08.23.06
Posted in teach, byteclub at 11:15 pm by Clinton
I know this is a late post many days after, however just to let ppl know that as far as I am concerned, Lucien doesn’t get away that easy and any excuse I can find to involve alumni staff, espically officially in his new job, in our byteclub business - it’s happening! Lucien was the founding force - I mostly tried to nod in the right place. Its been great to work with Lucien and i’m really missing that. Lets just say IM chats ease the pain.
Also, knowing my human limitatins I am actively seeking help from other staff with byteclub and making plans. Okay, it’s not “all happening” at the moment the way we wanted, and I honestly (sadly) don’t have enough time for cool stuff here on byteclub as is, but the byteclub project is definitely an on-going and supported venture.
Here’s some ideas I have - and I would really like your help and feedback (easy on the “pain points”).
- Get the onine registration form happening again. (Mark is ready to help here, so that’s in my entourage todo list after open day!)
- Actively seek out past and present students - maybe some finders fees are in order? Hm… “Bounty hunters”…
- We need more than just “online” events. Speakers are good. Food, games nights, videos…
- game development competition
- newsletter (any volunteers?)
- posters/flyers etc
- online project repository/bug tracking etc to help group members develop projects
- … others?? let me know
So, do I have any helpers? Comments? Suggestions? Comment or send me emails or just plan knock on my office door and have a chat - that would be nice.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
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06.07.06
Posted in web dev, byteclub, programming at 12:30 am by Clinton
Look again… more changes, feedback welcome (positive/negative/observational)…
http://www.byteclub.net/blog/index_comments.php
I haven’t linked in and checked the external blog comment feeds - i’m working on it and get it happening i promise.
Still think the count of post/comments is too high? Let me know your opinions.
Would really like to be able to sort comments by “post” (thread)? Let me know (pretty easy to do now).
Runs like a dog? Probably cache issues (but i did have to restart apache tonight… dunno what the deal is).
All feeds (blogs or comments) are cached for 10 mins, but I think there may be other proxy+chache issues causing havoc… it would be great to see things quicker!
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06.02.06
Posted in general, learn, byteclub at 11:26 pm by Clinton
google’s great - but one *has* to be asking the *right* question. eish!
I wasn’t. Wasted lots of time. boo!
As many of you know, i’ve been know to play with php/rss/feeds for the byteclub blog list. I’m using the nice MagpieRSS code for getting feeds. I kept having nasty ?? instead of nice ‘ etc in post and titles… not happy, tried to fix, so, the short version/solution was to add…
define(‘MAGPIE_INPUT_ENCODING’,‘UTF-8′);
define(‘MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING’,‘UTF-8′);
define(‘MAGPIE_DETECT_ENCODING’,false);
before include the rss_fetch.in file. I’m posting code snippet more for my reference but i’m sharing ’cause that’s blogging. (oh yeah - i changed the html meta charset to utf-8 also…)
*but* my point: i spent a lot more time than i wanted/thought i needed to on this “little” issue (right zooba!) simply because i didn’t know the “right” question to be googling… urgh! Okay, rant over. i feel better now, and the results of the other changes i’m making to the blogroll i hope will make our byteclubbers happy too.
Some of the more enlightened bloggers/visitors i’m sure already known this fundamental “ask the right question” principle of the universe…
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05.17.06
Posted in general, byteclub at 8:44 pm by Clinton
Welcome Ronak!
I set up Ronak’s blog back early April, but major “bad” on my behalf I didn’t add up his name to the blog roll straight away. SORRY! Hope we hear more from you soon. Everyone else, why not head on over and say “hi”?
Rally Call!
To all you regular byteclub blog/clog-gers, if you know of current IBL or past FICT students that are blogging elsewhere, or would like to be blogging (you think), ask/get them to email (cwoodward@byteclub.net) as it would be great to grow the list and grow byteclub. I don’t know about you, but I really like to read what people of similar interests are up to and how they are going. I learn a lot and its a neat part of my day to read what people are up to. (Just never have time to blog everything… :~)
(Side note: I hadn’t been adding people to the blogroll straight away ’cause it’s not unusual for people to ask for a blog and then post 0, 1 or 2 posts and that’s it… but that’s okay. Perhaps the better policy is to just put them all out there… what do you think?)
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04.25.06
Posted in learn, byteclub, programming at 9:51 pm by Clinton
“Programmers need to learn statistics or I will kill them all”
(catchy title - i remembered it :)
http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/programming/programmer_stats.html
From the author…
I have a major pet peeve that I need to confess. I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.
There’s also a bunch of other writtings there that I think may interests to other byteclubbers.
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04.12.06
Posted in web dev, byteclub at 2:01 am by Clinton
So what do you use for mysql? Love that command line? Can’t live without a GUI? Web front-end is your thing? I’m curious… here’s some i’ve looked at recently (this ain’t no definitive guide), and so I thought I’d post a quick wrap and ask for further comment from the enlightened byteclubbers…
You’ll notice that there is a pattern of “free” in the above list. Go figure… and hey - tables work in wp!
Now, the good-ole mysql client (CLI) you should know. I read recently something like “knowing SQL with a GUI is like knowing HTML with FrontPage” :~). But we still, we all like a good tool, and you should know your way around this puppy…
The mysql query browser is a new one - I didn’t know about it and i’m trying it tonight. So far, nice. Apparently you can say MyQB? Whatever. You can just type in your queries (it keeps a memory like a web browser concept), or use the tool bars to create a select type query -also nice. You can easily compare result sets and edit records, add new etc. So far my favourite features has to be the “Inline Help” feature (syntax/functions/params) because looking through the mysql.org docs again (for something i’ve used before and “kinda” know the syntax but can’t quite rememebr) is not my idea of fun. There’s also a script editor concept. (Not just multiple queries executed sequentially, but controllable conditional execution - nice.) Turn on the “advanced tools bars” - more buttons. There is a table editor (i couldn’t seem to change the order of fields… doesn’t really matter but) with clear options and some handy drag-n-drop features.
The mysql administrator - it’s an administration tool not a SQL client. So, use it to check the health of your databases, the memory, status variables, replication, backup, restoration etc! Look, it’s a definite advantage over the command line if your not a power (ie remember everything) user. Plus - the graph of load/memory etc a asthetically pleasing :~). You can create projects and schedual backups of your databases… cool. Just a note: the MyQB and this admin tool know about each other (and the command line tool if its available) and you can switch to each respective tool using handy menu links (and the connection details are store so you don’t have to retype that - but not the passwords - its called security!).
DbDesigner4. This probably deserves its own post, because I think its pretty cool. That said, i really haven’t used it that much yet, and only to “reverse engineer” existing db tables to get pretty diagrams of the design. I still have much to learn, so if anyone has used this one and can tell the pro/con features, let me know. So far, i like it a lot.
DbManager Pro - I’ve been using this tool since the dark ages, and so it has a special place to me and I included here, especially when it was (at the time) one of the best windows based GUI table editors/creators i’d found - it really helped me when I didn’t know the syntax etc and could do things graphically instead. However, after some buggy version in the past and UI changes, i’m not so loyal now, but its still a solid tool (and free for non-commercial use, which also limits my preference now).
SQuirreL SQL is a graphica java app to view, browse data, issue SQL command of JDBC compliant databses. It has a generic plugin architecture, but comes with a standard plugin for MySQL (to support “DBMS specific capabilities”). Features: code completion, syntax highlightiing, graphs, script generation etc. (The installer ses IzPack www.isforge.com which I though was pretty slick). Took me a while to sort through the require mysql driver install - that could be easier (but easy for a fluent java/db user i’m sure). As a sql creator/syntax helper, its pretty good, but the install hassels left me tired.
phpMyAdmin (why not phpMySQLAdmin eh?) has been around since the stone age, and has had its share of exploits etc which always makes one wary. However, you can’t deny it’s a very useful web interface to mysql and is so packed with features I often turn to it for a quick alteration etc (if available - and that’s the pinch - it needs to be installed *and* maintained.). Also, it can be slow (hardware/network specific of course). Whenever I’ve set this one up i’ve always locked it up as much as i’ve known how (https, .htaccess, chmod -r until needed etc!). Bottom line I think: very useful, very popular (lots of award etc), strong features. Theme-able too… yikes.
“Short” blog eh? hehe.. well, hope it gets some interest. Let me know what you do!
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04.06.06
Posted in general, web dev, byteclub at 1:40 am by Clinton
Yes - it’s there.
Last time I said there were some things I still wanted to complete on the byteclub blog roll, and so it is…
- Posts ordered by most recent - DONE (although an edit to a post also causes update)
- The title of the most recent post showing - DONE
- Checked out the cache settings - DONE
Things still to be done (perhaps)
- Show the number of comments next to each post title
- Create an export RSS feed for those that want to aggregate our aggretated list.. :)
- Get those monkeys showing
- Add more blogs (internal and external)
There is still the issue of a better migration from the old data to these new wordpress setups. I have grand intention to create a wiki entry on how we can do that… (it would be great to still be able to get back the old comments…)
Here’s a call (I think an actual email will be in order) for those that either a) want a new blog on byteclub or b) would like their blog listed on the byteclub roll, then please let me know. There are still some of the past active bloggers that I want to contact, and I’m sorry to those that I haven’t asked yet - you can always contact me first!
In other news, Lucien and I have grand schemes for some unified admin, and I actually think that will happen sooner rather than later, simply because it’s really needed.
Finally, I have updated the code syntax highlighter extension for the swinbrain wiki (and i’ll move the new version to byteclub soon). This was inspired by John asking if the extension could be used elsewhere, and so I decided to add a fix and some features. Short versions: single line works, don’t need to add ‘Y’ all the time (it’s implicit if you specify line numbers - kinda obvious now…) and you can now ask for special “marking” of individual lines, or a *range* of lines… quite swish. :~)
Check out Swinbrain entry and the editing help page for more details if you are interested.
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04.05.06
Posted in web dev, byteclub at 1:44 am by Clinton
The top ten most recent byteclub post!
I had to have it back, and so i’ve spent some time coding once again in the name of happy monkeys!
It’s not quite complete. For starters I haven’t set up 10+ blog in the list :), and I need to tweak the CSS to get those monkey awards showing in IE and others, but the “how will I do that…” stuff is done! I would like to add the title of the lastest post for each blogger, and perhaps a comment count (which can also be gathered via rss).
It’s using MagpieRSS, (which uses snoopy for http client+proxy support). Nicely, Magpie is cacheing feeds (although I want to check the period of caching), but its pretty quick once the initial feeds were gathered.
So - getting there…
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03.30.06
Posted in web dev, byteclub at 1:42 am by Clinton
Need to test the new geshi based code syntax highlighter plugin i’ve written for wordpress here… hmmm
Show the list of supported languages [langlist]
Current enabled languages: actionscript, ada, apache, asm, bash, c, cpp, csharp, css, delphi, dos, eiffel, html, ini, java, javascript, js, lisp, matlab, mpasm, objc, oracle8, pascal, perl, php, pseudocode, python, qbasic, ruby, scheme, smarty, sql, vb, vbnet, vhdl, xhtml, xml.
Java code anyone?
for(int i=0; ,i<stuff.length; i++) {
System.out.println(“wow”);
}
Let’s try some pascal…
procedure DoStuff(String str)
var i: int;
begin
for i := 0 to 10 do begin
print(str);
end;
end
Hoorah!
I’ll post details, code and docs on the byteclub wiki after sleep!
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10.18.05
Posted in web dev, byteclub at 5:14 pm by Clinton
How to use the extension
About the extension
The GeSHi Homepage (the *real* engine behind it all)
Just head over to our own ByteClub wiki and check out one of the code snippets… i tried to update as many as I could so people could see what it can do.
Now, sleep… then some GeSHi to blo!
g hacking… ;~)
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