Log Manager: COM Port Card Logging Software Written in Visual Basic

April 11th, 2010 Posted in Design, Programming
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In October of 2004, I decided to take on a new project at college.  I was determined to write software that could be used in the Computer Science Major’s Lab to monitor who came in and out.  I originally began the project in an attempt to learn how to write software that could interpret the data that was received from a card-scanner via a COM port.  Then my interest grew and I decided to write a fully functional Log Manager.  I knew a variety of other labs wanted a way to log who was coming in and out of their lab, so I figured it was a good project to take on.


Download Log Manager Version 1.3:
Installer | VB 6 Source Code

Log Files:
A new log file is created each day. Log Manager writes the log information to text files in the specified Log Destination.  It’s capable of saving the log files to a certain folder on a server if necessary. By default Log Destination is set to “C:\INSTALL_PATH\LogDestination\”. Here is an example of the automatic file creation:

Below is an example of the contents of a log file.  It is a comma delimited file,  so it can easily be opened in Excel or similar program.

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How to Convert URL’s in Text to Links Using PHP

April 6th, 2010 Posted in Programming
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The function below takes in a string of text and converts all URL’s that start with "http://" to an HTML link.

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/**
 * Returns the string with URL's replaced with actual HTML link tags
 * @param string $string The string to parse for URL's
 * @param boolean $noFollow Whether or not to add the rel="nofollow" 
 * attribute to the tag
 * @param boolean $newWindow Whether or not to make the link open in a new
 * window
 * @return string
 */
function getStringWithUrlLinks($string, $noFollow = true, $newWindow = true)
{
	$pattern = '/(http:\/\/[^\s]+)/';
	return preg_replace_callback($pattern,
		create_function('$matches',
			'return \'<a href="\'.$matches[0].\'" '
			. (($noFollow) ? ' rel="nofollow"' : '')
			. (($newWindow) ? ' target="_blank"' : '')
			. '>\'.$matches[0].\'</a>\';'
		), $string);
}

Here is an example usage:

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$string = 'This is my website: http://www.jesterwebster.com/';
$stringHtml = nl2br(getStringWithUrlLinks(htmlentities($string)));
echo $stringHtml;

The example above would output:
This is my website: http://www.jesterwebster.com/

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robots.txt vs meta tag. Which has precedence?

March 28th, 2010 Posted in Programming, Web Development
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Question:
If you have a robots.txt file and a meta tag within an HTML web page, that contradict each other, which has precedence?

Answer:
If there is a conflict between the directive in robots.txt and the meta tag directive (e.g. if your robots.txt allows spidering but your page meta tag does not) the robots.txt directive has precedence.

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Time for a change…

March 27th, 2010 Posted in Design, Programming
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It was time that I took down my old website.  I figured I could at least post a couple photos from it for posterity sake.  Goodbye old friend…

A screenshot from the old JesterWebster.com

A screenshot from the old JesterWebster.com

JesterWebster.com - Snapshot Numero Dos

Another snapshot of the old site

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