ZinZam

BBcode

October 08, 2005

I personally like BBcode, and think it isn't used enough. Recently I wrote a really nice c# class which parses BBcode. BBcode allows you to give users styling choices without risking layout to your site, security, or other mal behaviours being introduced.

A number of sites could be cleaned up by replacing it's HTML inputs with BBcode including any popular teen portals such as mySpace. BBcode can be tricky to implement so alot of these sites just don't bother. So to put the myth that it's better to just allow HTML than to implement to rest I wrote a class which does it in my sparetime during the week. It was not only wasn't difficult to implement, it's much more extendable than other engines such as the one in phpBB2.0, is fast, and secure.

To encourage people to use BBcode in their commercial applications and see it take off, I am rewriting my BBcode documents from 2002 and making them alot more formal. You can see a draft of these documents on my website under BBcode. I will warn you that they are currently draft and incomplete. When they are complete I will 301 redirect from the old documents to the new ones.

I am also looking for recommendations for a suitable open-source or creative-commons license that would allow commercial applications to deploy my BBcode class in their product or website without having to relicense their codebase. It must be a license and not Public Domain. You can see a live demo of my BBcode class here, sorry if it's unresponsive, it's on free hosting, it should still be fast. If you get start to get errors just restart your browser.

Expect to seem more from me on BBcode in the comming months. BBcode still has a bright outlook being the primary user input styling language of popular internet forums including phpBB, vBulletin, Invision Power Board, Simple Machines Forum, UBB, YABB, and many more.

If you use an application that doesn't support BBcode, bug the developers to implement it, it's well worth it ;) For php applications, the BBcode component in phpBB2.0 is licensed under the GPL and is an excellent implementation that is easy to extend.

There is also support beyond web applications with a BBcode extension for the Mozilla Firefox Internet Browser which allows you to format text in a text area with BBcode via the right click context menu.

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Next Generation WAGDS

September 05, 2005

The next generation WAGDS is on it's way and it's gonna eat all the others alive.

Some of the features are implemented, but there is more to come, most will be worked on during December, but some of the others will be done during September through November.

The idea of this site is community, so what better way to encourage community than to make the site more my-space like. That includes better profiles, and better integration of the community features already present such as blogs and photos.

I've already implemented new green buttons, as well as added blog and photos buttons to the list. I've also integrated the friends list and you can also leave comments on your friends profiles.

To be added
Under 13's feature lockout and manditory word censoring. They will still be allows to participate to a lesser extent for privacy reasons.
Gender in profiles
Birthday in profiles
extra profile fields
Music we like
TV we like
Books we like
Movies we like
Adding a market to the trading card game
Comments on news articles
and more...

So stay tuned for other improvements.

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Why Maths C is still important

August 27, 2005

Maths is about solving equations, and that is especially true for Queensland Math C.

Surds

Surds are important, they can be used for moving complex numbers and squateroots from the denominator to the numerator. The reason we want to do this is to rationalise the denominator, remember a squareroot squared is a rational number.

Example complex surd:


Example real surd:

Cis notation

Partial fractions

Partial fractions can be used to make complex expressions easier to evaluate

Integration by parts

Cramers Rule

Ironically my ELEC2004 lecturer got annoyed that they skipped over this rule in University Mathematics, but here it is, right from my Math C notebook.

Cramers rule is one of many ways we were taught to solve a system of equations. In the example I have an imaginary set of two simultaneous equations with variables x1 and x2 with answer vector (s1, s2)

Expansion using pascals triangle

I should have never forgotton this, it would've been so useful had I remembered it




This is only a taste of what math C offers. It really is useful stuff for engineering. Other stuff studied includes first order differential equations, more integration, more matrix theory, probability theory etc... It is all stuff used in engineering and computer science.

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Limits

August 17, 2005

Let us for a second cover some theory on limits. Sometimes in mathematics for an infinite sum we can work out a limit and find a real answer that we can express as a known quantity.

For example, the sequence (you need a MathML enabled browser/plugin to view this page)



We can take the limit of:



This gives us the constant


The same can be applied to other systems. Now I pose the following question:

We can construct a snowflake by taking the following steps:

1. Draw a triangle


2. Divide it's side length into three


3. Draw a triangle of 1/3rd length in the middle third of the side



4. Repeat forever




So now heres the questions:

Q. I want to measure the preimeter of the snowflake, what is the answer?

Q. If the side of the original triangle is 1m and I am traveling at 1m/s, how many seconds does it take to have travelled distance but have zero displacement.

Q. If the snowflake's unit length was now 1mm and the atomic radius of a water molecule was close enough to that of a water molecue (0.65Ã…), and the snowflake was densly packed, how long would it now take travelling at 0.001m/s.

Yes these questions have answers, but I won't reveal them until someone has a go at answering them ;)

MathML in Mozilla/Firefox. (There are other plugins for Internet Explorer users on the internet.)

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Back to uni

August 07, 2005

Not much time to come here lately, I really shouldn't be here as much as I am but hum ho,

Testing to make sure I haven't broken this thats all.

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Shuttup and get off your high horse.

July 29, 2005

Thats right zealots from all software alligience camps, shut the hell up!

Especially the wanna-be zealots illegally downloading Microsoft software Beta releases off of P2P and complaining about the interface of all things. I think that explains why only MSDN subscribers (which isn't cheap) get the betas. Because only MSDN subscribers are likely to have a clue. i.e. they are the Hardware and Software engineers who have a piece of paper to prove it and are employed in the industry, most other people cannot afford the thousands of dollars a subscription costs.

Those who says there aren't any significant improvements because the interface isn't 'revolutionary' shutup. Any feature that makes a developers life easy will eventually find their way down to the end-user and they will not even realise it and like the computer itself, take it forgranted and demand things which are most probably impossible at the current stage of computer developments, especially hardware wise.

If you are doubting Windows codename Longhorn, download the Avalon CTP, .net framework 2.0 beta and the Visual Studio codename Whidbey beta and learn how to use it to build XAML interfaces for applications, you will soon realise why it's so revolutionary.

Those who think the features in Longhorn aren't revolutionary go and take a good look at the point in time the feature list was announced, yes so many years ago. True some of the features have been included in 'competing' operating systems since then and some of them were only small improvements on existing features. However, Microsoft announced many of them well before any of their competitors, that includes Google's Desktop Search, as well as Apple's spotlight search.

Yes Microsoft were aiming high, and that takes guts, and thats why it's taken so long to get to fruition. It really wasn't so long ago that Longhorn pre-Alpha's would barely run at all, now the interface has been through probably at least half a dozen revisions since then, so it's likely that it's not the last time it'll be changed in the public Beta 1.

Though it's probably fairly likely the glass effect will stay as they had already named the high-end theme aero-glass, to what extent that will be in the final is probably still on the drawing board.

I have no insight into how Microsoft operates or anything like that, just like all you punters out there. Sure there are some conclusions that you can draw from the facts released from Redmond, but there is still alot to be answered for.

And finally to those illegally obtaining Betas. That is still piracy, it's still illegal and if you get caught I say one thing, SUFFER YUO. The beta wasn't made avaliable to it, which is no different to me not making all the thoughts in my mind avaliable to you, however I give you these ones for free with the value of 0.02AUD, not for re-sale.

This article is protected by Australian copyright law and you may print one copy for yourself for personal uses only, or reference a small portion of it (10%) as allowed in Australian copyright law. Yes if you live in Great Briton or the United States or America or wherever my law applies to you!

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Problems getting attachments

July 15, 2005

I'm having problems restoring the database backup on my home computer so I can adequately test the attachment MOD without fucking anything up on the site.

I am trying so bare with me please.

The backup is over 100MB of text and compatibility between a few things seems to be causing problems. You guys have been posting alot, this use to be much easier when the site was 1/6th it's size.

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Bring back the age of the Codecs

July 08, 2005

Back in the days of Windows 95, to play a new media format you would just have to download and install a new codec to play it with Windows Media Player 2. It was a great platform, we'd have one player which just play media files. Windows 95 even included a free game few people remember, Hover! And for those who didn't even know Windows 95 even had an AVI video clip of Weezer's song, Buddy Holly on the disc.

It was a great time in computing, where innovation seemed to be blossoming in the Y2k windup days. In many ways those days spoilt us very much so and we have become comfortable and lazy in the expectation for those days to continue at the same pace.

Then we had the days of Windows 98, and the days of affordable consumer internet access started to spoil us. We had windows media player 6.2. It had the same codec support as media player 2, and an improved interface. These were the hay days of the internet that everybody misses, but there is no way to get them back. We then had real player and winamp come onto the scene in a big way, neither had spyware, and a good reputation, and nullsoft wasn't owned by AOL, a small startup. Nobody cared that windows had a media player that couldn't rival any media players of other companies which were given away for free, even in those days.

I may have been in primary school in those days, but they were alot different. For one the term spyware hadn't even been coined. Redhat and Caldera (now SCO Unix) commanded the linux scene, and the world was relaxed in a state of peace post Cold War days of the 90s.

These were the days the video formats of choice were MPEG and MPEG2, and MP3 sharing was in it's days before all the lawsuits. Napster was large on the scene.

Then came 1999 and Windows Media Player 7, probably the best ever revolution made to the media player. Sporting the playlist features of other players of the time, it also included a skinned and unskinned mode that used XML to describe the skins. For those who think that XML is only just starting to get used, think again, XML made it into wide use long before you realise. The one big feature it had that changed everything was the media library. But it also supported the USB Mass storage Device transfer of songs to external devices. The common driver used by every USB Key (flash drive) and most media players out there today. These are the days before the iPod even existed.

Anyway, whats the point of all this rambling. Give us back our codecs. How are media players supposed to be interchangeable when apple will no longer make windows codec layer compatible codecs of quicktime. iTunes can easily make use of this layer which is present on every version of windows since windows 95. Probably even Windows XP reduced Media edition despite it lacking Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player is only an interface, it's heart and soul lies in drivers burried deep into windows.

And to finish the line of talking about the iPod. The first DAP's were flash based for a simple reason, this was supposed to be the solid state revolution. Thanks to IBM's pixie dust HDD technology the iPod was soon born (still before anyone knew about the iPod). This stiffled the progession of price cutting on flash media due to lack of demand, and has wasted so much extra power due to the need to spin up those power hungry discs in the iPod. The main reason flash continues to get cheaper is because of Digital Cameras.

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Jo Lively

June 18, 2005

Probably the biggest living well promotion to hit Australian televisions since "Life be in" it is Jo Lively's more all round message of "Eat Well, Live Well, Play Well", something I wish I did.



Of course my generation were a bit young for life be in it, and now we're a bit old for Jo Lively's message, so I officially feel screwed. Ahh well.

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W800i

June 17, 2005

Sony Ericsson make some of the best phones, and their recently announced models do not dissapoint.

My favourite of these models is the W800i. Why?

It's a camera (with print quality @ 2 megapixels), phone (tri band) and MP3 player in one. Not only that it takes memory cards up to 1GB and is supplied with a 512MB one. The only thing to disapoint is that instead of going with a standard like SD (aparrently the PS3 will support SD), the W800i only supports Sony's heavily overpriced Memory Stick Duo. It's not really that much expensive, but when you're buying 1GB of it, the small percentage is quite a bit of money I could spend on music.

The good points is that it supports MP3 and AAC unlike sony's failed attempts at MP3 players in the past which required the use of their propietry Atrac 3 plus format. The only disapointing thing is it doesn't appear to support WMA, but AAC is just as good and you can use iTunes to convert to the format sans-DRM.

The phone is a step in the right direction, and while it looks great (I love orange), it isn't completely right, but I also felt that about the SD format when it was first released in order to squash consumer rights.

Unfortunately I won't be able to afford this phone as the inclusion of a 512MB card seems to indicate it will premier at retail at between $600 and $1000 AUD (speculation mine).

Sony have a real opportunity to make camera phones right with the inclusion of a 2MP camera, the largest I have seen advertised attached to a phone, and combined with Sony's CCD and lense technology it isn't likely to disappoint for a camera phone, though it still isn't likely to rival a dedicated Camera with a proper lense. Also aparrently a first among camera phones is the inclusion of an autofocus on the camera, so no more taking out of focus pictures.

Whats more it that it can pump out a massive 15 hours of music with the phone turned on! This figure rivals the iPods rediculously inflated claim of 12 hours.

While it could seriously replace your iPod shuffle, the fact is the camera in phones is still much to be desired compared to dedicated camera. But who can complain at only a fraction the size and weight of a real camera. It will be classed as a good enough to take everywhere, good enough for prints (6x4's)and the web. But it isn't good enough to have the pictures blown up to 8x10's.

It's good to see this phone comming soon and only being a fraction larger and heavier than my T100 (smallest lightest phone I've ever seen, well 2nd smallest, and ties with a Nokia my friend used to have).

Well, I'll see how this plays out, still I won't be able to afford it, but it would be one cool toy.

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