I ran into a problem today with encoding strings for SQL. Upon looking into the problem, I realized an oddity from a past problem was very much related. It turns out that PHP, by default, escapes quotes. It was originally included with PHP to prevent SQL injection attacks. The problem however, is that like-minded developers who already take measures against this end up having data appear in the database as if someone had double- escaped the strings during an insert/update. I’m at a cross roads determining if I should detect if this is on, or to turn it off and assume that it will always be off.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

This morning I found a plug-in called Flexigrid that works well with jQuery. It supports AJAX calls to get a paged set of data. It supports dynamic page sizes, searching specific columns, as well as the ability to sort each column. I’m even able to resize the columns and drag them into different positions. It’s been a little tricky getting it to work, as I had to beef up my skills on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Overall, it will make the presentation of data increase dramatically with little effort.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Once I got a working front end web interface, I started to look into jQuery to standardize a bit and support cross-platform browsers easier. I have run into a few problems in that there are not many data grids available for jQuery that use server-side calls. It appears that I’ll have to develop my own plug-in. I just finished working out how to get a page of data to display. Next is pagination, column sorting, and searching. Afterwards, I want to look into implementing the jQuery UI. There are many widgets available that I could make use of.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I’ve tried many attempts to working around the PDO integer problem such as direct binding, casting strings as integers, and working with stored procedures. The end result was not something that I like, in that it involved me going back to the basics and doing some manual string replacement. It works, but I’m not happy with it. In other news, I’m looking at using a price tag object I made a while back to dynamically show both the price and permissions above each item. I need to setup a texture to page results, get a note card, or tie-in gifting options.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I seem to be finding bugs left and right. I am using PDO to prevent against SQL injection attacks. It takes all parameters that I pass in, and makes certain that the correct SQL statement is created to run against an MySQL database. The latest bug that I ran into is PHP Bug #40740. It is converting integers to strings, and breaking on paging results using the “limit” keyword. Unfortunately, the bug is over 2.5 years old and looks as though it will never be fixed, but plenty of people are complaining about it. I’ll have to find a work-around.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I usually come up with some interesting ideas when I go take a walk, or get a good nights sleep. The latest idea was how to improve the vendor experience. Most networked vendors are loaded with lots of scripts and prims. Using touch-based mapping, and the 5-faced prim that I use for my letter positioning, I can essentially create a vendor that has 10 preview panels, paging, and a main product presentation with 3 prims and 1 script. I’ve made a mockup and it looks like it can be done. I’ll need to get a rudamentary web interface working first assign images, note cards, and prices to items.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I was going a bit nuts trying to find out why I was getting an error when adding one of my inventory items to the database. I have a primary key that contains a varchar(64) data type as one if it’s keys. One item got in the database that was 63 characters long. I tried to add another item with the same name, except that it had a trailing space. It appears that MySQL thinks that this is the same name without the trailing space. It appears that it may be related to Bug #14131. I’ll look into changing the collation from PADSPACE to NOPAD.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

One of my tests that I use on my drop boxes is to copy the large list if notecards in my inventory into the contents of my dropbox. I’ve had a message pop up each time I attempt to do this: Inventory creation on in- world object failed. I’m assuming this has to do with inventory loss. Just about any information I have found on the Internet indicates that the item disappears in both their own inventory and the content of the prim. The message doesn’t go into detail regarding what the name of the item was. In the mean time, I’m trying to identify the limit of how many items a prim can actually hold, and if it has an effect on the scripts performance.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

After trimming the fat off of my code for my drop-box, it is back online again. The server-side scripts had to be rewritten to handle the newer/condensed form of communications. The backend database is being updated to reflect when each box had last been verified along with it’s api endpoint uri. The next step is to process the inventory that the box sends to the server. I have a method that throttles the http requests to prevent problems with people who have multiple drop-boxes sending inventory at once. It also sends a condensed, serialized batch of inventory information (name, type, perms) so that there is less traffic needed.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I’ve been working on my inventory server again in regards to optimizations. I’ve really cut it down to size while retaining much of the functionality that I had originally put into it. One thing that strikes me is the size of memory available when it’s compiled in Mono or LSL. LSL has a limit of 16 KB. The free memory reports 12,431 bytes free, so it’s safe to assume that the script itself takes up about 3.5 KB. Mono has a limit of 64 KB and reports that I have 48,298 bytes free; resulting in code roughly 16 KB in size. With Mono scripts taking up roughly four times the memory for the same written code, it’s understandable why the memory limit was increased to 64KB for mono.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Found some odd looking bunnies. One appears to be handing out twenties of the teenage mutant ninja turtles money, while the other is wallowing in self pitty. Each bunny has buttons for eyes, reminding me of coraline.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Tableau using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I saw Bevan Whitfield plurked about being at Timless Prototype’s party. I decided to head on over and the first words I see is Timless shouting “DEDRIC!!!!!!”. Timeless puts on spectacular shows. Prokofy Neva had mentioned earlier today about Timless having a unique message board when he had visited me. I think I just spotted it. Perhaps I’ll have a closer look.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on RavKom using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I was waiting for the weekend so I could take a picture of myself outdoors in the daylight to get light that wasn’t so yellow, and to get subtle highlights/shadows. An overall even distribution of light seems to make a big difference. I can still see shadows/highlights, but not as bad as in the house. I’m impressed with the latest skin that I made using the AvMaker software from CyberExtruder.com. For a dollar for each skin, it is pretty inexpensive and allows me to correct problems without costing me an arm and a leg. The software reminds me of a simplified version of Morpheus targeted specifically a morphing a photo into a skin template rather than a different photo.

posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

CodeBastard RedGrave was talking about how my images were compressed compared to XYText. I started to take a look at the XYText images. I found that they had a pyramid look to them. This is inefficient because each row has unused whitespace. If XYText had used the entire texture, they could have saved 5 images. They used 512×512 images, giving a better resolution, but takes longer to download individual images. However, this may help improve the blurryness that I see when I’m at a distance from my own 256×256 textures. It appears that they use reversed pairs. I had problems getting this to work on my own and have more images as a result. I’ll have to take another look at my solution.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

In my earliest days entering the world of Second Life, I created a script that would allow me to display dynamic text. I was able to create a script that would display 10 letters per prim. Later, I found out about something called XYText that did something similar. I stuck with my own scripts for years. I finally released the script (Letter Positioning) two years ago as a new years gift to the community. I was talking with CodeBastard Redgrave and dug up the original program I used to create the images and sent it her way as well. With the font builder, you have the capability to support just about any characterset (Japanese, Chinease, etc.) along with the style and size. The LSL is compressed and light-weight compared to XYText.

I’ve used the Letter Positioning script in many of my past products, and continue to use it today. It’s been by far the most useful script for me that I have made. Here are some of the products that I made using the letter positioning script.

posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I was having a bit of a problem getting the calendar cog working and asked CodeBastard Redgrave for help. She responded promptly and we were able to troubleshoot the problems. After the problem was ressolved, she had demonstrated how the calendar cog hud worked, which was pretty nice. (Disclaimer, CodeBastard handed me a free hud) Afterwards we chit-chatted about a shirt she had with the front saying “XgreedSL” and the back said Exit. All in SLX styled colors. The funny thing was that she was just in a room with Lindens when wearing the shirt.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Rouge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I keep hearing a lot about the CalendarCog. It’s mostly good news that a few people can’t stop talking about how great they are. I decided to jump on down to pick up a copy to check it out. I arrived and found many different variations of it. I don’t know which one I need to get it to start working. There is a Kiosk, HUD, Board, SuperBoard, and a Business Package. Not sure if they all work on their own, or if there is an initial package I need that is the CalendarCog itself. I’m about to head off to sleep, so I’ll just take a guess and go with … Kiosk?
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Rouge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I found out about CyberExtruder.com yesterday. They offer some software that lets you use an existing photo of yours, and then create an avatar skin from it. I pulled my hair back to get a better picture. The software is free, but you can’t save unless you purchase licenses in batches of 10 saves for $10 USD. The quality looks great until you upload the skins into Second Life. I think it has to do with the limitations of the pixel depth in Second Life itself. Afterwards, I was spending a lot of time getting my avatar to look like me, as well as shopping for hair that makes me look a bit more like the real me. The hairs a bit too flowey, but I can’t find anything closer to me yet.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nikita Fride using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I often find myself at a loss with the scripting language. Although it is powerful because we can make interactive objects. It is lacking in many simple methods that are found in most programming languages (string replacement, case statements, error handling). In addition, upcomming functions seem to be on hold forever (text box, url on a prim, dynamic textures). I’ve even create/voted a few feature requests (encryption, html encode/decode, name 2 key). In the end, we settle for crude ways of implimenting these features or leaving them out. The end result is often scripts that use more memory, or server load. Unhappy with the results, many of my product ideas are abandoned.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Many scripters have had the problem of running out of memory to store information, or losing the information when a script resets. Ways around this include adding threaded scripts, using note cards, using the description field, or adding a back-end service such as a database. I happened to come across TinyPaste.com in which you can paste text from your clipboard, save it, and hand the link out to your friends. Amazingly enough, it has an API. Using a bit of my LSL scripting skills, I was able to create a script that makes use of this API. Have a look at the code: http://tinypaste.com/70c90ce.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]