Et-Setera » Miscellaneous http://www.setera.org Ramblings of a geek Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:37:36 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Still A Geek… http://www.setera.org/2010/03/07/still-a-geek/ http://www.setera.org/2010/03/07/still-a-geek/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:38:01 +0000 Craig Setera http://www.setera.org/?p=228 Looking back to my last post way back in October it is pretty clear when things started getting crazy at work.  The team survived and managed to finish another awesome version of mFoundry’s mBanking product.  These days I’m doing more management and less coding, but I’m definitely still a geek.  Given that iPhone applications are all the rage in the industry, I’ve been trying to learn my way around iPhone development.  During the process of learning, I’ve noticed a few things that have caught me off guard compared to Java.  I hope to post a few of those things in the days and weeks to come that may help other Java programmers.  In the meantime, I thought I would share some about the project I’ve been playing with to learn.

The Project

In order to learn a new platform, I always like to have a project to build.  Looking around, I didn’t find any iPhone DAAP clients for servers like the Firefly Media Server.  I’ve been trying to build a DAAP client as my learning experience.  I have a good chunk of the navigation working at this point.

DAAP Player

The iPhone Core Data support is amazingly powerful, providing a good chunk of the underlying data source support for table views like those in the client.

DAAP Albums

There is still much to be done, but the iPhone SDK has provided a large amount of functionality for a very small price.  As always, I continue to be impressed with the power packed into modern handsets.

]]> http://www.setera.org/2010/03/07/still-a-geek/feed/ 0 Once A Geek… http://www.setera.org/2009/10/17/once-a-geek/ http://www.setera.org/2009/10/17/once-a-geek/#comments Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:41:09 +0000 Craig Setera http://www.setera.org/?p=219 Looking back, it is hard to believe how long I’ve been a computer programming geek.  Way back in February of 1984, I had my first game, Circus, published in Compute! magazine.  Thanks to Kevin Savetz, you can now see my original article as well as many other classic computer magazine articles.  These articles are back in the days before the internet, laptops and cell phones.  The iPhone in my pockets has so much more power and storage, that it is hard to imagine programming as I did in those days.

Circus VIC-20

Circus VIC-20

Looking back at this article publication, there are a couple of things that make it particularly interesting to me 20+ years later.

  • My original program was written on the Commodore VIC-20 (5K of user memory!) and was rewritten for all of the other computers for the publication.  This happened behind the scenes and I was unaware until publication.  Not surprising, they also rewrote all of my descriptive text.
  • This game was a clone of a game that was available in arcades and pizza places around that same time.  Had I done this in present day, this game would very likely not have been published due to copyright or other legal issues.

20+ years later, I’m still a computer programmer (software engineer?).  While I program less than I used to, it is cool that my hobby so many years ago has been able to be both a hobby and a source of income for so many years.

]]> http://www.setera.org/2009/10/17/once-a-geek/feed/ 0 First Post http://www.setera.org/2009/05/31/first-post/ http://www.setera.org/2009/05/31/first-post/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:42 +0000 Craig Setera http://www.setera.org/?p=51 While I’ve had a blog for EclipseME for a few years now, I finally decided to convert setera.org over to using WordPress.  I’m looking forward to using this space now and into the future.   Please have a look around!

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