Aptana, the Ideal IDE for Drupal and Web Development

By Dean Chen | Published: March 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

An Introduction

I’ve tried many IDEs from easier to use IDEs like Adobe Dreamweaver to more advanced IDEs like Zend Studio. I’ve used Dreamweaver for more than 5 years, only coder view for its code coloring and FTP integration. Although the HTML from Dreamweaver’s designer view may be satisfactory for simple HTML pages the code it generates quickly becomes unmaintainable with quirks such as poorly nested tables, empty <p> tags along with the addition of PHP, Javascript and custom CSS for cross browser compatibility.

After gaining experience with Eclipse while developing Java applications I realized that Dreamweaver is woefully inadequate for development, missing simple but key features such as inline code checking(think grammar checking for code syntax), code highlighting(for quickly locating the start of a loop or to easy distinguish parenthesis in a complicated if condition) and version control integration(requirement for larger projects). Another problem is that Dreamweaver isn’t supported in Linux I would argue is the best operating system for development due to the fact that it better matches the production environment and that open source projects such as Apache, MySQL, Eclipse and Git are faster and more stable on Linux.

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An Analysis of Obama’s Tax Proposals

By Dean Chen | Published: January 19, 2009 | 3 Comments

Tax Mess

The Brookings Institute, one of Washington’s most respected think tanks, has a very informative page on Obama’s and McCain’s tax policies(McCain’s policies aren’t of significance for obvious reasons). Obama is officially going to be our president today, so it’s about time I’ve fully analyzed his policies and adjust my behavior accordingly. To my surprise, his policies are reasonable and is potentially extremely beneficial, financially, to my family(and most American families). Although I have to reiterate that my criticism of Obama was mainly based on the misleading messages of the Obama campaign in addition to the biased role that media played.

The Obama Administration’s newly introduced policies are mostly innovative and prudent, I’ve listed below the ones I felt will make the greatest impact on everyday Americans.

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Graduation Speech

By Dean Chen | Published: June 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

Colbert Graduation

Good evening everybody.

As I stood in front of our graduating class this morning, something hit me… I’ve never seen half of you before, and don’t know the names of the remaining three quarters. That leaves the only 1/8th (for those of you who failed algebra) of our class, most of whom, I know and love. My first reaction was that my worst fears have been realized… that Scientology has infiltrated our graduating class in attempt to turn all of us, even the females, in to Tom Cruise. Thankfully, Mr. Finnochi assured me this was not the case and that you all belong here.

Understandably, I was in a pickle this afternoon as I was trying to write something that would appeal to the ENTIRE class, half of which I didn’t know existed till a few hours ago. But soon it hit me, everybody has had problems at Cross these past four years, even me, the epitome of perfection, so perfect that I’m often asked that if I’m human or not. Most of these problems range from getting yelled at by Mrs. Sherban Cline for being in the hallway during class time, to getting suspended by Mrs. Sherban Cline after she found out that you don’t have a pass. Note: I only had experience with the former and the SECOND part of the latter. On a more serious note, not that my previous statement wasn’t serious, we’ve had a lot to deal with these past few years at Cross, especially this year, with college application and/or job hunting while making sure all your graduation requirements are met.You’ve no doubt also had to deal with problems at home involving angry parents, relatives, friends, and dead pets. I know your parents and teachers are proud of you for making it this far, and you should be proud of yourself, so you can give yourself a big hug at this moment if you wish….

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National Honor Society Speech: Scholarship

By Dean Chen | Published: June 27, 2008 | 1 Comment

National Honor Society

Good evening students, parents, teachers and guests, I will be occupying the next 3-6 minutes of your life by speaking about scholarship.

I imagine a scholar to have been well privileged grey haired old man who spent the majority of his time in a dark, secluded, silent, fire-lit dungeon, surrounded by thousands of barely legible hand written documents in alphabetical order, painstakingly filtering through the potentially erroneous works of others.

The pursuit of scholarship is a much different experience for modern students. We sit in our messy, air conditioned rooms, with Sparknotes, Google search results, GMail and countless ringing AIM chat windows littered across our computer monitors, and iTunes blasting music to our stereo in the background, providing a symphony of sounds that would drive most adults crazy. Every weeknight was a journey, a journey filled with Shakespeare, LOLs, derivatives, OMGs, regression analysis, ROFLCopters, red blood cells and the realization that Sigmund Freud will just have to wait because it is too late in the night (or morning), or when everyone signed off of AIM and GMail.
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Bear Stearns BUYOUT, not BAILOUT

By Dean Chen | Published: March 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

Bear Stearns

There has been much discussion about buyout of Bear Stearns by J.P. Morgan. CNBC has a video that pretty well sums up many people’s perception that the Fed showed preferential treatment towards Wall Street over the individual citizens amid the economic crisis. The media has a knack for revving up emotions for the sake of their ratings and I find its focus on the Bear Stearns deal especially unnerving. The media wants you to believe that the Fed negotiated the BSC deal in order to cover Wall Street’s ass, by using 30 billion dollars in your tax money to “bailout” BSC. When I see these reports I often find many small but significant details left out.

First and foremost, BSC was initially sold to J.P. Morgan at $2 per share, at the urging of the Fed. J.P. Morgan officially announced today to raise the bid to $10 in order to make the transaction smoother by gaining some shareholder support. Even then the 6 month stock price chart gives you a pretty good idea of how cheap BSC is being sold at; the stock price hovered near the hundred. Bear Stearns, its executives and employees are losing a majority of their wealth by going through with this deal. About 30% of the BSC is owned by Bear Stearns employees and I’d bet that no employee is happy about their investments and savings taking the huge dive evident in the charts.

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