Recently I worked on a project where all member data was being managed through a third party member management service, provided by a company named Avectra. The product does more than manage member data from the looks of things, but all I cared about was interaction with the member management API.

I had to authenticate against an external data source, as well as query the data source for member information when needed. Avectra does have a web service API which it has named xWeb. Here is a quote from their Wiki:

xWeb is netFORUM’s XML web services application. netFORUM is an enterprise level Association Management System (AMS) developed by Avectra that allows associations to manage their customers and related activities. netFORUM is used by association staff, members, and the public at large.

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I recently had the need to set up some permanent redirects for an application built on CakePHP. My first thought was to use a simple .htaccess Redirect at the top of my www .htaccess file, like such:

Redirect 301 /foo /bar

However, the result of the redirect was actually the following url:

http://foobar.com/bar?url=foo

This has to do with the QSA flag in the last RewriteRule of the root htaccess file. The QSA flag indicates that a query string should be appended to the url. In our case, foo is recognized as the query string and it ultimately is appended at the end of the bar redirect. Not what I wanted, as the appending of foo to bar results in a 404 error. (more…)

The death of an open source project starts when the lead developers stop actually using the project. If it is only being maintained out of a feeling of obligation for those who have downloaded and installed the code, than it’s bound to have a short shelf life. In July of 2006 Stephen Eskin (a former student of mine) and I launched the first version of Project Alumni. We had implemented an alumni application for our High School and we figured we might as well make it available to the world. In nearly two years the project has been downloaded approximately 3400 times. I’m pretty happy with those numbers. Just query google for “Powered by Project-Alumni” and you can get a good idea of the number of sites using the project. (more…)

I’ve been working on a project for a while now at work which we have dubbed SimpleMC (Simple Managed Content). I spoke with Dave this morning, and he gave me the go ahead to start the process of open sourcing the project … which I’m very excited about. I haven’t officially even released an alpha version yet, however you can get a sneak peak:

• Google Code Repository
• Live Demo
  • u: admin
  • p: admin

I apologize in advance if someone gets in there and changes the admin password or completely destroys the demo.  It is a demo and thus I haven’t spent a lot of time (5 minutes) putting it in true demo mode.  I’d also like to mention that you won’t find any documentation about getting SimpleMC to work for you.  You can take a look at /bai_cms/demo/ in the source to see how it is integrated into a page.  Any issues, just contact me or post a comment here.

I recently implemented DFS and Iterative Deepening algorithms to search for a target node in a tree. Initially I thought I would write my program in C++, however after some thought I decided to go the route of JavaScript. I believe the source code is commented sufficiently to give you a glimpse into some of the decisions I made, therefore I won’t be providing any real detail in this post.

DFS and Iterative Deepening Project

I have to give much thanks to Kirupa, as his ActionScript implementation of DFS and BFS gave me the inspiration to go the route of JavaScript. Not only that, but I was able to use much of his work as a model for the direction I took. I hope you find that I did provide sufficient credit in my comments. Enjoy.

NOTE: I stayed up until 1am, two nights in a row to finish this. I don’t work well late at night and that is likely reflected in some of the algorithmic decisions I made. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. Also, you might be asking, WTH did he use extjs here? Honestly, I don’t know. I originally had grand visions for my node tree, etc, however those didn’t pan out. In it’s current state there is no advantage to using that framework.