Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

Well well well, I’ve been quite busy the past few weeks. Balancing school, work, play and of course the internet (which can fall under all three). In my business I have been maintaining websites for my clients, for myself and creating entirely new pages. Today I’d like to announce the release of the new Nexuiz Homepage, redesigned for the soon to be released version, 2.4.

The new version will be released shortly, I’ll be sure to let you all know when. Check the site for screenshots, videos and more details.

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');

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!

Entrecard users knew from the start that not everyone was in it for the same reasons and lets face it, there are some blogs we’d rather not waste our time viewing. Blogs that waste our time trying to get rich off their garbage content. Unfortunately, the only system in place as of now, is reviews. Unfortunately, these were being gamed until recently.

So Tyler, what do you suggest?

Well, I wouldn’t want to tamper with the one-click drop method because that would be silly but I want to integrate something into the widget so a user can tell a lot about a blog just by being at said blog.

My proposal is a system such as this:

With this integrated voting system, it will be easier for other bloggers to know if it’s a reputable source or just some more internet garbage so some degree. In an ideal world, there would be some crazy algorithms to back this thing up to prevent gaming but I’ll leave that logic to the Entrecard guys if they like my idea!

Another approach Entrecard can take to limit the amount of abuse would be some additions to the forum. Staying true to the proud design of Entrecard, I’ve crafted my idea of a simple solution.

The reputation would preferably use some ajax that would pop up with a box to fill in a reason. Reporting posts would help admins moderate the forum. A quick link to message a user would be handy as would the edit post button.

What do you all think?

Edit: There is a thread on the Entrecard Forums that answers some FUD related questions.

To do daily database backups, I use cron jobs. If you aren’t familiar with cron jobs, think of the as scripts that run on a timer. Much like ’scheduled tasks’ on windows. To edit your cron jobs on dreamhost, locate the ‘cron jobs‘ menu item located under ‘goodies‘ on the main menu:

Before we add a cron job though, I want to familiarize you with the script and have you run a test to save you a headache later.

#! /bin/sh
 
# Daily backups on your database with email notification
# Tyler Mulligan
 
# file
dateVar=$(date +%m-%d)          # Date variable to append to filename (default: month-day | 11-24)
savePath="/home/tyler/backups/" # Backups are stored here
fileName="my_db_backup"         # File name minus the date
 
# email
subject="My Database Backup ${dateVar}"
email="db_robot@mydomain.com"
 
# database
username="root"      # username
password=""          # password
hostname="localhost" # hostname
database="database"  # database
 
mysqldump -u $username -p$password -h $hostname $database | gzip  > $savePath$fileName-$dateVar.sql.gz
 
uuencode $savePath$fileName-$dateVar.sql.gz $fileName-$dateVar.sql.gz | mail -s "$subject" $email

I’ve set it up so you fill out your information like any other config file, the last two lines do all the work.

I suggest you create a new text file called ‘dbbackup.txt’, and paste the above code in and saving it for future reference. It’s always good to have a clean slate to start from. Once you have that done, fill in your file, email and database variables and give it a test run.

Create a shell script through ssh and run that.

Copy your personalized database dump code, log into your server and type:

vi my_db_test.sh
[press i]
right click (to paste the copied code)
[press esc][type ":wq"]
[press enter]

Your script is now written to a file called ‘my_db_test.sh’.

chmod +x the file and run it:

chmod +x my_db_test.sh
./my_db_test.sh

Once you receive the email, check your backup directory and verify that the database was properly dumped. If you don’t receive and email, you did something wrong.

If everything worked fine, return to the dreamhost cron job page, add a cron job and paste your working code into your newly created cron job.

Save, wait a day and you should receive your email. It’s a wise idea to grab a copy of your backup every week or so to store locally.

Dreamhost is actually offering a special for their 10th anniversary right now, 500gb disk space, 5TB transfer for only $5.95 a month. I’ve been with them 2 years and I’ve been pleased.

Just the other day, I was trying to integrate Entrecard into one of my Blogger accounts and it didn’t work. The reason for this, is google’s very strict about their document validity, while Entrecard has seemingly over-looked a common HTML markup mistake. The use of an ampersand, rather than html entity:

Theirs:

<script src="http://entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com/widget.js?user_id=629&type=standard_200" type="text/javascript" id="ecard_widget"></script>

Valid:

<script src="http://entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com/widget.js?user_id=629&amp;type=standard_200" type="text/javascript" id="ecard_widget"></script>

Note: don’t just copy that code and use it in your blog… unless you want to display my card!

To me, doctypes have always been somewhat of a hassle. I know when I write good code and I know how to fix errors the validator spits out at me. Other than that, my knowledge is limited. I usually just copy the header from my older documents and hope for the best. However, yesterday I had a change of heart and thanks to a simple google search, that led me to a great article, that brought me to a not so easily found page on w3. I was able to sigh in relief. I really don’t understand why the chart below isn’t easily accessible.

This chart is located about half way down the page.

According to my purple to blue link ratio, there are no links off the front page of w3 to this article. I find this rather inconvenient. Thankfully, the good folks at ALA know what’s up.

With the evolution of communication via the internet, it’s interesting to see how websites of today are really client-side applications of yesterday. In some cases, we see applications mirroring existing applications (meebo). Advances in CSS and Javascript with the push of ‘web 2.0 technologies’ such as application frameworks and AJAX have shown programmers of other backgrounds that we web folk really aren’t that different. This in combination with the release of various APIs and the opening of platforms ensures these companies existence in this new module war. Thus initiating the next step in this game of chess, which one company has already taken a shot at.

Behold the future of web applications:

Businesses will ensure their place in the industry by becoming the host of niche web applications, utilizing their services as modules.

I can’t recall a time where I was working on just one project. Sometimes bigger projects eclipse my little adventures and so I’m left with half completed mini scripts. Today my memory was jogged by a friend who asked about some Christmas deals. I like a bargain as much as the next guy but I don’t really feel compelled to waste a boat load of time to save a few bucks. My solution to this, was to create a website that does the work for me.

Utilizing google’s CSE, I created Coupon Crawl. I’m still playing with page weights to yield the best results but it works fantastic for certain items. Before checkout at any online store, it’s a good idea to do a quick search here for a promo code. I’ve probably saved over $100 total from this thing already!

After going to GameDev ‘07 at Harvard with James Lindsay on Saturday, I got some motivation and decided to get my feet wet with the facebook api. I have created my first application which pulls pictures from the website www.xepic.com and displays them in your profile like so:

If you’d like to try out my application, you can find it here.