I have been hard at work (in my spare time at least harr) working on updating 5 or more to get it into a much more playable state. I think I am down to 2 more bugs. One is a big pain in the ass and the other isnt too bad. Sometimes if you are able to fill the whole board and you get a 5 in a row RIGHT at the last second, it will go to gameover. I know what is wrong, I just havent fixed it yet.
The reason I haven’t is that I decided to get my mind off of it by making another Pre game. This one is much more recognizable, which is Simon. Yep, that game that you played with you were like 8, with the 4 buttons and you have to repeat the pattern. Anyways, it is in version 0.5.04 at the moment. I still have some things to work on it though. The pre does not seem to handle audio very well though. Almost as if it is a delicate flower.
Anyways, if you want to check out the updated game and simon, here you go!
Simon v0.5.04
Five or More v.0.7.25
Also, I do plan on doing some WebOs tutorials in a bit, so stay turned!
Marcel Palm Pre, Random Notes
Any regular readers of this blog probably took not that I went from posting one of two things here a week to posting nothing for about two months. Maybe I cursed myself by writing the article Why do our time estimates suck, because I am finally wrapping up a project where the estimations just went down the crapper. I did learn another lesson though about why estimations suck, and that is being on a project that its entire life cycle (IE, planning, development, testing, regression testing, etc) is a massive discovery phase.
This basically boiled down to those who were in charge of pulling the data down were not aware that what the client was asking was either a)something different or b) next to impossible given the dataset. No one knew it at the time, so everyone just found out as the project progressed. Luckily the blame of that was not on our plate, but it did affect our ability to get the job done in a sane manner. However, the project is “done”, so hopefully my schedule will go back to something more reasonable and I will be able to contribute more.
In the mean time, I did end up picking up a palm pre and actually got invited into their pre SDK development program. I have been messing with that and I have started working on a game called 5 or more. The gray pieces are “open spots” where you can move the colored pieces to. You have to have a clear path of open pieces when you move a piece from one place to another. Each time you move a piece, 3 more pieces will drop. Once you line up 5 or more of the same color, they will change into open (gray) pieces. Here are some pics of it so far:
5 or more picture 1
5 or more picture 2
Its pretty close to being completed. Once it is completed, I will be submitting it to the app catalog, so hopefully I will be able to be part of the initial wave of new apps 
.
In the future, I would like to start posting articles about developing for the pre, but I would like to get some more experience with it first.
Marcel Random Notes, java
Recently at work, I was approached by my boss and was tasked with estimating how long it would take to fix a list of bugs. I accepted and said I would have the estimation come end of day. Then I found out which project this was for. It was *THE* project. Every company has this project. It’s the project that no one likes working on. The codebase is horrible, poorly designed and could be described as brittle at best. The problem isn’t just the code looks bad, it is just that to fix a bug in here causes a rippling effect through out program.
Instead of offering a time estimation, my manager got something pretty much every manager hates to get. She got a list of what needs to be rebuilt and how long it should take. Almost everywhere you read, they say rebuilding an application should never happen. I can agree with this to a point. When developers use that word “rebuild”, they often use it like a child who just found their father’s gun in the closet. It can be dangerous and not treating this with careful planning and consideration, you will be rebuilding yourself right into a corner.
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Marcel Best Practices, Opinion, Random Notes Best Practices, howto
I love writing for this blog. It really wasn’t that long ago that I started taking it more serious and try to make time in my day to post new content. Whenever I post a new story, I check my stats within wordpress to make sure that the correct article was posted, see if things are getting recognized, etc. Usually, depending on the time of day/night, after the first halfhour/hour, ill get roughly 20 or so hits. After posting my last article at 11:30pm EST on a Monday, I followed my standard routine to check. I quickly noticed that I was at 250 hits in 30 minutes of posting. Automatically I thought ‘well something is wrong”, then I realized that I was getting a large amount of traffic from Reddit, as it apparently caught some attention there. Now that the time has past and Reddit has forgotten about me, so I wanted to do a “back to normal” article and show what you get whenever your story becomes popular on Reddit.
I remember back when I enjoyed trolling through posts on Digg, I would always get offended if someone blatantly posted on article there to get hits. “They just want ad revenue!”. Other times, I would click an article and get the ‘bandwidth exceed’ message. “Bandwidth exceed” was at least a sign the server didn’t crash, sometimes it would just crash the server. I use GoDaddy, so I wasn’t too concerned about that, but still. Here is how all these things turned out, before and after.
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Marcel Opinion, Random Notes
How many times have you hopped into Flex’s source code only to see the modifier “mx_internal”? No public, private or protected, just mx_internal. It is everywhere in there. But what is it? Turns out, according to Adobe, it is a namespace used to flag functions and properties within the framework that may change in future releases. Obviously, since they might change, Adobe, with all its motherly goodness, hides these properties and functions from us behind this namespace. This does not mean we cannot access them though. We just have to jump through a few small loops. This article will go over how and when to use mx_internal, but also what to be careful about when using them.
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Marcel Best Practices, Flex, Opinion, Random Notes Actionscript, Flex
