Current Projects: Siliconfreaks (v3), Zombox

Siliconfreaks Blog on Tumblr

June 24th 2010

Nothing going on here, but if you fancy yourself adventurous you can Look over there at the Siliconfreaks Development Blog I've got going on Tumblr. I'm trying to hit it with some sort of update at least once a day. Right now it's mostly just screen grabs of the development site with little descriptions, but eventually I'll get wordy.

What the What...

June 7th 2010

buh? So apparently viddic stole my placeholder ad image for siliconfreaks and is using it as a placeholder ad image for their site, even though ... well ... look. It clearly says siliconfreaks on there. Go team Viddic.

Oh Steam...

June 1st 2010

Sometimes doing things is hard. Let's take steam for example, a wonderful service provided by the people at valve software.It's a social gaming hub and store, the problem is that their APIs are ... not so open. There's a few that you can sort of tap into, but there's lots of inconsistencies with the data they report (i'm looking at you games list). There's also the small matter of fact that in order to access a user account they need to have configured a "personal" page URL. This seems to have happened to some people automatically, others it never did, and yet another set of people have it turned off completely. This makes doing anything 'reliable' considerably difficult. None the less i wrote some PHP to go out and scrape some info and pull back your friends list and games list (when it's properly reported >:( ) you can take a look at it here, just replace user in the querystring with your custom URL name, or your user#, or, if you dont know either, it'll grab whoever did OR if no one did it'll do a search, scrape the results and display the page for the first returned result. You see how this can be an issue?

I was going to use this in the new version of Siliconfreaks, but unfortunately i don't feel like the supporting service is stable enough to really get the job done = (

You can download the source here.

Sometimes You Just Have to Get it Out the Door

May 11th 2010

air island thing Even if it's not done, even if its only crime is sitting idle on your hard drive for far too long; you need to let it go. If you don't it will just continue to suck up potential and distract you from other things. Enjoy the workprint = )

1,000,000 Monkeys hitting keys at random could probably be more productive.

Feburary 14th 2010

Since I never really update the website I figured I'd need something that was updatitive (yes i just made that up, jealous?), this is why you can see some of my internet net based goings-on to your right. It's like guaranteed automatic content freshness. As an added bonus i took the time to actually write the PHP class that handles all that jazz from scratch. "Why?", you may ask. Put simply it was because i couldn't find anything already written that wasn't a full-blown interface to the respective services. I have no need for that. All i wanted were a few tracks, a few tweets, and a few diggs. Is that too much to ask!? Thusly, simple_api.php was born. Easy to use, easy to extend, easy to ... uh ... it's just easy. If you're interested in that sort of thing you can download the source and rock it wherever you need to. Instructions for use are in the file. Enjoy.

P.S. All the doodles are still around, they've just moved to the doodles page.