I always had always wanted to play around with new technologies. I still remember 4 or 5 years back when I left Crimsonlogic to pursue my own entrepreneur dreams… Those days I was so young and idealistic. Full of self-confidence and armed with an indomitable can-do spirit.
My boss asked me what were my plans…. and I told him I was going to dabble in open source. He asked me how I was to earn the money to feed myself, I said I have a little savings…
Man.. what was I thinking?
Anyway, within a really short time, money started to run out and I had to move on to do something that actually put bread on the table. (yah… some times in moments like this… I wish that I got rich parents… 
) Before long, I got so entrenched in doing small projects here and there, struggling for bread and butter issues that I was back where I started. Utterly busy and no time to really do what Iike.
Recently, finally have time to play around again. Just read my blog.
The frustrating thing about development is that there is a lot of trial and error. It is a pure hard work. Sure, you master some basic techniques like:
- Familiarity with a powerful IDE
- Code Debugging (through step throughs and watch list)
Then after you start feeling happy and confident, starting poking around on architectural issues like Design Patterns, Open Source Frameworks..
And after you have done with all that, you want to go really leading edge… and go tinkering around with all the “Not many people have tried before stuff”. Some guys like Chuen Yang will do things like google maps. Herry will start playing with Ruby N Rails….
Well, maybe it is now my turn to start moving into this area of leading edge stuff… and sigh… suddenly, I am confronted with a lot of trial and error. Unlucky maybe. Had to install Google Gadget Editor (GGE) on 2 computers and try out 2 different browsers, i.e. 4 combinations before finally got something working…
The 3 other combinations showed this:
The final one, running on an IE 7 showed this:
Man… just when I was about to give up…. hehe..
Anyway, good thing is, some programmers are pretty philanthropic. So, for those of you interested, can play around with
http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets
Man… really friendly. Got something out like this in 5 minutes.
Can probably send sms from my igoogle soon!