The switch

So I tried switching to just a Pure Linux environment...long story short I missed my games and had to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu so I could download my games off steam and and using wine I could run some of those games right off my windows 7 drive and it works for the most part.
I have to say I do enjoy working in Linux more then windows, br it simply for the wobbly windows i get from compiz or the use of the terminal it just feels...right

Hacker culture

Almost everywhere you go someone is trying to "become a hacker" and the problem is to become a hacker you must transition into a lifestyle and do it transparently because its not one of those things that you can just accomplish in one night or even a whole month.
Its something you progress into..its the difference of Knowing everything and wanting to learn everything (or something similar to this)
I am not claiming myself to be a hacker, more of a tinkerer

Edge.py server

Here is a small pure 2.6+ implementation of a simple restful server i write about 5 months ago
it uses just the built-in socket librairy

and a small test that shows an example on how it can be used

ofcourse i have no documentation written but its very simple to understand

you navigate to 

doing so shows all the values you entered..its kinda like a key:val store

The problem with stackoverflow

Sometimes the people who are there to help
often get carried away and think its important
to moderate HOW you ask your question more than
helping you actually answer your question

Sometimes it works other times it just leaves you feeling
bad like the community is only helping to get points,
or to get reputation.

And im sure they have some excellent people solving problems
and they have a very high score because of it.
It may just be me, but it seems everytime I see a
question on stackoverflow. An answer is nowhere to be found
instead a bunch of people griping over the format of the post.

Or i see questions that don't really fall into a category, more of
a discussion and these sometimes are very VALID conversations
that are closed because they are not QUESTIONS...
it's things like this, that make me think twice before consorting with
stackoverflow.com

your $0.02 is very welcome.

The digital tv

Does anyone else notice that we are pretty much slaves to the t.v channel schedules ,If a show comes on that you cant watch because of when it comes on or what channel it comes on you have a few choices

• find the correct time to watch it or 
• record it later
• find it online

but what if the television actually acted like it was manufactured in the 21st
century....where is the dynamic broadcasts?
where is the create my own channel?
how about t.v API's?
nothing its like everyone has forgotten about the boobtube.


Am i the only one who looks at a tv and sees a possiblity of endless creativity

so for example lets say you want to watch cartoons but its 4am and they are no cartoons at 4am
wouldnt it be so nice if i could ask the channel directly for certain cartoons.
and maybe create a small channel based off the cartoons that were on the previous day or maybe even
the next day. even search for a cartoon that aired a few days ago that you missed.

i mean think about this do you watch a channel or a show...for me its mostly the show
you dont turn on the t.v and say "i wonder whats on USA or SyFi"
no you flip through the channels or a guide hopeing to find something to catch your interest
and if you see something you like your stuck on that channel.

sure tvs of today have app and web connectivity...but its just another computer.
theres nothing innovative about it...at all

and yes we do have websites like netflix and hulu that offer whole shows you can watch
on your computer or stream to your t.v but like I said its just another computer

ScraperWiki

Scraping is considered by most a devious or malicious art that is only for those who wish to steal data, However this is not true, the problem is most websites offer great data however lack a real nice way of getting just the data. Some of the websites offer an api but most dont so what can you do?

Well you could manually visit each website and extract the data yourself...OR  you could write a program todo it for you maybe in something like pthon or maybe php even javascript and that would be all fine and dandy OR you could have the cloud scrape for you...Enter Scraperwiki.

One of the best scraper services on the web allowing you to leverage python, ruby and even php to write scrapers that you can manage and run when you need it or let it run daily so you have the latest data

Either way you spin it if you want to scrape some data and want a great online

service to manage it look no further then Scraperwiki

Want a small example?

The only thing you need to worry about is choosing which library your going to use

for python you can choose from

• lxml
• html5lib
• Beautiful Soup
• Beautiful Soup v4
• ..so many more

and ruby offers

• Nokogiri
• Hpricot
• LibXML
• mechanize
• ...a few more

and php offers only a few

all languages implement a library called Scraperwiki that expose a number of functions that will also help you. 

Ill admit when I started writing this post I only knew of a few of these features and they have alot more...more then I can explain just head on over and start grabbing data today.

Reddit Link grabber

Here is a small script I wrote to extract links from reddit its not bullet-proof but the point was to avoid regular expression
and rely on CSS Selectors. I also chose to use Sizzle because it gives the power of jquerys selectors minus all the stuff we dont need

SOPA & PIPA

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill - PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House - to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit's lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

because of this I urge any site that is not already fighting sopa and pipa todo immediiatly.
by going to http://sopastrike.com

Python script to Stop/Sniff Popups

Create a new File called myhosts and fill it with the DNS redirects you want then run the script
What this does is creates a psuedo web server that responds with a script to close the window
later i will modify it to load in a html script so you can respond with whatever you wish!

My first Chrome Ext: Scroll top/bottom

So today i actually got down into some code and wrote an extension for chrome that scrolls you to the top and/or bottom of the page instantly none of that slow scroll crap
using pure javascript without the magical jquery library :)
you can download it here
lets take a look the code i used

Simply created 2 Elements and populated their properties so they would stay on top and scroll with the page thanks to CSS

and i simply set their href to a javascript injection of scroll(x-axis,y-axis)

Its nothing too fancy but I find it useful for many things :)

Java Post Requests Class

Pygame Game and Player Class

This is a simple python class I wrote back when I was playing around with pygame its very basic and I used it as a foundation for my game projects

Simple Multithreaded Web Server in Python

Like before when a client connects its socket it passed to the clientThread Class and then we call start which starts the thread

in the main loop of the thread instead of trying to pinpoint where the GET or POST request is i simply split the string by a space and then get the 2nd element(in this case its the 1st since we start at 0) is the file the client wants
so we take this file and get the extension of the file by spiting the file by the "." so that the 2nd elements(again starting at 0) so that we get the ext of the file requested now we can do a small check and see if they want a plain text/css/javascript file or a exe or image or anything else that would need to be opened with the binary mode right after that we close the socket and stop the while loop
so the client knows we are done sending the requested file.

Win32 Api Usage using Ctypes

This utilizes the Ctypes library that allows you to use functions and methods from both Dlls and .so files in both the windows and *nix Operating system i assume it would also work in mac since its based on unix
This test simply uses the FindWindow Function with SetWindowText to change the title of the Window that was found.
This is great if you want to make alot of Api Calls but dont want to program in C just for the purpose of using windows api calls
for refrence on how to use the functions you should use msdn and search the function

Simple Multithreaded Echo Server in Python

This listens for connections comming in and for each client that connects
it spawns a thread for each client by passing in the socket that is created in the while loop to the clientThread class (that has a base Class of Thread)