Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

More often than not, when I’m doing form to database interactions, I use the same field names. This means there is some redundant information in my code, making my job more difficult. As such, I’ve started to create feather.php, a SQL statement constructor class that works off data sent by the $_POST or $_GET arrays.

It’s not ready for a public release as there are still some security issues to address (see TODO) but I wanted to get some thoughts, opinions and suggestions on this.

For those of you concerned about using the same field names as database columns, I plan to add associative arrays to allow you use different names.

i.e. something like this:

$field_names array('the_first_name','the_last_name','the_zipcode');
$column_names = array('first_name','last_name','zipcode');

When I do group projects at school, I like to keep the team in check with a project management system to keep a centralized collection of work, including conversation and various files about said work. In the past I had been a big fan of the (once open-source) Base Camp clone, activeCollab. However, as many of you reading this may know, activeCollab is no longer free.

Fear not my friends! There exists a fork called Project Pier, which picks up where the the free version left off.

In my opinion, the default theme shies away from the clean cut web 2.0 freshness that was activeCollab but the folks at Project Pier were friendly enough to bundle some slick themes for those who are as nitpicky as I.

Someone had requested a script that would redirect a list of ip’s to a random list of sites.

Here’s the snippet I came up with:

<?
// list of ip's you wish to redirect
$ips = array('127.0.0.1');
// Sites you wish to redirect to
$sites = array('http://yahoo.com/','http://www.aol.com');
 
foreach($ips as $ip) {
    if ($ip==GetHostByName($REMOTE_ADDR)) {
        header('Location: ' . $sites[rand(0,count($sites))]);
    }
}
?>

I was checking out an address with a friend on Google maps yesterday and we noticed that Street View had been added to Boston.

I never really played with street view before because I wasn’t traveling to any of the supported locations, so I never really felt a connection to the information. Now that it’s in my own backyard though, I can make connections to familiar objects such as a friend’s car or even that friend (double edged sword)! The interface is very intuitive and smooth as one would expect from google. You’re given a little man that you can drag and drop. This man has a bubble that shows the picture. You can click and hold the picture to free rotate.

Google’s gotta pretty nice spread right now. They’ve undoubtedly covered some ground both literally and figuratively.

P.S. Before submitting any important form on the internet, it’s a wise idea to hit ctrl+a, then ctrl+c. That way you don’t have to write a whole post over when your browser craps out.

Checking your class schedule is easy at Wentworth Institute of Technology. So easy in fact, I’ve decided to share this web experience with you.

Step One: go to http://lconnect.wit.edu

Step Two: Be told that Firefox is out of date because this web application is using some new crazy technologies that your browser may not be able to support like “javascript, cookies and java”.

Step Three: Click continue to go to the ‘real login page’, which if you note is ipsca.com secured. Solamente el mejor para Wentworth.

Step Four: Click Leopardweb-Banner (whatever the hell that means! More confusion to the end user than anything IMHO).

Step Five: LOL

Step Six: Click Student and Finical Aid

Step Seven: Click Registration

Step Eight: Your choice. ‘Week at a Glance’ or ‘Student Detail Schedule’. H3LL Y34H B0Y, TH4T’5 L337! I hope my browser can support the technologies that are able to give me two options on how to view my schedule O.o.

So, do think your school can top this?

Sungard Higher Education may be the solution for you!

I’ve talked about mind overflow before. You know the stuff that your brain wants to remember but it can’t because you’re trying to focus on too much information at once and it stresses you out because you forget some things and blah blah blah? If this sounds at all familiar to you, check out my makeshift solution that’s sort of a precursor to TSO which I haven’t gotten developed yet.

I take a 5×8in piece of paper and fold it in half then in half again to make myself a little ‘book’.

Then I label the sections (imagine pages 1,2,3,4) as ‘todo’, blank, ‘ideas’, ‘remember’ respectively.

I do this because to me, TODO is the most important (front), then Remember (back), then ideas (inside right), then blank space for who knows what (inside left). If I ever run out of space, I have the whol inside to use, wheee! So all day, I just have this with a pen in my pocket and write down / cross out whatever I need.

To manage my mind overflow further, I use a three ring binder to manage the overflow of the 5×8 overflow so I can move todos, ideas, remembers and whatever else to new days without losing track.

I don’t but I’m giving it a shot for the first time! I’m starting from scratch, building an XHTML compliant template the way I like it, then through some reverse engineering / tutorials, I will pass the data I need to my template files. I’m pretty excited!

Here’s a sneak peak:

I’ve been busy with some design work the past few days, finishing up a few more entrecards and working close with clients to get a design that properly represents their business:

The ninjaz have been making some headway and we’re testing out a new host for ~5 game servers which will run NANL configs on. I go back to school in less than a week.

I’m a bit surprised at the number of blogs I come across that fail to load. A lot of the times, this can be fixed with a simple plugin call WP-Cache. WP-Cache will save a copy (cache) a Wordpress page the first time a user visits the page. This greatly reduces the overhead as it doesn’t need to run through all the php code and connect to the database on every page call.

It’s a very simple install, just upload the contents of the zip to your plugins directory and activate it. A new menu will appear under your options tab giving you filtering options.

And you can check the status of your cache at anytime, deleting files when necessary.

This plugin is simple and useful. It should be integrated into the project.

Please refer to the README.txt if you’re having trouble.

It’s important to note… that if you have this installed and you’re making template changes, you will need to disable the cache or clear it every time to see the changes in real time.

I post a lot of zip files on forums to trade information with my fellow gamers, programmers, internetards and what have you. As such, I like to tell them what the zip contains. Now the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer as I haven’t really created the zip yet… but I figured it would be just as helpful. The only extra step you would have in doing an actual zip file would be to extract the files to a folder but enough of the intro, lets dive in.

Step one: Have a folder with the files you want to list

(Whats with your image icons d00d? My images are associated with irfanview)

Step two: Open the Command prompt.

Do this by going to start -> Run… and typing in “cmd”

Step three: Navigate to your folder with “cd” (change directory) and list the files without any attributes using “dir /b”

Step four: Right click anywhere in the black and choose, “Mark“, this allows you to highlight the outputted text.

Highlight your filelist

When you right click again, the text is copied to your clipboard and you can paste it anywhere you’d like

I’m proud to announce that I’m one of the Entrecard users with seller status. I will begin selling Card Redesigns, Quality reviews, Ad space shortly and possibly some t-shirts in the future.

To give you an idea of the quality of my work, here are two cards I’ve designed for forum goers who took advantage of my free offer. There are 2 spots left… if you’re interested, act fast. Otherwise, it’ll cost you 400 Credits.

Congratulations to the rest of the winners and too readers uninterested in Entrecard, I have some more how-tos and lifehacks on the way!

I you’d like a check check out My Entrecard Page.

Happy New Years 2008!