The Program

I just made a new webpage, called GrepArt.  It isn’t quite what I had in mind for it originally, but I like how it came out overall.  Check it out!

Well, IPv6 has been a topic talked about for years, but this is the first year that I have seen it starting to be implemented. My friend stumbled upon http://ipv6experiment.com, which is a very interesting, daring, brilliant, and humerus way to attract people to IPv6. Google also launched ipv6.google.com to cater to the IPv6 audience.

Overall, I think this year will start the push towards IPv6. With google’s support, the government’s new requirement for all branches to support IPv6, and this “grand experiment”, I think IPv6 may have a chance in the world.

I just finished writing another PHP script that I’ve entitled “MiniGallery”.  It is used to embed a small gallery right into a page with a little HTML/PHP.  Check it out at http://www.redgalaxy.net/minigallery.

So, I sat down and wrote a small little program on my website for cellphones.  It’s a text message based command line system.  It receives text messages, processes the command, and sends a response back to my cellphone if necessary.

Some of the commands I currently have programmed in are reading/writing to a notepad file, checking my email, checking the weather, and getting other information from my website.

It was a small project, and only took a few hours to complete.. but it’s probably one of the more useful things I’ve written recently.

In a little more detail, the whole program is based on a PHP backend which runs every few minutes that checks for new messages.  If it finds a message, it takes the first word, assumes it’s a command, and runs the PHP file associated with that command, and forms a response, and then sends the response back to the sender.

I’d give out the address for everyone to test, but I’m still working on security features

For those of you who don’t know, twitter is a web application that allows people to tell any other “followers” what they are doing.  You can update it online, through many client applications, and by cell phone.

I’ve recently started a project (C++) that I hope will analyze twitter’s “tweets” (as they call them), and look for common positive and negative terms.  Through these terms, I want to try to make some sort of graphical display which presents the world’s current mood as a whole (and by the “world”, I mean twitter users of course).

Another goal of mine to be implemented eventually is to add support to learn new words and associate them with positive or negative statements.

I won’t pretend to be perfect in the algorithms I use to analyze the statements received from Twitter’s RSS feed.  Right now, the “analyzer” is fundamentally just a word search (with some fancy stuff added on that looks for derivatives of the words as well, i.e. past-present-future).

I should hopefully complete the project this week (if my school schedule doesn’t dramatically change).

Turns out that the “downgrade” was my own foolishness.  Somehow I had accidently deleted the htaccess file in my home directory that controls the PHP versiosn.  Oh well, at least I figured it out.

In the case of Microsoft Windows machines, sometimes downgrading is better.  Even in the case of some games, down grading can help the player.  But my host downgrading my PHP version from 5.x to 4.x is simply outrageous.

I first noticed this today when I go to log on to my Question-Answer website to see if there are any questions posted that need answering.  Right when I jump on the home page I see PHP spewing out all sorts of errors about how I’m using str_replace incorrectly.. which is a relatively common function and rather difficult to break.  My first instinct is to check if I was hacked [again], so I look into all the databases and files, and everything is perfectly fine and unchanged.

I then check the php manual to see if they discovered any recent bugs.  It’s there that I saw that the str_replace I use only supported in 5.x, so something clicks.  I print out phpversion(), and what do you know, I’m running 4.x! I’ve been downgraded!

So, please, have some patience with me and my host.  if this isn’t corrected soon, they will find an angry email in their inbox tomorrow morning.

I have created a video tutorial outlining some of the basic functions of phpMyAdmin.  This includes database and table creation, inserting data rows into the table, row functions, and general database layout.

Enjoy, and feel free to comment.  Below you can find the high quality version of this video:

I’ve recently discovered the website twitter.com where users can post short messages about what they’re doing.  It’s a great website, though it appears that it needs some maintenance.  Once upon a time it had many features (such as IM updates and cellphone service) that are no longer avaiable because of high volume.  Well fix those services! They have been unavailable for over two months now.. and you’re losing users!

Other than that, it does exactly what it’s described to do.  Update friends, family, and other people with what you’re doing.  Great little program – but would love to see some improvements.

I may or may not try to embed my current status on this webpage.  Depends how good their API looks.

The next project I hope to be working on is a web-based file explorer.  I had been writing one ages ago but then I discovered some core issues with the development and it stopped production.

Now, given my new knowledge on AJAX and PHP web programming, I hope to restart the project with even more advanced features and security updates.  It should be just like every other file viewer out there, but with my own special features.  Some of the features I intend to include, besides the obvious (upload/download): Picture viewing, video viewing, audio listening (using flash client), full AJAX updating – meaning no page loading, along with information on a per-file basis provided by AJAX.

I hope to release this application within the next few weeks.