roytang / weblog

Archive for the ‘Geeky’ Category

http://royondjango.blogspot.com/

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Software Developer | No Comments

After trying out usernamecheck.com, I decided to try claiming my username “roytang” at various websites. Here’s a list of various websites where I have this username.

http://friendfeed.com/roytang - This one actually seems useful.

http://twitter.com/roytang - Okay, I admit it. I’ve actually had this for a few weeks now.

http://pownce.com/roytang/ - I’m not yet too clear on what it’s used for.

http://roytang.posterous.com/ - would be useful if I didn’t already have a blog

http://roytang.livejournal.com/ - now I can be emo!

http://roytang.pbwiki.com/ - I created this a long time ago. Recently I had to use pbwiki again so I revived the account.

http://www.last.fm/user/roytang - music I listen to.

http://roytang.wordpress.com/ - As mentioned, I only got this account so I could activate Akismet

There’s probably more. Sometimes when I see a random website I try out my username to see if I’ve registered before and this is successful more often than I expect.

Some “roytang”s on the web that are not me:

http://roytang.blogspot.com - obviously not me

http://www.myspace.com/roytang - some guy from Singapore

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I was looking to try out some Flex stuff at home, but of course I didn’t have a personal Flex Builder license I could use. (A coworker of mine wisely advised me not to try using my work license at home.) So I looked around to see if there were any free (as in beer and as in speech) alternatives.

The one I found was FlashDevelop. Although the IDE looks Eclipse-like, it’s actually built using .Net. While it’s not yet 100% polished, my impression from about an hour of working with it is that it’s reasonably mature and quite fast (speed is not exactly something you could claim was a strength of Adobe Flex Builder.)

It seems that it supports AS2 and Adobe AIR as well, but I wanted to try it out using Flex first. I needed to download and install the Flex SDK separately - it builds your MXML files by invoking the Flex Compiler Shell. This means the “Build automatically” option isn’t really practical here (although I’m not sure if Flex Builder does it differently) I probably need to download the Adobe AIR Runtime as well if I want to build AIR apps.

I’m not gonna demo anything Flex-y yet (I only tried it out for an hour!), but this means I can start working on a particular thing which I’ve been thinking about for a while. Hopefully I can announce it soon, though methinks it’ll be months before I get anything sensible ready.

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I was going through some old files today, I found this screenshot of my desktop from 2004:

(Click for larger image)

Actually, I still like that wallpaper. It’s well-drawn. It’s from RPGamer Theme Central.

Items I had in the quick-launch toolbar:

• mIRC (for downloading comics)
• Thunderbird
• IE
• IE again (?!)
• I believe this is EditPad, a notepad replacement
• Chami.com HTML-Kit
• WinAmp
• Windows Media Player
• DivX Player
• No idea
• Shortcut to some folder
• Kazaa (pirate!)
• No idea
• 2xExplorer (Windows explorer alternative)
• Crimson Editor (so far there are at least 3 different text editors)
• Show Desktop
• Terminal
• Outlook (I never used this)
• Excel
• No idea
• Thunderbird again…apparently I never cleaned up this taskbar.
• Visualboy Advance
• Firefox
• Quicktime (3 different media players too!)
• Warcraft III
• Yahoo Messenger
• No idea

For reference, here’s today’s desktop, same wallpaper:

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Geeky | No Comments

In my continuing quest to become better than everybody else, I spent some time today learning Django (a Python webapp framework) and the Google App Engine.

I tried following the tutorials included in the Django Book for a while, but I’ve never taken too well with just typing up examples from a book, so I decided to write something from scratch. I decided to write a simple message board application.

I wrote the message board pretty quickly using Django; it took me about 2-3 hours to have a bare-bones message board up and running. (I was watching Speed Racer at the same time.) The UI is horrendous of course, but it’s functional, with categories and topics, etc.

Now to deploy the message board app somewhere. After a bit of searching around, I couldn’t find any suitable free Django webhosting. So I went with the backup plan: I’d upload the project to the Google App Engine.

I’ve had a Google App Engine account for a while now, but haven’t done anything with it yet. Unfortunately, a Django app can’t be ported directly to GAE as Google has their own datastore implementation which won’t work with Django’s models. So I spent the rest of the day porting/rewriting the message board app for use with GAE. Google has their own guide for this sort of porting here: Running Django on Google App Engine.

Some problems encountered when porting:

• Can’t seem to use the list_detail generic view; I get errors about undefined user attribute on the request
• Sometimes after editing a view, I get random “NoneType has no attibute get” errors. Restarting the dev_appserver fixes this.
• Unlike Django, GAE models don’t have an “id” primary key. Instead, you must use object.key() which returns some sort of hash string (making for very inconvenient urls)
• I’m having errors raised during 404s; the problem is mentioned in this thread which should already be fixed but I’m still encountering it. I’ll investigate it later.

The final product is here: Random Encounters Message Boards. I don’t know who would actually use the site, but I think there’s some people I know reading this blog who wouldn’t be able to resist testing it!

The next step would be to improve the UI of the app!

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Software Developer | No Comments

I needed to transfer a file to my phone today, but could not find my USB cable. I figured I’d try out the Bluetooth with the laptop.

After around 30 minutes of struggling with the unintuitiveness and some helpful googling I finally was able to transfer my file using the ff steps, for future reference:

1. Turn on Bluetooth on the Acer Aspire using the Bluetooth button.
2. Right-click the Bluetooth icon on the systray -> Show Bluetooth Devices -> Options -> tick “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer”
3. Enable Bluetooth on the N73 via menu -> Tools -> Bluetooth
4. Scroll right on the N73 and the Paired Device screen is shown. Choose Options -> New Paired Device
5. The N73 should list your computer name (mine is PANDA!), select the computer name and you’ll be prompted for a passkey. Don’t input anything yet…
6. Back to the Vista PC, right-click the Bluetooth icon in the systray, then choose Add Device.
7. Tick “My device is set up and ready to be found.” and click Next.
8. The wizard should list your phone. Choose the phone and click Next.
9. Tick “Let me choose my own passkey”, and type a passkey.
10. You get the message to “Please enter the passkey on your Bluetooth device now”, so do just that.
11. The bluetooth connection should be all set up, to send a file to your N73, right-click the bluetooth icon and click Send a file
12. You’re done. Hooray!

Side note: After step 10, Vista seems to want to install drivers for the N73…but it doesn’t seem to be necessary

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Geeky, Hardware | No Comments

Am I the only one getting these random JavaScript alerts (obviously debugging messages!) on the new Facebook today?

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Software Developer | No Comments

I joined this year’s Google Code Jam.

It’s part of my characteristic competitiveness and arrogance that I actually imagined I had a chance at winning the contest. No such luck, see my results. I was eliminated in the second online round. That I managed to get there at all was surprising considering the level of difficulty.

I’m not really a com-sci guy, so I’m weak with regards to algorithms, I don’t always know what the best approach for particular classes of problems - I usually just brute force it then try to optimize based on my on-the-spot analysis of each problem. It seemed it wasn’t enough; there were a lot of hardcore guys who were able to get perfect scores, and I salute them.

I’m not sure whether I’ll still participate next time, as the problems don’t seem to be geared towards someone of my skillset. Still, the fact that I managed to pass 3 rounds (including the qualifier) indicates some potential for winning. And I was one of only two Filipinos who made it to round 2! Good luck to the last guy…

After the code jam, I’m thinking of taking a look at TopCoder.com which hosts weekly programming contests. I’m not sure whether I’ll really have time, but I’ll probably try it once or twice to see how well I fare.

This was a very humbling experience; even though I consider myself a pretty good programmer, there’s always someone better.

Posted by Roy in Geeky, Software Developer | No Comments

I find myself staring at stacks of old CD-Rs in my room that are just there taking up space. As far as I know, they contain copies of old TV series/anime I used to watch and backups of my old hard drives from time long past. (I’m pretty sure I still have backups of my drive contents from the IRC laboratory in UP.)

I’m wondering whether I should bother going through them to check which ones are already useless (as some certainlty already are). If I’m going to rearchive them into a different format it would probably take more than a week to reburn them to DVDs. But DVDs are soon to be obsolete with the coming of Blu-Ray, maybe I should just buy another external drive and archive them there? I could easily buy another hard drive with the capacity of somewhere around 200-300 CDs.

I’ve had a pack rat mentality ever since I first bought a CD burner back in the day, but lately I’ve found myself unenthusiastic about backing up anything to optical media. I had to backup the factory settings on this laptop to a DVD (because the Acer software didn’t have an option to backup to an external HD), but aside from that I haven’t burned any discs in half a year maybe.

Maybe it’s just due to my bad experience with failed CD writers and DVD writers that are slow as hell to burn, but I’ve pretty much given up on optical media. High failure rates, low life expectancy, insanely long writing times and difficulty of transfer and storage, I probably would prefer an additional external hard drive. Granted, hard drives fail as well, but at least you didn’t spend a hundred thousand hours writing stuff to it in case it does.

Or I could just (heaven forbid) toss out most of the stuff I normally archive; TV and anime episodes especially. After all, when was the last time I went through all the old episodes of Rurouni Kenshin? I barely have enough time to watch the current shows I follow, there’s probably no chance of me watching those old shows again. And even if I do get a hankering to watch season one of Smallville again, it’s not like it would be hard to find either online or IRL.

One could argue that I could keep the copies on disc in case someone wants to borrow them from me. But frankly, every other person now keeps his own stash of old episodes, and there are better people to borrow from than me.

Side note: I’m pretty sure the tendency to archive, compile and categorize everything is a symptom of NADD.

I’m almost done convincing myself now, maybe I will toss out those old discs…

Posted by Roy in Daily Life, Geeky, Pop Culture | 2 Comments

Wait to see the screenshots at the end!

Embedded Video

Posted by Roy in Games, Geeky | No Comments