A Somewhat Uneventful Two Weeks

Well, I know it seems like I do quite a lot since my posts are usually massive but that isn't entirely true. In the past two weeks, I've been quite lazy and haven't really amounted to much. Literally everything I did was based around web design or usage of the web and wasn't a whole lot of hard work. I worked a whole lot on the website, which you can see in our Beta here, and the Beta is coming out nicely. Everything has been changed out to PHP and is running beautifully. I don't have to look at any more silly html code for some time, which makes me happy. I'm particularly happy about the new and improved Projects page. It divides my projects in to three main categories. Active, inactive, and discontinued, each of which is explained in a paragraph above the lists. Active means the project is updated often and with good reason. Active projects are likely to have the least amount of bugs however they may sometimes have more bugs than Inactive projects. Inactive projects are projects, typically with some minor bugs, that I have, for one reason or another, stopped updating as often. In some rare cases, inactive projects will have a minimal amount of bugs and the updating was stopped because I felt it unnecessary to continue updating it. Finally, discontinued projects are projects that are, quite obviously, not updated at all any more. These projects lack any official support but questions will be answered by a simple email to me (email in my profile) and will be answered promptly. The projects page, as you may have noticed, also has a dynamic statistics line at the end. The number of projects and over how long they've been made is dynamically determined using some simple PHP scripts. The other two statistics are so unchanging that I felt it unnecessary to modify them dynamically. If you look at the stats right now, you can see that there are 25 projects over 4 months in 4 languages on 3 platforms, which some would say are some pretty impressive statistics. Although I've made 25 projects in 1/3 of a year, I feel like my productivity is decreasing slowly, thus I'll be trying to make more projects over the course of 2010 so that after my 1 year mark for C++ is hit, I'll  have a large amount of projects completed or being maintained. Aside from that, I've set up my very own iPhone/iPod Touch Cydia Repository known as Deviant Core Repo or Deviant Repo and you can add it by adding the source "http://cydia.deviant-core.net/" and the repository currently contains about... 24 packages and this number will increase with time. I've also started a twitter as well as a competition against Podulo as it is probably one of the worst Cydia repositories in existence. The twitter can be seen here and is updated relatively often. To get back to the subject of topics, I'd like to discuss what exactly those 4 languages and 3 platforms are. The 4 languages I'm referring to are C++, HTML, PHP, and Python and the 3 platforms (target platforms) are Windows, Linux, and iPhoneOS. With that, there are some projects that unintentionally cover more than just those 3 platforms hence why the real statistic on the site says target platforms. To discuss my iPhoneOS projects as well as the multi-platform coverage, I'd like to talk about my Gyz Compression Engine. Gyz was referred to in the first release as Genuine YZ compression but is often referred to as "gyz." Gyz currently runs on Linux, OS X, iPhoneOS, and anything else using a filesystem similar to EXT4 that can run Python. Running Gyz on a Windows computer requires some very basic modification in terms of the file path links and the things of that sort. A Windows version may released with the first official release of Gyz. All current releases of Gyz are Betas and you should expect a Release Candidate soon. Gyz currently runs on iPhoneOS through a modified version known as Gyz4iPhone. Gyz4iPhone, like Gyz, is complete freeware and is only available from the Deviant Repo. Gyz boasts powerful and easy command line compression by combining the bz2 library with the zlib library. Together, these powerful compression engines become even more powerful. Gyz is currently at version 0.9-9 and the iPhone version is subject to be a bit higher. You should be expecting a patch soon that will count as the first release candidate and all release candidates will be 1.0-X and 1.1-X, hopefully by then I will have decided on my set up and the first version will be released as version 1.2-0. The Gyz project was started in mid November and worked on consistently until one day I lost interest. Soon after I discovered a python version for iPhone (2.5.1), I decided to revive the project and port it to the iPhone. This port was completed on December 19th and required very minimal change. Future versions of Gyz may run off of command line parameters instead of the terminal I am using right now. In my habit of planning for the future and mimicking naming styles, the 2.0 release of gyz will be known as yz2 and will use the yz2 extension. On an unrelated note, the projects on the projects page will be modified to have every project name be a link. For non-web projects, the links will obviously be a download link. Also, I'm pretty amazed that I was able to talk so much. I expected this to be one of my shorter posts since this past two weeks was uneventful but I guess it really wasn't that uneventful.