Well, I’m back from my long blog break. No particular reason. Neither, unfortunately can I talk much about what is going on in dev at the moment, more will be revealed later. Sorry, this one is short.

As you can tell if you read the title of this post aloud, this post comes in three parts, and they all rhyme.

I started today by hooking up an ancient Pentium 75 with 16 MB RAM with FreeBSD 4.8 (latest version that will run on that hardware). It worked, up until the point at which I wanted to put Apache on it, and I couldn’t mount the CD-R I had burnt with the sources on. So that stopped there.

I then did some Visual Basic.NET programming, with Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. I started to create a little Text Editor application for Windows. I got fairly far, then VB crashed and I hadn’t saved. Grrr. So I have got just beyond that point now, and I will continue another day.

Now I am downloading the official trial version of Windows Server 2003 R2 from Microsoft. If I can find a suitable box to run it on, I hope to see how it compares to Linux when it comes to doing server stuff. Over a 1MB connection, though, this could take some time.

Hello everyone, and before I start proper – Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all (if anyone does read this, that is). It’s Christmas Eve, so don’t expect a blog post tomorrow, people.

You may have noticed that in this post’s title I have substituted the word ‘Happy’ for ‘Hybrid’, and there is a very good reason for this. I have relaunched my Hybrid Web Services site with an all-new look and the latest Project Krystal build, version 0.6a. There’s a tiny bit of info on Project Krystal here, along with my RSS Generator (which is in its next version now, having cleared up a few minor issues).

Well, there’s not much else dev-wise I’ve been doing, today I was pretty much just skinning Project Krystal to Hybrid’s requirements and making it look integrated with the whole Hybrid look. Well, I did rediscover a gaming classic (and found a patch to make it run on Windows XP) – Worms 2. It rules. See you soon.

Well, it’s certainly taken me a while – I’ll grant you that, but at least now SUSE Linux 10 is back online. I’ve installed Apache 2.0.54 and a PHP 4 version included with SUSE 10, so I avoid compiling myself and once again causing the partition table problem. SUSE 10 works, it works well, and I even found an RPM for Firefox 1.5, so I’m fully upgraded and operational.

Windows, however, is plagued with a choppy sound, plus still the disappearing mouse trouble from my last post. I’m working on a solution with the guys at Linux-noob.com (thanks guys, you rock), but until then it looks like MS Office doesn’t work.

Ah well, at least I can continue webdev finally (on Linux, naturally). I am adding a user logon auditing system to Project Krystal. Speaking of which, the build on the Buttons site is now v0.5.2.

Let’s hope Windows starts working soon.

I had a bit of a major problem recently. Other people disagree (more), but I’m convinced that PHP 5.1.1 deleted my partition table for my first hard drive. I’ve explained it enough already, so use the link above if you want the story.

So this means that Windows and Linux need to be put back on, in fact I only just managed to save my source code, as I could boot into Windows once and once only. This is a job for the Christmas holidays; only three more days of school to go.

I’m running a temporary build of Windows at the moment, because it is unstable as anything. The mouse stops working periodically (and it’s not the cable) and it boots up slower than a snail with a speed limiter.

I’ve done some serious sorting of security on PK recently. The logon security algorithm has been made a lot better, but for obvious reasons I’m not saying why, as the alpha version of PK is still online (somewhere) and it is a potentially hackable thing (it’s been taken down by me now).

Also, user permissions have had an MD5 hashing system added as well to make sure people can’t just meddle with their session data to gain access to modules they aren’t allowed to access.

I’ve had an idea that I might do a Webdev & Nerd Stuff podcast at some point, if I get round to it, so I’ll keep you updated with that and as ever with all my webdev projects.

Major news update :

Project Krystal has gone live on the all-new Buttons Productions website (my school’s Young Enterprise company). It’s been a long time coming having the system this stable (it’s approaching Beta quality). I’m really happy because it looks great, works (better than the Alpha builds anyway) and just generally it has been quite an achievement to get to this stage. We’re now on version 0.5.1 (approcaching Beta 1).

Whoo!

I’ll keep you posted with GPL stuff and PK stuff too.

I’ve created my first ever open source project, to give back to the open source community who have helped me learn so much (GNU/Linux, PHP, MySQL, Apache, too many things to mention).

It’s fairly simple, a basic RSS feed generator. It uses PHP and accepts input from a MySQL database. It’s licensed under the GPL, so it’s free for anyone to use and make improvements to.

You can get a download of it from my site, located here. A sample bit of code it generates can also be viewed at that page.

Any suggestions or comments, just post a comment here (you will need a Blogger account). Or send me an email, it’s strategyoracle=-AT–gmail=—DOT–com.

Well, it’s out to you now, so use it if you want and please do give feedback if you like it.

Yes, today is (well, has been) a day off school for standard teacher training stuff. I’m now about half way through my mock exams, which is fairly good and, well, let’s keep off the subject of exams shall we?

Due to the exams (oh no, said it again) Project Krystal has crawled along in progress, making only a few minor adjustments in the last week. The development process should speed up sometime soon, when I get more free time that I can plug into the project.

Well, there’s not much more to say other than that I joined a new forum today, http://teendev.com, under my strategyoracle name.

Well, until next time…

As this post finally wins the award for longest post title ever, and longest time between posts, I would like to welcome myself back to writing this blog.

I haven’t written for ages for a number of reasons. Firstly, mock exams are about to start, so revision has been heavy recently and secondly, lots of further development has been taking place, so there hasn’t really been time to write here.

But anyway, on with today’s post, and it’s going to be a bit of an essay to make up for all those days I didn’t post.

In development, Project Krystal has come on leaps and bounds, but is still most definitely in Alpha stage, as there are major flaws getting it to work. I am kitting out a friend with a copy of the latest ‘stable’ (I use the term loosely) build to test and find improvements, not only to the code but the web user interface too. He gets a free copy of my website management software to build his website, I get a tester. Symbiosis at its best.

In code, I am now building the final bit of the project, the products page with cataloguing system (fully sortable) and searching for the products. Also, the rich text editing system is officially integrated with the whole admin system, so it is as easy to use as any WYSIWYG word processor.

Christmas is also coming, so that means a new graphics card, the Geforce 6600, hopefully, to replace my current (rubbish) Geforce FX5200.

When will I be finished with Project Krystal? No idea as yet. Once all the features are done, the code will have to be seriously stablised to the point that I consider it something worth(y) of selling.

On the note of Hybrid, which will take over from Buttons Productions after the end of the year, my friend Chris is now on board to deal with the design of the future Hybrid site and our contracts. He’s good at building mock designs (albeit in Paint) and making them look good when I convert them to the cool XHTML.

OK, until next time, which I’m not sure when it will be,

Peter the Nerd