My GitHub Page

Octocat

Github, the social coding platform is a pretty cool website. The idea of the website is to make it much easier to have a open source life collaboration over the internet with complete strangers. It's free as long as you don't mind having the rest of the world able to look at what you put on there, though more often than not it's just individuals using it for their own projects version control.

The official mascot of the website is the "octocat" (pictured right).

The Github system is based on git (DUH) and is quite easy to learn and use, even for newbies. Here is a tutorial that I found useful.

Github hosts some really cool programs, they host the source code for the popular internet site reddit, they also host the up-coming Project Hawkthorne the side scroller game based on an episode of the NBC sitcom Community.

My Page

I have several side projects running at the current time, I have started work on a ALEKS competitor, as previously mentioned. I also am starting to download the source of projects hosted on others sites, like dwm over on suckless, and put them onto github. I'm doing this because I think that out of all the version control services git/github is the best (in my experience). The last thing that I am working on at the moment is a Box.com client for the Linux desktop. The idea behind this client is that instead of doing the traditional WebDavFS approach it would be written using only the offical Box.com APIS.

ALEKS Competitor

ALEKS Competitor

Today I started work on making a ALEKS competitor. Why? Because it needed to be done, they have ignored my complaints (and those of others) for too long, they need to know that we don't need them. This project that I have started on does not yet have a name, over on github I just used one of the randomly suggested names, that might end up being the name just for fun.

Features

So far I have made many features, the main site will be written in PHP and the questions and answers will be stored in XML format. The XML will be stored server side, and protected from the general public so that they can't just download the file and get all the anwsers. As of right now there are only 2 types of questions supported, multiple choice and fill in the blank, these can either be delivered all at once, 5 at a time or one by one, depending on how you write the delivery. There will eventually be a API, there sorta is one already taking shape for displaying the questions.

Planned Features

I plan to add everything that ALEKS has, all in good time right now I'm concentrating on the way that the questions will be written and delivered, the XML already has a format that for now serves it's purposes quite well.

There is no download but just cloning the repository into a php server directory with the php simplexml module installed and going to the "index.php" page should work about the same for you as it does for me.

[How-to] Solve different base logs

This is going to be the first of many (hopefully) articles about how to do ALEKS and general math topics, both for you and for me, hopefully it will make me remember it longer... I'll fill these out as I come to them so if there is one you need feel free to contact me.

log₅9
This is asking for the logarithm, not going to explain what that is..., in base 5, if it is not notated with a different number it is assumed to be asking for base 10. For both base 10 and base n (where n is any number) this can be done on a calculator.

                               log₅9 =

 log₅9 = 1.365...

Also on wolframalpha you can solve this type of problem by formatting it like this:

log base 5 of 9


I hopefully will find a better way to do the fraction notation, it's either do it in pictures or x/y, neither of which look all that good.

Comments, questions, or suggestions? Leave them below!

[How-to] ALEKS on Ubuntu

Having to do ALEKS for my classes was one of the major hindrances that was stopping me from making the full switch to the (in my opinion) far superior GNU/Linux platform. But now I have found a solution to the problem, that is much better than their "streaming" option or the instructions that they have on their website for GNU/Linux, which still refer to netscape!

1. Install (if you haven't already) the appropriate java package for you GNU/Linux distribution. In my case I believe it was just the wrapper package "default-java"
2. Download the aleksPack10.jar 
3. Copy it (with sudo or root perms) to "/usr/lib/jvm/default-java/jre/lib/ext
4. Do your ALEKS!

 If this helped you and you are (understandably) mad about the ALEKS Corporation's lack of support please take the time to fill out a support ticket complaining about the lack of  GNU/Linux support that they offer you. I like to file the "technical problems" as it seems that they will get back to you sooner, even if it is only to say that it's not officially supported.



Comments, questions or suggestions? Leave them below!