• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600
• 256M Radeon X1300PRO GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card
• KWORLD PCI Interface TV Tuner Card
• 1 GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Memory
• LITE-ON 18X DVD±R DVD Burner
• Hanns·G Black 19? 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
• 250 GB SATA Hard Drive + Plus one of my old 120 GB IDE Hard Drives
• Some cheap Creative Labs Speakers (In a noise free apartment complex)

Now I would love to tell you guys to look forward to a lot of new posts, but honestly I’m going to be wrapped up in this for a while. I got a lot of new games to play and a lot of movies to watch on my wide screen monitor . So, I’ll be with you guys in a couple days, lol.

Just kidding. I haven’t been able to post lately because I sold my old computer and I didn’t want to risk blogging at work. But it’s all good now. I’m back.

• No Computer No Posts
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• On Vacation pt 2
• AJAX Seminar in March 2006
• My Apologies for the Downtime

• I Think I Owe IE 6 An Apology, Nah.
• My Apologies for the Downtime
• I Hate Internet Explorer 6.0 Even More
• On Vacation pt 2
• Importing Large MySQL Databases – When phpMyAdmin Let’s You Down – Get BigDump

• New Domain: WebDevelopment2.com, New Focus: Frameworks, CakePHP, Javascript, Web 2.0
• FeedBurner + Google search cache = Instant Blog Back Up
• Finally Graduating – I’m Done
• Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps
• Finals Week – Sorry Folks

OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information.

How It All Started

Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good. Business is so good that they got a new client in the state of Washington. For this client, however, they were doing a complete rewrite of their software from Visual C++ 6.0 (with all that MFC stuff) to a .NET product written in C#. So they were looking for programmers to work on the new stuff. So they were going from university to university looking for some programmers to handle the new contract.

I was supposed to be one of these programmers, but things didn’t really work out that way. I went to the interview at my school, took a test, got another interview for a week later, and went to that interview. I thought everything was all falling into place, except I didn’t hear from them every again. About a month and a half later I decided to call to see what’s up. I was informed that all the positions were filled. Needless to say I was disappointed. About two days after that I got a phone call asking me whether I would be interested in a Visual C++ position. I said “sure, why not”. I did a telephone interview and got the job.

Day One to Now

I started work on January 16th. I must say, it was quite an experience. Prior to that day, I’ve only ever worked on small stuff for school (apart from a simple Visual Basic program years ago). I was not prepared for the magnitude of the product. It was just huge compared to what I’ve dealt with in the past. But I’m coping with it. The department I work in simply fixes bugs. We get a list of things that aren’t working right and we’re required to get things working again. My greatest problem isn’t with the code; it’s with understand what the product is supposed to be doing at any given point. Just trying to duplicate the errors sometimes takes hours. This is even before I load up the debugger or look at one line of code.

What can I say? We’ll see what happens in the long run. Oh, by the way, Happy Valentines Day!! Enjoy.

• A Bit On Open Source And Some Baz Background
• Finally Graduating – I’m Done
• Give Me 15 Minutes and I’ll Make You A jQuery Expert
• Using CakePHP for A School Project – Proof of Concept
• Chitika Revenue Dropping?

• Person: So you’re graduating in December?
• Me: Yep.
• Person: So you must be really excited, huh?
• Me: I guess so.
• Person: So what are you going to do afterwards?
• Me (Thinking): How the hell should I know? Do you have a rich uncle that owns a company and is willing to give me a job? Because I sure haven’t been successful on the millions of interviews I’ve gone to. Shoot, I guess I’m going to end up working in the mall selling women’s shoes or something.
• Me (Actual response): I’m not sure. I guess try to find a job.

Not to mention I’m trying to scrape through the semester and just finish. In my entire college career, this semester should have been my easiest. I was only taking five courses, one of which was a Walking Aerobics class. Another one involved C# Programming, which after having background in C++, came rather easily. So technically, it was only supposed to be two real classes. Algebraic Structures: Oh My God. This was the worst experience of my life. Just saying the name of the course brings back scary memories. In a nutshell, I sometimes wondered if I would ever pass this class.

Another one of my classes was Software Engineering. This should have been a walk in the park. Except for one thing, we were required to present a group project at the end of the semester. Sounds simple enough, but groups suck. People drop out, people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, etc, etc. I was in a group of three (3), which turned into a group of two where one guy sat on his ass and I did the entire project by myself. I was scared that I wouldn’t pull through.

All these uncertainties made it hard to get excited about graduation. But bit by bit, with a lot of hard work and a lot of prayer, things began falling into place. After about a month of waiting on of my interviews I got a call back, which resulted in another call and eventually a job offer. Not a bad start I must say. Somehow I got that A in Software Engineering and that C in Algebraic Structures and I’m done. Computer Science and Mathematics double major, class of December 2006. It feels good.

So congratulations to myself, congratulations to my fellow graduates, congratulations everyone else who is graduating in December across the country, and to everyone else have a Merry Christmas!

• Finals Week – Sorry Folks
• One Down Two To Go
• Using CakePHP for A School Project – Proof of Concept
• Writely is Kicking A** – TechCrunch
• Job Update – Part 1

Tomorrow I have Contemporary Programming Languages and I need to hand up my Numerical Analysis take home exam. That should be simple enough. On Wednesday I have to hand up Part 2 of Algebraic Structures and then that’s it. Did you hear me? That’s it. Well, that is after I graduate on Saturday. And I’ll be done with school for a while; a very long while. After this I have about one month before work starts. Yes, that’s a whole other story on it’s own, I got a JOB. I got to move and all that stuff. But hey, I’m just so psyched about finishing with school that I can barely contain myself. Again, this is a 10 minute break from my studies and I got to get back to it. I don’t want my GPA to take any other unnecessary dips before I’m all done. Rumor has it I’ll be graduating with honors. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

• Numerical Analysis – Take Home Exam II
• Finally Graduating – I’m Done
• Job Update – Part 1
• Making Sure Your Javascript Doesn’t Rise When Baking
• Should A Business Use Free Web Hosting?

• Finals start today. Yes, this struggling college student is about to go into finals week and obviously I’m going a bit crazy.
• We’ve had end of semester project dues. One project, Software Engineering, was proving to be a major pain. Not the project itself, but the process by which it was to be delivered. Let’s just say, this whole “group work” thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
• I’ll also be graduating. Yep, it’s finally over. In one week I’ll be putting on that gown and walking through those doors. Wait a minute, where’s my gown. Whoops, mental note: “Need to check on gown at the bookstore”. We’ve been having graduation practice and all this good stuff.

So basically, I’m about ready to pull my hair out from the roots. But I’m trying my best to hold on to what little sanity I have left. Things should be back in full swing on Thursday.

• Finally Graduating – I’m Done
• On Vacation pt 2
• No Computer No Posts
• AJAX and Fast CGI
• Blog Revival

Now comes another problem. Rather a solution that causes a problem. Most people fixed this resolution issue by slapping on a fixed layout. Now fixed layouts have their pros and cons. The pros are, you know exactly how it will look every time. You know where every thing will be on the website. One major con, I experienced at a friend’s house. He had just gotten a brand new 21″ flat panel monitor and everything looked so crisp. After a couple hours of playing, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory we were just browsing the Internet and I just asked him to check out my latest post at the time. When he did I was horrified. My beautiful fixed width 787 pixel layout, which looks just brilliant on my 17″ at home, still looked brilliant here, but it was so bloody small. I mean the thing was tiny and scrolling took forever. Yeah, we would have had to scroll a lot on a smaller monitor but since we have this huge one, why should we. There was just so much wasted screen space it annoyed me. You could almost fit a whole other site right next to mine.

When I went home, I said goodbye to the fixed width layout and picked up a fluid one. And I must say, I’m kind of in love with this one. Whether 800 pixels or much higher, everything just stretches out to fill the screen. Sometimes you scroll, some times you don’t. So first off, I’d like to apologize for all my visitors with large fancy monitors, I did not know what you were going through. The other issue is that blogs are less affected by this screen resolution thing for two reasons. First of all, blogs are meant to be read. Therefore the less vertical eye movement the user has to do easier it is on his eyes. A blog is less about graphically and structural presentation and more about reading the text. I’m not saying blogs should be ugly, I’m just saying you don’t need to hook the visitor with too many pretty pictures to get their attention. The second reason is that, a lot of blogs don’t even get visited anymore. With the advent of RSS feeds a lot of people don’t even know what the home page of the blog looks like. RSS feeders just feed straight text and it fills it out however your reader is configured to.

Now because the fluid layout is so great, you know there’s going to be a catch right? The main issue, for me anyways, is getting it to have a minimum width. I mean, there is a point where you just don’t want your website getting any smaller. After all, the main reason we’re using this fluid layout is so that things get expanded. Enter the problem of CSS and the min-width property. This is an entirely different post all on its own, so I’ll leave it as that.

Anyways, tell me how you guys like the new layout. Love it, hate it, I wanna know.

• Websites on Wide Screen – How The Other Half Lives
• Yay! Wordpress 2.5. Almost Perfect
• I Think I Owe IE 6 An Apology, Nah.
• Dclick Ads – Another Quick Start Up Advertising Site
• Joomla Template Tip: Optional Modules

Funny as hell.

I must admit, that part about Internet Explorer is so true, but what are you going to do? It’s all part of the job description.

• I Hate Internet Explorer 6.0 Even More
• Make Your Web Site Not Suck In Internet Explorer – IE CSS Min-Height Hack
• Internet Explorer 8 – The Drama Begins
• JQuery, Prototype, and MooTools Benchmark – SlickSpeed
• IE Hack: CSS Centering – Another Reason I Hate Internet Explorer

Check it out:

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• 5 Steps to Simple SEO
• Poll Results – What Do You Look for in a PHP Framework?
• Chitika Ads
• New Domain: WebDevelopment2.com, New Focus: Frameworks, CakePHP, Javascript, Web 2.0
• Blog Revival

Yes, it’s due in a couple of hours. Did I just start it? Come on now, no I didn’t. I’ve just been procrastinating in finishing the last question. So I’ll have it in tomorrow and everything will be fine.

The topics covered in this exam were interesting. We’re doing Interpolation using Taylors Series, Lagrange Polynomials and Divided Differences. What is interesting about this class is that I’m taking it with a professor who is in love with Excel spreadsheets. Actually, his first love is Lotus, but since Excel is what we have on all the computers at school, he has little choice.

I’ve read the book and I’ve even searched online and I haven’t found anyone using his particular spreadsheet method of solving these things. It takes a little bit of work to set up the spreadsheet, but once you have it set up you simply substitute points for different questions and it spits out your answer. Pretty nifty if you ask me. I think he should fine tune this method and he might even get anothe research paper out of it. I would lend my assistance, but there are two things standing in my way:

1. I don’t really like Mathematics that much
2. This is my last semester and I have absolutely no free time.

• One Down Two To Go
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• phpBB vs. SMF