tolleycoder.com's blog

Moving

2010-07-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

This blog has been moved to tolleycoder.com Please update your bookmarks and such accordingly. There will be no more content added to this blog.

Lucid Lynx

2010-05-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

I installed xubuntu 10.04 onto my netbook. It's noticeable faster than the previous version of xubuntu that I had installed. It actually makes my netbook easy to use.

I've been really busy lately. I guess it's time to pay back the previous seven months :) I've been learning Drupal too. If you want to write a website without actually writing a website, Drupal is the answer. It's ashame that it's not object oriented, but I guess you can't have everything.

Tolley no Go

2009-08-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

New pics are up in the pictures section. I took all of them at the 25th US Go Congress. It was my first time at the Go Congress so it was very exciting. I learned a lot, and my AGA rank went up 5 points after the results where reported (I'm now 23 kyu, up five ranks from 28 kyu).

I played in the US Open Go tournament. It consisted of six rounds, one round a day for 6 days. In the end my final record was three wins, three loses. I feel pretty good about my performance considering it was my second Go tournament, and definitely the biggest Go event I've ever been in.

Always learning

2008-04-22T17:58:00.001-07:00

Long time no post. First of all, I just put up a new project. Its a Sudoku game written in Python using wxPython for the GUI. I have to admit that I really like Python. It's so lean and clean. It removes all the syntax markers that you thought where necessary like end of line characters and it forces you to properly format your code. Also, I've never worked with an implicitly typed language but now that I'm used to it, I love it. No longer do I have flip through reference books and search google to make sure I'm declaring my datatypes correctly.

I've spent the last few months learning. I've become familiar with UML and the Unified Process and I'm itching to put it to use. I've always had a more spontaneous approach to my side projects. Because of that I tend to loose focus and my projects would get eaten alive by the Creepy Feature Creature. Diagramming everything out has made large projects seem very small and manageable. Its really good to have that kind of focus and I think that my next attempt at building my own commercial site will be a successful one.

I've also discovered Inkscape. Its a vector graphics editing program that a few of the UI guys at work recommended to mock up pages. I spent a few nights reading and working through tutorials. Its actually a lot easier to use than The GIMP as it lets you manipulate elements of an image as individual objects. This makes it a lot easier for me to go back and change things and generally play around with the layout and color scheme of a given page.

Anyone who hasn't already should go check out my youtube debut. Thats me on a homemade rola bola juggling.

Web 2.woes

2008-01-23T16:56:00.000-08:00

I've recently begun working on a suite of web services for social sites (MySpace, Facebook, Orkut). You can check out my progress at services.tolleycoder.com. I'll probably change the name and move it to its own domain when its ready for prime time, but its good where it's at for the time being.

So, my idea for this is to take advantage of all the skills I've been teaching myself recently and come up with something really snazzy. Last night I was on gmail and I noticed that it was using the location.hash property as I navigated around. Not only that, but the back and forward button worked as well. This got me thinking. If I implemented a similar solution, I could have the browser keep track of its own history, just like it normally does, while still using AJAX to make every request.

I had been using a hidden iframe who's document had an onload event which loaded a second page, who's onload event told the parent window to fire off an 'onBackButton' event (using mootools events.) This allowed my application code to hook into back button events and I was able to simulate the back button, but the forward button, that was a different story. This also meant that I had to keep track of the history of the application either in javascript on the client, or on the server in the session. Keeping track of the history yourself is a pain.

I spent some time today googling around and I found out about a method that uses location.hash and a polling system to keep track of where the page is. All you have to do is change location.hash to reflect your current page. So far so good, but the problem comes when you try to throw IE into the mix. Turns out that IE doesn't add a layer to the history stack when you change a fragment of the URL. You can however put a hidden iframe in the document and use it's source property like the location.hash.

So, I'll be spending most of my night tonight implementing a system that works in both IE and standards compliant browsers. Its a pain, but I'll be thrilled when its finally complete.

I made bread

2007-11-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

Yes, I actually made bread. I like to cook. I don't do it a lot cause ultimately I'm lazy, but I like to try news things every so often. I found a bread recipe online and it looked easy so I tried it out. Click to see the resulting loaf. It doesn't look like much cause the bread pan I got wasn't big enough to give it the classic loaf shape. Next time I'll make more dough and let it raise longer.

Cirque Du Soleil was awesome. I was amazed by what they where able to do with such a small amount of space. My favorite act was the boleadoras cause I have a thing for percussion acts. I also beat Zelda Phantom Hourglass. It took me a while to get used to using the stylus for almost everything but once I did, it was hard to pick up a controller again.

I'd love to be able to take Dec off and work on my personal projects. Theres so much I want to do, so many things I want to write but I just don't have time to fit it all in. I remember back to after I graduated college and I was having trouble finding a job. I would sit around my dad's house day after day and work on my game. It got really depressing and I remember how I couldn't wait to find a job. Now, about 3 years later, I'd love to have nothing to do all day. Have the entire day free to focus on the things I want to do. Oh well, such is life.

Zelda and traveling

2007-10-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

Spent last weekend in beautiful Ann Arbor, Michigan with Adrienne. It was a lot of fun and we saw some cool places. The University is really nice. I put some pictures up in my picture section so everybody could see.

Zelda Phantom Hourglass is finally out for the DS. I've been looking forward to this game for quite a while now. Since this is the sequel to Wind Waker, I've decided to play through Wind Waker before I get to Hourglass.

That doesn't mean I haven't tried it out however. I played through the first five minutes or so and its really cool. So far, I've been able to do everything with one hand using my stylus. You can tap enemies and Link will attack them. You can draw a slash on the screen and your sword swings. Best of all, you can run. Its so nice being able to run in a Zelda game. Usually, you have to roll to move faster so the entire time you're playing you get to hear "hup hup" and an occasional, frustrating, "thud" when you smash Link's head into some stairs.

For those of you out there that have purchased your own copy of Hourglass, Nintendo is giving away a free quill shaped stylus to anyone that registers their copy on the site. Mine should be on the way soon.

One last piece of news, this weekend I'm going to see Cirque Du Soleil right here in Norfolk. I'm really looking forward to that. It should be a good show. My only regret is that I waited to long to get tickets, so my seat isn't that great, but I'm still excited about this.

Many Months

2007-09-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

I've been kinda busy lately. Work is crazy, but its ok cause we are about to launch a new version of one of our sites. It'll be nice to see all our hard work pay off at last. After that, its off to rewrite the next site.

I managed to update a few things on my site. First I put a link to my blog on my homepage. If you are reading this on my site then you should see the link below. If you are reading this from Blogger.com then just ignore this. The second update was for the photos section. Now, if you click on a photo, it now opens in Picasa's slide show. I just found out about the slide show the other day and I thought it would be cool use.

The final thing I recently did was that I put up a section for some of my projects. Go check out my handy work.

I've decided to start getting into digital video editing. Its obviously gonna continue to get bigger and bigger as sites like YouTube gain in popularity. I get the feeling that one day web site developers will be required to know some basic video editing software. Also, it seems like a lot of fun. Some of the stuff that I've seen is amazing and way more entertaining than most of the stuff on tv today.

I really want to try to take advantage of YouTube while I can. I could see a time coming when sites like YouTube become as organized and controlled as television. A time when you can't just throw a video of yourself onto the most popular sites. You'd have to get your video approved by some panel of judges or pay someone for space or bandwidth. I think it may be a ways off, but I could see that happening sooner or later.

Text box magic script

2007-07-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

Demo this script here.

I'm seeing more and more sites using a simple little text box effect. The text box in a form is loaded with some descriptive text in it like "Name" and when the user clicks on it, the box empties itself in readiness for input. It's a nice little effect that makes forms look cleaner so I thought I'd put up a code snippet here that does it for you.

function textboxFocus( txtBox )
{
var tempVal = txtBox.value;
txtBox.value = '';
txtBox.onfocus = null;
txtBox.onblur = function() { textboxBlur( txtBox, tempVal ); };
}// End function textboxFocus

function textboxBlur( txtBox, msg )
{
if( txtBox.value.length == 0 )
{
txtBox.value = msg;
txtBox.onfocus = function() { textboxFocus( txtBox ); };
txtBox.onblur = null;
}// End if
}// End function textboxBlur

Now, here's how to use that code:
Obviously, the first thing you need to do is to copy the above code into your document. Next, you'll need a textbox with an onFocus event set up to call textBoxFocus:

<input type="text" name="myText" value="Name" onFocus="textboxFocus( this );" / >

Now, when the page loads, the textbox will have whatever text you put into the value attribute (in this case 'Name'.) When the user's cursor enters the textbox, the onFocus event fires off and textboxFocus is called.

The textboxFocus function removes the default text, removes the onFocus event handler (so the user's text won't be blanked out), and sets up an event to fire onBlur to call textboxBlur with the original text as an argument.

When textboxBlur is called it checks to see if the user entered anything. If not, it puts the default text back in and sets up the original event handler to fire onFocus to call textboxFocus.

I think this is a nice script cause its small (only 17 lines), simple (only 2 functions), it works on textarea elements too, and it puts the original text back into the box if the user doesn't enter anything.

Arrow Problems

2007-06-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

I saw an article not too long ago describing ten different apps that you should use if you are running Ubuntu. One of the ones on the list was Katapult, the application launcher. I installed it (easy) but when I tried to use it, by pressing alt+space, all I got was the context menu. I did some googling and figured out how to disable that keybinding and got Katapult working fine. The next day when I tried to do some coding I found that the down arrow wasn't working. Somewhere along the line I've screwed up the key binding (I think.)

I've been googling around, asking friends, trying different things but I can't figure it out. Its really annoying when I try to code and hit the down arrow and nothing happens. It completely derails my train of thought. I'm gonna have to figure this out soon.

In other news; I got the Opera browser for my DS. Its pretty cool actually. I just wish that there where more WiFi hotspots around that I could connect too.