Application
Articles, notes, and tutorials filed under Application.
Infinite Servers
Introduction Infinite Servers is a self-hosted server fleet monitor built around a single design constraint: the agent must run completely unprivileged. Each monitored host installs a PHP script that runs as nobody, reads /proc, and pushes status every 15 seconds to a central dashboard. No root access, no persistent daemon with elevated privileges, no external database server. This design was motivated by the security risks that plague popular alternatives. Tools like Nezha require agents to run as root, which creates a severe blast-radius problem: if the dashboard is compromised, an attacker can push arbitrary commands to every connected host with full system privileges. Two recent CVEs illustrate just how real this risk is:
DataNinja
Introduction DataNinja is a full-stack machine learning workbench designed for object detection tasks. It provides a browser-based interface to manage datasets, configure and train detection models, evaluate results, and, most distinctively, push trained models to embedded hardware in a single workflow. The motivation behind the project was to bridge the gap between the server side (where GPUs live and models are trained) and the edge side (where inference actually runs, often on low-power embedded SoCs or FPGAs). Most open-source ML tools at the time handled one or the other; DataNinja treats them as a single, connected pipeline.
Similar Patient Finder
Introduction Similar Patient Finder (SPF) is a web-based clinical decision support tool that helps physicians explore patient similarities at the molecular level. Given a dataset of high-throughput gene expression profiles, optionally paired with clinical metadata, SPF runs a configurable analysis pipeline and renders the results as an interactive 2D patient map, making it easier to identify disease subtypes, staging, and appropriate therapy options. The motivation was that raw genomic data is too high-dimensional for direct inspection. SPF bridges the gap between bioinformatics methods and clinical workflows by wrapping a full preprocessing-to-visualization pipeline in a browser-based interface that requires no command-line work from the physician.
Verwandlung Online Judge
Introduction An Online Judge (OJ) is a web-based system used in competitive programming. It presents algorithmic problems, accepts code submissions in various languages, automatically compiles and runs the code against hidden test cases, and immediately tells the user whether their solution is correct, all without any human involvement in the grading process. Platforms like LeetCode and Codeforces are well-known examples. Verwandlung Online Judge is a self-hostable, open-source OJ built for running your own contests or practice environment. Its main distinguishing feature at the time of release was cross-platform support: most open-source OJs were Linux-only due to their reliance on Linux-specific sandboxing APIs, whereas Verwandlung runs natively on both Windows and Linux.
TestZilla
Introduction Crowd testing is a software testing approach where a distributed group of real users, rather than an in-house QA team, tests a product across a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and usage scenarios. The goal is to surface bugs that structured internal testing tends to miss, at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated test lab. TestZilla is an open-source crowd testing platform designed to connect two parties: hunters (volunteer testers who find and report bugs) and developers (product owners who register their software and receive the reports). Hunters earn points for accepted reports, creating a lightweight incentive loop that encourages quality submissions. The project started as a Spring MVC application and was later fully rebuilt using the Phalcon framework to support a faster continuous delivery workflow.
Medical Image Tagger
Introduction Medical Image Tagger (MITagger) is a collaborative web-based annotation platform developed with Harvard Medical School to accelerate semi-automatic tagging of biomedical figures. By combining NLP-extracted figure legends with the BioPortal Annotator REST API, the system recommends structured tags from major medical ontologies, reducing the manual effort of medical annotators by 20%. The platform later evolved into a broader medical big data initiative, ShuYi Technology (数翼科技), which won the Silver Award at the “科蓝杯” 9th HFUT Student Entrepreneurship Competition in 2014.
Student Management System
Introduction The Student Management System is a PHP/CodeIgniter web application built for the School of Software at Hefei University of Technology to replace a fully paper-based Comprehensive Evaluation (综合测评): an annual multi-dimensional student assessment covering academic performance, peer review, extracurricular involvement, and community service, used to determine scholarship rankings. According to school news coverage, what previously took over 5 days of manual tallying per cohort was reduced to microsecond-level computation. The project was selected as a National Undergraduate Innovation Training Program (国家级大学生创新训练计划项目) project in 2013.
HFUT Portals
Introduction As an undergraduate at Hefei University of Technology (HFUT), I designed and built official websites for several university departments, listed below with the period each stayed in service. Each site runs on a custom WordPress theme, which let department staff publish notices, news, and documents on their own through the familiar dashboard. School of Software (软件学院): March 2013 to March 2018 Psychological Care Center (大学生心理关爱网): from November 2013 Office of Academic Affairs (教学办公室): August 2014 to October 2020 Center for Humanities and Quality Education (人文与素质教育中心): July 2015 to May 2022 Discipline Inspection and Supervision Office (纪委办公室、监察处): August 2014 to November 2021 The Psychological Care Center was launched after nearly a year of planning. It combines five sub-sites for students, parents, peer counselors, faculty, and mental health professionals, and was entered in the 6th National Top 100 University Websites (第六届全国高校百佳网站) contest run by the Ministry of Education’s China University Students Online.