I had this big long journal entry in my head that I wanted to write, but at the moment I’m completely exhausted, so I’ll just give you the basic talking points:
* TAAG has had some major updates
– 11 New AOL fonts were added
– The code was optimized a bit, so it should run faster
– A preview page has been fully constructed with all of the fonts. Lets me know how this looks. I plan to spruce it up a little and maybe add a few more features in.
* I’ve been thinking it’s time to move onto my next application. I’ve got 2 ideas in mind that I want to implement. One is something easy that someone suggested through email, and the other would take a little bit of research and a little more time. Both would be online apps.
* I’ll probably be buying a new car within the next two weeks (maybe even on Sunday). My current plan is to get a Tiburon. I know it doesn’t have the highest ratings in everything (though it has gotten decent ratings and all the reviews I read were positive), but it looks awesome – yes, not a reason one should buy a car, but it’d be nice to drive something that actually looked cool.
Can’t wait to see what else you have in store for everyone. I thought about picking up a book on PHP today at Barnes And Noble, but I decided I don’t want to get into another programming language since it’ll most likely just be a bother. On TAAG the AOL font “TRaC” needs a little work, because it doesn’t place some of the characters on the last line correctly. Other than that I’ll probably use it a lot as I enjoy using ASCII art for a lot of my files.
Thanks for the heads up on the TRaC font. I edited it a little before I posted it up, but it appears to still be a little messed up. Though I think it’ll be impossible to completely fix. If you type in one letter repeatedly (say 10 times), the letter will eventually end up looking like crap. It’s a cool looking font, but the author didn’t set it up correctly, or it may be that it’s impossible to correctly align that font, so he/she left it flawed.
A book on PHP really isn’t necessary unless you’re going to be doing some heavy duty stuff or some database work. I actually don’t own one (though I may look into getting one). I just took a few tutorials online and use the online documentation to look up the information I need. I know what you mean about not wanting to get into another language though. I think sometimes I try to do too much stuff at once and then end up not doing much at all (example: last Fall I picked a book on LISP and Java EE, I’ve only read a little from each one).
Premature optimization is bad.
“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil” – Sir Tony Hoare
It’s an interesting quote, however, I think people misuse it. I always review the code that I write and optimize where I can without complicating things. Good design is important, and if you’re making major changes to your design when you optimize you obviously did not spend enough time planning out your design.
That is, however, not what I did when I optimized the code. I looked over things and noticed a few places where I was needlessly recalculating things. So I removed them or moved them out of for loops. This significantly sped up the generation time for certain fonts.
Personally, I believe any good software person should review their code after they write it. I don’t think anyone can write perfect code all the time on their first try. And if they claim to do that, they’re just full of BS. Reviewing your code and fixing up certain areas is a good policy. It’ll result in better performance and a better end result for the program user.
Interesting article on the subject:
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i24_fallacy.html