Rex Flex

I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, but it has been very interesting. The past couple of days I’ve been working with the AES/Rijndael to encrypt sensitive user data in the application I’m currently working on. It has been pretty interesting and has proven to be quite a learning experience.

The main reason it has been a challenge is that some of this data that we’re encrypting needs to be decrypted and searched through for reports. We have already decided on using SQL Server Reporting Services (which I haven’t worked with before) to handle these reports, however there was the question of decrypting these fields through SQL Server. Luckily we should be able to create CLR User-Defined functions to handle this.

I have also spent some time cleaning up the solution. This particular project has been going on for the past year and a half (or so) and has had quite a few hands touching it. I went ahead and organized the projects in the solution and fixed the dependency problems that everyone had been just dealing with for the past year or so. I think taking care of these issues will make my life a lot easier in the long run.

After looking at PodiPodi yesterday there was an obvious problem of context, which brought up a very valid question, “why would someone want to do a google/yahoo/whatever search while on your page and have the results displayed as an overlay on top of your page?”  There’s just no real point to it or value added to your site, so it seems really useless and as Ryan said, “just meant to be a flashy addition to a website.”

I found another program called Devo that solves this problem.  Well, sort of… I’ll get to that later.  It’s a Firefox extension that gives you basically the exact same UI (you press Shift+X or set the trigger command to whatever you want it to be instead of it always being Shift+Space) and allows you to search google, yahoo, flickr, wikipedia along with several other sites.  There are also a few other cool features like annotating a site through SharedCopy.  Those are all cool, but what I think really makes this stand out is that it allows you to create your own commands.

So, back to the contextual problem; I still see it here.  These commands are only available when Firefox is open.  What if you boot up your computer and you want to immediately do a google search, without having to open Firefox?  What if you want to use that same UI to do something in another application, like notepad, iTunes, or internet explorer?  I think that ultimately Enso solves the entire contextual problem because it’s a small program you download and install on your computer.  This makes it computer-wide, so you can use it within any application you want to.

As for the features that Enso packs, it has all the web searches you could ask for.  There are media controls to control your music (which Devo also has, however you must have the FoxyTunes Firefox plugin).  There’s the spellcheck command which will do a spellcheck on any text you have highlighted, and since this is computer-wide it brings spellcheck to every application on your computer, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.  There’s also the launcher commands which, if I’m remembering correctly, crawls your computer for applications to run and adds them to the launcher so to open the calculator you can type, “open calculator” or “open calc” since the auto-complete will fill in the rest.

I really like these command based UI’s that allow users to do what they want to do quickly, without losing focus of the task at hand or having to reach for the mouse, keeping the UI pretty (not like a command shell), and keeping the commands easily readable by humans.  I think that once more and more people start using these, they’ll realize how helpful these tools can actually be.

I was browsing around on the internet this morning and I ran across a website plugin called PodiPodi.  Basically it looks like they took Enso from Humanized, ported it to the web and now offer it as a service to webmasters, allowing them to add it to their site.

On July 7th they entered “public beta” (aka you can use it now and it’s going to be an ongoing project that will never actually have a real release, much like every other web 2.0 site.)  Looking at their updates on the main page it seems like they’re coming out with new features for it somewhat regularly.

When you come across a PodiPodi enabled site, you can hold shift and press space. You’ll then be presented with a text box in the top left corner of the page that looks similar to this:

Empty PodiPodi command box.

You can then type a command into the box and hit enter, in this case I’m searching Flickr for the term “nature”:

Searching Flickr for nature through PodiPodi

After this, hitting enter will execute the command and the results will be displayed in the middle of the screen:

PodiPodi Flickr Results for the search term 'nature'

The features currently supported include:

• calculate (calculates a simple mathematical expression)
• find (finds text on the site)
• flickr (searches flickr)
• google (searches google)
• google images (search google images)
• open (opens a section of the site)
• send comment (sends a comment to the web master)
• twitter (gets the 20 most recent updates for a twitter account)
• yahoo (searches yahoo)
• yahoo images (searches yahoo images)
• youtube (searches youtube)

If you’re looking for a quick way to “integrate” your site with all of these different services and also add a few neat (read somewhat useless) features to your site, this offers that, along with a very nice and unique user interface.

I have just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress.  I really like where WordPress is going and hope they keep up all the good work.

And as always, DreamHost made the entire upgrade process a simple one-click step.

Those of you that know me in real life probably realize that I have a tendency to obsess about something for awhile, then sort of forget about it. Well, my latest obsession has been developing native applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

For those of you that haven’t heard, apple has released their SDK. This means that the development tools are available to easily create applications for the iPhone, with apple’s blessing. After I saw some of the applications that were created, I was pretty much hooked.

I decided to start looking into getting the SDK, then realized that it was only available to those running OSX. So, I looked into virtualization options for running OSX on a PC. I didn’t really find a whole lot. Sure, there’s VMWare, Virtual PC, etc; however I couldn’t find anywhere where these solutions supported OSX specifically. I looked into it a little more and found out that there is a clause in OSX’s EULA that states it’s not to be run in a virtualized environment. After finding this out, I decided to go ahead and just get a new Mac.

So, I’m now typing this up on my new Mac Mini (the cheapest Mac they had at the apple store). Apple also has a program called one to one, where you can schedule appointments to go in and learn how to use your Mac. The email they sent me states, “learn how to do everything you ever wanted on a Mac–with your trainer beside you every step of the way”, so I plan to take advantage of that and try to get them to teach me the basics of XCode. I’ve installed the SDK and I am now exploring, trying to figure out just what you have to do to create an application for the iPhone. From what I’ve found so far, there’s not a whole lot to it.

1. You have to learn Objective-C, which if you know any other programming language, really isn’t a big deal. From what I can tell, it’s very much like C with some syntax changes.
2. If you want to hook up your application to run directly on the iPhone, as shown in the roadmap, you’ll need to sign up for the beta and fork over $99. As I understand it now, they’ve only accepted a very select few people to start the beta, but will expand it to more people once it gets rolling. It sounds to me like apple’s getting their partners in early so they can have a little jump start, but what do I know, I’m just an infrequent blogger.
3. You need to be able to go in and make positioning, size, color, etc changes to the UI in the code. From what I’ve seen so far, the Interface Builder isn’t working for iPhone apps yet. Unless anyone can show me otherwise, I’m going to be doing these things by hand for awhile.

Coming from a C# (Visual Studio) background it is quite different. But I almost feel as though I’m getting back to my computer science roots. New things to explore and fiddle with.

That’s really it, I haven’t run into a whole lot, however I’ve only really created a Hello World program, which I basically copied from an example on apple’s site. I’ll be sure to keep my blog updated with things I encounter and create.

It’s been over six months and two quarters since I’ve posted anything. So at the beginning of last quarter, I began working on an ongoing project here at Neumont University known as NORMA (Neumont ORM Architect). This is the most complex project I’ve ever been apart of.

Last quarter I was working along with Josh, getting verbalizations working for the ORM subset constraints. After we worked on that for about eight weeks, we were assigned the task of creating the framework to make it possible for end users to generate a PHP back end once they get their information modeled. We were able to get this done successfully in 10 days.

This quarter I’ve been working on reverse engineering a database to ORM. This task has had its complications, but is coming along smoothly. When this is done I’ll be teaming up with Josh again to get the framework setup to generate a Java back end.

Also, since the release of Internet Explorer 7 (and its support for alpha transparent png’s), I’ve decided to go back to the old layout on the site. I’ve always thought it looked nicer, however it didn’t play nice with IE7.

I’ve also been on a team of a group of coders known as Revolutionary Networks. We’ve been working on a portfolio type project which will, in the end, display each of the members in Rev Net and display certain details such as which projects they’re working on, which technologies they know, where they’ve worked, their resume, etc. It’s a very in depth project that’s been going on for awhile.

Quarter 5 here at Neumont University has started. Luckily I got into golf class so at least I get to have a little fun in between all of the work. This is what my schedule is looking like this quarter.

• Golf
• Game Programming
• Calculus
• Algorithms and Data Structures
• Development in the J2EE Framework I
• Projects IV

I’m pretty excited for the Projects class. This quarter I’m working on the PHPGedView project. Which is currently ranked #2 on the list of most active projects on sourceforge. My group is responsible for creating an Open “Source” Repository so that people can easily find more sources to look up information about their family tree. It’s a very interesting project and I can’t wait until we get past the database design and start the coding.

I also landed a grading position this quarter, so I have some source of income. I’m grading the Topics in Software Development, which is a class that all of the new students have to take. It’s pretty interesting to see the different things that get turned in and the different ways people decide to do things.

I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again after giving it up for about a month. I’ve decided that I’m going to finish leveling my Rogue and transfer it to Kalecgos since they’ve opened realm transfers. Most of the people that I used to play with decided to give the game up, and I have some friends on Kalecgos, so.. goodbye Tichondrius.

That’s really all that’s going on right now. Since it’s 1AM and I have Golf bright and early in the morning, I’m going to bed.

The other day Trip told me about something called Pandora. It’s a cool little program that lets you listen to music and build your own station. You add an artist you like, and then it’ll start playing. You then say if you like the song or not, and it goes from there.

It uses information found from the Music Genome Project to hone in and figure out exactly what you want to hear. Very cool.

Trip also showed me something called Digg. This is a cool news site that shows you popular stories from across the internet. It’s pretty cool, too.