Thoughts from the underground

Espero que todos estan muy bien…un abarzo para todos para esta navidad..Esperamos que estan navidad este llena de risa y de familia…

I wanted to get into iPhone development but it was a little hard to even get the environment needed to develop. The biggest issue was the need to develop on a Mac….well in Q1 of 2010..you will be able to develop iPhone apps with flash cs5…recompile the same code and use the resulting swf for the mobile Droid OS..for Blackberry, etc…That is pretty awesome…Check out a tutorial at IPhone App..

You can also build augmented reality apps..This stuff is really cool…again same site for the tutorial AR App

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I was going to write a post about the USC season and specifically about Pete stubbornness and favoritism towards certain players.  Of course I have been screaming about McKnight and Barkley for as long as I can remember..Then I read these columns and I thought…”These guys have been reading my emails and my blog”

Commenting on Carroll

Colleague could see the fall of Troy from months away

Both are respected columnists….

The main problem is the staff….Pete has surrounded himself with yes men. His staff is weak and inexperienced. It has been since the end of the 2004 season..it just got more and more inexperienced…The Trojans play more and more like an NFL team. They play for field position..The empire is defiantly crumbling right now…Empty seats at the last game…empty seats expected at the bowl game….All we need if for recruits to notice…If there are no changes to the staff with experienced coaches…this will be the beginning of the end. Sad really…but what he buildth….He tears down…

P.S

Ucla game…bruins should get over it..Their coach called a timeout after USC took a knee. That means I do not accept a knee and I wish to keep playing…USC did just that.

Let’s kick off ucla week with an old video classic….All my fellow Trojans will know the chorus of this song…FIGHT ON!

All the credit goes to www.trojanfb.com for creating the video…

Fitting that the year USC’s strangle hold on the Rose Bowl in the Pac10 is over…the Pac10 representive will be decided in the state of Oregon….where USC is 0-4 in their last 4 games in Oregon.

In some states it is happening folks. The IEEE reports that the Principles and Practices Exam for software engineering will become available in 2012. Thte states that have requested the exam are Michigan, Missouri, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas and Virgina. No California yet. Only software engineers offering their services directly to the public would need to be licensed.  If you work for a sizable company where the company’s resources can aborb any liability…you will not need to licensed.

Only software projects that affects the health, safety, and welfare of the public would require oversight by a licensed engineer.

With anyone that can write a line code calling themselves a software engineer I welcome licensure for software engineers. I am hoping this starts to filter out programmers from software engineers.

http://www.todaysengineer.org/2009/Sep/Software-PE.asp

Wow…I was really surprised as to the game between my Trojans and the cardinal. I never really thought I would see a performance like that from a Carroll coached team. The team looked lost..and confused. It looked as though they … gulp..gave up. I have a hard time writing that considering we have come to expect from a Carrol coached team. The team that would run on and run off the field. The team that would play hard all four downs….was simply going through the motions. Unfortunately I think that this falls squarely on coach Carroll’s shoulders.

It starts with coaching…I have been preaching for years that once the great assistents left after 2004 Carroll has not replaced them with quality coaches. I thought he made a step in the right direction this year with the additions of a special teams coach and coach Bates…sadly both have not performed well. I don’t know if Bates is even allowed to install his offense. I said he would learn and run USC’s offense. What is USC’s offense exactly? It seems that Norm Chow took that with him when he left because we have been searching for an indentity on offense ever since.  Most of  USC’s staff is home grown or were not well known when they got the USC job. Another sad note is that most of the outside hires Carroll has made lately have been NFL guys. I am of the opinion that the NFL and the college football are very different and you must learn to think differently. Carroll has not hired a coach with a strong college background since Tim Davis. He had inexperienced coaches at the most important positions…Offensive and Defensive cooredinators. Seto has never been this position. He has risen thru the USC ranks from a grad assistant to defensive coordinator. John Morton came to USC as a wide receiver coach and got the title as offsensive coordinator…having no play calling expereience. Bates called plays for one year in the NFL. So, who can Carroll turn to to help right the ship? He is too busy teaching his coaches how to be coaches.

All this trickles down to the players. Carroll has lost his way and forgot the mantra that gotten him where he is.” The best player plays”…this has not been true since 2004. Yes that long ago. It was masked by the succeess but Carroll has been playing favorites since then.  Please explain to me what McKnight has ever done to earn the starting job? I am not saying he has not grown somewhat into the position…but he was given chance after chance. It used to be that you would tell a great player..if you mess up there are other great players ready to take your spot. That is not the case anymore and McKnight is a glaring example. Fumble after fumble….missed block after missed block.(McKnight missed the block on the Barkley fumble on Saturday)…yet no benching….However, Carroll’s most blantant example of favorite players has to be Barkley. Carroll has been completely unfair to all the quartbacks including Barkley. I said before…an 18 year old …fresh out of high school should NOT start at the most important position on the team. He is too young to read the complex defenses that will thrown at him. He is adjusting to college life, being away from home, etc….I am not saying that Barkley has not performed well this year. The Ohio state game showed what a great quartback he can be. I just do not think he should start. He should be red-shirting..learning the game and learning to adjust to college life. Carroll put a tremendous amount of pressure on him…then conpounded it by saying that he is playing as well as anyone has ever played at USC…why make that comment? I am not blaming any of this on Barkley. I hope this experience does hurt his confidence in the future. I think he could be one the best if the best QB in USC history. I just think his coach has not put in the best position to succeed. Corp played terrible at UDub…no doubt. But he was prepared horribly..not given much of chance…In the fourth quarter Carroll had an INJURED Barkley warm up….How bad has Barley played in the last couple of games….He was responsible for 4 turnovers last saturday. Ill-advised passes, over and under thrown balls….Has anyone been warming up on the sideline when Barkley is struggling?? In the end the message is clear…some players cannot play poorly. You are given one shot to justify more playing time. Other players are given as much time as needed to justify their playing time…Their are two standards….I think the players see it and no longer believe the matra Carroll says but does not believe in himself.

Some people have asked about the basics of web development. I put together a quick overview. It is not the prettiest or the most complete. It is just a quick overview. I will try to work on it as time permits.

http://juanmchavez.com/WebDevelopment.php

Nevertheless, it gives you the basic idea. Some quick links on how to get started

1) Hosting:
This broken down into 2 types. Microsoft and Linux. They support different programming languages.

Microsoft:

1. ASP  – VB Classic and C# – .Net
2. PHP
3. MSQL
4. MYSQL

Linux

1. PHP
2. Ruby On Rails
3. Java
4. Python
5. ColdFusion
6. Perl
7. MySQL

GoDaddy.com offers hosting for as little as $7/month..That is about $84/year. When you buy hosting you can buy a domain for $1.99/yr

It is a great way to have a platform to learn and try new languages. You just need notepad to code. Godaddy provides an FTP to upload your code.You can also get free IDE such as Eclipse and Netbeans.

http://netbeans.org/

http://www.eclipse.org/

or you can buy cheap IDE software on Ebay or http://oem-share.com/

I have purchased from both and had great results

To try PHP development…go to http://www.wampserver.com/…you can get Apache, PHP and MySQL for free..

What about open source projects to work on??? These are projects where you can start from an existing project.

sourceforge.com – mostly java and php prjects

http://www.codeplex.com/ – .net open source projects.

Try your coding skills at topcoder.com

According to the IEEE computer society the top 3 programming lanagues in demand are

1. Java
2. C#
3. PHP

I know this lacks a little in details…please feel free o ask for more details about any particular topic.

I had the privilege to work for a company that practiced the very definition of software engineering. We were exposed to the complete software development life cycle.  I also had the honor of working with and learning from  some very intelligent senior software engineers.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for my former manager. I would really like to use him and his approach to software engineering and software management as a template for my career. He had a pet peeve about calling ourselves programmers. I can still see him now pounding his fist on his desk whenever one of us called ourselves a programmer. He insisted that anyone can write code but a software engineer understands the SDLC and the core principles of software engineering.  That has always stuck in my head. More so when I started to develop more complex web applications with different programming languages on the web platform.

Programming languages are  tools that implement and adhere to the core fundamentals of object orientated software development. Programming languages for the  web platform are no different. I started with web programming in 1998 and back then object oriented design for the web was unheard of…not anymore. As more software goes to the web the programming languages become more and more like traditional object orientated languages. If a software engineer understands the fundamentals of software engineering he can easily pick up any of these languages.

That is why I have been surprised as to potential employers requiring tests on specific frameworks or programming languages in order to gauge the knowledge of the potential employee.  I recently took two tests as part of my application process and I really did not understand the point. Before anyone assumes that I am complaining because I bombed the tests….the first test was on .Net 3.0 and I got called for my second interview the next day. So apparently I performed well on the test. The second test was on ColdFusion MX 7. I was told at the time I scored the highest on the test.

However, I do not think they were anyway true measures of my skills or talent as a software engineer. Questions such as “What component would you use if you were presenting a user with a calendar” or “Name the upgrades from ColdFusion 6 to Coldfusion 7″ do not tell the hiring manager anything about my abilities as a software engineer.  With these types of questions I would fail a “CNext” test and I worked with that framework for 11 years.

In the end, I find it ironic that people are looking for “Software Engineers” and trying to screen them out with these tests especially in the web development. The web is still the wild wild west..with new frameworks and programming lanagages coming out every year. But all these still follow the core fundementals of software engineering..So I would think that hiring mangers would want to hire someone that understands this and can quickly learn the tools (programmin lanagues) rather than a “programmer” that can become obsolete as his programming lanaguge of choice becomes obsolete.

Last weekend I participated in the muddy buddy even with my younger brother Frank. He is 14 years old and barely made the the cutoff in terms of age. The last time I was in the muddy buddy was in 2002 with my other younger brother  Cesar. He was 24 at the time. The MuddyBuddy event is a 6-7 mile course. It consists of a team of 2. One starts on the bike and one starts running. There are 5 points where you do an obstacle course and switch. The runner becomes the biker and the biker becomes the runner.It ends in a crawl through a mud pit.

It is alot of fun. This year has been tough. Alot of challenages have presented themselves. But I must admit doing the event with Frank was fun and took my mind off of things for a couple of hours.  I was a little nervous about Frank doing the event with me since it can be tough to complete but Frank is a trooper. My partner last year quit and backed out at the last second. My partner this year got run over by a car. In steps in Frank.

I have been through alot with Frank. I still remember him hiding behind my legs at the first cubscout meeting. I always tell the story of taking Frank and the scouts camping when they were young and it being so much work. Now when I go camping with them…I simply ..”Frank set up camp”.. He is amazing at it. My wife will not go camping unless Frank goes.

I can still remember Frank not wanting to run in soccer…and now this year he was on the waterpolo team. A  tough sport..and he did great. Now he is my muddy buddy. I was as happy doing the event as I was proud of Frank…It was the first of many events for Frank and I….I can only hope.