Programming

One of my favorite hobbies is programming. Most recently, I have been programming with PHP, which is a language designed to create dynamic web pages, and a database called MySQL. Using them in combination, you can make some very useful and powerful tools. I have also written a few scripts in Perl. Here are some of the programs I have written:

• My online dive log, written in PHP. All of the dive log data is stored in a MySQL database. The dive log can be searched and sorted, to only show dives at a certain location, or with a particular buddy, or to show only dives with a particular word in the description.
• Corey's online dive log, which is the same as mine.
• Dive site review database: This started as a database of reviews of dives sites that I have been to, but I opened it up so anyone can review dive sites that they have been to. Like my dive log, the dive site review database can be sorted or searched for particular keywords.
• Guestbook: This was a fairly small and simple program, as I was learning to use PHP and MySQL. I hope you stop by and sign it!
• Upload page (password required). This utility I wrote so people can easily send me a large file, as sending through email usually limits you to small files. It turned out to be so useful that I wrote a similar page for my work, which is used almost daily.
• Corey's messageboard: Corey asked me many times to write him a message board, so he finally got his wish. Some day I'd like to add more features to it, when I feel motivated enough.
• Jay's Movie Reviews: My friend Jay has been doing movie reviews on his web page for years. Since we have similar tastes in movies, I've enjoyed reading his reviews. He's been doing them manually in a flat HTML file, so I copied his reviews to a MySQL database and wrote some PHP pages to access them.
• Mail scan: This is my first useful Perl script, which checks my email logs and compiles statistics on how many messages are identified as spam, infected, or (more rarely) legitimate messages.

I've done quite a few programming projects on the job as well, including some questionnaires, a product information utility, an upload page, and the prototype of the online shopping cart. Since then it has been built on and improved by other programmers, but it feels good to know that I had a hand in that large project. I recently did some other web side jobs, including a web store for another company.

I do all of my programming on my main computer (pictured at right), an Ubuntu Linux workstation. On the left is my MacBook, and above it, my Zaurus Linux-based handheld. I host my web page and PHP projects using the Apache web server on a Red Hat server. Apache is the web server software that runs the majority of the web sites on the planet. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl are all free open source software.

I am employed as a network administrator, and have been slowly migrating most of the old Windows servers over to Linux. Much of what I do to administer these servers is handle text files, either to configure software, tune spam and anti-virus filters, or to examine the logs of what the servers have been doing. I have recently been learning another language called Perl, which is especially suited to manipulating text files, which should come in quite handy to keep the network running smoothly. My first useful Perl script was a program that examines the last few weeks of mail logs, creates an HTML summary of what's been happening, then copies it over to the web server. Lately Corey and I have been learning Python together at home.

In December 2002, I became a Red Hat Certified Engineer by taking Red Hat's certification exam. It was the hardest test I've ever taken, and took several weeks of preparation and 32 hours of classes, but was worth the work.