As everyone knows coding standards quickly become a religious debate as soon as there are more than a single developer working on a piece of code. Luckily the people I work with share the same sense of clean coding standards as I do.
However the other day we had a dissagreement about what to name the event parameter in a handler, ‘e’ or ‘evt’. Neither of us had a strong argument for using one over the other. So we ended up playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is the perfect solution for deciding on issues that have little to no impact on how the code actually works. It enables a decision to be quickly made, and hopefully the parties involved agree that RPS is a fair and balanced method.
If you want to get super geeky, you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard. I just found out about that the other day because of a t-shirt on Think Geek. I haven’t tried playing yet, it may take a while to remember what beats what now.
Posted July 2nd, 2009 under Code Tricks | No Comments »
I apparently suck at blogging. I haven’t posted in almost two months, that’s not going to keep anyone coming back to see whats new. Oh well, guess I’ll give a quick update of whats new in the Pinter Industries world. Not a whole lot actually, like no new site design, although I have sketched out some ideas.
The big Flash CMS project I worked a bunch on still hasn’t gone live. Not sure what they are waiting for since they haven’t asked for any updates recently. At least I’m finally getting paid for that project. Got a cool video portfolio site project for a friend that I’ll be starting, and hopefully finishing, this week. It will kind of be a portfolio item for me as well, since it should be a pretty neat Flash site.
The big project at the moment is something I’m working on with Heavy Robotic Chris. We are restarting a project we had built a year and a half ago and taking it to the next level of functionality. We both think it’s a great idea, something that we will both use, and hopefully people will use it this time around too. I’ve been writing quite a bit of JavaScript and PHP that writes out JavaScript, so it’s been a good learning experience. I’ll have much more to say about that project once it launches. Not that I think anyone would steal our idea and build it before we finish, especially since Amazon already did that.
Posted June 30th, 2009 under Uncategorized | No Comments »
I found an interesting blog post about video games and the direction of the market and design related to board games. You can read it here, and I suggest you do, the author makes some very good points about things possibly not turning out well for video games. He mentions the consolidation of the game publishers, which is already happening in video games, there are a couple huge publishers that pump out a lot of games, which leads to a lack of innovation, which also already happens.
But I think he missed one big point, it is much easier for a small independent gaming company to make a quality game, release it, and have it become ’successful’, than it is for a small independent company to create a release a quality board game. Granted success has a lot of different meanings, but there are big differences in teh two markets when it comes to building and distributing the product. With a board game there are physical items that need to be manufactured, packaged and then sold at a store, well you could sell them online as well, but you still need a bunch of storage space at least. With a video game, all you need is some computers and some programmers and artists, which could be all the same person. The cost and commitment is much lower. With the loads of different platforms for gaming, and different distribution options, even on the same system, an independent company can make an impact. Look at Braid or Sins of a Solar Empire for example. Braid is one of my favorite games on the Xbox 360, it is just so beautifully done, the art, the music, the gameplay, it all works together so well. I haven’t had a chance to play Sins of a Solar Empire yet, but some of my friends are big fans. Thats a big game, and it supposedly was built on a budget of less than a million dollars, and they built their own graphics engine.
Anyways, I was just trying to point out that I don’t think it’s the end of the world for video games. I think there are a lot more talented people with good ideas and the ambition to try and make their visions playable. Heck, even board games are making a comeback with the more hardcore style games, although Europe still seems to be making the funnest games.
Posted May 5th, 2009 under Gaming | 1 Comment »
Well I got some of the site updates I wanted to do. There are still more content and style updates I need to do. But I did get WordPress moved to the root of the domain, which was super simple. I followed this tutorial and got it done in five minutes.
I also got pretty permalinks working, which took me a while because I wasn’t reading the instructions correctly. But that’s all working now. If you have mod_rewrite enabled in Apache edit your site configuration file under apache2/sites-available (at least that’s how apache is setup on my box). And place the following config in any relevant <Directory> tags.
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Then all you should need to do is log into WordPress and choose your pretty permalink style from the ‘Permalinks’ section in ‘Settings’.
If you don’t have mod_rewrite enabled, on Ubuntu you can enable it with this:
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
To disable, use the a2dismod command instead. Thanks to this guy for those commands.
Posted April 28th, 2009 under The Site | No Comments »
I was pretty busy last week. I’ve been working with Chris of Heavy Robot on a large scale Flash CMS site, we are taking over maintenance and development duties. It’s interesting to see what the original developers did and their design choices, some of them make me wonder what they were thinking, others are very well thought out. And it sounds like there will be more work on that project this week.
Besides that, I’ve got a game I’m porting to the Android mobile platform, an upcoming interactive map project in Flash, some other Flash work, and maybe some fun side projects in there as well. But I’m always looking for more work, so if you have any, Flash or other programming work, let me know.
So speaking of fun side projects, Chris and Brian made Heavy Mural. It’s a neat site for figuring out how to build sticky note murals. Well it doesn’t have to be sticky notes, you can use other square colored items. I think it’s pretty neat, hopefully some other people do to.
And on a related note, I met up with Chris and Matty Harper and Amy Brodie of Dreamlets fame for an idea brainstorm last week. It was a great time, we hung out at the ‘dream pad’ and discussed ideas for cool projects. It was inspiring and makes me want to do more side projects, but I need to finish up the ones I’ve already started first.
So, some day you’ll see some of my projects on here. And someday you’ll also see an updated style and more content on this site.
Posted April 20th, 2009 under Work | No Comments »
Okay, just a quick note to say I’m still here and will be making some updates to the site real soon, like including my resume and work samples up here. I’m going to try and do better with actually posting here so maybe there will be something useful or interesting up here at some point.
Posted April 6th, 2009 under Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m in the process of making a Joomla site for the first time and I needed to be able to have different pages of the site have different styles. I looked around and wasn’t able to find any examples that actually worked for my needs. I found some info about the Page Class Suffix option, but nothing about how to really use it. I talked with Brian over at Heavy Robot, since he has actually made some Joomla sites and he whipped up this bit of code that fits my needs perfectly. Basically it uses the Page Class Suffix variable from the menu system as the class name on the body. You can then add any styles you need to your basic style sheet and have all sorts of different page styles.
Place this PHP block in the head of the index.php file of your template. I used the built in template editor, which also points out which template you are currently using.
<?php
$menus = &JSite::getMenu();
$menu = $menus->getActive();
if (is_object( $menu ))
$params = new JParameter( $menu->params );
$pageclass = $params->get( 'pageclass_sfx' );
?>
Then replace the open body tag with this block, also in the index.php file. Or you can use just the part where the page class is written out if you want to have multiple classes on the body.
<body id="bd" class="<?php echo $pageclass;?>">
Now whenever you create a new menu item in the menu manager, add a value for the Page Class Suffix (under the Parameters (System) expando-box) for any pages that need different styles.
Posted January 26th, 2009 under Code Tricks | 3 Comments »
Well, I’ve had WordPress up and running for a while now, so I probably should post something, even if the theme needs some more work, like actually including the logo I made.
Anyways, my name is Ian Pinter and I have recently become a freelance developer. I have been doing basically freelance work for the past year and a half, but with several friends at the same company. So doing this on my own is new and different.
My professional development career started off doing C# development. I worked at Microsoft for a bit and started out using ASP.NET/C# there, but then got re-org’ed into the Live Search team, where they use C++. That was a bit of a change, but I got to work with some cool people, and on some neat new framework code. For the last year a and half at Skull Squadron, I have been doing all sorts of web projects, most in C#. But I did learn Flash/Actionscript and have been quite enjoying that. I hope to continue doing more Flash projects in the future, and have several possibilities at the moment.
However, I am currently trying to take it easy and not really look for work. Although some work has found me, which I don’t mind. Anyways, I’ll try and update this a couple times a week and hopefully somebody will find something interesting or of use.
- Ian
Posted January 19th, 2009 under Uncategorized | No Comments »
