24h-payday

Got my IntelliJ OpenSource license!

February 20th, 2018

Got my IntelliJ OpenSource license!

Thanks to the JenBrains folks. I got my license to IntelliJ Ultimate edition, this is going to help me a big time to deliver new code for StupidZombie!

Jumpstarting the project

February 14th, 2018

It’s been a loooooong time. Have several ideas for the project, will start coding and definitely plan to release sooner as well.

I’ts been a loong time

August 24th, 2013

I closed StupidZombie one year ago. A lot of things have changed since a lot since then:

  • I have a precious daughter and my older son is 6. Time travels fast..
  • Sun Microsystems is no more, Oracle took over. In the process they killed Kenai.com
  • JavaFX is now an API and not a separate language. That makes it easy to integrate with Java. Oh, and Swing is officially deprecated now.
  • I weight 35 pounds less and have finished 3 half marathons since then. Also just 11 weeks away from my first marathon
  • Several supported sites doesn’t exist anymore: VeneBlogs.com, To2Blogs.com. R.I.P

StupidZombie was my excuse to learn new technologies and put them to use; It served its purpose and now I feel it is time to pick it up and try new things, using it as a base to learn new things.

Some of the technologies / tools that I want to try now:

* Git (Yes, move over Subversion)
* Graddle (Yes, move over Maven)
* JavaFX (Yes, move over Swing)

So that’s it for now. Expect next post to have more substance.

–Jose

StupidZombie is getting a makeover after a long time

January 8th, 2012

After a long time I decided to come back to work again on StupidZombie; The last two years of my life I focused more on my well being and this project lost relevance after I found that only few people were using it and the WordPress program gave me everything I needed to get the pings working.

So the ‘Pinger’ code of StupidZombie will be no longer maintained and is now officially dead; Instead StupidZombie will be a collection of useful applications, all fun and easy to use.

I’m working on the first one of them so stay tuned, more details will be posted on the main website and this blog of course.

–Jose

Zombies in México: Distrito Mictlán

July 26th, 2011

Well, looks like Zombies are invading the world, not just the USA!. Look out in FaceBook for ‘Distrito Mictlán‘, looks like a pretty ambitious. I wonder when someone will help me to direct ‘Venezuela Zombie‘ one of these days 🙂

Now, comming back to StupidZombie, I’m working on a full migration to JavaFX; I’m kicking the tires and playing with some ideas so stay tuned for new code!

StupidZombie is comming back to life (OK, ok, will stay undead :-))

April 28th, 2011

StupidZombie is back!

Yeah, has been a long time since I touched the code of StupidZombie; One of the main reasons is that the program did (and still does) what I needed and there was no good reason to push it forward.

But things change, even for the undead 🙂

So this year I expect some things to happen, some more exciting than others:

  • Refactoring the code base to StupidZombie is easier to compile out of the box. Yes, that is right. The code base is small but I want it to be even more easy to download and compile. Well, also it is a perfect excuse for me to learn how to use Apache Ivy on a small project 🙂
  • JavaFX. Yes. StupidZombie GUI Swing based interface is ugly, TOO corporate. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping than Oracle do a proper integration with JavaFX and Swing so I can refresh a little the application
  • Improvements on the Kenai.com site. I’m waiting for Oracle to move the project to Java.net, until then no news is good news 🙂

And that’s it. No huge news but rather realistic deliverable for the project. Also I promise to put more updates on this blog, it’s been really a while since I provided updates on the app.

StupidZombie 1.1 finally released

October 28th, 2009

To all fans of StupidZombie, version 1.1 is finally out!. This release contains both important bug fixes, is faster and also adds new features.

Please download and enjoy.

José.

—-

A todos los fanaticos de StupidZombie, la versión 1.1 al fin fué liberada. Esta entrega contiene correcciónes importantes, es más rápida y también contiene nueva funcionalidad.

¡Por favor baje la nueva versión y espero que la disfrute!

José.

Working on bugfixes for 1.1

August 16th, 2009

Found more bugs and they are not pretty (well which bug is it ;)). So I’m still working on cleaning up all those bugs, making sure the application works as expected.

I think the 1.1 release is just one week away, so stay tuned!

Twitter support will not be ready for release 1.1

July 25th, 2009

The reason is that I found several usability issues while testing the twitter code, that also affect the other pingers. So rather to release new functionality at this point I rather focus on fixing this issue while improving the current user experience.

But don’t worry, release 1.2 is not as heavy as 1.1 and Twitter code is pretty advanced. I prefer to release more often than do a mega release, that is all 😉

Thinking ahead: StupidZombie 1.2

July 18th, 2009

Yeah, release of 1.1 is one feature away and I’m thinking ahead for the 1.2 release; This one will be more focused on GUI improvements than anything else, no more functionality. Besides profiling the application with Yourkit, I plan to polish the Swing GUI by using Swing Explorer.

A quick preview of what is coming:

Use Nimbus!

Nimbus is beautiful, but will require some customizations. Good thing is that is based on Synth and everything can be tweaked using UIManager.

		for (LookAndFeelInfo laf : 
			UIManager.getInstalledLookAndFeels()) { 
			    if ("Nimbus".equals(laf.getName())) { 
			         try {
						UIManager.setLookAndFeel(laf.getClassName());
					} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (InstantiationException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (UnsupportedLookAndFeelException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} 
			    } 
			} 

JavaFX GUI?

Very likely. Here I will try to come with something that looks totally awesome, less “Swingy” :). Still, the old GUI will be supported so you will have two flavors of it. Let’s see how that goes, but I expect it to be a combination of Swing + JavaFX.

More localization?

I’m thinking seriously to add more languages to StupidZombie. If the audience is global then it should, right?

OK, too much thinking, time to do some coding instead 🙂