Kyle Mulka's Blog

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Michael Jackson cleared of abuse

I don’t want to encourage mass poker playing, especially if you can’t afford it, but check this out:

High-stakes start-ups | CNET News.com

For anyone who may be following my thoughts on creating an away message aggregator as it may be called, here’s an article to support the thought.

For those that don’t care to read it, it basically says people in hollywood that work, or hire for short time gigs use iChat because of its feature to display all away messages together. So, a quick browse through the list would indicate if someone was in need of work or just finishing up a gig.

“‘Ninety percent of my work is given to me through a pop-up (chat window) on my desktop,’ said Simon Foster, 32, a freelance production coordinator living in Santa Monica, California.”

So, maybe my idea of creating an easier way to view away messages would have some use after all.

Wired News: Never IM in This Town Again!

MulkaMich: have you ever played the one game that you sing to and it recognises the pitch? its a little like ddr
MulkaMich: except with voice
Jeremy31337: No.
Jeremy31337: That’s weird.
MulkaMich: well, anyway, I whooped it singing Cher’s Believe in falsetto
MulkaMich: it was hot
Jeremy31337: Wow.
Jeremy31337: So you have to sing correctly?
Jeremy31337: And you get points for that?
MulkaMich: more or less, yes
Jeremy31337: Wow.
Jeremy31337: That’s awesome!!!
MulkaMich: you have to get the right pitches
Jeremy31337: I would totally pwn that game!
Jeremy31337: I have perfect pitch
MulkaMich: and by perfect pitch, do you mean you can sing any given note without a reference?
Jeremy31337: Correct

Here’s an interesting blog post about a girl Dating an Apple Developer. I hope my girlfriend/wife will be as understanding when I turn into a hardcore developer if I’m not already.

Respecting The Programmer

So, I guess the name for the technology which Goolgle Maps, Google Suggest, Gmail, etc uses is called Ajax. Hmm… interesting.

The point of using Ajax to make web applications is to make them faster, and more snappy. When you use Ajax, you don’t have to reload the webpage to do a lot of things, and processing can be done on the client side.

This makes them more like desktop applications. The whole trend of web applications now is to make them seem more like native applications. You don’t have to “download” them, they just work when you go to the site.

On a side note, I think JavaScript is a really bad language for writing applications in. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was never meant for it. Rather, it was meant for little popup boxes and slightly dynamic pages. Of course, you can completely adjust the content of pages dynamically, but still, it’s pretty bad. Another reason it is bad is because all the various browsers don’t implement it the same way, so the developer(s) end up testing in several different browsers which is really annoying. There has to be a better way.

Maybe that way is Java, which actually isn’t related to Javascript at all. It is more of a real programming language like C++v except for the fact that it is not compiled to a natie application, it is compiled to bytecode which requires a Java Virtual Machine to run. However, this means it can run on pretty much any operating system that is used today.

Here’s some related links:

JSON-RPC-Java – JavaScript to Java remote communication
DWR – Java library
Ajax Wiki

Looks like they’ve started construction on the Walgreen Drama Center on North Campus. Sweet! Maybe North Campus will be more of a hot spot now, instead of a baren wasteland.

Do you think I should buy a Roomba? We currently have no vacuum, and I think it would be really cool if it worked.

We played around with these things in my first semester Engineering 100 class at the University of Michigan. We basically had to reverse engineer it… draw up detailed diagrams, explained its logic, etc. It was actually pretty nifty. The funny thing about that class is that the projects we were doing actually were being implemented. For example, a GPS Tracking System for the UofM Busses, a Social Networking Website, Wireless Internet Connections, etc.

Matt introduced me to Model View Controller, and it looks promising. In fact, it looks like the exact design pattern we have been trying to do from the begining of Mschedule. (after he joined that is) Basically, the main goal is to separate the application logic from the display logic. This allows for complete change of display without changing the back end. It also allows the application logic to be cleaner without all the html gunk or whatever you are outputing. Below is a list of links, basically for my own reference having to do with MVC as it is called.

php.MVC
J2EE MVC
Web-Tier MVC Java
Design Patters
Do you need MVC?
Ruby on Rails
PHP MVC Frameworks
Phrame
Struts