IT Club website moving along

I'm the one assigned with making the content of the website for IT club. I am planing to use some cool perl tricks for parts of it. I spent three hours on starting it today. Thusfar I have a (database) file which has news in it, an index.cgi file which displays the news using a format specified by another file (news_layout.html). I also have the file which will allow us to add and update news, addnews.cgi, part way done. I can add news with addnews.cgi but I cannot yet update news. I also will be making a file which acts as an RSS feed when accessed. This will actually be fairly easy since it is similar to index.cgi but even simpler.

The best part is, I'm actually writing legible Perl! I used subroutines seriously for the first time and I actually indented my code and used braces in a consistent way. I guess AP Comp Sci actually is good for something.

I can draw!

I just exported my first jar file from BlueJ successfully. Now I can actually create executables of my programs so they can be of use.

Now if only I could find a use for one of our assignments. The one I exported was Rectangle.

Home Entertainment System Specs

These are the specs for the GeeXboX-based home entertainment system we built over the summer:

• Case: Antec ARIA mATX CubeCase
• Hard drive: Maxtor 200GB
• Video card: ATI Radeon 9800
• Sound card: SoundBlaster Audigy 2
• RAM: (2) 256MB DDR 400
• Motherboard: ASUS A7V400-MX
• CPU: Athlon XP
• WIFI: Netgear WG311
• Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro
• OS: GeexBox 0.98

Slackware 10 Rocks

I used Fedora Core 2 as my main system all summer. We bought the parts for our GeeXboX home entertainment system a few days before our LAN party at my house the last friday before school started. I bought SuSE 9.1 at Fry's when we went I ended up installing it during the second week after school started. During this week I went on a distro-downloading-n-burning-frenzy.

I downloaded Feather Linux 0.58, FreeBSD 5.2.1, Slackware 10, College Linux 2.5, and Linspire 4.5.499. I happened to have 'received' a few more hard drives so now my collection includes:

1. 120GB with Windows 98(?)/2000
   
2. 1GB with nothing
   
3. 8GB with Mandrake 10
   
4. 80GB with corrupted Fedora Core 2 partition
   
5. 80GB with Suse 9.1 Personal
   
6. 120GB with Slackware 10
   
7. 80GB with FreeBSD
   
8. 60GB "DeathDeskStar" with Linspire (it hums)
   
9. 60GB with nothing
   

The story behind my Fedora drive is simple: I was stupid enough to fsck a mounted disk (if you pronounce fsck incorrectly like me that phrase rhymes). Luckily I had backed up a few things, installed SuSE 9.1, and got xorg to actually work in SuSE. Then I decided to install Slackware 10. After a few days I got Slackware 10 working well and I started using XFCE4 until I had a few problems with it so I switched to Dropline Gnome 2.6.

Moral of the story: Be careful ... or just always keep a few extra usable OSs laying around just in case.
I think I need this shirt

BlueJ is not a jbird

I'm learning Java this year in AP Comp Sci and so far the labs we've been assigned have been extremely easy. We have so far drawn a house, done our taxes (not really), found out what day easter falls on in a given year, etc. Compared to what I've done on my own time in Perl or Shell Script this is so easy.

The best part though is that I get to work extensively on the formatting of my code and my comment style. Before this my perl code was horribly difficult to edit and it was written using obscure methods that I made myself because I was too lazy to look up alternative methods. My shell script coding has been better because it has been more geared toward the public to read and critique and my shell scripts are generally much shorter.

Updating mp3ogg helped me out quite a bit with formatting my code. I had to work with code that was not my own and keep it formatted consistently... Loran Hughes' has a very good coding style by the way.

Well... there codes one good post... more to come.

I have too much on my plate!

I haven't had the time to post to my blog or to my Free Software Reviews. I promise I will get some time to post to both soon. Even with me not playing a sport this year I feel as busy as ever. I've got three APs, I'm actually getting A's, and I'm now a VP of one club and a member of another at my school. On top of all that I need community service hours.

Maybe I'll post some general complain-and-moan-about-life posts soon... depends on my mood I guess.

Gmail Anyone?

I have 6 gmail invites? "What would you do for a gmail account?"

I know I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy school, installing things, and sitting around doing a lot of nothing