MeetJennings

My buddy Andrew wanted to be able to hack on something a tomorrow’s HackNY competition. He’s never used PHP before so I wrote him this file to help him make an api call and display it on a web page. I’m assuming that you’ve already got a PHP environment set up somewhere. If not, check out XAMPP.

This file is intended to give new programmers (hackathon or else) something to start hacking on quick. Of course, you would have already needed to set up PHP and a webserver.

This file just makes a simple api request and displays the response. The API for this example is embed.ly, an API for turning normal links (http://…) into embeddable widgets (video players, slideshows, etc) .

The actual code can be found here. you should copy and paste it into an index.php file in your htdocs directory (if using XAMPP).

Everytime I start a new CodeIgniter project on Dreamhost I face the same two problems.

1. How can I get URL rewriting to work properly?
2. How can I repopulate $_GET variables once they are stripped by CodeIgniter?

The problem with this pair of tasks is that task 2 is dependent on how you solve task 1. I’ve solved both problems (on dreamhost) with the following fixes:

Make sure your config.php has these values set:

$config['base_url'] = "http://domain.com/";
$config['index_page'] = '';
$config['uri_protocol'] = 'AUTO';
$config['enable_query_strings'] = TRUE;


Your .htaccess looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|public|favicon\.ico|static|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

And add this to the top of any Controller you wish to use $_GET variables in.

function __construct() {
parse_str(substr(strrchr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "?"), 1), $_GET);
parent::Controller();
}

Now you’ll be able to access the $_GET variables as you would expect:

echo $this->input->get('foo');

Out of 19 presentations, Jablonowski won with his creation “Cockle Doodle Doo,” an alarm clock with the ability to call someone and read them the news, remind them of appointments and go through the most recent posts on whatever websites they frequent most.

http://www.dailytargum.com/university/student-hacks-way-through-competition-1.2381967

Like many other college students, 19-year-old Ian Jennings Jablonowski treks to rock concerts and plays videogames. But the East Brunswick, N.J., native also designed his first website when he was 13. Now, he’s part of a new project trying to reshape New York’s job market.

A semi dated article from the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703302604575294740285039332.html

Well you can’t do that just yet, but a Rutgers University college student may have invented the next best thing. Rooster.am is a crazy alarm clock, which not only wakes you up with “Cockle Doodle Doo” but also reads the news to you that you missed while you were sleeping. 20-year old hacker Ian Jennings unveiled his project to a group of 750 local tech enthusiasts at the monthly NY Tech Meetup.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/11/03/rooster-am-a-crazy-new-alarm-clock-that-wakes-you-up-with-the-top-twitter-and-social-media-news/

When he’s in front of people, Ian Jennings Jablonowski, the 20-year-old hacker from New Brunswick, stands over his laptop like a DJ at a club, feet planted far apart and further out than they need to be, back hunched, arms stretched out. He talks fast and has piercings in both ears and in his lip. His pointy black hair looks like that of an anime character, and the straight-brimmed black hat that sits carefully askew on top of his head does not come off.

Check out the full article here.

I am continuing development on my first place alarm clock hack from last weeks HackNY contest. Although still in-the-works, the app will be a full featured version of what you saw at the demo.

I’m going to be presenting the first public version of the app at next months NYTM on November 2nd. If you’d like to stay in the loop, just follow me on twitter.

I figured out why 22Pixels has been loading extremely slow over the past few months. It had to do with some extremely inefficient tag queries, something I should be able to clear up within the coming weeks.

PC guys think while they are “trying” to sleep. A curse, as you know…

- Dad

Watch out, SmarterFox was recently renamed FastestFox. It seems like a blatant attempt to score traffic from old FasterFox users. FasterFox was a great extension to improve Firefox 2.0s speed, but is no longer available for Firefox 3.0. FastestFox does nothing to actually improve the speed of loading webpages.