the coding room

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!