First Softball Game
by AJ Michels on Apr.28, 2010, under Life
Our team, The Detroit Ligers, lost 8 to 9 against the Tiffs. It was a fun game despite the lose. We were a little worried about the turn out but in the end we had more than enough people.
Me Hitting the Ball
Team Manager, My Cousin Ryan. Working hard to keep us organized.
Swing Batter Batter!
Near Miss, But a catch none the less.
cf.Objective() 2010 – Day 3
by AJ Michels on Apr.24, 2010, under ColdFusion, Development, Life, Work
Part three of my cf.Objective 2010 series. Again I arrived a little late today. Just over tired. I got to Terry Ryan’s ORM talk about half way through. When I walked in he was talking about lazy loading, extra lazy, and eager. He mentioned how you can actually do a eager join when you load an object which instead of running separate queries two get all of the data you need it Hibernate will create a ‘large’ join statement that will pull all of the data in one query. This was something I hadn’t previously heard of and sounded like it might have some good uses. He went on to talk about Caching, Event Handling and Table Generation.
cf.Objective() 2010 – Day 2
by AJ Michels on Apr.23, 2010, under ColdFusion, Development, Life, Work
Part two of my cf.Objective 2010 series. I was a bit worried this day was going to be rough as I had been at the office until almost 10pm the night before. I was a little late the first session and missed breakfast but for the most part I was more awake than I expected. It helped that the first couple sessions weren’t entirely boring. Actually the session on Flex 4 was pretty interesting, but still wasn’t earth shattering information.
Apple < Microsoft
by AJ Michels on Apr.23, 2010, under Development
Short rant about how pissed I am with Apple. People who think that Apple is less ‘evil’ than Microsoft are ignorant.
I own an iPhone and for the most part I really like it. I have few complaints, and most of them are a result of greedy mobile carriers. iPad comes out and now I am really interested in developing apps for the iPhone and iPad. I think it would be fun as well as a way for me to branch out from web development. So I go to the Apple website and register as an Apple Developer. It wasn’t until after I registered that I found Apple has made it virtually impossible for you to develop apps for the app store if you do not have a computer running OSX. On top of that it has to be running on an Intel platform, so one of their newer model machines.
Screw you Apple.
OSX blows you elitist bastards. You develop a great mobile platform, the iPhone OS, and then you tell me because I prefer *insert favorite not apple OS here* I am not worthy of developing applications for your platform.
As if that wasn’t enough they updated there App store terms of use to eliminate Adobes efforts of circumventing this proprietary BS.
I guess it is time for me to start looking at Android or the Win Mobile 7 OS. I definitely wont be buying an iPad anytime soon.
cf.Objective() 2010 – Day 1
by AJ Michels on Apr.22, 2010, under ColdFusion, Development, Life, Work
Through work I received the opportunity again to attend the annual cf.Objective Conference held in the Twin Cities. I have attended the conference for the last four years since its inception in 2007. To summarize it is a conference for advanced ColdFusion developers. If you are brand new to ColdFusion you would be better off attending CFUnited. Some session you might see at cf.Objective would be about Frameworks, ORM, CF integration with Flex, etc.
In this post I am summarizing the sessions I attended on the first day.
Dependency Injection with PHP
by AJ Michels on Apr.16, 2010, under Development, PHP
Found this article while looking for an open source Dependency Injection engine for PHP. The grammar needs a little work but otherwise it is a really good summary of when Dependency Injection is and why programmers should use it.
In ColdFusion we use ColdSpring which is based on the Spring Framework for Java. It actually does a lot more than just DI but I am not concerned about that. What I really want is something that can handle the same kind of DI situations that ColdSpring does for PHP. I am currently working on a WordPress plugin for a freelance client which has turned out to be the most heavily object oriented PHP project I have done so far. I have trying to translate a lot the best practices I have learned while working with ColdFusion over to PHP and came across a need for DI. What I ended up doing to creating an Factory that handles all of my object creation just like what is mentioned in the article by Ryan on PotStuck. I pass an array with all of my classes, their paths, and their dependencies, like so:
So far it is working pretty well but I am thinking about making a more substantial DI framework that I can use on many projects to come.
Web Programming Presentation
by AJ Michels on Apr.01, 2010, under Uncategorized
I gave a talk at St. Cathrine University in St. Paul on the basics of web programming. Really the basics of web servers. The presentation is attached.
Time for Something New
by AJ Michels on Feb.14, 2010, under Development, Life
I new it was on it’s way out, but my Compaq Prisario v2000 finally died. Just short of 6 years and showing the wear for it. So I have moved on.
Meet the Dell Latitude e6400. Not as stylistic as the XPS series but much more practical. After having a laptop for so long I have discovered that the power of a desktop is no match for the convenience of a laptop. But what to do with the quality peripherals I have acquired over time like my 22 in Samsung monitors. Well… I have always wanted a docking station, hence the business class Latitude equipped with a docking port.
- Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 3.06GHz
- 4Gb RAM
- Windows 7 Professional 64bit
- 250Gb 7200rpm HDD
- Nvidia Quadro NVS 160m, 256Mb
Now I can use my laptop as my primary machine while still getting the high productivity of having two monitors a full sized Keyboard and Mouse.
Mass Effect 2
by AJ Michels on Feb.14, 2010, under Console, Games
Mass Effect was a great game. The game-play was good but the story was excellent. Being a huge Sci-fi fan I have to say it had an incredibly compelling story. So much so that it was often difficult to maintain the ‘completionist’ style game-play I usually undertake. I was even able to see how the story took root from some other great Sci-fi novels and short stories. Combine that with beautiful imagery and an extensive space travel simulation, it was hard to put the controller down.
A Sequel
I wasn’t exactly jumping on the opportunity to play Mass Effect 2. Surprising as that my be given how satisfied I was with the first installment I just didn’t feel compelled to go out and get it. Maybe I didn’t feel like I could justify the time commitment with all of the other things going on in my life. Though after listening to so many people get excited about playing it (including my cousin who pre-ordered it for his PC) I decided buy it for my Xbox.
Advancement or Regression
So far the game has been… Ok. There is no question that BioWare has made improvements. However, there are a number of changes they have made that seem to be steps backwards not only in game-play but also from a Sci-fi tech standpoint. My first example of this would be the weaponry. In Mass Effect the weapons seem to be a very sophisticated technology that do not use ammunition but a kind of energy. Firing the weapon causes it to heat up, and after firing many shots in succession the gun can overheat and requires cool down time. This eliminated the need to practice ammunition conservation and allowed you to play the game however you wanted. It also created balance with the biotic abilities which also required time to recharge. Completely shifting game-play and making the soldier class a slave to ammunition availability, they have changed this in ME2. Now the weapons still use energy based projectiles but rather than building up heat and needing to cool down they expend the capacity of their ‘heat sink’ which then needs to be replaced. So in the two years (game time) between the first and second games tech has changed in such a way that it is less efficient. You now have to collect ‘heat sinks’ which for some reason fall out of enemy gun’s when they are killed.
to be continued…
Giving In
by AJ Michels on Feb.14, 2010, under Development, Life
For too long I have been telling myself I will create a website to promote my work and everything else important to me. I have started so many site only to get distracted by real work. After playing around with Word Press for work I am doing for a freelance client I discovered how powerful and well written it is. Therefore I have given in and decided to start with Word Press rather than aspire to end with something like Word Press written on my own.
I think a big part of my failure to create a site was I kept getting hung up on the big picture. I wanted to develop something that I could build upon over time. I would start with a simple design and a few pages and never really get much farther than that. A few months later I would give it another go. Now I am going to start with Word Press as a base and build upon it with my own Themes and Plugins.
