Category: programming

Most of the students where I teach have time in their computer labs to surf the web or play flash games. The IT department, in order to conserve bandwidth and filter "inappropriate material", need to block most games. Since most games are just mind-numbing wastes of time, most teachers support this. Students looking for games will scour the web searching for game sites that aren't blocked. As soon as one game site is discovered, the URL spreads like wildfire before the site is blocked in the next few days. The cycle repeats itself ad nauseum.

Seeing the problem from both sides, I decided to make an "approved games list" of games that at least feature some academic merit. I understand that games can be beneficial and educational while still being enjoyable. I asked my Computer Science class to find games they enjoy and add them to my games list. They needed to list the educational lessons found within the game and the supporting TEKS on my games list.
The end result has grown into "Mr. Gober's Games". Several students use the site daily and it has received the approval of administration.
Ideally, the next step will be to house the site on the school network to reduce the bandwidth load and increase response speed for the user.

Recently I have added a page to add games, a method to report broken or inappropriate games and a new ratings system. The ratings system was my first successful foray into AJAX. I've attempted AJAX before but came up short. Fortunately jQuery made the effort much easier by abstracting most of the work for me. So, take a look at Mr Gober's Games and have fun - don't forget to vote for your favorites!

I had no idea. Well, I guess I had never looked. I found Freelance-projects and elance this morning, after being told by friends. They're connection points for posting freelance software jobs and finding freelance programmers to do it. It's definately an international thing (quite a few are from asia) so the pricing can become very competitive.

I just missed a simple "PHP/MySQL export to Excel" job by a few minutes. The bidding was already closed. So if you have any online tech skills and figure you have some free time, pick a fun project and pick up some extra cash.

I was rolling the idea around in my head how I'd do it (database structure, features, etc.), but I was considering making a Christmas wishlist that you could log into and edit/update, etc.Sure, Amazon does wishlists, but you can only link to items sold on Amazon, what if I want something they don't carry? Yeah, how about that? So, as all real programmers do, I started coding before I had a finished concept. I didn't get too far into it before I got distracted and hassled with schoolwork.

So, I stalled out. One day, whilst on Digg, I came across this lovely site: wishlistr.com. I guess they're trying to stay with the whole Web2.0 naming convention wherein you drop the "e" from an "-er" name, ala Flickr. Anywho, the site does just what I was planning to do. You create an account and start in on your list, you can reorder the list and add/remove as you wish. (here's my list)

One notion that I'm not sure if they captured is to scan the users' URL, if it links to Amazon or some other site that gives referral bonuses (like 10% of the sale), then pass the user through your referral link transparently, therein resulting in a nice pull for your time/effort. That's the only thing lacking in their design, that and no ability to include a thumbnail of the item on your list. Otherwise it's a solid site, wish I'd thought of it sooner ...or is it spelled "soonr"?

I posted this in the shoutbox the other day, but I can't get over how helpful and informative these are. Yahoo posted some tutorial/introduction videos called the Yahoo! UI Library. It's basically a collection of videos that were (mostly) shot at Yahoo internal workshops on the JavaScript language and using JavaScript tools with the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI).

The videos I've finished watching so far is the introduction on the ins-and-outs of the JavaScript language by Yahoo JS Architect Doug Crockford. With sites like Yahoo and Google using JavaScript to create great webapps and sites like Digg with it's great user interface, which is powered by AJAX, I knew it was high time I finally put a saddle on JavaScript. For much too long I thought JavaScript was a PHP wannabe and I poo-poo'd it for quite a while. After seeing the "big dogs" like Yahoo and Google put it to good use, I realized I was mistaken. I've tried to read and understand JavaScript syntax and structure before from different books, but I've found these videos to be super helpful in explaining the usage of JavaScript and the structure of the DOM.

So, if you're at all interested in learning more about JavaScript or what Yahoo's doing with it in the form of the YUI, check out these videos.

update: I found this interesting and pertinent enough to be added here. O'Reilly.net has a good article on migrating PHP applications to AJAX. It covers a bit of AJAX terminology and it's associated technologies (JSON, XMLHttpRequest, et al).

I finally figured out why I couldn't get XBMC to stream Frontline shows anymore, it turns out PBS has changed the URL of their media server from a static IP to a real hostname. The script was originally written to use the static IP, so I fixed it. I also noticed they changed the URLs slightly so I allowed the script to handle that as well.

If you have XBMC running on your Xbox, make sure you're running a relatively recent install. (The one on Slayer's won't cut it.) You can grab the script and extract it in your XBMC/scripts directory. Once you run the script it will grab the listing of all of the Frontline episodes available on the web along with a description of that episode. (This isn't to say if you don't have an Xbox you can't watch Frontline, the videos are made to stream to your PC, it's just more comfy to sit on the couch and watch them!)

Update: I've submitted my updated/fixed version to xbmcscripts, and it has been posted. You can download it here, or just grab it from my files sections here: pbs-v.0.2c.zip.