Since I got a new camera and what to become better at photography I am going to post up once a week some of the best shots from the week.

To see other sizes please click on the image.

Some people may not realize, but I like photography and will spend a lot of time looking at photography on the internet.  My dad actually was an amatuer photographer for a while and took several classes to get better and has passed on a little of that knowledge to me.  The biggest problem is I have never had a quality camera that could take a quality picture.  Today I did a little bit of reasearch on ultra compact cameras for around $200, and found an amazing one for the price that a lot of profesionals said for the price is an amzing point and shoot camera.  So I got it.

This camera is to be a multi funcation camera for me.  I will try to carry it with me always so that I have the oppertunity to take some pictures I have always wished i had a camera for.  Also it is a camera that takes good high quality pictures (8 megapixels) so if I do get that good shot it will be a good picture quality wise.  It will also get me started down the path of being a better photographer as it will allow me to take a LOT more pictures anytime I want so that I can get better.

As a test I took some pictures of our dog playing fetch in our living room and here is the results.  Note that I know nothing about any settings on the camera at all.  This is just me pointing and clicking after throwing the ball. So if they suck its not me. If they are good then I have amazing raw talent ;) LOL

If you are into photography and have any tips please let me know what you think.  If you are in the market for a good inexpensive camera that takes good pictures I think this one is it.

For a while now I have tried to push for more beginner content on the web to help developers bridge the gap from beginner to intermediate.  Unfortunatly, it hasn't been the most successful since I haven't pushed very hard in public just nudges here and there.  So with that I have decided to give it a shot myself and started a Beginnermediate community.

http://beginnermediate.com

I am moving all of my programming posts over there and am gathering other bloggers as well that are willing to primarly post beginner to intermediate level content. This doesn't mean more advanced topics like dependency injection and Inversion of Control wont be talked about.  This just means there is a lot of other stuff that needs to be understood before then.

I am not stopping this blog by any means.  In fact I have wanted a place where I can post about anime, building stuff for my jeep, and just general thoughts for a while now.  So that is what this blog is going to become which means I am probably going to lose a lot of subscribers right there.  Please stick around if any of that is interesting to you.

If you would like to help Beginnermediate community grow please visit the site (http://beginnermediate.com) register and start asking questions on the forum and answering them too.  Also please read blog posts and comment as much as possible.  If you would like to blog there please hit me with an e-mail (cross posting is allowed).  Also we will eventually take requests for stuff to post on so please start gathering questions you would like to know about on programming concepts.

Thanks and hope to see you over at beginnermediate.com
Buddy

P.S. Please also check out the first tech blog post over there "Immutable and Mutable Objects in C#"

I want to thank all those that came to my talk.  I have added the files for you to download.  Just a note you will need to edit web.config file for connecting to the DB.

OOP_TechFest_2008_Presentation.zip (737.83 kb)

I try to visit Pirate 4x4 when I can to read about jeeps.  The biggest problem is that the color scheme hurst my eyes after a while.  So I found out about Greasemonkey for FireFox and you can write custom scripts to edit "stuff" on a website.  So I found a quick piece of javascript code on a site for editing css and modified it for Pirate 4x4.  So to install and use it here are the instructions

1) Install Greasemonkey for firefox.
2) Visit the script home for "New Pirate 4x4 Colors" and click install this script on the right.
3) Visit Pirate 4x4 forums and seee it change the colors.

 

Note:

So that you know when you load up the page it will load up the normal colors then once the page is done it will execute the Greasemonky script and change the colors.

Hope you find it useful.

So the other day I aquired a Tablet PC, been wanting one FOREVER.  The great thing about having the tablet is now I can do my math on the computer and no more paper.  I also am taking a Japanese class at college to better help my cultural influeances in the world, heh not really I just want to understand anime I watch better.  Anyway one thing about taking the class is I am learning to write kana. 

Well it is easier to learn kana when you can write it so I got the wild idea to do it on my tablet.  I spent a while online looking for programs to let me write kana and recognize it.  Then a friend showed me a link to someone using Vista and writing Kanji.  That got me thinking why can't I write in Vista using the default settings.  So i set out to figure out how and spent another hour looking online for a how-to. Unfortuantly, I didn't find one, but I got very annoyed and just decided to figure it out myself and figured out how easy it was to actually do it.  Just add Japanese keyboard to Vista. Its just that easy.

Here are the steps.

1) Open Control Panel.

2) Go to the "Clock, Language, and Region" section and click on "Change keyboards or other input methods"

 

3) With the new dialog box click on "Change Keyboards..."



4) Click on "Add..." to add the Japanese keyboard to the list.

5) Find "Japanese (Japan)" and select Japanese checkbox. Then OK.

6) Now you should see english and japanese in the installed services area as an available keyboard to use.



7) Next is to make sure you can write.  Click on the flyout, if available, for the tablet pc writing area on the left side of the screen.  And you should see English and Japanese from the langauge selection.

7) Select Japanese and you should be good to go to start writing Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

That is it.  That is the process for getting support to write in the Japanese language.  I also note stroke order does tend to matter.  I found that out trying to write ki in Katakana. I kept getting really really weird results when I got the stroke order wrong.

So last night me and a friend were goofing around.  While copying stuff off of a external HD I picked up my juggling pins and started juggling.  Most people don't realize I can.  Anyway, we also decided to test the video recording on my phone and here is the result.

LOL bad video I know.

Was looking at the lazycoder blog and saw a post on Herding Code podcast, sounding cool, I saw he posted on a "Back to the Basics" episode.   I just want to be clear as I start this.  I am a beginnermediate (not quite a begginer, but defintely not an intermediate developer) developer.  I look and listen in my world at that level and base my conclusions on my skill level.  The purpose of this post is to show a bit of the discrepency between what an advanced developer would consider basics and what a beginner would consider basics. I do agree these are all basics, but I believe there are levels to them that should be clarified.  

Below, I have categorized things the podcast hit on as basics.  I tried my best to put it in a linear fashion as what you should learn first to last.  I have also included a short opinion on each of these.

Beginner

Memory Management

This is defintely something a beginner _needs_ to know.  Not necessarily every part, but have a good idea of what is going on.

References (pointers)

This I agree is another thing to learn so you get a better idea of what is going with Memory Management.

Requirements

Here is the gold of what a beginner needs to learn.  If you don't know the requirements or can't translate those requirements to code then you will most likely fail as a developer.

Beginnermediate

Floating Point Math

This is one thing that should be learned and is important, but not quite as important as not knowing the above.  This tends to be an extensive thing to figure out and to really grok so I put it in the beginnermediate area once you know the beginner level and the general basics of developing like: if, then, for, varaiables and the like.

OOP

This is one thing that is a basic to learn. However, it is HARD to learn for the real world.  I learned OOP in a college class in one semester no problem.  It has taken me well over a year to translate, effectivly, that knowledge into real world applications, that aren't games.  This is a big must, but can be put on hold to learn whats above first.

Source Control

To me this is kind of a debateable topic as when to learn.  I think before you move to intermediate level programming level you should learn the basics of source control because it is at this point that you are going to be writing more sophisticated programs that are going to need Source Control.

Intermediate

Data Structures

Data Structures being an intermediate skill to learn is kind of misnomer.  I think you should learn 2 to 3 basic data structures like an array or in .net generic List<>. Just something to get you by then later once you understand more and more go back and really learn other data structures.  I believe this really would work out well because then you have probably coded quite a bit and will learn the data structures quicker and really know when and where to use them.

Design Patterns

This is most definitely an intermediate skill to learn.  Design patterns are important to writing smooth pretty and effective software, but until you learn OOP really well or a few other things you are stuck in the land of "please just work".  Understanding and using design patterns from what I have seen just takes time and writing quite a bit of code before they make sense.  I saw this because I have yet to be able to use them effectively and really understand when and where.

Dependency Injection

I put this in intermediate because I still don't know what it is and everytime I ask I just get confused which means it is something beyond my skill level so I am defaulting it to the top of the list.  Because of the not understanding problem I personally don't think this is a basic, but I will listen to those more experienced than me and consider it a basic.

 

Concolusion

I guess I mostly wanted to do this post to kind of come up with a way to organize what and when to learn the basics.  From reading and research ALL of the above basics are things that are used daily and very important to know, but not all of it is easy and can be learned quickly so it is good to break it down. I really loved this podcast episode because it is honestly not often I get to hear pro's talk about the basics.  The basics are something I strive to help people understand because it isn't taught a lot online usually and _most_ of the time not well.

Most anime fans should get a kick out of this.  If you cross Lucky Star and Transformers this is what you get.

Hope you enjoyed that.

I have been wanting to watch my videos that I have on my hard drive on my TV for a looooong time, but never seemed to have the right equipment that actually worked.  Well yesterday a friend finally hooked me up with the right equipment and I have been playing with Vista Media Center since then.

First off, Vista Media Center rocks. I am loving it.  I used to have to get up every so often and switch videos on my computer to watch from my chair or bed, not to mention mess with rotating the flat panel monitor.  Well, now with media center and the IR Remote that is hooked up to the computer I basically have a TiVo like system going, minus recording tv.

Now along the way I ran into a problem, was user error.  If you hit the power button on the IR remote it would send the computer to sleep mode.  Not to big of a problem except the setting for windows was to prompt the user for a password upon resume.  Normally that wouldn't be a problem for I couldn't seem to login or even get anything to display on the TV or my computer once I hit the power button on the remote again.  So, I did the one last thing I could think of.  Hard turn off of the computer.

That is when the problems started.  Once I got it back up apprentely some db got corrupted that no longer let me view the videos.  So after reading for a few hours on the internets i came accross the solution, and with a bit of guessing, to just delete the db's.  Only probloem is I didn't know where they were located as no where explicitly said where.  After some searching I found out 2 things that are kind of important.

1. Media Center information and stuffs are stored in "Microsoft\ehome" folder
2. The media library database is stored in the "Microsoft\Media Player" folder

You can find the main stuff for Media Center at "C:\Windows\ehome". That is where the executables and other things are located.  Other stuffs are in "C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ehome" that will be important for other thigns besides this problem. Just letting you know file locations.

What is the most interesting though is that the media center library is stored at "C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player".  I was amazed because I figured they would store that info in the ehome folder.

Anyway, the problem specifically that I had was when I would go to the videos  area of the menu in Media Center it would try to display all the folders, but wouldn't.  I could actually get it to do anything.  Once I decided to delete the database information it reset everything back and I could finally add files through the monitoring folders of settings.  Well once I did that it still didn't work properly as the videos would only display in the "Date Captured" view.

So what was my solution?

1. Delete the database files at "C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player" 
2. Unmonitor all video locations
3. Install 3rd party MCE application called Video Browser

That is it.  Now I just use video browser app that I installed into Media Center as it works a lot better, but a bit different.

 

Install and Use Video Browser

Installing Video Browser is super simple.  Just visit the site "http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/" download the installer and install it.  After that go to the Pictures+Video section of your Media Center menu and you should see a tab to the left called Video Browser.  

Now the most important part to not is. VB only monitors your "C:\Users\<user>\Videos" folder.  So to add vides from other locations just simply create a shortcut to that folder or file and it will work.  This works out great for me as I have a lot of things I need to watch so I only put shortcuts to my "To Watch" videos.

 

I suggest giving the Media Center stuff a try in vista it is a lot of fun.  So much fun infact if I am not careful I might make an app for it.