The Programming Pebble

When I was setting up my new website, using Drupal, I wanted to have a page per project, like the one you're reading now. I wanted to attach the programs to the page, and have it show the MD5Sums and download count. The builtin upload.module didn't do that. Other modules did, but added more complexity, such as making each download its own node, so I wrote downloads.module.

checkbdays.sh is a small piece of bash shell script designed to be run from cron every morning to check for upcoming birthdays and remind you of them by email. Each birthday can be warned a configurable amount of time in advance. For example, if your sister lives on the other side of the planet to you, you might need a month's notice to get something organised, but for other people it's just nice to know on the day if you see them.

In my professional life as a programmer, I found myself often asking the same questions of people seeking support. Since we have a support department, I thought these questions should already have been asked, and when they do need to escalate the problem to me, they should include all the info I'm going to ask them for. It struck me that if I could encode my technique for narrowing down the problem and locating relevant information, it could save me time.

Robopebble was written to do just that. It is a general purpose, web-editable "Expert system". An expert system is an AI technique which asks questions designed to diagnose a fault or condition. With Robopebble, you can teach it new questions to ask at any point, or add new options.

This is a very simple quiz script in PHP. Originally it was written as a replacement for a site called friendstest (which doesn't appear to exist anymore) - a quiz site that got quite overloaded. Later it was expanded to make it a little more flexible, with ideas from Darkmoon.