I just realized that it’s been over a year since I last programmed something in PHP.  It was an odd discovery.

I was asked if I knew PHP and could help someone debug an error in their site.  I was ecstatic, no one usually asks for PHP help anymore.  So I went to help them, and low an behold, the source file they opened was like a foreign language.

Okay…  I understood most of it, but I was shocked at how rusty I was.

Lately, I’ve been working in Perl, Python, Common Lisp and MatLab.  The P* languages are my favorite so far, Common Lisp has some cool aspects, and MatLab is awesome at Math.

But I knew I had been doing some web development lately, but I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting even more errors when I was trying to help someone with PHP.  Shockingly, I had been using Python for far too much web development recently, and I kept telling them things you’d do in Python, and not in PHP (import being a big one)…

Anyways, I’ve been working on some new projects.  I’ll share them here once I get things setup and working.  I hope you’ll like what you see.  But in the meantime, you guys should download the latest version of Chrome, Safari, or a Beta of Firefox.  I’ve been dabbling in some HTML5 and whatnot (don’t get too hyped up, it’s amazing to me, but kindof basic).

So I’m finally on my last year of College!

It feels like it was only a little while ago that I took a big step up from the incomprehensible days of high school into the easily understandable days of my college career.  Oh how time flies when you have projects and reports to turn in.  I feel like I’ve grown so much, approximately 2 inches taller to be exact.  My foot size remains the same, but the amount of knowledge I’ve gained ceases to bewilder me.

Anyways, this year seems like it’s going to be awesome.  I’m taking Artificial intelligence, and we just received our first awesome assignment: programming a bot to play a game similar to chinese checkers.  Okay, so the assignment isn’t too “artificial intelligency” like SkyNet or something, but it’s something fun and interesting to do.

I’m also taking Computer Vision, and our next assignment is to do feature recognition.  I believe we’re given four photos, then we pick out major features.  Then, we take a database of other photos, and try to identify if anything from the first four photos are in any of the photos in the database.

So for those of you who don’t know, I’m getting a degree in Computer Science and (wait for it) Mathematical Sciences.  I was originally supposed to minor in Computation Mathematics, but some of the courses aren’t offered this year.  So I got some course substitution forms, and now I’m getting a Bachelor’s in Mathematical Sciences as well.

After this year, I’m still going to be in school though.  I’m going for my Master’s in Computer Science, and if things go as planned, I’ll continue for my Doctorate’s.  I’m not sure if I want to be called “Doctor” yet though.  I’ve always felt that it was a bit too much.  Just the thought of “Mister” makes me cringe.  When I become a professor, my students will simply call me “Professor.”  It doesn’t make me feel old or anything.

That’s what’s currently on my mind and happening.  So wish me luck, and hopefully I pass all of my classes…

So, this summer I decided I was going to try to learn some new things and update myself to some of the newer stuff out there.

So PHP 5 added a whole slew of new features to PHP, but I’ve been stuck in PHP 4, so I figured I’d learn some of that.  I’ve also been stuck to relational databases (and that’s usually what they teach at school), but I’ve started to see some of the sites I know and love switching to non-relational databases.  So that was also something I wanted to learn how to work with.

I went online to search, and the three major contenders seem to be Cassandra, CouchDB, and MongoDB.  I decided to go with MongoDB since it seemed like the easiest to use and setup, and I liked the idea of document-oriented storage.  CouchDB can be ran on webFaction as well, but I’m not too sure about Cassandra (I’m guessing you can with effort).

So here’s my guide on getting it setup and ready to run.

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