Recently in Hobby Category

I haven't seen much activity about PERL in freelancing. In fact everyone have kind of forgotten this powerful language, specially in text processing. Today I started glancing at a PERL book my teacher had on the shelf. I felt a bit awkward because, well, I've always hated PERL's syntax, it wasn't something I classified as a "logical syntax"(for example, Java's syntax are pretty self-defined), but the more I read-I found myself thinking "whoa, everything I could do for manipulating text is here".

The one thing I love the most is regular expressions in PERL. It doesn't feel bloated or hard to write the code. It's purely straight to the point. One of these days I'll probably manage to learn PERL. Well, manage isn't exactly the word. Learning the syntax and built-in functions is what I mean.

Anyway, I'll be toying with it pretty soon (probably next week). I still have to take a deep look at C++/C/C# for a change. It's something I have been avoiding from the very start because I don't want to confuse myself right now.

I'm pretty much happy today I'm making my switch to Opera Browser. Mind you, Firefox has been quite slow and while their plug-ins are awesome I don't really do much nor need many plug-ins. Of course, as a firefox user (if anyone here reading this) you might feel offended and try to back it up. I've been looking foward to use Opera for quite some time, and the only thing that stopped me was not having ad-block which I finally found the solution today.

Mouse Gestures in Opera is also something to be amazed, you just don't know how helpful they are until you get the hang of it and use them. I'm still learning the gestures and well takes a bit of time to get used to.

Another reason I moved to Opera was because of their interface. I've really grown tired of Firefox interface, there is just something there that doesn't makes me feel there is something wrong.

I'll probably keep using Opera no matter what other people say, it's something I have been eager to do since I reformatted this computer. I really can't live without adblock, due to many sites cluttering the web pages with stupid ads. (Ignores mine)

If you are interested, give it a try, and not one of those that lasts 30 minutes and start trolling. Cheers!

There has been quite a fuss about the new browser Google released, Google Chrome (Chromium). I wasn't that eager to ditch my firefox, and as far as I've used Chrome, there is no way I'll ditch my current web browser. Obviously because I can't live without Adblock Plus, Web Developer, Stumble Upon plug-ins.

How much I yearn Google Chrome to have those plug-ins. I would make the switch fast, of course the only reason I have, the interface. I can't help but to love and embrace the simply yet usable interface. Chrome comes with spell checker, somehow I feel it's quite faster than Firefox's one but I'll leave one to those who benchmark a lot since I have no interest in that kind of information at the moment.

I'm awed by the launching speed of this browser, it opens almost instantly, perhaps because I don't have plug-ins here but I doubt it makes a difference, why? I have used firefox with no plug-ins and its launching speed has always been slow.

Now something I caught from gossip is the "incognito" window, or "porn mode", of course calling it porn mode is stupid, just because tons of teens, kiddos (and shameless married men) are going to watch porn using incognito mode doesn't mean it's just for porn. For example you work for a company and you happen to be always online on the company's rival site because of whatever reason. Close incognito and nothing ever happened. Anyway, yes, now Firefox 3.1 will have this feature, although was this planned or did they just did it out of desperation? (To not lose their % in the browser share)

There is also the Yahoo! Dropdown in google main site. Something I have found is that keywords like "sex", "hardcore" does not appear in the dropdown (as you see in the screenshot) so at least we have an idea what google blacklists from the search results. The release is still not mature enough. I really miss the privacy settings, and smooth scrolling. (Yes, I realize this is a beta)

Well, here I am again, with a working parser that might be helpful for your development, especially if you are looking for a youtube link parser.

What is this?

videoCast PHP Parser is a pretty simple class that helps you parse links like http://vimeo.com/613460 into an embedded HTML. It supports Youtube, Dailymotion (permalinks only), Metacafe, Revver and vimeo.

How to use?

This is the easy part. Upload the parser to your site and in your php file.

require_once 'viCastPHP.php';

$parseVideos = new viCastPHP();
$parseVideos->getFormat($_POST['text']); // You will need to change this and adapt it to your needs

Another way of using this parser is

$parseVideos->limitParse(3)->excludeSites(array('youtube','metacafe'))->getFormat($_POST);
or
$parseVideos->limitParse(3)->getFormat($_POST);

getFormat must be called last for it to take effect of the changes.

excludeSites() only accepts arrays or a plain string.Right now the strings you may put in the array or string are only: "youtube","dailymotion","revver","vimeo","metacafe".

limitParse() only limits # for each pattern. (I'm thinking of extending this but that depends now)

What was this for?

I created this for learning purpose for both PHP5 OOP and Regular Expressions. I thought I'd share it with you guys :).

Get the parser NOW!

Yesterday out of boredom I started playing with Regex (Regular Expressions). I somehow got carried away and found that regex is actually fun once you learn it. It's like playing chess, all the strategy you have to do to match and process your text is part of winning over content.

Well, what I did is pretty little, that is converting plain urls like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF-cXjxgREQ

To

It also supports links with http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PF-cXjxgREQ and so on. Of course youtube alone wasn't enough so I threw at it Metacafe, revver, dailymotion, vimeo support.

Of course, an issue came up with dailymotion, that is the way the "categorize", so the URL is affected and it only works with Permalinks. I'm currently working on a fix that might actually fix the redundancy of "/section/section/section/".

Try the parser, live!
Paste links like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkuLh4u0H8E
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5qbhc_99-dreams_shortfilms
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1269694/trick_shot_masters/
http://revver.com/video/1076971/sexy-fitness-break-tight-glutes/
http://vimeo.com/707539

Paste them inside the textarea :) (of course!) Anyway, this will be available under New BSD License as soon as I finish a few things.

I'm still new at regex! Can't wait to master it soon :)

It's been a while since I visited digg.com. I don't know why but I get this feeling that it's being overrun by 12-17 year old kiddos submitting silly stuff. Sadly it somehow ends up in the front page, so digg is kinda becoming the next 4chan which is actually the most horrible thing that can happen besides hearing that Kevin Rose is getting a sex change (of course this is just a rumor! err).

Anyway, going back to topic, as if there's any, this is a damn blog (a.k.a: weblog, diary, net diary, a system used to vent about the government and how much they hate it, not limited to personal attacks) . Furthermore, Root of All Evil has enlightened me on how much does blogging actually sucks.

Wait, what wasn't that topic but here we go again! Now that's digg.com phailing hard I wonder where I'm going to get my daily fix of interesting articles/sites and not an endless loop of

Politics
Memes
Something photoshopped
Britney
Idiots pasting memes
Hollywood idols...
Batman..

I think I'm just going to take a break and read a book...

I can't help it but to embed something here, probably one of the most amazing illustrations I have seen so far, although many artists may differ, but since I'm just a fanatic and also a person who wants to learn spare the criticism :)

Saffron Skies by ~azhrarn on deviantART

Anyway, I found this while looking for inspiration to work on my site. Believe it or not GIMP has been open for three days in my computer. I'll probably start working on it soon I already got most of the things I need although there are some brushes missing :(.

Oh boy, oh boy I seem to keep breaking promises! A month ago I made an entry talking about the re-design of RouteCafe's GIMP Blog. I don't know why whenever I sit as my desk and start brainstorming I can't just bring something decent, or maybe I'm just demanding too much of myself.

Nevertheless, I've already started to write a tutorial and there WILL be more coming. It's just that I'm working at three sites almost at the same time it's a tad hard for me to keep up and sometimes I need a long break for computers due to my brain burning. Now as for brushes and other resources I hope to keep finding nice ones around the web I hope they help me fully build the design.

Cheers!

I'm pretty much happy! My hard drive arrived today and got it installed. It was an easy install although I have 2GB DDR ram waiting for me in the post office, sadly I couldn't take out the rams because the section of receiving/delivering packages was closed.

Anyway, I installed openSuse. Very impressed on the install, probably the most user-friendly interface I have seen. Although I chose to use GNOME, I'm thinking of wiping it out for the heck of it and chose KDE 4.0, reasons are because the last time I used KDE (years ago) left me with such a bad experience that I never wanted to use it again. This means, after 1-3 years of not using KDE this will be my last install, if I like what I see then I'll give it a try, if not, well oh well, doesn't matter really.

Although I do miss OpenBox :)

Cheers!

Right, I'm getting a new 160GB HD SATA which I'm going to use a "Pet Drive" for testing and checking out new linux distros. Of course I don't plan to to be formatting every time there is a new distro out there or a distro I haven't used, it's kind of a waste of time if you think about it.

Anyway, thanks a darkmatter I was (forced) to decide in using openSuse. In the end I might probably install Debian Etch, although Debian 5.0 is releasing this september. I don't know why I have always liked debian...

In other news, as you notice this post is pretty much random, sorry about that I just don't have anything to talk about that requires deep content. SO! In other news, GIMP 2.6 is coming closer than anyone would have expected, they might be releasing GIMP new version this year. I haven't played much with the SVN copy so I can't really give insights of what's being changed and what's new.

Cheers!