My new website, stillinbeta.com has just opened it’s doors. This site will be much more tech-oriented, and probably written in a completely different tone. It will focus more on tutorails and reviews than the rambling I tend to do here.
This may be the last post to this site for a while. I may come back here (I renewed the domain, mine till 2008), but I’m using this site to keep my projects and host my stuff.
To teach myself PHP and MySQL, I have decided on a project to accomplish over Thanksgiving break. I will actually get around to writing the Conserve School Community Council database. I will be migrating this over from the wretched Filemaker. Or at least I’ll complete a working implementation. I’m unsure as to wether I will be able to actually convert the school, but I believe that this will teach me quite a bit about modern web design.
I decided to use a development framework to write my application. As a framework, I chose to use Code Igniter. I chose this for a couple of reasons:
I’ve been reading through the APIs, and it looks like the engine will be pretty easy to use. I haven’t started work on this yet (I am exeptionally busy this week), but I think that this will not be very difficult. PHP is not a very distinctive programming language, and I am not thinking of doing anything that will be very difficult.
I may have to learn some CSS, but that will be about it.
Conserve School’s Computer Science Club is a small organization that meets almost never in a small conference room. We have a small network set up using snakes of ethernet cables tied together with pull ties. The network The room is littered with USB cables and strange peripherals. It is a stereotypical geek den.
As with all networks, we have a naming scheme. The other head of the CompSci club and I chose to name our boxen after characters from the comic User Friendly. The comic deals mainly with the trials of a small ISP called Columbia. It’s a very geeky comic strip and was thus an obvious choice for a naming convention.
Our central switch is an old 3com Superstack. It’s not a terribly interesting switch, but it has the range of features you’d probably expect from a higher-end switch. The switch is named Mike after the network manager from UF. As the 3com is a simple switch and does not provide any routing functionality, we use a Smoothwall box named Sid. This box provides a firewall (rather unnecessary behind our corporate firewall), port forwarding to within the Comp Sci room, and DHCP for the computers within.
We have three fully functional workstations on the network. One is a custom built model named Erwin. The other two are midrange Dell Dimensions named Miranda and Pitr. All three of these machines run Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, the latest stable release. In addition, all of the machines are constantly running Folding@Home, a distributed computing project that deals with the folding of proteins. At current, all three of these machines have local logins, but we hope that we will get LDAP support soon.
The compsci room also has two servers, Smiling Man and Pearl. Smiling man is an old Dell server inherited from the school. It’s quite old, but it is still highly functional. Pearl is a rack mount server, and very, very noisy. There do not appear to be any easy controls to turn down the obnoxiously loud fans, which are loud enough that people in the room need to raise their voices when it is turned on. Pearl will eventually be the LDAP and file server, and Smilingman is simply a testbed server that sits quietly in the corner.
This is a basic layout of our network. Expect more posts from here regarding specific issues that come up within this network. I plan to base a significant part of the future blog around IT, so this network may become highly relevant.
I’ve been using Del.icio.us for a long time now. After losing my bookmarks one time too many, I finally got fed up and started tagging all my posts. Since them, I have accumulated 185 bookmarks. All of these posts are easily searching using magical metadata tags.
On top of all this, however, del.icio.us has one of the simplest and most elegant interfaces I have seen in a long time. To get to your homepage, you go to del.icio.us/yourusername. To browse your bookmarks by tag, the address is del.icio.us/yourusername/tag. Two tags? del.icio.us/yourusername/tag+othertag. Every page that is available event has an RSS feed if you need it.
Del.icio.us also has the obligatory social networking component. You can add people to your “Network”, which basically means when you go to your network page, you can see links they posted.
Overall, Del.icio.us is a shining example of a highly functional yet highly simplistic interface. And it does this all without really complicated coding: all the page load very quickly. The website is one of the few greats to come out of Web 2.0
A lot of us geeks see things that other people might not notice. Therefore, we enjoy the sight of certain things someone else might not care about. (This list is pretty arbitrary, actually. But I think a lot of geeks could agree on most of them.)
1. Every port filled.
All modern electronic devices have an assortment of ports on the back (or front) of them. For many people, these things are “magic boxes”, their functions are a mystery. However, every one of those boxes serves some purpose. And the more things plugged into it, the better. Having every socket filled, or achieving Zen for that device, leaves a feeling of a complete, fulfilled purpose.
2. Shiny, Pretty, Blinking Lights.
They’re everywhere. Probably almost all the devices you own have some sort of LED on them. There may be one, there may be many. But all together, they form a field of pinpoints of light. Like stars, but electronic and cool.
3. Wireless Access Points
The’re everywhere! But they are also often hidden, which makes finding them a treat. And when I find them, thanks to my n800, I have Internet!
4. 1337
Have you ever seen this number in some completely random place? It’s really, really funny. If you have a group of geeks (a gaggle?) then you will have a group of thoroughly amused geeks.
5. It Finally Works
This isn’t really specific to geeks, but after hacking at something for hours, days, even weeks… words cannot describe the feeling you get when the printer finally works or the program finally compiles. Complete and utter euphoria. It’s amazing.
Filemaker is my school’s database of choice. Pretty much everything that there could possibly be data about (short of grades) is stored in a giant, obnoxious, slow, Filemaker database.
If you aren’t familiar with Filemaker, it’s database software released by Apple. It basically allows people to easily (allegedly) create databases about pretty much anything. We use it for inventory, wellness class (our version of phys-ed), even whether people are on or off campus. We have an entire server dedicated to them.
And it is slow. Agonizingly slow. Unbelievably, mind numbingly slow. It can take 5-10 minutes to load the inventory. The problem lies in the fact that Filemaker was not really designed to be used over a multiuser database. It works relatively well to just use on a single user program. The networking system it uses, however, leave a lot to be desired.
I’ve been talking (to myself mostly) for a while about how nice these databases would be if they were done using PHP and MySQL like proper web applications. Recently now, I decided to get off my lazy bum and actually do some work in this department. So I did a basic Google search for PHP MySQL Tutorial, and followed the first post I found.
What did I find out? I’ll get into the technical details in a later post, but my initial impression is that this is really easy. SQL is almost a plain English language, and PHP seems no harder than any other language.
Walks in, looks at cobwebs, shudders
Looks at date of post below
Wow, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Yeah, I’ve been thinking of updating for a long time, but things happen and then there is something. It seems like this blog always gets shoved to the bottom of the stack of things to do. The ideas for blog posts However, all that is about to change.
A couple of my friends and I are all involved in a contest called an Iron man. This basically means that we all have to update every single day, otherwise we lose. The winner gets the pot from the buy-in.
Pretty soon, I’m going to be taking this blog in an entirely new direction. I’m going to buy a new domain name, which will eventually become my completely new Internet handle. It’s taking a while, because a handle has to be really carefully thought out. I’m thinking of something involving an abacus. Because abaci are just plain cool.
The website itself will stop being a sort of pseudo-personal mess and become more like a professional website like Coding Horror or Engadget (two of my favorite blogs). I’m probably going to keep this website, possibly even updating every once in a while(read: every 2 months, like now). However, I am trying to make the new website update consistently.
I am actually pseudo-considering (twice in one post… that’s bad) a career as a professional blogger. Despite the fact that this really isn’t feasable, I’ll probably get some good writing/research skills out of it. Hey, what have I got to lose?
I love guitar hero. I have ever since I first picked it up at
school. Unfortunately, I am unable/unwilling to shell out for a
PS2/PS3/Xbox 360 that would be required to play it at home.
Today, I encountered Frets On Fire. It’s essentially a Guitar hero
clone written in Python. Instead of a cool controller, you just use an
upside-down keyboard. The Fret keys are F1-F5, and Strum is the enter
key.
It sounds dumb, but this scheme actually works pretty well. However, my Wireless keyboard was a little too laggy, so I switched to one of my old USB ones.
When you first download the game, it only comes with three games, and a Tutorial by a guy named Jurgen. The tutorial is just silly.
I found two communities that have emerged around this awesome game: Keyboards on Fire and Frets on Fire.net. Both of them have song areas, and googling for fof song packs will get you more. There are also a lot of mods and themes running around.
I highly recommend you take a look at this. It’s really a lot of fun, especially for those of us who can’t be bothered to pay for software.
(BTW, sorry for the lack of updates. Blah Blah, Distraction, Blah Blah, I’ll try harder next time.)
I did it for the lulz.
