Morpheus: Information Collection

Elizabeth — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:09:27 +0000

It’s not just Mr. King Jr. that has dreams. In fact we all do. And those people that actually remember their dreams the next morning often have interesting stories to tell. Unfortunately, these types of dreams are not as easy to uncover as those recounted by major historical figures. And, thus, I had the challenge of trying to find the data I want to use for my dream visualizer.

After considering already available options, I decided to forgo the inevitable challenge of filtering the signal from the noise of Twitter and other related sites. Instead, I decided to make my own database of dreams. Before now, I never setup and wrote code to communicate with a database by myself. I had a vague idea from a web languages class a year ago, but this was still an entertaining challenge.

I knew where to begin. HTML forms are nothing new to me. They are something basic that you learn right away when working with web languages. Even the initial bits of PHP were familiar. But then I started wanting to do new things.

I created a text document of emotions that were presented as a drop down table and could be augmented through a text field. With this, I was hoping to allow people to accurately express their emotions while still encouraging users to reuse terms, thus making it easier to draw connections between related dreams.

I also set up default values. The number of times a person dreamed a dream was automatically set to 1, which the writer could change if it was different. Unspecified author’s names would be set to “anonymous.”

One problem I anticipated was the threat of mySQL injections attacks. Look, I love my friends, but I only trust them as far as I can through them. And since I’ve never really had the opportunity to participate in the age old sport of friend chucking, I’m not going to encourage the bad habit of dumping a friend’s table values just for lulz. Not to mention, I want good old Bobby Tables to be able to enter his dreams like everyone else. Consider me to be an equal opportunity developer. Thus, I wrote some PHP that parses through the answers and replaces all single quotes with the ASCII equivalent.

Exploits of a Mom, brought to you by XKCD.

I’m still in the process of cleaning out the bugs. For a while, I wasn’t altering the double quotes and they lead to the following text to be dropped. I don’t even really know how that works. I still haven’t figured out how to clear out the remaining backslashes that somehow were added in the course of processing this information between PHP and HTML. I can’t figure out how to have PHP recognize the back slashes since the regular expressions “/\\/” and “/\/” both give errors that the final “/” is missing since it interprets the line as “\/”. Bah!

Still, this has been a good exercise. Now I feel more comfortable creating new tables. The next stage is to bug the hell out of people to get entries. I already have some interesting ones. Enter your own at:
http://dream.efuller.net/share.php

And, to prove that we can always get a little more political

Elizabeth — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:34:20 +0000

Meredith’s group just presented their response to the Presidential Elections yesterday, concluding with a group exercise where the class chose one question to ask Obama at an event at MIT. Obviously, we want our question to be the one that gets picked. So, vote us up!

http://www.communitycounts.com/forum/?id=bigdialog&linked=tYftyIRBb78

What I find most fascinating about this video is its meta nature&emdash;using a medium to critique the medium itself. After all, what we are saying is that web video is not accessible to a portion of our population by the very nature of the medium. The response is actually formatted as an example of what they could be in future, with subtitles for the deaf and a voice over for the blind. Leon is even in the front signing the message. Unfortunately, it is too small to really see it in detail.

Uploading » Applications of Interactive Technologies

Morpheus: Information Collection

And, to prove that we can always get a little more political