What a past 6 months it has been. Who would have ever known senior life was going to be this crazy? It seems just yesterday I was seemingly making my way through the passing crowds in between classes junior year and yet here we are again, senior year, except it has been a roller coaster ride from the start.
Between classes, homework, studying, college apps, personal statements, SATs, robotics club, MyBB, NCAAbbs and client’s websites, this blog was pushed to the back burner. Tonight I find myself, for what seems like the first time in a lifetime, with time to simply reflect on the past 6 months.
Ending Junior year, I started my summer job at ActiveVideo Networks again as the SQA Intern which was definately a really good experience. I also managed to visit Washington D.C., for my first time ever, twice. The first time being with my robotics team, attending the Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) and the second time with my family for a short vacation and then a wedding down in North Carolina (a very beautiful state, btw!).
As always, I continued my development work with MyBB and IT functions for NCAAbbs. In fact, we made some significant changes, including opening up our development servers and source code to the public. As always we kept up with security and maintenance releases, and I even have some tidbits to share further down in this post. But back to the story first:
Senior year opened with a bumpy start. The AP Computer Science class I was going to take was canceled because they couldn’t find a replacement teacher (the old one had to take a leave of absence for the year). It practically ruined my chance for attending one of the UC’s (University of California), as I wouldn’t have an AP class under my belt, and in turn neither the extra GPA points nor the AP test. That dampened my mood quite a bit. Second off, my counselors (whom are hard enough to work with in the first place) changed my schedule 3 times consecutively, making me run around at lunches and breaks to find a teacher whom I could TA for and wasn’t already taken. I ended up as the Drama department’s TA, ironically enough, which was the last place I was expecting my academic life to turn towards. Surprisingly it has ended up being, thus far, a very intriguing experience; there are definately very interesting things to learn from a drama class.
Just as I was settling into my senior classes and classmates, SATs, college apps, and robotics club hit me like a 2 ton Honda Pilot. The next 4 months consisted of 19 hour days, frantic studying, club co-managing, eye-tearing 4 hour test taking and answer bubbling. Fortunately, I was able to get through most of it early. As for my friends, well, they are all freaking out right about now, realizing all the work they need to finish quickly. Fortunately I am able to help them out with answering their application submission questions, editing their personal statements, etc. I still have one last single SAT 2 test in December, but once that is done I am never touching an SAT test again in my entire life.
More significantly, in between all this, my robotics team participated at a competition called CalGames where we placed 1st in the end. Doubled with one of our team member’s birthdays it ended on an awesome note. (We are the teal shirts below)
(A closeup of our team during a competition game. Go! Go! Go!)
(I’m unfortunately hidden behind another team member)
The robot in action:
Now that you’ve seen all that, let me momentarily show off some of my work. As I became the lead programmer of the robotics team, I was given the opportunity to learn a completely new coding language, one which is called LabView. It’s an industry standard program that is primarily used in the programming of robotics or being able to control mechanical or electrical parts.
There is too much code to show and explain all, so I won’t even try. However, let me give you a general overview. This is the Robot Main.vi code which is the highest level of the robot and the central interface to all of the robots functions and executions. Following the flow of the code hierarchy, will be lower level functions. Each “Block” you see in the code is basically a “function” in programmer layman terms. The difference between this language and most others is this is by default a highly multi-threaded language.
Gallery:
So as you can see, the robot may only do a few things, but a lot of work goes into making it do those few things extremely well.
All in all I have had a terrific time on the robotics team, but in these dwindling economic teams we have had trouble sustaining the club. This year we are faced again with the challenge of keeping our club open and running. Our robotics club is by nature very expensive in comparison to many of the other clubs, but in contrast it provides an extremely rich experience that prepares the students much more for the real world experience in their various relating industries than any book or test can do. Our expenses for the club are around $19,000 annually (http://evhsrobotics.com/files/2009-2010/Sponsor%20Packet%2009-10.pdf – page 6). Most of the costs are for materials or registration fees to compete in competitions. If you can provide assistance or know of a company or someone else who can, please feel free to leave a comment below or visit our club’s website at http://evhsrobotics.com/ and we will get in contact with you! We also accept in-kind donations and negotiate with companies for competitive prices for various materials. We could definitely use every bit of help we can possibly get.
On a different subject, we are nearing feature-completion of MyBB 1.6. This means that within the next month we should see MyBB 1.6 in public beta and out soon after that. First though, we are going to make a maintenance release for the MyBB 1.4 series within the next couple of weeks. MyBB 1.4.10 will be the last release of the MyBB series, excluding any security vulnerability releases.
As I have reiterated over the past year, MyBB 1.6 won’t be as drastic of a change as MyBB 1.4 was. As MyBB 2.0 will be a complete rewrite, we are aiming MyBB 1.6 to have much less “behind-the-scene” changes than MyBB 1.4 had. This means that most of your plugins will still work with very little change (most simply the version compatibility indicator), and themes should be easily upgradable too. This will allow us to aim the of end the MyBB 1.x series on a great note and put it to rest in an honorable way.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to post any comments, questions, suggestions or concerns.
MyBB 1.4.5 was released a little over a week ago, and I have been monitoring the release and so far we’ve only had a few regressions pop-up. This release was a very successful release to say the least. It’s gone through:
Developer Testing
SQA Testing
A Private, 2-week, beta test
SQA Testing has proven to be a very successful team, spotting errors in fixes and code the developers have written. The private beta identified 19 new issues that were fixed for MyBB 1.4.5 and also confirmed 39 fixes (the fixes that weren’t already confirmed by SQA) were working and if not were fixed to work.
Not being under the pressure of having to make a release because of a security bulletin has made this a great release as well as it wasn’t “rushed,” unlike past released. We’ve also had a fairly decent staff restructure and things are running more smoothly now. A blog post on the exacts of the staff restructure will be made in the following weeks, on the Official MyBB Blog.
MyBB Team Positions
We’re always looking out for new potential. If you want to be on the MyBB Team, you just have to show:
You are dedicated and active to the project
You speak English very well and have good communication skills
You have good knowledge of how MyBB works and in the position you want to take up
If you don’t feel like we’re noticing you it’s probably just because we’re too busy making the next version of MyBB! So just shoot a Team Leader a Private Message to get their attention. Remember though, your chances are considerably increased if you stand out with the three suggestions listed above.
Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Most of what I would have posted here has gone to our official MyBB Blog. So unfortunately I haven’t really had much to post. Since we’re not giving a release date, it makes sense to fill you in as much as possible instead.
So for the last two weeks I’ve been working on the last and final ACP page; The Themes page. It’s going to be pretty cool and a lot simpler than MyBB 1.2’s. I’ll post an overview of the Themes & Templates section once I’m done with the Themes page on the Official MyBB Blog.
The theme’s page will still take a considerable amount of work to finish. Most of the front end is complete, but behind-the-scences things like when you save a theme still needs to be programmed or finished.
Why is it taking so long? First and foremost, the Theme’s system is extremely complex. More complex then something I’ve ever dealt with. The system was originally designed by Chris Boulton (Lead MyBB Manager & Programmer) and was planned to be finished by Chris, but his time has been taken up by many other things so it was handed off to me. While I can code the mockups created gererously by Chris B. and Justin S., the logic that goes on behind the scences isn’t something you can just pick up on and code in quickly. As I stated before, it’s extremely complex to do correctly.
So because of that Chris and I have been in constant communication about how x and y works. The only problem is our communication is limited to the weekends because of time constrains (And living half across the world from each other doesn’t exactly help either). Even then, the weekends can become busy with other priorities.
To sum this all up, we’re trying to wrap up MyBB 1.4 as soon as we can.
Nevertheless, we’ve had an awesome turn out for the public beta and over 400 bugs have been squashed since the beginning of beta testing. I have to definately thank everyone who has participated for contributing their feedback and findings for MyBB 1.4. Hopefully, 1.4 will turn out to be an awesome product.
For the past 4 weeks I’ve been busy working on MyBB 1.4 and the upcoming Merge System as regular, but in addition to having to create a 4 minute video on the “Reign of Terror” with Robespierre for World History. I did this with two other friends. Seeing as most of this was done by me (most of the scripts, and the movie editing) I’ve uploaded it here for you to view:
As for MyBB, we’re continuing to pace forward. The target for the release of the Merge System RC1 (phpBB 2 & MyBB Converters) should be within the next few weeks. At this point I can’t say much more than that. The information flow will probably start to pick up soon.
Recently I found myself updating my modifications / plugins to the GNU/GPL License. I’ve been asking myself why? And I think the answer to that is because it’s such a good way to share your experience, knowledge, and insight with the rest of the world and at the same time breeding a new generation of programmers through useful examples. I always knew there was a bigger part of me that just wanted to help people. What better way to do it than through the “most free” license out there?
I’ve just finished coding (Well, Chris wrote the base of the code) a new feature in. MyBB 1.4 will now feature MySQL & PostgreSQL slave drivers. (Yes We’ve added PostrgreSQL and SQLite 2 & 3 support for MyBB 1.4). This will come for a great boost in speed on large forums that run on multiple servers (think if MyBB ever ran Gaia Online).
Using a MySQL/PgSQL slave driver allows us to separate SELECT queries from queries that modify the database (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE etc). Allowing that will let each server be tuned to select or modifying to get the maximum performance out of each server and over all have a speed increase on the servers.
Not to mention we’ll be the first free forum software (afaik) to do it. In addition to this, we’ve made many other optimizations to MyBB 1.4 and we are continuing to do so. We just hope this continues to show how dedicated we are towards making you a product that is fast, free, and efficient!
A long while ago Chris had made a blog post on “Bitwise Operators“. Now, just to make it crystal clear, Bitwise Operators are not in MyBB 1.4. MyBB 1.2 was more focused on the code. MyBB 1.4 is focused more on features. Sorry folks, but there isn’t just enough time in the world!
However, I’d like to bring them up again and revisit the idea of what they are and how they work.
To re-iterate what Chris stated on his blog post, Bitwise operators are operators that work on a bit-level. You can assign “levels” to a number. This number indicates the level and later on, will be able to provide us with what users have what permissions. In turn you have an array of users each assigned a specific value.
We’ll use Chris’s crisp and clean example to show how bitwise operators work:
foreach($testers as $key => $tester)
{
echo “$key”;
foreach($notices as $key => $notice)
{
if($tester & $notice)
{
echo ” – $key”;
}
}
echo “<br />”;
}
?>
Now this code will print out the following: 1 - can_view
2 - can_view - can_post_replies
3 - can_view - can_edit
4 - can_post_threads - can_post_replies - can_edit
Now you may be asking how we got that? In case you missed it, tester 4 has a value of 14. Now look at what the tester got: “can_post_threads - can_post_replies - can_edit". can_posts_threads has a value of 2, can_post_replies has a value of 4, and can_edit has a value of 8. Now what does that all add up to? 14! And so on and so forth; See? Simple!
This system can make our most difficult permissions night-mares as easy as the above example. If our course doesn’t change, I believe you will be seeing a lot more of Mr. Bitwise in 2.0 than ever before.
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