the coding room

Recently I listen a lot to undeniably soul-crashing, mind-traveling paranoid sounds. The band Ephel Duath has been a very close friend.
Their music literally makes one want to tear his heart out [in the good way]. Jazzy improvises, inspired rhythmic changes and deadly vocals compose the picture of real cynicism.
On the other hand, there is also the Mars Volta phenomenon, music of Latin roots in combination with progressive world shaping notes and unmistakably truly incredible vocals like they are coming from the beyond.
Now, do not judge this sum of digital words just yet. There is also another thing I want to share.
I also listen to Joanna Newsom a lot. Yeah, she is like Bjork, in an even more mysterious way, she travels me very far, far beyond my sanity levels. Not like Tori Amos, but in a more loving and harmonic way, she can synthesize my thoughts into a song.
Too much online sharing for now.

… but better late than never, right?

I launched a personal portofolio here, one could call it a brother site. This will house only my projects, starting with the first semester’s university project. Others will follow, surely, it will just be some time before I post something new.

I have so many things to talk about and no time to write. Hopefully, I will open some subjects in the near future concerning game AI, Physics and scene management.

Yesterday i delivered my big project for the first semester here in Hull, after 2 and a half months of coding. I must say I am relieved. Next follows a big Christmas break!!!

My country is experiencing the 6th straight day of fire burning inside its mainland. The images can speak for themselves.

24/8
25/8
26/8
27/8

Everyone is devastated. Spirits are very low. 63 dead and counting. Fire has no intention on stopping and there is no going back now… its really one of the greatest catastrophes Greece has ever experienced. This summer is the worst summer in … I don’t know how many years. The natural disaster is so vast …. really sad. I do not know what to add. You, we, can’t imagine what these people are going through. Thousands of people, mostly villagers are now homeless. Ancient heritage of Olympia, the mother of Olympic Games, is now blackened, has gone through fire. Thousands of years kept these monuments intact and we come, at 2007, and destroy everything that makes us who we are, at some point anyway.

Nothing … only ashes…

I should also mention, just for kicks, that last week I delivered my final paper and thus I finished with my university studies at the University of Piraeus. My studies lasted five years (10 semesters) the last of which were combined with a full-time job. In September I am flying for Hull, UK, for a full-time postgraduate MSc degree in Games Programming[!!!] and I can’t wait.

This experience of a full-time job had many effects on my personal life and my perspective on things, as I came to realize even more, how precious the little time we have is and how we should always make the best out of it.

Working on a full-time basis as a web developer gave me a chance to see how real life is with its tight schedules, deadlines, real-life programming experiences and many other that have to do with the fact that I learned SO F***IN MUCH just working next to people that new what they were doing and why! Things that I never had faced while in the university.

My paper, titled “Design and implementation of a modern and modularized CMS”, introduced a what I think is a flexible new way to look at web sites in terms of file structure, nationalization, modularity and, most importantly, database design.
It tries to see a web page as various nodes (name borrowed from Drupal) that connect with each other, drawing an one-way graph. In reality, these nodes construct the web page, or many other web pages for that matter as they are reusable, in a kind of hierarchy that can be very simple or really complex.
It also tries to have a generic concept of ORM (Object relational mapping), where it tries to map a database table, or a database entity, with a PHP object and make its manipulation ‘fast and furious’.
The design part of the paper is very interesting, as it can be defined as a collection of stuff one has to take into consideration if he ever attempts to create something as vast and massive as a web CMS.

Anyway, It is a very big discussion for a very broad subject. Anyone who cares to leave his notes or thoughts on the subject (a.k.a CMS) is welcome. I am just a little disappointed that I will not be able to get more into these stuff for a very long time.

I bought an Asus G1S recently and it has been great.
At first I finished the setup of Windows Vista, which I have never used before, just for the experience.
I was disappointed to see a gaming laptop with a nVidia 8600M video graphics card, a 2.2GHz dual core cpu and 2 Gigs of RAM to get on its knees with this OS. In addition, I wonder what does an operating system do with 13 Gigs of hard disk.
Other than that, Vista was unable to play my .avi files directly (I had not downloaded any codecs :p ) and still have not figured out why it does not see any wireless network while I am not logged as ‘root’.
Generaly, I was frustrated most of the time. Still, I won’t format the Vista partition because I know that if Cedega fails, I will have to go back there to play games in a decent manner (or even play with DirectX10 Shaders a little bit :P…).

I went on to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with Gnome which I find rather minimalistic, but still great for my taste.
I had to do several things. At first, set up the same standard things (for which I should some time write a script) like network, repositories, codecs, players etc.
Then I went a little deeper, to the graphic drivers. Here, I have to admit that, I was expecting to face a dead end at some point before finaly making it (like always), but fortunately the Feisty wiki was more than helpful at this part too, and it took nothing more that a simple .dep download and a dpgk -i to have the official, latest nVidia drivers installed.
It was a great feeling, which I have not felt before, since my ATI Radeon card on the desktop pc was not that cooperative.
Anyway, since I got that running, I turned on the Ubuntu desktop effects and it nearly blow my mind to see window transparency, translucency and cube-like workspace switcher without Beryl or any extra effort whatsoever.
Then I setup my touchpad, that turned out to be rather easy as well, always following the Feisty wiki.
Still, I have yet to setup my onboard camera, microphone and wilreless (and the mouse sidebuttons :P).

It’s been great. The laptop seems very powerfull and I think I will be very pleased to program opengl on it…
Ubuntu setup takes time, especially for the things that do not work out of the box, but the road to success requires sacrifices, and also, I really really do not like Vista!

Once again i fell into the hands of the evil one.

I was implementing this extension to YUI’s extenion that generates nice looking charts. I had everything working on Firefox when I saw that the chart, along with other things, did not generate on IE. I said to myself that it must be my fault, not the YUI or the extensions’ fault. So I went debugging, which you all know is not trivial in IE.

I spent an hour or so just to find out that Yahoo’s connector was not building the query string at all in IE when reading a form with Connector.setForm().
So I took a look inside my template to see what was going on and after a dozen checks It turned out to be the INSANE fact that I was using the word ‘length’ as an id.

I mean, who do I think I am to use ‘length’ as id. I must be crazy.

After a very small search about reserved keywords I found this blog entry.
I do not know how many of you have fallen into this trap but it is common to ignore some ( rare ) things up until the moment the nature of programming makes us face them. And once again, I found something about IE that I didn’t know and once again I wanted to kill it.
But the least I/we can do is raise more anti-IE awareness for the sake of web developers firstly and general web security secondly!! Am I ignorant?

I don’t know about you folks, but I have a little function I call to get an element by its id and it goes something like this

function getObj( pID ) {
    if( util.docRoot.getElementById )
    {
        return util.docRoot.getElementById( pID );
    }
    else if( util.docRoot.all )
    {
        return util.docRoot.all[pID];
    }

    return false;
}

For example, we have two <input> fields as such

<input type=”text” id=”shakeit” name=”shakethis” value=”valueA” />

<input type=”text” id=”shakethis” value=”valueB” />

Well, in Firefox, when I do

var someElement = getObj( ’someID’ );

the someElement contains the element with ID equal to “shakethis”, as expected.
In Internet Explorer though, someElement contains the first occurence of “shakethis”
even if it matches the name of the <input>.

Which, in the above example, means that if we were to print someElement.value this would be equal to “valueB” in Firefox
and “valueA” in IE.

Weird bug or just me being totally ignorant??

Or, as someone would say, is it a bug or a feature??

I was working till seven o’clock yesterday trying to see why the floating box I had created two weeks ago sometimes would not give up and disappear.

The story behind this project

The project is an online jewellery catalog, although you can think of it as an image gallery for simplicity. The goal is to show a pop-up bubble box, when the mouse is over an image, with extra information about that particular product.
Read the rest of this entry »

…is always a charm. Here is mine. This, hopefully, will be a place for discussion. I intend to update the blog with bug discoveries concerning Internet Explorer and web development in general. And more, whatever comes to mind actually.