Why I did this?

Over the past few weeks I have been working on this project which in some ways uses MIDI. I have primarily been working in Linux  but I had plans of porting the finished application to windows. In order to convince myself after a while that my approach would work, I decided to try to compile the unfinished app in Windows.

Introduction

I must admit here that one of the most annoying things for me when I was learning how to develop PHP/HTML applications was designing those HTML forms. Point blank, it sucks! It is very painful validating your data and doing all the other crap that comes along with that HTML chore. Don’t tell me about DreamWeaver and all those other WYSIWYG editors, they just don’t work for me.To solve my own problems, I decided to build a library to help me on the whole forms thing. This was actually inspired by the concept of the forms api in the Drupal content management system and the code igniter framework. I just didn’t use either because I wanted to be able to do something of my own so I could just extend it to do whatever I wanted without going through lenghty documentation. Trust me, the time invested is sometimes worth it. This forms library I am talking about has already been used in a couple of applications already (some by me and others by some very good developer friends of mine). This probably means that it has undergone some amount of testing already. I cannot stick my neck out that it is very secure and I can also not stick my neck out that it is very stable but one thing I can tell you is that it works.

For a long time I had always wanted to develop for the flash platform but the huge cost of the authouring suite always put me off. I tried a couple of open source ways to develop for the platform but none of them really worked well for me. Earlier this year during a random escapade on the Internet I came accross Flex.

I must say that its been quite a while since I expressed myself on this blog. I know this sounds like the regular cliche excuse but I have been busy. I have also been very broke. Sometimes it feels like I am living the broke but almost rich lifestyle. So now that I am done with the excuses I would like to continue with my post. In the past month, I have been working on this crack down of a project with some software development company. Through this project I have had the opportunity to meet a few of the developpers who actually turn the IT wheels here in Ghana (although there are technically three people working on my project and the other two are not related to this articvle). I am trying hard to learn a lot about this “IT business” as it is called in Ghana but my first lessons have not been pleasant ones.

I was recently working on a web content management system with a friend and we made a very surprising discovery. We were actually using PHP to include content from another page on our local server unto the page that was curently being viewed. This thing worked perfectly when I was using the Eclipse editor but when I moved to my friends office and we started using Expression studio (which obviously doesn’t seem to support PHP), the include statement started introducing unwanted characters. Although most of the browsers on which this was tested (Opera, Safari and FireFox) skipped these characters, IE of all browsers displayed them and messed up our template. Well we started to panic because we didn’t know what we had done wrong and IE is one browser you don’t want to mess with because everybody uses it.

To graduate in my school one has to work on a graduation project. For my project I decided to build a TV broadcast automation system. What exactly was this system supposed to do? Well, the whole idea was to build some sort of media player which played video’s as it has been scheduled to. It was also supposed to keep a log of the media files played. The system I came up with was quite interesting. It did all that was required of it and even more. It had the ability to place logos on the screen, scroll text along the bottom of the screen and also automatically give information about the currently playing media file such as flashing a tag saying “Now Playing” as the video is playing. Cool eh!

Almost a year ago a new set of bank notes and coins were released by the government to replace the old bulky and cumbersome notes. I mean who wanted to carry a bank note worth 20,000 cedis which is equivalent to just 2 dollars. This move was embraced by everybody and I think one year down the line we are all still getting used to it. At least my parents cannot laugh at me that our generation didn’t spend pesewas. For me when these new notes and coins were released I was happy because we were now going to be able to pay arbitrarily any price for anything. It was the end of the era where everything was increased by 500 cedis when the prices of fuel shot up.

Four years ago, when I first entered the university, I really wanted to learn a lot before I was taught so I decided to try the new craze everybody was talking about… LINUX. It sounded very cool to tell someone that you have Linux on your computer (and trust me it still does). There was however a problem getting started with Linux. I didn’t have the bandwidth to download any of the major distributions and I even didn’t know anyone who could physically give me a copy, so I decided to try some minimalistic Linux distributions. The first one I laid my hands on was muLinux.

I have a friend who is stuck on to Microsoft Windows. He is always blowing the windows horn and he would readily stand up to defend MS-windows in any situation.This friend always tries to show off cool things that MS-Windows can do that Linux can’t. We always argue about the power of windows and linux. Just last week I paid a visit to this friend and he was teaching his girlfriend how to use the computer (he was actually teaching her how to use microsoft windows). He was explaining the options in the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click on the desktop. When he got to the refresh option he said:

This option allows you to refresh the computers CPU and memory so that when any program is frozen it can be refreshed.

After several years of teaching myself to program computers using Microsoft QuickBASIC, I got to a point somewhere in 2002 when I realized that the MS-DOS era was over. I needed an alternative. All roads were leading to VisualBASIC but a poor guy like me couldn’t just afford it. So I searched for a free alternative to VB. Mind you around this time the hype of .NET and Mono were not that in rage so we had to make do with what we had.