Barcamp Rochester 5 is fast approaching, scheduled for April 3rd, 2010. This year is gonna be just as awesome if not more awesome than last year. We are currently in the planning process and are making great progress to bring you an event that you will never forget that will make you come back for more next year.

I recently had the pleasure to redesign the the Barcamp website, bringing us away from the rather confusing wiki format, hoping that it will make it easier for users to network with each other. The main goal behind the redesign was to give Barcamp Rochester a more professional look while making it really easy for users to post their presentations for others to see. One of the major features in the redesign is the ability to upload presentation materials right to your profile page for others to see and download. You are also able to customize your profile page directly with (limited) ... [More]

All this time, Ive been creating libraries for Codeigniter and talking about its features and whats so awesome about it, but Ive never actually explained what Codeigniter is. So some of you might be looking at the GCal Library I wrote and be like "what the hell is this guy talking about??". So Ive decided that I should probably do a mini series of blog posts, introducing the Codeigniter Framework and even do a couple of tutorials on how to start developing with it.

First of, what is Codeigniter? To quote the Codeigniter website, "Codeigniter is an Open Source Web Application Framework that helps you write kick-ass PHP programs". In short, Codeigniter is a framework, or toolkit, that allows you to rapidly develop projects and applications, and basically makes it so that you dont need to write your own library to interact with a database, or to create html templates, or basically reinvent the wheel, allowing you to focus on what your product will be doing, and not on how much co... [More]

Back a few years ago I decided that I wanted to set up my very own web server so that I could do your typical web stuff. Granted this was before the days of twitter, Facebook, and before everyone started releasing API's for their applications, so the web was a simpler place. Well back then I knew nothing of Linux let alone how to use a terminal to get anything done, and there was no definitive guide for installing a web server on a dedicated machine. So that's what I hope to solve. So today we will be installing a full LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server from scratch using Ubuntu Karmic Koala Server Edition. Im not going to walk you through that install simply because it's so simple a monkey could do it. But I will mention that when you get to the bit about selecting packages/services to install DO NOT SELECT ANY. We will be installing everything by hand not only for the experience but because managing software with aptitud... [More]

When it comes to application development, Apple makes it vary difficult (well, not difficult, but rather costly) for you to even load your own applications that you have written on your iPhone. In order to even load them on your iPhone, Apple makes you buy their $99 Developer Package. The Developer Package allows you to put the apps that you have written on your iPhone and up to 20 (I think?) other iPhones for testing. Having the developer package also allows you to put your app on the iTunes App store for downloading and purchasing. But if you are a Computer Science major like I am and like to write applications for your own projects, you're not going to want to put those up on the app store, and you're not going to want to spend $99 just to "officially sign" your apps just to test them out. So What Im going to do is walk you through how to sign your own application so that you can actually get it to run on your iPhone as if you downloaded it from the app store.

First lets s... [More]

Being Thanksgiving break and all, I figured Id work on my CMS a little more and add in some features. One of the features that Ive been thinking of implementing has been one that tweets your blog post when you publish it. Being that twitter limits you to 140 characters and my URL's are rather long, I figured Id make a mini Codeigniter library for URL shortening. I started out by checking out the two more popular services, Bit.ly and TinyURL. As it turns out, TinyURL is just a simple cURL call away for shortening a URL, so for simplicities sake, I went with that one. All you do is drop the file into your System/Application/Libraries directory and make one call, passing the URL you want shortened to it.





Source on Github ... [More]

This past Thursday Google made public the source code to its new operating system, Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based on Linux, and based on some poking around under the hood, that flavor of Linux seems to be a mix of Debian's unstable and testing versions "squeeze" and "sid". But more on that in a little bit. All of Chrome OS runs in the Chrome web browser, with everything being web based. Even the contents of USB drives show up in a new Chrome Tab at the top of the page. The purpose of using Chrome and opening everything in a new tab is to maximize your desktop real-estate. Putting everything in tabs keeps everything organized. In the top left corner, you'll find the Chrome logo which brings you to the "apps panel" where you'll find links to web apps like Google Docs, Gmail, Hulu,... [More]

Being that I am always looking for projects to do and looking for things to improve (even for my own enjoyment), the other day I was looking at the current BarCamp Rochester website and thought, "how could this be improved?", and immediately opened up Photoshop and started to map out a new layout. Little did I know, some of my friends who are on the planning committee would get wind of my design and actually want to use my new implementation. See the current BarCamp website is in a wiki format, which fits the nature of BarCamp perfectly, but for the majority of us who have no clue how to work a wiki, we find it utterly confusing and tend to get a little lost. For example, one of the main problems from last year was that it wasn't 100% clear that to get on the list of attendees, you had to sign up and then edit yourself into the list of already existing participants. So here's some features that Im going ... [More]

So this week kicked off the first of the (hopefully) many installments of the CSH Seminar Series. This week we were gracious enough to have Kevin Purdy one of the senior editors of Lifehacker.com give us a talk on comments on the internet and how sites like Lifehacker and other blogs and social bookmaking sites deal with user comments, especially the really bad ones. We even got into a little bit of a discussion of "if you had a dream commenting system, how would you implement it?" and got some interesting responses from the audience.