Weikiat.NET

… life enjoying life and programming is so much more rewarding.

I guess only those without a proper channel through which to derive a sense of satisfaction would be able to afford so much time to blog extensively about tiny tiny insignificant stuff in their life, and worst, some blogs that copy and paste content for the sole purpose of what? - to generate a few cents of ad money from “make money from your blog!” scams like nuffang, advertlets and blog2you that only rewards blogs with really high readership but earns ad dollar from advertiser without really paying them out to bloggers on lower traffic blogs.

I haven’t been blogging about my life for quite some time though, so I think it is high time I do, so at least people who RSS this blog or check back frequently will not delete this from their bookmarks.

The ordeal of installing a Chassic Fan to my PC

Recently after installing a new chassis fan on my PC with a fanciful blue LED, i notice that frequent BSODs (blue screen of death) on my PC which are seemingly random (different error code and cause everytime). Thinking that it was due to a partially failed graphic card driver installation I did sometime back, and having a bout of panic attack afraid that I am have broken something on the motherboard or graphic card (due to a loose jumper I also experience inability to boot due to my graphic card popping out of position or having bad contact), I decided to reinstall my entire OS. While I’m at it, I decided to try Vista.

The installation was not smooth and I had BSOD even during the installation, which further suggests that the problem is with my hardware. I panicked more, this system is new, and I don’t have the cash ready to replace any parts. I’ve also just thrown a $350 on a vacuum tube headphone amplifier, the Little Dot MkIII.

Logic dictates that the fan could be the source of problem, because the frequent BSOD only occurs after the installation of that damned CoolerMaster fan. However, ZOMBiE insists a fan causing BSOD is impossible, and after calming myself down and thinking through the whole thing it doesn’t seem likely. While I have made some mark on the internet and software world, I am a total noob when it comes to hardware. After randomly popping out a few RAM sticks and popping them back, the BSOD problem seemed to have gone away. I was relieved at this point.

Then I noticed another problem. Although I have had 3 sticks of 1GB RAM install, my Windows was only reading 2GB. It could be a faulty RAM, or a loose RAM, but CPU-Z, a utility that shows all your hardware information, shows that I have 3 RAMs running in triple channel configuration, which is correct. This resulted in me looking high and low on the internet, and there are so many different users experiencing the same problem as me, and so many possible reasons that I had no idea what to do.

Under the recommendation of ZOMBiE and my random trial and error, I proceed to pluck out all my RAM and re-seat them again. This time, 3GB RAM showed up in Windows, and no more sleepless nights for me.
Damn the CPU-Z for detecting something that Windows cannot even see.

Development of SgZap.com and a mistake

With too much time on hand and my constant need to use my creative juice (I was having frequent headache and sleepless night where my brain would keep on having random thoughts about everything and anything in a jumbled, disorganized manner which happens during school holidays or during long periods of time when I did not do anything productive thinking again.), I decided to come up with some website.
Creating a web app beats creating a Windows app, because there is larger exposure. Also, I already paid big money for my unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space and unlimited domain support hosting, so it is good to make use of it.

Recently there was the hype of tinyurl and other url shortening services, and looking at the miserable interface on tinyurl I decided to make my own with a more user friendly and simple interface. I suck at design, I am still a newbie at PHP, so I downloaded the open source PHURL and started modifying it intensively. I need some graphics, but ZOMBiE wanted to charge me for them, so I decided to keep all graphic elements of the site as simple as possible, so that I can generate them.

And thus, sgzap.com was gone, with fantastic interface compared to that of tinyurl. I even emailed MrBrown to try using it on his twitter instead of tinyurl. One day later I realized my mistake. Twitter automatically uses tinyurl for any links longer than 30 characters. (It uses another URL shortening service now)

I was shocked. My mistake for not researching enough.

I needed to give sgzap a new focus and I finally found it. Traffic tracking. I notice that people love to post links to sites in forums, tagboards etc. However, unless those websites belong to them, they would not be able to find out how many people have clicked and visited the links they post. I added some code to sgzap, (first time I wrote mysql queries) and now sgzap tracks the number of time each of the “zapped” urls are clicked.

So there you have it. SgZap.com. URL shortening feature with real-time traffic tracking.

Please rate: (4 votes, average: 1.75 out of 5)

 Loading ...