Programming
INTERACTIVE DESIGN: EMU Marketing Exhibit
Artists’ Reception | Fri, Oct 16th | 4-7pm | Adell McMillan Gallery
UPDATE – Show Website: id.uoregon.edu
Darrel Kau, Director of the UO Cultural Forum, offered us an opportunity to exhibit our work in the Adell McMillan Art Gallery. Needless to say, we jumped on it.
This was an ambitious project for us. While the designers had experience creating small exhibits through their classes, none of us had executed an art installation that included a 34′x9′ wall, six 8′x8′ display cases, and a 17′x11′ display case. The challenge was to create an exhibit that reflected our collaborative work style, gave props to the designers and programmers, showcased how we advance student learning, and gave those viewing the installation an engaging, interactive experience.
We like this kind of challenge, and we made it work. Big time. Read more…
Quick and easy AJAX with JSON-RPC
The web has come a long way since the days of intrepid coders hacking asynchronous content into pages with hidden iframes and dynamically loaded javascript files. Today we take the ease of use that standardized support for XMLHttpRequests (XHR) affords for granted. Libraries like Prototype and jQuery help to clean up code by handling generating requests and processing return values but we can do better. Here’s where RPC comes in.
Learning Outcomes: From Print to Web
I was hired by EMU Marketing last summer as a graphic designer for posters and advertisements. Before I even made it back to campus for fall term, I was given 3 large-scale projects to work on. It was an exhilarating experience designing for the entire student body.
Learning Outcomes: Interacting with the Flickr API using PHP
Many of the sites we build feature a small photo gallery as part of their design. Rather than roll our own photo management solution, we opted to integrate Flickr into our custom site framework.
Reactive tree caching
APC is an amazing tool for increasing the performance of PHP scripts. The framework we’re developing makes extensive use of caching to store complex data structures that would be too resource intensive to rebuild often. A lot of template engines produce static files to cache the output of resource intensive database driven systems. This works great but we wanted more flexibility.
Learning Outcomes: Compiling Shibboleth-2.1 on FreeBSD 7.0 From Source
Shibboleth is a Internet2 single sign-on initiative. We were looking into using it to provide authentication services for some of our campus users. Unfortunately they don’t officially support the FreeBSD platform (only Cent-OS and RedHat). They do however provide instructions for compiling the software from source. The first thing you need to do is start compiling the multiple dependencies that Shibboleth will require.
Getting Wordpress Working on Shell
UPDATE: Jeremy Blanchard has written an awesome shell script that will compile and install wordpress for you on your shell account. Check it out here: http://wiki.auzigog.com/Wordpress_on_shell.uoregon.edu
Getting Wordpress working on Shell is slightly more complicated than normal, but still fairly straightforward. The two important hurdles are getting PHP and MySQL working.
Learning Outcomes: jQuery and AJAX
So this term I took CIT 381 Database Systems (part of the CIT minor). For our final project we had to design and implement a database that would store information for a fake K-12 tech conference. So that means information on speakers, topics and volunteers. We were then required to develop a web form that could be used to get information out of that database.
5 essential features for database abstraction layers
Computers are much better suited for repetitive tedious jobs like organizing data than programmers. We can avoid writing countless lines of code by making systems to do the work for us. Rather than building components from the ground up we like to write reusable systems that address basic feature requirements then combine them in different ways to solve similar tasks. By doing this we spend less time writing the same patterns over and over again.
Easy PHP on Shell
A question I see quite often around campus is how to get PHP working on shell. The easy way is to add a shebang to the top of your php file. Simply add one of these lines (for php4 and php5 respectively) to the very top of any php file that you’re going to be using. Make sure there are no spaces or empty lines above the shebang.
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