Well, it’s been a busy few weeks, lots of small projects that needed to be caught up on. Recently, I stumbled across OpenID, an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. I decided to use OpenID for my new social/community site (ala MySpace), and provide OpenID URLs to members. It isn’t online yet, as it’s still in development, but I’m quite excited about it already.

I also decided it was time to start using the PHP Data Objects (PDO) classes for my database interface needs. It’s a more portable, cleaner looking, and a more easily mantained way to manage database access than the specific database interfaces that come with PHP. Other than a small issue of having persistent connections enabled causing errors, which I fixed by disabling persistent connections for the time being, everything is going smoothly.

Well, busy as always. I’ve been trying my hand at some image processing and OCR work. There is a lot of material out there, some good papers, and lots of very helpful tutorials on edge detection algorithms. This isn’t really an area that I’ve focused in before, but I am always looking to expand my expertise.

Thanks to a new (currently unnamed) partnership, several new projects have come my way. Most of the work on the first project revolved around modifing an existing PHP solution to add new functionality, and applying several templates to various parts of the site. I’m still waiting for details on the other projects, and so I had a little time to update this blog.

In the past two weeks my workload has gone from a little less than I would like, to almost more than I can handle. My current projects include a C++ 2D overhead game, a myspace clone customization, and debugging a C#-based Google AdWords API ad submitter application.

Things are coming along though, and I hope to have a little more time to attend to this blog and my company’s main site.

I woke up this morning much earlier than I would have liked, but of course I checked my email and so forth. First bug of the day, the ftplib module in Python had been giving me problems for the past two days, and I was disappointed to hear that a small script that I had written that used it was still being difficult. It turns out that (and of course I should have expected this) the FTP class raises an EOFError exception when the server drops the connection. Of course, I can’t keep the server from doing this, but I can at least get the script to behave properly. With a quick fix to catch the exception and retry that server later, I went back to sleep.

I woke up, a couple of hours later, feeling much more alert. I’m working on a C++ port of a 2d multiplayer overhead game, that was originally written in VB6. It turned out to be a much larger project than I thought it would be, but I still started chugging along on it again any ways. I was getting little pieces here and there done, but still much to do.

It’s been about a year since I last setup a subversion repository, since I haven’t worked on too many large projects recently. The last one I setup, I did for a small 3d game engine I was working on as a hobby project. A quick ‘yum install subversion’ on the chosen server, followed by adding a ‘svn’ user and a place for the repository, and away I went. I had to check the documentation a couple of times to be sure about things (An important lesson I learned along time ago about unix: If you are ever unsure about what a command or option does, check the manual!). Overall, it was a decently productive day, interspersed with many IMs asking about VB6 (I don’t mind answering questions about pretty much anything I know something about, as many of my clients eventually discover).