David: September 2008 Archives

I haven't seen much activity about PERL in freelancing. In fact everyone have kind of forgotten this powerful language, specially in text processing. Today I started glancing at a PERL book my teacher had on the shelf. I felt a bit awkward because, well, I've always hated PERL's syntax, it wasn't something I classified as a "logical syntax"(for example, Java's syntax are pretty self-defined), but the more I read-I found myself thinking "whoa, everything I could do for manipulating text is here".

The one thing I love the most is regular expressions in PERL. It doesn't feel bloated or hard to write the code. It's purely straight to the point. One of these days I'll probably manage to learn PERL. Well, manage isn't exactly the word. Learning the syntax and built-in functions is what I mean.

Anyway, I'll be toying with it pretty soon (probably next week). I still have to take a deep look at C++/C/C# for a change. It's something I have been avoiding from the very start because I don't want to confuse myself right now.

After starting with Java I asked my teacher if she could lend me her Java book, Java How to Program, published in 1999. It's a bit outdated and I knew it will give me problems. Yet, sometimes old books cover more about subjects like OOP, OBP. Polymorphism and other programming terms because they were slightly new to developers.

I've been researching about games made in Java, to my surprise no one has created a real game, and when I mean a real game I'm talking about things like "Call of Duty 2", "Final Fantasy 7". Gaming in Java has been deserted for unknown reasons. My current goal is to break the myth of "you can't program games in Java" due to "resources hog" and many other things.

Well, let's see the outcome of this, maybe it will turn just fine.

I'm pretty much happy today I'm making my switch to Opera Browser. Mind you, Firefox has been quite slow and while their plug-ins are awesome I don't really do much nor need many plug-ins. Of course, as a firefox user (if anyone here reading this) you might feel offended and try to back it up. I've been looking foward to use Opera for quite some time, and the only thing that stopped me was not having ad-block which I finally found the solution today.

Mouse Gestures in Opera is also something to be amazed, you just don't know how helpful they are until you get the hang of it and use them. I'm still learning the gestures and well takes a bit of time to get used to.

Another reason I moved to Opera was because of their interface. I've really grown tired of Firefox interface, there is just something there that doesn't makes me feel there is something wrong.

I'll probably keep using Opera no matter what other people say, it's something I have been eager to do since I reformatted this computer. I really can't live without adblock, due to many sites cluttering the web pages with stupid ads. (Ignores mine)

If you are interested, give it a try, and not one of those that lasts 30 minutes and start trolling. Cheers!

There has been quite a fuss about the new browser Google released, Google Chrome (Chromium). I wasn't that eager to ditch my firefox, and as far as I've used Chrome, there is no way I'll ditch my current web browser. Obviously because I can't live without Adblock Plus, Web Developer, Stumble Upon plug-ins.

How much I yearn Google Chrome to have those plug-ins. I would make the switch fast, of course the only reason I have, the interface. I can't help but to love and embrace the simply yet usable interface. Chrome comes with spell checker, somehow I feel it's quite faster than Firefox's one but I'll leave one to those who benchmark a lot since I have no interest in that kind of information at the moment.

I'm awed by the launching speed of this browser, it opens almost instantly, perhaps because I don't have plug-ins here but I doubt it makes a difference, why? I have used firefox with no plug-ins and its launching speed has always been slow.

Now something I caught from gossip is the "incognito" window, or "porn mode", of course calling it porn mode is stupid, just because tons of teens, kiddos (and shameless married men) are going to watch porn using incognito mode doesn't mean it's just for porn. For example you work for a company and you happen to be always online on the company's rival site because of whatever reason. Close incognito and nothing ever happened. Anyway, yes, now Firefox 3.1 will have this feature, although was this planned or did they just did it out of desperation? (To not lose their % in the browser share)

There is also the Yahoo! Dropdown in google main site. Something I have found is that keywords like "sex", "hardcore" does not appear in the dropdown (as you see in the screenshot) so at least we have an idea what google blacklists from the search results. The release is still not mature enough. I really miss the privacy settings, and smooth scrolling. (Yes, I realize this is a beta)

It's been several weeks since my last post. I can't deny that I've been busy with college and it's been a nice time too. I've given my first presentation to the class and I plan to give my second relating to object-oriented. Of course, my knowledge of OOP is limited as most of what I've learned were theories and how it worked, the concept itself is easy to understand, writing and producing isn't the easiest part.

I'm introducing myself to Java, now with the help of my professor (she's a Java freak) I plan to take advantage of that and learn Java to some extend. There are quite lots of questions, as an starter I can't help but to think of a dozen of questions.

Ah yes, my first presentation was about logic operators, arithmetic in programming and most of the basic fundamentals a programming language provides (IF/ELSE/THEN/WHEN) etc etc. I used PHP on this, with the hopes to move to another language. Mind you, it's really hard for me to leave PHP.

Anyway! That aside, me got a Wii!