Owner: /dev/blog/ URL:http://www.greybeardinc.com/blogs/devblog/ Join Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:42:54 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: This disjunct, sometimes incoherent ramblings of a long winded Open Source enthusiast and freelance programmer. Site statistics:Click here
Automated Knights Tour using AJAX 2007-11-24 11:38:40 As a child I was, for a time, fascinated with computers. I even briefly entertained the idea that I would write a game in BASIC. The hours it took me to draw a slightly skewed line across the 16 color monitor of my Atari 800XL dispelled that notion almost as quickly as my prepubescent brain had latched on to it. Fast forward to college and while not a CS major, pursuing a Mathematics degree involved some logic and programming courses. When I say "pursuing" I mean barely attending classes and eventually dropping out completely to instead hitchhike across the continental US with all my belongings on my back and only a vague idea of where I was going. The bits of pascal and logic I did study did not stick with me except as a faint memory. Fast forward 8 years to 1998 and I have a wonderful daughter, a quaint middle management job at a box factory, and a renewed interest in the surging home computer phenomenon going on at the time. So with a brand new Windows 98 machine and a copy of Deite Read more:AJAX
, Knights
, Automated
Linux Audio Through a Home Theater System on the Cheap 2007-11-16 12:32:15 Few things in life are more pleasurable than stopping a telemarketer dead in their tracks. Telling a cable or satellite TV telemarketer that you don't own a TV is one way. And during the next few instants in which they scan their script to find a possible response you have the perfect window of time to interject a polite "thanks for calling" and hang up. Technically I DO own a TV, however it is relegated to monitor duties for a DVD player and Sony Playstation in my daughters room. It's not that I am against TV, I enjoy watching sports or sitcoms or whatever with friends. It's just that I don't miss it when It's not around. It's really like a deeply jaded apathy toward the whole media platform. Writer strike? Tell somebody who cares bud. I do however enjoy watching movies and listening to music, and while I am not an audiophile per say, laptop and computer speakers in my budget range are tinny at best. Read more:System
, Home Theater
, Cheap
, Audio
, Linux
Substitution Ciphers, PHP, and fond memories 2007-11-15 15:47:26 If elephants never forget, then I have mouse memory. As the years go by I strain at times to remember early childhood events. I do recall however a certain Christmas gift I received long ago, and when I consider how much fun I had with it I can't help but wax nostalgic. It was a book of ciphers and codes, and had instructions on how to create a multitude of substitution ciphers of varying difficulty. The excitement I felt when I scrawled an encoded message and rolled it up inside a hollowed out pen was not lessened in anyway by the fact that nobody would ever receive said encoded message, nor would anything happen when some time later the hollowed out pen was eventually fished out from the junk drawer to then be thrown away after the quick conclusion that it was broken. But heck, I was like 9 or something. When you are that age the day after tomorrow may as well be 50 years from now, and the reason for doing things need not make a whole lot of sense. At least when I was 9. As I reread Read more:memories
3 Screen Desktop. Sort of. 2007-11-13 14:01:48 In a perfect world a laptop with both DVI and VGA outputs can power two separate monitors. There would also be less of what appears to be an internationally organized effort to convince me to "impr0ve my manliness" via a constant stream of email. But back in the real world my Inbox is full of spam and my laptop (DELL Inspiron 9400) is limited to one connected monitor on either the DVI or the VGA output. Having convinced myself that a desktop split between the laptop's 1920x1200 17" LCD and a Samsung 21" 1680x1050 monitor is far to small a workspace to get anything done, I set out to see if it was possible to add another display to my setup. It just so happens I have a 21 " Westinghouse LCD that would be a perfect 3rd monitor, currently part of a dual workstation connected to an aging Gateway PC running Debian unstable. While I can't make this 3rd screen an actual part of my main desktop, I can gain control of the window manager running on it almost as if it was, giving me a 3 screen Read more:Desktop
Marketing for Dummies, AKA Programmers 2007-11-08 14:08:04 If I was not writing software for a living I am not sure what I would be doing, but it would not be sales. Having spent some time with friends shopping at car dealerships recently I shudder to think that in the process of promoting my own business I might somehow be associated with the underhanded hard-sell stigma often stereotypically associated with car sales. And though stereotypical it may be, the "what can I do to get you to buy a car you neither need nor can afford" pitch is indeed prevalent on a new car lot. With this hopefully avoidable possiblility in mind I set out to market my buisiness in the same way I set out to tackle a complex programming challenge: break it down to manageable pieces then address each in turn. Read more:Dummies
, Marketing
, Programmers
Linux 2.6.24-rc1-git8 on Debian unstable 2007-11-01 12:03:58 Since very early on in my professional career I have been afforded the luxury of running Linux
exclusively on my own hardware, and most of my administration experience and programming work has been primarily done with Linux or Unix like operating systems. Having dabbled in maybe a dozen or so systems, and supporting several as a part of work duties, I just really like the way Linux runs. My Linux work environment is fine tuned to the Nth degree of precision, though it does take the occasional fiddling to keep all the ants marching in the same direction. These days I have settled into a happy symbiosis with Debian
unstable. Possibly because I am a micro-managing control freak, or possibly because I am the kind of person who finds patching, configuration, and compiling a new kernel fun, I keep apt away from the kernel bits and build my own from kernel.org source.
select * from life 2007-10-31 23:00:46 If the English language is the Amazon, then SQL is a birdhouse. Or at least a well organized small town with streets in a logical grid arrangement. I love it. I don't claim to have traveled each of it's narrow alleys but I have traversed many a side street and it's longevity is not surprising once you let it into your heart.
PHP Frameworks, one guys approach 2007-10-30 16:13:28 Programming is fun, at least to me programming is fun. It's a series of puzzles inside of puzzles, weaved together into a tapestry of function. Or something like that. It's the thrill of each challenge met, each hurdle overcome that keeps me interested in programming. There are however quite a few ubiquitous qualities that web sites and applications with a moderate feature set share. Sessions, db interaction, form processing, you get the picture. I will confess that over the years I am guilty of re-inventing a wheel or two here or there. In retrospect I believe the experience and knowledge gained from doing so was worth the time, or at least the finer tuned re-invented wheel rolled more smoothly or fit more precisely to the circumstances for which it was created. As a software engineer I despise bloat, and detest dependencies, two positions that make designing a usable framework an interesting challenge.
New Site Addition: Forums 2007-10-26 15:42:01 I have noticed that writing blog articles is sort of like talking aloud in an empty room, but one that might be connected via sound carrying corridors to other rooms teeming with listeners. So on the one hand it's like listening to yourself talk (or drone on endlessly as in my case), and on the other it's possible that somebody is actually hearing whats being said. Regardless we have added a new site feature that is both a demonstration of what we do, and a place for anybody looking for advice or to discuss web programming can drop by and post their thoughts. Read more:Addition
, Forums
, New Site
Running Two Workstations from one PC 2007-10-11 14:26:14 Having run LInux (and X more specifically) on desktops and laptops for a long time, I have tried a lot of different configurations and setups. Recently however I found myself with a need for two workstations and while I had two sets of keyboards, 2 mice, and two monitors, I had only one PC (running Debian unstable). It took some trial and error but running multiple desktops from one not-so-new PC is both relatively easy to configure and surprisingly usable once set up.
Writing secure PHP code 2007-12-14 12:10:20 People often ask me, "Jason, oh great PHP master, how can I write secure PHP code?". To this I respond "Climb back down the mountain and return to your home my son, the answers will find you there ... as long as you click over to my blog and wait until I get this post done. Now GO!". Seriously though, about the only thing I am a master of is run on sentences, embellishing, and the sometimes spooky but usually droll ability to raise either of my eyebrows individually. I have however written quite a bit of PHP over the years and have some suggestions to help others avoid some of the mistakes I have made in the past. So without further ado, here is my somewhat short, seemingly solid, sometimes sordidly sarcastic, synopsis of secure scripting suggestions.
Using Web 2.0 Powers For Good 2008-02-24 13:39:24 I think the phrase "Web 2.0" is for the most part universally despised, and I wholeheartedly subscribe to this point of view. While it may be fluffy market speak it does carry a meaning to me, a vague and over hyped meaning, but a meaning none the less. When I work on client sites I will suggest using AJAX or a more interactive design if doing so is a good fit for the site and overall functionality. More often than not however clients will ask for dynamic parts of a site, even going so far as to say "I want this page to be more AJAX-y". Over the last few years I have been involved with and written quite a few different dynamic and interactive web site features. Thanks to great packages like Sajax, Prototype, and Script.aculo.us among others, adding varied levels of web 2.0 goodness while k Read more:Powers
Building a Porch on the Ivory Tower 2008-02-12 14:25:17 Rarely do I post what I would call "opinion pieces" (that is not to say my average post is not littered with opinionated statements), though I occasionally read some while trolling through tech and PHP related news and blogs. While doing so recently I came across an article with a title similar to "40 things bad PHP programmers do". As I scanned the list I thought the ideas where all valid, if not a bit over zealously stated in an effort to make the point. This and a recent job interview (in which I did not get the job) got me thinking again about something I have pondered for a long time: How does a programmer balance practical limitations with best practices that can be difficult and time consuming to adhere to? Read more:Building
, Porch
, Ivory
, Tower
Word Wrapping Email Text for Webmail Applications 2008-02-12 01:46:28 Email comes in all shapes and sizes, from complicated nested multi-part structures to simple text bodies. But even messages comprised of just plain text require special preparation to safely and properly display from within a webmail application. For security purposes any HTML within a text message needs to be converted to appropriate entities. Using the CSS "white-space: pre;" setting is effective as well, the CSS equivalent of tags, but this makes word wrapping the message in such a way as to ensure that the webmail interface remains consistent very tricky. Neither approach is ideal (entities vs pre-formatted), and both suffer from some similar display problems. For example a line containing 200 characters in a row with no spaces, such as a long URL will either spill out from it's conta Read more:Wrapping
, Email
, Applications
New Hastymail.org website 2008-01-28 08:44:48 Having decided at the new year to revive the Hastymail project (a neglected PHP webmail client I wrote years ago), I set out to improve the project website
in a few different ways. First I moved it from the sourceforge web hosting to a private host, changing the site name from hastymail.sourceforge.net to good old www.hastymail.org. Many thanks to ThinkHost for generously donating the hosting to our project, and to David Schaefer for safe guarding the hastymail.org domain name for years in the event that we would someday need it. Secondly while the code is still managed at sourceforge, and we will continue to support any use of the sourceforge trackers and feedback tools, we now have some nice feedback and discussion facilities at our main site as well.
Hastymail 2 status 2008-01-11 13:47:48 Hastmail 2 has kicked off with a bang. And by bang I mean a bunch of late night coding. We have svn setup for the new code at sourceforge, and porting useful Hastymail 1 code has begun. The framework we are building from provides many basic web application mechanics, so the porting effort is focused on the back end functionality, like talking to the IMAP and SMTP servers. So far almost 1/3 of the IMAP related code has been ported, reviewed, and improved. I'm excited! I have yet to determine a satisfying metaphor to describe what it's like coding to the IMAP rfc, but when I do it will be rife with ambiguity if nothing else. Having not dug into the bowels of that dastardly document in a few years I almost washed away that clinging chill it evokes that eats away at your belief that you can r
Site Updates: News, Knights Tour part 2, Calendar, Forum fixes 2008-01-03 12:04:55 I have been meaning to update the site with some new fixes and features that have been running in my local copy for the past month and finally have taken the time to do so. So without my usual off topic long winded self absorbed introduction here is whats new. Read more:Knights
, Calendar
, Forum
, Site Updates
Hastymail 2 2008-01-03 09:42:19 Maybe it's the new year getting to me. Holidays always seemed so contrived after reaching adulthood, as if rather than celebrate human achievement or spread good will the experience instead is commercial and fabricated, but as I start to slide into my late 30's I'm as sentimental as a child. Worse even I get choked up at times for literally no reason at all. Seems even a Mountain Dew commercial can bring a tear to my eye. Whatever the cause I have decided to dedicate some time to Hastymail development again.
Tips for Handling Video Uploads 2008-03-13 12:40:47 I am not a huge video fan, though watching a video online does have an undeniable coolness factor. I have done some client work involving videos for a site and during the process ran into a few things that might be useful to others trying to handle video. There are quite a few open source and inexpensive tools to help deal with video handling, and combined with some server settings and PHP code it is possible to build some pretty cool video features. Read more:Handling
, Uploads
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