Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:46:16 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Been thinking about my career lately with regards to what I'm doing and where I'm going.
As I've always done, I've been keeping my CV and portfolio out there - making sure that the relevant people and agents have access to them so when the opportunites arise, and when people consider me to be 'worthy' of entering the games industry I'll join it.
Things have been hotting up lately, what with the recent job offer from that company in London and I think I'd be fairly happy if I were to get a games position by the summer.
I had a conversation with somebody today who's opinion I should probably respect when it comes to me 'being ready side of things. It probably didn't do my ego a lot of good but he said some things which made me happy about the relative state of my portfolio and the chances of my succeeding in the positions that I would like to do.
So, I've decided to let that happen - I'm going to let this person show me where to go, see what opportunities are available and if something comes along that I like, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it and deal with what's left of my lease and DriveWorks when it comes to it :)
It should be interesting what I end up doing over the next few months, it would be nice to have a blog of the months preceeding my joining of the industry I've been aiming for for the pas six years.
Stay tuned for some exciting stories about interviews and rejections ;)
Friday, January 19, 2007 11:16:55 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
While I may have misforgivings about how dasBlog does certain things, I will hand it to the dasBlog team that the blogging engine is not only very powerful but appears to have a very nice API.
It is with this in mind that I am now writing a presentation layer as part of the main application that drives the rest of this site so I can maintain my standards compliancy(it's become a bit of an obsession for some reason) and keep my constistent theme.
Once I have done this, I may consider refactoring it for public consumption for those wishing a more themeable dasBlog. Because I'm making no modifications to dasBlog itself it can be considered as a plug-in on steroids :)
Thursday, January 18, 2007 3:12:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Holy crap!
The wind just blew the roof off the building next door, we were watching it shake about and then it lifted off and slammed into the wall and window where we were watching from. It then slammed into the building next door where the builders are working and it narrowly avoiding smashing through the window where they were stood.
Man that's intense.
Our phone lines are now down, as the roof also brought them with it. The lights have stopped flicking now though, as it was the roof next door that was causing our power issues, so we're safe with power for now.
I've tapped into a nearby wireless network, they must be another step back in the line before it reaches our building. So I have some weak internet for checking the trains for my trip tonight. The viaduct across Thelwall has been completely shut down so I'm probably in for a miserable journey as commuters try and find alternate ways home. (If the trains are still running!)
The power will hopefully remain on until then.
I feel sorry for whoever has to stay here tonight(probably Ian). Because we have no phone lines, our alarm system is locked down until an engineer comes down(or something like that). No alarms means no security, means insurance badness.
Thursday, January 18, 2007 1:04:12 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Some of you have noticed that the blog history on the right hand side is weirdly formatted in contrast with the neat left-align of all other content menus.
This is not something I'm currently able to do anything about without writing my own macro for generating the history menu.
The reason for this deficiency is that the dasBlog macro which generates the table, does just that. It generates a table, with inline style!
I thought the whole point of theming was that a theme provided the style, but obviously this is not the case. I have a great respect for Scott Hanselman, having been to one of his talks at TechED, but whoever wrote the code for generating these menus - shame on you.
Of course dasBlog also doesn't comply with XHTML standards, in either content body (hard to do) or even in those macros themselves, so I already know it's not perfect - you may have also noticed I don't have the standards menu to the left hand side of this page either.
I just feel they should have approached the design of this slightly differently. I know that the majority of people out there just use the default themes, but I'm not like that. I like consistency, it makes me happy and I've taken great care in making sure the theme for the blog matches that on the rest of the site.
Foiled by somebody elses mistake. It's always the way :)
Thursday, January 18, 2007 11:04:49 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Or possibly not.
I was called last night from a company based in London asking me if I wanted to come down for a job interview. As I'd already purchased tickets down to Reading this weekend and next weekend is cancelled because DriveWorks needs working on, on the surface it seems ideal that we conduct that interview this weekend.
Ah, not so. I'd unofficially decided that this weekend was going to be cancelled as well, because DriveWorks needs working on (anyone notice a trend here?) so I hadn't made any plans with the powers that be to take the day off work necessary to use these tickets.
So, I don't lie - its not in me, so the idea of taking a day off work under false pretences doesn't hold water. I rang my boss this morning who is currently in Reading and asked him for the day off and told him I was going for the interview.
I consider my current bosses to be friends and I really love the working environment, the amount of leeway given to me and their general attitude towards making DriveWorks a better place us to work. I'm not going to spring surprises on them like this, because it's just plain unfair.
I certainly hope they aren't offended by me at least scoping the place out - games development is somewhere I really want to be, and it's somewhere I've wanted to be for coming up on six years now, and while I'm maybe the happiest employee on the planet, I can't stop a fear of change stop me at least window shopping at whats out there.
It will take a lot to move me away from where I am currently, but it shouldn't stop me at least looking if opportunities come along?
So what do people think? What would do you tell your current employer if you had an impromptu interview like this and needed time off work?
Personally I think it's never worth lying, because when it catches up to you it always bites you in the ass.
Monday, January 15, 2007 12:01:09 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Ahem yeah, what an overused word, but in this modern world of *gasp* browser competition it's starting to become more relevant.
I've pretty much finished putting content in, although I'll be re-writing vast tracts of it as I get time as much of the text is just placeholding to look pretty.
Now I'd like to complain about IE6, IE7 and Firefox.
Firefox: XSL transforms - why oh why do you read the <xsl:output> tag to work out what you're going to do with the transformed document? In what world does that make sense? If I'm outputting valid XHTML and my output type is XML, I expect you to render the XHTML, not get confused and fall over because the output document doesn't match your expectations.
IE7: max-width? Who decided to leave this out of the product? I mean really - one of the most useful CSS tags for making sure that my content doesn't escape the safety of the enclosure I've given it and it's not in IE7. My fix is included below the IE6 complaint.
IE6: margin: auto; - Why do you not do this? After resizing my images, I wanted them centered and the only way to get you to do this was to make an extra div with text-align: center set and place the image container inside that. What is up with that I ask you? I thought that when I turned CSS compliancy mode on with the XHTML DOCTYPE you might possibly, just possibly become CSS compliant but I guess I was just asking too much.
Resizing and Centering Images without losing CSS or XHTML compliancy.
First off, my CSS for centering the images and text underneath them:
div.ImageContainerIEHack
{
/* NOTE: This also has the effect of centering the image and text inside the div too, so that's ok. If I didn't want that, I could override text-align in the next div. */
text-align: center;
}
/* This is the centered div which holds the image to the center */
div.ImageContainer
{
margin: 20px auto 20px auto;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
width: auto;
}
div.ImageContainer
p
{
/* Just center up and be small and black. */
color: #000000;
font-size: 10px;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
div.ImageContainer
img
{
/* This should conveniently be centered and look pretty. */
margin: 0px auto 0px auto;
border: solid 1px #0000FF;
/*NOTE: IE does not support this property, but I have Javascript in place to resize */
/*This is for those that are ultra careful and turn off javascript */
/*Let's just assume for a second here that those are the same kind of people that would be using a standards compliant browser :) */
/*Me? Well I use IE7 and leave javascript turned on - like 90% of the people out there. */
max-width: 400px;
}
This solution centers all my images and that's great, but of course in the IE browsers the images are not controlled by max-width, so I run a script when the page finishes loading which goes through and resizes any images which have escaped the max-width property:
This code goes in my XHTML header:
<!-- My Glorious Javascript. Ho Ho Ho. -->
<script src="../Scripts.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
This code goes in my XHTML body tag:
<
body onload="OnWindowLoad();">
This code goes in my javascript file:
function OnWindowLoad()
{
// Check For Availability
if( !document.getElementById ) { return; }
// Get The Main Content Div
var content = document.getElementById('RightContent');
// Check For Availability
if( ! content ) { return; }
if( ! content.getElementsByTagName ) { return ; }
// Get All The Images
var imgs = content.getElementsByTagName('img');
// Check For Availability
if( ! imgs ) { return; }
// Go Through Them All
for (var i=0;i<imgs.length;i++)
{
// If They Have A Class, Then Ignore Them
if (imgs[i].className)
{
continue;
}
// Is The Image Too Large?
if (imgs[i].width > 400)
{
// NOTE: This Value Is The Same As The 'max-value' Used In CSS
// However, Due To The IE Team's Incompetency, This Is How I Get Around Their Lack Of That Property
// And Still Manage To Maintain Some Semblance Of Standards Validation..
// Resize
imgs[i].width = 400;
}
}
}
Obviously this code is specific to my stylesheet - it only looks for the images in my main body content div, and only resizes images which don't have an overriding tag.
In IE6 and IE7, this means that when the page first loads, the image still appears as its huge normal self, but that is quickly rectified once the page has fully loaded. If IE6 or IE7 has Javascript turned off, the user will get the big image - but that's a risk I'm going to take because it's such a rare occurence that anybody actually using those browsers is so security paranoid that they do that.
Note: In my version I've actually defined a function which adds multiple events to the window load event, as Dasblog(this blogging system) wants to register one of its own for no particular reason.
One of the alternatives to this is in the CSS itself, you can use some inline script which looks like this:
max-width:800px;
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth > 800? "800px": "auto" );
}
This however is awful, because it won't get validated, only IE understands it and it's an awful hack of what should be quite an elegant way of expressing style.
Below is an image which is about 1920x1200 in size, but has been trapped by the Javascript or CSS to behave itself:
A Big Screenie from Black and White 2
Sunday, January 14, 2007 8:00:00 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
So, I've moved house - to the somewhat more sensible domain of CodeOfRob.com, and from now on I'll be keeping my sensible entries here, along with my sensible projects and my sensible pages.
For those of you who are easily worried - rest assured I have not grown up and will shortly be doing something childish and amusing with the old domain of IReallyDontCare.com.
My next post will be on the inadequacies of Internet Explorer, and also the inadequacies of Firefox. If I was bothered about Opera I'm sure I'd find something to say about that browser - but I'm not. It is not a major player and I don't care whether it works with this site or not :).