February 28th, 2005, 03:07 am
I thought of another way to do caching in XtroCMS which involves putting cache information in the users session. If any of you have looked at XtroCMS’s code then you know that I handle sessions using PHP 4 session methods but I have custom measures in place so that it writes the data to a table within the database. (this is so that I can query how many users are on the site). I was talking to Josh of VGProjects about caching and they said they were going to cache information in the session. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time but the other day it hit me. I could put cache the queries that are loaded for the one user on every page! Now that I have that implemented and all of the caching is done, the administration index page of XtroCMS only executes one query to the session table.
Most of you are probably wondering what the big deal is. Well, every query to the database takes time. The less you have to do, the faster your script will run. Speed is one thing that I really want XtroCMS to stand out in.
The Auth system is almost fully in place now. Things are going really well. So far I am really happy with how XtroCMS is looking. Those that choose to use XtroCMS I think will be very impressed. But then again, everyone probably says that about their own scripts. 
Posted in Programming • 3 Comments »
February 23rd, 2005, 01:19 am
If you haven’t heard already, I’m now the phpBB.com MODifications Team Leader. You can read Nuttzy’s announcement about stepping down here.
I’m really excited! I can’t really think of anything else to say. I’m just really amazed that this has happened. I never dreamed that I would be the MODifications Team leader when I started using phpBB a little over two years ago.
I’ve said this a million times already but I’ll say it again, thanks everyone for your support! I don’t have any major changes planned. Most of the changes are really little and most people won’t even notice them.
At school today I finished a project for one of the courses I was taking. The teacher looked at my work, ask me how big the folder was so I showed her, it was over 300 mb. She tells me she wants a back up of it and hands me a 100 mb zip disk. I’m thinking its not going to fit on there. I didn’t say anything and proceeded to copy the file over onto the zip disk while the teacher watched me. When it started copying, the teacher talked to me about the next course and got everything I needed.
While she was getting what I needed for the next course and helping other students, I stopped the copying of my work to the zip disk. I went through and cleaned out a lot of the files that I didn’t need. For some reason the movie (it wasn’t anythin spectactular) I made was duplicated multiple times in many different folders. This got it down to about 125mb. Still to big.
I then compressed the folder and that made it less than 80mb. I was then ready to copy it over. I started to copy it, got all finished, tried opening it to make sure it worked correct but it said it was corrupted. When I was deleting the files that did make it onto the zip drive from the first copy, I think I corrupted the zip disk during that. Some of those files weren’t being deleted even though it said the file size for them was 0kb.
Well, I just took the disk up to the teacher and told her my folder was too big. She handed me a blank one. This was even more of a mess. I ended up having to format this disk. In the end I got it working.
What makes me laugh is that the teacher doesn’t know that the zip disks only hold 100mb. I sure hope see knows that 300mb is bigger than 100mb.
Thats a useless boring story. It was the most exciting thing that happened to me at school today. Hopefully tomorrow at school it will be just as exciting as today!
Posted in phpBB • 2 Comments »
February 20th, 2005, 11:28 pm
I have released XtroCMS Alpha 0.0.1 today. For more information, download, and a demo, read this post
http://xtrocms.best-dev.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=23#23
Posted in Programming • 1 Comment »
February 14th, 2005, 12:09 am
Happy Valentine’s Day! I know it is a day early but I probably won’t have a chance to write anything tomorrow.
Yesterday I took the ACT. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it is a standardized test that Universities use to determine if you are accepted or not. A lot like the SAT. Here is Utah the schools look at your ACT score and don’t really care about your SAT. It wasn’t hard or anything like that. It was really long though. When I get my score in four to seven weeks, I’ll be sure to let you know what I got. I hope it is around 30.
XtroCMS now has two developers! I’m not the only one! A guy contacted me and he was interested in buying XtroCMS. He said that I could stay on as a developer. Right now is a bad time for that to happen since I have an idea in my head on what I want the first release of XtroCMS to be like. Also I’ve put a lot of work into it and I want to see it through until the first release. I asked him if he would like to help me finish the first release and then we can talk about him taking over after that is finished. He accepted.
You’ll probably see more features since two of us are working on it. I cut a lot of things that I wanted to do for the first release because I didn’t have time and I wanted to get it finished. Now that two of us are working on it, things should get done twice as fast.
I’m thinking of releasing an alpha within the next two weeks. Be on the look out for it.
About a week ago phpBB.com was hacked by a group of people that were in it for the glory. That is the only reason I can see why you would want to hack the website of an open source, free to use software. During their hacking they ended up messing the server up so the site was down for about a week. A couple days ago a temporary server was put in place of the old one while more investigation was done on the the server that was hacked.
No one needs to worry that phpBB.com was hacked through phpBB. The phpBB Team is pretty confident that the hackers got in through an exploit in Awstats. If it was through phpBB, you’d probably see it on all of the security trackers and a new version of phpBB would have been released. This isn’t the case so don’t worry about your phpBB board having security problems if you are running 2.0.11. If you are running anything lower than that, upgrade ASAP!
Posted in Programming, phpBB • No Comments »
February 7th, 2005, 10:57 pm
Last night before I went to bed it started to snow. I was surprised to wake up and find 8 inches (about 20 cm) of snow on the ground. I wasn’t expecting this much because the past couple weeks has been decent (High 40s to low 50s, F). It has continued to snow all day and I bet there is atleast 10 inches of snow.
If I had a digital camera, I’d take a picture of it for everyone to see but I don’t so that’s not going to happen.
This has been the best snowfall we have had all year. I don’t think it snowed at all during January. I was getting a little sad because we always have atleast a little snow on the ground for most of winter but this year it hasn’t happened. This should make my winter complete!
I’ve made up my mind on what I am going to do with programming. The catDB for phpBB will wait until I have finished XtroCMS. The reason for this is because with the catDB, I just have to get something that is useable for when phpBB 3.0 is released. It doesn’t need to have all of the features. So all time that I have to code, I will spend it on XtroCMS until it is finished.
Once XtroCMS is finished, I’ll work on the catDB and quickly put together something that is useable. When it is useable, I’ll start on all of the cool features that I am planning to add.
This should make me happy and other people as well. Maybe at the end of all this I’ll be able to work on some of my MODs again.
Posted in Programming, phpBB • No Comments »
