Yan Huang | Yan's Blog

Email Piping

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:46:58 +0000

I set up email piping–it is very straight forward in Linux using cPanel. Pretty much whenever an email gets sent to support@domain.tld, it gets forwarded to the PHP piping script, and that adds it to the application. The alternative method of doing email piping is not true email piping–it is cron piping. In Windows, you use Scheduled Tasks as oppose to Crontabs (Linux). This method is useful for Linux when the email server that does the forwarding is not on the same machine as the server with the application. Using cron piping, every X amount of time, the script logs into the mailbox via POP or IMAP and reads the emails, and then pulls it into the application. Definitely a lot less efficient than true email piping, as CPU cycles and bandwidth is wasted each X amount of time, even when there are no emails coming in.

Murphy’s Law Hits

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:30:06 +0000

I have been diagnosed with Murphy’s Law of Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. My version of Murphy’s law…When shit hits the fan, shit hits the fan HARD. Placing all your eggs in one basket is not a wise idea, thus, I placed all my eggs in different baskets. Unfortunately, all the baskets had holes. Fortunately, a friend from the past lent me his basket today.

Mass Responding to Craigslist through Gmail via SMTP

admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:06:10 +0000

Yan Huang (me) explains the way he automates his process of gaining leads from Craigslist, using PHP/SMTP and Gmail to do so. The Craigslist URL is pasted into the Craigslist API that we developed, and the output is a datafile in CSV format. This server does the parsing of Craigslist pages, and strips out the titles, and emails. The other part of the application takes in this CSV file and parses it. Each line of the CSV file is entered into a loop, and for each loop cycle, the PHP connects to an SMTP Adapter, which connects to Google Mail (Gmail), and sends out an email. The reason for using Gmail instead of sending it via our own servers is because Craigslist will ban our server’s IPs, but they will not ban Google’s IPs. The only flaw is only 57 emails can be sent until Craigslist won’t allow you to send for 24 hours. However, incremental process is being made to overcome this obsticle.

Radario Test

admin — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 04:43:01 +0000

Tags: facebook, business

This post is to test the automatic blog polling and trackback service for Radario.

My Facebook App Hello World

admin — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:31:10 +0000

I never had a purpose for creating a Facebook application, and I still do not. One of my friends, whose still in high school, mentioned the computer science teacher gave extra credit to any students that created a Facebook application. From my knowledge, none created one, but knowing that was what sparked interest for me to look into Facebook applications. Facebook’s APIs support all the popular programming languages but for my interest, I used PHP 5. Basically you generate and copy over the keys like any API and you type in the callback URL. The rest is pretty much you just do your own thing. You can opt to use FBML (Facebook Markup Language) or use an iframe. FBML is pretty interesting–syntax looks very similar to ASP.NET control tags.

Here is my “Hello World” Facebook application: http://apps.facebook.com/oneve-yan

Road to Str8 Ballin

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:30:48 +0000

Usually my posts are about technology but a lot has taken place in the past month. It seems like all the pieces of the puzzle are finally coming together. This post will be a bit awkward because it will be very philosophical and probably not logical.

During the past few weeks I have learned far more about human behavior than I ever had and it feels as if I am able to communicate with people on a stronger level now. I got out of living with room mates and finally have a studio in downtown Los Angeles. I was given the freedom to re innovate it–I am still in the midst of wrapping up the paint job. ONE V8–online media and applications company for upscale clients that I started seems to be coming together rather well. I feel blessed for the people I know. I have to give credit to a close friend of mine who works with me–he really helped me pull it through.

The American dream is out there–I am pursuing my version of the American dream. Whatever it takes and this goes for everyone else with an American dream…whatever it takes, I will make it happen. Most importantly, “Family, integrity, hard work.”

Ajax with JSON > Ajax with XML

admin — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:17:36 +0000

I don’t know if it is still Ajax if there is no XML involved. I used PHP to
parse the CSV data from Yahoo Finance and exported it into JSON. My server did
not support the json_decode and json_encode functions so I had to manually parse it
to JSON. The thing I really thought was cool about using JSON is it skips a
whole step. I did not have to parse XML into stuff I can use in JavaScript.
All I had to do was have var arr = JSON_data and we can just call arr.index_of_value
to get the actual value. JSON is pretty cool.

Same PageRank for Websites

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:48:17 +0000

Let’s back up for those who are not familiar with the term PR–it is
not Public Relationship in this context. PR stands for Google’s
PageRank and it is an old method of tracking which websites are relevant or important
by Google.

Dranet used to be a PR6 website at one point in
time–it is now a PR3 website. Md5 Encryption used
to be a PR4 website and just last week, it I guess Google reindexed and now
it is a PR2 website.

On the flip side, it seems that this blog is now a PR2 blog, which is very flattering.
My two proxies A Big Fruit and Myspace
Squad are now both PR 2 websites. Seems like the PR rankings went into an
averaging pot and now all my websites have similar, if not same, PageRanks.

To see the Google PageRank of a website, just download the Google
Toolbar and it will show you.

American Gangster

admin — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:31:36 +0000

There is something about American Gangster that caught my attention–both protagonist went for their own versions of the American dream and did it. Denzel Washington did an excellent job portraying Frank Lucas. His actions for the most part were along the line, in my opinion, with the exception of him shooting the guy in the head and the time he bashed his cousin’s head with the piano. Great irony when he told his brother not to wear anything flashy and in the following scenes, he gets spotted out because he wore the flashy fur jacket his girl got him.

“Most important thing in business is honesty, integrity, hard work, family.
Never forget where we came from.” - Frank Lucas

I think what made this movie really good was the music behind it, especially the trailer. Jay
Z - Heart of the City was a great song for the trailers.

American Gangster…

… No, Just kidding. It is just a picture of myself that I thought was good.

PHP Pear is Pure Awesome

admin — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:34:05 +0000

I have heard a lot about PHP Pear or PHP Extension and Application Repository. I never really had to use it but heck, I tried Ruby on Rails and it was pretty cool–why not try Pear. The repositories that I downloaded were Mail and MDB2. Mail was pretty straight forward–I liked how clean declaring the header information was, as opposed to PHP4’s method of doing so.

What I really liked about PHP Pear’s MDB2 library was the fact that defining the datasource
is as clean as you can get. If you have any problems connecting to the MySQL
using the socket, check that you have MDB2/mysql.php.

I mean…How much cleaner this be? mysql://username:password@localhost/database