Web Portfolio

This page is dedicated to showcasing my portfolio of software written in PHP and JavaScript.

These have been my main two programming languages since 2015. Alot of my previous work in other languages have been lost due to hard disk crashes and other happenstances in my life which have seen the total loss of my C/C++ portfolio which was my main language until around 2010. This included work I did in Java, albeit that I was mainly working with JDK 1.0.2 with only a little bit of Java 2 which to be fair is far from recent.

During the same time I was working with Borland C++ for Windows I was also dedicating some time to writing assembly code for 80x86 instruction set. Eventually I wrote an 8086 assembler in 8086 itself such that it could produce its own binary from its own source code. I thought this would be a useful tool in constructing an operating system from scratch having the assembler and a text editor available after a bootloading from POST. The original source code was lost in one of those hard disk crashes which happened over the years but I had sent a version to SourceForge and eventually published 8086 Assembler to a GitHub account I can no longer access due to 2FA issues.

So I have been programming computers for a long time. A very very long time if you consider my attempts at creating games on 1KB ZX81 when I was around 12. Fortunately I have kept my skills up to date. When it comes to computer languages, I am a polyglot. While my games on Sinclair Basic and Commodore Basic were never completed, I did make attempts to write games in the 6502 assembly language of the Commodore 64 which was the way the professional games were made back then. However my first full complete games were written in Borland Pascal, targeted for IBM XT compatibles with CGA screens. My feelings of success with Borland Pascal made me choose Borland C++ as I moved to C/C++ around the millennium when I was also learning to program in Java and MIPS (68000 RISC / Crusoe) during a course in Computer and Electronic Systems at Strathclyde University.

I did not graduate from university due to personal issues going on in my life at the time, so I graduated to being a taxi driver where I again used my computer skills to write courseware for "the knowledge" of Glasgow where candidates where expected to know 90% of 1300 three point locations in the city to demonstrate they had a map of the City of Glasgow in their heads. The program was written in a now obscure Java usecase where Java itself (not JavaScript) was once something which could be run on a browser in windows before Sun sued Microsoft over the Microsoft JVM which Sun thought was not properly their version of Java. It was after this that the C# and .net languages and APIs were launched. These are languages I never learned since I was stuck on Borland and Java.

I have continued to program computers as I always have done since I was around 12 years old. For over a decade now I have been strictly focused on PHP with JavaScript. I like the idea that JavaScript can be programmed anywhere there is a browser and I choose PHP over ASP since I object to Microsoft business practices and don't like the idea of being stuck inside their platforms. Linux has my main operating system since Windows XP SP3 insisted on automatic updates. Although I do have a dual boot into Windows 11, I rarely need to boot into it since most of the windows software I use will happily work performantly under the Wine Windows Emulator for Linux.

Before Social Media and AI, the word "algorithm" meant something very generic like Dijkstra’s algorithm which is the standard way people get around using google maps but no one calls it an algorithm. This is what an algorithm means to me. The method that goes along with the ingredients of a recipe and I have been studying these personally from before learning any formalities about Big-O complexity. I write in a variety of computer languages and often I will have to refactor an algorithm for a particular use case.

I suppose the first algorithm I learned was the bubble sort algorithm, also known as the quick sort algorithm but before I started learning about formal language to describe algorithm designs I was already noting that the quicksort algorithm was great when it came to everything being on RAM but somewhat inefficient when trying to sort two streams coming from files on slow disk memory where the merge sort algorithm was my preferred choice in attempting to write something which would compete with the MS-DOS sort program. I managed to write something that was a tiny little bit faster than the official Microsoft version, way back when DOS was a thing and since then, every now and again, I have a need to know the best algorithms available to solve particular problems.

Recent examples came up with the creation of the WebGL program which is a half-completed virtual reality engine for browsers which does not employ three.js or any such frameworks. All the collision detection code had to be hand coded, which to be fair is not featured in the published WebGL version you can view at that link. If the WebGL engine was a scientific application then the collision would be fairly straight forward, albeit sluggish, checking if any vertice in a mesh had travelled through a triangle defined by three vertices of another mesh. The intent of the WebGL application was as a live virtual reality world which would work even on mobile devices so the sluggish performance of exactitudes have to be put aside in favour of the Phong philosophy of not replicating reality perfectly but replicating it enough for it to be believable.

In "game physics" for cheap processors, algorithms tailored toward the detection of collisions between two meshes are definitely overkill. This program was to work on JIT compiled JavaScript efficiently so the idea of complex physics was out the window at the start. Collision detection for the most part would be the player colliding into other players or the map mesh or other objects placed within the map.

Instead of doing collision detection for every point on a collidable mesh, the possible algorithms are cuboids defined by eight vertices or spheroids defined by one point an a radius, the latter being the most efficient way of doing things, however, if this spheroid is painted around a long thin object like a player in a first person shooter then it can be understood that the distance to the wall will not be realistic if the distance to the floor and ceiling are. On researching this specific problem within collision detection algorithms I came across an algorithm which uses a sphere to represent the collision "box" of the player but calculates the collision based on a squished map such that the sphere maps as an spheroid when the map is unsquished, thus allowing a very simple collision detection algorithm to be used for collision "boxes" which are more egg shaped than spherical.

This is just an example of how far I have come since the early days of planning the correct algorithms for a sorting data from a files using the merge sort rather than the quick sort algorithm due to the particular use case. It's a fair point that there are a lot of places in my various code where I could be using more efficient algorithms to make things better such as more extensive use of the trie where searching is to be done. In general, even though this would improve the efficiency of my application, I have considered it overkill if a simple sequential search can be carried out without too much bother to the end user.

My computing skills are not just the various languages I have at my disposal but the various ways in which I can use these languages to make the software that I never seem able to sell.

As long term user of C++ since Borland C 4.0, I found PHP to be an easy migration. Prior to PHP, I was using ASP 1.0 since it came free with every copy of Windows XP Pro if you could find the switch for IIS so you could run a Web Server. I started learning PHP around version 5.4 and have been involved in upgrading my own software as the slight little changes occur in PHP from one version to the next. The implode/explode commands work slightly differently between version 5 and 7 and as for version 8, the monkey patches for setting lax cookies in PHP 7 don’t actually work anymore and all of this has to be catered for when you decide its time to switch to the latest version of PHP.

The website you are reading this on now is written in PHP and its my best work in PHP. Most of the time I just use PHP to provide a back-end to a program I am mostly writing in JavaScript. I have considered using Node.js as an alternative to PHP but currently don’t see a need to do so.

PHP isn’t just PHP though when you look at the extensive number of modules you can install alongside PHP. The setup page for this application insists on the MySqli and GD extensions since it needs to build a database for the users in MySQL (MariaDB) and it will also produce for the website owner (me!) a full set of favicons for Android/Apple/Microsoft and good old favicon.ico using the GD library of PHP. It's running on a LAMP server and has a variety of mechanisms that make it close to a full blown CMS and it was written part time while I worked as a truck driver and a taxi driver over a number of years.

This is version 13 and it has went through a number of changes since it first started having version numbering about six years ago. Until version 4, all the user information was stored on a flat filing system when I decided that to sell the application, it would need to scale better and so I decided a SQL database would be a better choice. As you can see from Version 7 and Version 8 the PHP has been supporting the back end of various JavaScript audio functions such as the idea of a forum where people talk instead of type in version 7 to the implementation of audio chat rooms in version 8. Neither of these two audio functions are implemented in this version but the application is modular so you might find it will have modules for audio functions at some point besides integrations for PayPal and Google OAuth2.

I have also integrated OAuth2 for Facebook but found the Facebook pixel so abhorrently slow that I neglected to port it to any later version. You will find any code which implements third party scripts to be containered so the app simply wont run them unless it is absolutely necessary.

It's fair to say that I have also used PHP to produce the tiny little back-ends for the various JavaScript programs I have written such as Flat Earth where most of the work is being done on the client browser but sometimes something has to be said to the server the client is visiting. Outside of this web application, most of my work in PHP is limited to things like very simple GET and POST catches but I do have a little more knowledge of PHP than BASH so I will sometimes find myself writing short PHP scripts to do a minor calculation or two at the CLI.

I have been around computers so long that I can still remember DBASE IV although I preferred drawing interfaces with the DOS border characters (╠═╪═╣) than doing anything serious with it. Until going to University in 1997, my idea of a databases were arrays of records of the same length that could be searched through as quickly as possible. You could describe this as non-relational databasing or simply arraySearch() of a well defined array.

In 1997 I came across SQL, perhaps in too much detail at first but it seemed to formalise the operations I would be doing with arrays in tables although the concept of a join may still be a little too complex for me at present. (I mean why not just read two different tables and join them on the hop?) As for the delete functionality, this put me in mind of the big red button on a BBC Micro no one should ever press if they wanted their program to not be deleted half way through. None-the-less, despite my aversion to SQL, it is a skill I have had to learn.

I cant say I am familiar with all the data-types provided by MariaDB, my preferred version of MySQL, nor am I familiar with the purpose of some of the commands such as the "join" I mentioned earlier. I know what they do but cant think of the use case kind of thing. Mainly I know how to do a "create table" and a "select from table" and few bits and pieces that make it all work but I would not consider myself to be a SQL expert by any means. I just know it scales well and its what is expected of software facing the public when a flat filing system will be much slower. I would not compare my SQL skills to be anywhere close to my skills with PHP and JavaScript (and of course C/C++ which I cant demonstrate here).

My only real purpose for SQL is the back-end of this web application where user logins are supported and that's about it. I have some intent to go full MediaWiki style and store the webpage content in a database but it comes to mind that some shared hosting providers limit the size of databases to only 50MB so potentially I am losing customers if I ever get one should I go down the route of everything being on a database, and in addition, migration could be problematic.

I'm not sure of the original version of JavaScript I began writing with but it wasn't called EMCA Script or anything like that. It was a fun toy to create dynamic effects to static web pages. I had a friend Tom Fletcher who was heavily into it in 1997 who was fully versed in C/C++ and Java but for some reason liked writing on the old JavaScript. I turned my nose up at it back then because it was an interpreted language in an era when JIT compilation of JavaScript wasn't really a thing. The landscape has changed somewhat since then.

When Web 2.0 (as it was called) came out, it was all down to the XMLHttpRequest object which meant rather than having to re-update a chat room by a post request to the server to re-flash the chatroom with the latest content, the content could be collected by XMLHttpRequests through JavaScript. Even while this was going on, although I could do it, I was mainly focussed on C/C++ at the time.

WebGL

I was busy playing a game of Homeworld around 2015 and I betted myself I could write a 2D version of Homeworld in JavaScript where I discovered the WebGL API had recently moved from experimental to "standard on all browsers" and I suppose I got sidetracked and began working on Web GL apps instead, producing This Application amongst others. I had previously worked with OpenGL 1.0 using Dev-CPP (similar to Borland C++ except it was freeware with updated libraries for OpenGL). WebGL is equivalent to OpenGL 4.0 and while the methodology is similar there are significant changes, especially shaders.

OpenGL 1.0 did not have shaders. You could certainly do lighting and textures but it was all programmed on the CPU rather than in what is now known as GLSL which is a language written for the GPU rather than the CPU and the way a GPU works is so different from a CPU that I would consider GLSL to be a language in its own right. For instance, if in a shader I was to say "if this is true do this otherwise do that", in an ordinary high level language it would look like "if (x) y(); else z();" but with the way a GPU works, both versions of a the if/else clause will operate simultaneously so alot of the if/else decision making inside GLSL has to be done in a mathematical way in the sense of a Dirac comb either working or not working depending upon a mathematical condition. I have found the GLSL of WebGL (for JavaScript) quite a paradigm shift from the ordinary programming I have been doing for years and as I traverse along the path of studying AI, my understanding of GLSL help significantly in making sense of how a neural network implemented as a transformer stack can work despite how "magical" the AI's themself are programmed to make it all appear.

My work with WebGL for JavaScript on Mozilla Firefox has reinvented old problems for me to solve such as efficient collision detection that doesn’t bounce me behind the wall opposite from the one I have collided into. It has also invented new problems for me to solve, such as "how do I even begin to make the water look realistic?" WebGL on JavaScript is probably the most fun I have had in computer programming since writing very lame chatbots in the early 2000s using C++ and sockets.h.

Audio

Back when I had an IBM XT compatible that didn’t have an ISA port for a sound card, I wrote a "sound card" that could play WAV files through the PC speaker as a 2 bit audio streams. In 1994 I was achieving impossibility and it felt good. Now I get a free sound card with every motherboard I buy and it takes a lot of effort to get the OPL midi devices to work properly on Linux. My main focus on audio has been in JavaScript. Audio is not an unfamiliar territory to me but the use cases have been.

Now all the work is done for me, all I have to do is time it right. If you have a look at the audio chat rooms in Journal28 you will notice that you don’t need any NAT navigation or signal servers to talk to yourself or your buddy. I have deliberately avoided the use of WebRTC due to the way it is a practical monopoly of Google and Amazon connecting clients when my audio chatroom function demonstrates that there never has been a need for anyone to want WebRTC other than the big players like Google et al who want a monopoly on people communicating with one another. The problem you will notice with the Jounral28 audio chatrooms is timing. You will note that sometimes you lose a little chunk of audio. Lets just say its not quite perfect but almost is and although work on the audio chatrooms has been placed on the shelf in the meantime, I have the intent to go back and fix what is not working quite perfectly. I believe the problem to be in the audioContext trigger rather than in the MediaRecorder API so that all of your speech is being recorded but not quite being put back together perfectly when the chatrooms go and fetch the latest audio chunks.

An earlier version of the use of MediaRecorder and AudioContext's is shown on Version 7 where the purpose is not an audio chatroom but an audio forum. This was a unique idea of my own at a time when big tech social media were shutting down conversations in a landscape where people couldn't be bothered typing. I though, why not just have a forum where people speak and listen rather than type and read. Version 7 works perfectly, having everything anyone would ever need for a community of like minded people ... except the people itself. If only I could get product placement on the BBC like the big tech counterparts.

This 13th version of the application doesn't feature much in terms of JavaScript. There are bits and pieces all over the place like the way the footer will appear at the bottom, despite a short webpage or how the less secure cookies for the website theme are updated. There is no need for an advanced fast maths library such as that I had to write for the matrix algebra of WebGL and Flat Earth .

The FlatEarth is my most recent "big work" in JavaScript, inspired by the idea of questioning reality as believed by the people who believed the earth was flat, and knowing full well that the data from NASA, Google and other raster map tile providers are infact an image of a flat earth which I go out my way to make it look round, so I will leave it up to the viewer to decide what shape the earth is, but FREE GALILEO because he has every right to question whether the planets are going round the Earth or Sun!

As mentioned in the introduction section, this portfolio is about my work in online programming, which is to say PHP/JavaScript along with the various modules, extensions and sub-languages like CSS and HTML which I regularly employ when doing programming for the web.

I also mentioned that I have been involved in computing as more than just a gamer since I was around 12, with my first successes being three fully working games written Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0 when I was 19 years old.

I would say the vast bulk of work I have done in computer programming has never been completed. I once wrote a 3D game engine and in parallel wrote a 3D mesh animator. My intent was to combine both into one program so the 3D game engine would have animated characters within it. Both parts of the final product were created but they were never merged and this along with lots of other complete and incomplete work have been lost in between hard disk crashes and life's upturnings. I will give you a brief synopsis of work I have did in the past.

These specific examples do not go into too much details about various versions of these applications and the list is not exhaustive as even now having thought about it, I can recall writing programs which used the first version of Microsoft Speech SDK, programs that had to read and write BMP files directly without calling external libraries and sound programs that could sequence midi using instructions sent to the OPL3 chip of a sound blaster. It is sufficient to say that my work as programmer has been very extensive involving the programming of UARTs, APICs and controllers for VGA beyond the basic 0xA000 memory mapped IO that allowed for screen resolutions greater than 64K. Much of this kind of programming work has become obsolete and I am starting to wonder if it will all become obsolete as generative AI which can do coding comes into being.