This year my university decided to enter all the third year BSc computing students into a competition held by O’Reilly for the best and most original dissertation; my entry was of course phpAnalyzer. A couple of days ago along side the results of my degree, I got my prize in the mail as well as a little certificate – definitely a good way to end three years of higher education!
In addition to getting good results and winning the contest held by O’Reilly I also got a new job as a software developer, so now when I’m not at home programming, I’m at work programming! It’s been a bit tough making the transition from the life of a student to doing five full days of work every week but I can’t complain as I am doing something I love and I am working with nice people who are helping me get to grips with their way of doing things. As a result of starting my new job one of my new projects has been slowed down a bit, as well as the development of EDK (which is now nearly finished) but I’m slowly picking the pace back up as I get adjusted to working life. My new project is another Xbox LIVE game which I will also make available on the PC, I have managed to get quite a lot of people on board so far; at the moment the team consists of:
One developer (myself as you can imagine)
One artist
Two graphics designers
Five level designers
Two audio engineers
The only thing really missing at the moment is someone to come up with a storyline, but if I fail to find anyone to come up with a plot I’ll just throw in more blood and violence – that is a suitable replacement for a good story isn’t it?
After many months of analysis, research, design, development and testing I have decided to open phpAnalyzer to the public. Up until this point I have been very secretive about the system as I produced it in partial fulfilment of my BSc and didn’t want anyone with more resources and time to be able to spring up a similar system overnight that voids the usefulness of my own; now however I can launch it and I hope that it will be of use to people and meet the goals it was originally designed to conquer.
phpAnalyzer allows users to upload a script to the system, at which point it will scan the script for bad PHP development practise; once the file has been fully scanned a report will be displayed to the user which indicates what they need to revise and display possible solutions to the problems, which in most cases will contain links to the appropriate pages in the online PHP manual which will aid the user in implementing the updated and correct methods and or global objects.
Who is phpAnalyzer aimed at?
It is primarily aimed towards students / people learning PHP as with an ever growing number of students and freelance developers turning to online resources it is important that a tool be available that will allow the developer-to-be to ensure what they are reading about is indeed the way they should be tackling a given problem.
It has been a while since I’ve posted any updates in the blog but I have been hard at work nether the less, last week I released one of my new projects – Joo.
Joo is a lightweight and portable OODBMS for Java developers which was originally being developed to support some of the functionality being implemented in the new major update of SPG2 before being branched off into its own project. If you are interested in getting involved with Joo or want to try it out for yourself you can get the latest release and information at http://www.joodbms.co.uk/
The next major update that has been planned for SPG2 is going to contain a complete redesign of the GUI and will add new functionality in the way you can store your passwords; to be more specific it will contain an encrypted password bank which will allow you to store your generated passwords with notes along side them as a means of identifying what they are for. If you want to follow the progression of this update you can do so via the 2.5.x branch in the repository at the Google Code page.
Updates to SPG2 and Joo are currently taking a bit longer than expected as I am studying for my final exams at the moment, but within the next fortnight I will be finished with education for good – leaving me with more time to commit to the progression of these projects and others that I am currently prototyping and designing
Over the past week I have released three new projects of mine, which are as follows.
CrackerHash - a program I developed originally for the purpose of demonstrating how inefficient brute forcing can be as the number of potential combinations increases, however can be an effective tool for reverse engineering MD5 hashes. It should be noted I take no responsibility for any activity you use this application for, it has been released as a means of data recovery and as an educational tool and I do not encourage this to be used for any illegal activity.
MyVimeo - a WordPress widget which allows you to display your latest activity on Vimeo in the sidebar of your blog. It is fully customisable in that it allows you to specify how many activities you wish to display and allows you to customise the title of the plugin in the sidebar to whatever you want.
tweetbox – a WordPress plugin that let’s you display your latest tweet(s) in the sidebar of your blog, in a manner which will not disrupt the rest of your blog should Twitter be slow in responding.
After getting my new jazz bass I have been dying to get some good recordings done with it, but due to lack of equipment I have had nothing to use until tonight when I remembered I actually had a £200 mixer sat away gathering dust.
It took me a while to get my head around it and had to mither a friend of mine for some advice (check out his band The Portlands), but I am pretty happy with the quality that some of the recordings were coming out.
Click the play button on the small media player below to check out a sample of a recording I did. There has been no editing on the recording other than lowering the master track’s volume, a pretty impressive sound for just a raw recording in my opinion; let me know what you think though.
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This bass is absolutely awesome, managed to pick it up for £170 and it sounds brilliant; this is proof that Squier are fully capable of creating a bass equally as good as Fender. The Duncans on this bass sound amazing compared to the pickups on my other jazz bass (from a Fender American jazz).
In addition to how awesome it sounds, it looks brilliant! As far as I am concerned there is no better looking bass than the 75 jazz, I’ve opted to not have any pick guards though as I always feel a bit restricted when they are on (never been keen on them).
I’ve posted a little demonstration video on YouTube, but it really does not do the bass any justice, I recorded it with just my camera as I currently have no recording equipment so the sound has come out very low and a bit distorted at places, but believe me this bass is worth every penny!
This is actually a really simple encounter, but it seems many people are struggling with it.
At the start of the fight switch your paradigm to Medic – Medic and continue to heal, typically he targets only one person and sticks on that target; if he is targeting Hope then be sure to start casting your heals before he attacks as Hope will take big damage.
Once Odin uses his shield ability (it will indicate he is using a shield in text above his head, and he will be standing still not attacking) switch the paradigm to Commando – Ravager and spam your auto-attack.
Keep repeating these steps and you should beat the doom timer in no time!
I did this and finished with a five star rating and didn’t come close to dying once.
EDK is a new project of mine which is still in its infancy but is progressing at a rather promising speed. The goal of EDK is to provide a high quality and customisable drum module that is compatible with a plug and play kit.
The drum kit consists of four highly durable pads (similar to those you would find on any retail electric drum kit) and one pedal which connect to the MadCatz RB module via male stereo connections on the end of each pad. Once the pads are connected to the module, the module then connects to the computer via USB.
As can be seen in the demonstration video below the interaction code is fully working, along with the resource management (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to load and use the sounds), however there is still quite a long way to go before it is of much use to anyone as I still have to work on the GUI that allows for customisation; it is all coming all very nicely though.
If you have the time leave some feedback and let me know what you think of it so far
It has been a long time since I have updated this blog, I have been really rushed off my feet lately and not had the time. I am nearing the end of my BSc now and will be reviving some old projects soon which is why I have merged pixelsandlife.co.uk with etftw.co.uk, so I have one central place for my blog and my projects
In light of nearly finishing my BSc I have also decided to join my old band as they were looking for a replacement bassist for the bassist who originally replaced me (that was a mouthfull…). If you’re on Facebook then Become a Fan of Doctor Science now!
In other news I have finished and released version 1.4 of SPG2 and it is now up for download
I was browsing the DefCon forums earlier today and I came across a topic in which someone posted this video, and I honestly could not stop laughing at this kid who actually thinks tracert is some kind of out of this world tool that will list the IP address of every host connected to a website; I mean come on, the purpose of the tool is in the name, traceroute!
This year my university decided to enter all the third year BSc computing students into a competition held by O’Reilly for the best and most original dissertation; my entry was of course phpAnalyzer. A couple of days ago along side the results of my degree, I got my prize in the mail as well as a little certificate – definitely a good way to end three years of higher education!
After many months of analysis, research, design, development and testing I have decided to open 
Over the past week I have released three new projects of mine, which are as follows.
After getting my new jazz bass I have been dying to get some good recordings done with it, but due to lack of equipment I have had nothing to use until tonight when I remembered I actually had a £200 mixer sat away gathering dust.
This is actually a really simple encounter, but it seems many people are struggling with it.
It has been a long time since I have updated this blog, I have been really rushed off my feet lately and not had the time. I am nearing the end of my BSc now and will be reviving some old projects soon which is why I have merged pixelsandlife.co.uk with etftw.co.uk, so I have one central place for my blog and my projects