Rayser
Working at Rayser has been incredible. Learning from the Pivotal engineers for those couple weeks was awesome too. Many thanks to Amerson and Winston, I had a hell of a great time learning iOS programming and writing specs, and it was great fun seeing something being put together from scratch. I must apologize though, for not keeping to test-driven development. The last couple of weeks have been pure coding of features without any specs. I promise one day I will sit down and work through everything! Hehe.

In other news, I still haven’t gotten a chance to properly sit down and learn Ruby. But from what I’ve seen, as we try to throw together new backend features for our mobile app, as well as new futures for our web app, that Rails, for everything it advertises itself as, has a humongous learning curve and the way it organizes files, and how these files interact with each other, is very complicated. Is it our implementation of it that is messy and complicated, or is this how Rails is supposed to look like?

Still, I’ve been looking into PHP quite a bit. Including sourcing for good methods to write code on localhost, write specs, and a good platform to serve it on, that supports git. I think it will be worth it. Granted I do have some experience writing PHP, hence my attraction to it, but I think server-side scripting is so much less complicated via PHP and ASP, compared to our current Rails setup.

Mass Effect 3
Oh, and Mass Effect 3 and SWTOR… Haven’t touched SWTOR at all, save for a couple minutes, ever since I came back from Korea on the 29th of February. I did play Mass Effect 3 though, and completed one run of it. Disgusting ending! It could have been good. The entire game experience was insanely good, save for that last 15 minutes. Still, it’s worth another play through. I didn’t import an ME2 save the first time around, and missed out on so many things. I’m going to do it properly for my next play through. The best thing is, it runs great on the Macbook Air, even with anti-aliasing turned on.

Eirmerdean
The domain expires on the 24th. Got to remember to renew it. I’ve new ideas for it. Will write more in the Eirmerdean blog later this week.

Weight, IPT and self-confidence. And My toes
Got into the weight-lost programme in IPT, as planned. They clocked me at 78.1kg on the 8th of March, though the last time I took my weight (on Sunday) I was closer to 82kg. Argh! As soon as my toes are fully healed, I really want to start exercising. M-100s every day! Start walking to office again. Cut down on junk food. I think improving my physical looks will do good for my self-confidence. Heheh.

Audio
Am enjoying the use of  my Alessandro MS-1s at work greatly. Also, the Brainwavz Beta earphones I got from En Sheng are petty awesome, save for the defectively soft left earpiece. I’m still looking for an Android music player that supports changing the L/R balance, as well as music playing with some controls in the lock screen. Is there one?

Worked at Pivotal Labs for a couple of weeks. Learnt a lot from Amerson. iOS programming is fun, and I enjoy working through new features and getting rid of bugs.

Leaving for Korea in another 2 weeks. (Note to self: download a “Learn Korean” app of some sort so I can pick up some useful phrases). Oh, I hope I run into a live filming of Running Man, heh.

Traded Raymond’s old MBA for the new one in the office. It runs awesome, and it can even play SWTOR. If I ever get one for myself and have the budget for it, I want to throw in an OWC 6G 480GB SSD.

Anyway, now that our training with Pivotal is officially over, it is now time for a new leg at Rayser.

I’m working on an iOS App that needs to retrieve some data from an online SQL server. Using PHP as a middleman for inserting data and retrieving data. The retrieval is a bit of a hassle, or at least I thought it was. I needed to parse the data into XML first, then let the App parse the XML for viewing as a list/table. My problem was the SQL to XML via PHP part. I couldn’t do a full retrieval of topics and posts because of how the data is organized in the users, topics and posts tables. But of course, it wouldn’t have made sense to. Why retrieve everything, when at some point there’s probably going to be too much data? So I broke it up into two separate retrieval functions, one for just a list of topics, another for posts on selected topics, which is what I should have done from the start. Took me long enough to realize how stupid what I was trying to do at first was.

Now for the fun part. *Click Publish, swipe three fingers up, select Xcode*

On another note, I ran into this blog earlier today. http://uow-assignment.blogspot.com/ And subsequently this one as well, that it links to. http://des-ourdiary.blogspot.com/ It made me think about my own FYP, last year. So full of regrets… *sigh* I wish I could have written a last entry like that for my own FYP blog as well. http://kalestarler.com/fyp/diary/

Oh, yeah. Have to mention this. I finally, finally officially cleared my course at UOW. 1 year and 3 months late, but better late than never. Finally hit level cap for that Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science (Multimedia and Game Development). Wonder what I would be doing now if I had cleared that one last module in session 1 2010 instead of session 3 2011?

Are things finally looking up for me? Am I headed in the right direction? I sure hope I am.

Anyway, I’m typing this from within my Snow Leopard VM, and its not too bad. Running Xcode and the iOS Simulator works well, but without QE/CI I can’t run iWorks. Anyway I really just installed this Snow Leopard VM just so I can turn my Lion dmg installer into a bootable thumbdrive, hehe. So that I can install Lion and try out the newer Xcode. Won’t be working on this Dell for long though, because boss RS offered to loan me his 1st gen Macbook Air, which for me would be great. Will still setup the VM for app testing I suppose?

I’m very behind on my to-do list. It’s accumulating at such a frightful speed, I can’t keep up, lol. Especially when there’s so much on my mind, so much for me to be excited about, its quite difficult to focus and concentrate. But bit by bit, I’m going to get it all done, and bring myself to where I want to be.

In other news, I broke my Desire Z again, towards the end of my ICT. Ordered another replacement LCD, making it the second one I’ve bought since I got this phone. But damn, it’s taking ages to come. Shipped on 1st Sept, and it’s already 4th Oct. Grrr. Had I known, I would have paid for the fastest shipping, I miss my Android. The replacement cover I ordered for my Dell reached in less than 2 weeks, why is this LCD taking so long to come?

I love Android.