GoneWacko’s Blog

Choosing my semester(s)

Argh! I was typing quite a nice post but then I accidentally pressed CTRL+W and lost it all

Anyways: Today I received information about the various semesters I get to choose from. Managed to pick a few which I like (of the 14 available semesters!), of which I’ll probably have to choose three:

• Develop an OO application
• Game creation (in my case, programming the 3D engine and the AI)
• Network programming (on a relatively low level)
• Information System Development

So now I’m not sure which semester to drop, because both Network Programming and Information System Development seemed very interesting, also because the speaker said that both subjects were rather important in the business world. And that means a higher chance for me to make some cash

Clearly I’m going for the Software Engineer ‘function’ Especially the first and second semester seem quite cool, because they were defined as ‘the hardcore programming’ - which I hope to be doing later - and because both semesters are given by cool teachers

Awesome

Somewhat technical blog coming up, so if you’re bound not to understand any of it (Martin?) then consider yourself warned.

My scripts page is hardly a day old and already I’ve rewritten it entirely. On the outside, it looks just about the same, but internally, everything is different.
Originally, the pages were just static HTML pages. Now, however, I’m using PHP with XML, which is something I had not done before, apart from the RSS2PNG script.

It’s nothing too revolutionary, but I’m still quite proud of it, because it’s an interesting example of how much my knowledge of PHP has increased over the past 5 days. Maybe I’ll even add one of those ’show source’ links to the script just so my ego can grow a bit more.

So, on to the details. The script makes an index of all the available scripts by looking in every directory in the scripts folder, and checking if there’s a script.xml file inside. If there is, it opens the xml file, takes some of the basic information such as the script’s name and short description, and places it in an array.

Then, when it has placed all the scripts into the array, it just dumps that to the page, in a pretty way.
When you go to the page of a specific script, it also reads the xml file, and just writes all the other information to the screen.
For example, check out the RSS2PNG XML file.

Then I also wrote a little RewriteRule which ended up being a pain in the ass. The RewriteRule makes it possible to go to http://www.gonewacko.com/scripts/rss2png, even though it will technically go to http://www.gonewacko.com/scripts/index.php?script=rss2png.

To do this, I used the following rewrite rule:
RewriteRule ^(\w+)$ index.php?script=$1 [L]
However, this somehow did work on my localhost (Apache 2.2), but it didn’t work on gonewacko.com (Apache 1.3), even though mod_rewrite doesn’t appear to have changed that much at all.
In the end I found out that \w wasn’t working for some strange inexplicable reason, but after replacing it with it’s equivalent,
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$ index.php?script=$1 [L]
everything worked fine. That did take quite a long time to figure out though, probably because I was tired, because I found the solution shortly after waking up this morning

I’m currently planning on doing three things:

• Adding a download counter to the scripts
• Making it possible to write comments about the scripts
• Adding smarty support so I can easily change the layout of the pages

And finally, a quote:

GoneWacko says: Read about it in my magazine, yes
Thomas says: you got your own magazine?
Thomas says:
GoneWacko says: yes
GoneWacko says: GoneWacko Weekly
GoneWacko says: There’s a new issue every month

Script(s)

Well, I finally added something new to the site!

Maybe you already noticed it, maybe you didn’t, but the navigational bar at the top of the screen has a new Scripts tab.
Currently there’s only one script, which I mainly wrote for Born_Acorn, but I figured I had to start the portfolio section sometime with something. So that’s now, with rss2png.

Furthermore, I noticed there’s been a lot of new posts on Planet TT-Forums lately (including quite a lot of posts by me, as of late).
I must say it’s good to have something new to read every 3 or 4 hours

The past 3 days

For those who don’t know, I’m currently having a week long holiday, which means that I have been doing relatively little stuff.
Yet, at the same time, I’ve also done quite a lot of stuff if you compare it to the summer holiday.

On Monday I played some games (Tycoon City New York, Star Wars Empire at War), and I went to see the doctor as I described in my previous post.

On Tuesday I did some PHP coding and I spent some time trying to understand mod_rewrite. I’m not new to apache or php, but there are still a lot of things I have never touched before, simply because I never needed them or because I never thought of touching them (that’s usually my problem; not knowing what to make or do). It turned out to be pretty neat (I already knew what it was, but still).

And today I went to see the doctor again. He fixed my nail, which was interesting. At first I was a little bit anxious, mainly about the sedation. Not because I’m afraid of needles - because I’m not - but because I wasn’t sure if it would truly sedate me. My experiences with that other guy in white, the dentist, haven’t been very good; I’d generally still experience a lot of pain when teeth got jerked out of my jaw.
But this doctor (in training) was a pretty nice guy. He sedated me (which did definately hurt quite a bit because toes are rather full of nerves) and then he did some poking around asing me if I felt anything (which is of course standard procedure, but he promissed he would not start doing anything before I was certain that I wouldn’t feel a thing). To my relief, the answer to his question was no.
Afterwards he admitted that the places he poked around in were rather ‘mean’, (probably under my nail and into the wound - with a scalpel…) so I felt quite good about the whole operation.
When I got back home it started to hurt a little bit, but nothing a painkiller or two couldn’t solve.

So, “what did you code in PHP?”, I hear you ask.¹
Well, firstly, I rewrote a script I wrote in JSP, but in PHP and, in the process, made it better. In this particular case I rewrote the tree menu that was I also writing for my school project. After showing the code to SpComb he immidiately wrote a similar tree menu, but better (because it can get the various treenodes from either a database, an array or an XML file. Afterwards he put his script on his website without even giving me a shoutout as a thanks for all the great inspiration (*ahem*). How rude!

¹ Disclaimer: This may have been is a blatant lie.