What I’m Up To (Part 1 of 2)
World of Warcraft: Vanilla on a private server.
A friend pitched the idea, and I thought it sounded great! Here’s the Blogger blog that I’m writing about our adventures through WoW in its vanilla days. Feel free to follow along http://back-to-vanilla.blogspot.com/.
Tricky Optical Illusion
I came across this optical illusion online about a week ago. And even now that I know the truth, I still can’t get my mind to see it that way.
A and B are the same color! But that’s not how our minds see it at all. I think the “problem” is that the mind sees the square in the shade and it adjusts things to try to “brighten up” that object so that something doesn’t become hard to see because it’s in the shade. That is totally my thought on the matter though, I don’t truly know why they are the same color but they seem different.
If you’re like me and it takes a little extra convincing.. print the picture out (even printed you’ll see the difference in the colors (as long as it’s a decent quality print out)) and then cut the two squares out. And then you’ll see the reality that they are the same and there’s no disputing it at that point. I even set the cut out pieces back into the picture and it once again appears they are different colors to me.
What a tricky, tricky mind we have.
Update: As bwoodlee pointed out in the comments, Photoshop will suffice if you don’t have a printer handy.. Open it in there and either color pick or cut the A and B squares out and lay them side by side.. Either way you’ll see both are indeed color #787878!
Glassfish Installation Error Solved
I was getting my Java and Glassfish installation set up so that I could get into some development using Eclipse. After a couple of attempts, I was unable to solve the problem after a restart as well as running the installer as admin. But with the help of some Google searches and following the clues, I was able to get it resolved.
The Problem
I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. When I downloaded and tried to install the Java EE 6 SDK, I would get the following error “The system cannot find the path specified.”
Under the heading CREATING DOMAIN it would print out the commands that the system tried to run with asadmin.bat. With the final line including error being “domain1The system cannot find the path specified.”
The Diagnosis
The most useful Google result I was able to find was a post at devdaily.com. It was a person who was having the same problem but for a different reason (if it were the same reason, I could just link you there and call it a day, ha). But the resolution that he details pointed me in the right direction. I looked at the file that he edited to solve his problem. I noticed that his file pointed to his JDK installation while mine pointed to my Java installation.
The Resolution
I went to the directory where my JDK should have been installed and noticed that I didn’t already have it installed. So I went back to Oracle’s website and got the installation kit that included JDK. Ran it as admin (in anticipation of any more possible issues) and it installed without a hitch.
So for a brief summary of my resolution:
1) opened ‘glassfish\config\asenv.bat’ and looked at the ‘set AS_JAVA=…’ line
2) confirm that it points to a valid JDK install
3) edit the file to point to the right location or install the JDK in the first place
And that’s what I had to do to get my Glassfish installation working. I hope it helps you if you happen to come across a similar problem.
Website Toolchain
Now the initial design of my code-centric website is completed. I’ve brushed up on my CSS skills so I’m feeling ready to tackle making my design a reality.
I’m putting together my toolchain both for creating the website and for writing the small code snippets that will be housed in that sub-site.
Here’s what I’m working with so far:
Time Management
14dayz is an online time tracking project. It allows you to set up a project and insert start and stop times for activities. I’ve used it before and found it to be quite useful. There is some amount of inspiration to be had from being able to look back on the amount of time that you’ve spent working on a project. And there is also something that helps drive you forward when you know there’s a record of your time that is going to acknowledge that you did or didn’t dedicate time to the project.
Code Editing
It’s no doubt true that code of all types, from C++ to html to Java, could be written in any text editor, even Notepad. But the gains from having a proper code editor are phenomenal.. the boilerplate code that’s generated, the syntax highlighting, the nice indention happening automatically and those only scratch the surface. As the site will contain code written in a variety of languages, I will in all likelihood use a number of ides (integrated development environment). The base ide is going to be Visual Studio 2010. If I’m working on Windows, Visual Studio is always my go-to. If Visual Studio is compatible with the language I’m using, I’ll take Visual Studio all day long. But as things tend to go, you’ve gotta make tougher decisions sometimes.
I picked up an ide for dealing in python code towards the end of my most recent python programming. Aptana Studio. So I have it installed but haven’t really done any work in it. I hunted it down for python so I’m really aware of what other languages it supports or can support via plugins. So I may end up trying it out for other languages as well.
Languages in the web group (CSS, HTML, XML, javascript) and python will be done with Aptana Studio. Any .NET languages will be done with Visual Studio. And the rest of the languages will be happy surprises along the way.
Version Control
When I first used Google Code’s Project Hosting, I took up the task of learning to use Mercurial. I found it to be straight-forward and simple enough to use. So given the choice, I’ll be using Mercurial. And if I end up hosting my project(s) online somewhere that doesn’t support Mercurial, I’ll start to look to other distributed platforms (git probably tops that list of alternates) first and then resorting to SVN if nothing else is available.
Online Storage
Online storage is one facet I haven’t yet decided on. There are multiple solutions for open source code available but few if any that are free that don’t force open source licensing. It’s most likely that’ll I’ll decide on one of those free options and open the source up. Making the source code available is pretty core to my idea of what the site will be about for me anyway. The code will be there and available for people to see and scrutinize (hopefully constructively).
Wrap Up
As all of the above comes together to describe, some of the pieces are in place. Some are decided and are just waiting to get a chance to play their role. And some are still undecided. I look forward to the enjoyment of making those final decisions and getting the whole machine functioning to crank out code whenever I want to.
Tags: .net, 14dayz, aptana-studio, code-editor, css, git, google-code, javascript, mercurial, python, source-code, svn, time-management, version-control, visual-studio | 
1 Comment »
CSS Joys
My code-centric sub-site is coming along nicely. I just finished up the layout of the main page, which was the last of the major pages.
Now I need to be able to turn that design into a real page. I haven’t experienced the joys of writing raw CSS in a while (I’ve had the luxury of creating or finding a theme for WordPress then tweaking the CSS to fit my needs). Yes there’s a little sarcasm in that statement. I’m running through the offerings at w3schools for a quick refresher. I’m a fan of using their tutorials whenever they have a topic that I’m learning or relying on their references whenever I want to reference against one of the technologies they teach.
I took a look at the current browser support for CSS 3.0 and it doesn’t look promising just yet. So, I’ll be sticking to 2.1 for the time being. Aaand I’m off like a herd of turtles to reclaim my CSS knowledge.