Puppy WiFi Assistant is completed!!!!!

Using applications, configuring, problems
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can8v
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#31 Post by can8v »

@Aitch
Viewing the page source helps with JavaScript and HTML/XHTML, basically anything done at the client side. PHP and MySQL happen on the server side, so you can't rip off someone elses code. No worries though, whatever I can't easily figure out for myself I have generally been able to google around and find a tutorial for. Anyway on this particular issue I figured it out last night. :D
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Béèm
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#32 Post by Béèm »

For some reason I just see this post now.
I think the idea is very good and will be a helpful tool as quite a lot of questions are about WiFi connection.

However I still am not in agreement with myself if there should be moderation or not.
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
Use peppyy's [url=http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html]puppysearch[/url]

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#33 Post by can8v »

@Beem
Do you care to expand on that? I would like to hear your arguments for and against. This argument has been in my mind the whole time. What experience do you have as a moderator of a blog/forum or other online applications that you might be basing your opinion on. I have only moderated my personal blog (and a couple others that were short term blogs for project management purposes), which I developed from scratch not that long ago. I can tell you I implemented very strict moderation. Every reply to a blog gets moderated before it is accessible to the public. In the case of my personal blog which see little traffic I get about 2 spam replies per day that include links to porn sites and only about 5 replies per month that are legit replies from family and friends. If it gets much worse I am going to require login credentials from my family and friends before they can reply to my post. I would like to not have moderation at all, as it a pain in the tail, but I think the real question is how strict does the moderation need to be, because I don't want to make it any stricter than necessary.
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#34 Post by can8v »

I got to spend three hours on this project today, but I got bogged down when I discovered I would have to rewrite all of the queries for the display abstracts function. This process required almost a dozen loops to accommodate all of the filtering of the search results. It seems kind of silly using the filtering on my test data, but I know it will be required as the db grows. I will get around to converting the search by date to a search by date range sometime later this week, then upload the changes, before adding the functions to make updating accessible from the web.
Cheers,
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#35 Post by can8v »

I have been in the hospital since Friday evening, dke ue to a bowl obstruction. I don't expect to be home until tomorrow, but to my delight I discovered that the hospital has even faster WiFi access available for their patients than I have at home. I only wish I discovered this sooner, as I have spent many distraction free hours here "resting". That is code for doing NOTHING. It really is driving me crazy. Anyway I sent my wife back to the to pick get my Puppy WiFi Assistant files off of my desktop and she is on her way back with them. I really hope to get this project close to completion before I split tomorrow, as I will not have distraction free time like this again for some time. Whatever I get completed I will post up to my sandbox space on my website for you all to review, before I leave the hospital.
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Aitch
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#36 Post by Aitch »

dual post

Aitch :)
Last edited by Aitch on Sun 25 May 2008, 23:29, edited 1 time in total.

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#37 Post by Aitch »

...dke ue to a bowl obstruction[typo in the anus?].......before I split tomorrow
Split?; I should get a nurse to have a look, if you think that's likely....

these damn bowel problems can go too far, you know :lol:

Take it easy

Aitch :)

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#38 Post by can8v »

Progress has been made. I have finally worked out what I believed to be the last of the bugs in the search filtering system. I went with a design that requires the user to start by selecting a manufacturer, then the user can narrow the search results down, by selecting only certain models, only models that have been tested with specific Puppy versions, and whether or not the card has been found to be compatible, not compatible or unknown compatibility. I still have to put in some labels to make things more self explanatory to complete newbies, and a convert the search by date to a search by date range, otherwise the visitor interface is roughly complete (I have hopes of completing all of this before I get out of the hospital. and I should be starting the registered user interface this coming week, which is where the db will be updated.

Speaking of the registered user view, I was thinking I could limit the amount of moderation required if I had a minimum of 15 post on this forum as a requirement to register. I would simply require the user use the same username, and write a script that checks to see how post the user has on this forum, if it is 15 or more the script would create an account and send the password as a PM on this forum. This would only be done once when the first registers. Of course I would have to run all of this past Mr. Murga, as it would cost his forum a slight amount of bandwidth. That is of course if I can work out all of the technical difficulties. In the mean time I would have to manually approve the registrations, so the motivation to complete such a project would be high.

@Aitch
Yes I know these things can be serious. I had a partial splenectomy in 1988. In 1998 the adhesions (scar tissue) from that surgery had grown and strangulated my colon causing me to require a second surgery to remove the adhesions. I was afraid that was what was happening this time, however; this time resolved on its own, all I required was some medication for the pain and to be observed for a couple days to make sure I wasn't going to need another emergency surgery. the second surgeon told me to expect to go through this about every 10 years and it has bee almost exactly 10 years since the last surgery, so I am a little freaked out it.

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#39 Post by can8v »

******* News Flash********
I finally got the visitor view completed and will start work on the registered user view as soon as possible. Please review the visitor view at: http://salis.sutteryuba.com/WiFi.php. I will be adjusting the css this morning to color coordinate a few things, like the calendar controls, but it will not affect any testing. Enjoy and please leave feedback.
********End Flash********

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#40 Post by Aitch »

Cool :D

I hope you are going to have links somewhere on the page to 'wifi howto'

This Rhinoweb video is yonks out of date & we really need a current version

http://rhinoweb.us/howtosetupwireless.htm

This, from the Wiki/WhoDo, only needs a little updating, but good visuals:-

http://www.puppylinux.org/~whodo/wiki/h ... neral/wifi

Anyone got any better ones?

Aitch

PS: There's hundreds of forum entries, which I don't know how much info your db will utilise?

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#41 Post by can8v »

Aitch,
Yes I definitely will have a few links out in the left side navigation and The main page will actually be something of an intro similar to WhoDos page that you have linked above, but with less screen shots and more links to external resources.
Right now I am only focusing on the application, because that is the largest missing piece in support of WiFi on Puppy.
As for the hundreds of forum entries that will be challenging to incorporate, but absolutely essential. In fact it was the main reason behind this project. It is simply unreasonable to expect someone who doesn't know how to get their hardware working to navigate something as massive as the Puppy linux forum and skim through hundreds of threads in several different categories and hundreds more that turn out to be about something different entirely, but turn up in the search because someone happened to mention one of the search terms somewhere in the thread. Currently we are in the unfortunate situation where ones best hope if they run into trouble with WiFi, is to post a note on the forum and wait to see if Tempestuous can help them. Alright that is a little sarcastic, I do realize that others help, but my point is that only limited number of people on the forum even have much experience with it beyond their own hardware. There have been several attempts at making it easier, most of which have helped to some degree, such as WhoDos Wiki post, or the various videos out their. The problem has been that they only help with select cards. I am really hoping that this db application will pull together all of the information on the forum and organize it, so that people can readily find it. In about two weeks I will be seeking help with the data entry. It will take a couple months if I do it all by myself. that is something for interested parties to think about.
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#42 Post by Aitch »

It will take a couple months if I do it all by myself. that is something for interested parties to think about.
The first would be masochism & not recommended

The second I hope will generate more interest when you have got a bit further on as people generally, unfortunately,
tend only to be impressed with results

However, I am not a general, so I'm already impressed :lol:

Keep up the good work

http://www.wizardofjobs.net/wizofoz/humor.html

Aitch

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#43 Post by can8v »

@Aitch
I certainly have not kept my hectic schedule a secret, so I certainly wouldn't hold it against anyone who doesn't want to volunteer before seeing the results of my efforts. On the other hand like you said I hope that a few more people will volunteer after the project is completed in a couple of weeks (which is a couple weeks before the original deadline I set for myself).I also did some cross-browser testing and found some major cosmetic issues, so I resolved most of those last night and I rewrote the css for the calendar popups, so they blend with the rest of the site.
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#44 Post by can8v »

I had a few free hours so I started work on the registered user view of the Puppy WiFi Assistant, but I have a ways to go before it will be ready for users to register and start populating the data. I have howerver, finished fixing all known bugs in the visitor view (all 19 of them). If a couple of you could test out the popup calendar selection system for the search by date range and the filtering system in the search by Manufacturer results screen I would greatly appreciate it. I will continue working on the registered user view unless someone finds a critical bug in the visitor view.
Kind regards,
can8v
P.S. with the feature set requested for searching the db in this thread, keeping the visitor view JavaScript free became extremely impractical. I finally gave in and included some significant JavaScript. I have not finished making it degrade gracefully when JavaScript is disabled and I may not finish this until the rest of the application is complete. In other words please only test with JavaScript enabled.

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#45 Post by can8v »

Alright I put in a couple more hours and completed the update functions, but have only minimal validation and I still have to create the edit db functions and registration process, so I cannot upload yet. I should be able to complete the edit db functions this weekend sometime, but it may well be the following weekend before I can get a chance to work on the registration process and smooth out the edges.
regards,
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#46 Post by can8v »

The visitor interface is now complete and being tested by Aitch. Aitch will also be using the recently completed form for updating the db with new WiFi adapters, so fairly soon there should be some useful information to be had in the Puppy WiFi Assistant. Anyway once that all happens and I get some feedback from Aitch I will finish the development of this project.
kind regards,
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#47 Post by urban soul »

Cool.

Just to point out that what tempestuous said earlier: It is important to have the chipset info.

Vendors tend to change the chipset in use even within the same model revision!

Also the question on the forum is: Does WPA/WPA2 work ??? This is important, you name it, WEP is compromised.

Urban

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#48 Post by can8v »

@Urban
I agree that is important imformation, but I felt it should go in the notes section. Perhaps I should relabel it configuration notes instead of setup notes. The chipset is something you need to know (sometimes) in order to configure Puppy to work with the card. I thought it more important to no if the card is compatible and the location of the driver to use. If you know the driver to use then the chipset is not very relevant. It is when you don't know which driver to use that the chipset becomes extremely relevant. In, which case this application would not be especially helpful. This applications purpose is to assist people with sharing data about how they got their WiFi adapter to work in Puppy or which, adapter they were not able to get working and what they tried to do.
If someone knows the chipset of an adapter, but not the driver, then they would need to ask someone for assistance. Since this application does not facilitate discussion, the forum would be a more appropriate tool, Once the problem is solved the Puppy WiFi Assistant would then be an ideal place to record the solution, so that others could more easily find it. This application was prompted by a thread on the forum that attempted to consolidate the solutions for installing a great many WiFi adapters in Puppy, but it became very convoluted and difficult to find the solution you were looking for. That is the scope of this application. perhaps I could have come up with a grander vision for it. Greater clarity of communication in the beginning or more participation at the technical discussion level could possibly have steered this application in a dramatically different direction. As Aitch pointed out however, that level of participation was not forthcoming. right now I am very interested in getting this project completed, so it can start getting used, before I have to leave for Cub Scout camp, a wedding, church camp, and to put a roof on a church in Portugal. I have a very busy summer and I am trying to squeeze this project in amongst chaos. I did however, make this application very portable and easily modifiable, at some later date it is possible I could further expand its purpose and features, as well as create similar applications to help with printing, video adapters or whatever. These ideas may be getting ahead of the game a bit, but they are merely ideas right now.
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#49 Post by urban soul »

We appreciate the time and energy you invested. Take your time... work on the project when you feel it is fun...

Regarding the driver question:
You cannot state "Interface xyz uses THIS driver and works in Puppy 3.01."

The world would be nice if it were so simple. Unfortunately it isnt. Moreover this info is a bit redundant and may be even missleading. Imagine you go buy some recommended wifi card by this database. Vendors change chipsets every 3 month. The sentense that it works in puppy is not true anymore.

Dont feel critisised, however. You put up a great database and you are not responsible for the contents.

Urban

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#50 Post by can8v »

@urban
Interesting, so you are saying that someone may have a Brand X SuperDuperCard version 7.1 and someone else who has a Brand X SuperDuperCard version 7.1 could have different chipsets in their respective cards. I have yet to experience that. I have seen different chipsets between say versions 7.1 and 7.2, but not between two version 7.1 cards. This poses a major problem, as most people don't even know what chipset they have. So if I require the chipset to be entered into the db before the data is accepted then a number of people will likely not enter anything. Do you have any possible solutions to this. At this point it would still be fairly easy to add a chipset field, but to filter by chipset would be a chore at this point.

As far as the db being redundant you are right it is, it was never meant to do something never done before, it was simply meant to do it much better. The data could and has been entered into the forum; the problem is that it is difficult to get at the information for the exact card and puppy one is trying to use. Not many people want to scroll through a list of a few hundred cards that are in no particular order to find the card they have only to realize that the listing they found is for a different version of puppy and the instructions don't work, so they need to continue looking to see if there is another listing even farther down the list for the same card, but a different version of Puppy. This type of application is simply meant to replace and organize data that is found in such list, then make it sortable for ease of use.

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