BiggieStylin

Well, I’m finally doing it. I’m rewriting my voodoo code that makes reloadable modules or plugins in PHP. I’ve always toyed with the idea of rewriting my original work for PHP_Modules and making it work with classes; now the time has come. I have started work with my SiTech library to make SiTech_Plugins. It will be the same concept of PHP_Modules, but not only will it work with functions, it will now work with classes. This is something that was never really possible before because when PHP_Modules was written, it was written for PHP 4.

I haven’t gotten very far yet with code, but the theory of it is to create a base class with a __call() method. That’s basically all the base class will consist of. When a plugin is loaded, the class read from the plugin file will be created to extend this base class. From there, all methods found within the class will be stored as lambda functions inside a special class variable. This then makes it easy to reload code, by recreating the lambda function when the code is reloaded. Therefore, the class itself never needs to be redefined, it just needs all the functions reloaded. So, in theory this is entirely possible with PHP 5 and the use of the magic __call() method for classes.

Some of you may wonder why I don’t use runkit from PECL. While it would make things a ton easier, I wanted more of a code solution that might work for everyone without extra requirements. I might look into creating it to work both ways though. I can imagine runkit would be a lot cleaner method of doing such voodoo, but I’m also unsure if runkit will even compile with 5.3.  I’ll have to do some research into that and find out for sure. Of course, there will be more to come as I make progress even if its good or bad progress.

Well, its been a bit since my last post and I think its time for another update. I’m still looking for a job, haven’t had any luck finding much yet. Might have a part time job lined up until something else works out though, so that’s good On the other hand, I’ve had some time to work on dev.php-oop.net So far its been mainly backend work, so there’s not a lot more to show for it, but I’ve taken some time to implement a new password hashing using crypt and blowfish. I’m also trying to work on the password reset form to make it work better. Currently it just resets the password, but I want it to e-mail the user, then the user must click a link before the password is actually reset.

On the other hand, my jogging is going well. I’m not keeping up with it as good as I would like, but I have managed to go as far as 3 miles in one time. I also went this past Sunday and jogged with my friend, we both ran to see how fast we could do a mile and half. I managed to run it in 12 minutes and 51 seconds! I just hope I can keep doing it and keep running further. I would like to participate in a marathon sometime soon as well. I’m also, starting this week, lifting weights with the weight set I just got moved in. I’m hoping between that and running, I can make up for the last few years of my life that I just haven’t tried anything to get into shape. Hopefully I’m making up for lost time at this point

Well… things have been changing in my life lately. I’ve had to move back to my home town and look for a job in the Kansas City area. I’m currently living in a house my parents own until I can get a job and a place of my own. Kelsey had to move back in with her parents for the time being until sometime in late January or early February of next year. Its hard on both of us, but we’ll make it through it. I’m currently looking for employment in the St. Joseph, MO or Kansas City area, so if anyone knows of anything, please feel free to let me know.

On another note, with the lack of work I’ve had lately, its given me time to work on php-oop.net again. I’ve actually been working with the dev site to get things going. I started with a total rewrite because I wanted to take a totally different approach to the back end of the site. I didn’t want to use a framework, but I wanted the same structure. I wound up using my own SiTech library for the back end to make it more MVC like. I think the approach is working wonderfully. I’ve learned new things and made tweaks to SiTech to improve functionality and how it all ties together. If anyone is interested in participating with either SiTech or the development of php-oop.net, please let me know. I could always use some extra help.

A couple of other things I’m trying to do more/better is writing in my blog, and jogging each day. This is the first post after a while, so we’ll see how that part goes, but the jogging is already going great! I started Monday (the 19th) by jogging almost 3/4th of a mile. I can say that Tuesday, my legs were so sore that it killed me! Wednesday I went jogging again, but I’m not really sure how far I made it. Thankfully after that my legs weren’t as sore, but still hurt Thursday. Yesterday (Friday) I went jogging again and actually made it a full mile! Since we ran on a track, I also did a lap of sprint/jog where I sprinted the straight parts, and jogged through the corners. It was really great, and I’m happy to say today my legs don’t hurt at all. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to push it up to where I can go every day instead of every other day.

Well, here’s to hoping things go as planned… I’ll update again later this week.

So I’ve been waiting for a while for Digsby to finally release their Linux client. I just decided the other day to try and install Digsby through Wine on my Ubuntu install. I wasn’t having much luck with the default Ubuntu version of Wine, which is pretty old to say the least. I did a google search to see if I could find newer .deb files and ran across this http://www.winehq.org/download/deb which shows how to setup apt to pull from the latest builds on the site.

Now running the updated 1.1.25 version of wine, Digsby installed without a problem. I started it up, logged in and now its running just fine. The only issue I’ve noticed at all with Digsby under Wine is the fact that the text input box in chats seems to wrap text after a few words. Its annoying when writing a long reply to someone, but nothing more than just annoying. It doesn’t cause any problems or crash anything, so its just an annoyance at this point.

Hopefully this helps someone with Digsby under Linux. I love using it as my IM client, but I can’t wait until they get their Linux version going.

For all of you that know I keep a bot miniE, I would like to announce his death. I have somehow through the art of moving files around, lost his old working source code. I have been trying a rewrite, but just haven’t gotten enough there to replace him. I’ve been down a bit lately and just haven’t really spent the time on re-writing the source code for it yet. I’ll see what I can do soon enough though to get miniE going again.

IF anyone has the source to the old miniE bot, I’d greatly appriciate you letting me know. I wouldn’t mind getting the source back until I take the time to rewrite him.  Until then, miniE will be no more… so hopefully I can get it done soon.

Well, I’ve been tagged by Lig to write seven things about myself. This should be interesting… Here’s my seven things:

• I’ve been coding for about 10 years now. I started when I was about 15 by learning HTML and Perl. Shortly after though, I picked up on PHP3 and the journey began. I used to love being an admin on the EvilWalrus website, and actually gained most of my knowledge while coding on the site. Now I enjoy languages such as PHP, Python, C/C++ and C#.
• I’ve been with my girlfriend Kelsey for over four years now. She is my everything, and I plan to spend every minute of my life with her. I want to travel the whole world with her and see everything we possibly can. She is the most amazing person and the most amazing thing to ever happen to me. I honestly can’t wait to make her my wifey
• I’m actually adopted. I love my parents who adopted me very much, and I’m also so happy that they were able to give me more than I ever expected as a child. I don’t know my birthmother at all and I don’t have any desire to. I have a paper with her name and her mothers name on it, but there is no name or any information for my birthfather.
• I’ve been to over twenty states during my childhood while traveling with my parents. I’ve also been to Cancun Mexico three different times, to Hawaii four times and Pearl Harbor twice. I’ve been able to ski in Colorado, snowmobile in Wyoming, and watch hot air baloon show in New Mexico. The thing I remember the most from all the traveling though is in Hawaii when we went downhill mountan biking. We had to get up at 4am in the morning and take a bus ride to the top of a mountan where we watched satallites orbit above us, and then the sunrise.
• I don’t get along with my family very well. I’m very close to my parents and grandparents, but not at all with any of my aunts, uncles or cousins. It’s partially because I’m the second youngest out of 25 cousins and partially because I feel like an out cast and not accepted into my family.
• I was home schooled from 7th grade all the way through high school. This was for a couple of reasons, one is because of all the traveling I was doing with my parents. Another is because the kids at the private school I went to loved to pick on me and I hated it. While I enojyed home schooling, I feel like I missed out on a lot by not going to high school.
• I actually know how to do a lot more than use computers and program. My dad is a developer, so while growing up I learned a lot from him. I can operate several types of equipment like tractors, backhoes, loaders, bulldozers, and skid loaders. I’ve also had to lay sod, pour and curve concrete curbs, and do lots of odd jobs for him. My favorite thing is when he would get new land and there would be buildings that we had to tear down and destroy. I’ve seen some of the hottest and biggest fires from burning the debris. My dad has shown and taught me a lot of things that I’m very thankful for.

Well, there’s my seven things.I hope its been as interesting of a read as it was for me to write. Now for my seven people… ok, only five, but I’ll add two more later.

• Adam Ward – Because he’s been an awesome friend over all these years.
• Joey Smith – Because he’s been an awesome mentor and friend, and he’s given me my start into Linux.
• Cody Brocious – He’s always been there to talk and help. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in Python without him.
• Philip Olson – Because we still need to get that windows site done!
• Graham Christensen – I know he’s been tagged already, but I haven’t seen anything yet and would love to.

Last but not least… the rules to pass on!

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

So I just installed Gentoo again because I miss being in linux. I am running amd64, so the first problem I had with totem is that it wouldn’t create thumbnails or play certian video files due to missing codecs. Some of codecs I was missing was MPEG-4 and some of the WMV codecs. If you’ve ever used the x86 branch, you know that by enabling win32codecs, you can get all of the neccisary codecs installed. Of course, this doesn’t work in the amd64 branch, but after a bit of googling, I tried installing gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg. Once I got that installed, thumbnails started showing up and videos started playing just fine. If you don’t really like totem, I can’t say I blame you, there’s also VLC which with the proper use flags works fine as well for watching videos.

Another issue I came across was when I was browsing around some files and realized that Nautalis wasn’t displaying thumbnails for .flv files. I remember coming across this a long time ago and never finding a solution for the problem, but today things have changed. One thing you will need is gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg installed. From what I understand here, thumbnails don’t show up due to Totem not getting the right mime type for FLV files. The comments mention that this is fixed in Totem 2.23.4, but amd64 only has 2.22.2. You’ve probably already noticed the XML file on the link, but I couldn’t make it work in its current format. So, I recreated the file using a format that worked fine for me. To load the file into your configuration just run the command `gconftool-2 –load flv_thumbnailerschema.xml`. Once I ran that command, I refreshed a directory with .flv files and saw thumbnails. YAY!

Here’s the download link for the XML file: flv_thumbnailerschema.xml

Anyway, I hope all of this has helped someone out.

So, recently I’ve been looking around for a new IM client other than Pidgin. I don’t have anything major against it, but the latest version 2.5.2 had quite a bit memory leak that cause it to consume memory like no other. That and the fact that its very limiting in what you can do with it look wise. Recently Kelsey showed me a post on lifehacker.com about free software. Most of them I’ve heard of or used before, but one I hadn’t heard of before was digsby.

Uppon looking into it further… I found that Digsby actually has quite a bit going on. Not only does it support all the major messengers, but it also supports other sites like Facebook and Myspace. Another cool feature is that it checks e-mail from IMAP servers for you, as well as gmail, hotmail, and yahoo mail. After seeing all this, I had to give it a try. I’m happy to report that I’m now using it as my IM client for.. well… everything. I’ve had it open for a full 24 hours now with absolutely no problems or complaints. It’s staying well within the expected memory usage and hasn’t been slow or laggy.

Well, that’s all for now, just thought I’d throw it out there that I found something cool I like So far they only support Windows and Linux, they don’t have anything for OS X, but I’m pretty sure they’re planning on something. Anyway, check it out, you might like it.

Edit: After looking around further, I realized Digsby is only available for Windows… sorry. Aparently there will be a OS X and Linux version available soon. Also, I found one thing I don’t like about it… it doesn’t parse /me messages

So, as most of you haven’t noticed, since no one really reads this thing… I lost my server over a week ago. Now I’ve finally gotten everything back and setup on a virtual machine, thanks to my friend Adam. Even though I was a wee bit (heh) behind on payments, he was still a good enough friend to hook me up with something that works for both of us. So now I can post all of my ramblings again that you probably won’t even read.

Nothing real exciting has gone on lately… I’ve caught a cold, that’s really it. I guess on another side note, I have been working on somewhat of a new exciting project. It’s a custom gallery I’ve built for myself. As it is currently it doesn’t really do much, but I have been working on the admin side of things to get everything going the way I think it should. Right now it adheres to a current directory layout parsing images and spitting out thumbnails. While I was developing, I figured… hey, why not do movies too? So I did… it also makes thumbnails for all kinds of movie files. I even added embeded HTML to allow for playing the videos, though I prefer the FLV method.

I’m not really sure when I’ll have a good preview available… I just kinda work on it when I’m bored. Anyway, I don’t have much to say besides that, so I’ll let you all get on with not reading this. Will post again soon, I hope.

Well, I’m sitting here today trying to think of new subjects to do a new tutorial. A few ideas are coming to mind, but if there’s anthing that anyone would like to see, please let me know. It’ll probably be a few weeks before I have anything ready, but I’d like to start on something!