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  Part 2 of 3  

Through College

2008 - 2010

I attended the University of Nebraska Omaha, with a major in Biology and minor in Chemistry; however, I did my sophomore year at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln Nebraska. Many of my friends were going to UNL at the time and I thought I'd try Lincoln out. Omaha is better, so I finished at UNO.

Chpwner.org saw some upgrades during the latter half of my college experience. But it did remain hosted on my homebrew server which resided at my parent's house. During this time, I found a working stray computer that someone had left in a dumpster, though it needed a format and OS install. It had an Intel Celeron 3.0GHz processor with 512Mb of RAM; it ran Ubuntu Server, with Apache as the host. 32-bit was still supported at the time.

2008

Chpwner.org

Advent of this Site

MOTW

What does a large mammalian database
and a bookstore have in common? 🧐

They were both lackluster first-editions to my website, which was now relabeled from Kirkserver to Chpwner.org.

The first entry was the Mammals of the World spreadsheet, which simply outputted data derived from a relational database into web table form. I needed more practice with SQL and PHP, but to do that I needed some data to work with. Being a biology major, animal taxonomy came to mind. So, I found a machine readable database of mammal species online.

Ultimately this site was no more than a spreadsheet, in fact you can download the data and manipulate it in Excel (or similar program) to achieve a greater effect than I presented on my website. The screen capture on this page is actually from Excel, I can confirm the 2005 edition of Mammals of the World is still online.

Database from Bucknell University:
Don E. Wilson & DeeAnn M. Reeder (editors). 2005. Mammal Species of the World. A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (3rd ed)

Bookstore

eCommerce is Lame

Bookstore

Free books, not free books

The university was giving away tons of old textbooks for free one day. I grabbed a bunch, with the hope to sell them online. There was a reason the University gave them away for free, they were far too old to have any value. To supplement my Amazon and eBay listings, and to get more practice with web-coding, I made an online bookstore page as seen in the screen capture on this page.

Here we actually have the creation of my first branding logo. It features my favorite amino acid: tryptophan. As trivia service, the reason for this is because of a particular episode of Alton Brown's "Good Eats" where he is talking about the nutritive benefits of corn, and he really accentuates tryptophan as if it is the greatest amino acid ever. Stuck in my mind—also I had to memorize all 22 chemical structures for class.

See a larger screen capture - here

2010

Web Design 101

A Senior Edu-site (Iteration 2)

I took my first web-design class

but I already knew everything

Everyone has at least one course which they take for fun, or for an easy A. For me, one of these was an introduction to web design which taught HTML, CSS, and Perl. At this point in time, I would have already considered myself an expert on HTML and CSS, though Perl was something which I only briefly used in the proxy script on my first webpage (which I did not code). I enjoyed learning Perl but found it less useful than PHP. Even at the time, Perl was not considered an ideal language to use on the web (or at all) due to its age.

The climax of the class was to create a full website which included Perl code using a CGI gateway. Students could pick any topic they wanted. I was taking Organic Chemistry II at the time, which was one of the hardest courses at the university (at least for me). So, I bridged the two classes and decided to make a site dedicated to UNO's specific brand of O-Chem.

Perl is good with Regular Expressions (RegEx) and is well known for its ability to use them. Many Perl scripts are used to manipulate STIN and STOUT, with RegEx. The Perl-rename command is Linux is an example. So, it is not a surprise that my script made use of this immanent Perl feature. The Perl part of my site filtered a list of organic compounds (CSV) by daisy chaining RegEx expressions according to user input on a form.

Organic Chemistry 102

At UNO it was called CHEM 2260

My first site with real purpose...albeit very niche.

My Perl powered site was made to assist students with the Laboratory portion of CHEM 2260. A particularly difficult part of the lab, was the qualitative analysis or "unknown lab". These were few and far between but acted as a cumulative test of all the skills learned during the lab course. The premise was that the professor would create a mixture of unknown chemicals and the student had to separate the mixture into individual components using distillation, filtration, precipitation, etc. and once purified, apply various chemical tests and spectroscopy to actually identify the compound.

The professor provided a "red book" of all the possible compounds you could have gotten in your mixture. In this book various chemical properties would be listed (melting point, boiling point) as well as its spectral profile. There was basically a pass-fail mentality here, you either identified the correct compound or you failed the assignment. So, you had to be careful purifying and running tests, each would consume your finite sample and you did not have enough source mixture to run all tests or redo a botched purification.

The website's purpose in all of this was clear, it allowed the student to enter what they knew about their unknown mixture into the HTML form, the Perl code would apply the correct regex and then filter out the compounds helping you eliminate the possibilities. Of course, you could do this with pen and paper, but with my site, you could be sure you did not accidentally skip a line from the red book.

Compounds Search
Compounds Search

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