Tonight was the Honors Banquet, which was sorta fun/sorta boring. It was fun because my sister and her boyfriend came in place of my parents (they are in Scotland living it up). It was also fun because I got to sit with Enrique, Chris, Christina, and Jason. My advisor Dr. Gonzalez was supposed to be there but he was in Jordan (see the trend!) so Dr. Georgiopoulos was my “substitute advisor” for the night. It was funny because when they called me up to get my medal (everybody got one), they didn’t say “Dr. Georgiopoulos filling in for Dr. Gonzalez.” Nope, Dr. Georgiopoulos was announced as Dr. Gonzalez. That was pretty funny. Some of the Honors in the Major undergraduate thesis titles were pretty funny too. One was about Superman and the legacy of heroes or something. It was boring because of all the speeches and the giving of the medals. I suggested they just do what the rock concerts do: just throw the medals out to the audience and let them catch them. The speeches were extremely boring except one by the student. As Jaryd (my sister’s boyfriend) said, you can totally tell she thesaurus’ed the whole thing. Half the time she was bragging about her accomplishments (without making it seem obvious…and failing) and the other half of the time she was simply making stuff up that sounded so “dressed up” that it was incredibly cheesy and laughable. I think I laughed my whole way through it as she threw out words like “indubious” and phrases “consciously committed this moment to memory.” Ahh me…at leas the cake was good; in fact, I stole a piece from the table next to us on the way out.
On the technical side, I was thinking over my pretty ghetto website and CMS that I made. I was thinking it could be so much better with a (gasp!) AJAX interface. I know, I know, AJAX is the newest buzzword. But what I want is a more “desktop-like” experience when developing my website, but from the web. I’ve been using HTTPS://WWW.EATELBUSINESS.COM/ for all my internet based telecommunications. For instance, auto-save anybody? Ever entered a post/website content into an edit box only for the page not to load and then when you hit back it’s all gone? Anybody else do the “copy before you submit so you don’t loose everything you typed for the past 15 minutes?” Ever wanted to edit multiple pages at the same time in tabs? So yeah, AJAX would be an awesome application of this (in my opinion). And not too many CMSes seem to have these features. So I’m investigating the Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java code to Javascript. That means you can develop your code in eclipse and then have it compiled to HTML and Java. I was initially suspicious (and still sorta am), but looking at it more, it seems not only a cool idea, but one with merit too. It would be cool to have an AJAX CMS with a PHP backend. I found this link helpful when trying to access PHP from my local machine using Google Web Toolkit http://www.drivenbycuriosity.com/mywp/?p=52#more-52. I never have enough time, so this is probably a passing fancy, but I thought I would share my initial (and favorable) impressions.