TuesdaySiren

My name is Conrad Tran. I am a programming addict. I have been developing software professionally for 7 plus years. Before that I spend endless hours programming for the fun of it. I still program just for the fun of it on my off hours.

I started out programming in Basic on a 286 then moved through Pascal, C/C++, Scheme, Perl, and PHP. My current active languages are Java, C#, and Ruby. Groovy is probably the next language that I will add to the list.

The picture in the header was taken while I was in a hotel during my visit to Can Tho, Viet Nam. I took it at around 5 AM. Standing on the balcony looking to the other side of the river.

I, like many programmers, started many hobby programming projects but rarely finished any of them. I once started programming a game and ended up writing my own graphic library just because the one that came with Turbo C++ was way to big for my taste. I think it was 2 MB. 2 MB is very large in the era when 360 KB disk was all the rave. Mode 13h anyone? How about Mode X? The followings are projects that I present to the world.

SleepTimer

A Windows application that allows the user to specify the duration of time before turning off the monitor. The user specifies the duration by selecting it from a drop down list. It is written in C# and run on .Net 2.0. I wrote this program after I got rid of my TV and use my computer to watch TV shows and DVD. For some unknown reason my computer won't turn off the monitor after it hit the idle time I set in the power management setting. I also missed the timer setting I used to have on the TV. I can't sleep unless the TV is on. I used to set the TV to turn off itself in an hour. I want a way to turn off the computer monitor after a certain period of time. As they say, open source project is the result of a lone developer wants to scratch an itch. This is my itch.

Learning Ruby on Rails

This is where I keep track of all my Ruby and Ruby on Rails' tibits. I mostly use it to keep track of all interesting blog posts I found on the internet. Once in a while, I also use it to write about things I learned while using the technology.