GizmoLA.com

The Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC) is one of a number of Massive Multiplayer Online Role playing games (MMORPG) available for people who like those types of things. Mythic Entertainment, the company behind DAoC decided to offer an xml feed with various statistics about the game including the number of active players. From April 2002 to July 2005 I used a cron job to query the xml feed once every 5 minutes, parse the results and store the statistics in a database table.

I made a graph of these statistics available on a fan site I operated. The graph used the open source PHPlot graphing class in order to draw a line graph charting the number of players playing the game by hour for a 24 hour period. Visitors to the site would see the line graph shown here, plotting the number of players per hour against a second line showing the day's average. Like many PHP graphing libraries, PHPlot assumes that you have the GD library installed and available to PHP on order for the graphs to work.

This was one of my early experiments with PHP, and illustrated its power and flexibility. Now that the site where the graph appeared is no longer online, I figured I would provide the code, and a small subset of the database, for people interested in how to program with PHPlot. At the time I created this code, PHPlot didn't have much documentation and required some trial and error experimentation. Of course, since then (several years now) PHPlot has been improved, and should definately be considered if you want graphing in your application. Because I don't want to spend time debugging old obsolete code, I've provided the library I used in the download along with the graph script. It would probably work with the latest release, but I don't have time to test it. You can download my example database, version of PHPlot and script here. The database contains one months data, so you can play with the script and explore the class.

Read on for some brief instructions and an explanation of the code. Continue reading "PHPlot, MySQL and the Dark Ages of Camelot"

This is a major release with all sorts of new features, and numerous bug fixes. I've been using the beta releases for quite a while and they are definately worth upgrading for.

Release announcement is here

Version .02 of my GeSHi plugin was also released.

Sometimes I see people attempting to use VARCHARS or CHARS to store dates in their MySQL database application. This is really fighting against MySQL, which has a variety of interchangeable date types. Internally MySQL is storing dates as numbers, which allows it to do all sorts of nice arithmetic and comparisons with very little effort on your part. For example, when you use a mysql DATE column to store a date, you don't have to worry about sortation, or comparing that date to another DATE, because MySQL already understands how to do those things internally. A lot of people also don't realize that they can output a DATE column in just about any way they choose using the DATE_FORMAT function. This causes people to shy away from using DATE, DATETIME, TIME, or TIMESTAMP columns, when they really should.

Continue reading "Exploring Mysql CURDATE and NOW. The same but different."

I've exploring the Serendipity API by writing an "event" plugin wrapper around GeSHi. GeSHi is an extremely cool php class that does color syntax highlighting for any computer language you want. Since I hop from language to language, this is exactly the type of capability I want. So without further ado, here's a test of my plugin, currently in alpha state:

First some PHP


Now some SQL


and how about a hot cup-o...

Java


I have a lot to do (and learn about Serendipity) before I feel the plugin will be ready to release in beta state, but at least I thought I'd try it out and show a proof of general concept.

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world's first Bionic man.
Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before.
Better . . . stronger . . . faster.

After several web years having earned some sort of living from the development of interactive systems, I felt it was finally time to sit down and get started on a project that has been in the back of my mind for much of 2004. Namely, to relaunch GizmoLA.com, using database driven technology (in this case the popular LAMP combination [Gentoo Linux running as a UML instance on a coop server coowned and operated by myself and a bunch of people I met virtually through the Linux Users of Los Angeles, the Apache Web server, Mysql database server and PHP scripting language] as the platform for a php based "blogging" server called Serendipity. I realized some time ago that the original GizmoLA.com (which was always plain old html, created primarily in Dreamweaver) had always been designed to be a "Blog" of sorts, only I began it long before anyone had actually coined the term. Back in those days you just called it a homepage or personal home page. What I always wanted was a site that I could use as a repository for notes about my various projects, diary entries and musings about the places I've been, music I listen to, books I've read, movies I've seen, people I know, products I like and dislike, and things that I find interesting.

For quite some time the task of sitting down and manually updating things in the static html pages that comprised GizmoLA have made it an onerous task. The site has also moved a number of times and in the process things that were originally on the site broke or became obsolete.

I have a variety of goals for this new system, and I'm betting that Serendipity, which is still very much in Beta, will be the platform upon which I can build the type of site I have always wanted. As I work on converting the original Gizmola over, I'll try and elaborate on my goals, and provide an occasional update in the process.

My first order of business will be to convert some of the old articles over (or not, I haven't 100% decided how to proceed), and create a template that reflects as much of the original GizmoLA.com design as makes sense. This will certainly be an adventure in wrangling html and .css.

Another important aspect of what I want from my blog is the ability to include code and diagrams in certain blog entries. From what I can see this will probably be the first thing I'll need to create a module to do, unless I can find one that already exists. I did look hard at using the popular PHP blog package WordPress, even to the degree of installing it and adding in a few modules. I can't say for certain that my experience with Serendipity will be better, but the module architecture for Wordpress required me to do a lot of manual editing of existing scripts which didn't strike me as particularly modular.

It's been a while since I updated. I have plans to move the site to a new server I bought and have been configuring. Part of the process involved getting my new ISP in place (thankfully, and after numerous false starts) I now have DSL again, courtesy of Megapath Networks. The new server is setup with RedHat 7, and is hosting several small gaming sites: Cali Tribes Players and LaLa-Lan. Eventually I plan to move Gizmola.com onto it. So obviously, I've been working on a few side ventures.

I'm also playing a lot of Ice Hockey at Culver city and Burbank, and learning PHP and MySQL in the process. I think I can now be considered officially nocturnal, as I find myself up most nights. Lately I've been playing a fair amount of Tribes2, and my Tribes2 team has climbed into the top 10 of the teamwarfare ladder. This is somewhat contributory to the nocturnal lifestyle, although I think the primary reason is that I'm just basically a night person, and without the constraints of a regular job to attend, my free running cycle allows for me to sleep when I'm tired. As I write this, it's 5:40am and I'm still awake.