The Laziest Coder

I had issue with loading a gem and I forgot in order to load a gem you need to load rubygems in first. To be fair to me, none of the examples I looked at mentioned you needed to do that before loading a gem. That seems strange to me.

I had programmer's block you could say, anyway the clouds have been lifted and I did a small Flex project. Here is a screenshot of it. I will go into detail in a later post. I learned quiet a bit more about Actionscript and it is my 2nd favorite language behind C#.

Those are the two that I would like to have right now and the second may exist but I have yet to find a source example or documentation on it.

I want to give props to any Obj-C developers out there. I don't see how you do it. It is not a horrible language by any stretch of the imagination but coming from a .NET developer perspective it is a whole other animal.

So I have been doing some coding since I last posted but nothing that I wanted to post about until now... I do simple 3D modeling on the side. I say simple because I am not an artist and I don't have any 3D modeling skills or at least they are very limited. I wanted a way to create a three dimensional grid of a certain size programmatically so that I can use the grid and scale it back to create an "8 bit" version of the model. At first I tried using my favorite program Cinema 4D to do this but ran into problems using MoGraph to accomplish this. In MoGraph setting up a AxBxC array of aligned cubes is easy. Getting the cubes to barely touch each other when given different dimensions for an array requires a lot of manual tweaking to eliminate the gaps between cubes. It is not that bad but I wanted a way to do this as quickly as possible. I decided to move away from C4D and try to do this via Houdini. I tried using Houdini next because it has a powerful particle system and is pretty easy to use. I quickly realized that this was not easily doable because there is no quick way to uniformly distribute particles along a mesh(BTW, if there is a way please send me an email) My next course of action was to use Maya since I have a native MacOS version and I did not feel like trying a solution out on Softimage. I have some experience using Maya but I never really did any MEL/Python scripting outside of maybe a command or too in the MEL expression bar. I have done scripting and plugin work in the past using mostly Cinema 4D. Creating GUIs in Maya is more of an breeze than using Cinema 4D. I have to give thanks to the only site that I found that gave a good tutorial on how to code GUIs. If want to program GUIs in Maya I recommend you checking it out. The tutorial helped me learn how to grab values from Maya Controls. The whole query mechanic it uses I have run across before using Modo but the mechanic is a bit different. I was going to use the script in conjunction with another technique(not yet discovered) to reduce the number of cubes to fill a targeted geometry but during the writing of this article I realized a keen way of building the grid array of cubes using Cinema 4D. I am even close to solving getting the cube array to form into a specific targeted shape. Post explaining that to come...

Listening to TWIT as I normally do except it is a Sunday and they mentioned that Twitter would like to end the development of new client apps especially ones that mimic Twitter's own Web site. This news is not surprising especially if you look at the external API. An example of this is when you try to get all replies for a specific tweet. You can do it but it is very difficult and requires a database backend and a lot of processing. The result? Creating a similar display for replies is a lot slower than what Twitter's own web site offers. I would admit that there is probably an over saturation of Twitter client apps but to kill the development of new apps seems kind of silly to me. Especially when outside talent develops a feature that the main Twitter site incorporates. I am out of indie development at the moment but I did have some Twitter client plans in the works but given the news about Twitter those plans are killed. My thoughts? No big deal. There are plenty of other projects for me to focus on in the future. Article

There are a couple of excellent MonoDevelop Add-ins for creating Mobile Phone apps. The first Add-in released for MonoDevelop was MonoTouch which enables you to create an iPhone or iPad app. You use the add-in for free but if you want to publish an app to the app store you have to shell out at least 399 which is rather steep for indie developers. I have used MonoTouch and it is pretty good. I only created a relatively simple app but it is a lot easier to develop apps coding using Objective-C. The other Add-in is called MonoDroid that allows the creation of Android apps. It is currently free and in beta.

I want someone to create an extension that will run into the background and clear the page cache every minute. Sadly, the Chrome Extension API does not provide a method to perform the task. Please Google provide this functionality to the API. 

I found a reason to install Visual Studio Web Developer 2010 Express and it is the new ASP.NET MVC 3. One feature I really like is the new Razor View Engine. It reduces the need to use <% %> tags when adding code segments to the view. The result is a cleaner look to the page. Now only if Mono and MonoDevelop had an MVC solution that was as awesome. I am sure it will in time because Mono managed to implement a lot of features from the .NET 3.0 framework.

Update: There are more than 2 libraries out there and I think I found a great one. It is made by the Mono team and called MonoMac. It works pretty well and it has a MonoDevelop 2.4 addin complete with Interface Builder C# code generation.

What is even weirder is that I can't even preform previous OAuth calls that two lines earlier execute with incident.  

I am planning to create a simple twitter client which I may expand depending on how much I like the framework. I am having problems at the moment with the twitter libraries(not written by me).

I do have an idea for another project idea(so many). I would like to create an iPhone/iPad simulator that can tap into the iPhone app store or a better plan would be to tap into Itunes somehow. The project sounds great right? Too bad I am not a great programmer who can pull this off. I am a decent programmer at best.

No word on the result of assessment test but I am proud of it nonetheless. I haven't done anything code wise since but that may change tomorrow.

string[] values = new string[] {"Foobar","Foobar2","Foobar3"};

The tangent this time: Unity 3.1 for Mac with a C# backend. I wasn't able to do too much and I am waiting on the forums for an answer to a problem I encountered with it. I wanted to do something fun and visual and it was a good diversion.