Maven - A great tool

Let's say you are going to make a project that uses MySQL as a database and Hibernate as a persistence tool. Importing the jars of those into Eclipse can be hard and challenging sometimes. At this point, Maven shows up and gives a hand. What Maven does is downloading the dependencies of the project automatically.

How can it do this? Well, when you create a maven project, it generates pom.xml file. You are going to write dependencies (the jars that our project needs) of your project into pom.xml and Maven will do the rest. In pom.xml, you have to write dependencies in a certain template which is:

<dependency>
<groupId></groupId>
<artifactId></artifactId>
<version></version>
</dependency>

But how can you fill this template? At this point Maven Repository saves our lives. You will search what you need for your project in that website. After choosing the version you want, you will see a page that shows the filled template for your pom.xml (for example: mysql-connector). Finally when you update the project, you will see that dependencies are added.

You can download Maven plugin to your Eclipse as applying followings:

• Go to Help->Install New Software...
• Paste this link to the Work with: area.
• And you're done.

Simple Advice From A Friend

Hello everyone (including Russian bots who are very obsessed with this website). I've found a job, unfortunately not in game industry. I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad about this.

In this period of time, I discovered the thing that hurts most of the people including me. I made this mistake and still making over and over again. And now I'm trying to warn people who makes this mistake. I'm telling this thing with a meme to make things interesting.

I will write a detailed post about my job-searching-and-finding journey later.

WHILE I WAS LEARNING RUBY ON RAILS

Tweevio - Last YouTube videos shared on Twitter

Some of you may know that I was working on a project called Tweevio. Tweevio is a website that shows last YouTube videos that are shared on Twitter. My goal was both develop my web programming skills and provide a website which people can discover new videos.

I couldn't work on this project for a long time. But I had completed the Javascript and jQuery part but it was aesthetically poor. I was free lately and I said to myself "It's time to go back and finish what you started". After this motivational moment, I decided to learn HTML and CSS. I was going to need those to make the web page beautiful. Before, my relationship with HTML and CSS was literally like this. I couldn't do I wanted to do. For that reason, I was getting bored quickly and unfortunately this was resulted in giving up. But this time I was determined. And here is the result:

Tweevio

Tweevio*

* Dropbox mirror. It may not work on every browser.

It's not a final version. It's very minimalist now and I want to add some colors to it. And there is a huge empty space on left-side. I don't know how to use the page efficiently for a website like this. Sometimes, page is not acting right because of the Japanese and Chinese tweets, I guess they occupy more space. Other than those, I think it is not a bad beginning for the web programming.

I had made a list of what I am supposed to do for this project. And it turns out that it was a very bad idea. Planning on the things that you don't know really good is not working as expected. It gives general idea but it can be misguiding at the same time. For example, I didn't know that every link in Twitter is converted to a short url which is start with t.co and for that reason I needed another plug-in to lengthen that t.co url.

While I was making this, these stackoverflow questions helped me a lot while I was working on this project.

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2222847/asynchronous-programming-in-javascript-without-messy-callbacks (Especially this one drove me crazy.)
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3452546/javascript-regex-how-to-get-youtube-video-id-from-url
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9827095/is-it-possible-to-use-jquery-on-and-hover
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11449175/how-to-access-ul-elements-created-by-jquery

PS: David Bowie rocks!
UPDATE (13.06.2013) Twitter upgraded its API to the new version. That's why currently Tweevio is not working.

AI in Computer Games Project

Hey everybody, this is the video of the AI project that I wrote about on previous post. The video says a little bit about what we've done. I hope you like it.

I survived!

In my last post, I mentioned how busy I am and how busy I will be. Today, I've completed all of the things that I mentioned in that post. And I feel very relaxed. I'm planning to write about this period and also I want to share my experiences about the projects I've made. But first, let me enjoy being free.

By the way, tomorrow will be the last day of my entire university life. I still can't figure out is it a good or bad thing.

Long Time No See - Part II

Generally this time of the semesters, I cannot update my blog. There are always documents to write and projects to finish. In this semester, I am very busy with senior project. I also have to make a project for AI in Computer Games class. I did a little bit progress on that but need to do more. There are five weeks to the end of the semester and I have to finish all of the assignments/projects/documentations.

And this means that there are few weeks for my graduation. This is kind of stressful because in the meantime, I need to find a job. I even got rejected from one of the companies that I applied. I really thought that I would be hired but after the phone conversation I feel that I'll be rejected. But anyway this is not the first, won't be the last. That was my first phone interview and I was so excited. Actually, this was a nice experience.

As I said there are tons of things to do and not many weeks. I believe that I'll pull it off. By the way the idea of graduation is so EXCITED, WOOHOO!!!

Sorry, in this post there won't be any images.