Blogs

 For the last couple months a friend and I have been working on a 4000 series based clock in electronics class. After having failed building a FM receiver, we opted for a clock. We didn't go the microcontroller way, but old school ICs. So, we created a circuit for a simple clock. I opted for a 24-hour version, while my friend made the 12-hour equivalent. 

I recently put Pasteros up on Github [link], the text storage service. What was once a singular file is now a collection of models, views and controllers. You can see it running here: paste.gelat.in. Feel free clone the repo and use it for your own projects.

Of course, it's not made as a turnkey solution so tables need to be created. Pastes can be forked and also compared to the parent paste (diff). It' has also been a huge stepping stone to not writing such terrible code, at least that's what I think.

There comes a time where it's unacceptable or inconvenient to stash var_dump() into your code. And then there's Xdebug. Xdebug makes it easy to debug your PHP application and with the intergration of NetBeans, it's even easier.

For the record, I'm using Debian 6.0.4 on my workstation and Debian Wheezy/Sid on my dev server.

First of all, lets install Xdebug on the server:

pecl install xdebug

I recently bought a VPS to host a Counter Strike server. WIthout having any choice, I was stuck with CentOS 5. After getting everything set up, I wasn't left with much disk space left. So, I read the man page for sort and used the following RPM command to find the largest packages installed:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name} %{size}\n' | sort -k2n

So, I have this old Pentium 166 box laying around, so I thought I'd stick Linux on it (of course). At first, I used DeLi Linux and it ran quite well. The problem is, the project changed directions, to ConnochaetOS. They took a more modern take on things, using kernel 2.6 and other modern applications. Most of the newer applications don't run quite well on an older box. So, after finding a mirror of a DeLi Linux that I cloned to a local server, I now had a working respository.

The last week, I've been tinkering with Google's Analytics API. What I wanted to do was have daily reports on my website which then  tweets the difference from yesterday to today. The ideal situation was I would have it SMS me the results. The problem is that my phone carrier (Rogers) complicates things. For most carriers, you can email a carrier-supplied address (5555555@att.com for example) which in turn would send an SMS to that address. But, what Rogers does is once you receive a text, you have to respond back with REPLY to view it. Stupid huh.

 Kobo just released their Vox eReader a couple of days ago and I've had the chance to play with it this weekend.

It's quite heavy compared to other ereaders. I found that it's even heavier than the mighty Kindle DX. See below for a comparison to a Canadian quarter.

I made this little tool the other week: it's a simple URL to QR code generator that uses AJAX so it's even zippier. Check it out here: http://qrer-snacsnoc.dotcloud.com

It uses the PHP QR Code library to generate the QR codes. I set it up so it caches URLs that have already been generated which make it faster to deliver the image.

After playing around with WorkSimple 1.3.5 (and apparently not doing much  testing), login.php doesn't redirect on login and cp.php strips HTML.  Download the attachments below and replace cp.php and login.php with the new versions. Save the new versions as cp.php and login.php respectively and upload them to your WorkSimple install directory.

 I've never played with any geolocation tools before but I thought I'd take a whack at it. After stumbling across GeoHelper, I thought I'd test things out with it. Well, after finding that the only reverse postal code lookup is Canada Post, I might as well make my own.