JohnHok.Com

There’s a logo contest going on for a local student initiated club at the University of Toronto(Scarborough Campus) called “Scarborough Campus Files“.

Scarborough Campus Files (SCF) is a newly-created organization whose goal is to create an online/digital yearbook of student life, clubs, events, graduates, and faculty at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This yearbook will be launched on a website and sold as CDs afterwards.

You can find out more about SCF over at http://scfonline.ca.

I’m actually the Vice President of Information Technology for SCF and the IT Team played a big role in getting the site all setup (details of which I will share at another time). SCF decided to hold a logo contest and here are the quick facts.

Prize: $50 gift card at Scarborough Town Centre, recognition in the yearbook and credits
Requirements: Logo must include ‘SCF’ or ‘Scarborough Campus Files’. Logo has to be vector format.
Deadline: March 21st, 2008
Send in entries to scf@utsc.utoronto.ca

Good luck and be sure to tell your friends who may be interested to get designing!

Just thought I’d share with you how my workstation at home looks like. I know a lot of computer geeks (and non computer geeks) like seeing the setup of people’s desktop and where they work. So here are pictures of my workstation taken with my camera phone!

Laptop - Toshiba Satellite A200-AH5
Intel Core Duo 2.00GHz
1024MB Ram Original (upgraded to 2048MB)
120GB Hard Drive Space
15.4″ Glossy Widescreen
Windows Vista Home Premium

LCD Monitor - Dell 2005FPW
20″ Matte Widescreen LCD
1680×1050 Native Resolution
16.7 Million Colours Support (one of the few LCD panels that can truly support the full 16.7)
IPS Type LCD Panel (almost perfect viewing angles with no colour distortion, support for 16.7 with no dithering)

The laptop I got for around $650 with a $150 gift card I received as a gift from one of my high school teachers. It’s great for it’s use. I bring it to school as a portable and bring it home as a desktop. It’s a very fast machine after upgrading the ram to 2GB. The computer really wasn’t sufficient with only 1GB running Vista. The build quality is more or less solid and it does it’s job nice. The only real gripe I have with it is the awkward bilingual keyboard(which I’ve gotten used to by now) and the glossy outer casing. The glossy coating on the outside is a fingerprint magnet and always gets dirty.

The monitor I purchased used for only $200! One of my best hardware investments I have to say as having the second monitor has proved invaluable. This has got to be one of the best LCD monitors to hit the market. Unfortunately they are no longer being produced. It’s a 20″ LCD built with an LG IPS panel. There are 3 main types of panels used in LCD manufacturing: TN, MVA, IPS. TN are the most widely used as they are the cheapest to manufacture. The problem with TN panels is that they support only 16.2 million colours and it simulates the rest of the colours through dithering. Also TN panels have horrible viewing angles which distort the image when you don’t look at the screen directly. IPS is basically the opposite of the TN panel and are the best panels you can get in LCD monitors. The Dell 2005FPW has been compared to the Apple Cinema displays which retail for almost $800.

When I went to look for a new LCD for a dual monitor setup I knew I wanted this one so it took months of researching and searching before I was able to find a seller who was willing to give his up. Now that I have it, it was well worth the effort. The monitor is amazing. In that last picture you see that the 2005FPW can tilt 90 degrees and have a very high vertical resolution which is great for browsing websites without scrolling. The monitor also has height, tilt, and rotate adjustment capabilities so it’s very ergonomic and you can adjust it to just about anyway you need to have it.

Do you have pictures of your computer setup? Feel free to share them with me! As a fellow computer geek, I love seeing other setups as well.

This is just a quick PHP tip I’d like to share. It’s called the Tertiary Operator. It’s basically a way to simplify simple(and complex) if statements into one liners!

Say for example you have a conditional statement like:

<?php
if (5 > 10)
{
	echo 'The world is ending.';
}
else
{
	echo 'Yes, I am still sane!';
}
?>

You can reduce this statement into the following using tertiary operators:

<?php
echo (5 > 10) ? 'The world is ending.' : 'Yes, I am still sane!';
?>

What it basically does is

(if this statement is true) ? (we should do this to it) : (else goes here in an if statement)

This can come in real use when you don’t want to stick in an if statement in the middle of an echo statement for example. You can even nest them! Here is a more complex one I used in one of my scripts(sorry about the code wrapping!):

(($query_count_result['count'] > 1) ? (($query_count_result['count'] == 1) ? $query_count_result['count'].' Song' : $query_count_result['count'].' Songs') : 'No Songs')

Can you figure out what that statement is doing? I might be able to actually simplify this statement but I didn’t really give it much thought at the time of making it. I just wanted to get it to work and wasn’t really thinking about what was the most optimal way to do it. Hope this tip was useful!

Magento is an open source eCommerce solution built on the Zend Framework. I came across Magento when a client wanted to create an eCommerce solution to his brick and mortar herbal store that he had here in Toronto.

I knew that building an eCommerce website from scratch was not a real viable solution as eCommerce websites are complicated things. You have to take into account security, transaction processing, admin usability, and a slew of other things related to the storage and retrieval of information in databases. osCommerce was the first open source solution that came to mind but I’ve heard many things about osCommerce. Many not so good things about osCommerce that basically eliminated it as a solution for this client. This was when someone from the SitePoint forums referred me to Magento.

When I went to look at Magento, I was blown away. The beautiful, yet simplistic design of the Magento homepage was the first thing that caught my eye. Delving deeper into the application itself, I find myself confronted with a feature rich- yet clean eCommerce package. The admin control panel is also quite a thing of beauty as well! It doesn’t present you with a million of options, instead there is a nice navigation system at the top that breaks down the management of your eCommerce website into small and manageable bits. You can have a look at the demo of the admin backend right over here: http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/index.php/admin/

I had to ask myself, this thing can’t really be free can it? Open-source free? This will probably confirm it. Indeed Magento is free as in open-source free!

PS. I must’ve had a freudian slip writing this, as after proof-reading this entry, I noticed I spelt Magento as Magneto the entire time. But again that might just happen when your name is too close to a famous Marvel comic villain.

Well it’s always great to set goals, it gives you something to reach for, something to achieve, and something to give you a sense of achievement.

I’m not going to make and list all my elaborate goals. Instead, I want to keep this one simple for now and take it one step at a time. I’ve always have trouble keeping up with this blog so my goal for this month and beyond is to at least hit 2 digit figures in terms of blog entries.

This might seem like a small and stupid goal but looking at my archive of blog entries by month, you can see this seems to be a trivial goal for me to reach. March 2007 was the only month I’ve reached double digit blog entry figures! That seems quite pathetic, so hopefully I’ll make my way to break this trend.

Wish me luck! :)

Well it’s been quite awhile since my last post, midterm season for University students is quickly approaching once again and it’s an awfully busy time of the year. Here’s whats been going on with my latest projects and ventures.

mp3Upload.ca
mp3Upload is a website that allows users to upload mp3 files and share them freely with their friends. The idea spurred out of my mind one night and about 3 days later the design was made, domain registered, and backend created! The goal was to create a simple and intuitive user interface that quickly allowed users to do what they came to the site to do, upload mp3 files.

Many people who I’ve talked to after using the website can attest to the ease of the user interface, so I’m happy that I was able to achieve that. The site has a no frills upload form and once the mp3 has been uploaded, he or she is redirected to a page where they can share the links to allow their friends to listen or download the mp3 file they just uploaded.

Right now the site is only monetized through Google AdSense, making minimal coin here and there. As always though, it’s always recommended that you don’t rely on just one source of income. The beauty of the site is it has a lot of room for expansion. My plan in the future is to implement a premium membership system which will allow users to keep playlists of mp3 files, view mp3 files they have uploaded, search our database of mp3 files (by genre, title, artist), and also freely browse through the latest mp3 files that are uploaded onto the site. This premium membership will be subscription based most likely broken down 1 month, 6 months, 12 months, and “lifetime”.

Of course, the service will still be available for free, you just won’t be to access the extra features. This will hopefully introduce this second source of income from the site, making the revenue from it less reliant on just one source.

SiteProxy.org
SiteProxy.org is a free anonymous web proxy that I purchased off the DigitalPoint forums for $150USD. Actually it was a network of about 8 other proxies! You can view all the other sites by looking at the “Try these other proxies” box on the right. I basically revamped the design of all of the sites I purchased to use this new standard format for all of the proxies. They are all managed through a single set of files which allows me to easily add sponsored links or new proxies across the entire network when needed.

The idea of having a network of proxies is so if one is blocked, your users can go to your other one. Also having the network allows you to easily share traffic across the network of proxies you own. So by promoting one proxy to get a lot of traffic, you can push some traffic around to your other networked proxies as well. I’m hoping to hold onto this for awhile and try to get some more traffic to the network and eventually resell it for a nifty profit!

In terms of expansion, the only real expansion that I see useful here would be to add more sites to the network as traffic grows. This gives you more web properties which is more attractive to a buyer who might be looking to buy a proxy network.

Those are the major things that’s been going on with my online investments. I’ll keep you updated with the progress of these sites as they come!