JangChoe.name

I love Twitter. It’s good to my lazy nature. I’m more inclined to write short, random thoughts that pop into my head instead of writing gigantic posts. Anyway, I added a Twitter Tool to the sidebar so my blog actually seems like it’s getting updated.

For those of you that are stalking me, you can now follow my every move in my facebook, blog, and twitter since I synched all of them up. Or it’s just my way of being an attention whore.

I read this blog post about OO programming. In a nutshell, the article gives you an exercise to flex your OO-programming muscle. It’s not meant to be used in a real-life situation. But it’s a fun exercise for programmers to try to get their brains in shape.

Since my OO skills are not up to par, I decided it could be a fun thing to try. I haven’t finished my little project, but I already ran into some roadblocks.

The main roadblock I ran into was the constraint of not having more than 2 instance variables. That constraint was challenging to get around. The only reason was because of the other constraint: not having getters, setters, and properties.

For example, let’s say I have a class called Person. And that Person has a name, age, and phone number. So that would be 3 instance variables inside the Person class. But the rule says to have only 2. That’s no problem, I’ll just create another class called PersonalInfo and store those name and age values in there. And the Person class can have the one PersonalInfo instance variable and the phone number instance variable.

That’s fine and dandy, but that causes a problem. I have to use PersonalInfo class as a datastore. So I need to have getters and setters for that class. This is a problem in Java. In C# or C++, all you need to do is create a PersonalInfo struct. In JavaScript, you can store them in an object literal (maybe that’s cheating since all objects in JavaScript are pretty much object literals). But Java doesn’t have a struct. So what do we do?

If I was using Java, I would’ve probably created a class called Struct class that can store properties. I haven’t thought of how to implement that though. Luckily I didn’t use Java.

Overall, I think the exercise is fun way to expand your mind. It did get me thinking more creatively. There was another challenge I found that I might try out next. It was to use all the constraints mentioned in the article, but classes can’t have instance variables. No instance variables? That sounds hard.

The new version of Weather Channel Desktop is out. If you’re a MLB fan you can download their MLB version as well. Yes, I’m pimping my own software that I was a big part of. In fact, I even did the two download websites that I linked to. So go and download it and see what you think. If you find any bugs, it’s not my fault.

Today I tried canceling my Bellsouth account (to achieve one of my New Year’s resolutions), and they offered me naked DSL! It saves me $40 a month! So go and ask for naked DSL at Bellsouth. This is great if you don’t use your landline.

– Jan 16 Edit –

Never mind, I knew this was too good to be true. I’m only saving $20 a month. They require a $5 additional fee to make it work over the empty landline (BS). And the only DSL that is available naked is the $39.99 version. They say it’s because that’s the only speed that can handle being naked (more BS).

So I’m getting a slightly cheaper yet faster DSL. I wish I was a EE or telecoms guy so I can call him out.

To keep some of my resolutions, I decided to use this simple little web app. It’s called Joe’s Goals. It’s easy to use. So if you need to keep track of your resolutions, try it out.

So I’ve been using Twitter for a few days now. It’s pretty interesting. I kind of like it. Once I started using it, I can see how addicting it could be. Here are some uses I found for Twitter:

• It becomes a mini log for you. You can check Twitter and see what you did a few hours ago. Of course, you have to update Twitter constantly, so it can get tiring. But if you do update constantly, it can get useful.
• If a lot of your friends use it, you can follow their lives on it.
• Depending on who you follow, it can be used like a Digg or a StumbleUpon. People like Guy Kawasaki tweets interesting links.
• You can follow CNN and get news updates.
• You can follow your favorite candidate and see what’s he up to.
• You can probably follow other people to get the latest tech or product announcements.
• If you have a lot of followers, it can be used as a marketing tool.
• It can be used to broadcast messages to your friends at once.
• You can even use it to figure out where to buy a Wii.

And there are many more uses. I think I’m going to use it a lot more. But I need more people to follow. So sign up so I can see how annoying it can be.

I want everyone to go to http://www.twitter.com/ so I can see what all the hype is about. Twitter is like the little status updates in Facebook, but you don’t have to be confined to Facebook to use it. You have to be confined to Twitter.

Actually you can send status updates through your phone, email, IM, or using the Twitter website itself. Then you can choose to get your friend’s updates using Twitter, phone (don’t do this), or RSS feeds. It’s like a micro-blogging tool. You don’t need to write paragraphs and paragraphs of your life, you can just write a phrase or 2 to show what’s up in your world.

It sound stupid, but it has gotten a lot of press and lot of high profile people use it too. Since no one I know has Twitter, I would like to see if it does become addicting. It’s also an excuse for me to keep up with my industry’s fads and trends.

Since I owned Google stock since it’s IPO, I’ve been a lot more invested in Google products. I use google docs, google reader, gmail, google analytics, google adsense, google maps, and so on. I’m all about putting money into Google’s pocket. I was actually disappointed that The Weather Channel didn’t use Google maps for their interactive maps. But it’s okay since we’ve worked with google to offer something similiar called Interactive Weather Layers for Google maps.

It’s not like I’m selling out because I own 0.000000001% of their company. They make very nice and innovative products. Not only that, they’re free to use.

Of course I don’t do this with all the stocks I own. I own Pepsi (PEP) stock and I don’t even drink Pepsi. But I believe in their brand (Mountain Dew, 7-Up, Dr. Pepper, Gatorade, etc.).

I’ve been reading my billions of RSS feeds I subscribe to in google reader, and I noticed that they added a new feature. They have a top recommendation section. This helps you to find more blogs that relate to what you’re into. That’s pretty cool. More things to help me waste my time.

I changed from textpattern to wordpress. I also got a new theme for my blog. Why did I do this? Because Wordpress is more powerful. Also, there’s a huge community for Wordpress.

All of my previous blogs were hand-coded, I never used a blog engine before. I thought I did the correct research to choose the correct blog engine, but I was wrong. I used Wordpress and typepad, but never textpattern. I should’ve tried out textpattern before I committed to wordpress.

So now I’m on wordpress and I’m happy.