When Brains Fly

More on Amazon EC2

Ryan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 01:03:21 +0000

I now have an instance running using a 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid build with EBS boot from the folks at Alestic.

Note to self: just stop, don’t terminate the instance. You cannot restart a terminated instance.

I installed lots of useful stuff, including the ubuntu-desktop, which I only wanted to have so that I can test VNC, particularly HTML5 WebSocket+Canvas-based VNC. I got it to work very easily, and I must say that it is utterly amazing.

That’s all for now. More updates another day. Probably next weekend.

Amazon EC2

Ryan — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:28:10 +0000

Signing up for Amazon EC2 now for an inexpensive VPS-like solution, where I can tinker with a live web server for which I have root access and can install and configure whatever I want. I also considered Rackspace Cloud Servers, but though they may be a bit faster, they’re a bit more pricey for my needs. My instance will only be up when I want to toy with it (maybe 10 or 20 hours/month?). I don’t plan on having a running website/app there for a little while and I don’t want to pay for all the time that it’s up and running and no one is using it.

Some resources for comparing Amazon EC2 vs Rackspace Cloud Servers:
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/compare
http://www.tonycode.com/blog/archives/122
http://blog.schicks.net/2009/rackspace-vs-amazon/

Websockets

Ryan — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 02:11:26 +0000

I finally have an HTML5 WebSockets example up and running! Yes! Only took me an hour of trying various tutorials before stumbling upon one that works for my Windows/Cygwin setup and is easy to configure. Thank you, Pedro @ http://diffract.me/2009/12/websockets-tutorialexample-with-pywebsocket/.

In other news, I am spending my summer in the always either too chilly or too hot Bay Area this summer for an internship, getting a taste of the computer science industry after years of science research. The experience has been quite awesome so far. I can’t really say much about what I’m doing now, but perhaps later on.

I’ll try to keep this little blog updated.

Yet Another Major CSS Update

Ryan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:47:42 +0000

All right, I folded. I inverted every color on this site and tweaked them a bit. Much more readable, although slightly less “cool.”

Here is the old site look, for posterity:

Another CSS Update

Ryan — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:03:54 +0000

Since I myself was having trouble reading through the paragraphs of the last post, I decided to look on the internet for why that might be and solutions for that. This was a useful post. I guess my eyes are just not well suited for light text on dark backgrounds, which stinks because I really like the current color scheme. They linked to Five simple steps to better typography. This article basically told me that my measure is too large and my leading/line-height should be increased. I made those changes, and magically, large blocks of text are a little easier to read! I also made the white text a little less bright. I hope this helps. Let me know if I should change anything else with the CSS.

REST, AJAX, PHP, la di da

Ryan — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 22:06:08 +0000

Yesterday, I spent much of the day playing around with Javascript and PHP. I had the idea to create a simple web front-end to access the Weewar API and control bots, an alternative to the current main method of controlling bots, which is to use existing non-web-based Java programs to call the API or use cURL on the command line. Neither is particularly easy for novice bot developers or those new to programming. Then again, controlling a bot move-by-move manually through a GUI and without programming isn’t all that practical… Oh well, it would still be useful for me when I have to do a few simple moves with a bot or two but don’t want to sign in as the bot, access the game, and do the moves there. Regardless, it was a new mini-project which I could use to sharpen my knowledge of Javascript and PHP, and it was fun. (<-- whoa, graphical smiley face!)

First, I needed a way to access and display games that a user is currently playing. This can be done with the API: http://weewar.com/api1/user/[username] and is already partially done with the Weewar Profiler Greasemonkey script, which I was already somewhat familiar with, having had to edit it every time there was a Weewar UI change that broke it. I adapted that to take in a username from an HTML form and use the Javascript XMLHttpRequst object, but then it didn’t work. It turns out that, unlike Greasemonkey, using normal Javascript, you can’t make calls to pages outside of your domain, for security reasons. That makes sense, but was a bummer.

So I had to make the API calls from my webhosting server and decided to learn how to do it using PHP, which I barely knew. (What other easy ways are there?) I used this as a reference, and just now realized upon exploring the Yahoo Developer Center that my approach was already documented here: Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful. Ha! I guess that doesn’t leave much to say except that I pretty much did method #1 there.

Also, since I had to make many XMLHttpRequest requests, I had to make an array of those objects to keep them from confusing one another. It took me a while to figure out why that was happening, why I was only getting one or a couple requests returned correctly. So I guess that’s it. Now I know how to make REST calls using sockets in Java, Apache HttpClient in Java, the Spring 3 REST template in Java, XMLHttpRequest objects in Javascript, GM_xmlhttpRequest in Greasemonkey Javascript, and the cURL extension in PHP. Whoo!

Aside: I just realized that the Poster Firefox add-on, which I had downloaded a couple weeks back, makes REST calls as well, and in a much more general-purpose way. Oh well. I wouldn’t have learned much had I not done all that I had done yesterday, so it was not all for nothing. =) Here is what resulted from it, by the way: Weewar Bot Control

Hm. Am I an aspiring web programmer? It certainly is fun and the Internet is the Wave of the Future/Present. I’ll have to think on that some more. I’m still quite attached to neuroscience research. At the very least, web programming is a nice, useful hobby. =)

Random HTTP Bug and Solution

Ryan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:53:53 +0000

I just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to figure out why my HTTP GET request was hanging on input. I had had this problem a few days ago and solved it somehow, but I completely forgot how. It turns out, I just forgot to put a blank line at the end of my GET request. Stupid. (At least now I know how to fix the mistake next time, even if I forget, because I’ve written it down here!!! =D)

Also, in searching for code to deal with chunked responses, I came across Apache HttpComponents. I knew something like this existed by Apache but I didn’t realize that it took care of so much for you. Now I’m wondering why the Citrus Framework doesn’t use this to handle HTTP requests. Right now, it uses mostly Spring to handle a fair amount of the configuration and message building, but it doesn’t yet handle chunked responses, at least not that I’m aware of. Now, to code it manually or use massive amounts of code already written? That’s obvious. I should talk with the Citrus developer, get onboard, and see if he has a preference first though, since these changes to the Citrus source would be useful to others too.

Colors

Ryan — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:45:39 +0000

Is this color scheme readable? White text on black / dark blue background? Let me know if it’s not. I think it’s mostly fine, although there are times when it feels harder to read paragraphs in my blog than it does elsewhere with black text on white.

Also, let me know what you think of the design in general and if anything should be changed.

Trying Out Citrus

Ryan — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:40:43 +0000

As part of a new hobby/freelance project, I’ve been trying out the Citrus Framework, an integration test framework written in Java for SOA application. It’s quite neat and interesting. Right now, I’m using it mostly for testing sequences of HTTP GET and POST requests, and it works pretty nicely so far, although I did have to go into the source code and hack in handling for GET requests and variable URLs since those weren’t yet implemented. That was fun though and exposed me to some design patterns live in action in someone else’s code, which is pretty cool (I don’t see too much of this as a student writing my own code most of the time). Perhaps with more time and effort, I can clean up my changes and submit them to the framework developer(s) and actually be a part of open source software! That would be pretty exciting.

For the last week, working through this project, I’ve re-learned and learned quite a lot about HTTP requests, Ant, DTD/XSD, and XPath, and I feel much more comfortable dealing with those now than I did a week ago. It’s a good feeling to have learned and done something new that’s kind of on the cutting edge of things, and to have fun doing so too! Ah, I sound so corny. Anyway, I can’t wait to get more involved with the company that this project is for and delve into some code that has a lot of potential and fun-value. I’m just waiting on approval from the developers now, but so far things look good. Wish me luck! =)

Some UNIX/Linux Command Line Shortcuts

Ryan — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 05:33:35 +0000

I have to look this up so many times that I figured I should just blog about it and have it in one easy-to-find place. =)

Text/cursor control:

`Alt-B / Alt-F`	Move the cursor backward/forward one word
`Ctrl-W / Alt-D`	Delete one word to the left/right
`Ctrl-A / Ctrl-E`	Move the cursor to the beginning/end of the line
`Ctrl-U / Ctrl-K`	Erase line to the left/right

History control:

`!!`	Repeat last command run
`!-5`	Re-run the 5th to last line in the history (`!-1` is equivalent to `!!`)
`!str`	Re-run the last run command that began with str
`!str:n`	The nth argument for the last run command that began with str
`!$`	The last argument for last run command

(There are many more history control commands, but I don’t need to use them as frequently. See the last two references for them.)

Other useful shortcuts:

`Ctrl-S / Ctrl-Q`	Turn off/on output to the screen (useful if you accidentally press `Ctrl-S` like I do all the time, or if you have a lot of output streaming to your screen)
`Alt-F2`	(GNOME/KDE) Display the Run Application dialog

Also, I learned something new today while fixing up the CSS for the site. Margins can overlap. =O

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts#Command_line_shortcuts
http://www.computerhope.com/ushort.htm
http://blog.macromates.com/2008/working-with-history-in-bash/
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#History-Interaction