Creating my new employer's website

Been a while since I posted.

What I've been doing:

Both at work and in my spare time, I've started messing around with the Android SDK, and am planning a small mobile app. I'm usually very concerned with the UI aspect, so I believe I'll make something good and useable.

I've changed jobs, and my previous bosses at António José Moreira decided that I wouldn't get paid for my work in the month of January. They state that the work was being done on a per-objective basis and that they haven't been satisfied with my work. However, they always paid a constant monthly salary.

Working at António José Moreira was a challenge, but I was always aware of their ruthless nature. As a company, they never cared for the well-being or satisfaction of their customers, or even cared to pay their suppliers or service providers at all.

I doubt that they will pay my salary willingly. However I have earned my pay with hard work, and I'm determined to get it.

My new company and their new website

I work at a company called Descontel Consulting now. They are a small company with less than 20 employees (Not sure of the exact size though).

I've already made their new website. I used Joomla! CMS for the first time, and I must say it was fun customizing a template and making it work with all the components.

First I created the above image (grayscale helps me focus on organisation of content rather than how the page looks like)


Then I was asked to take Twitter off the top of the page, so I decided to make the above 3-column layout. The black thing to the right was a screenshot of the Twitter plugin I thought I was going to use.


After that, I colored it and started coding the HTML


No programming was involved, since everything was handled by Joomla. My work there was just creating the template, planning and organizing content and a lot of HTML and CSS. I used this great jQuery plugin for the slider up on the top. The site currently loads the jQuery library twice, though, because of the twitter module. I'm going to have to optimize that.

I had to support Internet Explorer 6, and I did so using a second stylesheet and a conditional comment in the page header.

Like this:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template?>/css/style_ie6.css" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
It does make the browser download another stylesheet, but it's not a big one, and I didn't have the time to support IE 6 properly.

I'm sysadmin!

I have a job now! It's my first job. I'm sysadmin on a store that sells wood and construction material. You can check out their site here: www.ajmoreira.com. There's much to do about the site...

But there's more!

They're going to install new terminal and server software, due to new regulations from the capitalist pig which require companies to upgrade their software to have a link to our country's financing, helping our country get every last cent we need to get out of the financial crysis while keeping the political class nice and spoiled.

I digress. I'm going to be a key element to help with this upgrade. The people working there need training and help with the new software, and I'll also have to move the old data from the old Unix server, to the new system. I'll also have to find a way to create backups of all the data, dealing with never-ending (but not very serious) data growth. Will zlib and a python script cut it? Do I really need full redundancy? Where will I keep the data? External 1Tb hard drives? How often to backup? Nightly? What's the best way to schedule this?

Another task is the website. A website replacement might be in order, complete with full design, and everything. I'm also going to have to find a way to link the website to the database of the system without having to query the system for every page loaded. I could build up a cache, put it online. Cache would be built nightly, as well. Do I really need to update everything on the cache? How could I avoid that?

A lot of problems to solve, and a lot of interesting ideas to solve them come up all the time. A huge system in my hands, I hope I'm up to it.

The Emo Programming guide, Part 1

1. Get Python from http://www.python.org/


2. Open it up


3. Type: print ('Goodbye, world!')


4. Cut yourself

Started a project outside school -- Finally!

I started a project with a few colleagues from college. It's meant to help you use public transportation. We wish to solve difficulties like having to check multiple websites and manually cross-referencing information, just so you can catch the right bus(or buses) to get you to your destination. We consider this to be hard, so we are creating a website, coupled with an android app and a smartphone-ready website, to help people find their way using public transportation.

It's probably going to be hard, since we're thinking of putting up a graph structure for our app, and we'll search it quite often, so we need to optimize a lot!

I've read somewhere that drawing the interface of a user-interfaced application helps programmers in its development. Since we don't really know where to start and our ideas for features are a little vague, That's where we start :)

I'm really excited about this. It could become big, but even if it doesn't, it's bound to be a wonderful learning experience.

No Matter -- Finished animation

The No Matter animation is complete!

No Matter -- Rendering stage

I used two computers to do this, since I didn't finish the facial animation. As a computer was rendering a certain sequence, I was finalizing and fixing the facial animation on the next sequences.

It took a whole week to render the whole thing, since I used HDTV resolution, and the character's materials had large textures which slowed down rendering considerably. The average per-frame rendering time was 20 minutes.

After this, I assembled the video together with Francisca's 2D animation, made in Adobe Flash, and the song we made with Ricardo Pacheco.

Finally we have all the posters on the walls! They're animate-able and are constrained to not leave the walls. A lot less complicated than the posters which will crawl away from the wall onto the floor.



Now, I'll start animating. After I'm finished, I'll correct the loose ends in the character skinning, and in the character itself, and then the 3D part of the animation should be good to go.

And this happened. I only had one light in the scene so far (to keep renders quick), but I was quite surprised to find out that my character turned out to be a ninja!