Jacob’s Technical Blog

For one of my classes, I’ve been playing around with GNU Octave. Octave is a free and open source program very similar to Matlab. From the Octave web site:

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.

Sometimes, I’m away from one of my own computers, but I still want to do a little bit of Octave work. I’ve written just a tad bit of PHP code that allows me to access Octave over the web. You can type in your Octave code, and it will return the output results and output graph.

Because I would rather not hammer my server with octave requests, I won’t be showing a demo, but I’m making all the source code available, and you can put it on your own server and try it yourself. I’m hosting the project at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/web-octave/

I thought I would throw a few marbles around about my current personal coding project. It is an object oriented content management system written in PHP. In one of my other jobs, I’ve written something very similar, which means there is a good working proof of concept.

A lot of the ideas for features have come through my experiences with Plone, a content management system written on top of Zope in Python. Plone is an excellent CMS, but it is a little complicated, and my CMS should be quite a bit easier to hack on.

I’m calling my project Harvest or Harvest CMS, I haven’t decided which one yet. It goes along with my domain, peargrove.com which I use for various project hosting.

As the project gets underway, I’ll post a link to the project page or project blog or whatever else comes along.

About 9 or 10 hours ago, Wordpress 2.2 was released and announced. Wordpress is free, open source software which used to create blogs, like this one, but can also be used as a simple content management system, like how I used it to create my mom’s business site.
Continue reading Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2…

Despite having a pretty cool name, Cyberduck is a pretty cool program.  It is an FTP/SFTP program for Mac OS X.  I like using it to upload files to my webserver using SFTP.  It integrates in with my Mac operating system pretty well, and best of all, it is open source.  Being open source means that I'll never be charged for it, and I can copy and redistribute it as much as I want.  I can even change part of the program if I want.  Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out and applaud those who have worked on Cyberduck and say, thanks.

Continue reading Cyberduck…

For one of my web developer projects, I've tasked myself with building a homepage similar to Google's Personalized Home Page, now called iGoogle.  I thought it would be great to provide various modules on the page, and that I could provide a custom set of modules based on audience.

Continue reading What is it? It’s a whatsit…