While I haven’t entirely given up on my
Android Clock Widget
project, it has definitely stalled out for the time being. I have some potential ideas on how to move that project forward, but between work and coaching soccer I just don’t have much time at the moment to play around. In the meantime, I wanted a nice analog clock on my phone’s homescreen. While looking around the Google Play store, I came across the awesome
Analog Clock Collection
. For anyone looking for an analog clock widget, I’d recommend taking a look.
One of these days I may actually learn my lesson when it comes to installing new software. Lately I’ve been busy with work and recovering from some surgery, so I haven’t really had the energy to focus on any of my personal programming projects. Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of home network administration and software updates. In a multiple cases, I’m reminded of why being on the leading (bleeding?) edge of software may not always be the easiest place to be.
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OK… not really. It is more a case of experiencing zero time for non-work technical projects. As my girls traveling soccer team nears the end of the season, things should start to lighten up just a bit. With that said, I have a few upcoming work and personal trips that will continue to keep me away from personal programming projects like
AndPingus
for at least a little bit longer.
In the meantime, the
Eclipse Foundation
has managed to deliver the
Eclipse Indigo release
on schedule yet again. It is always strange to see the
Eclipse MTJ project
based on my original
EclipseME
work ship “yet another release” with no involvement from me. While I’m glad to see the project outlive my involvement, I have to admit it is kind of strange.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), JavaME is on a downward slide at this point. I had hoped to take a look at the
Eclipse Usage Data
for the MTJ project and get an idea of its usage as well. However, I’m still looking around for up to date usage data. If I find something useful or interesting, I will try to post something here.
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.
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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
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.
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!