At work, I’m shifting gears and readying to write v2.0 of our web software. Where in the past I have always worked alone, we are now hiring a part time developer to take up some of the slack.

This was incentive for me to adopt new open source frameworks to build on this time around, intsead of coding everything from scratch as I usually do. I’m quite happy with the software we chose. After having spent some time with each package, I can’t recommend them enough. Here’s a list of what we ended up with.

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I’m impressed. I updated my copy of Parallels yesterday and WindowsXP now runs at native speed (without a reboot) on my quad core Mac Pro. XP also uses accelerated graphics now ... *drool* ... The last thing on my wish-list is for Parallels to allow XP to run off multiple processors. Good news: I saw an optimistic post yesterday from an admin on their forums ....

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I did some searching today on an issue I was having with Apple’s Mail program. 

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Early Monday morning I went to bed at my usual time, about 4:30 am. The winds were howling and I’d just finished my latest Java assignment for class. A good friend of mine, Barnaby from Connecticut, had just text’ed me some sorry images of his house being flooded by the coming storm. The rain was hard but I didn’t think hard enough to warrant that sort of concern for myself here in Maine ... little did I know.

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As the title states, this is the next iteration of my Sonar applet. I’ve added a “ping” collision sound, optimized the classes a little and added key commands to pause (P) the animation and show the FPS (D).  I also discovered the proper way to reference the sound files internally so it works as an applet and an application. You’ll notice there are 2 tracker lines now ... only the first one is used for collision testing, the second tracker line is simply a place holder for a feature I am trying to add.

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I am uploading this dummy applet I wrote to try out a new java applet embedding plug-in that I found for Wordpress. Its called Snapplets and was written by Steve Winton. Now that I see it working I am pretty impressed. It could use a little more work, I may have to modify it further. Thanks Steve.

View the applet after the jump.

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Man oh man, today is a day I will never forget, the day I learned to use Subversion.

Subversion is a server-side piece of software you use to do version control on your documents. It’s particularly useful in situations where more than one person will be editing those documents. You edit your files locally and then commit those changes to a server, at which point someone else is able to safely check them out again, edit away and then upload their versions over yours. The important thing to note: older versions are always still accessible.

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I took this evening to update the engine that my website is built upon to the 2.1.2 release of Wordpress.

I ran into an odd problems along the way, a situation where all the site seemed to work fine except that I was unable to load the “Manage” (/wp-admin/edit.php) posts page. All that would come up was a white page. After some investigation, I found a post where at least one other person had experienced the same problem.

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I started taking a Java programming course at the local university. I’m looking forward to learning “everything java” over the next 4 months, though its been such a long time since was a student. I’ve never been a fan of classroom environments. Going at someone else’s pace, whether faster or slower than I’d prefer is just a lose/lose situation to be in. 

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Here’s what’s been keeping me busy for the past month (or has it been 2 months!?).

I’m planning this as a Christmas present for my Wife’s father. This character is actually a mascot for his Japanese restaurant, Sapporo, here in Portland, Maine. The sculpt happens to be my first sculpture ever, a hobby I’ve been slowly getting into for about a year now ... How do you slowly get into sculpting in a years time? Lotsa reading

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