Jordan Martin

I just published this on my portfolio and thought I should share it here as well.  It’s not finished, and probably will never be, but it’s still a fun little physics experiment.  So go JOUST!

Flash, Programming

As you can see I started piecing together my portfolio today.  You can see the link in the menu at the top also.  Obviously it’s not complete yet.  I’m going to try and keep it up to date, but don’t worry, if I make anything new that I think you’ll like I’ll be sure to post it here to show it off.

Sweetness

I thought I might take a moment and share with you my favorite Javascript Library.

I have had experience with a few different libraries.  Not all, obviously, but some.

- Scriptaculous was my first, and I fell in love.  While it’s no longer my preference it will always have a place in my heart.  Alas, I found it to be less robust then I needed and had to break off the relationship.

- Dojo I played with but found it to be a little too broken for different browsers.  While it may have gotten better, I feel that if the demos of a library are broken then it doesn’t really inspire confidence.

- MooTools is supposed to be good and stable, but I had a hard time finding any useful effects, which are important to me in a Library.

- I would be interested in trying Ext JS sometime, as they have quite an impressive collection of widgets, but I have been resistant to put time into something with such an iffy license.

So this is the reasoning, along with positive experiences, that I have chosen jQuery as my library of choice.  Bear in mind I don’t often check the current state of any of these libraries and they may have changed for the better since I last looked into them.  Feel free to comment and let me know if you’ve had conflicting or supporting experiences with any of these.

~JM

Javascript, Programming

Great news!  I finally took the little puzzle creating app I made for my mom and created a website to host it.  Hopefully this will just be the start.  I plan on adding more puzzle generators in the future and offering all this as a free service.  I have some Google Adword credits that I might use to start up some traffic, and maybe push it on some forums.  If it gets popular enough I might add other features like user logins to post puzzles they created and rate them or something.  Of course the hope is for publicity for BigTree I.T..  Also if it gets enough visitors maybe add an ad or two.  We’ll see.  I’ll just be happy if it gets used at all

Sweetness

Been learning 3d modelling in Blender for a little while now.  I tried to start learning it twice before, but just anything at all seemed incredibly difficult.  The whole interface felt foreign.  But this time I finally got past the initial roadblocks of the interface and completed a couple tasks.  After that there is still a ton to learn and it can be quite difficult to do what seems obvious, but it’s so awesome and powerful that the fun factor seems to be enough to keep me interested.  I’m thinking about starting a youtube channel just to document my progress.  I’ll post a link here if I decide to do that.  If not I’ll post a video soon.

Blender

Feel tired and cranky today.  Not enough sleep and definitely not enough food.  Being hungry is a surprisingly good motivation for programming though.  When all I want is the time to pass working seems to be a great default, time-killing activity.  I even finished up version 1.0 of the database administration script that I was creating.  Think like phpMyAdmin except you have to create a file that explicitly chooses the database and you get to choose how you want each datafield displayed: none, checkbox, textarea, dropdown list populated from another table(you explicitly select the table, id field, and display field), time of day (converts timestamps into hour/minute/ampm and back), or a textbox(default).  It all works really well and you can make a whole new page that edits a database table in just a minute or two.

Dieting, Programming

Yeah, let’s try this again.  If you try enough times you might eventually succeed, right?  Also using that concept for a diet right now.  Trying again.  With all the practice it should come closer and closer to working.  I’ll keep you updated! *fingers crossed*

Dieting

Have you figured out who I’ve done a lot of work for yet?  I’ll give you two guesses.  This piece I was just as proud of as the rest, not because it was complicated, but because I thought it looked professional.  I guess that’s what Flash is there to help you accomplish.

1week_sale

Flash

This was a prototype for side-hanging banner that originally was supposed to promote antique rugs but kept growing/changing as time went on.  It eventually got forgotten and just left as it is.  Still seems like the idea could be useful.

antique_banner

Flash

This was a project I didn’t really want to do.  It was totally a rip off of someone else’s site.  They were under construction and never finished their page, but I felt like a sell-out.  Also, I didn’t know how to go about the effect, so I was convinced I wouldn’t get it down or it would take me a year.  Sadly, I had it done in a day and my boss was very happy.

rug_flippin

Flash