IComeFromTheNet.net

I bought A New laptop a few weeks ago, I had enough with my old $800 Celeron, Too much too slow and I am glad to see  it now delegated a new life in the lounge room.

With a $915 dollar tax rebate coming my way thanks to a stimulus package I decided to spend big and went with a $1800 HP that I bought from JB-HiFi. An I did get suckered in for extra 2 years insurance.

Here are some photos:

From the Amazon  a quick rundown on specs

• 15.4 in (Diagonal) High Definition Brightview Infinity Display 1280 x 800 Resolution
• 2.00 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor P7350 with 3 MB L2 Cache
• 4096 MB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm), 320 GB (5400RPM) Hard Drive (SATA), NVIDIA GeForce 9200M GS NB9M-GE with up to 2047 MB Total Graphics Memory with 256 MB Dedicated
• LightScribe Super Multi 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support, Intel WiFi Link 5100AGN and Bluetooth
• Windows Vista Home Premium 64 with SP1, dims in inches: 4.3 (W) x 14.05 (L) x 1.65" (H) approx., 5.83 lbs.

I’ve been doing some work in PHP  and my normal IDE Visual Studio 2008, obviously does not support php syntax. I was introduced to Aptana by an article from site-point into development of AIR apps.

It has the features that I need PHP support, SVN integration and CSS,JavaScript and html syntax highlighting and has code-assist for a number of JavaScript libraries like extJS and jQuery.

From the Aptana website:

Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services that help you and your team do more. 

For under $200 AUD with the features I want it was worth the investment. My on quibles are with the FTP support which is not as good as it could be and the speed is not always fantastic on larger documents.

Also on a minor note.

I also signed up to a SVN service, I wanted a repository for a few projects now and in the future and since I have an IDE with support it felt a good time to sign up.

Is a host service that includes SVN and Git repositories , Access management a ticket and wiki system and millstone tracker, many good tools for teams, I am using a free plan atm while I trial it but a basic plan is only about 20 dollars AUD a month.

Well I have renewed my subscription to World of Warcraft, I originally began on the games release in November 2004 and kept at it till about April 2007. To say the least the game did get the better of me. It’s time sink design drew me in like no other, my poison was raiding, I was involved for almost a year and a bit with a new guild that followed the ZG,MC,BWL,AQ progression path, though my tier 2 Trans shoulder did also alluded me.

After the expansion pack Burning Crusade, I levelled my Priest to 70 but became disillusion with the new direction and after a guild disbandment the game became lacking lacking in that special something. I freely admit that I pushed too many hours into the game, though never dropping a credit average for my university degree which is part testament to the ease of same of the early classes. With harder classes on the way and a desire to expand my knowledge continue my credit average ended my subscription.

Come end of 2008 I have improved my knowledge gaining a strong understanding of CSS and HTML, Learning important OOP concepts, experienced the ExtJs javascript library reviewed general OOP design patterns also developing  a strong understanding of C# and web-development on the ASP.Net framework gaining valuable experience through university on XML and XSLT.

I have a blog with some customizations of my own with more exciting projects to come, I have toyed with office development with VSTO (finding many limitations) and various other projects and reading. 

I am looking forward (fingers crossed) to another year of post-grade study at UWS, and with these self improvements and a new WOW Exp WOTLK felt now possible to enjoy once again a guilty pleasure.

I have renewed after some important improvements were made to the game,

• New Xpac , a gear reset and a new chance
• Only use one mana/health pot in a boss fight reduce consumables necessary.
• Enchanting and now enchant onto scrolls to sell or send to alt characters.
• The Big Improvement: while not yet implement has been confirmed dual specs, very important for a healing class like the priest.
• New character class

I done some more work on the photo display widget. I have done the following today. I would say I have done a fair days work.

• Fixed the upload handler , now returns text/html instead of text/plain, the upload control uses a normal submission inside and temp Iframe. When the content type was set as ‘plain’ the returned JSON would be encapsulated insde <pre> html tags causing a eval error.
• Since the above was fixed had the upload form refresh the datastore to include the new images.
• I added a click listener to the dataview control, when an image is clicked it will load a new window positioned at the top of the screen(useful for the large screen shots) with the image inside, though not as pretty as say ‘lightbox’, it works.
• Implemented a pass key on the image upload form a security to stop unwanted uploads.
• Fixed a CSS issue with the dataview, overflows of floated elements.

I had a very happy Christmas and new year but now its back to work and learning. I purchased Learning Ext JS from packet publishing, the book came with a password protected pdf version which is always a plus with me.

I rate this book very highly for a beginner like me with plenty of well explained explanations. My two great criticisms

(1) Used coldfusion and PHP , should stick to one backend language.

(2) Not enough Meat once the beginners tag ends.

For the price and with the inclusion of an e-book and removing the beginner tag on one of the harder JavaScript libraries its a must buy and if you pirate it burn in hell.

The result of my first successful (nearly finished) project with the Ext JS library and .net background

The can be found on the root page (aka my portal) at http://www.icomefromthenet.net.

It allows images (jpg,gif,png) to be uploaded , these images are stored in a sql-lite DB. The Json stream is loaded at page start with the data filtered on the client side using the Ext JS store widget. An generic ASHX handler is used to retrieve each image from the DB, optional thumbnail function is included as well.

Areas Used from the Libary

1. DataVew and x-templates
2. FormPanel, normal Panel
3. FileUpload control
4. DB Bound combo Box
5. Json Store and Http Proxy.

Still to complete

1. Fix the DataVew CSS
2. Upload more photos
3. A Better selection of photos onload.
4. Maybe Less Blue.

I bought A new PC Last week , a mid-range warrior Duel Core AMD AM2, 500GB 2GB DDR2 and a NVIDA 9800GTX graphics card, I added my old Audiology 2ZS PCI sound card and I had a System. The Case is a black finish Lan-Li brush aluminum with a very cool light on the front. My Last pc was also a mid-range warrior that I built myself back in 2004, it dies recently and after that many years the upgrade path was max out. I hope this new PC will last a similar number of years.

It took me nearly 2 days to install all the software necessary for development and leisure. I decide to make a list here for future reference.

List of Software :

• Windows Vista Business
• Vista SP1 and 30 so updates
• Office 2007 Student
• ASUS Bluetooth Adapter Drivers/Software
• Audiology ZS Drivers
• Mother Board, LCD Drivers
• Nero Essentials
• Flash and Silverlight runtimes.

Browsers:

• Fire-Fox
• -Addin: FireBug
• -Addin: WebDeveloper
• -Addin:Sage RSS Reader
• -Addin:ColorfulTabs
• -Addin:SQLite Manager
• -Addin:Tamper Data
• -Addin:Screengrab!
• IE8 Beta 2
• Google Chrome

Development Tools

• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• .Net 3.5 SP1
• JQuery Intellsence plug-in
• Notepad ++ and plugins
• PSPad and plugins
• WAMPServer
• Virtual PC 2007
• IE6 windows XP image
• VSTO SE Runtime.
• Aptana Studio
• AIR Runtime and SDK

Graphics and Misc Tools

• Gimp Image Editor
• AVG Anti-Virus
• SpyBot S&D
• Adobe® Digital Editions

Still to Install

• Trillian
• TheBat Pro Email Client
• Mobipocket and new e-book licenses

I have been working on my project where I can and I have decided on a JavaScript Library for the project. The winner was jquery, due to a recent decision by Microsoft ‘jquery will be the official script library for asp projects and as such there is a patch to add intellisense for jquery, this obviously helps development of custom JavaScript widgets.

I have been doing research and found the following sites helpful:

• 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET.
• Using jquery to consume aspnet json web services.
• Calling webservices via ajax [part 1].
• ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button.
• Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls.

I have prototyped the methods for the web-service, No other code is yet implemented, I will use these prototypes to build custom ajax calls using the jquery methods and not the built in script manager.  Hopefully then after creating the data objects in JavaScript I will be able to test these methods and see the resulting post data they generate and in the web services test if the ajax calls product expected input and output using magic data.

What to do next?

• Code the Data objects in javascript.
• Code custom ajax calls.
• Test input and output for these calls.
• Design template for the site.
• Mock-up the interfaces for adding, removing and updating.
• Look at UI tools offered by jquery UI.