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Start programming python!

Lucas — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:32:39 +0200

VPS

Lucas — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:04:30 +0100

I recently ordered my own VPS, so I finally can create websites with my favourite programming language python! I finished my first website already: http://www.lucasvandijk.nl This site is created with the amazing webframework Django. I was amazed how fast I had the website working.

And because I have a VPS, I'll rewrite this site too in python, so I can migrate this site to my VPS. The layout won't really change, but I think I'll make some small changes. All the big will happen 'behind the scene', the coding. I will rewrite my portfolio, project system, and 'subsites' like my Pocket Physics will get there own layout.

I have no idea when I finish the new version, but at least before september

Lucky IRC Bot v4 Alpha 1

Lucas — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:16:42 +0100

Well, after quite some time, the time has now come to release the first alpha of my Python IRC Bot! I'm quite suprised how well it already works, but there a lot of things still to be done.

Alpha 1 Features:

GUI and Console Mode
Multiserver, it can connect to multiple servers
Multichannel, it can join multiple channels
Nice plugin system
Which are quite easy to create
Authentication system
Multilanguage (depends on some plugins), currently only english is available

Download
http://code.google.com/p/luckybot/downloads/list

Started at the university

Lucas — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:28:29 +0200

I had a very busy time the past few weeks, because I finished high school this year, and now I'm starting my new study: Mechanical Engineering (Dutch: Werktuigbouwkunde), at the Technical University Delft (Located in Holland). Which means I keep programming as a hobby, and I won't make it as my job. I also became a member of the dutch student society named 'Virgiel', which brought a lot of events with it the past few weeks.

I'm currently searching for my own room here in Delft, which I suspect to have within a few weeks. When I have my own room, I finally have some more time working on my projects and updating this site a bit more. Until then, I'll probably be pretty busy.

It's been a while since the last update, and I also wanted to say that my python IRC Bot is progressing pretty well. The plugin system works very well (and it worked the first time I ran it, however at that time it could have some performance improvements), the main window works, although not every part is implemented yet.

The project page has been moved from Google Code to Launchpad, which you can find here: https://launchpad.net/luckybot

That's it for today, I'll see you later

Lucky's Graphing Library

Lucas — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:06:03 +0200

The last few days I've been working on my new PHP library: Lucky's Graphing Library. It currently can draw pretty nice bar and pie charts, including legend. Almost everything is configurable, so you can customize everything to your taste.

For more information, download and examples, check the project page:

http://www.return1.net/site/projects/Lucky-s-Graphing-Library/

LuckyBot v4

Lucas — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:11:12 +0200

Well, now I'm currently not developing Levon anymore, I used that time to work on the next version of my IRC bot: LuckyBot v4.

v1 was a not extendable irc bot written in PHP, don't want to talk a lot about this one :')
v2 was a desktop app written in C#. It had a nice GUI, you could easily change settings, enable or disable plugins etc. But the code what very ugly.
v3 was a nice extendable irc bot written in PHP. It had a pretty nice plugin system, the only problem was that you couldn't reload plugins at runtime.

v4 will be the best from v2 and the best from v3. It has a nice object oriented plugin api, it has an GUI, where you can change all your settings etc, but there'll be also a console mode. And the best: it's written in python. Which means easily plugin creation, reload plugins without restarting the bot and a lot more

Current Status:
- It connects
- It parses incoming messages
- It can load and call plugins
- GUI isn't finished yet
- Console mode works.

You can find more info, including the source code on:
http://luckybot.googlecode.com

Emesene

Lucas — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:57:17 +0200

I recently discovered a very nice MSN Messenger client for Linux: emesene. It supports pretty much of the most important MSN features (Custom emo's, DP's, file transers), although not yet that much as aMSN. But webcam support is added with one of the next beta's, and many other features will be added in the next releases too.

The nice thing is: it's written in python, and it uses the GTK library for the interface. That means it looks very nice on my Ubuntu distro. It also has a nice plugin system, so you can create your own plugins, to add extra features. Support for a lot of MSNPlus things for example is already included.

Since I discovered this messenger, I decided to pause the Levon project. Emesene is almost exactly what I had in mind for my messenger. I'd rather create some plugins for emesene, or submit some patches than completely reinventing the wheel.

Download emesene at http://www.emesene.org
It's also available in the ubuntu repo's.

Type hints still coming to PHP?

Lucas — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:46:15 +0200

Damn, will PHP finally grow up to a real OO programming language? Today there was another proposal for using type hints. This is partly already possible, but this one goes much further. Currently you can only type hint for array and objects. No default types like string, int or something. You can't also type hint the return value of the function. But it's probably all coming in PHP5.3.

Damn I would love to this implemented, because it would save a lot of validation work for us. It's also more clear what type of parameter you want in a function. For those wo don't want to use type hinting: here's the good news, it's completely optional.

Some examples of the syntax and how it works, click read more.

Traits, a sort of multiple inheretance

Lucas — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:22:46 +0200

This afternoon, I was browsing the PHP Internals mailing list, and found something pretty interesting. It was a new proposal for some new OOP feature, called Traits. Traits is an language construct which enables you to reuse code more efficient.

It looks a bit like abstract classes, because of their syntax: almost the same as a class, only a different keyword, but you also can't create any instances of it. But why the hell would we need something like traits if we got abstract classes? Well to quote Stefan Marr, the proposer of this feature:

Quote from Stefan Marr

Code reuse is one of the main goals that object-oriented languages try to achieve
with inheritance. Unfortunately, single inheritance often forces the developer to take a decision in favor for either code reuse *or* conceptual clean class hierarchies. To achieve code reuse, methods have either to be duplicated or to be moved near the root of the class hierarchy, but this hampers
understandability and maintainability of code.

To circumvent this problems multiple inheritance and Mixins have been invented. But both of them are complex and hard to understand. PHP5 has been explicitly designed with the clean and successful model of Java in mind: single inheritance, but multiple interfaces. This decision has been taken
to avoid the known problems of for example C++. Traits have been invented to avoid those problems, too. They enable designer
to build conceptually clean class hierarchies without the need to consider code reuse or complexity problems, but focusing on the real problem domain and maintainability instead.

To view an example how traits will look like in a PHP script, click the read more link.

Windows Vista's Source Code

Lucas — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:53:52 +0200

Source: fok.nl

Projects Section Online

Lucas — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:21:44 +0200

Well, it took some time, but I'm lazy, for those who didn't know But I finnaly got some motivation to work on the project system, and it's finished now In this section I will show my personal projects, which in most cases are open source.

Currently just 2 projects are in the Projects section, but I'll add some older projects too, but for those I haven't got a good place to put them online.

Pocket Physics

Lucas — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:29:15 +0100

I love my Nintendo DS Lite, it's a beautiful thingey, and there are some very nice games on it, but there's also a lot of crap for it. However, the best of the Nintendo DS is the Homebrew Community, hobby programmers who create apps/games for the Nintendo DS without an official Nintendo license.

And some games are really cool. For example Pocket Physics, a game where you can draw anything, and it will become physically, it will interact and move according to the laws of physics. You can also save your creations, and share it with others. And I made the perfect place to do that: A Pocket Physics dump.

You can find the PP Dump here:
http://www.return1.net/site/pp

You can upload your own PP file, and it will be automatically added to our database. Previews are also automatically generated. So upload your own, and rate the files from others!

Linux Gaming Series: Enemy Territory Quake Wars

Lucas — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:18:37 +0100

Welcome to the second part of the Linux Gaming Series! In this post I will cover one of the best online FPS: Enemy Territory Quake Wars, the successor of Wolfenstein: Enemy territory. W:ET was free for download, for ET:QW however, you'll have to pay. But it's really worth it, and the best of all: There's a native Linux client!

In ETQW it's not about killing, it's not about getting the best score, but It's about teamwork and objectives. And that's why this game is so great!

Installing this game is really easy, and works perfect, because of the native Linux binary. For the complete instructions, click read more.

Google Code Project Hosting

Lucas — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:25:13 +0100

Woot Google owned! Beisde their uber search engine, they have a lot of other free webtools and programs like Google Docs, An online text writer, spreadsheet app and even a small Powerpoint look alike. Or Gmail, a free email account with almost 6GB of space, uber fast AJAX interface, POP3, IMAP and a LOT other features.

But the best of all: Google Code, the place for developers who want to integrate something from google in their own site/program. And it also offers project hosting for any open source project.

Google Code Project hosting offers a subverion repository, wiki system, issue tracker, download system, and a lot more. The developers are still busy adding new features, which already brought us a very nice subversion web client, where you can view the source of the files in the subversion repository.

I, of course, already hosted some projects there, like my MSN client, and my C++ game statistics program.
http://luckys-query-tool.googlecode.com
http://levon.googlecode.com

It's way better than sourceforge in my opinion, because it has a cleaner interface, is not bloated with ads and is waaaay faster. If you're going to start an open source project, I would recommend to host it there

IE + PNG = Not good

Lucas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:53:23 +0100

It is a too beatutiful dream: IE which handles PNG images correctly. IE6 can't even handle alpha transparency in a normal way without hacks, luckily for us IE7 did. But, IE7 still has a bug with the PNG gamma correction, which results in PNG's which are darker than it should be.

Luckily, for almost every problem there's a solution. The gamma info stored in PNG files is optional, so we can remove that data, without breaking the image. And guess what? Without that info, IE7 renders PNG's properly.

On Linux, we have a nice tool called pngcrush, which can remove the gamma data and a lot more fancy color info from the png. However, using pngcrush on every file is a pain in the ass. And we programmers are lazy, we don't want to pngcursh every file in a directory, we want to see it automated. And that's what I did: a little python script which pngcrushes all images in the given directories.

Pretty useful when you're slicing a layout, and want to use PNG's. To view the script, and how to use it, click Read More.

Neon and Fan Controller

Lucas — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:24:02 +0100

Wh00p, yesterday I finally received my neon light and fan controller! And I installed those parts immediatly of course. My case is an Antec, which had already a side window, so the neon creates a beatiful effect And with my fan controller I can control, yeah, my fans

My fan controller is the Akasa Fan Control Pro, which is a beautiful thingey, with nice leds, and has a very nice feature: it contains multiple frontplate colors, so it always fits the color scheme of you case.

To view a few pics, click read more.

New Captcha

Lucas — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:30:42 +0100

The past few days I had a lot of spam comments, so I had to install a CAPTCHA. I've created a lot of captcha's, but this time I wanted something new. And you can view the result at the comments page

This captcha consists of three completely random generated drawings, and each of the drawing contains has a code behind it. The drawings are painted on the image on the right side. One of the three drawings is drawings is painted on the left side of the image. The visitor has to enter te code which matches the drawing on the right.

phpBB3 had in it's early stages a captcha like this, and that's where my idea comes from Bit I didn't take a look at their code, my captcha code is 100% coded by me. The source of the captcha is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence v3, you can view it in the scripts section.

PDO Tutorial

Lucas — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:41:51 +0100

Because the fate of the mysql_* functions are uncertain in the next release of PHP, moving to the new data-access api of PHP, PDO, wouldn't be a bad idea.

In my opinion it's a great idea to remove the mysql_* functions and use something more object oriented, and PDO is the perfect solution for that. It supports multiple database engines, although you'll need to correct PDO drivers for each database engine.

In this post I'll explain how to enable PDO on your PHP installation, and how to use it. Click read more for the tutorial

Project Levon

Lucas — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:46:33 +0100

In less than a month I became a great fan of the scripting language Python. In the scripts section I have a few Xchat scripts, but I wanted to create something bigger. And that's why I started my new project 'Levon'.

It will be an open source MSN Messenger clone. The main operating system is Linux, but I will support the other two, Windows and Mac. I opened a Google code project, which you can find here.

Planned features are

Plugins
Multi language
Display Pictures
Custom Emoticons
File Transfers
Webcam
And all others thing you would expect from a good MSN Client.

RSS Feeds

Lucas — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:41:21 +0100

I've created a RSS feed today, something still missed on this site. It contains the latest 30 news items. You can find the page with the feeds here:

http://www.return1.net/site/rss

In the future I will add some more, but that task isn't my highest priority now. So subscribe to the feeds to keep on track what's happening here.

Linux Gaming Series: Counter Strike Source

Lucas — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:33:58 +0100

One of the prejudices of Linux is that you can't play any games on it. Wrong! A lot (but of course not all) windows games can be played on Linux, using the all mighty Wine! Wine translates windows function calls to one that Linux understands, so it's not an emulator You'll be suprised what wine already supports.

In this post i'll explain how you can play Counter Strike Source on Linux. It runs pretty damn good, with sometimes a few crashes, but it's very playable. And in the future I'll post some more games that work on Linux.

Namespaces in PHP

Lucas — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:22:38 +0100

One of the most requested features for PHP are namespaces, and they're finally coming. And we don't have to wait untill PHP6, because PHP 5.3 will have them already! And in this post we're going to take a look how namespaces in PHP look like.

Why namespaces are so important
When PHP5 was released, OOP became a lot more important in PHP applications. And with OOP comes classes. Sometimes, you want to use an existing framework, with an other lib. But when the framework and the lib have a class with the same name, you'll get an error.

A solution for this is to prefix your classnames, but in some cases, your classnames will get very long, and because we, programmers, are lazy, we don't want that.

And here's were namespaces come in, you can group classes under a name, and classes can have the same name, when both are in an other namespace.

So, you want to know how to use namespaces in PHP? Click the read more link.

Enemy Territory Quake Wars protocol documented

Lucas — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:21:10 +0100

In my old windows time, I once created a game server status tool called Source Server tool written in C#, and now, because I'm a Linux user, I'm creating a similar application for Linux, written in C++.

The first game my game status tool will support is Enemy Territory Quake Wars, a very nice class based first person shooter. And there's even a native Linux client, which makes the game even greater.

You can 'query' almost all gameservers by sending some data through an UDP socket, and then you'll get a response back, containg all sorts of information of the server.

Unlike the Source query protocol, the ETQW protocol isn't very well documented. So I had to investigate it myself, and the only thing I new was that the protocol is a slightly modified version of the Doom3 protocol. But with some extra info from the developers, I now know what every byte means. And I'm sharing it with you. So to view the documentation, click the 'Read more' link.

Site status

Lucas — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:03:22 +0100

Development of this site is going really well last days, and I thought to inform you about all the changes here:

My portfolio is online, it contains all my paid projects, and discontinued projects, which I made in the past. It has some nice Javascript effects, and a small AJAX part. Definitely worth checking.
The scripts section is also online, which contain small and free scripts, this page has been improved a lot if you look at my old lucasvd.nl site. Multiple can be showed in tabs, and finally highlight support for multiple languages.
A lot other small bug fixes and improvements.

And also remember, it's not forbidden to comment

Creating screenshots with PHP

Lucas — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 13:15:19 +0100

Ever wondered how the site browser shots worked? I bet they're using a sort of custom COM object or PHP extension to create screenshots or maybe an other scripting language, but today I saw two nice PHP functions which can achieve the same result: imagegrabscreen(); and imagegrabwindow();.

They're added in PHP version 5.2.2, and only work on windows. I'm no windows user anymore, so I can't test it. To view an example, click 'Read more'

The new design is here!

Lucas — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:25:44 +0100

And here it is! The brand new design of return1; It's created by Dryxe, and wow I love it

I got a few problems with the slice, the left menu pushed the content sometimes a bit down, but after some help @ webdeveloper.com, I got it fixed!

Tell me what you think about it, leave a comment!

A new layout coming

Lucas — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:40:08 +0100

Well, the site is just online, and we're already switching from layout. Personally, I like the current layout pretty much, but very few people had the same opinion when opened a 'Site Check' topic for this layout.

The new layout will be made by Dryxe, who kindly offered to me to create a new layout. I won't release a sneak preview, just be patient.

Site development also goes well, I'm currently working on my personal projects system, where I can manage my personal projects.

The Registry Pattern

Lucas — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:16:19 +0100

I often use several design patterns in my scripts, and this is one of my favorites: The registry pattern.

If you use a lot of classes, I bet you came around the problem you want to share an object with another class.

One solution is, to use the Singleton design pattern. But if you have a lot of classes, this is not really efficient. This is were the registry comes in. It's a class where you can store and retrieve variables.

To view an example, click the 'Read more' link.

Welcome!

Lucas — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:29:05 +0100

Welcome at my new site return 1! Since my previous domain lucasvd.nl has been 'kidnapped' while moving to another host, I have worked on this site, my new programming blog and personal portfolio.

This site will be slightly different than lucasvd.nl:

It will be an english site, because I visit a lot of english communities.
This will be more a coding blog than a personal site. (But there'll be some personal elements here of course)
It's based on a complete new MVC framework.

The beautiful layout is created by Belgian top designer Karel-Jan, thanks for that

By the way, the site is under heavy construction, and a lot of pages don't work yet. To view a list what has to be done, click 'Comments'.