I am Coder of the Month
Posted 25 Dec 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
I think it's pretty awesome (TM) that I became TopCoder Coder of the Month for the component development competitions! Look for me on the left side of the TC homepage and be sure to read my interview. And no one's allowed to make fun of my mugshot.
Happy Holidays!
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Prevent the Flex TextArea from intercepting the mouse wheel event
Posted 09 Dec 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
Life has just taught me a lesson. Do not encounter problems that people have rarely experienced.
I have a story to tell. I had a TextArea in a VBox which prevented the container from vertically scrolling if the mouse cursor was over the TextArea. The vertical scrolling worked fine when the mouse cursor was over other parts of the container. After spending several hours on Google looking for how to fix this and coming across only a couple of solutions (this and this) which did not work, or maybe my Google fu just plain sucks, I decided to roll my own.
After doing a bit of digging, following the approach in the second solution, I discovered that the TextArea has a mouseWheelHandler event handler defined. All I had to do was remove the event listener like so:
package
{
import mx.controls.TextArea;
public class MultilineText extends TextArea
{
override protected function createChildren():void
{
super.createChildren();
removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL, mouseWheelHandler);
}
}
}
Problem Solved. This occurred in an AIR app, though. I haven't bothered to test this in Flash Player and I really don't feel like it. Hopefully, this helps someone who encounters something like this in the future.
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First Gentleman.
Posted 29 Nov 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
I got to see 24: Redemption and it was awesome. I suppose it was pretty nice because I haven't had my fix of 24 for over a year now, many thanks to the writers' strike. Anyhow, it got me wondering, if the wife of a male president is called the "First Lady", what do you call the husband of a female president?
In other news, I've seen a number of movies over the past few weeks. Eagle Eye, exciting. Max Payne, quite okay. Taken, alright. Children of Men (I know it's old, but I just saw it this year), awesome. The ones that I'm looking forward to before the year runs out are Body of Lies and Transporter 3. I've never been too keen on 007, but I guess I'll just give Quantum of Solace a shot when I can get around to it.
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My WCG Nigeria 2008 Performance
Posted 05 Oct 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, 2nd place, quite disappointing. And the first place prize was reduced because of the turn up (6 players in all).
Need For Speed Pro Street, 3rd place, got owned by a kid who took first place and I lolled. I promise I have a good excuse. I didn't take the game too seriously since I actually wanted to win Warcraft.
Age of Empires 3, cancelled because there were only about 2 people that intended to play. Pretty annoying. I spent a lot of time playing this game trying to get better; no reward for my efforts.
To be honest, I really don't like it when such changes are made at the last minute. But considering this is their first time, I guess the reasonable thing to do is let it slide. It's all good, though. It was fun and entertaining. I may do this again next year.
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My take on Google Chrome
Posted 30 Sep 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
Around the beginning of this month, the Internet was ablaze with rumours about Google planning to release a new browser, and they eventually turned out to be true. Google released Chrome on September 2, and like every web developer/technology enthusiast, I had to get my hands dirty with it. When I initially found out about Chrome, I was rather sceptical, because I thought like every web developer would, "Great. Yet another browser to support." Designing web page layouts so that they look the same across different browsers isn't fun because of the vast differences in the ways they've decided to interpret the standards.
In any case, I downloaded and installed Chrome, and the first thing that got me was the speed. Google Chrome is very fast and responsive. It made IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera feel very slow. I fancied that. And a couple of other neat things caught my attention: a very clean and uncluttered interface which gives me more viewing area for web pages and the browser's task manager. I find the task manager very useful as I can use it to identify what's hogging my resources if there's any problem. I haven't tried Chrome with Java applets, though. I may be wrong, but I recall reading somewhere that the Java plugin wasn't supported yet in the beta release.
Chrome isn't without its flaws though. The first major thing the interface needs is a title bar. I admire the way the tabs are positioned, but I don't like having to hover my mouse over a tab to show me the full title of the page that I'm currently on; I want to be able to see that at all times. On Vista, when I run apps that need to switch to Aero Basic from Aero, the top-right side of the interface gets rather jumbled. This is not pleasant to look at and needs to be fixed. Additionally, after you leave the browser running for a long period of time minimised, there is a noticeable problem when you switch between tabs. The page for the tab you switch to is initially blank, and it takes anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds before the page for that tab actually displays, which is not acceptable. I've also noticed slowdowns when the browser is left running for a long period of time.
In conclusion, I do fancy Chrome. It's a neat, fast browser. And I'll be looking forward to the final release which definitely has to be improved. However, I'm going to beat up the next set of people that use the term, "browser-based OS" when referring to Chrome, or any phrase that implies something like that for that matter.
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Awesome New Rig
Posted 17 Sep 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
I finally built a new computer system after much waiting and speculation. I initially intended to go with a Quad Core CPU (Q6600), which I already have, but since I was unable to find a motherboard that supported it at a reasonable price locally, and importing felt like too much trouble, I decided to just go with a Dual Core CPU for now. Of course, obligatory specs:
Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2180 2.00GHz (overclocked to run at 2.40GHz)
2GB DDR2 PC2-5300 RAM
PNY GeForce 9600GT graphics card with 512MB DDR3 memory
Seagate 80GB SATA hard disk drive
LG DVD-RW drive
Pretty sweet rig, to be honest. Got a Vista Experiece Index base score of 5. And I can now play my games on max settings without breaking a sweat. I finally got around to playing and beating Call of Duty 4 (sweet, but short) and Half-Life 2: Episode Two (although longer than Episode One, still felt like it ended too quick) over the past few days. I'm currently replaying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. since I never got around to finishing when I played it on my laptop. The games look so beautiful! I'm going to add a 750GB or 1TB hard disk drive, eventually, once I can find them around here at decent prices, or maybe I'll have to resort to importing. We'll see.
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More gaming
Posted 27 Aug 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
It's World Cyber Games. With an organiser in Nigeria. And they're called, wait for it... Association of Computer Games Operators of Nigeria (ACGON). LOL. What's up with Nigerians and tacky names? I mean, come on, that's just really overboard. The good thing is that Warcraft 3 is one of the competitive games. One of the few Warcraft players (about 7 in total, including myself) that I met at the ESWC preliminaries told me about this. We're probably all going to take part in this one.
The web site almost makes my eyes bleed - inconsistent font sizes, poor alignment of text and images. But hey, I'll still participate since I want competition. I get another chance to prove myself in Warcraft 3, and this time around, there's complete control over race selection. No excuses. I may also consider participating in Age of Empires 3. This is definitely going to be fun.
I've been unemployed for just over a month now, and working as a freelance developer is actually more rewarding. No more bad roads. No more traffic to deal with. I work on my own time. Plenty of free time. But yeah, I'm still working towards starting university. Sometime. In the near future. We'll see how that goes.
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Rig Foundry forums
Posted 01 Aug 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
I decided to organise my releases in a friendly fashion so I've set up a forum at http://rigfoundry.com/forums/ for basic information, user interaction and general banter.
Go there and register. Now.
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Unemployment, ESWC and a Javascript Date Picker
Posted 26 Jul 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
This is a much deserved update.
I finally resigned about 2 weeks ago. After 2 years and 6 months. It was a pretty cool experience considering all the additional I had to do as a software developer - Linux/Windows server administration, technical support, database administration - in addition to actual software development. I'm actually preparing to go to university to take Computer Science so I decided to quit. Currently doing freelance work here and there, though, and it's very rewarding.
Yeah, I attended the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) event held here in Nigeria and it was pretty fun. I participated in Warcarft 3 and Trackmania Nations Forever (very fun game, btw) I only picked up Warcraft 3 a month prior to the event, so I was pretty much a newbie compared to the other participants. I got pretty good at the game, but what killed me at the competition was the fact that I wasn't very conversant with Night Elves (race selection was Random) so I finished up at 5th place. I could use Humans, Orcs and Undead. But not Night Elves. Lameness. On the other hand, I did take second place in Trackmania. The second place prize wasn't very encouraging though, but all in all, it was fun.
I also got around to coding a Javascript date picker control from scratch. Sadly, the available solutions are either rather crappy, or require you to pay before you can use them, or both. Which led to me writing my own! Good thing is I had done something similar in the past (wrote a calendar system in PHP about 3 years ago) so I had something to base off on, and I was done within a few hours. And I suppose it's rather good, and easy to integrate into existing code. I have a demo online. It's free for everyone to use and modify, etc. You can download the whole thing here. As for improvements, I'm thinking of implementing month selection - something similar to how it's done in Vista. Let's not forget the obligatory screenshot.
In conclusion, I'm so looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight.
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And then VideoSeek
Posted 08 Jun 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
You know, Yahoo! Widgets is actually pretty neat. I heard about it a while back but I never paid much attention. Works on both Windows and Mac too, although there are some platform-specific quirks, but nothing that affected me.
I couldn't follow through with my intended Truveo/Google Maps app because not all videos have the country specified in the result set, which is actually very essential to the whole thing. Had to come up with something else. VideoSeek is a video search widget that I developed, which is also an entry for the Truveo Developer Challenge. I kept the whole interface pretty simple and straightforward. Less options = less worries, right?
I've submitted the widget to the Yahoo! Widgets gallery and it's currently awaiting approval. Meanwhile, you can download it directly. You will need to download and install the Yahoo! Widgets application before you can use the widget.
By the way, I haven't forgotten about the Half-Life 2 giveaway yet. I've been rather occupied with a lot of things so I haven't been able to run the random selection yet. I'll get around to it soon enough.
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