chrishowie.com

I need to get into the habit of blogging more often. I haven’t even been twittering much lately…

You’ve probably noticed the visual update to my blog by now. I got tired of the default Wordpress theme. I had to tweak this one a bit to get it to behave the way I want, but overall it’s pretty nice. A few weeks ago I added the live chat widget as well, which so far has attracted comments from exactly two people. Come on, I know there’s more of you out there!

My new job is going well. The current project I’m working on is a migration script to fix some datetimes that may have been incorrectly converted to GMT. If you’ve done any programming around timezone conversions, you’ll know it’s a blast! … Ok, it’s not that bad. It’s actually kind of fun, in a weird way.

On the “my projects” front, I’ve converted the OpenVP Subversion repository to two separate Git repositories, and created a third for the metadata pipeline project. Check them out on Gitorious.

I’ve started playing Black & White on my lunch break. The voice acting is a little iffy, but the gameplay is good after you figure out what you’re doing. (Which, ironically, doesn’t happen until you leave the tutorial island.) Oh, and I got the Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii. I’ve only played the first on GameCube, but absolutely loved it. Can’t wait to tackle the two sequels.

That’s all for now.

There have been many good changes in my life recently. It’s been almost three months since I graduated college, and nearly two since I got married. Well, now I have another for the list.

For two years I’ve been working at Ontario Systems as an intern. The first year and a half were a lot of fun. I was coding PHP and Flex/ActionScript on a team of two other developers (one also my manager). However, I’ve been unable to secure a full-time job offer since graduating and have been continuing work as an intern, which pays enough to cover the bills, but not much more. Additionally, the company’s partnership with Microsoft means that pretty much all of the Linux servers are in the cross-hairs, so to speak. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that my current role of PHP developer and interim Linux sysadmin is not exactly going to be permanent.

Last week I had the privilege of accepting a full-time job offer from Aprimo and will be starting work with them on July 27th. They are also a Microsoft shop, but I will be working on the development team and coding C#, which I’ve been hacking with for some years now. The company looks to be doing well, and the people I’ve met so far have been very friendly and welcoming. The developers I’ve talked to all seem very knowledgeable, and I’m looking forward to working with them.

I’m not sure which I’m excited about more: getting to work at Aprimo, or finally ending my job hunt. Both are pretty cool. I will miss my friends at Ontario Systems (we’ve had some pretty good times) but I am definitely looking forward to the future.

When this is posted, my wedding ceremony will be underway. It’s been a long wait but it was so worth it.

Today I am marrying Deanne, the love of my life. We started dating about two and a half years ago. I can’t say it’s always been an easy road, but it’s been a good one and I wouldn’t trade her, nor my experiences, for anything.

I love you, De! I look forward to spending the rest of my life with you.

Expect radio silence until the 16th. (This, unfortunately, includes comment moderation. I will check comments first thing when I get back. Promise!)

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“It is still in dispute whether wars between neighbors occur mainly because they fight over territory, because they generate disagreements in their day-to-day interaction, or because they are more easily available for fights—but Vasquez (1995) presents a strong case for the territorial explanation.”

I’m selling textbooks online, you see…

I will be graduating in two weeks from Anderson University with a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics. I’m actively looking for employment in the Anderson/Muncie/Indianapolis, Indiana area. I’ve had several prospects for some months but nothing has come through yet. If you know of any opportunities, or are looking for a dedicated coder familiar with many languages (C, C#, PHP, just to name a few) and both Linux and Windows environments (Linux preferred), drop me a line. My résumé is available in two formats: PDF and HTML. Feel free to ask any questions about my experience or skills. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Update: I’ve disabled comments since I’d rather people email me about opportunities than leave a comment. My email address is on both versions of my résumé.

I’ve been up to a lot of little things recently but haven’t undertaken any projects big enough to warrant a whole fancy blog post. I figured I might as well summarize what I’ve been up to.

I’m doing a project at school that improves the experience of on-campus tutors and their clients. They’d been using Moodle workshops to allow clients to submit content to tutors, and recording hours manually on timecards. Moodle will still be involved, but the tutors will now interact primarily with a web application I’ve been coding that will track their hours for them, as well as fulfill some clerical roles, such as preventing two tutors from working on the same paper. (Previously this was done more or less manually by updating the workshop submission title. Not a terribly fun way to track that kind of stuff.)

This project has me up to my neck in JavaScript, a language I’ve long held in contempt. However, after reading up on some patterns and watching a talk or two my mind has been completely changed. In fact, I enjoy coding in JavaScript now. I enjoy it a lot. When you know what you are doing (and what to avoid) all the frustration and general icky feelings associated with working in the language disappear. What’s left is an incredibly pure, lightning-fast web application. A maintainable one too. Who knew JavaScript could do that?

Some other semi-random facts:

• I’m getting married in 91 days. (See that counter in the right column? Yup, that one. If you’ve been wondering what that’s counting down to, now you know.)
• I’ve recently revived the RTS gaming genre on my system by reinstalling Age of Empires 3. I don’t recall why I stopped playing, but I shouldn’t have.
• In case anyone wonders why I haven’t been on WoW for a while, it’s because I let my subscription expire. That was over six months ago, I think. Honestly I have not missed it. There are more fun games out there, and they don’t require a monthly fee. Team Fortress 2 is an especially good option if you like class-based games and first-person shooters.

That’s all for now, I guess. Stay tuned for some more developments on Banshee.OpenVP in the coming weeks.

I got the replacement for my defective laptop display on Saturday and got around to installing it last night. So far everything looks good. There are no defective pixels as far as I can tell and, as a bonus, it’s a matte display instead of the glossy one that came with my laptop. Woot!

It’s that time of the year again… when I get to relax after completing finals. It looks like I’m going to pass everything too, which is a pretty big deal since I literally cannot fail any class I’m enrolled in and still graduate in May. So now that I have some time to myself, here’s what I plan to do:

• Prototype a web application for a Moodle-based tutoring system that I’ve been developing for my university. This really isn’t “me stuff” but I enjoy a good PHP+JavaScript+AJAX coding session.
• Try to work some more on OpenVP. I recently looked at some of the old visualizations I wrote for Winamp 2’s Advanced Visualization Studio plugin. Wow… OpenVP has some ground to cover. My goal is to port some of my better visualizations (which are loads better than I remembered them being) to OpenVP for the very first release as part of Banshee.
• Try this again and report the results to C.J..
• Try the newest PulseAudio with the Flash 10 beta. Hopefully the problems I’ve been having were resolved by now.
• Ship my defective laptop display back to the eBay seller for a replacement. According to him, having two defective pixels doesn’t qualify for a Dell warranty replacement (four are required — the ‘tards), but he is going to replace it with another from his stock. Seems like a nice guy. He’s got a store on eBay if you feel like browsing.
• Probably some other stuff I forgot already.

I got my new display installed and all is almost well, but there’s two pixels smack in the center with the red component stuck on. I’ve tried such things as JScreenFix and massaging/tapping to no avail. So I guess it’s going back to the seller for an exchange.

(You can’t really see it at this zoom level though.)

Well, this morning while I was packing up my laptop it kind of slipped, and… well…

Yeah, so don’t expect Banshee.OpenVP to be ready for a while.