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Posted on 4.10.2008, 13:22 by alcaeus
Posted in Personal, Work
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I'm not back in Munich yet, but I decided to talk about what's new before I get too tangled up in it to write something.
My days as a student are officially over. On Monday I start my job as a web application developer in Munich. After my studies went awkward I went looking for a job, and within a few days I had an offer for a full-time job in Munich. After thinking about it for a couple of days I decided to take it and start working full-time. It's a chance to do the kind of work I've been doing for the past few years and get paid for it in return. That's an offer I just couldn't say no to, so here we go...no more student work 
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 1.10.2008, 19:30 by alcaeus
Posted in Personal, Vacation, Work
Comments: 0
Well, it's nice to be on vacation for once. But when work catches up with you, it just isn't vacation anymore. That said, I'll try to relax some more before going back to Munich this weekend. And when I'm back, there are some big news to be told.
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Posted on 18.9.2008, 01:55 by alcaeus
Posted in Ayumi, Secret, Work
Comments: 0
Sometimes it's easy to get along with a project. I was struggling to even touch Ayumi a few weeks ago after my mishap with the updater, but now I'm just all over it. For the past two weeks, I've written technical documentation, finalized the updater, updated the only productive version of Ayumi (this website) in a time-consuming process and just made a lot of progress on stuff.
But today....was different. I was trying to cope with the usual stuff in my head. It was one of those days where I've got so many ideas running through my head that it's hard to go step by step. While I'm actually working on step 1, my head is already thinking about how to do steps 3, 4 and 5. I guess I don't have to explain how it isn't that easy to work with that kind of head. But then, I got a motivation. I won't talk about it yet, but after that 2-minute phone call everything changed. I was organized, I took things one step at a time, and for the past few hours I've been sitting in front of my computer, listening to music and quietly finishing one side of the language system. It wouldn't surprise me if the other side (which I'll work on tomorrow) would come just as easy. I guess sometimes you just need the right motivation to do something, and today was one of those days that keeps me motivated for weeks...if everything goes as planned.
Just hope for big news in the future
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 11.9.2008, 13:39 by alcaeus
Posted in Ayumi, Work
Comments: 0
I have now updated this website to the most current version of Ayumi. If there are any problems with the style, please hard-refresh the site to load the new style images (Ctrl+F5 in most browsers). I hope you like the new style.
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 10.9.2008, 14:41 by alcaeus
Posted in Ayumi, FlightSim, Personal, Work
Comments: 0
It's been another week with a lot of progress on Ayumi. All modules that actually do something (the search module is present but still doesn't even know what it's supposed to do) have reached at least version 0.9.0, which in my development schedule prepares them for a limited release. There is still some testing to do (for example, I never checked if the common module is capable of updating itself), but in general everything is ready. The UCP is implemented, the module permission system is in place, the automated update system works well, so there shouldn't be much in the way.
So, what's next you ask? Well, after giving this site the udpate it desperately needs I still have a few modules to build. The RSS system for the blog is nowhere near functional and the search engine, well, see above. Also, since Ayumi is supposed to be used on infler.de, there needs to be a forum module as well as a feedback module, which is going to be a difficult task, considering that it's supposed to integrate itself into other modules. We'll see how that plays out.
I also need to finish the language system (currently only one language is available), the style system (see before) as well as the addon system. Modules can be upgraded with addons, which change part of their functionality. The idea is in my head, now I only need to tell Eclipse how to do it. Also, the installer needs to be made available. At the moment nobody besides me could install this thing, as you need to manually create every table and insert all data. It's a gruesome task to be honest
With that, I'm going to work on a few different things as well. I've been using MS Flight Simulator 2004 heavily recently, but I'm lacking some good panels for the awesome POSKY planes. So, I've downloaded the panel SDK and I want to learn how to build panels. Maybe I can even get something done in that area
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 1.9.2008, 13:34 by alcaeus
Posted in Ayumi, Browsers, Firefox, Infler, Work, XDebug
Comments: 0
Yes, that title sums up the past few days. After I managed to find the reason for my fatal data loss last week, I quickly went back to work on it. I changed the function in question (of course, I'd be stupid not to), and just for good measure I treated my computer to a SVN server to back up my work and to have version history. I never got around to doing it before, but I guess that crash was enough motivation.
I also decided to install another PHP debugger. I was using the debugger included in the Eclipse PDT (I guess some tiny version of Zend), and occasionaly I used the DBG debugger included in the Delphi for PHP IDE. However, both were not that good. The Eclipse debugger could not handle global breakpoints, which DBG could. On the other hand, Delphi for PHP was configured to launch every project from localhost, which doesn't quite work with my application, since it relies on subdomains. So I decided to install XDebug. It's free, which is a good thing, but then it's also the only choice besides Zend supported by Eclipse out of the box. With the right configuration in Eclipse I can launch the application with the proper URL, click myself through it and rely on it to stop whenever the first breakpoints turns up. I'm pretty happy with it so far, even though it isn't perfect. Eclipse launches IE by default (I have to check if there's a setting to override it) since it's my default browser. However, I do most of my web development in Firefox, since it has a few better debugging features that I haven't gotten around to look for in IE. I won't use Firefox at the moment though, since it manages to crash my Apache server on every pageview. I have to see what goes wrong, since it's only a simple pageview.
So, what's the progress you might wonder? The installer works like a charm, I'm working on the necessary UCP modules (changing password, E-Mail-address and basic settings) and I'm also changing the style a bit. The current one has too much of a "hospital-flair", which isn't really my thing. It once again will be focused around "blue", but it will be different....just a little bit here and there though. The big changes won't come until I start using it for infler.de
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 26.8.2008, 15:47 by alcaeus
Posted in Ayumi, Work
Comments: 0
It's been a few days since I've almost lost all my work on Ayumi. Since restoring all files I haven't touched it. I looked in the error log to get an idea what happened, but I haven't yet retraced the error, just like I haven't made any attempts to fix some obvious flaws that I got from the logs. It's shocking how much confidence goes out the window when something like that happens. It's one thing to lose all data because of a hard drive failure (which has happened to me before), but having your software go into self-destroy mode is completely different. I'm curious to see how long it takes until I decide that I've been avoiding it long enough...
[edit@19:47]
I finally got myself to work on it again. After (finally) installing a SVN server on my machine to keep track of changes I decided to change the files a little and research the nature of the problem. Once I did, I once again was reminded why I love programming languages like Delphi, Java or C/C++/C# which require you to declare variables before using them. I partly moved the installation code from one class to another, and in doing so forgot to update a few variable names. The variable that used to contain the temporary path for the package files was now empty, and when the installer checked to make sure that there were no remainders of older installations it noticed that the directory was already there....the root directory that was, instead of the temporary one. That's when undefined variables are a bitch. And the consequence? Since I already defined a custom error handler to catch notices and warnings I'm going to change it to die when certain errors occur (for example, undefined variables)
[/edit]
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 20.8.2008, 23:27 by alcaeus
Posted in Ayumi, Work
Comments: 0
Backup (computing): A copy of a file or record, stored separately from the original, that can be used to recover the original if it is destroyed or damaged.
From en.wiktionary.org
I actually meant to write something new way sooner, but then I also meant to write about something else than backups. I just need to write this one down.
It was yesterday that I had enough motivation (and caffeine) to work on Ayumi's update system again, this time finalizing the package builder. I was going to work on the installer as well, but then I decided against it. However, when I was laying in bed wide awake with my girlfriend wanting to finish her book, I thought that maybe I could manage working another couple of hours. At 4am then I had the installer ready for a first test run, a dry run however. That means that it's only going to tell me what it would be doing if I had the gutts to test it right away. Since it was late and I wasn't sure about the quality of my code (it tends to be bad if written between 3am and 7am), I went back to bed and postponed the dry run.
Continue reading 'Backups - and how much they are worth'
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Posted on 31.7.2008, 19:59 by alcaeus
Posted in Cell phone, Personal, Toys
Comments: 0
I finally got my HTC Touch Diamond, so I just wanted to let you know that I'm too busy playing around to write anything useful at the moment. Just kidding, I'll write about it in a little while.
Greetz
alcaeus
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Posted on 13.7.2008, 12:38 by alcaeus
Posted in Browsers, Rants, Work
Comments: 0
Yes, I just felt the need to talk about this a bit. Today's internet world is messed up, not only because of spammers, phishing mails and corporate overlords trying to grab as much data from us as possible. No, it's also messed up because of the browsers we use. Yes, I say browsers because I don't mean one in particular. It's a shame that people are coding web pages to fit one browser instead of sticking to a set of standards which work in most browsers. Why is that?
Continue reading 'Browser support - can you say PITA?'
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