2013

• jQuery holdEvent

  The making of this plugin was completely a random act of hand-itchiness. A friend of mine (@cornguo) published a fun app online. There is a name for this kind of app, but I can’t recall at the moment. It typically displays some buttons (usually in a grid), and clicking them causes some sound to be played. The interesting part in cornguo’s app is that there’s a text-input field where the name of the buttons can be typed-in for replaying.

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• Quick Hack: Terminal Appearing from Right

  It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.

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• Revisiting Fizz Buzz in PHP

  Back then when I was attending a job interview, I was asked to write a Fizz Buzz program to prove that my coding ability. There was only a pen and a piece of paper, so basically means there’s no way I can refer to the documentation for the API syntax. Fortunately I somehow managed to remember and not screw up.

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• Update in tools

  It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.

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• Database transactions involving prepared statements

  I was thinking whether it is possible to avoid exposing PDO and PDOStatement objects to the users of my database library (mainly just me). While I was working on my project I sort of notice that there is a almost fixed pattern whenever I work with the database. With this in mind, I added in some new functions to the library, and decided to make a quick release for this.

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• Evaluating logical statements

  Often times one would have to write code to evaluate logical statements. For example, given statement p and q, what is p implies q? As there’s no operator for implication in PHP, one would have to rewrite the statement that consists only in NOT (!), AND (&&) and OR (||) operators. When there are a huge load of these statements, code can be difficult to read.

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• Evil evil update

  This update took me quite a bit more time than I initially expected. Anyway, I have done some refactoring work to the original code, and thought it would be nice to document the changes. Overall, most of the changes involved the refactoring of function names. I am not sure if this would stick, but I am quite satisfied for now.

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• My evil evil form and database library

  Writing a usable form and database library has always been a painful experience. So why bother re-inventing the wheel when there are so many to choose from already? I am writing one mostly for learning purpose. After numerous attempts, I finally get my form and database library in shape. It is nowhere complete, but nor it is perfect, but it is currently the implementation that is closest to my original design. I will keep working on it so it can be used in my personal projects in the future.

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Random Posts

• Hitting a nail with the wrong hammer (my writing tools)

  I just failed a programming assessment test miserably yesterday and thought I should at least document it down. However, the problem with this is that the questions are copyrighted, so I guess I would write it from another point of view. So the main reason I failed was because I chose the wrong strategy to the problem, thinking it should be solution but as I put in time to that I ended up creating more problems.

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• Symlinking two Blogs

  I am currently doing some organization to my blogs. Few weeks ago, after spending months struggling to work in Ubuntu 7.10, I learned about symbolic links. Then I thought this would be good for my project file management. Therefore I started to re-organize my project file structure to utilize symbolic links. One of the projects that uses symbolic link is the current wordpress theme.

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• Setting Up Virtuoso for Redland Under Ubuntu

  Just a quick update to the previous post, the virtuoso storage engine works with redland provided the required packages are properly installed (yes, yes, yes, I know I haven’t release my PHP OO wrapper for Redland). Now that the package is installed, we need to do some configuration so that Redland can use it.

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• Quick Hack: Terminal Appearing from Right

  It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.

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• Adding complexity to the bot: threads and processes

  Being new to asyncio, after publishing the previous post on running multiple applications in one event loop, I also cross posted it to the discussion board for feedback. So apparently instead of cramming everything to the same event loop, it would be better if each application run on a separate thread. That makes sense, considering all the code that was written for that.

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