2009-07-07
Every now and then I get an idea for an electronics project. Last year the idea was to build my own alarm clock out of a gumstix board that could also double as a MP3 player. It would wake you up by playing an MP3.
Since we got rid of our TV before our move to Portland, I'm now seeking a way to better use our digital tuner box. I thought maybe it's wouldn't be too hard to take the output from the tuner, maybe from coaxial cable or composite, and stream it over our network to any computer that wants to pick up the video signal. It'd be a read-only setup, but if I wanted to watch a channel on my laptop from on the balcony or upstairs away from the tuner box, I could. It appears such a thing is more complicated than I thought. I expected to find add-on boards for gumstix motherboards that could read video input, but had no luck. So either I have to research creating a hardware device that can efficiently process video input with at most a 600 Mhz processor at its disposal, or I need to abandon the idea. Not sure what to do. Need to get involved in an electronics scene around here (assuming there is one) and talk to some folks that have a clue.
2009-04-03
Somehow I've failed to mention that I've been using a homebrew personal information manager for about 4 years now. It's written in PHP5 with SQLite, and was the first major testing ground for my dbFacile, ORMer, Vemplator, Wikivert and Autoform projects.
What does it do for me? It stores Events, Notes, Tasks, and Pages. I used to use it for bookmarks, but then I switched to Delicious about a year ago. You can't beat having a browser plugin for quickly adding bookmarks.
Page functionality is what I use the most. It's a wiki-like with hierarchy, and where I stage 99% of my blog posts, project ideas, daily journals, etc.
Events is useful for keeping birthdays, conference dates, anniversaries. Specifically, when they start, end, and their recurrence.
Why haven't I released this as open source yet? I don't know. I created it after finding a dearth of personal information managers (I hope that's the right categorization) on SourceForge, so maybe this space needs another project.
2009-03-11
Autoform has now surpassed my PHP Database Abstraction Class comparison in pageviews per month. Over the past month Autoform had 292 and the comparison 286. Autoform has been on SourceForge since August 2006, and it has only recently started to get a good amount of attention.
It probably helps that I've released two versions within the past four months. When Andy at Codeworx Technologies starts promoting my project I hope it helps even more.
2009-03-05
It's no wonder my dad used to say I dressed like a clown -- I think I'm partially color blind. Or at least, color dumb. Sometimes I can't tell whether something is dark brown, or dark gray, or whether this color has more elements of green in it rather than blue. It's rough. So this means it's incredibly difficult for me to choose colors for websites. I just can't do it. But this doesn't stop me from trying to solve the problem with better tools. Here's what I want:
An overlay that you can attach to a site just by including a javascript file. It would show you the currently used HTML tags, CSS ids and CSS classes. Somehow it should show you exact rules from your CSS so you can tweak color and background-colors. You could test new colors much more quickly. Too often a color looks great in 30x30 or even 100x100 squares, but when you apply it as a background color it's overbearing. This tool would be a way to discover that more quickly.
2009-02-20
I don't find PHPDocumentor type documentation all that helpful, especially for large projects with lots of classes. But some people do, and it really is the easiest possible way to create at least some form of documentation. Andy at Codeworx started adding PHPDocumentor comments to his customized version of Autoform, which he sent me. I should probably pick up where he left off.
I re-worked dbFacile into non-OOP for a project at work. And you know what ... I quite like it that way. The code is so much shorter, easier to understand, trace through, debug, etc. The non-OOP version for MySQL is now bundled with the normal dbFacile class.
The ONLY thing I hate about non-OOP dbFacile, is you can't easily connect to more than 1 database at a time. And it'd be even harder to let you connect to two different types of databases at the same time. This is something I absolutely NEED to do when performing imports for my shopping cart software.
2009-01-19
I'm gaining more autonomy at work. This means I get more opportunities to choose tools to expedite development work. Of course, I've chosen dbFacile for database abstraction. However, our SaaS system doesn't need the overhead of OOP and driver classes, so I'm stripping dbFacile down and converting to functions. I'll publish the results when they're stable enough.
