So after much debate on how a useful CMS should function in this day and age I decided that a CMS is no longer something like joomla, and in fact should function like wordpress but allow for easy plugin development as well as management. Many of you already know my love for cakephp. I have many plugins already developed for cake, and other people do as well so my team’s current plan of action is to create a plugin manager of sorts… The way I see it, thats all a CMS essentially should be when everything in cakephp can essentially be a plugin. The plan is to load it up with some basic plug-ins that we have created (that can be replaced easily if desired); however, there may only be 1 or 2 core MVCs for settings purposes, auto updating and possibly a really slick GUI… I think the plugin manager as well as everything else can be a plugin, which allows for a great deal of modularity.
I feel that wordpress has it down right; however, services on linux machines like apt (synaptic) also work well to consider different repositories in existence, which I find ideal. Trying to host all plug-ins from 1 centralized source or even serve them through 1 centralized source isn’t the correct solution… instead it is better to simply allow different repositories to be added manually. That being said, we are currently trying to develop this plug-in we will see where it leads, but things are looking bright 
.
Ideas? Comments?
Not me - but it hilariously/accurately describes my emotions currently
Wow, its been almost a month since my last post! Sorry guys, was busy with school and work; however, now that that is done I can devote more attention to personal projects, woo!
Andy and myself found out last week that we made it to the semifinal round of imagine cup. This round will determine the winners in the national scene! So now its time to start upgrading our entry.
Meh forget that for now…. IM GOING TO DC BABY, FOR FREE! WOOO (THE CROWD GOES WILD). My plans for DC are as follows:
- First and foremost: Become president and take over the world. Don’t ask me how… It will happen.
- Second: Don’t be sober… Being sober is completely unnecessary for the purposes of a presentation.
- Third: Nerd out with fellow nerds… Self explanatory and completely necessary.
- Forth: Roll out to the clubs with random people I meet from Imagine Cup. I will visit the top 10, as described here: Clubin’ . There is something about the name Zanzibar that just makes me want to go there. It better be good DC or I will be highly disappointed!
- Fifth: Be a nerdy tourist for a bit. I used to make fun of people taking pictures all touristy like, but now it feels right haha. I am in London right now (unable to sleep), but I feel like taking pictures of everything, including the subway even though I find that odd myself…
On more serious notes we gotta quickly ramp this project up from a demo to a fully functional platform. We currently have a bunch of ideas in the fray… Here is my to do list :
- Create more powerful user centric features including multiple network functional
- Graphing/Statistical plotting of power consumptions, per network and per machine that scales up and down based on the time range
- Upgrade the user experience on the website
- Create some tables to keep track of all hardware available out there with power consumption information
Andy is handling the optimization of the client side stuff and user experience related to that, although I may help with design related issues.
I also had ideas for expanding this project out to mobile devices. We could a) at the least be able to track consumption via mobile device and b) it may be possible to track power consumption of phones. I have not done much mobile development, but I seem to be venturing into it more and more. (Being a web/game developer inherently allows you to make applications for smart phones now a days.)
I do not think it is possible to have multiple processes running on a phone other than an app and a phone OS, I think the biggest challenge would be to be able to keep the app in the background. I am not sure if this sort of thing has been done on a phone before? Also if it is in a daemon of sorts how much power will the app itself consume…
Meh! First things first I guess . I’ll worry about non-mobile things first… Also I don’t have a real “smart phone.” The LG Dare does not really count hah.
Droid here I come! (cue cheesy advertisement here)
The following video shows off Andy’s and mine’s Imagine Cup 2010 submission. The project dubbed Tesla is about conserving and monitoring energy consumption across a home or office network (or any other for that matter). Tesla has 2 aspects the client side which records data of individual computers and the server/web side which will create new users, networks and display device data.
Currently the user experience is not that amazing; however, the website almost looks awesome and the functionality exists! We are looking to expand in user experience of course; however, we are also looking to make functional enhancements (if we get into the next round). These include enhancing our database of known products (to get more accurate statistics), making an awesome visualizer for the data, and giving alternatives for your computer components in order to reduce consumption. I hope you guys enjoy our video. More coming from us soon on this hopefully!
Someone also mentioned how this could also be applied for overclocking machines and trying to get the biggest bang for the buck/power.
PS: We were running on fumes while recording this, please discard my lame explanations !
UPDATED: Nov 11th, 09 , changes: added python info
I have been struggling to find a way to get around selenium’s onload deficiencies. I tried all sorts of ways to hack up my script, but alas it mostly ended up in turmoil. Onload is one of the main ways most developers use to make sure certain actions happen in code, and my entire content bed was about go into flames before I found the light at the end of the tunnel. A magical gift from the heavens known as AutoIt saved me from a timely demise…
All retardedness aside… (sarcasm)..
AutoIt really did solve this problem for me. It may not work so well for others.. it depends on your situation. For me a simply wanted to close a popup window after it loaded from a different windows onload and then click the popup’s confirmation’s Ok button. Then close the original window that started all the madness…
The cool thing about running the code below is that it just runs as a daemon of sorts in the background waiting for some unruley popup to be struck down with Wrath of Kahn, plus it can also test for popups with different names. I am hoping I can do some sweet regex stuff, otherwise, life may prove difficult. In any case here is my AutoIt script:
While True
If WinWait('Name of the final Popup', '', 1) == 1 Then
;Wait for page to load if found
Sleep(10000)
;Close Page
Send('!{F4}')
Sleep(5000)
;Confirm Dialog
Send('{ENTER}')
Sleep(1000)
;Close Lanucher Page
Send('!{F4}')
EndIf
;Let another thread have a turn
sleep(3)
WEnd
Now, lets say you want the above to be directly embedded into your script rather than have it constantly running externally. I personally use python for my Selenium scripting so in python you can do the follwoing (which is the equivalent of the above script).
from selenium import selenium
import unittest, re, time
from datetime import date, datetime
from xml.dom import minidom
from win32com.client import Dispatch
# Auto it window closing stuff
def autoItCloseWindows(self):
auto = Dispatch("AutoItX3.Control")
#Your Popup Name Here is the name of the window...
#I did this because different windows could open for my project
if (auto.WinWait("Your Popup Name Here", "", 1) == 1):
# chill
time.sleep(5)
# close window
auto.Send("!{F4}")
# wait
time.sleep(2)
# confirm dialog box
auto.Send("{ENTER}")
time.sleep(5)
# close the launcher window
auto.Send("!{F4}")
To run this script you mainly need selenium, time, autoit3 and win32 dispatch. To download win32 stuff for python click here. Another thing to note is that this will only work for windows. There are similar solutions available for *nix. If you are using a mac to do things like this it is probably a waste of your mac ha, but there are also similar solutions.
Good luck oh weary travelers…
Other than the awesome costumes today we also had a chili cook off and potluck! We definitely have the best events of any team I have ever talked to. Right now we have a beer bash downstairs. I should probably get to it… I love silicon valley. Place of dreams ! This blog post is really about me wanting to show off some pics….
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- He will save you money on your car insurance :)!
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- Foosball!
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- More Costumed People