Advogato: Personal info for robocoder

robocoder is currently certified at Journeyer level.

Name: Anthon Pang
Member since: 2002-11-28 18:27:54
Last Login: 2010-09-08 02:29:57

Notes:

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An expert in C, and a proficient/competent programmer in many other languages (including, C++, Java, VB, Perl, PHP, Javascript), my involvement with open-source dates back to my Amiga days. I have contributed to a number of projects, participating in a variety of roles, including advocate, patch submitter, developer, and maintainer. My (eclectic) computing interests include data communications and networking, compiler construction, configuration management, user interface/interaction design, software maintenance, and software quality improvement.

After many years at a leading provider of mobile workforce management solutions, supplying companies in the energy, telecommunications, broadband, public safety, transportation, and field service industries, I am now the principal software developer / software consultant at VIP Software Technologies Inc. I have held a number of IT positions, including Programmer/Analyst, Engineering Team Lead, and Technical Manager, in addition to earlier stints in accounting, sales support, shipping and receiving, and inventory management. My expanding domain knowledge also includes equities and forex trading, and real estate. In fact, I'm a registered real estate sales broker in Ontario.

Location: Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Ontario, Canada (after many years in Greater Vancouver, BC)

Affiliations:

[ ACM ][ IEEE Computer Society ][ Toronto Real Estate Board ]

Geek Code »

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- GAT d-(++) s: a C@ ULAHS P++ L++ E--- W++ N+ w(++) PS(+) PE@ Y+ t 5 X R- tv+ b+>++ DI+ D G e+>+++ h---- r+++ y+++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Web-Ring:

[ Robocoder (Web Design) ][ Domain names and Web Hosting ][ Software Development (Vancouver | Toronto | Canada) ][ Wiki: Anthon Pang ][ Anthon & Elizabeth ]

Projects

Developer on Piwik

Recent blog entries by robocoder

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21 Jun 2010 »

I've been sidetracked from Piwik core to work on replacing the continuous integration (on a server hosted by OpenX) to our own server. This was a welcome diversion from PHP... for awhile... but it now looks like I'll have to dive deeper into HtmlUnit (and coding in Java) to isolate some HtmlUnit bugs when using jQuery 1.4.2.

5 Apr 2010 »

Just popped in to read the blog roll. Advogato's recentlog is downright spammy looking...

Piwik 0.5.5 was released a couple of weeks ago. One critical bug fix, some index improvements, and an IP anonymizer were the big highlights.

While Matt leads the big feature development in 0.6, I've been contributing small patches and improving our Trac reports. (This was a good opportunity to brush up on SQL JOINS.) Generating the graphs for the project's metrics will hopefully be easy to automate. (I hope to revisit the BMI and Fix Responsiveness graphs at a later date.)

Ok...back to work...

21 Jan 2010 »

PowerUp!

Working on a new plugin for Piwik (and ActiveAnalytics) to provide in-app download/install of plugins. I've prototyped the client and mocked up the digital download store (not pretty). Building our own hosted extension repository (ala Wordpress & Typo3) -- for third-party developers -- may be next on the horizon... (being discussed).

17 Jan 2010 »

PHP mbstring.func_overload is evil.

There's no mb_substr_replace() function, so you can't pass a value from mb_strpos() -- ie overloaded strpos() -- and expect it to work. Also, if you use substr() on binary data -- precisely because it's binary safe -- then you really don't want/expect to use mb_substr(). And there's no way to disable this at runtime via ini_set().

I just borrowed a snippet from ZendFramework and applied it to Smarty' s outputfilter.trimwhitespace.

Detecting this and coming up with workarounds is fugly.

16 Jan 2010 »

Re-inventing the wheel. Sure, I could have used the ip2c library from FireStats, or the geoip code from MaxMind, but the former doesn't support shared memory and the latter is just fugly looking code.

So, I just coded/tested/benchmarked a new IP-to-country plugin for Active Analytics -- it'll be an optional, third-party plugin for Piwik. It can search the database in either a flat file or shared memory. (The difference is in the 10ths of a millisecond per query on my antiquated test box.)

In hindsight, I wasted a lot of time over-3ngin33ring the solution. I thought it would be safer to sign and check the integrity of the shared memory segment for users in a shared web hosting environment. I later realized this was a non-problem because shared web hosting doesn't offer access to shared memory (due to security and resource concerns). This came as a relief because signing and verifying killed the performance benefit of using shared memory.

[ed. "engineer" is a protected title here in Ontario.]

325 older entries...

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daverd certified robocoder as Apprentice
pvanhoof certified robocoder as Journeyer
Alphax certified robocoder as Apprentice
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