This blog entry is directed mainly at the body of web developers who have very little formal training but are trying to improve their own skill sets. As I've matured in my understanding of object-oriented software design, I've come to grips with certain realities. Often, I've found myself doing something that feels 'dirty' or 'hackish'. That's usually because I'm "doing it wrong" as smarter people say to me when I show them my code or describe my problem. When that happens I have two courses of action, but the only one that provides growth and self-improvement is to heed the advice of my mentors (usually a chorus of developers on IRC saying, "you're doing it wrong!").

Most people who even know the term, think of open source software as software you don't have to pay for. I'd like to use my tiny blog as a platform to help eliminate that limited and even incorrect view. I think the best way to explain the reality of open source is to give an example of what makes it different from other types of software.

In part 1 of this series, I took an Asus router and loaded openwrt onto it. I added an LCD display and connected it to the serial port on the router board. At this point, I have a low-power, small form factor computer that I can customize to my heart's content. As far as I/O, the computer still has its original wifi antenna, 5 wired LAN interfaces, a serial port and a USB port. My USB sound adapter still hasn't arrived from Hong Kong, so I'm going to work on another piece of the puzzle.

I've been inspired by Jeff Keyzer to build a wifi radio. I've wanted for a long time to build a wifi radio to play internet radio and music from an arbitrary remote filesystem. The low cost of the platform he chose, the WL-520gu which I picked up for $35 shipped and is now even cheaper made the barrier to entry much lower than I had thought. So I bought one and tore out the guts as soon as it arrived.

I was looking at the bottomless pit of badly-written and malformed javascript that loads on fresnobee.com the other day and noticed a peculiar filename loading multiple times (of-course) in our advertisements: DocumentDotWrite.js. Since I loathe the overuse of document.write on our site, it piqued my interest. I had to see what on earth could be in this ridiculously named script.

I've been working on a project using django, and I've got some great things to say about it. I also have some nasty things to say. I'm currently prototyping, which means the databases I work with get destroyed and recreated regularly. I normally have a set of test data that should always be present in the system. Database fixtures to the rescue!

Once you understand all the basic concepts of writing programs, the practice of software development can sometimes devolve into a simple exercise in pattern recognition. If you catch yourself writing the same code more than once or twice, you're probably doing something wrong. Here's an example that will apply particularly to those of us who use the Zend Framework.

After upgrading to Intrepid Ibex Alpha 5, I was presented with a familiar problem. I knew I had dealt with this at least a half-dozen times in the past, but I never seem to learn. It all happened when I tried to import a project I'd started from my subversion repository into eclipse on my laptop. I began to get very strange un-googlable Java errors that I knew I'd seen before. Here's two of them:

We're getting ready to launch a new college football site for the upcoming Fresno State Bulldogs season. The site uses a table to display a player roster. Adding sortable columns to the table is a snap with jQuery. All you have to do is load the tablesorter plugin, and call it up when the page loads. This makes every table you have sortable:

There's something strangely satisfying about switching gears from a well structured language like Ruby all the way back to the days of actionscript 2. It brings me back a little. Actionscript 2 has a lot of intricacies and subtle nuances that you wouldn't expect and that's one thing that makes it fun. It's fun because it doesn't normally work as expected. You have to delve deep into the minds of the poor people who were forced to create it and outsmart them.