Do want!

My next thing to aim for:

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11092927&whse=BC&topnav=&browse=&lang=en-US&s=1

Thanks Where It’s Due

Right now at Blabber, we’re concentrating on the comment’s system (coincidently the same time Digg is working on their new one) which features a simple “Ajaxified” reply system. I, of course, had a lot of trouble getting AJAX callbacks to work. Luckily, Will was there to request me to use SimpleJax. This is a lightweight AJAX library available for download here. I really recommend this library as it’s incredibly easy to use. Definitely helped me out a lot. Blabber will definitely use this on top of Prototype JS and Script.aculo.us.

Checking A Password Strength

Tonight I wrote something pretty nifty in PHP, and pushed it out to the /dev/ section of Blabber. I’d like to show it, and even tell you how it’s done.

I wrote a script that checks the strength of a password. This strength is ranked by the consistency of letters and/or numbers, and the use of special characters in the password. It’s a pretty neat script, and it uses regex to calculate the strength.

Here is a link to the live, working version of the script: http://www.blabbernet.org/dev/pass_strength.php.

I used a function to make it easy to call to, as well:


function passStrength($string, $strength = 0) {
$expressions = array(
'#[a-z]#', // lower-case chars. from a-z
'#[A-Z]#', // upper-case chars. from A-Z
'#[0-9]#', // numbers from 0-9
'/[¬!"£$%^&*()`{}\[\]:@~;\'#?,.\/\\-=_+\|]/' // special characters
);
foreach($expressions as $arg) {
if( preg_match( $arg, $string, $find ) ) {
$strength++;
}
}
return $strength;
}


Now, if we’re going to make a full script that checks password information from a form, and prints out its strength, we’re going to want a function to format the strength outcome, since right now it would just print out a number from 1 to 4 (1 being weak, and 4 being strong).


function formatStrength($strength) {
if($strength == 1) {
return "weak";
} elseif($strength == 2) {
return "mediocre";
} elseif($strength == 3) {
return "good";
} elseif($strength == 4) {
return "strong";
} else {
return "not found";
}
}


From there, you should be able to figure out how to get this into your registration form or what not.

That’s all for now,
Keep on Blabbering

- Brad

Summer!

After finishing my French exam today, I ran out of the school in excitement. Ahh, summer.

It begins tonight with an all-night hackathon with Tubby, which should be a load of fun. I’ve bought Red Bull for it and everything. In this hackathon I’ll probably manage to push out some new features. This will definitely speed up the process of development.

Meh, I’ve written enough all week. Hands are tired.

Keep blabbering, internet.

- Brad

It’s Just One Big Circle.

Hmm, looking back on my previous blog entries, I seem to post about circles a lot. The drunken, “Sir Cul Jerc” entry, and the Digg Arc entry. However, I was just thinking about another circle. A circle that many people don’t notice, but is actually quite important.

In my life, I have realized that, when people feel depressed, and want to overcome it, they often turn to religion. This has been evident with a few of my friends this year. But, it makes you think about what these people are benefiting from turning to a God.

Religion, in the opinion of many, is home to much disturbance of peace, and has lately brought nothing but disturbance of peace. Different religions always seem to have a go at each other, and, as a non-atheist, even atheism is involved in conflict with Christians.

It really makes you stop and think – why are people turning to a God who is only believed in by a few religions? Obviously, this type of belief would cause arguments and the such at some point in time, but why are these people choosing to take their side?

It’s a circle effect really. Depressed => Religion, Religion => Fighting.

And it’s a tough thing to think about. But, as a non-religious person, I really think about it a lot.

Anyone have answers? Perhaps a personal experience? I’d love to read it.

- Brad

Why Paris Hilton Doesn’t Interest Me

Okay, so by now you’ll all have heard about Paris Hilton’s jail dilemma. Am I the only one who’s extremely uninterested, and not surprised at all?

First of all, she’s a downright whore. In my opinion, anyone who’s brave enough to make a sex tape is brave/stupid enough to do something that would get her into jail. And for the record, she’s not so great at sex.

Secondly, I find it really hypocritical that she said she was just going to wait out her sentence, just to prove to the media that she really can, yet she gets out 4 days later because she “coincidently” broke out in a rash, and her sentence gets cut to her being trapped in her motherfucking mansion.

She got ordered back in now, I hear. That’s a good thing, but still, the silly mingebag’s case really doesn’t even deserve all the coverage it gets. She drove drunk, got a jail sentence, it’s not long enough – Good for her, we don’t really care.

——-

I haven’t been able to update lately, because of exams around the corner. Give it a week and I’ll be blogging regularly again.

Keep on rocking,
Brad

What Wins?

Skype wins. Today was possibly one of the least physical but most social days of my life.

I just decided to start up a skype chat with my good old buddy Louise. Me and her have chatted before, usually about sex, drugs, crazy looking males/females, or Tubby. But it all ended up in a conference-call with Tubby, Skooj (possibly my new skype buddy as we talked pretty much the whole day and it was _awesome_), Fin, Louise, and Josh for a bit. Oh my. We started pranking, using Fin’s skype credit, calling to order several types of food in bags (all because of the “Milk From Canada Is Shipped In Bags” meme -_-). Was really funny. All of a sudden, something really fast and confusing but hilarious happened. SOMEONE made a call, and Tubby ended up dealing someone 2 glazed windows, without even realizing what was going on.

Epic. This summer could be filled with Skype days like that. If so, I will buy some serious Skype Credit.

Exam Preperations

I always find it hard to study for anything, let alone exams. It’s the pressure of what’s to come that just drives me away from touching a book. However, if I don’t study, I get worse and worse. So I think it’s about time I studied for a little.

Just received possibly the worst test I’ve ever done in all my school years. For some reason it’s not depressing at all. I didn’t fail, but pretty close. I think it’s the lack of time left in the year, and the fact that “I have exams to worry about and I don’t need your stinking test in front of them”.

I can’t wait for the next two weeks to be over. I’ll be cycling and programming everyday. Fun, fun fun.
I love freedom. Being out for unlimited amounts of time. No curfew, very little sleep, a summer’s worth of money…it’s well worth a year of schoolwork.

I guess I need sleep. A good night’s rest, followed by a night of studying. Good times.

Who Knew Religion Class Could Be Exciting?

I sure didn’t.

It was second last period of today, when my friend Steve and I broke out in an extremely nerdy and interesting conversation about evolution. We talked about all sorts of things, about my religious beliefs (agnostic), and how I basically will never believe in anything that can’t be proven. We also talked about reincarnation. Personally, although I’m not of any particular faith, I find reincarnation is the most possible out of all theories out there. It only seems possible that once you go under the ground and decompose, you become a part of something else. Something organic.

I think most people believe in life after death because they want something to believe in. Face it, most people hate the fact that one day, you will be dead and buried. They like believing in a “heaven” after death. A place where everything is magnificent, fantastic, and absolutely perfect. It sooths their mind. Steve and I both share the fear of death. It’s something I have to live with. Born with the way of believing only what can be proved, I go through moments at a time, really freaking about the fact I’ll someday live no longer. Steve has turned to religion, but again; I just can’t do that. There are so many things wrong with religion it makes me sick.

I’d like for you all to comment and discuss your feelings on this. Really look forward to hearing your responses.

Concentration/Focus

The #1 reason why I like working with other developers is that it gives each developer a chance to concentrate and/or focus on one certain area or feature. For other projects/websites, I had to “just get it done” for every page. But working with Tubby and Alec opens up a new light which allows me to work on a certain feature all to myself. We’re working with a policy that allows each developer no limits to what they add to the feature. We will decide as a team before releasing if everything is really necessary, but I think it’s really quite fair, and each developer has their own ideas about what works well and what doesn’t.

I’m currently working on the Private Messages system. The process of this feature began with a hunt. I signed up to several different sites, logged in to others I already was a member of, etc. to view different private messaging systems. The purpose of this, is to compare the ideas we had already to the results of many Private Messaging systems around the net today. We came up with some really great ideas, which I think will push Blabber’s PM system ahead of others; even if it’s just by a notch. The PM system is currently going under some final development. After that stage, we can move on to the stage of testing. During that stage, I will be making a blog post with pictures and perhaps an audio-featured video clip of the live PM system. We have developed some of these crazy ideas already, and it’s just exciting to see it all running in real-time.

Once the PM system is complete, we’ll be moving on to user profiles, which will also include the friends system as one complete *package*. For this, we’re going to need to work out an algorithm that ties in with other ideas we’ve drafted, to make everything possible. Should be fun.

Along with these updates, I also wanted to let you know that the backbones (oriented programming) of the Blabber system is getting pretty solid, which is exciting. Looking through the code; we’re using theorys and functions that run efficiently, and just perform more solid than the “Blabbernet” framework did. This makes writing an API (which we will be doing in the future) much easier, in the long run.

Hope you enjoyed the updates. If you want any questions you might have answered, just leave a comment or email me.

Blabber on!