WillErwin.com

I’ve started back at school, now attending the University of Houston. I’m only taking 6 hours, as I’m just getting back to going to school again, it’s a new school, and I don’t want to overload myself. This leaves me with a lot of extra time on my hands, so I’ve taken a keen interest in learning PHP, specifically version 5.

There is a real beauty behind PHP in how it works and the actual power behind the language. It’s an extremely powerful language, it’s fast, open source and with a programming background, the learning curve is simple - all great reasons to use it. Also, I believe in the next couple of years, we’ll be seeing a lot of applications that we use everyday going online, to be completely web-based. We’ll also see a increase in web-based storage solutions - where you’ll be able to access your information anywhere with an Internet connection. The drawback on this is that your information no longer becomes exclusively yours, which is a major privacy concern.

However, with everything going web-based, that is where PHP comes in. I was familiar with it previously, and could read and understand it, but coding it would be a challenge. Now, I find that since I’ve been hosting the Shareaza Daily Builds, I’ve gone from having multiple scripts to incorporating everything into one script using functions and sessions. It’s been quite fun actually, while being a learning process, and reminds me of the days of when I used Visual Basic 6. Once I get the Daily Builds script perfected, I’m going to release it under the GPL v3. While I haven’t gotten to a point or project where I’m incorporating databases and MySQL, that’s on my future agenda.

I’ve also been working closely with Greg Hazel, one of the lead developers of uTorrent. While I’m not going to go into specific details, I will say that version 1.8 is progressing nicely and will definitely be a recommend upgrade on final release. Using Visual Studio 2008 on debugging this project and learning the inner-working of Shareaza has been a pleasure.

Having been a developer in the peer-to-peer and Internet scene for several years, from a few years at PeerGuardian, working at a web-design company, to now working with Shareaza and helping with uTorrent, it’s been very interesting to see the progress and direction that peer-to-peer is going in. I strongly believe that in the next few years, we’ll see an increase in hardware appliances and applications using some sort of peer-to-peer protocol to deliver information. Along with this happening, we’ll see an increase in broadband speeds, moving to wideband speeds, throughout the United States.

I was asked an interesting question the other day, about what I thought about the sharing of illegal, inappropriate or questionable material online. My response is that with the recent events of things such as mandatory filtering throughout Australia and talks of AT&T filtering copyrighted material at the network level, I maintain my stance in the freedom of information and flow of traffic on the Internet.

Voltaire once wrote “I may not like what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. I fully agree but now that we’re in the information age, I think it may be more appropriate to say “I may not like what you have to share, but I will defend to the death your right to share it”. We cannot stop the flow of information - you can try, and I promise you that you will always fail. We must learn to embrace file sharing and peer-to-peer protocols. Specifically, corporations need to stop going against the grain and instead try a new approach. I applaud Netflix and Xbox 360 for their recent delivery of full content (eg: TV shows, movies, etc.) through the Internet, directly onto your computer or television. This is where the future of media content and delivery is going.

On February 4th, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers. With this transition, it will finally be possible for two internet hosts to communicate without using IPv4 at all. Certain obsolete software may face compatibility problems due to the change, but those issues are addressed in an ICANN report (pdf).

Update: The transition has begun!

The development team for Internet Explorer reached a new milestone yesterday and IE8 now fully complies with the Acid 2 test. If you’re not a web developer, then you probably don’t know what that is. Let’s just say that it’s a big milestone to have reached and I applaud Microsoft for their efforts, even if I do hate Vista.

My latest web site design is complete. It was for Red Haute Designs.

Red Haute Designs was established in 2006 and provides high quality, fashionable accessories at affordable prices for women and children of all ages. Their current offerings include a wide array of earrings, necklaces, bracelets and jewelry sets as well as specialty bridal, children, and exclusive collegiate lines. Their jewelry products are manufactured from the finest materials with a particular emphasis in freshwater pearls.

A few challenges were faced with designing this website. The first stemmed from finding an open source solution that contained a shopping cart. A few solutions (with full templates designed :/) were tried but were not up to the task of being a full shopping cart. I needed more than just a simple implementation - one that I could customize the interface, change the back-end code (open source), and one that was easy for the client to use. Many solutions required paying a fee for their software and I wanted to avoid this. I tried several different setups, including Wordpress with WP e-Commerce, Joomla with VirtueMart, Zen Cart and osCommerce.

Each of those solutions contained what I believed to be a fatal flaw. The Wordpress plugin hardly worked at all and development was slim to null, VirtueMart wasn’t up to date with the latest version of Joomla or fully compatible with the server settings I was using, osCommerce hasn’t been updated in ages, although development is still apparently happening, and Zen Cart was really the same. I continued searching and came upon a relatively new project called OpenCart.

OpenCart seemed to fit my needs and although it is being developed by a one-man team (I guess 2 now since I plan to submit some code fixes and changes that I’ve made while working on Red Haute Designs) it worked well, was being actively developed, worked with the server I was using and it was VERY easy for the client to use. If you’ve used other products such as osCommerce, the back-end can be very confusing; not the case with OpenCart. I’ll quote the client from Red Haute Designs - “…I have been able to easily add our products!” and “That is awesome that it was a free program as it is sooo easy to use!”.

There are a few flaws in the program that I’ve had to change up the PHP or make adjustments to fix - such as file permissions for user uploaded product images. This was fixed with a crontab chmodding the images in the upload directory. However, job well done and the client seems pleased. I’ll be adding some code changes and additions to OpenCart in the near future. I think this project has great potential to become a widely used open source shopping cart.

You can see OpenCart in live action at Red Haute Designs.

I’ve started to use tagging on each post that I write. This will currently be in beta status for the next few months while I monitor the SEO results.

I still haven’t come up with a methodology for how I’m going to tag each post while keeping things semi-consistent. As always, suggestions are welcome.

Posts have also been moved into move appropriate categories besides “General”.

Update: I’ve disabled tagging as I didn’t really like it.

Contrary to the popular belief that I’ve been sitting around Houston doing nothing, that hasn’t been the case. I’m always learning or doing something new - whether it be getting my real estate license or getting Cisco certified. To further development of my skills, and to give me a project to do, I’m going to fully re-design this website. Here is a list of features that I’m going to base the upcoming design off of.

Code:
- Standards based upon XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1
- Consider additional “light” design based on XHTML Mobile 1.1 and CSS Mobile Profile 2.0
- Framework based on PHP 5.2, MySQL 5.0, and Prototype Javascript 1.6
- Dynamically generated and updated sitemap based upon 0.9 schema.

Design:
- Web 2.0 Design
- Use of AJAX with “Unique URLs” Nixed idea due to SEO
- Tags along with dynamic Tag Cloud
- Feeds published using both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0
- Favicon

Posts:
- Online bookmarks submission (eg: Digg, del.icio.us, etc.)
- Individual (separate) META tags for each post - to be defined dynamically. Include post tags into META data.

*More coming when I get one of my brilliant ideas. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comment section of this post. It doesn’t even have to be something you’ve seen before.

Well, it seems like this site is going to get a new design after all, especially after a year of procrastination.

First though, I have to fix my main computer, which started going haywire today and reboots randomly every 2 minutes. I believe it’s a motherboard problem. Thankfully I policies in place for situations like this with another hard drive with all my important (and up-to-date) data stored.
So, I may be busy ordering parts and building a new computer this week. This is such an inopportune time for something like this to happen, since the release of Intel’s new processor, Peryn, is just a month away. I might just throw in a cheap motherboard and make due until then — we’ll see.

I’ll also be switching over to be running Windows Vista Ultimate, as SP1 is due out relatively soon and beta copies can be obtained online. Time for me to migrate from XP.

Lots to do and I want it all done now!