Just Let It Flow!

Using Windows XP and keep getting the prompt to restart your computer, after downloading Automatic Updates?

I do, and it annoys me to death.  It happens to pop up at the most inopportune times, watching a movie, playing a game, developing a website, etc.

For those of you that are lazy, I have created a simple .bat file to kill the annoying windows update restart popup.  Simply download the file and open it.  A black box will appear, and then go away.  You should see the windows update box go away.

I originally found this post on LifeHacker

Well, a while ago I posted about some goals I wanted to meet before the year was over.  None of which I’ve met 100%, however, I’m improving/attempting to still do.

1. Being employed at a company/corporation - I’ve went to a few interviews, felt they went well, but apparently someone wasn’t expressing their exact thoughts.  When I inquired about whether or not I was invited back for another interview or even got hired, I got the run around.  Anywho, still trying to be optimistic about things, I’m still looking for employment elsewhere.

2. My goal about finishing things on time, not quite on time, but atleast I’m getting the finishing down.  Kind of hard to get things done between all the distractions, having a normal life, working a real job, and trying to keep yourself motivated.  I feel I have improved in this area dramatically.  I still feel that the main reason I lag on things is due to interest and the fact that I know it’s not my primary source of income.  If it were my ONLY source, I’d have no choice or just be homeless.

3. Learning a new development language.  I think that I’m pretty much done learning new development languages.  I mean, as of now, I see it like, “what’s the point?”.  I’m not employed and my skills are useless.  Regardless of what I know, places that want developers, want college educations.  I find it completely irrelevant to the position, but hey, their money, their choice.  WHEN I get a job that requires or atleast seems like it’d benefit from me learning a new language, then I’ll atleast try.  Until then, my brain is locked.

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The four sites that I had listed.
1) poetrycircle.net - Halted development completely on it until I had a better base and idea of what the site should be.  A very broad idea of the site was in my head at the time.  I’m reworking my ideas for the site and the old designer is wanting to redesign the layout.

2) babetemplates.com - I don’t think this site will ever be back to ‘life’, so to speak.  It went from having a forum with 1k+ members, to being completely dead in no time.  Though, I’d like to bring it back to life, I sit and think…”Who actually wants babe templates anyhow?”.

3) mystorytime.net - The current site contains OLD exploitable code from when I first began developing in PHP.  I redid the site using CakePHP, it’s not 100%, however only a few pages are left to design.  I had got sidetracked by some paid work, and forgot all about it.

4) oceanempires.com - I’d still love to complete this game, I just have this feeling it won’t ever happen.  While chatting in the #cakephp channel, I met someone who was interested in developing it with me.  We created a project page and that’s all that happened.  The other guy’s computer messed up and he fell behind in work.  From that day forward, he magically never had time anymore.  Funny how that works, eh?

My next issue is, creating a portfolio with all my work in it.  I do graphic design and web work.  I’m not sure whether I should separate the two or just keep them in the same portfolio or what.  Blah, stress.

While reading one of my favorite blog sites, LifeClever.com, I came across an interesting article. In short, it basically gave tips on how to be more productive, while reducing distractions.

How many of you check your email every 10 minutes, IM while working, have people distracting you in many ways, people calling you, and overall, feeling overwhelmed by all of these distractions? I know that these things tend to happen to me when I’m trying to complete a site or a design.

A bad habit of mine is chatting on IM’s rather than working on what I KNOW needs to get done.

If some of these things happen to you while you’re attempting to get work done, check out the article on LifeClever.com - “10 quick and (almost) painless ways to kill distractions“

I happened to take a look at my site’s stats and realized, “gee, quite a few people from phpclasses.org visit my blog”.  Noticing that the hits were referred from my Server Status class, I decided to rewrite it, after establishing that the code was simply garbage.

Some may find it useful, others may find it garbage. I some how managed to place 2nd in a coding competition phpclasses.org entered me into at php-editors.com. You can get more information here.

As those of you that read my blog know, I posted that I want to be hired on this year being a web developer. Here is my attempt at that.

You can download my resume in Microsoft Word (.doc) format or Adobe Acrobat Reader (.pdf) format.

MS Word - Resume in .DOC format

Adobe PDF - Resume in PDF format

Not much to it, but it’s a start.

While in the process of maintaining my dedicated server, I ran into a bit of a ‘bump’ so to say. It all started when after I updated to PHP 5.2.1. I recieved an email from one of the people I host, asking why he had a 5MB error_log file.

He supplied me with the contents of the log file, which were:

[11-Mar-2007 17:00:45] PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: pdf: Unable to initialize moduleModule compiled with module API=20050922, debug=0, thread-safety=0PHP    compiled with module API=20060613, debug=0, thread-safety=0These options need to matchin Unknown on line 0

Knowing that I had installed a PECL module for PDFLib, I assumed that it was it, I was right. I had previously went through a ton of hoops to get this to work. Here is how I fixed the error message above and how I got mine working. I would like to note that I am not a Linux expert.

I used PDFLib Lite, for free, non-commercial use. http://www.pdflib.com/download/pdflib-family/pdflib-lite/

You need to be root/sudo while doing this and PEAR/PECL needs to be installed.

wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/701/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.1.tar.gz

tar xzvf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.1.tar.gz

cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.1

./configure --prefix=/usr

make

make install

pecl install pdflib  (will ask for installation directory, type: /usr/)

You should recieve a string similar to this:

"Build process completed successfully
Installing '/var/tmp/pear-build-root/install-pdflib-2.1.2//usr/local/lib/php/ext ensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922/pdf.so'"

What I did next, was copy the pdf.so file into my php extensions directory:

cp /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-<tab>/pdf.so /usr/include/php/ext

I then modified my php.ini file, to load the pdflib, by adding the following line to the extensions section:

extension=pdf.so

I hope this helps some of those that got this error. There isn’t much help out there on this error, that I could find on google, that is why I decided to post it in my blog.

On top of what I already have on my table, I’ve been asked to do some contract work. Payment is done per script. Writing simple classes to have certain functionality. An example, would be a class to create FAQ’s using a MySQL database. I look forward to making a bit of extra money doing this. Hopefully I will be able to handle the load.

This year has had its ups and its downs. Needless to say, it was just another year. People coming up with New Year’s resolutions, that probably won’t last for more than the first month, if two weeks. This brings me on to the next subject. I don’t have a New Year’s resolution, however, I do have goals that I would like to meet/achieve by the end of this year. They go as follows:

• Be employed by a company/corporation doing web development.
• Finish projects on time.
• Receive some sort of certification.
• Learn a new development language.

My goals, to me, seem reasonable and worth attempting to do.

Now on with the next subject at hand. I currently have some projects in the works.

1. Babetemplates.com - This site has been under development for sometime now and is long overdue. It has been constantly thrown on the back burner. The designer has lost ideas for the site, and has come to what he calls a “designer block”. The coding for the site is next to none. We plan on making it a wallpaper site as long as a ‘reference’ to find ‘babe’ pictures.
2. Poetrycircle.net - This site too, has been under development for ages. It was almost complete at one time, but then lost the time to complete it. The domain is roughly 4 years old. I have a great designer who has made a design for the site. I have coded it and it is using Smarty Template Engine. I have few things left to do on the site. It is functional — has registration, login, logout, add/edit/delete poems, and view poems. I plan on adding a few more features to it before I release it to the public.
3. MyStorytime.net - I mentioned this website in a previous blog. I haven’t touched the code for this in a while and as a matter of fact, it has become buried (not good). I’m going to dig it up eventually and complete it. Most of the code is done for this site as well, I just need to integrate it.
4. Oceanempires.com - This website/domain is an Open Source project. It is planned out to be a text based online game. Visit www.oceanempires.com to read the design document and to visit the office SF.net page.

These projects are currently marked ‘todo’, by me. I will post status on these as time goes on.

As many of us know, myspace TRIES to limit us with our abliities in our page’s designs.  I recently visited a friend’s myspace page, and to my astonishment, it looked nothing like a typical myspace page.  To me, the page looks quite nice, to the point that I would like to create my own.

With that thought in mind, I am going to slowly design and piece together a “complete” website/myspace page.  I never thought that I would be interested in attempting to do so, however, my friend has inspired me todo just that.

If anyone has any tips/tricks for myspace, please feel free to leave them in a comment.