MattKendrick.com

So I was bored today and I know how much Matt has enjoyed his Arduino board, so I decided I’d give it a go.  The first project is just a little blinking LED.  Well that got me thinking about all the fun possibilities you can use a blinking LED for, and I thought it would be cool to make it say SOS…everyone knows the Morse Code for SOS, a simple dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, so it’s easily recognizable.  Well then once I figured out how to code that, I thought “How fun would it be to be able to say ANYTHING with my lovely little blinking LED?”  And this fun little project was born!

I coded every letter and number in Morse code so that all you have to do is change the letters in the loop function to make it say whatever you want!  This is the first thing I’ve ever coded, and if i do say so myself, I think it’s pretty awesome!

Feel free to download the code to use for yourself, and check out my YouTube video saying “Hello World”!

Last weekend I bought a new toy to play with. It’s called Arduino. Which is an open-source programmable electronics prototyping board. Basiclly it’s designed for people to play around with and develop interactive objects. For example you could create a simple device that flashes a light to building a advance device to post to Twitter when your coffee pot goes off. The possibilities are endless. There is a huge online community of people using these boards to create robots, automating their homes and all kinds of niffy other stuff.

I’m using it to gain a better understanding of electronics. I like that it’s simple to use. For example I built a basic little device that mimics what a stop light does. It lights red and then waits for a period of time. Then lights green and waits followed by a short flash of yellow before repeating. The electric circuit is very simple. I just hooked each LED with a resistor to a digital output on the board. I joined all the negative sides of the LEDs to a common ground. Then I wrote a file (which is called a sketch) that contains the instructions or code to make it all work. After uploading the file to the device via USB it began running! Magic!

If you’re interested in learning more about Arduino you can visit their website at http://www.arduino.cc/. The boards are very affordable. The basic board like the one above was only $35 bucks. I bought mine at Radio Shack. However you can find them on Amazon.com through our link below! Also attached below is a copy of the sketch I wrote for my stop light. As I get time I will try to post more of my Arduino projects.

I’ve been working on a new PHP script to help people restore individual MySQL tables from a MySQL Dump file. You may recall my post on having a backup plan. This tool works great with another great tool called BigDump.

PHP MySQLDump Browser
Version 0.01 Beta
Author: Matt Kendrick (yeah! that’s me)

DESCRIPTION:
PHP MySQLDump Browser allows users/system admins to browse through MySQL Database Backups (Dump Files).
Users can view and extract individual table structures and or data from MySQL database dumps.
Use this script to avoid restoring entire backups to recover individual tables.
Database dumps complied by mysqldump and phpMyAdmin are compatible with this tool.
Note: This is an unofficial tool released under the GNU General Public License.
PHP MySQLDump Browser creators have no affiliation with Sun Microsystems.

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Place the script on your webserver or webhost in the same directory as your MySQL backup dumps.
2. Run the script.
3. Choose which backup file you want to search. The script will search through the
dump file for table structures and data. Depending on the size of the dump, this may take some time.

4. Once the script has finished indexing the dump file, you may choose which table you wish to extract or
view. By default the results of your query will display in the iframe at the bottom of the page. However
you may download the results to file by clicking the download link above the iframe.

IMPORTANT: Remove PHP MySQLDump Browser as soon as you are finished.

COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER:
THIS SCRIPT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OR GUARANTEE OF ANY KIND
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version. If you change this script or add any features please tell me.

PHP MySQLDump Browser (845)

Universal Subtitles

A group of developers on a Mozilla Drumbeat project is working to provide a way add subtitles to online videos. I am extremely excited that this will open new doors for the deaf and hard of hearing. Being a hard of hearing person myself, I find it hard to understand what is being said on some online videos. This will also make it easy for those who don’t understand the language spoken on the video to enjoy translated subtitles as well. Granted it doesn’t mean subtitles will automatically work on any video. There will still need to be someone writing/translating subtitles. But I think it would be an awesome and noble service for someone to take the time to write subtitles for popular online videos. I know that any content that I would submit, given the right tools and knowledge would also have subtitles avaliable as well.

How does it work?

How does it work? It’s not completely clear. They’re still in the gathering stages of the project. But from what I’ve read, they’re working on a widget. The widget could make it easy for someone to add subtitles to video without needing to re-encoding. Basically the subtitles would over-lay the video. Through the use of browser plugins, subtitles could be fetched from centralized servers through a common protocol. The crew working on this project have their work cut out for them.

Great Tools + Community Mix

That’s what makes site’s like Drumbeat so great. They have a uniform place to work and share information. It’s like creating something while being miles or even worlds apart. Developers can jump right in any project they feel they can contribute to. I hope to be able to contribute to something like this at some point. I may not have time now. But someday I will have a chance to give back. Thanks to the guys at Drumbeat: Universal Subtitles team for working on something that I’ve wanted for a lifetime!

Mozilla Drumbeat: Universal Subtitles

About: This plugin watches your Twitter RSS Feed for user-defined “launch codes” to trigger user-defined script URLs.

Have you ever needed a script or task run on your blog and you were not near a computer with internet access? Well look no further than “Tweet My Script.” This plugin allows you to simply use your cell-phone to text a short tweet to Twitter with a “launch code.” When someone accesses your Word Press blog, Tweet My Script will check to see if you’ve left any new launch codes to activate. After each successful launch, the plugin records the previous tweet. This insures that the script being launched will only be launched once, unless the launch code is used again in a new tweet. This plugin can be used to launch any public accessible script.

Updates

Version 0.75 – March 7th 2010: Offset feature added. Allows for bloggers to set an offset on the number of times your blog checks Twitter to keep from exceeding API limits. This is ideal for blogs with high traffic or blogs hosted on high traffic shared hosting. Default offset is set to 0.

Installation

1. Upload `tweet_my_script.php` and `tweet_my_script_options.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

3. Configure plugin settings from the dashboard settings option `Tweet My Script`

Download

Tweet My Script WordPress Plugin (924)

This is my first official plugin for WordPress! If you find it helpful or would like to help further push development, please donate!

Flash is not one of my strongest suites in web development. At this time, I would say my skills are very limited. You could say I’m more of a backend kind of coder. But from time to time I dabble in front-end affairs. I thought I would start learning more about Flash. So I read through some tutorials. Got a little confused. Became little frustrated, because there isn’t a ‘Hello World’ type tutorial for Flash. But now I think I understand things a little bit more. For my first project I wanted to try building a whiteboard.

www.webwasp.co.uk has some nice click by click tutorials for learning flash. I found one aimed at building a whiteboard. After a few minutes, I had a working product. I expanded a little bit more on the tutorial. I added a control bar at the bottom and restricted the drawing function from being able to draw in that area. Then I added a link to my website from control bar. You can see how this all turned out below.

http://www.webwasp.co.uk/tutorials/018/F8-click-by-click/index.php

A few weeks ago, our friends Catie and David gave us an electronic lab kit (about to get rid of it in a yard sale). The kit came with instructions and parts to build over 300 different electronics projects. We were ecstatic. Heather and I have been looking for something like this for some time. As a kid I had basic kits like the one we received. However they were much simpler. We ripped through the packaging and started playing around with some of the projects.

It took us a little while to put something together. One of the problems we kept running into was decoding the resistor values. Granted the theory is very simple. But it takes some time to get use to. We found some resistor calculators online. Most of them got the job done. The calculators we found, you submit the resistor codes and it returns the value of the resistor.

Since the instructions tell you the resistor value, it would be much easier to enter the value and get the resistor color codes. Then a light went off. Being a web application coding geek, I deiced to build my own calculator. That night I finished the basic functionality of the calculator. At that point the application allowed you to submit what the color bands are on the resistor. Then the script would reload the page with the resistance value.

This morning I finished the project by building the reverse method of calculating resistor color codes. Now you can enter the resistor value, and it returns the color bands in the order they appear on the resistor. Pretty easy huh? I used a pure PHP script (no java script, no ajax) on this project. I wanted a server side only approach. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever written. But I had fun doing it. You can check it out using the link below.

http://mattkendrick.com/projects/resistor.php

Here’s a quick script I wrote to display random quotes.


<?php

//Random Quotes Script
//Matt Kendrick – Aug. 2009
//mattkendrick.com

//Displays random quotes from a MySQL Table

//database server
$db_server = “localhost”;

//database user
$db_user = “user”;

//database password
$db_pass = “password”;

//database name
$database = “quote_db”;

//connect to database
mysql_connect($db_server,$db_user,$db_pass);

//select database
mysql_select_db($database);

//query database for random quote
$sql = “SELECT quote_text,author FROM quotes ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1″;
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_NUM))
{

//display result – format however you like
echo “<i>’$row[0]‘</i> – <b>$row[1]</b>”;

}

//close database connection
mysql_close();

?>

Below is the table structure needed.

–
– Table structure for table `quotes`
–

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `quotes` (
`quote_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`quote_text` text NOT NULL,
`author` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`quote_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;

–
– Dumping data for table `quotes`
–

INSERT INTO `quotes` (`quote_id`, `quote_text`, `author`) VALUES
(1, ‘I think it”s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we”ve ever created. They”re tools of communication, they”re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.’, ‘Bill Gates’),
(2, ‘Never trust a computer you can”t throw out a window.’, ‘Steve Wozniak’),
(3, ‘The Internet is not just one thing, it”s a collection of things – of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language. ‘, ‘Jim Clark’),
(4, ‘What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?’, ‘Walter F. Mondale’);

You can download the complete script and database table here: Random Quote Generator (403)