project from marketing involved updating a German config JavaScript file to include the Sub Divisions of that country so they would show up on our contact sales form when the German local was selected. The original developer quit, then came back but in a different department. Another developer that was the next JavaScript Guru quit too so I guess it was just me. (*_*) Besides I had a lot of free time and my co worker was overloaded with things to do. Once I understood how the code worked, it didn’t take long to update. I also found another bug while going through the code so it was good that I did. Another producer had a request dealing with the same contact page and wanted to add a new config file to populated interested products. Going through the code made it easier and quicker to finish this project. What was really cool was I had told the producer I wouldn’t get to it till Friday or Monday at the latest. It was nice to get it done by Thursday. I then had to update and modify a new micro site written in four different languages, so four sites total. Originally I was only requested to update the background image and the buttons, but I ended up having to update the position of the content, removal of html, a lot of css updates, link changes and button image updates. That was interesting, but I have to say the micro site looks pretty cool. I like the different shades of blue. It was pretty messed up to learn today that all of the CSS changes for the French and German micro sites were gone and I had to redo them. On top of that I learned this morning we had a party at a pretty nice Museum starting at 11:30 so I had only 30 minutes to make the changes. My co worker was already updating the image names and so I told her I’d do the CSS. It wasn’t a total loss though. I only needed to make a few changes and it would be all good. I found out later my co worker had already made the changes and submitted the files to Perforce. I thought that was odd because I was looking at the page and I could still see issues. By now it was already 11:35 and I could tell she wanted to go. I had just heard about this party so I wouldn’t be to upset if I didn’t go. Besides I had things I wanted to do today. So I just stayed behind. I’m glad I did because there were a lot of issues I saw. It didn’t take much time to fix them and test them in IE6 and a few other browsers.

I spent the rest of this week working on my movie component and fixing a couple bugs in my Xgallery component. I finally moved this version over to my main site. The previous version I was using was one of the first revisions. It wasn’t even named the same. I’ve wanted to do this for a while and it also gave me some time to test it more. Today I wrote the documentation for it and fixed some oddities I saw. I just need to add the help icons and do some checks with movies displaying in shadowbox. I just learned that shadowbox seems to have an issue with media playing in a div container on IE. This is going to be a problem for people that want to use shadowbox...