girl geek in training

Artist: Laufman @ Newgrounds.com

One thing I never learned in school was how to convert an Adobe Photoshop document (PSD) to an HTML/CSS website. It’s something that the front end developers at my job do a lot. So, in order to understand the process and perhaps use it myself sometime, I decided to go through this tutorial. After seeing how much time it would take (especially hard considering Photoshop is my least favorite of the Adobe Creative Suite software), I settled on just reading through it.

Extremely educational and now I realize some of the pain (er, effort) behind the whole process.

So one of the things that has happened at my job is the guy that is the Flash and gaming knowledge guru is having a baby! This means that I’ve been getting to assist him (where assist is more like watch and be confused) with some of the proposals and calls for things I have limited or no experience with.

The first thing I’ve learned is that Flash doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon even without Steve Jobs approval. Thus, learning more about this isn’t a bad idea at all.

Currently, I am going through an Adobe CS4 Flash tutorial on banner ads. I will post my finished banner whenever it becomes…finished.

Meanwhile, I found (actually, it was posted in the tutorial) a useful link on standard banner ad sizes and specs. All hail the interwebs!

Now that I’ve completed all of the things due for the week (I still have another paper due Monday and a project for my Web Application Development class due Tuesday), I have decided to spend this weekend attempting to make a contribution to my group’s Data Mining final project. All of the code is hosted on Github, but I wasn’t quite sure how to pull code from an existing repository. What follows is my understanding of forking aka pulling code from someone else’s repository without screwing it up.

Github again proves to have wonderful instructions on forking which is likely all you’ll need. Essentially, forking creates a duplicate repository that you can edit at will.

1. I pushed the fork button on the Github repository of interest and it created a remote repository for me.
2. Next, I had to create a local clone of my forked repository. This was done using the terminal (aka command line).
3. Then, I had to create a local pointer to the original repository. This will help me keep up to date on the changes that occur there.

Something new to me are these apparent aliases that each of the repositories are given. My forked repository is nicknamed origin (automagically) while the original repository is nicknamed upstream (manually, see the Github instructions referenced previously).

Now I’m going to work on my code and will report back on the process to merge all these changes to the original code.

I went to bed ruminating on some of the bugs in my tic-tac-toe code and when I woke up this morning I had answers! Sleep, it is like magic. What I fixed…

• I couldn’t figure out why the game didn’t restart. It was just a matter of resetting the boolean that denoted a game had ended. Simple.
• I simplified the array code by using the push() method instead of a counter. Considering I was already using the pop() method, I’m shocked I didn’t do it before. I blame sleep deprivation.

After those fixes were implemented, more bugs popped up…

• The computer would overwrite a taken square. Turns out that my forking code had syntax errors: I wasn’t ending some methods with parentheses and so they weren’t behaving as they should have.
• The human player would win. Again, this went back to the fork code. The above fixes improved that situation.

Overall, I’m pretty excited about having written my first JavaScript game, simple as it may be. I think I will continue to work on it because I have a lot of ideas on how to make it more exciting, meaning more video game like. When I’m done, I’ll put it up as a sample on my personal website which sorely needs updating.

I have written code for a tic-tac-toe game to my github. I did look at other code for such a game. Most seemed to hard code every possible move and go from there. I thought it would be a better idea to follow some kind of logic. Another bright idea I had was to use HTML5 and jQuery JavaScript even though I’ve never done anything in the former and I’ve done very few things in the latter.

Getting a handle on the HTML5 canvas properties and getting more familiar with JavaScript added a good deal of time to my coding effort. I had grand plans of having a really great interface, but debugging and — after determining it would be in my best interest to write objects and methods instead of just functions — rewriting code took up the entirety of my time. It still doesn’t work like I want it, but the basic functionality seems to be working okay.

This and finals week have me feeling like I need a vacation. All those celebrities that go to hospitals suffering from exhaustion, I totally get now.

Thanks to Aquabird Consulting for having this awesome and relevant image!

I have to write a code sample for someone and since all the cool kids are using Github, I figured now was as good a time as any to make myself get somewhat decent at it.

What is this git?

Great question! I was introduced to git during my data structures class. All of our code was written to a git repository hosted by the professor. One of the most awesome things about it was when we completed an assignment, it was automagically graded! However, I honestly don’t know a lot about git other than the times I used it for that class.

What I do know is that with git you can: (1) commit a file as many times as you want and when you commit a file that means (2) you can recover older versions of that file. In addition, git is good for collaborating on code; I believe it is especially useful for that.

And Github?

This is a place where you can host your code for free as long as it’s public. If you want to do something privately, you have to pay for the privilege.

So far, I have created a Github account, followed their instructions for getting a ssh key and with a few tweaks, set up my first repository! The instructions provided were most excellent, so I won’t go through it myself.

I will however need this handy reference since I can’t recall all the commands anymore. One last thing, in addition to getting git make sure to get the vim text editor; I found using vi to be a pain in the behind. On Ubuntu, you can easily find both in the Synaptic Package Manager.

Being at a point in life where I am not afraid to acknowledge I don’t know something is a wonderful thing.

I participated in a Hackathon (as evidenced by my last post) this past weekend. I’m not the best at writing code or at designing on the fly, but I did it. All by myself, too! It was the first time I created something I actually wanted to create using skills I’ve learned from my college hiatus days and my newly returned-to-college present. I didn’t win anything, but I am a great deal more confident in my ability to progress.

After that, I went to a meetup type event that’s all about databases. We went over a paper on MapReduce. Then someone started talking about hadoop. I had never heard of hadoop, but they were kind enough to provide a brief explanation. Next, we learned about CouchDB, a NoSQL database. From what I can tell, the NoSQL database forces you to consider how the data is structured. (Relational databases hide the complexity of the structure of the data.) My course in data structures should help me a bit with this if I ever have the time to explore it…

Classes begin next week! I can’t believe it’s happening already. Also, I have changed my mind again and decided to complete my grad school application. I will likely only go for one semester to finish an obligation I began this year and then move along to the real world.

I have another hackathon coming up. This time, I need to do a mobile app. Luckily, I also have a partner who I think is pretty smart. He’s a full-on CS major.

Well, here it is. SocialDevCamp Hackathon. I am beyond terrified. I have nobody on my team. The idea that I do have requires that I learn to use three technologies that I either haven’t used before or haven’t used extensively. I can maybe get it done if I eschew sleep. However, that doesn’t sound like fun. I also have to speak in front of 300 people tomorrow, so I might want to avoid the crazy that is me sans sleep.

The benefit is that is forces me to learn how to work with different APIs which is important, no?