Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
After watching Jobs, the movie about Steve Jobs, I was left inspired. Despite all the negative criticism, there was still something to get out of it. Documentaries about civil right activists or people who made it against all odds also give me the same kind of feeling. So right after watching, I re-evaluate my own life and start setting goals. I want to make a difference, I want to be successful, I want to inspire the world. With all the excitement, I write down these resolutions. No doubt in mind, I will reach them all. The days go by, the excitement tones down, and I stumble upon this notebook where my life changing goals were jotted down. I realize that there is no way I can accomplish all this. I have simply created another to-do list that I will never get to.
It is very amusing to speculate what the next big thing is going to be. But history has shown that we are not particularly good at getting it right. The year 2000 has long passed and we have yet to see a flying cars; some actually find it to be quite a ridiculous statement. However, it is much easier to look back in the past and decide what was the next big thing.
Vim is my favorite text editor on the terminal. After playing for a little while with nano and emacs, I finally settled with vim for its simplicity (bare with me please). Although it can be customized and used like an entire IDE, I use it mostly for editing files on my servers and making small but crucial changes. Let's not get into Editor war and get started.
Making your own website shouldn't be too difficult. Hosting companies like Godaddy or Hostgator make it super easy for anyone to get started; they allow you to create a whole website without ever writing code. For most people, it is plenty to run a WordPress blog. If this is what you are looking for you should head to Godaddy.com right now. We are done here. But on the other hand, if you want to have control and not be limited by the short comings of a shared hosting without busting your wallet, you have come to the right place.
I recently got into designing very small games using Javascript. Working with canvas in the browser helped me appreciate how vast and complex games can be. I truly am a beginner at this point but there are few things that helped me get started. Spagetti code can only get you so far, but with a structured StateStack Engine, development is much more fun and easier.
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing.
In my mind, the canvas in JavaScript represented an obscure dungeon that I would never dare to venture in. Many times I attempted but did no more than create a circle [see figure 1] on the page. But lately, I have been in a quest to fight my fears and Canvas was the first to tackle.
Saying you love PHP these days is something most people simply keep to them self. You don't have to go on Google and type "Why php sucks" to figure it out. It's one of those things everyone agreed upon and you will be lucky to ride a full eleven story building in an elevator without hearing someone saying why he hates PHP. Well my experience so far beg to differ. I won't call myself an expert but when I am developing using php, the language is rarely the obstacle. Plus the learning curve is basically a straight line.
A site map is the list of pages accessible on a website. It is mostly made for crawlers to make it easier to find pages on your website. Sitemaps are written in XML and follow a set of standards that can be found here. It is pretty easy to build following these sets of rules. Adding a style to your sitemap can make it legible not just to bots but to your fellow humans.
Hopefully this will be my only post about blogging. The whole point of starting this blog was to improve my writing. Hoping that some strangers will find a place in their heart to tolerate my bad writing and look beyond the obvious mistakes and understand the message I am trying to pass. Not that many strangers for the moment but the few that come along did have an opinion. As hurtful as some can be I have come to build friendships out of others. 180 days went by so fast. I still couldn't pinpoint exactly how much I improved until I went to page one and started reading.
