Shawn Parker: Blog

Scenes from the Back Deck

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:15:00 +0000

In July of last year we moved back to Colorado and in to a new (as in brand new build, nobody else has lived here) home. The home backs up on 800 feet of green space that’ll never be developed. We’ll eventually get some apartment buildings or something like that on the other side, but for now we have a purely natural view from our back deck. The only houses we can see are to the north, but since we’re right next to the mailboxes and water management, nobody will ever be right next to us. Bonus Cows The land around us, as of now, is still ranch land, so we sometimes get some bovine friends hanging around. All in all, a pretty great place for us to have landed on our return to CO.

Mama

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 02:16:01 +0000

This post is WAAAAAAAY overdue. Since I haven’t posted anything in a while you deserve something really stinking cute as a reward for contining to check in here. After losing Stella to cancer in May of 2020, we decided soon after that we wanted another dog. So we looked around a bit and landed on this 8 year old velvet hippo named Mama. Mama spent most of her life on a farm. Her former owners tell us that she showed up on the farm one day with puppies in tow. She was probably a year old at the time. They eventually found homes for her puppies but decided to keep her. She spent a lot of her years on the farm with a 3 legged dachshund named Chicklet. Apparently even saving Chicklet from coyotes. We tried to see if we could get Chicklet, but he was being kept for health related issues, and we eventually found that the original owners took him back. She’s a sweet ol’ gal. Scared of everything. We can vacation with her, she’s OK in a hotel room, but getting her up to the room is a chore. Darting left and right...

Exploring Vancouver, Washington

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:47:51 +0000

The parts near where we live, that is. Sadly, all these photos are with an iPhone. I haven’t pulled out my main camera with intent in a very long time. Round Lake, Lacamas Regional Park Moulton Falls State Park Cape Horn scenic overlook Salmon Creek walking trail Dougan Falls Lauretta Norene Forest Preserve

IPv6 with Ubiquiti Edgerouter ER8 on AT&T

Sun, 05 Jul 2020 23:28:42 +0000

This isn’t the first blog post on how to do this, and it probably won’t be the last, but since IPv6, even within AT&T, seems to vary, and the quality of the blog posts out there vaires, this is also so that I have record of what I did for my actual needs. I’m not a network engineer. So this was mostly just piecing together bits of information that I could find posted by others, and then correcting it for my needs, mostly through trial and error. This will all assume that you: are working on an EdgeRouter without a built in switch are working with EdgeOS 2+ (this was done on 2.0.8) have the internet coming in on the eth0 and aren’t some kind of monster that uses another port for your WAN. If you are, then adjust the interfaces below accordingly Since the only part of the interface that knows how to manage IPv6 in EdgeOS is the config tree, and the config tree isn’t the easiest to work with, we’ll just work on the command line. Modem Configuration My modem is NVG599. I had to enable IPv6 and its settings...

OS X Samba with a Linux Server

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 21:01:42 +0000

Since migrating my iTu~ err… Music library to a Linux server to save space on my MacBook Pro I’ve been lamenting the move. Accessing my library via SMB was incurring the slowest speeds known to man, as well as was what seemed to be file writing issues. I was also continually having issues with artwork going missing or Music not being able to find the library at all. Today I finally dug in to see what I was doing wrong. That turned out to be not having read any docs. It is Already a Solved Problem I don’t know much about samba, can’t say that I want to either. So I was pleased to find out that I had simply been missing a page in the Samba Wiki that was specifically to show morons like me how to Configure Samba to Work Better with Mac OS X. Even Apple has Documentation I also found advice that disabling signing can reduce overhead, so I implemented that as well. And as it turns out there’s a support document from apple on how to Turn off package signing for SMB2 and SMB3 connections. Apple’s reasoning isn’t ...

New Arrival: Stella

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 13:28:00 +0000

Seeing as how we’re gonna be a lockdown for a while we considered this a good time to bring on a new addition to the family. Meet Stella. Stella is a 15 year old Pit Bull. She’s a total sweetheart. We were looking for older pitties, around 8+ years old. However when inquiring about another dog we liked, who was unavailable, we mentioned that we’re looking for older dogs and the gal at the agency got excited. As it turns out they had a foster person who has unfortunately met with some mental decline and they were scrambling to find the dogs a new home. The foster was forgetting to feed the dogs and overall just not able to function any more. So upon seeing a video of Stella we agreed to take her in for however long she has left. She’s old and slow. Can’t really get up and down the stairs by herself. But she’s a happy, gentle, sweet and loving little cuddle bunny. She just wants to hang out and go for a walk once in a while. Kinda like us.

The Dumbest Zoom Mute Button In The World

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 13:28:00 +0000

Now that we're all stuck at home and working more and more on video conferencing, and most of us on Zoom as they appear to have won the video conferencing war (despite their privacy bungles). On top of that, I'm often not totally paying attention all the time (I'm writing this during an engineering wide ops meeting), so I'm noticing that despite the various shortcuts available in Zoom my ability to quickly mute and unmute is severly lacking. While clearing out my desk space and making room to effectively work I noticed this old usb Big Red Button from Dream Cheeky. It was purchased many years ago by a co-worker so that we could make fun of a different co-worker, but that time is now long gone. I remembered that there was a Ruby library for interfacing with the button, which is a simple USB HID device. So with a little bit of quick googling on Applescipt libraries in Ruby I was able to crap out a bare bones event listener. Here's the crappy code:

Our Step Dog Cody

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 13:28:00 +0000

We’ve not been ready to get new dogs after our little turds died. But we certainly do enjoy just having a step dog come and visit once in a while. Meet Cody. Cody likes to sit on the bed and stare out the window all day. When he’s not surveying the neighborhood, he enjoys the couch.

A rant about Cardo Packtalk Slim

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 13:28:00 +0000

Four-ish days on the road with new Cardo Packtalk Slim headsets and I’m left wondering how people rave about Cardo. Installation was easy, the units are light, and battery life was impressive, but that’s where the highlights end. The software leaves A LOT to be desired. I have “Hey Siri” turned off on my phone. I don’t want her listening in on me, yet twice I still found myself wondering why Siri has been invoked at all. “Hey Cardo” is supposed to work. I could never get it to respond. The radio (seriously, why can’t I disable this feature?) just turns on randomly. And since I never planned on using this functionality, I got to fumble around for a while on how to turn it off since I never looked up how to use the functionality in the first place. My music just starts playing randomly. Same gripe on turning it off. That’s a lot of failures in the tertiary features, but what about the core functionality? The intercom. Well, its ok. The range is at least good. I’m guessing the headsets save on power by not tr...

Year of the Linux Desktop, Part 1

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 22:03:00 +0000

Over the years I’ve had a fleeting relationship with Linux. I use it every day, but mostly on remote servers. But I’ve never committed to actually using linux. Until today. Well, last month, really. Enter the Penguin I did some research, ordered some parts off of Amazon, and put together a computer. I made a couple of bad decisions on timing[1] and the Video Card[2], but overall its good. Really good. I got a plenty fast CPU in the Ryzen 7 2700X. The RX580 is overall a solid performer. Gobs of RAM and fast hard drives help a lot too. I loaded up the case with fans and the largest CPU cooler known to man and it runs cool and quiet. Overall I’m digging it a lot. For the OS I decided that mainstream was the best place to start. So Ubuntu it was. I reinstalled a few times to check out XUbuntu and to try different versions to see what felt right. In the end I chose 19.04 solely because I didn’t see much use in an LTS system at this point. I’m gonna fuck it up to the point of needing a reinstall anyway, so why n...

This Dog was a Jerk

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 09:00:38 +0000

But he was our jerk. Our cute, loving, man-eating jerk. He didn’t like other people. He didn’t get along with other dogs. He had food aggression. He and his brother constantly fought. He wouldn’t keep on up walks, he kept his own pace, stopping to sniff and pee on everything. He wouldn’t cuddle any more in his old age, just sit across the room from us, wherever we were. He would tear this house apart, from end to end, in the pursuit of a fly. I’m pretty sure his life long dream was to eat a skateboarder. He even bit the neighbor. But he loved his food. Treats were like gold. Any toy with a squeaker a conquest to silence that squeal from within. We still have a bin full the remains of his conquests. We’d buy him the strongest toys we could find and he’d have the squeaker out before we knew it. Even now, after he’s gone, I’m waiting to clean up the remains of his last toy so that I can take it in a bit longer. Relish the high pitched screams of the poor lobster who was sacrificed for the happiness of this po...

Chemo by the numbers

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 20:58:52 +0000

I was going over my time spent dealing with the chemo and was able to figure out some interesting numbers. Okay, maybe interesting to just me, but here goes: 117 days from beginning chemo 'till returning to work. 20 days of chemo treatments. 3 days spent overnight in the hospital. 2 visits to the hospital ER. More than 100 hours spent in the oncology ward. More than 70 liters of fluid pumped in to my body. More than 50 pokes with a needle. More than 15 vomit sessions. More than 12 days spent sleeping all day. More than 8 doses of morphine. Up to 5 days between significant meals. Up to 5 days between poops. But also… … 2 episodes of shitting my pants. The most important number of all, though, is the 2808 hours of unconditional love from the wife.

Cystoscopy & Stent Removal

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 09:55:43 +0000

Its been a long time since I’ve written anything here. The short of it is that my left kidney is damaged and the ureter (the tube that drains urine from the kidney to the bladder) collapsed. That meant that my kidney backed up and suffered more damage. Its now processing at about 4% effectiveness. Kidneys are considered a lost cause when they reach 10% effectiveness. I’ve been living with some form of drainage tube for a significant portion of the last year. First a drain to siphon fluid buildup after my RPLND, then a stent to open up the damaged ureter to help my kidney recover. If you’re not familiar with a ureteral stent, then pray this is your only association with it. Picture a tube, pigtails on both ends, one end in your kidney, the other in your bladder. Now imagine it rubbing on your bladder. All day. No matter how you sit, walk, or lie. The techs who put it in will tell you that you’ll not feel it at all, that everything will be normal. They lie. There’s not a single part of your day where you don...

Word of the day: Ouch.

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 16:21:16 +0000

Apologies up front, this is a long update. I was recovering well from the RPLND. I was back to putting in time at work, albeit from home, but I was starting to feel better and be able to concentrate on something else to take my mind off of the recovery. That ended last Thursday (Nov. 19) when uncontrollable pain sent me to the ER. The ER tech tries twice to give me an IV line before relinquishing the task to his buddy. The IV that “worked” hurts. Some morphine and a CT scan later I was feeling better and being told about fluid build up in my surgery sites along the front of my stomach and in my back. The fluid build up in my back, in the Retroperitoneal area where they removed my tumors, where the ones causing pain as they pushed on blood vessels, nerve centers, and my surgical site. I was told that this was called a Seroma and that it would get re-absorbed by the body. I was sent home and told to control the pain with medication. This is where I just lost about 5 days of my life. I spent the following day...

RPLND

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 14:42:16 +0000

It has been a week and a half now since my RPLND surgery and I’m recovering mostly fine, save the bloating. The surgery took about 6 hours and nothing out of the ordinary was encountered during the surgery. I had an epidural for the surgery (which they almost pushed me off of the operating table putting in) so I was up and walking the next day. The doctor pushed hard to get me on my feet as soon as possible. The effectiveness of the epidural was amazing. I felt great. I could tell that I had a large line of staples running up my stomach but didn’t feel really sore. I spent a week in the hospital recovering. Long story short on that one is lots of laps around the floor, some diarrhea, no real poop, and lots of bad food. And bloating. Oh, the bloating. I can’t fart. The epidural came out a few days after the surgery and thankfully I’ve not needed any extra pain meds at all. Which is good, because they’d only add to my constipation. We got the pathology back. Four teratomas removed. One was baseball sized. An...

I'm done with the cancer, but the cancer isn't done with me

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:09:17 +0000

I hate this. In two weeks I go in for an Retroperitoneal Lymph Node Dissection (RPLND). Not something I’m looking forward to. The verdict is that the masses I have left are either: scar tissue teratomas still tumors The docs are concerned that the tumors are putting too much pressure on my kidneys and could also interfere with other organs by means of compromising blood flow and possible invasion. So, that means that I get the big nasty surgery that I didn’t want. The surgery is a hefty one. It’ll require resting my intestines on my chest while they take out the tumors. The tumors are close to major arteries, nerve centers and my left kidney. I’ll be in the hospital for 5-7 days. Suggested recovery time is another 3 weeks beyond that. As of now they’re after only 2 tumors, but they’ll remove anything else they see that concerns them. The tumors look HUGE on the PET scans. The size of my fist or larger. I thought they were smaller than that. There’s a possibility that several different sexual functions can ...

Goodbye, my dopey dog.

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 10:45:56 +0000

Last night our dopey little boy passed away. It happened very quickly. I arrived home around 7:30pm to find him immobile. He tried to stand but couldn’t. I took him to the veterinary hospital where by 12:30 he had already deteriorated in to labored breathing. The diagnosis was a lump on his spleen, probably cancerous, that was bleeding internally and that had either grown in to or bled in to his spinal chord, thus causing the problems with standing and coordination. We elected to put him to sleep as anything we did to prolong his life would just be pain and confusion to him. He was gone by 1:30am. The horrible part about this is that my wife is currently in the hospital after having surgery on her knee. She had to endure this from afar and without actually getting to say goodbye to Dozer in his final hours. She’s lucky that she didn’t get to see him at the end, but I know how hard it is not to be able to say goodbye and be there. We’ll always remember Dozer as our dopey boy. Happy, goofy, and always energ...

So long, Alex King

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 22:26:20 +0000

We lost a good one yesterday. My friend Alex King passed away after a long fight against cancer. My life is better off today for having joined Alex at Crowd Favorite back in 2008. He was always the perfectionist, sometimes slave driver. He demanded a level of quality that only doing things the right way could accomplish. But it was nice to know that when the job had his seal of approval that it was good. On top of that he was a nice guy. He’s the kind of guy that you measure yourself against, hoping that you find some way in which you favorably compare. Not to bring him down, but rather in an attempt to elevate yourself. We shared interest in a lot of things. Among them were photography and general nerdery. But we also shared one unfortunate thing in common. Cancer. His was much worse than mine and he fought hard. And again I had a positive example set by Alex. My life is better in so many ways for having known him. I’m very grateful for it. Our hearts go out to Heather and Caitlin as they deal with his d...

The best day of my life this year!

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 16:36:17 +0000

So, today is a good day. Earlier today I had a PET scan to evaluate the status of my tumors. And the news came back positive. The release of stress that came with this news is unbelievable. Overall there’s no real activity within the tumors. They look dead. There’s one small spot on one of them that appears active, but its so far below the levels of being concerned about that my oncologist, and the doctors that he consulted with, are comfortable in calling my chemo a success. We’ll obviously be keeping an eye on it. My next scan is in 5 weeks. But all in all I hope to no be lying when I say that I’M DONE WITH THIS SHIT. Unfortunately I’m still on antibiotics for a c-diff infection (an ordeal that I was so broken down about that I didn’t write anything here on it) so my urge to break out the whiskey bottle will have to wait. For now, though, I’m just happy that life can now begin to get back to normal. The wife and I can start looking forward not at more treatment, but at me getting stronger and back to my ...

Progress scans are inconclusive

Sat, 15 Aug 2015 12:48:33 +0000

It has been 4 weeks since my last chemo treatment and so it was time for a CT scan to look at my progress. I had the scan last Thursday (Aug. 13) and got the results yesterday. My tumors haven’t shrunk. In fact, they appear larger in some ways, though its hard to tell as we were comparing an MRI to a CT scan. Needless to say I was, and still am, simply dumbstruck. The Oncologist said that while this isn’t abnormal, it is rare. That it could be the tumor is actually dead and will shrink slowly. As we can’t glean any more information from the CT scan we’ll be doing a PET scan in a few weeks. PET scans use a radioactive marker to measure activity at the cellular level so we should be able to see wether the tumors are active or not. Maybe they are teratomas? Why a few weeks and not right away? I’m not sure. Why not try to biopsy? I don’t know. I left the doctor’s office in a bit of a funk. My wife couldn’t accompany me so I didn’t have her level head there to ask more poignant questions before I stumbled out. ...

Achievement Unlocked: Chemo Complete!

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 17:51:40 +0000

Today marked my last day of chemo treatment for this shitty ol’ cancer. While I want to celebrate with reckless abandon I’m not over the hump just yet. In 4 weeks I go in for new scans to see if the chemo did its job. If it didn’t there’s surgery in my future. My diagnosis on the type of cancer was pure Seminoma and that is encouraging since the pure Seminioma typically responds well to chemo, so I’m hopeful, but I don’t want to call it a sure thing and get let down. But, for now, I’m content in knowing that for a while, at least, I can coast and just try to feel better. I’m now starting to look forward at my return to work. I’m still not sure what return date is appropriate. I have one tentatively set but I’m not sure I’ll be ready by then. That date is about 4 weeks away, but now that I know how I felt after having 3 weeks off (not great) I’m wondering if that’s enough to be fair to me and to work. I’m eager to get back to work but my brain and body are lagging something fierce. My brain has no capacity ...

Down with a sickness

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 16:52:10 +0000

Warning: incoherent babbling ahead! So, today should have been my second day of round 4 of chemo, my final round. But that is not to be. I was hospitalized on Sunday night with some kind of infection that was giving me strep-like symptoms: 101º fever, sore throat, sore ear, and the inability to swallow. After feeling bad for a few days, but not feeling horrible, everything got worse on Saturday night. We went to the ER about 2am after I’d tried, to no avail, to use morphine to ease the pain. I was admitted around 3:30 am and spent the night. Since we were waiting on bacterial cultures to figure out what was going on I stayed Sunday night as well. I got little rest while there. Despite needing to be at the hospital to get better the amount of traffic in and out of my room to ask questions, administer more drugs, ask me what I want to eat, just check in, etc… it was impossible to rest. Add to that the fact that hospital beds are the least comfortable surface in the world and that the food is impossible to ea...

Round 3 lingers…

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 17:36:37 +0000

Treatment is going as well as can be expected. Round three of infusions is now done. The down side is that I’ve contracted a mix of GI Tract and Oral Mucositis, which, just downright sucks. I’m producing a ton of mucus in my digestive tract, which I’m constantly coughing up, and also have sores on the inside of my mouth, mostly on my tongue and at the back of my throat, which are painful. I’ve got morphine for the pain but I’m trying to use it sparingly. I’m getting no sleep with the constant flow of mucus and saliva so sleep deprivation is definitely a concern. My taste buds are almost nonexistent at this point. My life now consists of a strict regimen of coughing up mucus, washing out my mouth with a mix of salt water and baking soda, brushing my teeth, wash out mouth again, coat mouth with a wetting gel, clean up bath tub of all the mucus I hocked up, try to cat-nap before doing it all again. Somewhere in there I make time for some diarrhea. I don’t think this is gonna get better before the next round a...

Round 2 begins

Tue, 26 May 2015 07:46:15 +0000

Hair loss is in full swing. My head is the worst. It got very patchy and had to be shaved down again. The rest of my body is actually thinning out nicely and not getting patchy. Its kinda weird how that’s going. Today another week of infusions start. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it. I don’t think a day by day is necessary for this round. I think every day is gonna be shitty. I started to feel a bit icky at the end of last week, but that might have been psychosomatic or possibly me just being worn out a bit from my Sister and Mother coming out for a visit. I much appreciated having some time to just hang out with them but 4 days ended up being a bit much. I miss my brain. Chemo brain seems to have taken a pretty good hold on me. I have little attention span and motivation to do things wanes quickly. It is frustrating as hell because I can wake up one day excited that I feel like doing something and a few hours later I just wanna go back to bed. I’m not too bad if I force myself to go out in the ...

On losing hair

Wed, 20 May 2015 11:45:37 +0000

I started to lose hair this week. Its coming out in clumps. Not everywhere, mostly my face and my ass. I finally trimmed back the goatee because it was getting a bit gross losing long hairs all over the place. That and my skin hurts a bit (I don’t know if that’s normal or not). I didn’t think that it would effect me that much when it started happening, but something is going on between my ears, I just can’t pinpoint what I’m feeling. Maybe the last, unavoidable, step of reality on the situation is here. One more thing out of my control that I just have to deal with.

Solving the World's Fluffy Tailed Rodent Problem

Fri, 15 May 2015 10:53:52 +0000

The video is a little dark, but if you turn it up you can hear the cute little scuffles and snoring.

Chemo: day 5 (belated)

Mon, 11 May 2015 14:08:31 +0000

Friday hit me like a two ton… heavy thing. Caution, this could get gross. I’m just now getting back to feeling how I felt on Thursday: nauseated, tired and creaky. I finally pooped. Between the stool softeners, the Ex-Lax and the Lactulose I finally got rid of the contents of my bowels. It wasn’t pretty, though because of all the weird shit I’d been taking to get 'em moving it didn’t smell or feel like poop at all. Go figure. I’ve only puked once. Thankfully. But it was a 30 minute ordeal that produced nothing but chemical-smelling, putrid, yellow bile. I unfortunately hit the bathroom floor with some of it so Andy had to clean that up. She had to hit it Comet to get the smell out. Every joint in my body is complaining. My sinuses are dripping like faucets. There’s a headache back there waiting to pounce at any minute. I don’t sleep through the night because I’ve been laying down so much I can’t stay in any one position for very long. I’ve been sleeping so much I’m starting to get very odd dreams. The neu...

Chemo: day 4

Thu, 07 May 2015 21:48:46 +0000

This is supposed to be a photo of me in a rooster hat, but the wife deleted her Flickr account :( That’s me putting on a brave face for the camera. Again, Chris’ credit card pays off in spades. I got a different nurse today. He was good. It looks like this hospital is staffed pretty well. I slept through most of the treatment. We came home and I slept some more. The nausea is pretty well under control, but still overwhelming at times. I still haven’t pooped. I’m full of Ex-Lax and Milk of Magnesia so we’ll see what the morning brings. I got a nice FaceTime interlude from my co-workers as they drink off the stress of the run-up to next week’s conference. That was nice. Awkward, but nice.

Chemo: day 3

Wed, 06 May 2015 23:14:45 +0000

I got me a private room today. It was pretty nice. I was able to nap for about half of the session. And no personnel issues today so everything moved right along. I heard some folks didn’t get to go home 'till about 8pm last night. Yeesh. I’m really starting to feel the nausea now. I didn’t eat all day but I was able to force down dinner. I still haven’t pooped so its only way out might be to come back up. Andy brought me home a large Starbucks Latte earlier 'cause that usually wipes out my colon, but no dice. Whatever is lodged in there doesn’t want to come out. I’m retaining fluids too. My hands are puffy. Not visibly, but I can feel my wedding ring is super tight. What pee I do get out smells like I could light it on fire. By gathering strength from my Frog Blankie I was able to do without a wrap on my IV today. I still couldn’t watch the nurse put it in, but I was able to have it out in the open. I’m started to get a little fascinated by it.

Chemo: day 2

Tue, 05 May 2015 22:38:57 +0000

The IV today fucking hurt. Getting the port sounds good again 😉 But I think I’ll have to average out the suck across 5 days and see what it looks like. It was a long day today. In for about 6.5 hours since there was a back-up in getting the drugs out in a timely manner. Something about a few people calling in sick or some such deal. There were quite a few bitchy people on the floor because of it. The nurses all handled it light a champ, but some cranky-ass fuckers just had to sit there and bitch and bitch and bitch. Fortunately they were relieved by their manager who stood in and took the shit. I was in no hurry. I napped. I feel bad for Andy. I get a comfy chair and I know hers isn’t that comfy. She went for a walk, though. I was jealous. Before this I never thought that I’d be jealous of being able to walk down a long, boring hallway and back. I’ll have to see if I can do that tomorrow. I don’t know if they let us out in the wild with the IV pumps or not. I’m starting to notice some mild side-effects. ...

Gaining strength through the pain of others.

Tue, 05 May 2015 01:59:32 +0000

I look around myself in the context of getting cancer and I have a lot of experience to draw from. My father who survived prostate cancer and currently suffers early stages of Parkinson’s disease. My friend Alex who still fights colon cancer. My friend Geoff who had testicular cancer and endured an RPLND (do not want!). The girl in the oncology ward who was there before I showed up and still there when I left. All people who have it worse than me. All people who are getting through it. Some with better fates than others, but of those that I have contact with—I didn’t talk with the young woman at the oncology ward—there’s no sign of faltering. Just a resolve to do what’s necessary to get through. There’s only one path as far as I see it. Giving up, running away, or ignoring it was never an option. And if these fine folks are getting through it with nary a sign of self pity I know that all I have to do is follow the regimen and stay healthy. I can’t even say I have to fight. I need to follow. Let the experie...

Chemo: day 1

Mon, 04 May 2015 20:54:43 +0000

I peed. A lot. 7 times in 2 hours. I wasn’t able to get in to have a port installed before this so I’m doing direct IV catheters for now. I’ll see if it gets too bad. If it does I’ll get it put in. If I can deal with the catheters I’ll skip the extra surgery. If you’re nice to the nurse she’ll wrap up your IV line so that you don’t have to look at the insertion point 😉 It was all a little surreal. I felt pretty good the whole way through and it almost didn’t feel like it was a real treatment. I guess I shouldn’t complain about that. I’m sure I’ll wish for days like this after a few days. My mouth is a little raw, my muscles and joints ache a bit, and I’m burping a lot (which I’ve read is an indication that I’ll probably end up with puking nausea and not diarrhea). I have a slight headache but its tough to tell what that’s from 'cause I’m grinding my teeth and am otherwise tense. I’m hoping the tension is just nerves.

More co-worker shenanigans

Mon, 04 May 2015 17:23:13 +0000

When Twilio’s Mr. Ozone uses his Amazon Prime account both I and the internet wins. This is supposed to be some photos of me with some gifts... but the wife deleted her Flickr account :( There’s a third item. Pics of that will come from the Oncology floor tomorrow.

Ya know what? I work for a wonderful company.

Fri, 01 May 2015 23:34:12 +0000

Last night saw the culmination of just 2 days worth of fund raising bring in just shy of $7,000 for the St. Baldrick’s foundation. Kudos and thanks to Natasha for arranging the whole deal and to St. Baldrick’s for allowing Twilio to put on our very own event. I’m overwhelmed by the support I’ve received from my co-workers and from Twilio as a company. In a time where I could have very well felt weird and out of place I’ve actually been able to feel kind of normal and at very much at ease about my next 12 weeks away from my fellow Twilions. I’ve participated in St. Baldricks 3 times before but never when it meant so much to my mental health. There’s a lot of good causes to give to right now, and Twilions love to donate (really, they do, if you need money, find a way to get your cause in front of a Twilion, its like guaranteed money!) and I’m just so happy that we got some good donations as well as some great participation. I’m humbled that so many would come together for something put together in my name. ...

Chemo Schedule & Dicks

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 14:04:50 +0000

I have a chemo schedule now. Starting May 4 and ending with my last infusion on July 10. I’m going with “EP” chemo which means that I’ll get both etoposide and cisplatin for 5 days in a row. Each cycle is 3 weeks with 1 week of infusions and then 2 weeks off. This will happen 4 times. The doctor recommended getting a port so that getting hookup up and under way is easy each time. I didn’t care either way so I went with his suggestion. I’m not great with needles so if it means that there’s less hunting for good veins as time goes on then I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing 😉 There’s a minor risk of getting extra surgery to have it put in and taken out, but I can deal with it. Lastly… this showed up on my doorstep:

With co-workers like these…

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 19:26:06 +0000

I have some very talented co-workers. First up: a get well soon card hand-crafted by Danielle. Laser cut and signed by a lot of good folks at work. The rest of you are dead to me! Just kidding 😉 <img src=“https://live.staticflickr.com/7656/17011253097_72b0288414_m.jpg” alt=“Photograph: “Get Well Soon””> Next: Twilio had a Painting Night at Wednesday Night Dinner last week. Look there, in the upper right. See that thing with a halo and wings? Lets take a closer look at what Nora left me. And artists rendition of good ol’ lefty headed to testicle heaven. I don’t think I could have asked for anything better than these two gestures… They’re both just simply fantastic. Honestly, though, I’m really smitten that all of my co-workers are thinking about my testicles.

Cancer verdict: Stage IIC Seminoma

Sat, 18 Apr 2015 04:10:37 +0000

Got in to see an oncologist yesterday. Not the oncologist that will be administering my chemo, but the first Oncologist that I could get in to see and get more information from. Stage IIC, which I’ve also seen referred to as “Bulky Stage II”, means: Cancer found within the testicle or surrounding tissue Cancer has spread to the lymph nodes in the abdomen Extensive retroperitoneal node enlargement of > 5cm My largest lymph node is approximately 5.7cm across (almost 2 ½ inches). They’re normally 1cm in size. My untrained eye (with the help of the oncologist) noticed at least 3 nodes larger than 5cm. More at various other sizes. That certainly explains the dull pain and discomfort in my abdomen. For reference, while I had multiple small tumors in my testicle, the largest actual cancer tumor size was less than .25cm. Its weird to think how the tumors in the testicle and metastasization in the body can be so different. Preliminary treatment schedule While I have yet to see the oncologist that will be adminis...

Yeah, I've been sitting like that lately too

Sat, 18 Apr 2015 00:52:34 +0000

Pathology, Finally

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 22:31:09 +0000

I finally got the pathology back on the removed nugget today. While the mass found within the lil acorn was not cancerous, it was a cyst, there is cancer. Type: seminoma. So, course of action and diagnosis of the stage of the cancer is still to be determined. I do have enlarged lymph nodes and a small 2mm spot on my lungs, but as of yet nothing has been conveyed to me about what stage this might be at. If I’m lucky, and I mean really lucky, the lymph nodes reduce in size with the removal of the rotten vegetable and I’m considered stage 1 and thus stay in a monitoring stage. If I’m not lucky the lymph nodes need some convincing and that’s where chemo and/or radiation come in. Worst case scenario is that the lymph nodes require removal. Nobody wants that. That’s an ugly surgery. So. Still scary 'cause I just don’t have enough information to know what the next 4-6 months of my life are gonna look like. The single spot on the lungs is not a good sign, but at the same time it is inconclusive because of its size...

Murderous Family Jewel

Wed, 08 Apr 2015 23:08:24 +0000

I’m probably premature in posting this but having it out in the open means that I can talk freely about it. My apologies but this is going to be a bit discombobulated. My left testicle was trying to kill me. He has since been banished from his sac. I also have swollen lymph nodes around my kidneys. It is still unknown if the cancer has metasticized. We’ll be keeping an eye on the lymph nodes to see if they respond to the removal of the testicle and I have a CT scan scheduled to see if there’s any indication that the cancer has spread further. The Backstory This all started last May. I had pain in my sac and in my lower back. The diagnosis was that I had a swollen testicle because of a kidney infection. I got the standard round of antibiotics and genuinely felt better after the treatment. But later the pain came back. Further diagnosis was that I didn’t have a swollen vegetable but a shrinking one. Alas, no better diagnosis was made at this time. At no point did anyone order any kind of radiology or ultraso...

1972 CB350 Rebuild Begins

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 14:16:09 +0000

Haven’t had much to write about lately. But my recent introduction to the world of motorcycling (I’ve been riding for about a year now and currently scoot on an '02 BMW R1150R) has given me more than just the desire to ride, but the desire to modify. The wife recently joined me on two wheels so we got an old 1972 Honda CB350 for her to learn on. Unfortunately the “'till it breaks” in “ride it 'till it breaks” wasn’t very long, so we upgraded her to a more modern bike that she’ll be able to enjoy for a while to come and the CB350 is getting rebuilt. Tear down began a few weeks ago. Here it is with all the easy bits taken off: Next the engine came out: And finally it was reduced to just the frame: Next steps are degreasing and rust removal in preparation for a powder-coat in black. The rebuild isn’t going to be a restoration. I don’t care about it being original. I want it to be a fun driver. I’m gonna upgrade the forks to something more robust, maybe from a newer CB500. Upgrade to disc brakes, and slim it d...

Digging up the past

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 01:03:27 +0000

In a good way. I’ve been wanting a slide duplicator for some time now. I’ve got a lot of slides from college as well as a lot of family slides that I want to digitize. I picked up a Pentax Bellows M with Slide Duplicator off of eBay for a damn good price. Below is a quick test with minor adjustments. I attached an old Pentax K mount Sigma 70-200 on there and adjusted it in to place. And voila. Mom, Dad, my Sister & Iggy the dog. The date says December 1973 but I think that’s probably the processing date and that the photo is from earlier in the year. The original wasn’t the sharpest photo in the world, but looking at how sharp the dust specks are I think this setup will do just fine 😉 I would have much preferred to use one of my 50mm Pentax lenses but I needed to pull back to get the right magnification adjustment for the APC sensor in the camera. Maybe now I need to find myself a nice 85mm lens to use here? Just don’t tell the wife I said that 😉 I’ve never been able to justify a dedicated slide scan...

Happy Monkey

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 22:42:34 +0000

So, who likes that new Y! nav bar on Flickr?

Sat, 13 Jul 2013 13:03:48 +0000

Yeah, that’s what I thought. There’s a lot going on in the Flickr interface as it is. Adding a garish purple Yahoo! bar across the top just sends my eyes in to fits. So here’s a bit of CSS that’ll hide nav bar in its current incarnation: body.with-eyebrow #eyebrow { display: none; } body.with-eyebrow { background-position: left top !important; } body.with-eyebrow #global-nav { top: 0 !important; } body.with-eyebrow .subnav-refresh { margin-top: 0 !important; } Now, here’s the tricky part: where do you put this? Most browsers include a user stylesheet override that can be edited. Its just a matter of where this file is. For example, on OSX using Chromium that file is located at ~/Library/Application\ Support/Chromium/Default/User\ StyleSheets/Custom.css Finding the location of the file on your specific browser is outside the scope of this article. So do a quick search on Google, edit your custom CSS file, and bask in the glory of a less suckage on the flickr interface.

Point Reyes

Sun, 07 Jul 2013 12:59:03 +0000

I think that I’ve found my favorite isolated place in California. We’ve made a couple of trips out there lately and despite it almost always being foggy and cold its a wonderfully serene place. Most folks seem to head out to the lighthouse and then leave without exploring the beaches and cliffs. This means that we can spend a nice and quiet time on the beach wandering, talking, reading, or photographing. This isn’t to say that the area around the lighthouse isn’t worth exploring. It is (the shack and deer photos below are from that area). The fun starts on the way in with a beached ship in Martinelli Park in Inverness. Park at The Inverness Store and then go around the back to access the area. Be prepared to get a little bit muddy, but its well worth the stomping around. Out around the point there’s not just the lighthouse that is interesting. The overall scenery, wildlife and accompanying buildings are fun to work with as well. That and when you show up on the wrong day or at the wrong time you can’t get ...

A few handy git aliases

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:34:19 +0000

I finally got fed up with some repetitive Git tasks and decided to make a few aliases in my .gitconfig file. Here are the commands, they all assume that they’re run from a valid git repo: Push your current branch to your upstream repository How often do you repeat the git command to push your current branch by typing git push origin [current-branch-name] because you never remember to set up the branch to track? Does this sound easier? $ git pb Alternately, here, you can add a default push method to your .gitconfig: [push] default = current So that you can just call git push to and have git automatically assume you typed git push origin [branch-name] Pull just the current branches updates With larger groups of developers it is easy for a git pull to fetch a lot of new refs that you don’t care about. This alias shortcuts git pull origin [current-branch-name]. $ git up A quick and easy update of just what you care about. Save big the git pull for lunch time or a coffee break. Open the current branch on GitHub...

Operation Shave the Wookiee, the Return

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:32:23 +0000

Here we go again. St. Baldricks is 2 months away and I’m in once more. Its been 2 years since I last pitched in and I’ve got 12″ of hair waiting to be shaved. On my head, you pervert. Last time was a success. After all was said and done and last minute donations tallied I managed to raise a little over $1200. Thanks to everyone who donated. It was much more than I was expecting. And here I am. Ready to go again. On March 30, 2013, at the Children’s Hospital & Research Center in Oakland, California, I’ll once again sacrifice a full head of hair in the interest of raising some dough for a good cause. Give me, er, the kids, money! Or join Team Wookiee. I’d be thrilled to have teammates. I’ll need someone to celebrate with since my wife has already made it clear that I’ll be sleeping in the other room until at least some hair grows back. However, I’ve just been informed that if I raise at least $2,000 that she’ll actually sleep with me while the hair grows back.

Art at Stanford

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:06:36 +0000

The wife and I decided to take a trip down to Stanford last weekend to check out the Rodin Garden at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford campus. Now, I know that I went to a small school. My graduating class was measured in the hundreds. But, holy shit, the Stanford campus is huge and beautiful. Granted we saw most of it while trundling to and from the Cantor Center, but that was enough to show off how great a campus it is. And to have such a large, and free, museum on campus to boot just makes me feel like I need to outright take my parents to task for not having the ability to send me to a much better school than the rug-rat fest that I attended. 😉 Kidding. Mom, Dad: love you. So, while we went to primarily check out the Rodin garden something else stole the show for both of us. Well, besides the campus, that is. And that was the sculpture/installation by Richard Serra named Sequence. The installation was designed to walk through. With wonderfully textured and rust-colored ~10’ high walls it quickly...

A Winters Day at the Beach with the Fuji X-E1

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:56:35 +0000

The wife and I decided to take the mutts for a walk on the beach this past weekend. We expected cold and dreary weather but were pleasantly greeted by partly cloudy skies and quite warm temperatures when the sun was out. All in all a good day to play with the new Fuji X-E1. In case you’re about to bolt, weary of more shots of my dogs, please venture forth, they’re not the feature of this post 😉 Fair warning, though, I had every intention of going out and shooting for black and white images, so there’s very little color in these photos. I must say that I’m still getting used to this camera. How to hold it, shoot with it, and how best to use its autofocus. The HUGE difference of using a digital viewfinder as opposed to a traditional optical viewfinder. Having a viewfinder that adjusts to the shooting conditions almost feels like cheating. The overall ergonomics of the camera are quite good but being a person who has big old monkey hands it can get a bit weird to hold sometimes. I’m waiting eagerly for the ...

MacPorts, Homebrew and Mountain Lion

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 21:25:41 +0000

The inevitable happened today. Mountain Lion was installed in a couple of different places. Unfortunately one of those places was at work and on a development machine before we had a chance to test out Mountain Lion compatability. Predictably, issues arose. Not surprisingly, at least to me, Homebrew has the biggest issue, and an issue based on its core philosophy. But first… XCode Prior to Mountain Lion the Xcode Command Line Tools could be downloaded separately from Xcode. This saved many of us the bandwidth and storage space required to install Xcode. As of the time of this writing I can only find the individually downloadable Command Line tools available for regular old Lion. So that means a download of Xcode is required. Dag nabbit. After downloading and installing Xcode open Xcode and go in to its Preferences, click on the Downloads tab and install the Command Line Tools. Update: As noted by Patrick Quinn-Graham in the comments below, the Command Line Tools are now showing up in Apple’s Developer port...

Alcatraz

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 23:43:03 +0000

Some friends came in from out of town and we ended up doing some tourist-like stuff. Unfortunately I was hacking up a lung so I was kinda just slothing around, but I was able to squeak out a few decent shots. Birds are abundant on the island and I caught this one is just about the perfect spot. It only would have been better if he were facing me. The buildings are in need of some upkeep which makes them very interesting to look at. Every piece of chipped paint, rust and bird poop helps create interesting textures. Amazingly enough I had the whole recreation yard to myself to get a nice hero shot of the main cellhouse. Unfortunately now age is starting to get the best of me and I need to get the diopter settings straightened out because I’m noticing that my efforts to manually focus are meeting with less and less success. I don’t mind getting older but couldn’t it be nice and effect some other part of my body? Oh, wait, it already is…

Post Password Token updated for WordPress 3.4

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:51:49 +0000

The Post Password Token Plugin has been updated for compatibility with WordPress version 3.4 and newer (tested up to 3.5 alpha). In 3.4 the post-password cookie was updated to contain an encrypted value, something that was probably long overdue, and caused the PPT plugin to fail in authenticating the post. All is well now. Update your plugins and enjoy!

Solar Eclipse

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:06:01 +0000

Just a few off the cuff shots. I tossed the 100-400 and the 1.4 extender on and THEN had to add my circular polarizer to get a decent exposure of 1/5000 @ f/11. And this was while I was also setting up a new grill. If anyone at Char Broil Grills is reading: Were you stoned when you designed the T-22D? Anyway. By the time the eclipse was in full swing most of the neighborhood was in the street hanging out, talking about it, and looking at my live view shots to see how it was progressing. I know I took a chance using live view to shoot. But I made sure to work quickly. I was shooting handheld (why not at those speeds) so the sensor wasn’t being constantly blasted. That and it only made sense to take a few new pics every 5 minutes or so. Better a fried 7D than fried eyeballs. I started off shooting in the back yard but was eventually obscured by houses uphill from us. Luckily I have trustworthy neighbors that I could trust to watch cars for me as I shot from the middle of the street 😉 Though in retrospect I ...

Peeled Bark

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:25:45 +0000

Trying out the new Canon 15-55 f/2.8 IS. I think I’m gonna like this lens. A lot. Like, A LOT.

Subway Fiddler

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 19:16:19 +0000

Found this interesting looking fellow playing for change in the Montgomery Station Bart. I tried to get the hustle and bustle of the activity around him to contrast with his relative camlness but ultimately couldn’t make it work the way I wanted.

WordPress TextMate Bundle: Better late than never edition (aka: 3.3)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:23:59 +0000

FINALLY! WordPress 3.3 support is up for the TextMate Bundle. This is pretty much an update to the function definitions to add in new functions that were added in WordPress 3.3. I’ve been out of the WordPress loop for a little while now and I’m not up to speed to what some of the new developer oriented hotness is that could be added to the bundle so if you’re looking for something in particular drop a comment here or open an issue on GitHub. If you’re so inclined go ahead and Fork it, update what you need and submit a pull request. Since I don’t work with WordPress on a regular basis there are going to be those of you out there that have a better grasp than I on what should be added, or even what should be removed, from the Bundle. So, my apologies for the delay with the update. I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Religion in Politics

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:42:08 +0000

“And I frankly would be very worried if somebody assured me that nothing in their faiths would affect their judgments because then I wonder, how can you have judgment if you have no faith, and how can I trust you with power if you don’t pray? The notion that you are endowed by your Creator sets a certain boundary on what we mean by ‘America’”; That quote is from Newt Gingrich. And, according to Newt, the adulterer, I can’t be trusted and he can, and that somehow I’m not American? This is everything that is wrong with religion in politics and this is exactly why I don’t want religion driving the decisions of my legislators. Despite religions teachings (any religion) its turned on its ear by anyone on a stump, contorted to drive a wedge between those who don’t follow the same version of God. Its not that freedom of religion is under attack in America. Its just that we’re sick of it being used as a tool to gain power. No matter who you pray to you need to open your eyes and question any time someone uses God...

USS Iowa

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:31:38 +0000

The USS Iowa was brought down to Richmond, CA to be renovated before heading down to its permanent home and exhibition spot near Los Angeles, CA. Though not much was open to the public because its very early on in the restoration process it was still a wonderful visit. <img src=“https://live.staticflickr.com/7004/6657573381_c1c1b40b65_m.jpg” alt=“Photograph: 5” Gun on the USS Iowa"> Just looking at the ship you can tell that its spent the last 21 years tied up and neglected. If you can believe it from these photos (and I can’t) the Iowa has been considered “in reserve” for the majority of its decommissioned time. Congress deemed that at least 2 Iowa class battleships be kept available in case the need arises but this ship has obviously been mothballed. From what I understand the Iowa will be in Richmond until March or April of 2012. A lot about its departure date depends on the weather and how much work they can get done before sending it down to LA for a July exhibit opening (I presume they’re...

WordPress Bundle now works with The TextMate 2 Alpha

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:47:12 +0000

The WordPress TextMate bundle now works just fine with the TextMate 2 Alpha. It was easier than I thought it would be. It boiled down to some environment variables changing a little bit. No biggie. So, there it is. TextMate 2 Alpha support. If you notice anything weird please open a Support Ticket on GitHub. Please include the full text of the error that you receive as that’ll most likely be what I need to fix the problem. WordPress 3.3 support is hot on its heels. Really!

Building a web

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:02:16 +0000

Noticed this little guy building a web outside our front window. I figured I’d see if I could handle a spider up close if there was a pane of glass between us. I had a much harder time editing this than I did shooting it. Editing it, dealing with it up close and full screen on a large monitor, gave me a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.

TextMate 2 and the WordPress Bundle

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:17:27 +0000

We’re all excited to see that TextMate 2 Alpha has been released. It was a long wait but by the looks of the Alpha it appears that the wait wasn’t wasted. There’s plenty to be happy about with the Alpha. I’ve been doing some cursory testing with the WordPress Bundle and so far it appears that only a few minor modifications might be needed to be compatible. Better yet, though I haven’t fully tested this yet, the changes should be backwards compatible with TextMate 1.5. For the time being it doesn’t appear as thought I’ll have to create a branch just for TextMate 2. So, keeping in mind that TM2 is Alpha, I’m pleased with how things are panning out. I’m eager to get in to the guts the new bundles and figure out what more I can do to make the WordPress bundle even better (suggestions are welcome!). Congratulations to Mr. Odgaard on his release. I hope he’s able to ignore the petty jerks who keep harassing him and finish up what already looks to be a kick-ass upgrade.

First to Bloom

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:23:34 +0000

I’ve been meaning to capture this ’lil guy since he started blooming. This bud is probably just about 2cm wide.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:56:05 +0000

There’s plenty more folks out there that can be more poignant and eloquent towards eulogizing Steve Jobs so I’m going to leave that with them. Without an Apple computer company backed by Steve there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, and would have missed out on some very influential relationships in my life. So I’ll keep this short. Thank you, Steve.

A few PHP Dev Helper functions

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:51:47 +0000

Don’t do this: There are much better debugging and introspection tools out there. Use this as a good example of what not to do. I’ve come to be pretty reliant on a few little dev helper functions that I’ve written that help introspect data in a couple of different output methods. A lot of development, especially development with unfamiliar systems, involves looking at objects and their contents. These helpers are designed to help give consistently formatted output no matter where they’re used. They output specific styling inline to override the current site’s style sheets and output readable, monospace formatted code in most scenarios. The pp() & dp() functions output to screen and the ep() function outputs to the error log. <?php /** * A few helper functions for debugging PHP * See: http://top-frog.com/2011/09/27/a-few-php-dev-helper-functions/ for info */ $__style = 'white-space: pre; text-align: left; '. 'font: normal normal 11px/1.4 menlo, monaco, monospaced; '. 'background: white; color: black...

Funny little toad

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:38:56 +0000

That funny little toad loves to watch the critter activity in front of the house. Rats, cats, skunks and racoons, all torturing him by lingering on his property.

New WP Salts command in the WordPress TextMate bundle

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:00:05 +0000

I just merged a pull request from Simon Wheatley in to the WordPress TextMate Bundle that adds the command wpsalts to generate the Security Keys for the WP Config file. The command uses the WordPress.org secret-key Service. Very handy. Thanks Simon!

Fog

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 10:23:16 +0000

I think this is just the first in a long line of foggy photos… We live in “Sunnyside” but that’s the misnomer of the century. We see the sun here about every 5th or 6th day.

curl'ing a URL in TextMate

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:07:32 +0000

Ok, sorry, I can’t let all the BBEdit users think that they’ve discovered something new 😉 In case you’ve noticed the amazement lately on blogs and twitter where BBEdit users have discovered a way to open a curl’d url in BBEdit to view its source you may be wondering “how do I do this in TextMate”? Well, its a little more code, but its also a little more powerful. #!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU require ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH'] + '/lib/io.rb' require ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH'] + '/lib/current_word' require 'open3' require 'cgi' theUri = Word.current_word('a-zA-Z0-9#\-_\.:;%/?&=@!$^\*\+', :both) if theUri.include? '@' auth, uri = theUri.split('@') theCommand = "curl -s -u #{auth} \"#{uri}\"" else theCommand = "curl -s \"#{theUri}\"" end stdin, stdout, stderr = Open3.popen3(theCommand) TextMate::IO.exhaust(:out => stdout, :err => stderr) do |data| puts data.rstrip end So, add this as a command in your bundle and tell it to open a new document when its done. Assign it to a keyboard command (if you haven’t already assi...

A day at the beach

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:35:11 +0000

The boys got their first taste of the beach at Fort Funston today. Literally a taste. They made themselves sick drinking the sea water. Hopefully they learned their lesson. Yeah, probably not.

WordPress TextMate bundle updated for WordPress 3.2

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:56:20 +0000

So, WordPress 3.2 has been out for a little while now and I’ve just gotten around to updating the bundle. My apologies, I’ve just been super swamped with a new job in a new city. But that’s some whining for another post. After much fiddling, the updated WordPress TextMate Bundle is here and it has been updated with a much better function definition display. I’ve ditched the old function scraper that was an abomination of grep & regex matches and replaced it with doxygen and some ruby abomination to provide much more information about the function or method being inspected. I’m pretty sure there’s a lingering issue with the parsing and display of special characters in the doxygen output (which I blame squarely on strange handling by doxygen) that I haven’t handled yet. There may be HTML Entities missing from the documentation here and there. Also improved is that the function definition search is contextually sensitive. It’ll only look for methods when in object scope (ie: $object->method();) and onl...

man Files as PDF, revisited.

Tue, 24 May 2011 13:32:37 +0000

I’ve posted before on converting man files to PDF for easier reading and forgot to post this update. The code is much terser, reminds you when you’ve invoked it without a parameter, and doesn’t leave turds that it has to clean up. #! /bin/bash mpg=$1 if [ ! $mpg ]; then echo "Enter a man page to convert: "; read mpg; fi if [ ! $mpg ]; then exit; fi man -t $mpg | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app; Enjoy!

Window Seat: I just can't help myself…

Sun, 22 May 2011 16:46:13 +0000

Yes, I’m one of those dorks. When I get to sit by the window on the plane I’m glued to it and shooting out of it as much as I can. And its even easier now with the iPhone 4s camera being so nice.

Bash snippet to remove a line from a file

Thu, 05 May 2011 09:03:42 +0000

A while back I was working on a project that involved spooling up and shutting down a lot of Amazon EC2 instances while testing and I was constantly running in to an issue where my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file was out of sync with the server that I was connecting to. Despite how simple it is, I could never remember the sed command to remove a line from a file. To help get around having to repeatedly manage my known_hosts file and/or look up the sed command I wrote a little function to remove lines from files using sed. Hopefully someone else out there finds this useful. rmline() { if ! [ "$#" = "2" ]; then echo 'Invalid paramter count'; echo 'Usage: rmline line-num filename' return; fi sed -i 0 "$1d" $2 } So, stick that in your .profile and smoke it enjoy!

Beware MAMP's default Caching Settings

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:20:46 +0000

MAMP is a wonderful thing. It allows for quick setup of a LAMP stack just about anywhere. This makes it great for testing. However, the folks who manage MAMP are focusing MAMP’s default settings towards production use, not development use. This means that XCache is turned on by default and that means that there is variable caching and file-path caching going on (MAMP also includes the APC & EAccelerator extensions, which do very similar things, as well). While enabling these caching settings is good for performance they’re not really good for development since both filesystem paths and interpreted code can be cached for periods of time. What made me notice was when a machine here in the office wasn’t honoring the new path to a renamed folder. The assets in this folder were all loaded via include statements using relative paths. Hard coded paths should not have been an issue, but for some reason the system kept looking for the files in their old location. It took a while before I narrowed it down to the...

Operation "Shave the Wookiee" is a success!

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:29:50 +0000

<img src=“https://live.staticflickr.com/5097/5518625391_6b8ec0b01a_m.jpg” alt=“Photograph: Operation “Shave the Wookiee”: After”> Now that’s a far cry from where I was. No more fuzzball. No more fro. Sorry I couldn’t do more to cover up the blemishes. I’m tired and my allergies are driving my eyes nuts. All in all it was a good night. Combining web donations with direct foundation donations I totalled $1000 raised via this little stunt. That wasn’t even close to being at the top of the collections list this year. Some folks managed to collect more than $10,000… amazing and fantastic. The actual shave process was quite entertaining as well. The two gals at the end of the shaving line were both eager to get to shave my head and the announcers had some fun with it as well. I actually enjoyed getting a little attention. And last, but not least, for everyone’s enjoyment: (sadly this has been lost to the black hole of Dropbox). Enjoy, and thanks to everyone who contributed!

The Genitorturers at the Summit Music Hall

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:00:16 +0000

This has probably got to be the most fun concert that I’ve covered to date. Violent, bloody, demented and, well, fun! The Summit Music Hall is, on average, dark, but when their stage lights are actually on well there’s a decent amount of light at ISO 6400. Not the greatest, but decent. I took a chance and left the flash in the bag even though I was able to use it in there. I much prefer the “natural” stage lighting at shows. Flash is like a bright white splatter of goo in the center of the frame in situations like these and I didn’t want that. I had to shoot a lot, but it paid off with some nice results. The strategy was to find a composition and shoot enough frames during the varied lighting (lighting that was almost flashing) to try and land some shots during the bright spots in the display. It worked. I threw out a lot of duds and lost a few when the camera would hunt for focus, but overall the number of keepers is good. On top of getting the lighting right I was blessed with a very expressive couple o...

The Dropkick Murphys & Against Me! at The Fillmore Auditorium

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:07:41 +0000

Getting movement and energy out of every band member on stage is a rarity, but a rarity that is enjoyed when you encounter them. The Dropkick Murphys provided non-stop action on stage which proved not only challenging but fun. Especially with the addition of an 8′ wide box in the middle of the pit that allowed band members to interact very closely with the crowd and which provided on a small channel to shimmy through to get to the other side (as much as I would have liked to have jumped right up and jammed with the band, I didn’t). Getting to photograph these two bands was a treat, indeed. Though I have to admit I was nervous and didn’t do as well as I’d have liked. While editing the photos after the show I realized that during the Dropkick Murphys there was a bagpipe player and a hot chick with a violin that I didn’t even get shots of. Shame on me! All in all, though, they’re decent and I had a good time to boot. A quick tip to some of you new folks photographing shows: when the security guys tell you th...

Operation "Shave the Wookiee" is under way.

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:50:15 +0000

<img src=“https://live.staticflickr.com/5094/5500635193_dbfe434cbb_m.jpg” alt=“Photograph: Operation “Shave the Wookiee”: Before”> On Friday, March 11 I will shave my head as part of the St. Baldrick’s foundation annual fundraising event. 2 years and 14″ worth of hair are gonna come off. The St. Baldrick’s Foundation volunteers raise money to help support child cancer research and to give long term support to survivors. So, quit reading this and head over to my donation page on the St. Baldrick’s Foundation site and donate. FAQ I’ve known you for a little while and just want to confirm: this is to shave the hair on your head, right? Yes. Are they going to shave your back hair as well? No. I’m trying to raise money, not scare anyone. Aren’t you afraid of what you’ll find under there? Well, the small family of mice are gonna have to find a new home, but this isn’t my first time in the rodeo and I know approximately what to expect. I’d like to come and mock you during the shaving. When and where do I s...

The Dum Dum Girls

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:00:41 +0000

Yeah, another night of shooting in the deep dark recesses that is small concert venues. This one was well worth it, though. The Dum Dum Girl’s album “I will be” has been keeping me more than entertained since I was introduced to it late last year and seeing them in an intimate place like the Hi-Dive was great. I did have a little more help for the dark environment this time though. I recently added a 28 f/1.8 to my bag of tricks and it worked out wonderfully. The length is just right and the speed was very welcome in this challenging venue. The only thing that I didn’t like about them was the typical non-moving stage show that is so prevalent in today’s lo-fi, sub-pop, whatever-you-call-it scene. I much prefer an active stage, but at least the musical energy was up there. The image above is the only one I managed to get of anyone stepping away from a microphone. It happened a few more times but I didn’t get it. I shot this one without a writer handy so I had to do the writeup myself. Sometimes I wonder ho...

Why the AppleTV needs to support more video formats

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:16:48 +0000

Because no matter which computer I convert formats on this will happen a few times in each conversion.

Look in to my eye…

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:51:04 +0000

I love medical imaging. Its even better when its of my own body.

Night of the Bassists

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:09:45 +0000

Some nights certain things just pop out to me. Last Saturday night it was the bassists of Wovenhand and Git Some. My favorite pics of the night were of them. At first the thought of a hard rocking band like Git Some pairing with the more mellow sound of Wovenhand was that they made an odd pairing for a tour but they both really worked out well. Both bands had plenty of musical energy and were pretty fun to watch. Best of all they sounded great. Despite being small and relatively dark I enjoyed shooting at the Marquis. Well, aside from who I think was Wovenhand’s tour photographer who kept stepping right in front of me, knowing full well I was right there, and half the time bumping me as well. He was a jerk. The night was also a great chance to put the new 28mm f/1.8 through its paces. Though neither of these pics was taken with the new lens I’m super happy to have it as it proved invaluable in the low light and tight quarters of the Marquis. While 28mm is no longer wide on a crop sensor it is a great leng...

View man files as PDF

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:58:40 +0000

Sometimes viewing man pages on the command line is less than convenient. Ok, its always inconvenient. But there’s a better way: convert the man page to pdf and view it with Preview. Add this to a file, I named mine manv, put it in a safe place (I keep a /bin folder in my home directory) and make it executable with chmod a+x filename. #! /bin/bash if [ "$#" = "1" ]; then man -t ${1} > /tmp/${1}.ps pstopdf /tmp/${1}.ps /tmp/${1}.pdf open -a Preview.app /tmp/${1}.pdf sleep 10 rm /tmp/${1}.ps /tmp/${1}.pdf fi Now invoke the man page with your new script name instead of with man and read it in Preview. Enjoy!

WordPress TextMate Bundle Updated

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:20:20 +0000

WordPress 3.1 RC is here, so I figure its time enough to issue an update my [recently neglected, sorry 'bout that, its been busy] WordPress TextMate Bundle. All function definitions have been updated to the 3.1 RC code base. There is a tag for the 3.0 branch as it sat this afternoon. No new features have been added yet, but this will at least jump you to the right place in the code base when needing to inspect an internal function. Suggestions for feature additions are always welcome, so lemme know how you use the bundle and how any improvements can help you use it better and I’ll see what I can do. As it always has been, the project’s source is freely available so you’re welcome to contribute as well if you wanna dive in to a little bit of Ruby code. I know I’ll regret saying this, but one of my goals to hit during the 3.1 lifespan is a better code scrape of the WordPress core. I’ve been playing with a couple of different code scrapers/documentation engines to replace the janky regex that I’ve got going o...

D.R.I. at the Bluebird Theater

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:35:08 +0000

I never really listened to these guys until recently and am glad I had a chance to see them live before they pack it in (though, judging by this performance they’ve got a lot of time left in them). I was a bit worried that this would be a “reunion tour” quality performance but the energy level was better than any show that I’ve seen in the last few years. Not to beat a dead horse but, again, the Bluebird was dark. Not as dark as last time but still challenging. Picking the right moments were key. Even though I was able to shoot at 1/160 @ f/2.8 and 1/125 @ f/3.5 using ISO 6400, movement on stage was still mostly moving too fast to be able to capture everything. Wether they were predictable or I was having a good night doesn’t matter to me 'cause I was able to get a good set of photos that I am really happy with. Lack of decent front lighting in the middle of the stage is a bit of a hindrance at the Bluebird but overall a good moment will survive less than optimal lighting conditions if captured properly. ...

Angry toy is being stalked by the monster computer case…

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 16:51:31 +0000

Filed under “just for fun”.

What month is this again?

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 11:46:13 +0000

We’re not supposed to have this kind of color in December. I’m actually ready for some snow.

Freelance Whales at the Hi-Dive, Denver

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 22:43:28 +0000

I was pushing the ISO limits of the 7D again last Monday at when the Miniature Tigers and Freelance Whales played the Hi-Dive. The Mini Tigers got the worst of it but there’s not much you can do when the lead singer asks for lights to be shut off. If he doesn’t want light then he doesn’t get decent pics… those really didn’t turn out well. Fortunately the Freelance Whales didn’t have any issue with the stage lighting so what little there was stayed on. Neither group was terribly energetic which actually worked out in my favor here because I was shooting at 1/60 sec @ f/4 at ISO 12800. I was able to sacrifice some speed to get some depth of field that I knew I was gonna need with having to push that far in to the ISO range. I lost a few shots to blur, but most were OK. Shooting in this low a light is definitely a zen exercise in how steady you can be and if you can choose just that right moment when the subject is not moving, but still expressive. I also like to frame tight so trying to keep a good composit...

One more place to pollute the interwebs

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:33:45 +0000

about.me/shawnparker The only other thing it needs is a big sucking sound when you load the page…

Gettin' Tattoo'd

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 13:08:29 +0000

The wife got some new ink by Willie Stewart at Ananda Tattoo (the website is seriously lacking, but his work is fantastic) and I got some time be a dork with the camera. The place was a bit dark so I had to augment with some flash. I put a Vivitar 285HV set at 1/16 power on my Gorillapod with a light sensitive trigger and pointed it towards the wall to bounce (you can see the 285 in the photo above in the middle square window to the right of the door). I then put my old Canon 430 EZ on the 7D, pointed him at the ceiling, and pulled him back to 1/32 power. With the small space this gave me some very nice, even illumination with all the bouncing that was going on and was able to shoot comfortably at 1/100 sec at f/4. All the good shots ended up being with the 60mm Macro, though I did shoot with the 10-22mm a bit.

Brandi Carlile at Boettcher Concert Hall

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:22:32 +0000

I finally got to shoot the 7D at a concert at only ISO 3200! And was able to shoot at f/4 for a little depth of field. How sweet it is 😉 To say that Brandi Carlile came to the Boettcher Concert Hall on November 13, 2010 would be an understatement. She and her band made the place their own with a performance that varied from the subtle to the rockin’.

The Heavy at The Bluebird Theater

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:53:32 +0000

This one was a challenge. I think that if I hadn’t had the extra ISO capabilities that my new 7D provided I wouldn’t have come back with much of anything from this shoot. Not only is the Bluebird dark but I think they actually lowered the lights for these guys. To add insult to injury the lead singer was black. Dark room, black subject. Oh, and did I mention that the lead singer danced around the entire time? Now that’s a challenge! Well, jack that ISO up, dial in 1/125 of a second shutter speed and hope that you’ve got the aperture to make it work. 😉 Fortunately at expanded ISO of 12800 provided by the 7D I was able to make something of this show. I tried to get a varied amount of shots which came out OK, considering the environment, but it wasn’t until I just decided to throw facial recognition out the window and go with the lighting how it was that I came out with something that I really liked. When shooting a concert I think that getting 10 good shots and 1 wow shot is a good keeper rate. I’ve seen t...

EOS 7D First Impressions

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:00:18 +0000

:wuv: I recently decided that it was time to upgrade old faithful (A Canon EOS 20D) to some new hotness (a Canon EOS 7D). The differences are amazing. Even the feel of the CF Card door opening and closing feels sturdier and smoother. This is gonna seem like a lot of ragging on the 20D, but its not. Its just simply that the 7D offers so much more than the 20D that it really makes the 20D feel old in its technology. Viewfinder {#viewfinder} One of the first things that I noticed (aside from the size of the LCD Screen) was the size and brightness of the viewfinder. The 20D has a 96% coverage viewfinder which means that there’s more than you see that is recorded with every shot. With the 7D you see 100% of the scene and the viewfinder is large, too. On top of that the new electronic “overlay” screen is simply amazing. No longer are the focus points hard etched in the glass. The viewfinder changes based on the autofocus mode that you’re in and nicely highlights the point that it selects when you’re in one of th...

Back in the saddle with Season's After

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 10:12:27 +0000

I got the chance to step back in to the role of Concert Photographer on Friday night and I’m pretty excited about it. The Denver Post’s Reverb Music Blog gave me a shot (and one more coming up soon) to see how I’d do. I think I did pretty well considering the place was a cave and I had to break out the flash to keep 1/125 of a second at f/2.8. The old 20D gave me all she had and actually came through pretty well despite her shortcomings. It can’t write fast enough for quick shooting and the autofocus just plain gets confused sometimes. I spent half the show in Manual Focus. So here’s hoping that the Editor liked my stuff as much as I enjoyed shooting. Read the full review of the show and see the entire gallery here.

Denver Zombie Crawl, 2010

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:14:27 +0000

Its that time of year again. Blood, bites, and Zombies. Downtown Denver turned in to a Zombie infection zone last night as thousands of revelers showed up to have a bloody good time. For whatever reason this year’s crawl started during the day and as a result produced a little more of a jovial crowd than last year. But that didn’t stop the flow of disturbing scenes… oh no. This year did feel a bit more “family friendly” as there were a lot more kids. Not that I’m complaining, but that also seemed to effect everybody’s mood a bit. Less smiling and more biting, dammit! The full photoset is available over at Flickr.

Our Fearless Intern

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:52:34 +0000

(click through to Flickr for the Animated file) Our slave labo… er, intern, hard at work. Nothing special about it. I was just looking for an excuse to play with the Reel Moments app on the iPhone. I’ve had the app for a while but was hamstrung by a Google phone lock policy that came down with using their Exchange access to the Google Apps. That has now been lifted and I can use the App. Once my Glif iPhone Stand gets here I can venture out a bit more and do some more fun locations.

Its hockey season again!

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 07:26:04 +0000

The Avalanche pulled one out against the Blackhawks. Nice. And my new tradition of taking a shitty iPhone panorama from my seat continues: Club level, section 226. Past shitty iPhone panoramas (and one decent real pano) can be seen here.

AppleScript to Detect Displays on Snow Leopard

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:26:28 +0000

One of the things about having a laptop and continually connecting and disconnecting from an external display is having to tell the system to detect the external (and sometimes the internal) display so that both displays are running. Simply detecting displays doesn’t seem to be an easily scriptable system event. I finally got an AppleScript cobbled together so that I can simply launch this AppleScript from LaunchBar (you Quicksilver users can do the same thing). This is based off of code that I’ve written as well as code that I found on Apple’s AppleScript mailing list and should be adaptable to most menu-bar items. to click_menu_extra at menu_list tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"'s menu bar 1 click (first menu bar item whose value of attributes contains menu_list's beginning) repeat with item_name in rest of menu_list click (first menu item of result's menu 1 whose name is item_name) delay 0.5 end repeat end tell end click_menu_extra click_menu_extra at {"displays", "Detec...

New York!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:52:23 +0000

I can’t say the current job isn’t without perks. I don’t travel much but when I do its to nice places. I can’t argue with San Francisco and New York. Salt Lake I could probably whine about a bit 😉 More pics after the jump. The view from above the city is a must see. Looking out over the city from the 102nd floor of the Empire State building was something else. Even in the dark the scale of what was around me was incredible. I wasn’t there long. Just a 4 day whirlwind tour of downtown Manhattan. We stayed within a few blocks of the Empire State Building so it was easy to find my way home if I need to. Living in Colorado its always easy to orient yourself if you can get a view of the Mountains (and most times you can) but in NY I was a little turned around once in a while. There’s no frame of reference. I could keep going in the direction I had to go but figuring out which way was north sometimes proved a challenge. The sheer size of the city really dwarfs anything else I’ve experienced. Though, that may b...

And I wasn't even being chased!

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:13:50 +0000

I started running today. I’m following the Couch to 5K program via an app on my iPhone. I came to a stark realization recently that my weight was getting out of control. I’m fortunate enough that I carry weight well, but that’s also been a reason why I’ve been able to let it go for so long. At 6′1″ the true nature of being 245lbs. is starting to show. Both in how I look, how I feel and how I now have to wonder if I’ll meet pre-set conditions on activities. My father got a free session at an indoor skydiving joint here in town and he doesn’t want to do it. He gave it to me and I’m pretty stoked about it since it looks like a lot of fun. But I noticed that they have a 250lb. weight limit. Depending on the scale, I may not qualify right now… that was quite the shock. So, off I go. I’ve got a little bit of a head start since I bike to work as my primary means of transportation. Not to mention the 5 lb. computer, the 2lb. camera and ~5lb. of lenses that I schlep with me. So with all that on a 15 minute ride in ...

2010 National Radial Engine Exhibition

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 19:52:59 +0000

The 2010 NREE happened this past weekend on Sept. 11. The skies were absolutely perfect for an air show. All blue, no clouds, and with enough of a breeze to keep you from burning up (but not enough to deter the sunburn. D’oh!). The Exhibition was the first time I had actually seen wing walking and have to say that I was quite impressed. It looks like great fun. I wanna try it (just don’t tell my wife that). I was hoping for a more diverse air exhibition than we got but I can’t complain about what we did get for the $5 entrance fee. Gary Rower, Don Nelson & Kyle & Amanda Franklin (pictured above) put on great shows. The F-16 Demo team also put on a performance. Its always fun to hear a fighter jet at full afterburner. There was also a WWII reenactment that I think was more fun for those involved than for the spectators. I know they have limited resources but it was kinda hokey. Shooting in blasts like this pushed the ol’ 20D to its limits. Between the random searching while tracking a plane and the...

Brett Michaels at the Taste of Colorado

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 23:55:20 +0000

So, as the Taste of Colorado comes to town I once again get my shot at some free concert photography. This years its Brett Michaels of Poison fame. I admit, I listened to that as a kid. I think their first album came out when I was in middle school. A guy in my class thought by the cover of the album that they were all girls… Though, you can’t fault him too much for that one. There was more make-up on the cover of that album than on Dee Schneider. I fully expected this show to be a train wreck but it was actually quite good. He impressed me by saying “let’s bring the boys home” during the inevitable dedication of “Something to Believe In” to our troops overseas. But, then, he’s also wearing a shirt with a picture of himself on it, so there’s that to weigh in too 😉

Now that's a lot of frogs!

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:30:07 +0000

Artist Melody Sealman and a group of cohorts arranged thousands of plaster frogs on the 16th Street Mall this morning. The majority of the effort was spent on an arrangement outside the bus station at 16th and Market. The effort was mirrored in other cities as well. Sealman and her crew worked 8 months to prepare for this day. Unfortunately a good deal of the frogs along other areas of the 16th Street Mall were swept up by maintenance crews. Obviously by the two photos I chose to display, the feature she put together around the “king” centerpiece was my favorite. All the little frogs were gathered around, as if waiting for his command to pounce. Each little frog was hand made by Sealman and her friends. The frogs closest to the “king” were all wrapped in silver leaf. And to boot she encouraged viewers to pick one out and take it home. The only one she wouldn’t let anyone touch was the “king”. And for good reason. That little bugger is cool!

Colorado Sport International Airshow.

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:57:12 +0000

I headed out to the Colorado Sport International Airshow today and had a pretty good time until my foot started bothering me. I think these shoes are toast 'cause I don’t have foot problems. I left early, before the 2nd air demonstration with the jets. Boo. Its probably for the best. The light wasn’t favorable (everything in the air was pretty much backlit) and I wasn’t shooting well anyway. Update: A few more from yesterday:

So fuzzy!

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:14:02 +0000

Found this lil’ guy making his way across the sidewalk this morning while walking the dogs. So, naturally, I interrupted his walk to talk a few pics… he was rather confused about suddenly being in the air and moving around. Didn’t make him any less active, though. Lil’ bugger was hard to shoot 'cause he wouldn’t sit still. And one more from the iPhone with minimal editing:

Baseball!

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:59:19 +0000

Its that time of the year again. Time for the annual Crowd Favorite trip to the ballpark. Tonight it was the Brewers that were in town to hand the Rockies a last minute loss. Boo! Oh well. I got free beer, pizza and hotdogs. As far as I’m concerned the game was great! 😉 Also managed to pull off a decent panorama. I should have gone around to the right some more, but overall I think it’s OK. Link to full size panorama.

A bit wonky, but I still like it

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:44:28 +0000

I would like it better if there was more of those great clouds in the negative space towards the lower left, but all in all its still fun.

WordPress export, import and double serialization.

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:32:47 +0000

Ran in to a fun one in the WordPress core today. If your plugin stores post meta and you store that post meta as an array then you’re prone to a bug in the WordPress core that can break your data should someone export their data and reimport it on another WordPress install. Yeah, this is a small minority of what actually goes on in WordPress but when you’re dealing with migrating data from one install to another, or are trying to supply complex sample data with a theme distribution, then things like this tend to get on your nerves. Quickly. I’m gonna sound jaded through this writeup, but I’ll get over it. Say your plugin saves and retrieves data correctly, like this greatly oversimplified example: global $post; $postmeta = array('one','two','bunnies'); add_post_meta($post->ID, 'my-meta-key', $postmeta); // ... // and later // ... $postmeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'my-meta-key'); You’re properly using the post-meta api and your array is serialized in the database, all safe and sound. Now imagine your use...

It was a flower kinda day this morning

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:39:09 +0000

The wife went off to run and naturally, I went off with my camera 😉 After all, why would I run? I wasn’t being chased.

Rooftop Sunset

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:23:06 +0000

Kids: don’t try this at home. I’m a trained… well, buffoon, probably. 😉

WordPress TextMate Bundle Updated

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:38:30 +0000

I just updated the WordPress TexMate Bundle with some new features. Cron/Scheduled Events I’ve never really worked with the built in Cron in WordPress but have heard others talk about how much of a pain it is. After recently reading a Sitepoint.com article on scheduling events I was able to get the jist of it. The WordPress Bundle now includes snippets for complete actions such as registering single and recurring events. I figure I had better get the snippets in there while it was fresh in my mind. Transients A little less fresh in my mind were Transients. After watching a presentation on caching at WordCamp Boulder by the very likable (and, yes, smart) Sean O’Shaughnessy and Chris Scott from Voce Communications I got pretty stoked about these functions. Like the wp_cache… shortcuts there are now shortcuts to the transients functions. For more information about the wonderful world of transients check out WordPress Codex pages on the Transients API. Scripts & Styles Two new shortcuts for wp_r...

Firefox view-source tab-width

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:53:37 +0000

<img src="/assets/articles/firefox.png />Rejoice! There’s a way to set the tab with of the view-source window in Firefox. In March of this year Mozilla finally added an about:config option to control the tab-width in Firefox. I’m on Firefox 3.6.6 and it works like so: Enter about:config in the url bar. Filter the list (using the search box at the top) by typing view_source. If you already have an option for view_source.tab_size then simply change its integer value and you’re done. If you don’t have an option for view_source.tab_size then continue. Right click in the window and select New > Integer from the flyout menu. Name the field view_source.tab_size and give a value appropriate to your needs, for me that was the common default of 4. Rejoice! For more info there is a full list of about:config options at Mozillazine. [update]: Pingbacks and Trackbacks have been disabled on this post 'cause its getting abused by people using the PingCrawl plugin. [update 2011-12-13]: As noted below by fx th...

photos.top-frog.com

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:58:06 +0000

I’ve been putting off doing something like this for a while now, but I finally broke down and signed up for a Zenfolio account so I can try and sell some of my photography. I figure its gotta be worth something to someone, right? So, photos.top-frog.com is the site and possibly, at this time, one of the worst implementations of Zenfolio theming in recent history. Its mostly event photos now, spurred by trying to quickly put together a venue for sharing and selling photos of my Dad’s racing clubs. The events currently on the site now are: Porsche Club Rocky Mountain, June 19, 2010 Denver Chalk Art Festival, June 6, 2010 4th Annual Denver Zombie Crawl, October 24, 2009 Porsche Club Rocky Mountain, September 19, 2009 Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing, May 17, 2009 So, as time goes on I’ll be putting more stuff up. Pretty much pruning just the good stuff from my flickr account and seeing if it flies. I’ve got a year to figure out how to pimp it and make it work before having to renew the account. Hopefully now the...

Another day at the zoo: the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo this time

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:45:17 +0000

Spent a nice day with the folks down at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. The zoo is great. Damn nice for podunk little city like that 😉 The giraffe exhibit is certainly something to go for. They don’t like being touched but its damn cool to get that close to them. I’m a little weirded out by the results of the day. The camera interpreted the light very strangely and everything seems a bit warm. I hope to have properly accounted for it in the processing. View the full set of images on Flickr.

A simple way to limit file downloads to only logged in users in WordPress

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:51:38 +0000

NOTICE: This is tutorial is old. While the approach may still be valid, it is likely there are key differences in newer versions of the software invovled that prevent the code below from working. So, you’ve used WordPress to build your client’s site and to provide downloads for the site’s users. You’re hiding the links to download content based on the user’s logged in status. Great. But what happens when the logged in user copies the download URL and sends it to his friend? Well, unless you’re filtering the download links and checking them with WordPress first his friend gets to download the file. I’m not a big fan of checking every file download with WordPress as it can take a lot of overhead if you’re running a busy site. So here is a pretty straight forward way to limit downloads from a WordPress site with a minimal amount of code. In this example I’ll illustrate how to prevent non-logged in users from downloading audio files in mp3 and m4a format. Basic Blocking First, lets use some ModRewrite rules t...

Non race photos from a day at the races

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 22:38:10 +0000

I love heading out to the track and taking oodles and oodles of mediocre pictures of cars running around the track, but this weekend I found more to enjoy surrounding the race that actually in the races itself. The above photo was by far my favorite. I noticed the rider doing a few tricks on his way out to one of the track bunkers so I followed him on his ride back, hoping that he’d have fun on the way back in. Well, he noticed me lookin’ at him and hammed it up. This photo by far falls in to the category of “be prepared to be lucky”. Had I not been watching things around the preparation of the race I’d have missed a great opportunity. The ATV wasn’t the only fun part of the day. Attached are a few more fun pics that had nothing to do with Porsche Club racing.

WordPress TextMate Bundle is ready for WordPress 3.0

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:52:56 +0000

Today marks the release of WordPress 3.0 and with this release the WordPress TextMate Bundle is ready for it. The bundle had been updated to support the new features in WordPress 3.0 including, but not limited to: custom post types, featured images, and WordPress MU integration. The menu has been rearranged a little bit and a slew of new commands and snippets have been added. Hopefully, :knock-on-wood:, no bugs have crept in. So, go and get WordPress 3.0 and update your WordPress TextMate Bundle!

Day 2 of the Denver Chalk Art Festival

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 16:17:48 +0000

Today marked day 2 of the Denver Chalk Art Festival in downtown Denver. It may have been a bit TOO nice of a day today as all I can remember is that it was HOT. Damn hot. Any time I went down for a lower angle I was reminded of the heat from the street. I wouldn’t have survived out there for 2 days 'cause I’m not that diligent about drinking water when my brain is occupied with something. The heat aside it was a wonderful display of art and a fun way to spend the day. If you missed it this year then put it on your calendar for next year. And get there early, the crowds like to show up later in the day. A few more from today: Full photo set (16 photos) available over at My Flickr Set for the Chalk Art Festival.

10 Years of Marriage…

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:31:20 +0000

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love; but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love; to be happy then is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy; therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down. ~ Love and Death, 1975 16 Years ago we met at the University of Northern Colorado and there’s been no looking back. We’ve grown together for so long I can barely remember who we are when we met. But I guess that doesn’t matter because I like who we’ve become and look forward to how we’ll change over the next 10 years. Love you, wife.

Goose Aerobics

Mon, 31 May 2010 12:13:12 +0000

Caught this little guy doing his morning stretches today.

Automatically download Chromium nightly builds

Sat, 29 May 2010 13:59:52 +0000

NOTICE: This is long since obsolete. Chromium can now be directly downloaded. Updated July 7, 2012: Fixed an issue on Lion where moving old version of Chromium to the trash would fail. Also now opens Chromium after the update is complete. Updated June 9, 2011: The nightlies moved again. The script below has been updated for that change. Updated Oct. 28, 2010: Sometime recently the Chromium nightlies moved. The script below is a revised version to reflect that change. So, if you’re one of the geeks that likes to live on the cutting edge of cool and use the Chromium nightly builds instead of Google Chrome proper or one of those paranoid types that wants to stay away from the built in usage tracker in Google Chrome then this post is for you. Well, the Mac users out there at least 😉 I’m not the first to do this and I probably won’t be the last, but here is a script that I polished up that downloads the current nightly build of Chromium and drops it in to your Applications folder. Run it manually or hook it u...

Open a file's parent folder as a Project in TextMate

Thu, 27 May 2010 22:31:55 +0000

NOTICE: This is long since obsolete with the addition of the mate command line helper. So, I can’t count how many times I’ve opened a single file for editing in TextMate and then realized that I need to do more than just edit that one file. And most of the time the other files that I need to edit are in the same folder as the file that I’m currently editing. Rather than head back out to the finder each time I do this I finally wrote a command to do it for me. The following code will close the current document and open its parent folder as a TextMate project. So, create a new command in your personal Bundle (you do have your own bundle where you store common snippets and commands, right? I keep mine here) and create a new command. Paste the following in to the Command(s) box: #!/bin/bash # safeguard against the vars changing after closing the frontmost file CURRENT_FILE=$TM_FILEPATH CURRENT_DIR=$TM_DIRECTORY CURRENT_LINE=$TM_LINE_NUMBER # close the file /usr/bin/osascript -e "tell application \"TextMate\" ...

Add Bash syntax highlighting to Coda

Thu, 27 May 2010 10:39:37 +0000

Just a quick tip here. Panic’s web-focused IDE Coda uses SubEthaEdit’s rendering engine. Coda uses an OLDER version of SubEthaEdit’s rendering engine. So if you want to add syntax highlighting modes to Coda they have to be older versions. I wanted to add the Bash syntax mode from SubEthaEdit to Coda, but had to go back a few versions in SubEthaEdit to get one that would load. Fortunately SubEthaEdit 2.2 is still available for download and contains a compatible Bash mode. To extract it you need to download the SubEthaEdit 2.2 version and mount the .dmg file. Right click on the SubEthaEdit icon and select “Show Package Contents”. Navigate to the Resources/modes folder and copy the bash.mode to your ~/Library/Application Support/Coda/Modes folder. Restart Coda if it was open. I’m not sure how to identify the newer versions of modes other than to just let Coda tell me that it won’t work after I add the mode, and I’m not sure what it is about the newer modes that invalidates them for the older rendering engine ...

Playin' close to home

Mon, 24 May 2010 22:32:33 +0000

Sometimes I forget just how close to home I can stay and still have a good time with the camera. Just played around with the pups this afternoon after a bit of frustration at work (nothing serious, but self induced which made it that much worse) and managed to turn out one or two keepers and lighten my mood to boot.

New Internationalization feature in the WordPress TextMate Bundle

Fri, 21 May 2010 23:46:18 +0000

The WordPress TextMate Bundle was just updated to include support for internationalizing strings. Its not terribly obvious how the feature can be used, so I thought that I’d do a quick outline of its features. The goal of adding this support was to make it as seamless as possible to integrate with your coding style. The command will properly adjust itself for whether your selected text is within a single or double quoted string, it is a quoted string itself, or if it is in a block of HTML instead of PHP. The command is found under the “Plugin API” section of the plugins menu or by using the command-shift-i keyboard shortcut. Inside Single and Double Quoted Strings With the sample code: <?php $string1 = 'one two three four'; $string2 = "one two three four"; Selecting text two three WITHIN the quoted strings will return: <?php $string = 'one ' . __('two three', 'domain') . ' four'; $string2 = "one " . __("two three", 'domain') . " four"; Single and Double Quoted Strings Again, with the same sample code...

Post Password Token plugin for WordPress version 1.2 released

Thu, 20 May 2010 08:32:03 +0000

I’m happy to announce that version 1.2 of the Post Password Token plugin for WordPress is ready to go and available for download from the WordPress Plugin Library. If you already have it installed you just might have an upgrade notice on your plugins page. Version 1.2 adds support for Custom Post Types and allows the token functionality to be enabled or disabled for Posts and Pages. In WordPress 3.0 this will also allow custom configuration of the newly exposed Custom Post Types as well (pending that you’re using that feature). Simply select which post types you want the plugin to work on in the Settings page. This version also fixes a couple of security issues. First: The settings page has been hardened against the possibility of Cross Site Scripting Forgeries. Not that it was a huge deal before since this plugin doesn’t advertise itself on your blog in any way, but its nice to know that we’re protected. Second: The settings page in the admin is not exposed to users who do not have the privilege to manage...

Bees!

Sat, 15 May 2010 16:25:18 +0000

Encountered a bee hive while out on our walk with the dogs earlier today and decided to go back for a good look with a camera. I’m glad that I did. Everybody was well behaved. I tried not to move quickly and I’d get landed on once in a while but all in all they didn’t seem bothered by me. Which is good 'cause I don’t like bee stings. A couple more from the encounter:

As seen on Bare Bones' website

Fri, 07 May 2010 13:09:25 +0000

Look, ma, we’re famous! Ok, not really. Thanks to the guys (and gals?) over at Bare Bones my WordPress Clippings for BBEdit are now listed on the Official BBEdit Clippings Library page. Now I’ll have to see if I can talk them in to some kind of developer discount as I haven’t had a chance to test newer versions of the Clippings since my trial ran out.

The Rockies from the Window Seat.

Wed, 05 May 2010 23:26:24 +0000

When you hear a camera going while on a plane its a geek like me that can’t resist pressing his or her camera against the window and grabbing a few of the world going by. Sorry if I woke you. (not really!)

Cherry Blossoms

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:24:45 +0000

These are the signs of spring that I like to see… not the snowy ones. Unfortunately its bokeh like this that illustrates how badly my sensor needs cleaning…

Dried up and colorful

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:56:56 +0000

From a trip to my parents’ house today. Colors have been boosted slightly, but weren’t faked. Those are from various colorful items in the background.

Everything I know about optimizing a WordPress install on Apache

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:03:34 +0000

NOTICE: This article is very old and lots has changed since it was published. Be aware that while the syntax/options below may have changed, the concepts are still the same. I don’t mean to badmouth WordPress when I say this, but if you deploy a WordPress based site without optimizing your install you’re just asking for a slow site. Below is everything I know about optimizing a WordPress installation. It is by no means a list of everything you can do to optimize a server for WordPress, but its a damn good base. Because of the nature of tweaking servers, you’ll need access to the server config files (and most likely access to the root user on the server) to make most of these changes. Update 2010-04-01: To be honest, this is mostly an article on optimizing your LAMP stack with some WordPress items at the end. I wrote it because I had seen some people put up some WordPress based sites that were struggling under load. It really applies to any general website deployment. Update 2010-07-21: Updated with a snip...

Shoes on a wire

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:01:21 +0000

I noticed these some time ago but just haven’t gotten around to taking some time to admire them. Today turned out well with a slightly overcast background to give me a nice thick sky and a warm setting sun to light the shoes. Unfortunately, and I say that damn word too much in relation to my photography, I wasn’t fully prepared. I should have had a tripod or monopod. These are just slightly soft due to camera shake. I’ve always liked the thought of seeing shoes hanging from power lines. Almost like you don’t have a real city neighborhood without 'em. We’ve got shoe cred here 😉 Update: A couple more from this afternoon.

Jewelry Box Landscape

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:18:32 +0000

A high key look at a jewelry box that belonged my grandmother. The only adjustments made were to sharpness, contrast and a slight straighten and crop. Other than that its pretty much straight out of the camera. There’s one little hair that I’d like to take out but I’m still learning the ropes on the Lightroom 3 beta that I haven’t figured out how to do that yet (or if I even can, the cloning tools seem a little strict compared to Aperture).

Springtime in Denver…

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:47:20 +0000

means snow. also from today’s snow:

Enable Etherpad to send email via GMail

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:42:34 +0000

By default Etherpad wants a local mail server to send email. We didn’t want to muck around with the security details of hosting a mail server so we decided to use our catch all GMail account to send email. The only problem was that Etherpad wasn’t set up to do TLS authentication when sending email. It was a relatively easy fix once I could a) figure out the problem and b) actually find the mail functionality within the Etherpad source. Simply make the change below and recompile your .jar. Update your SMTP settings to point and authenticate to GMail and you’re off to the races. --- a/trunk/infrastructure/net.appjet.ajstdlib/ajstdlib.scala Fri Dec 25 22:53:09 2009 -0500 +++ b/trunk/infrastructure/net.appjet.ajstdlib/ajstdlib.scala Thu Mar 11 14:38:29 2010 -0700 @@ -217,6 +217,7 @@ val debug = false;</p> val props = new Properties; + props.put("mail.smtp.starttls.enable","true"); props.put("mail.smtp.host", config.smtpServerHost); props.put("mail.smtp.port", config.smtpServerPort.toString()); if (config.sm...

Lil' Miss Hummingbird

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:26:23 +0000

My uncle pointed out a hummingbird nest out front today and in typical obsessive fashion I just had to get a decent shot of the little gal. Little being the operative word here. I don’t think she was more than 6″ in length. Shooting through the window produced less than desirable results so I headed outside to get a closer look. She saw me coming and bolted. So, I took a chance and got myself in to the best position I could and waited for her to return. I set up my GorillaPod to work help brace the camera on my arm and my chest since I knew that I’d be shooting slow because this was in the shade. She must have felt sorry for me 'cause she came back and actually tolerated my little moves to get different angles. She actually let me move in to about 1.5 meters (the only reason I know this is because its the minimum focus distance on my 70-200) which allowed me to use the house as a brace to augment the GorillaPod and get a nice stable look at her. I had to push the ISO to 800 to get anywhere near a hand-hol...

Blinking question mark on OS X Boot? Don't panic just yet.

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:53:53 +0000

My MacBook Pro has been acting up again lately. Crashes, stalls, and overall wacky goodness. Yesterday I pulled it out of my bag after getting home and although I had put it to sleep, and confirmed that it was asleep before packing it away, it had crashed on the way home. When I restarted it I was faced with a question mark flashing inside a folder icon. The computer couldn’t find a valid system to boot from. I was able to see a valid system directory when using the Startup Disk selector on the OS X install DVD. I was able to use the Terminal on the DVD to browse the disk as well. All the data was still there. I tried everything that I could to get it back but had no success. That is, until I ran across a forum post that I now cannot find again. The person in the post had seemingly run across the solution by luck and I’m very thankful they did. The problem, as it turns out, was that my Master Boot Record was hosed. This is bad. The computer essentially couldn’t find anything that would tell it about the ha...

That means no iTunes movie purchases for me.

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:21:55 +0000

Ever. Sheerly out of principle. This is from a Macbook Pro “Late 2008” connected to a Samsung HDTV over VGA because all of my HDMI ports on the TV are taken.

WordPress TextMate bundle & BBEdit Clippings updated for WordPress 2.9

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:47:25 +0000

I can actually say that I’m timely on this one! The WordPress TextMate Bundle and the WordPress Clippings for BBEdithave been updated for WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”. There wasn’t a lot that changed as far as the bundle is concerned, most of it being about a shift in line numbers of where the functions are located in the core so that the Jump to Function action works properly. There’s also a built in About page now that provides documentation on the plugin as well as credits to the folks who have helped out. The versions of the Bundle and Clippings that are compatible with WordPress 2.8 have been tagged at GitHub, so they’re still available through a direct download or git checkout. On a side note, a less used (and maybe less practical resource), my WordPress Hooks Tag Cloud has been updated for the new 2.9 version (and, 2.8… whoopsie!). If you’re looking to see where a certain action or filter is used you can find that out there.

Quickly View WordPress DB Credentials

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:40:22 +0000

Stupid Gippy Trick #2495: The title may sound funny, and the concept a bit weird, but when you’re working on many different client servers, development and production servers, with as many different configurations, keeping track of DB credentials can get a little tiresome and time consuming. Here’s a command line one liner to print the database credentials so that they’re easily used to manually log in to MySQL or do a database dump: $ grep DB_ wp-config.php Which prints out: define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); define('DB_COLLATE', ''); Voila! No more switching back and forth from a credentials file or database or get the credentials, you simply use that’s already there. Somebody more ambitious could probably make a little function that parses that output and creates a MySQL login command or mysqldump command, but right now that’s not me. 😉

Dragon Scale Bracelet

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:42:30 +0000

Read on to see the setup for this shot. I’m doing some photography for Siouxsiequeues, a friend who makes hand made chain mail jewelry. Its turning out to be a fun exercise. I don’t have a heck of a lot of room to work and don’t have some of the proper tools for doing studio work, but we make due with what we have, eh? So, consider the attached photo above and then check out the setup shot below. I used: 3 muslin shims cut out from a cheap-o “studio box” aparatus 2 monkey wrenches 3 pieces of cardboard 1 medium box 1 roll of packing tape 3 pieces of duct tape 2 pieces of cardboard 1 black sheet 1 black ceramic cylinder (purchased for $1.99 at Goodwill) Who says you need the right tools 😉

Post Password Token plugin for WordPress updated.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:29:17 +0000

The Post Password Plugin plugin for WordPress has been updated to version 1.1. This new version adds a feature to hide all password protected posts from anything but direct access. With this option enabled password protected posts will not be pulled from the database unless the post is accessed directly. This allows for truly hidden posts that only you and the people you notify know about. This way your regular readers aren’t asking you why they can’t access certain posts and nobody knows that you’re posting items in secret. Also as of this release the old GitHub project repository is officially deprecated. It will be coming down soon, so direct any support requests to the contact page on this site. Thanks! You can download the new version here. Enjoy!

More Snow.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:49:21 +0000

And its downright cold. If you need to out side in Denver today take a Taun Taun to crawl inside of. You’re gonna need it!

WordPress TextMate Bundle updates

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:03:52 +0000

There’s been a few updates to the WordPress TextMate Bundle recently. **Function Definitions:**Use the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-H while the cursor is within or highlighting a WordPress function to bring up a tooltip that contains the current function’s usage and path to the file that defines the function. Goto Function: Included is functionality for defining the location of your local install of WordPress. This is defined in the plugins preferences (Command-Option-,). When this is defined the keyboard command Shift-Command-Option-H while the cursor is within or highlighting a WordPress function name will open the WordPress core file that contains the function definition for the current function. ReadMe.txt File Validation: Plugin README.txt files can now be validated from within TextMate. Simply select “Validate Plugin ReadMe” from the Bundle’s menu to send the current document to the online validator. Make updates to the ReadMe content and submit the changes directly within the popup window. Widget...

High-key Blue Snowball

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:46:06 +0000

I’ve been having fun just playing around with a single flash. This one is on the right track, but I blacked out the front a bit too much. I think with a little more fill up front this idea could be a winner. This is a Blue Snowball microphone, in case you’re interested. The wife has been taking voice acting lessons and this is how she’s doing her homework. We don’t have a really good area to do it yet, so we’re getting a bit of echo from the hardwood floors and walls and ceiling and bookcases and, well, you get the idea 😉

Happy pups…

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:47:01 +0000

Its a wet snow…

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:27:24 +0000

And sticking to everything. Also from today:

Post Password Token Plugin for WordPress updated

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:26:52 +0000

The Post Password Token Plugin for WordPress has been updated to version 1.0.2. This includes a minor bug fix for a permissions error when using the link from the plugins page to access the plugin options. If you’re not experiencing issues there’s no immediate need to update. Accessing the plugin from the link in the WordPress Admin Sidebar works as expected. This in no way effects the functionality of the plugin. This release also moves the plugin completely away from GitHub to reduce redundancy in hosting/versions.

That's gonna mess with the daily stats for a while.

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:20:18 +0000

I was hoping that some people would check out my pics of the 2009 Denver Zombie Crawl, but didn’t expect this. Yeah, for some on Flickr this is just another day, but for me this is huge! Thanks to all who have viewed, commented and favorited my images.

Zombie Crawl Denver, 2009

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:57:39 +0000

Too much fun. The only mishap of the night was the yahoo who decided to touch his (fake) bloody finger to the front element of my lens. I probably reacted a little strongly, but, hey, DON’T TOUCH YOUR STICKY HANDS ON MY CAMERA! ‘Kay? Good. More photos on my Flickr Set.

One Virus Too Many

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:04:47 +0000

So while my dad is reinstalling Windows after being wiped out by a virus that got by both IE 8 and McAfee I’m installing Fedora on an old HP I have lying around. My dad is gonna give Linux a try for a while. He’s fed up. I figure its worth a shot. He wants at least one secure machine to keep financial and personal info on. Windows has been a long running pain in the ass. From one end to the other. He’ll be experiencing it on an old HP ePC 1.7Ghz with 1GB of Ram and an onboard ATI video chipset that feels like it wants to die. All in all, though, it should let him feel it out to see if he can deal with it or not. I think once he grasps the differences between it and Windows he’ll be fine. On top of that I think he’s gonna be blown away by the relative quality of the free software that he’ll get with Linux. While I’d love to put him in a Mac I can’t justify telling him to spend that much money right now. He’s thinking about a new computer anyway and if he does a $750 Dell it’ll be a smoking machine, he can d...

A Grand View

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:28:18 +0000

The view from our temporary office space in the Newsgator offices in Downtown Denver. There’s a few smudges on the window, but they don’t exactly open on the 25th floor, either 😉

Reading Material

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:57:16 +0000

I’m finally admitting that I’m not gonna grow up and getting back to reading comic books. I had always known about Usagi Yojimbo by just seeing at comic shops but never picked it up to give it an honest look. It wasn’t until I saw an exhibit of Stan Sakai’s work on Usagi Yojimbo in San Francisco that I really got interested. So, its snowing outside, I have nothing much planned for the weekend other than walking the dogs, cleaning the kitchen (it needs a good scrubbing) and maybe checking out the art museum to see what’s new, so I should be able to get some quality time in with my new friends.

Function definition tool-tips added to the WordPress TextMate Bundle

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:27:36 +0000

I’ve added partial function definitions to the WordPress TextMate Bundle. The tool-tips list the function definition as well as the file and line number where the function is defined so that the full function definition can be looked up easily. The function definitions can be brought up by selecting or setting the carat inside the function that needs to be defined and then using Command-Shift-H to bring up the tool tip. I don’t list full definitions (ie: the textual definition that accompanies the functions in DocBlocks) mainly because I haven’t worked out the best way to parse the WordPress source tree to get those. I’m sure there’s a way, it just hasn’t been high priority yet.

2009 Avalanche Home Opener

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:54:17 +0000

Its kind of becoming a personal tradition to take a cappy iPhone panorama before the game whenever we get tickets to an Avalanche game. So, that said: Hopefully last night was a good sign of the season to come. A young and energetic team with a goalie that can stand his own. I don’t expect much from them this season, but if they play like they did last night then they’re gonna be fun to watch wether they win or lose. Oh, and see ya 'round, Joe! Thanks for the memories.

Sunrise at the track

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:11:29 +0000

I got to head out and shoot a Porsche Club track day at High Plains Raceway a couple of weeks ago. I’ve finally got enough of the images up to call 'em a set. But the one I like the best includes MY car 😉 If you’re interested in seeing a lot of Porsches on the track then check out the full set on Flickr (which, hopefully, will be completed some day now – uploading has been going slow).

Easy camera tethering with OS X 10.6

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:05:41 +0000

Little niceties keep popping up in OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. For example: its super easy now to tether a digital camera and use your Mac as a remote for the camera. Handy if you want to do a little live shooting action for whatever reason. The secret lies in the Image Capture application that you may or may not have noticed in the Applications folder. Its been there for years, but just recently started gaining some nice little features. This feature has actually been there since 10.5, but 10.6 brings it front and center and easy to use. Simply launch Image Capture with your camera attached to the computer and you’ll get the main Image Capture window with your camera listed on the left. If you camera isn’t already selected then select it. Next, from the File menu select “Take Picture”. You’ll get a window like the image below. From here its pretty self explanatory. You can set the camera to download to a folder or set it on a timer. I just might have to do a time lapse of our ever exciting work day downt...

WordPress users: USE A FAVICON!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:33:37 +0000

If you’re using a favicon on your site, then you’re fine. If you’re not: Just recently I noticed that WordPress will do something evil: if you don’t have a favicon.ico on your server WordPress will do a 404 return on the favicon.ico request that’s made by pretty much every modern browser. To say it again, slightly differently: if you’re not supplying a favicon.ico in your webroot, or defining a valid location specifically in your page head, WordPress is picking up the call for the non-existent file and spooling up just to show a 404 page. This means that you’re spinning up WordPress twice for every page load just by not having a file in the server root. BAD! BAD! BAD! There are 2 ways to fix this. Use a favicon. Get more details about favicons at favicon.com. You can also create one quickly if you just want to get at it. Modify WordPress’ .htaccess rules to exclude the favicon.ico file from being an option for WordPress to handle. I’ll show you how to do that next. The fix, if you don’t want to add a favic...

Flickr Image URLs to BBCode in OS X 10.6 and Automator

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:42:58 +0000

I guess its just kinda worked out that the forums that I participate in all deal with BBCode and their text formatting. S’okay – I’ve been doing one thing or another in BBCode since, well, BBCode came out. At one point I even wrote my own expanded parser. But the time involved in posting flickr images to these forums is ALMOST not worth the effort. The almost is 'cause I’m lazy. So what do lazy programmers do? They automate the task 😉 So here’s a little Automator Setup for OS X 10.6 (aka: Snow Leopard) that’ll add an item to the Services Menu so that all you have to do is highlight the HTML in Flickr to have it copied to the Clipboard. The heart of Service is a little PHP that uses preg_replace to transform the HTML in to BBCode. php -r 'echo preg_replace("/<a href=\"(.*?)\".*?><img src=\"(.*?)\".*?\/><\/a>/","[url=$1][img]$2[/img][/url]",fgets(STDIN));' $@; Next step is to add this to Automator. When Automator is launched it asks what kind of Template to use. For this we want “Service”. Services...

WordPress Post Password Token plugin

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:50:16 +0000

This post is to introduce the WordPress Post Password plugin. This is a plugin designed to allow users to access password protected content without having to enter the password. This plugin was built based on an idea from, and in cooperation with, Gordon Brander. The concept is simple: when a post is given a password the plugin will automatically generate a password token that when used in a URL will automatically log the user in to the post without them having to know or enter the password. So, in the event that you just want to keep the riff-raff out don’t care about “ultimate” security this plugin can help you distribute an easy to use URL instead of a URL & Password. The tokens are built based on the post’s password, so changing the post password will change the token. In the event that you need to reset all the tokens at once there’s a central “salt” that can be updated to force all the tokens to update. You can read more and download the plugin at the Post Password Plugin’s page on WordPress.org...

Grand Funk Railroad

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:19:34 +0000

Lead singer Max Carl and guitarist Bruce Kulick (also of KISS fame) on stage at The Taste of Colorado. Some years they manage to bring in some interesting bands – we got to see Cheap Trick a few years ago. We’ll have to see if I can make it back on Monday night for Foghat!

Quickly unserialize PHP array data in TextMate

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:51:14 +0000

Every once in a while I need to see what’s hiding in a serialized array in a database field and finally just wrote a little TextMate command to do the job for me. If I’m already working in that area of code its easier to just dump it someone in the page output to read it, or maybe dump it to the error_log, but often enough I just need to see the data. It turned out to be much different than I thought it’d be. I figured I’d write a line of Ruby to call PHP via the command line but then I found that PHP can be used directly in TextMate commands. Okay, that helps. So, add a new command to your bundle (I keep a bundle just for adding miscellaneous things to so that I don’t pollute other bundles and/or lose my additions when those bundles are upgraded). Make a new command whose Input is “Entire Document” and Output is “Replace Document”. Give it a key binding if you want. Then put this code in as the script: #!/usr/bin/env php <?php print_r(unserialize(file_get_contents('php://stdin'))); exit; There is no sa...

MacPorts, php5-mysql & mysqlnd

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:59:02 +0000

If you don’t know what that title says, don’t bother reading on 😉 A little useless history: MacPorts decided to use the recent release of PHP 5.3 to change the way they handle PHP5 Extensions. They used to be applied by the MacPorts variants system but have been changed (and appear to still be in transition) to each be their own package. This doesn’t bother me as it brings MacPorts to be more in line with how other package managers manage PHP extensions. What I didn’t notice in my most recent upgrade was that the php5-mysql extension defaults to using a new extension from MySQL called MySQL Native Driver. Its benefits sure look nice and I can understand why they’d want to unify everything. It would be nice if it worked in MacPorts… 'cause it doesn’t. And the error messages are stupidly cryptic. For example, I got these error messages when trying to load a project: PHP Warning: mysqli::real_escape_string() [<a href="mysqli.real-escape-string mysqli.real-escape-string</a>]: Couldn't fetch mysqli in /p...

Use array_merge to reorder arrays

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:56:42 +0000

This one is pretty fun. Well, at least I think it is. I was working with jQuery UI Sortables the other day and getting the reordered elements from jQuery back in to PHP for reordering via Ajax I ended up with an array whose elements matched the array keys of the array that I needed to order. Pretty standard fare. But I knew that there had to be a keen way to tackle the reordering process without going through some convoluted code. I was right. The way was the merge the two arrays. The way array_merge works is if your array keys are non-numeric and that if the second given array has the same keys as the first given array the data from the second given array replaces the data in the first given array without reordering the first given array. This was perfect since the two arrays will match perfectly in length and keys since they were built off the same data. This meany that all I had to do was take the new order data from jQuery Sortable, apply array_flip and merge the old ordered array in to the new order. ...

Type Casting in MySQL, One Possible Application

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:53:51 +0000

Long story short: If you have a closed system and have to store signed integers in a MySQL varchar field you can still get the benefits of the signed integer by type casting the field during the query. Sometimes when writing functionality for a system like WordPress that has a definite benefit to using the built in storage mechanism the data can end up being stored in less than optimal formats. For example, signed integers in a varchar field. Fortunately it can still be made to work using the built in MySQL CAST function. First, some test data if you want to follow along at home: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `casting_test` ( `number` varchar(255) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; INSERT INTO `casting` (`number`) VALUES ('2'),('-2'),('4'),('-4'),('10'),('-10'),('1'),('-1'); Now, in the following query I select the number field and cast it as a signed integer. Pretty straight forward. SELECT number, CAST(number as signed) AS sortfield FROM casting_test ORDER BY sortfield DESC The results are thi...

Taming iTunes lack of auto-window resizing

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:24:51 +0000

So, I’m constantly switching between using an external monitor and the built in display on my MacBook Pro. The only application that doesn’t seem to like this is iTunes. Whenever I unplug the monitor iTunes most of the time won’t adjust. The little green “resize window” button is of no use in iTunes because it toggles the mini-player. Or so I thought. If I option-click that little green button in the title bar, whatever that little guy is called, the window will resize to within the display bounds so that you can grab the corners again. No more changing the screen resolution just to fix the iTunes window. I can’t believe that it took me so long to get this.

Hiking: I don’t do enough of it.

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:58:56 +0000

I like it. The wife likes it. The dogs LOVE it. So why don’t we do more of it? Hm. At least I get a good pic or two when we do go.

Sort arrays by key revisited

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:15:19 +0000

I don’t know why but I have an infatuation with little utility functions. Its pretty stupid, but it keeps me entertained and provides me with a cheap blog post 😉 That and I’ve noticed it trending A LOT in my search keywords lately, so I figure I should post some updated and easier to use code. A few years ago I posted on Sorting Multidimensional Arrays by Key. The solution had php4 and php5 version and they were class based. Kind of awkward to use. They were originally dumped in a framework and accessed statically. After much tweaking and moving it from project to project it is down to a single function that also sorts arrays of objects my member variables. <?php /** * Sort an array by a key within the array_items * Items can be arrays or objects, but must all be the same type * * @example * $array = array( * 'mary' => array('age' => 21), * 'bob' => array('age' => 5), * 'justin' => array('age' => 15) * ); * $array = cf_sort_by_key($array,'age'); * # array is now: bob,justin,mary * * @param $data - the ...

WordPress Clippings Bundle for BBEdit

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:21:43 +0000

I was having one of those never ending text editor comparison conversations at work the other day and learned that BBEdit has some pretty easy to format Clipping functionality. Since I had pretty much built a generic function parser for yanking the information that I needed out of the WordPress source files for the WordPress TextMate Bundle I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to create a set of Clippings for BBEdit. Turns out I was right. They’re not as glamorous as the TextMate bundle, but they’re better than what was there before.

Late Night Summer Storm

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:49:38 +0000

A little noise, a little rain, and a lot of lights.

Excluding packages from MacPorts operations

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:59:33 +0000

As much as I’d like to jump whole hog on the PHP 5.3 bandwagon I just haven’t had the time to read up on the compatibility issues not work out what I’d need to do to maintain a PHP 5.2 and a PHP 5.3 environment on my computer. For now I’ll just be sticking with PHP 5.2.x. This creates a problem, though, as MacPorts constantly lists my PHP 5.2 as outdated. While I don’t want to upgrade to PHP 5.3 right away, I still want to have a quick and easy upgrade of everything else that I have installed. There’s not any clear documentation about excluding ports from a port command, but there is a tasty morsel in the port man page. Logical operators "and", "or", "not", "!", "(" and ")" may be used to combine individual portnames, port glob patterns and/or pseudo-portnames to construct complex port expressions that expand to the set of matching ports. For example: port upgrade installed and apache* port echo maintainer:jberry and uninstalled and \ ( category:j...

Simple, but handy .htaccess tricks

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:14:34 +0000

These two have always been questions in my mind but until recently I’ve never had the need to actually put time in to satisfying my curiosity and as I look around I haven’t (easily) found any real world examples of these out there. So, we all know how to set up basic HTTP authentication, right? Good. Here we go… You might have something like this in your .htaccess file: AuthType Basic Require valid-user AuthName "Halt! Who goes there?" AuthUserFile /www/passwords/.passwd Now with just a few tweaks we can make less of a simple all or nothing wall between your users and the content and set some of it free. Allowing Access via IP Address So, you want to require a password to outsiders but you and your co-workers are getting tired of entering the username and password for every small visit needed to the site? If your office has a static IP address, allow it. AuthType Basic Require valid-user AuthName "Halt! Who goes there?" AuthUserFile /www/passwords/.passwd Allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Satisfy Any What we’re t...

Video Tutorials: just because you can, doesn't mean you should

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:20:04 +0000

I’m sorry, this is pretty much a rant. To all the sites that think video tutorials are a good thing: please rethink this. When people need a tutorial they need something they can follow along with step by step. Often times I want to come back and just read one part of it again. Or, heaven forbid, print it out to take it with me to where I need it. Following along with a video tutorial is nigh impossible. I’ve gotten to the point now that once I see a tutorial is in video form that I leave, I don’t care, because no matter what the reputation of the person giving the tutorial is I know that I’ll have a much easier time getting through a written tutorial. This is magnified 10 fold if I’m trying to get some info at work. I don’t have the time to get through your entire blabbering video. You don’t know how to present. You don’t have a good enough mic or a good enough voice for that matter. Your cadence sucks. And to boot I’m gonna be interrupted 10 times while trying to get through it so having to re-watch and ...

Announcing the SP Source Code Highlighter plugin for WordPress

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:55:04 +0000

Maybe you noticed already, maybe you didn’t (I’ll wager on the latter 😉 ) that recently this site got new source code highlighting in posts. Or, should I say, that it GOT source code highlighting in posts. I had made a simple Script Source viewer a while back. Something simple and straight forward that I could use to display full source code files in an easy to read and copy format (since the source is an ordered list the line numbers don’t copy). I was so happy with the way the source highlighting along with the line numbers turned out that I really wanted to put that in my posts. But I guess not wanted bad enough to do right away. So, now I finally got around to putting this together for use inline in my posts and decided to package it together for public consumption. The highlighting is pretty durned nice and fully CSS configurable. It supports a decent number of languages and if it doesn’t support your language of choice, chances are there’s something in there that’s close enough. The only drawback, a...

Quickly validate PHP files

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:13:54 +0000

Ever needed to quickly scan a directory full of PHP files for syntax errors? You can do this quickly on a *nix command line with: find . -type f -name \*.php -exec php -l {} \;

Storage Beast

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:18:31 +0000

Unibody MacBook Pro + MCE OptiBay + Seagate Momentus 500GB drive = 768 GB of useable hard drive space. I bit the bullet and purchased the MCE OptiBay and a big fat hard drive for my MacBook Pro. I needed more space to allow my penchant for virtual machines to grow as well as keep my ever expanding music library with me instead of having it live only at home. Though its been worth it, it could be better. Installation was a bit odd as the hard drive carrier from MCE didn’t fully fit as a replacement to the internal DVD bay. I had to put a spacer in there with the assembly to limit its side to side movement because they only provided mount points for 1 of the 3 mounting screws. Look at step #12 of ifixit.com’s teardown. The two screws circled in orange are not accounted for in the OptiBay assembly, leaving the bay to possibly move side to side. This was pretty disappointing but not a deal breaker since I was able to securely rig it in there with a little spacer. If I were smart I would have waited to do the ...

WordPress TextMate bundle updated for WordPress 2.8

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:33:03 +0000

The WordPress TextMate bundle has been updated for WordPress 2.8. New items include: quick access to esc_ functions. Mark Jaquith great writeup of the new escaping functions as well as the reasoning behind them new WordPress 2.8 widget templates. Head over to WP Engineer for a tutorial on the new widgets. The new OO structure is a welcome change. Very, very welcome. Get more information on the WordPress TextMate Bundle project page, download it from the Github project page, or, if you installed it via GetBundles (which is really the best way to keep up with it) you can simply upgrade it from TextMate. If you don’t already use GetBundles, you really should. Use Subversion to install it from that url.

Foxes

Sat, 09 May 2009 23:17:06 +0000

Every year its not a matter of if we’ll get foxes in the neighborhood or not, its a matter of where they’ll be. This year we got a family of 2 adults and 4 young-uns just down the street from us. I’ve seen one or two on occasion as the weather gets warmer, but recently they’ve been out as a family, rummaging through the grass and bushes in search of something to eat, or just to take some time and play. They’re cute. Damn cute. So damn cute I want my next pet to be a fox! 😉 This little guy on the left took a particular interest in me for a while but eventually just stopped paying attention to me and just ate some grass so I could get some fun shots of him with just a 50mm lens (~80mm on my 20D). He still manage to get a pose or two in, just for good measure. One of the adults was trying to get behind me for a while but eventually gave up. The entire group knew I was there the whole time but eventually just accepted that I was going to be around just went about their business. I got to witness a few mice b...

Announcing the WordPress TextMate Bundle

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:11:41 +0000

As the name implies this is a TextMate bundle to assist with WordPress development. Where I work we’re on WordPress almost every day doing this or that and it gets pretty tedious to not only remember the schizophrenia that is PHP syntax, but the schizophrenia that is my own code as well as the schizophrenia that is the WordPress code base (don’t take that the wrong way, pretty much every code base out there is a little bit schizo). To that end I got together with my co-worker Gordon and started hacking together this bundle. Gordon’s a detailed oriented guy, and I like to pretend to be, so together we were able to sufficiently over-analyze the situation and put together what we feel is a heck of a good resource for developing under WordPress with TextMate (someone I know has already taken part of it and converted it to emacs! Heathen 😉). So if you’re a TextMate user you should check out the WordPress TextMate Bundle and let us know what you think! This is the first official release announcement and it is ...

Client side pre- and post-svn hooks with Unix Aliases

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:31:10 +0000

Its probably nothing new but I came up with a way to do client side post- or pre-svn actions. Its nothing revolutionary but has already come in handy. The script is *nix only (though I don’t see why the same process wouldn’t work on Windows if it supports command line aliases like *nix does). I had to write this bash script because we had files at work that needed to be version controlled but still writable by the server process. The need arose because when Subversion updates a file it updates the files permissions with that of the user that did the SVN action. I’m not entirely sure but I think this is because the file isn’t actually updated, but replaced by Subversion (if anyone can confirm that, I’d appreciate it). So, this script is pretty simple. It sits in between you and Subversion via an alias and passes everything it gets through to Subversion and then operates based on the action that was taken in Subversion. In the case of the sample file, we look to see if an update has been performed. If so, we...

Matching Wedding Rings

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:26:51 +0000

The wife and I decided that we should finally follow through on getting matching wedding rings since we finally found a designer that we both really like. The designer is John Hardy and the rings are fantastic. Its significantly larger and heavier than my old one, but with much much more character. Much better than a traditional band. Much more interesting. More images over at my Flickr photostream.

Search and replace directly within MySQL.

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:21:06 +0000

MySQL always amazes me with the breadth of functionality that it has. Too often we just use it to push and pull information from the database. So when I hit an occasion where I can so in a single SQL statement that would require a time consuming PHP I get excited. Here, I had to so some simple string replacement on some database values. I had some PDF files in a WordPress MU database that didn’t get updated by one means or another when upgrading from WordPress MU 2.6 to 2.7. WordPress 2.6 stores attachment location data will full file paths, so that when the database is moved to another server the file paths are wrong and need updating. This was fixed in 2.7 by storing just the path relative to the upload root. What that also means, though, is that when WordPress MU encounters that full file path that permalink generation borks. So, with the scene set, here’s the code. Its pretty simple. We simply walk the database table using the REPLACE() function (found on the MySQL.com string functions page) where we e...

Pearl Jam: Ten > Ten (Legacy Edition)

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:38:38 +0000

I have to admit I’m a Pearl Jam whore. I’m so in love with their live recordings that I typically prefer them to any studio work, though that’s not to say that I dislike their studio work. That said, here goes: Its too nice. And it doesn’t feel cohesive. The old recordings have, to use a completely overused and subjective measuring stick, a warmer and more natural sound. This new mix sounds like a studio mix. While the original mix sounds like it could have been recorded live and that there’s some kind of interaction between the band members the new mix sounds like it very well could have been put together from sessions where the band members never even saw each other. Just by listening I know they’re in a studio. That feeling goes away as the power in songs picks up, but overall it sounds so very sterile with too much emphasis on Eddie’s voice I keep cutting new mixes off half way to go back to the originals. What I’m finding that enjoy about the originals is the cohesive sound that they generate. I can’...

Mac OS X, Subversion, and Keychain

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:30:36 +0000

I just learned this morning that Subversion since version 1.4 will cache passwords on OS X using the OS X Keychain. Lack up support for multiple passwords with Subversion has been a frustration for me for quite a while, but lo and behold its been under my nose the whole time. Note: This is all based on command line usage. I’m not gonna speak for any of the SVN utilities out there. The trick is that you need to let Subversion ask you for your password, not supply it in the SVN command string. So, while its tempting to do: svn co --username=me --password=that https://example.com/svn/repo . We should actually be doing: svn co --username=me https://example.com/svn/repo . We’ll then be prompted with: Authentication realm: Password for 'me': Enter the password and its cached with the Keychain instead of as plain text. The entry is still retained in ~/.subversion/svn.simple/server-name-hash but now it contains a reference to the Keychain for the password instead of storing it in the file. To verify that the passw...

Holy Spam, Batman!

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:56:37 +0000

Sheesh! I think the spam world noticed that I switched to WordPress. Plenty of Spam in just a few hours. Looks like I’ll need to port my old spam reduction strategy over to WordPress. Might make for a decent plugin too, who knows.

Site rebuilt on WordPress

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:22 +0000

After much futzing, fidgeting, and neglecting of other things I’ve finally got this site converted to WordPress. It was just a logical thing to do for many reasons (one of which that I’m in it so damn much I know how to hack the crap out of it. The other main one being: let someone else build the core, I just want to extend and use it). Read on in you’re interested in some of the high-level details about what’s different. The Theme Since I’m working on it so much I decided to use the Carrington Theme Framework (of which I’m now a contributor, whee!). I opted to use Carrington Jam (scroll to the bottom, there’s no anchors in the page to directly link to) since it is just a functional Carrington Framework just waiting to be arranged the way you like it. Pretty durnded handy. Lightbox has given way to Thickbox. Why? Well, simply 'cause I’ve heard talk of it at work and its being integrated in to Carrington Blog for the galleries so I figured I’d give it a shot. S’okay, I guess. I had to hack it to make it beh...

I should redesign

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Not by much, but the next iteration will surely be more friendly to the Flickr medium photo size. Right now Medium doesn’t fit, and posting photos as the small size just sucks.

Of MacBook Pros and Hard Drive swapping

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 08:30:00 +0000

I don’t think Apple really thought this one through. The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros have easily replaceable hard drives. This is one of the things that really made me want to get one as I wanted to have a dedicated Linux hard drive to play around on and not bork my main work drive when I decide to go tinkering in the Linux innards. Well, lo and behold, Apple done made a stupid. On the one hand they come up with a pretty neat system of using little stubbs instead of screws in the standard hard drive mount points on the hard drive itself so that the hard drive could be mounted in an anti-vibration rig. Pretty smart. What they didn’t do was make those nubs a part that any user can get a hold of. That’s right – the stupid proprietary nubs that are used to mount a hard drive in the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros cannot be obtained by us mere mortals. I spent 15 minutes trying to get an Apple store sales person to even understand WHY I would want to be able to quickly swap hard drives. Then I waited another 15...

WordCamp Denver, 2009. My humble experience.

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:37:00 +0000

Amazingly enough I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Denver. As nervous as I was before hand (I very well could have puked) I came out pumped. Hopefully a few others did as well. Say what? My talk was about the basics of WordPress plugin development: actions and filters. The amount of ground I had to cover was akin to having 10lbs. of shit in a 5lb. bag. In retrospect I could have cut one part of the plugin short to leave myself time to cover the other bases at a bit more of a leisurely pace, but in reality what I needed was about 2 more hours to have time to discuss what I was doing and why. Hopefully, though, the amount of ground covered in a short amount of time was a decent illustration of just how quickly one can develop for WordPress. While its not the optimal system (don’t take that the wrong way, nothing is optimal in the blogging space right now) WordPress makes changing the system very straight forward. The responses vary from WTF? all the way around Thank You! I’m not too worried about th...

Lipsum Plugin for WordPress, Version 2

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:14:00 +0000

After a while of using and not using this plugin I decided that it needed an update. The previous version would simply insert paragraphs of lipsum but now the plugin is set up to return a few helpful elements as well. Supported Elements Now supported is: 1-10: A number from 1-10 will insert that number of paragraphs of lipsum text. ol: Inserts an ordered list ul: Inserts an unordered list dl: Inserts a definition list table: Inserts a fully semantic table blockquote: Inserts a blockquote with citation Items can be combined to get the layout you want. For example, to get 3 paragraphs, an unordered list, and then a closing paragraph would be: {lipsum:3} {lipsum:ul} {lipsum:1} Why? While I know that there are plenty of people supplying demo content out there sometimes we need to test the creation of pages or shortcode and input/output filters. Having dummy text easily at hand is very useful. At least, to me it is. So, there it is. Hopefully one or two people find this useful. If not, well, it kept me entertai...

jQuery Image Slider: Improved

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:16:00 +0000

In a previous post I talked about a quick and dirty jQuery image slider technique that was conceived late at night and on a tight deadline. Now, with the attention of a friend (thanks John!) and a little time to work on it, the image slider has been improved! Ya. View the demo here Improving the old This version reduces the amount of code by using jQuery chaining to put together the navigation list at the same time the link actions are defined. The script wasn’t that heavy before but this does a lot to streamline the code, reduce duplicate loops, and overall make the code more readable. Adding new New in this version is a quick snippet to take the url hash and try to click a slider link to change to that image – that way an image can be targeted on page load. The url hash is updated on each click as well to make hotlinking to the selected image a breeze. If multiple sliders are to be included on a single page this will want to be limited to a single slider or altered so that the hash reflects which list it...

Stupid ASCII Addition Answer Page

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:51:00 +0000

So, I found a neat little math trick this morning that would build numbers out of ascii characters, so I modded it to respond to user content. Sound riveting and useless? Ya, well, it is. But it kept me entertained making it. The Stupid ASCII Addition Answer Page. Update: 2009-02-20 And then there’s the analytics… So, when doing a small project like this that you’d still like to track the analytics on be sure to consider your analytics. Since this stupid page’s actions are controlled via query vars I’ve now got many many variations of the page hit in my analytics. So, consider the ramifications of the stupid little project and filter the vars accordingly. Gah!

What I want in my next digital camera

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:25:00 +0000

I want a Pentax K1000 or Canon AE1 but with a digital sensor. That’s about it. I want a manual control only camera with a digital sensor. Keep the cost down by keeping out all the fancy dancy features. Here’s the basic features I would like to see: Manual Mode Aperture Priority Shutter Priority Custom White Balance PC flash sync & non-TTL hot shoe Metal frame Spot meter “Nothing special” LCD Maybe it could support autofocus lenses Seriously. I would love this camera. Lightweight, inexpensive, and maybe with a nice retro design. Canon? Pentax? Please? Those old K Mount and FD lenses are still freakin’ great (and I have some!). I’d love to be able to put them to use and get a small and convenient SLR. C’mon – they’d sell to all us fogey’s who remember the good ol’ days when you didn’t know how well you’d shot until you developed the film.

Mess!

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:50:00 +0000

This place is a mess! And is old. I really need to just bite the bullet and get this all on WordPress.

Javascript table row highlighting. Then and Now.

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:19:00 +0000

Just so that you're sufficiently warned: This post offers no practical information. Its a "remember when? didn't that suck?" post. I think it was 2004. Prototype.js was new and was rocking my world. But it was still just a few convenience features put on top of JavaScript. I needed to stripe table rows dynamically and ended up with 2 functions and ~25 lines of code. My, how things have changed.

Hm.

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:17:00 +0000

Man, how long has it been? Too long. I really should pull myself away and write some more. Its just that I’ve been spending so much time inside WordPress lately I haven’t had much time to spend on my own framework which I was hoping to port this blog to. That might have gotten more attention if I had been writing more… Or, I could turn this in to a “What I learned about WordPress today” blog which I’m sure I could gather a lot of traffic with. We’re doing some wonderful WP hacking around here and I’ve managed to get WP doing things that I didn’t think it could do (authenticated file access, anybody?). Anyway. Here’s hoping I can get more writing in this year. I’m not one much for making new year’s resolutions but I really should aim to create more content than I consume this year. That will entail writing more and I like that. Even if I have bad writing skills… its still therapeutic.

3 year old bug, really?

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 07:19:00 +0000

Seriously? I was being diligent, not upgrading Apache through MacPorts 'cause I didn’t want to deal with the 3 year old bug that causes and Apache upgrade to overwrite your vhosts file, but MacPorts decided that since I was upgrading PHP that Apache should be upgraded as well. So it blew away my vhosts file. Bastards. Oh, and, Time Machine to the rescue!

Gears of War 2 and getting my shit together

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:35:00 +0000

I haven’t been playing a lot of video games lately, the last one that I got through was Portal and I left Half Life 2 and Bioshock each halfway through, but this one’s gonna change that. I need to play a little bit before it hits so I don’t come off as some lil’ bitch n00b when we all get in to co-op and multi-player. And here’s the “but…” With the new job I’ve been working a lot (not tirelessly, but admirably) and just overall I’ve been feeling a bit flat for a while so there’s just a whole lot that hasn’t gotten done. It could have something to do with the new job dealing almost exclusively in WordPress and this being, really, my first exposure to WordPress. I’m literally the kid in the candy store and the guy sinking in quicksand at the same time. So much I can do, but so much to learn at the same time. That has taken its toll on the home life. Not with my relationship with my wife (though it has been the subject of discussion on several occasions), but just in the amount of stuff around the house that ...

30 Minute, 4 AM, jQuery image slider

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:37:00 +0000

Update: This script has been overhauled since this post. View the new code and demo here. As fate would have it the first night of my trip to Provo, Utah turned in to an all night work session to get a few things wrapped up so that we could release them during WordCamp Utah. As it turned out we needed a last minute feature to show off some images. Thanks to the miracle of jQuery it turned out to be all of a 30 minute venture. I have to admit it feels a bit hackish, but in my defense it was done at 4am. Please also keep in mind I’m writing this after being up all night. For Example First, the example: Click here to view the example page. The goal was to have a screenshot gallery viewer that nicely and quietly sat in the page so that we could maintain the simple & clean layout of the page and also allow us to dynamically update the featured images and not have to fuss with any logic to make new images work and also not have to load a carousel plugin to do it. After a quick conversation with Alex (the bo...

Quick thought for the day

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:38:00 +0000

Do you think that tattoo artists would lose a significant amount of business if they all refused to tattoo drunk people? Update: How about the link that prompted this post. She had to be drunk. Really. Could she have been sober?

Canadian Immigration Laws

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:31:00 +0000

Can anyone tell me details about Canadian Immigration laws? Depending on what happens in November I might need those. Update: Guess I’m gonna have to do this myself. Eh? (see that? I can be a good Canadadian). http://www.canadavisa.com/.

Puddlemonkey.com updated

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:16:00 +0000

Puddlemonkey.com has received its long overdue redesign. The update also puts the site on WordPress. The site is about the writing so the design is meant to be playful and stylish, yet still leave the content as the main focus. There’s still plenty of work to be done but this gets it off the ground and should alleviate the “I’ll write when it looks better” argument that I’ve been hearing for a long time now (pretty much since the last version of the blog was abandoned). So, here’s to PuddleMonkey – head on over and check out Puddlemonkey.com’s new digs. Be sure to mouse over that header a bit… I still just marvel at its sheer useless eye candy.

Is it the DNC or a donut convention?

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:23:00 +0000

Sorry, I couldn’t resist that joke. The DNC spared no expense when it comes to security. There’s police and sheriff deputies from all over. They’re easily the most prominent aspect of the convention (besides the road closures). Riot gear from top to bottom. Man and horse alike with face shields and body armor. Armored vehicles, tactical SUVs and cop cars everywhere. The sirens are almost constant. The news reports filled with stories of reporters being arrested and protesters being abused. I figured on some reports of police brutality but it has been less than I expected. I do have to commend the organizers, though. They’ve managed to somehow keep all the ruckus off to the east of the convention and the Pepsi Center. Mostly around Civic Center Park. There’s been a few marches up Speer but that’s about it. Down and around the Pepsi Center there’s a lot of sirens and a constant stream of helicopters but otherwise its just lots of people going about their business. Little hassle, mostly just crowded. I’m not...

Stop moving my iPhone icons!

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:20:00 +0000

Hey, Apple: I know of all the things that are wrong with the iPhone (what, you mean its not perfect?) is that my icons move with every application update… bah! Is it a stupid thing to be complaining about? I don’t think so. Part of being a designer means having a propensity to be anal-rententive about how things are arranged. In this case my icon arrangement and placement is deliberate and based on categorization and usage. Simply put – I placed the icons in that order, and on that page, for a reason. Is it really that hard to remember which icon was where and properly replace it after an update? I’m surprised an interface designer let this one through 'cause it seems like a no-brainer to me that an update should not re-arrange the interface. Oh, and do something about my battery life. It is atrocious.

SU from within VIM

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:22:00 +0000

I can’t even count how many times I’ve edited a read only file in VIM, not even noticing the warning that pops up telling me so. Its a royal pain to type in thing twice, especially config changes. After a little looking around I found a way around it. Its not perfect and its not really a solution, per se, its just a way to get around having to type things twice when you forget to sudo. The if you don’t have a .vimrc then create one. Add this line to it: cmap w!! %!sudo tee > /dev/null % So, when you forget to sudo in and need to save that file this will get you fixed up. First, exit edit mode by pressing escape, then enter a colon to start the command mode, then enter: w!! While I’m not 100% sure what is happening in the background I think what happens in that VIM’s buffer gets overwritten with admin privileges, essentially sudoing the changes into the file. Pretty slick. Not a replacement for doing it right the first time, but it’ll work in a pinch. Updated 2008-08-27: I wrote it down wrong, which means i...

SSH Connect Script, Hax, Whatever…

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:58:00 +0000

Don't do this: this script pre-dates suitable password managers. This is not how you manage server access! I work with many different servers at work. Most tedious part is that I need to ssh in to them on a regular basis. Not all of them can I, nor do I feel should I, be adding SSH keys on to. So I finally got around to writing a little script to hold onto logins and passwords in a handy little connection script. Caveat Emptor… Is it a bit insecure to put these into a single file in my home folder? Maybe. Is it even less secure that said file is executable? Sure. Is it damn convenient? Yes. So, now on to it: #!/bin/bash # # Server Nicknames # # ServerName nickname='me@server.com'; nicknamepassword='12345'; nicknameextra='an extra reminder'; # # etc... # Do not edit below this line # if ! [ $1 ]; then echo '_ssh error:'; echo ' please enter a dev server address'; echo ''; exit 1; fi SERVER=$(eval echo \${$1:=0}); PASSWORD=$(eval echo \${$1password:=0}); EXTRA=$(eval echo \${$1extra:=0}); if ! [ $SERVER == ...

WordPress Lipsum Plugin

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:57:00 +0000

Update 2009-02-22: This plugin has been upgraded to version 2. Read about it by clicking here. Tired of copying/pasting Lipsum placeholder text? Me too. Behold Gippy’s Lipsum Plugin. Bask in its laziness. With a simple {lipsum} in your post, page or comment you can embed 3 paragraphs of Lipsum text. It works on the creation or edit of those items. Want a more specific number of paragraphs? Ok, you can do {lipsum:1} to get just on paragraph, or {lipsum:5}, all the way up to 10. I stopped at 10 'cause its a reasonably long enough post or page to fill. Tested with WordPress 2.0+ though there’s nothing special about it and it should work with 1.5 as well (in fact, I think it does, but you shouldn’t be running anything that old anyway). The text could be streamlined a bit while sensing the current activity and I’ll do that once I’m more familiar with WordPress, but in getting started this will do. So, now, go forth and pay attention to better things and let the placeholder text take care of itself. Update 2009-...

MySQL bug with GROUP BY

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:12:00 +0000

Found a nice little bug in the stable version of MySQL5 in the MacPorts repository yesterday. Version is 5.051a and when using GROUP BY it ignored ORDER BY DESC and returned results in ascending order. Its been a known bug since MARCH. The MySQL5-devel port is working fine in the mean time, but holy shit. I have to wonder a few things. how did it take me this long to find the bug (to my credit, I have no idea when macports pushed 5.0.51x). why in the world hasn’t it been fixed or patched yet? Edit: Now that I think a bit harder on the issue I might have noticed it earlier and chalked it up to being a n00b when I wrote other queries. When I upgraded this site I had to rewrite some queries that had mulitple joins and group by statements… I wonder if that was the same bug?

Apple's MobileMe drops support for IE6

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:41:00 +0000

For PC: Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional (SP2) or later; Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3, Firefox 2, or later. Microsoft Outlook 2003 or later recommended. So, Apple’s pushing the dependency wagon to IE7. Love it. The faster IE6 is out of here the better.

“su”; to root on OS X without enabling the root user

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:56:00 +0000

I guess this is an old unix trick, but I didn’t know it: sudo su - You must have sudo rights (ie: be an administrator). Thanks, Jeremy!

Is Twitter a bit creepy? And spammy.

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:42:00 +0000

I was a bit late to the Twitter party (I’m WookeeBoy, if you’re interested). I see the value, and the fun, but am finding that part of it makes me feel a bit awkward. I’ve got followers. Not many. Some are friends. Others are, well, I don’t know. Its kind of weird. Some Tweet a lot, others not so much. Some can spell. One in particular can’t spell for shit. I’m sure they came across me in one fashion or another but what made them want to follow me really makes me wonder: who are you and what are you doing here? One, in the last 5 minutes even, was SPAM! SPAM SPAM SPAM on Twitter! Sheesh. Another one has no posts, but is following 36,851 people. I don’t get it.

Who would do such a thing?

Mon, 26 May 2008 17:00:00 +0000

The wife noticed a flash in a trash can in our alley and asked if it was mine… I said no and asked her to bring it to me. Someone had thrown away a poor ol’ Vivitar 283 Flash. After a little cleanup he still has some paint on him, but not on the bulb, and he works fine. Maybe a bit slow on the recharge, but otherwise he’s in fine operating condition. I’ve got the wife trained very well… spotting photography equipment on the fly like that. 😉

I'm one sorry out of shape sod

Sun, 25 May 2008 01:22:00 +0000

Biking to work for the last week and a half has really shown me just how out of shape I am. Compound that with pulling weeds for most of the day today and I’m one sore puppy… and a sorry excuse for an active human being. Ouch.

Comcast Sucks

Fri, 16 May 2008 22:39:00 +0000

'nuff said.

Furry Scurry

Sun, 04 May 2008 09:51:00 +0000

Did the DDFL Furry Scurry yesterday. A “Charity Walk” to raise money for the Dumb Friends League. Here’s one, more at the link below. More from the Furry Scurry.

Gippy's Got a New Job

Fri, 02 May 2008 22:47:00 +0000

Just when you least expect it life changes. And quickly at that. Long story short. A cold call from a recruiter on last Wednesday leads to me signing a work contract with a new employer the following Wednesday. Wow! I’ve never heard of that happening before, let alone with a company that has me this excited to work for them. The kind of work I’ll have my mitts in to has me very excited. My current job is all about securing information and controlling access. This new job is about gathering and distributing information. Such a wild contrast. Its working in some new methodologies that I’m gonna have to pick up pretty quick, like REST, but as I look at those ideologies I find that for the most part I’ve been following them but with slight ways in which I fall short, but that I understand. So it should be a busy, but non-stressful transition. The relationship should be mutually beneficial – I feel I’ve got a lot to offer as well as a lot to learn. On top of that it is downtown, so we’ll be able to sell a car a...

Neglected!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:51:00 +0000

Yep. Work has been time consuming. I’ve been reading more (currently reading up “World War Z”). I’ve been focusing more on photography and boning up on my lighting skills. Been programming plenty, just all at work. Life is good, but this poor, poor, excuse for a blog is dying a horrible death. He didn’t totally like the server upgrade, I think it was the change in MySQL, and I still haven’t fixed all of it. This code base is so old I could probably ditch it and rebuild with the framework that I’ve since built and save a ton of time. htDig didn’t like the move either. And apparently I’ve left Magic Quotes on in PHP. And the RSS feed is borked. Hm. I just browsed the code base… how amateur! How far I’ve come. Wow. Maybe I will switch the framework and keep writing… I do enjoy dumping garbage on the internet once in a while 😉

Server Room

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:13:50 +0000

We needed a shot of a server room crowded with janitorial equipment. Something that no IT Manager would ever let happen, not even if the equipment were dry and empty and if everybody “promised to be careful”. Just not gonna happen. So I got permission to shoot our server room and then reconstructed the angle in another part of the building to get the equipment at as close an angle as possible. Next I composited them together, added some suds and a puddle and opened up the right side to fit the banner design I wanted to do. This photo shoot didn’t just yield this composition. I also came out with a fantastic shot of the Server Room at work – a typical “Hero” angle. Because of the tricky lighting and that I only had 2 functional flashes with me this ended up being a composite of multiple shots.

It is Alive!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:58:00 +0000

After a probably much non-missed stint of downtime this piece of shit blog is finally back up and running. The upgrade process took a bit more than expected. Read on for the whole boring story. Dink, donk… OW! While upgrading the hard drive died. Figures. So I took the opportunity to do a few things that I’ve been wanting to do. I rearranged the hard drives a bit and also decided to upgrade. I ordered a SATA 300 PCI card and purchased a 500 GB SATA 300 drive. If I can get to CompUSA again before it closes, and after it does it next round of markdowns I’ll purchase another one for a total of 1GB of storage. That’ll be nice since I’m not nearly as diligent about backups as I should be. Though I’m still not convinced that I’ll use the entire space as backup. I’m still not sure what to do. I don’t want to give up the Ultra SCSI2 LVD raid. Though its only 32GB formatted its nice and fast and makes a superb Photoshop scratch disk. But with those in I only have 2 other HD bays. If I get the extra SATA drive that ...

Embed Flash Video in a page via JavaScript

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:31:00 +0000

Don't do this: the techniques used in this post and the sample pages use older techniques and don't account for modern browser safety precautions. Consider this a historical curiosity, like a circus freak show… I just finished up a new version of my script that embeds flash video in a web page to make it more diversified in what kinds of video it can handle. There are some that will not work since they’re doing some url manipulation on the ID of the flash object that make it impossible to gather the requisite information via the URL, but for the most part this script can cover most sites that are worth doing. New from the ground up The script has been completely overhauled and contains some major improvements. First off, it can handle many different sources besides just YouTube and Google Video. It currently handles video from YouTube, Google Video, College Humor, MetaCafe, LiveVideo, 5 Minutes, Live Leak, and Crackle. It can also be easily modified to at least understand other video sites so that ...

tmbundle update

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:32:00 +0000

I’ve been making incremental updates to my TextMate bundle updater for a while now and can finally publish the updated script. It now properly handles updating installed bundles and adds the ability to update only a single bundle and to list installed bundles. Read on for the nitty gritty. The file remains at a new URL: tmbundle.sh. Again, this only works with the SVN bundle repository. It will not update the default bundles that ship with TextMate. So be sure that if you need to update a default bundle you need to install it before updating it, however, if you do try to update a non-installed bundle this version of the script will attempt to find and install that bundle. Its not perfect – an error will be ugly, but not harmful. I haven’t fully taken advantage of error codes to intelligently handle errors – that will come in a future update. The scripts basic functions haven’t changed, but I’ll still do a full description here. Listing available bundles ./tmbundle.sh list This will show all bundles availab...

MacHeist – not this year

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:00:00 +0000

I was one of the people last year that jumped on the MacHeist bundle with glee because it had some interesting applications like Disco and Delicious Library, but I did it mainly for TextMate. To this day I use TextMate almost every day. The others, not so much. Disco once in a while and I’m not sure that I even installed most of the others. My reasoning has nothing to do with the “OMG teh developers are getting screwed” fest that went on around this last year. The developers wouldn’t do it if they didn’t see value. So, with that in mind and looking at the list of applications this year I can reason my way out of doing this year’s heist. 1Password While I really like the concept of 1Password MacHeist actually did something weird: They gave away Wallet during the missions. I’ve been taking advantage of OS X’s keychains lately and getting Wallet for free makes this hard to rationalize. Coversutra Coversutra is an interesting program as well, but unfortunately lies in a very crowded space where a wealth of fre...

Road to Recovery

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:13:03 +0000

Maybe its a bit cliche, but its fun imagery. We wanted recovery to be right around the corner, or just over that hill. Once a good stock image of a roadway was found I constructed the road sign in PhotoShop to make the scene. Pretty straight forward but a fun use of smart objects and vector drawing tools.

My New Best Friend

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:23:00 +0000

Ok, so my beautiful wife is my best friend, but this is running a close second 😉 I’ve actually had it for a few weeks now and just can’t get over it. I came into a little money and decided to treat myself to a new lens – a Canon EFS 10-22mm zoom lens with the lens hood (I don’t like to use UV filters for protection, so lens hoods are mandatory). It was a debate wether to go with one of the cheaper Sigma or Tokina models, but for once I wanted to actually a own good, high end Canon lens (even if its not L glass). Oh, and its so much fun… if you’re debating this lens, don’t. Just get it. Obligatory Samples Here’s a couple pics from the new lens (click 'em to embiggen 'em): This is a straight up photo, at 10mm, about f9, I think. This photo is an HDR photo, about 6 exposures, f9 as well. I have yet to do any diffraction testing with the lens, but I hear its damn good down to f4.5 and up to around f11. I’m so smitten with this lens. And if you ask the wife she probably does feel like the lens is #1 right now…

Flickr Me This

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 02:37:00 +0000

So, I finally broke down and joined Flickr. My account is under tehGipster. I tried for a long time to resist and make my own gallery but 1) that never got done, 2) the service is just too damn good, and 3) I finally realized that I just don’t want to program that much any more and want to try and focus more on creative work than programming. Now that I have a programmer/DBA at work to help me out that can become a reality. Not that I don’t enjoy a little PHP now and again, but I enjoy my camera and a pencil and paper more. So, to celebrate, he’s my first real image posting link from here to Flickr. We were snowed in today for Christmas (I can’t remember the last time we actually got snow ON christmas) and took the boys out for a walk in the snow. Here’s a few images from the outing:

It seems I have a mail problem…

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:11:00 +0000

Huh. I’ve got comments here I never got notification emails for. There’s no mail error logs on the server. I have no mail notifications in my mailbox, and no records of those emails in my spam filter. It would seem they just vanished into thin air…

MDS (Spotlight) and Parallels

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:54:00 +0000

I was having an annoyance on my MBP for a while where MDS (Spotlight) would start indexing and try to hijack the machine… it was working hard and at random intervals. Then it hit me… Parallels was typically active at the same time (despite Windows being “idle” inside the VM), usually jumping to about 25-25% CPU as well. Was Parallels writing out a page file that Spotlight was indexing. I took Parallel’s VM folder (~/Library/Parallels) and added it to the spotlight exclude list and I’ve had no more MDS hijacks. I’ve been good for a few days now. Don’t know if this was common knowledge or not, but it sure was annoying the hell out of me.

File upload class – it is fixed!

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:53:00 +0000

After a long time of knowing there was an issue with the script I finally got around to checking it out. Its a little embarrassing to say, but, here’s the dish: I wrote all the functionality to check the file type, but forgot to actually implement it… oops. The file is correct now, so to those who hung in there until I finally got around to it I say thank you. Soon I’ll be sharing my PHP Email script so if you’ve been looking for an easy way to send email with HTML and Plain Text alternatives as well as handle attachments this should work out nicely for you. Ok, well, nicely if you’re hosting on Unix… I haven’t tested at all on Windows. Though, I will say, if you’re hosting on Windows you really should consider .NET as it has some great functionality and is native to the system. So, enough said for now, the new script has been added to the old page located here. And source file highlighting I’ve also updated the source file highlighting to use the Pear package Text_Highlighter. I won’t go into details abou...

Fuzzy Coconut Logo

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:03:28 +0000

Logo built for a loosely fit freelance group that I do work with. We mostly just bounce ideas off of each other but we did manage to put together an XHTML DashBoard Widget for OS X and partially finished website to go around it. Because of our total disregard for the ‘nut's integrity he finds himself in some funny places. Home page: FuzzyCoconut.com.

XBox 360 #2 is dead

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:02:00 +0000

Harumph. Seems like the 25-35% failure rate of XBoxes may not be far off the mark. No sooner does Microsoft extent the warranty against the 3 flashing red lights, aka: Red Ring of Death, my replacement XBox 360 goes down like a 3 dollar hooker. Do I seem bitter?

XHTMLr (beta)

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:08:03 +0000

The name plays off the older Web 2.0 trends of funky names being copied from Flickr and constant beta status of a lot of emerging projects. The XHTMLr is the beginnings of an online companion to the Fuzzy Coconut XHTML Reference Widget. Designed to be clean and straight forward it still needs a database expansion to have more detailed sample information since we have much more room to work than we did in the widget.

Today's Hot Topics

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:06:14 +0000

Today’s Hot Topics A logo for a small group of students who were starting a blog. It was chosen during an informal contest on a web forum. Those funny bobble headed Canadians eventually lost interest, but the logo still stands proud.

Apple Software Update on Windows XP – What a Crock!

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:26:00 +0000

I love Apple to death, but sometimes they do things that really, really bug the hell out of me. The latest being the software update application for Windows. I made it a point that since my Windows XP installation is in Parallels that I didn’t need to install iTunes. Well, with Safari 3 came the option for a Software Update application. Knowing how easy things like that make life I went ahead and installed it. After using it I now have iTunes – I thought I was only updating Quicktime. I figured that maybe I didn’t pay attention to something somewhere and so I just uninstalled iTunes and didn’t think anything more of it. Today I hear that there’s a security fix for Safari because Safari shipped with some pretty nasty bugs so I used software update. And there it is… “iTunes + Quicktime” just waiting to be installed. It wasn’t my fault after all – the Software update application won’t just update Quicktime – it wants to install the entire iTunes plus Quicktime bundle. Uh, I have two words for Apple here: Scre...

Safari 3 Beta

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:44:00 +0000

So, while the Safari 3 beta is nice in many ways, and showing much promise on Windows, I was disappointed to find out that it still required a trip to the terminal to turn on the Inspector element. So, if you want to check out elements in a page and how they’re styled open up the terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true You’ll now have a new item in your contextual menus – control-click / right click – to inspect elements. You can run up and down the dom tree and also inspect elements that have been added via JavaScript. Very handy stuff. Its just too bad the UI for it sucks. I still don’t understand the UI elements like this – they simply feel clunky to me. All in all, though, its nice to see some advanced CSS features finally hit Windows! I can show all these people at work what MS and even FF are holding back on! Go ahead, give multiple CSS background images a look see. And lets not forget those super nice css drop shadows.

Easily install and update TextMate bundles from SVN

Thu, 31 May 2007 10:36:00 +0000

This script was rendered obsolete by newer versions of TextMate and is no longer available. I’m lazy. I’ll admit it. It comes at weird expenses though. I’m too lazy to remember the subversion commands for updating TextMate bundles and keeping the support folder up to date, and the GetBundle bundle never seems to completely update or remember what it has updated, so I spend time learning how to script the damn thing via bash. Weird. But handy. tmbundle.sh is the result of that effort. Its a pretty simple bash script that allows for listing available bundles, installing a bundle, and updating all installed bundles. This script is only for items from the Subversion repository of TextMate bundles, so if you haven’t pulled the SVN version of the HTML.tmbundle it will not update the default bundle that shipped with TextMate. It will not update a bundle that you have not already pulled from the SVN repository. Install only allows for installing one bundle at a time (I haven’t researched function overloading in b...

I want my OS X VM

Fri, 04 May 2007 11:11:00 +0000

So, apparently the OS X EULA forbids virtualizing OS X in any form. And, no, I’m not late to this party, I just finally felt like writing about it (I really need to start writing regularly again). I’m wondering what the overall use of this is? Is it to protect the OS X experience? To keep it off of Windows? To protect the kernel and keep hackers at bay? I’m really not sure. Allowing OS X to be installed in a VM (Virtual Machine) would take OS X into a lot of different places, including some places that Apple has a hard time with. Like the Enterprise (Enterprise being an overly fancy, Dilbert-esque, word for large companies). I would imagine that this would serve to sell more copies of OS X and to expose more people to the system. Something that I feel would be beneficial because everybody that I know who spends a decent amount of time with OS X likes it. For my purposes, I want to be able to set up test environments. Too often I’ve installed some software that won’t completely build or that just plain does...

Internet Explorer 7 User Agent Strings…

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:56:00 +0000

Ok, this is just a tad bit ridiculous. Those are the result of 1 month’s worth of collecting user agent strings.

Reason #137 to like TextEdit

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:34:00 +0000

Non-continuous line selection. Simply hold down the command (apple) key while selecting lines and you can select any number of out of order lines throughout the document. This just saved me a ton of time formatting a 500 row, 5 cell per row, html table.

Long Live the Image Map!

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:14:13 +0000

Why should the image map be ignored? Its understood by every major browser around and is perfectly suited to do what some people insist on doing in flash. This sample shows a simple North American map divided up into regions and the rollovers controlled by some very simple JavaScript code. View sample JS code for this post

Case Insensitivity and a bite in the ass

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:37:00 +0000

I made a disturbing discovery lately and I can’t believe that it has taken me this long to run across it. Case insensitivity in OS X can play havoc with a website, like completely bring it down, if any capitalization errors are made and not caught before moving to a case-sensitive server, like a unix server. And its all, most likely, attributable to HFS+. I first noticed issues with including files in PHP. If I include a file that is named File.php and I request file.php there will be no error on OS X and the file will include. On unix this will fail. 4 years and I’ve never run into this before… I don’t know why. This one at least makes sense as it is the file system’s behavior and should be expected. The next is a bit disturbing. Case insensitivity slips into MySQL. And not just through PHP. Through CocoaMySQL as well and even through the MySQL command line client. I’ve successfully called a table like AP_users by asking for AP_Users and gotten the right table, and successfully queried it as well. Again, ...

When it rains it pours, or dumps snow

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:00:00 +0000

I haven’t felt like I’ve really had a handle on anything at work or at home for quite a while. I feel like I’m just trying to make it from day to day without losing my head. Literally, I sometimes feel like I’ve lost it. Not that its a bad thing. I’m really busy at work, work is interesting, there’s plenty to do at home (not that I’m doing any of it) and I’m getting some good freelance work. For some reason, though, I just can’t get to a point where I feel like I’m caught up or at least at a place where I can think and do interesting stuff. Playing catch-up all the time is hard on the brain. Yeah, I know: woe is me… I’ll get caught up one of these days. And maybe I’ll have something interesting to write about too! I’m resisting writing about all the snow, but that gets harder with every storm.

Upping the speed of top-frog, and a little about the future

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 09:53:00 +0000

I’ve gotten a few comments about the speed of this site in the past. While considering the speed of the line it was being served on, 384Kbps, it wasn’t bad. But I finally got tired of the slow upload speed, for quite a few reasons, and upped the line. I now have a 768Kpbs upload. While not extraordinay, it is a significant improvement. Now I just have to get around to actually making meaningful updates to the site. The puppycam hasn’t been running in months, and the spot I had allocated for it has since been overrun by a stereo. I’m debating the ability to set up an IP camera instead of the USB cam that I currently have but to get an outdoor safe camera costs a lot. I’d like to move it outdoors because its the behavior of the dogs at the fence that now has us curious. The site needs to be updated, not necessarily the design, but the back end. Its currently a dumping ground of different scripts that somehow manage to work together. I have a framework in progress now that should be done soon (though I’ve bee...

Let's hear it for customizeable toolbars

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 13:40:00 +0000

A huge thorn in my side is the appropriate use of Reply-All vs. Reply when replying to an email. I don’t have a problem hitting reply all when I notice that the message was directed to more people than just me, I typically don’t notice that it was sent to more than just me, so I’ll just hit reply without thinking of it. The solution? Take the idiot out of the equation and remove the Reply button so that there’s only a Reply All button. I can’t believe that it took me this long to think of this solution. I’m sure my opinion will change the first time I reply with “he’s an idiot” with that person on the thread…

Classes for file uploading in PHP

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:18:00 +0000

Surprisingly, I still get a lot of referrals from The Stickman for his work on a multi-file javascript upload helper on which I briefly assisted on Safari compatibility. The script adds and removes file upload form elements as requested by the user. So a form can be designed to handle as many uploads as you’d like and the user can have up to that many files uploaded to the server. It really is a nice script. I posted a comment there that linked back to a file upload script that I wrote. Well, since then I’ve written something much better and its about time to show it off. I actually wrote it a while back and recently cleaned it up to go all PHP5 with it. The script works in two parts. In OOP fashion I separated out tasks that could be shared by other processes and that gave me an upload class and a mime-type class. With these two classes, processing uploaded files is as easy as: /** * This represents just the file portion of the form processing */ require_once('Upload.class.php'); require_once('MimeTypes.c...

Snow Dog

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:45:00 +0000

![Dozer buried in snow](/assets/articles/up-to-neck.jpg)

Early Christmas Present

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:43:00 +0000

I got one of my presents early since we had to go pick it out. A Tippmann A-5 with 20oz. tank and goggles. FUN! There are some minor mods that I’d like to do to it that include a shorter barrel (either 5" or 8") and modifying the air tank attachment so that it points forward and not backward. The whole idea would be to make the gun compact and easy to dart around with. I’m pretty excited about this. My monkey treats me so good.

Convert file size denominations in PHP

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:58:00 +0000

Convert a file size from one measure to another. For example, take a file that is recorded as 512KB and have it converted to .5MB. Yeah, that’s an easy example, but that’s 'cause I was writing it off the top of my head. So, if you need this sort of thing, here’s a function that I thought came out pretty well. function convert_file_size($unit, $from, $to) { $sizes = array('B', 'KB', 'MB', 'GB', 'TB', 'PB'); list($pos1) = array_keys($sizes, strtoupper($from)); list($pos2) = array_keys($sizes, strtoupper($to)); $up = $pos1 < $pos2 ? true : false; for($i = $pos1; $i != $pos2; ($up ? $i++ : $i--)) { if ($up) { $unit = $unit / 1024; } else { $unit = $unit * 1024; } } return $unit; } So, simply use it like: $kbytes = convert_file_size(2.7, 'MB', 'KB'); Is any of this code particularly special? No. Do I still think its neat? You betcha!

Tight lips lose Apple business

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:08:00 +0000

Though I realize that they’re not perfect and that there is plenty of room for improvement, I do love Apple’s products. That said, they have some stupid practices. Being tight lipped about every aspect of products in development is one of them, and today it cost them 18 laptop purchases and guaranteed that there wouldn’t be any other purchases from where I work. The MacBook that was purchased for testing went over like a dream. The Support Services Manager loved it and was interested in everything I showed him about OS X. A few of the Techs already own Macs at home and were the ones who initiated the process of looking into Apple as something they could use at work. A triple boot Mac/Windows/Linux solution was perfect for what they needed. They could have everything. But Apple had to go and be stupid. The main issue is driver support for Vista. For the purchase of the laptops to go through they needed to know what the driver support timeline for Vista was. Apple wouldn’t say. Since these were going into th...

Embed Google Video and YouTube – Now bigger and better

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 13:19:00 +0000

Don't do this: the techniques used in this post and the sample pages use older techniques and don't account for modern browser safety precautions. Consider this a historical curiosity, like a circus freak show… Well, technically smaller. This new version actually has less lines of code. See, I was trying to be a good boy when I first wrote the script. I tried to be fully DOM compliant and not use innerHTML as it is a non-standard function and has somewhat of a dubious reputation. Well. Screw it. IE will do the DOM standard element replacement, but doesn’t do setAttribute. Opera would take the DOM replacement and make space for it in the layout but wouldn’t show the video element. All this goes away with innerHTML. This new version has been tested with Safari, Firefox 1.5+, Opera 8.5+, & Internet Explorer 7. The only catch with this version is with Internet Explorer 6 in that it won’t display the Google Video objects, but will show the YouTube video objects. I can probably fix that later as its ...

WTF, SonicWALL?

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:03:00 +0000

My SonicWALL TZ 150 has a firewall filter rule limit of 20. Yep, I have a $360 router that can only make 20 firewall rules. I’m about ready to set this thing on fire and try to get my WatchGuard unit back because even though it had slower wireless it at least didn’t have limits on something as basic as firewall rules. That’s cheap. For what its worth: the WatchGuard had a better interface, a more versatile VPN (didn’t require a special client for OS X connectivity), and the wireless was more powerful as well. So, there’s my gripe. It was short, so take it or leave it.

5.2 or not 5.2, that is the question…

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 08:01:00 +0000

I so badly want to start using some of the new features in PHP 5.2 but don’t want to get too far into it before our web host at work makes the switch. After all, they’re still on PHP 5.1.1. With so many neat additions to the language its hard to resist, but I don’t want to start using new features before I can implement them. Gah! I’m smack dab in the middle of building a framework that will (hopefully) carry me and be extensible for a long time and I’d sure love to get these features in at the ground level. Guess its time to shoot the web host an email…

Multiple Firefox Homepages

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:21:00 +0000

I’m probably the last one to notice this, but I thought it was pretty neat. Place a bar character, |, inbetween entries in the Home Page entry box in the Preferences pane and Firefox will start up and open each entry in a new tab. You can get this same thing by opening up pages in tabs how you’d like them to open, go into the preferences, and then click on the “Use Current Pages” button in the Main preferences. A nice touch to an already fantastic browser.

Show PHP source without duplicating files

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:50:00 +0000

Every once in a while I want to show a php script’s source code. I would always have a .php file to show an active file in use and a companion .phps file (php-source) to show the source. With a little mod_rewrite and php this can be done with just the one active file, and two supporting files that never change. The original setup was just to use mod_rewrite to map any .phps request that didn’t find a real file to a .php variant, if it existed, and remap the .php file’s mime type to that of a .phps file. However, that didn’t work for me. I think php might have been grabbing and processing the file before it could be remapped and delivered. The trick was to route the request to another file that took the requested file as a passed variable and then have it check for the file and show it. Here’s how it works: The .htaccess file This the core to making the system work. It grabs any request for file.phps where file.phps does not exist and routes it to source.php?f=file.php. OptionsFollowSymLinks RewriteEngineon...

We finally got our xBox 360

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:51:00 +0000

I had been telling myself for the longest time, with the help of Andy, of course, that I could hold off on buying an xBox 360 until Halo 3 came out. But then there was Gears of War. Truly addictive, very fun, and bloodier than hell. Since we let our old xBox Live subscription expire we couldn’t get out old names back, but at least I could find something fun. Come and kick my ass if you see me online. I really suck. Though I’m starting to think that the Berserkers are actually kinda cute… That other game we got too As part of the package we also got Project Gotham Racing. And while I’ve enjoyed this game in the past I was sorely disappointed in the graphics after playing Gears of War. I need to find a good driving game. I adore the old Gran Tourismo games and would love to see something along those lines on the xBox. I guess Forza does that, but I’ll have to try playing it first… despite having dove into Gears of War I really do have a hard time diving into new games without knowing a bit about them. Especi...

InDesign, XML Import, and Whitespace

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:19:00 +0000

This is as much a note to myself as it is an attempt to make this information easier to find by others. Seemingly still undocumented in the InDesign Scripting Guide is a setting for controlling whitespace in imported XML files. So, if you don’t want whitespace between XML elements honored on import while using a script run the import then set the preference for xmlImportPreferences.ignoreWhitespace and set it to true. The syntax is slightly different whether you are using JavaScript, Applescript or (shudder) VBScript. Since I’m using Javascript to be cross platform compatible that’s the only one I’ve bothered to set up. So, if you’re interested, simply use this: app.xmlImportPreferences.ignoreWhitespace=true; When trying to find this information I had found several suggestions that were close but had wrong capitalization or other very slightly off spellings. This works. So, hopefully this helps somebody.

Fun with Finder Windows

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:27:00 +0000

Ran across a funny bug in the OS X 10.4 Finder this morning involving minimizing Windows to the dock. As we all know a double click in the title bar will minimize a Finder window to the dock. Well, this morning I was screwing around and triple clicked the title bar. The window minimized and jumped right back out. So far I’ve only found it to work with Finder windows. I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes, but it is nice and mesmerizing. For reference, I’m on 10.4.8 on a PB 1.67Ghz and probably the last person to find this…

PHP: Sort Multidimensional arrays by key

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 15:53:00 +0000

Update 2009-07-29: This code has been updated and posted here: Sort Arrays by Key Revisited. So, I had to do some array sorting this week and finally bit the bullet and wrote a class to handle it. If you’ve got the need to sort a multidimensional array by a sub-array key then this might be of interest to you. I often have something like this: $a['sjohnson'] = array('name' => 'Sam','age' => '4'); $a['bjones'] = array('name' => 'bill','age' => '3'); $a['mslavos'] = array('name' => 'Max','age' => '1'); $a['abrova'] = array('name' => 'aNn', 'age' => '2'); and need to sort by, say, the name. So I wrote this script to take care of that. Since I have both PHP4 and PHP5 environments I wrote for both. PHP5 /** * Sort a multidimensional array by a given key * * @example $b = AP_Array_SortByKey::sort_by_key($a,$sort_by); */ class AP_Array_SortByKey { /** * array key to sort by * * @var string */ private static $key; /** * Sort a multidimensional array by a given key * * @param array $array * @param string $key * @ret...

Broken 4G iPod? Maybe not…

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 13:31:00 +0000

It came up in conversation lately that a coworker of mine had a broken iPod. Being the tinkerer that I am I asked if it was broken and he didn’t plan on getting it fixed if I could have it. He brought it in today and I inadvertently fixed it. Oops, fixed it I cracked open the case because in my troubleshooting I found that sometimes the error I was getting (folder icon with exclamation point) could be solved by taking out the battery and plugging it into a computer to reformat it. Something about the battery state can cause the problem. About the time I was removing a piece of tape inside the case I noticed that it had turned on. Curious, I turned it over and noticed that it had fully booted. The only thing I can figure that I did was partially reseat the hard drive cable. Dammit So, since the iPod actually belonged to the guy’s son and he couldn’t replace it for a while since they just bought the son a new laptop I gave it back. If they had already bought a new one I might not have said anything and gone ...

This site and IE 7

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Since I now have an actual PC in the house I am able to take a look at this site with IE 7 and not have to endure Virtual PC’s glacial speeds. As of the official release of IE 7 to the masses this site only has three bugs (that I’ve found in casual browsing). One is that an IE 7 user will be prompted to activate Windows Media ActiveX controls and, if Quicktime is loaded, to active Quicktime controls. This is one bug and is caused by the Javascript used to augment statistics tracking by AWstats. Another bug is the Puppycam preview in the sidebar. It won’t register a click on the actual image, but will on the border. The last is on the archives page the floated page category isn’t lining up right. I’ll have to look into it. They’re minor… maybe not even worth paying attention to right off the bat, but there they are.

Clouds

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 06:28:00 +0000

Force Internet Explorer BSOD

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 21:35:00 +0000

Just ran across a fun little tidbit about Internet Explorer on Windows. You can force a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) by typing about:mozilla in the address bar. If you’re running XP SP2 that won’t work, you’ll have to do es://mshtml.dll/about.moz Just the thing to torture others in your office.

Javascript to embed YouTube and Google Video

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:03:00 +0000

Don't do this: the techniques used in this post and the sample pages use older techniques and don't account for modern browser safety precautions. Consider this a historical curiosity, like a circus freak show… NOTICE: This script has been updated and there is a new version available here. Thanks! A while back I got the urge to write this for no other reason than to make my life over at the Clubhouse a bit more convenient. Frankly, I didn’t want to have to click through to watch YouTube and Google Videos. So, with a little bit of JavaScript I was able to make it work. Its really nothing special in the grand scheme of code efficiency but it works. Its been in service for a while now with no complaints that I’ve heard of other than an initial caching issue where it refused to load if the page had been previously cached without the script. But I consider that a growing pain as there’s not much you can do about a viewer’s cache when first implementing something new like this. Updated: 2006-10-14. Updat...

Hockey Hockey

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 20:06:00 +0000

No, not tonsil hockey. We bought a 14 game package to the Colorado Avalanche and so far have been to 2 winning games. Unfortunately the first one was preseason so it was refreshing to see this latest win against the Canuck-leheads after a couple of ties against Dallas and Minnesota. I took the little Nikon camera with me this time just for fun. The view ![Inside the Pepsi Center](/assets/articles/hockey_game_1.jpg) The kids ![Shawn & Andy](/assets/articles/hockey_game_2.jpg) The Final Score ![Pepsi Center Scoreboard](/assets/articles/hockey_game_3.jpg) I’m actually still getting used to all the new names. Not just on the Avs, but on the opposition as well. But I can get used to Luongo being a Canuck – he couldn’t win against the Avs when he was in Florida – lets hope that carries through the season in Vancouver as well.

A Welcome Change to TextEdit

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:24:00 +0000

As a you might know I’m a huge proponent of a simple utility called TextEdit on OS X for its ability to export good looking HTML. I use it almost exclusively to convert word files by first exporting to RTF and then opening the file with TextEdit.It must have happened with the 10.4.8 update – TextEdit now properly nests lists when exporting as HTML. Updated below It wasn’t a huge deal before since it was easily fixed, but TextEdit used to do nested lists like this: <ul> <li>item</li> <li>item2</li> <ul> <li>item3</li> <li>item4</li> </ul> <li>item5</li> </ul> See how the nested list is not contained within a list item? On long and nasty lists it could be very time consuming to go back and clean all this up by hand. Now that has been fixed and we properly get this: <ul> <li>item</li> <li>item2 <ul> <li>item3</li> <li>item4</li> </ul> </li> <li>item5</li> </ul> The list is properly embedded in the list item. Happy day. Update:...

And now an iTunes bitch…

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 09:58:00 +0000

So, I finally moved my music library back to the server this morning. But after launching iTunes I noticed that it can’t find a ton of the songs. Upon further inspection it can’t find any of the rated songs. All unrated songs are playing just fine – anything with a star rating is needing to be linked again. WTF? I already knew that song ratings were not stored with the song but in a different file associated with iTunes. But now those rated songs have some kind of absolute path associated with them as well that prohibit the library from easily being moved? That’s pretty frustrating. iTunes creates an xml file of the library, but its only for other applications to use – the library is still stored in a proprietary format. So, its gonna be a manual process of updating all the rated songs in my library to their new locations. This has got to be my only real gripe with iTunes thus far, there are minor annoyances, but this is the first time iTunes has ever stopped everything I was doing because of an idiotic wa...

Comfy?

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:51:00 +0000

Dogs can find the strangest positions comfortable. Dozer was in this position for at least 30 minutes.

Safari, View Source and Character Encodings

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:31:00 +0000

Update: With modern browsers this issue appears to be long gone. Browsers are now smarter about how they interpret the source and are more forgiving about what they will and won't automatically correct. I just hit an interesting snafu with Apple’s Safari browser. While correctly rendering special characters from a page that lacked a doctype and character encoding meta tag, I viewed the page’s source and noticed that Safari wasn’t rendering any special characters that it was rendering in the actual page view. With the help of the W3C validator I was able to figure out what character encoding the page was in fact using, windows-1252. That’s not really any obscure. So I wonder why Safari was able to correctly decipher the page in HTML view but couldn’t apply the same logic the the source view. Update and Addition I’ve created a couple of pages to help illustrate my point. A valid page and an invalid page. For reference here is a valid utf-8 page for comparison. It seems that Safari has issues showing windows...

Quote of the day

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:42:00 +0000

I was not trained as a politician or a think tank guy or anything else, I was trained to consider all possibilities. ~Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on differences between him and the Bush Administration (Source)

Setting the base directory in PHP

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 14:48:00 +0000

Knowing the base directory that you’re working from when building a site is a pretty basic need. For the longest time I had been content with just manually setting the base paths and switching between them based on the name of the server. I recently learned a much better way. I hadn’t really sought this out since I really hadn’t thought about a better way to do it since my old way worked. This new way takes away the need to manually define your document root. A very handy thing to do is have a constants file that holds all your commonly used information and most of the time this file is in or near your document root. A single line of PHP helps us find where this file is and use it to set the document root for the site. define('DOCUMENT_ROOT', dirname(realpath(__FILE__)).'/'); That snippet of code will define a document root (including the trailing slash) constant that can be called from any script. __FILE__ is a magic constant that contains the full path to the file it is written in. No matter if this file...

Exhibitionist

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 10:28:00 +0000

Tasty VIM Morsel

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:27:00 +0000

I just learned a nice little bit on using VIM and feel the need to share. When using vim you can insert the contents of command line output by using the :r! command. For example: :r! ls /etc/httpd would insert the directory list of the /etc/httpd directory. :r! cat file.txt would insert the contents of file.txt and insert it into the current file. :r! man cd | col -b would insert a clean verson of the MAN page for the cd command. col -b is needed to strip special line breaks that man pages contain. :r! php file.php would insert the output of the PHP script into the current file. I can probably stop providing examples now. Handy freakin’ dandy! I dig it.

Disk Image to the Rescue!

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:06:00 +0000

The last time I decided to mess around with the formatting of this laptop I decided to dual boot YDL and OS X. Last night I needed more space to import video from our new (to us) video camera and decided to nuke the Linux partition since I didn’t use it anyway. It wasn’t until a minute after I booted from the OS X install CD and wiped the Linux partition that I realized I just deleted the yaboot config file – essentially my computer didn’t know where to find any installed OS. Funny how hindsight is 20/20, eh? Oops So, not knowing quite what to do next I decided to image the hard drive to an external drive. Booted to the Tiger install CD I loaded up the Disk Utility and made a disk image of the entire hard drive to an external firewire drive. This took about 2 hours. After that I couldn’t see any other way to resurrect the current state of the drive so I reformatted the drive. Not wanting to do a complete reinstall of everything I decided to see if I could restore the disk image I made back to the hard driv...

Hard drive failure is good?

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:05:00 +0000

You’re probably thinking I’m on crack. How about a little back-story. I recently had a near catastrophic hard drive failure on the drive that housed all my music. I feared the worst for a while but after a stroke of luck I was able to recover most of the drive. I don’t think I lost much and its much better than spending a few weeks re-ripping everything. That’s not the good part yet It has taken a while to get the collection back on track and useable. It certainly is slow going – it took 3 hours just to reimport all the song files back into iTunes (17,000+ tracks plus some music videos and a ton of podcasts). Now that I’ve got the bulk of the music accessible I have to start going through it again to redo the song ratings since those are stored by iTunes and not in the song file. Ratings is what I like to base a lot of playlists on. ie: “punk + rating of 3 or more”. This makes it easy to quickly grab what I’m in the mood for a put it on the iPod. Now this is the good part Having to go back through all the ...

Ok, NOW I'm pissed at the OS X Finder

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:51:00 +0000

As of late I’ve defended the basic operation of the finder as being adequate and have promoted the use of Spotlight wherever possible to get things done. However, sometimes you just can’t get around having to work in the finder when creating and managing files from other people. Tonight I hit what I consider a major glitch. Here it is: I create a text file. I name it test.txt and save it to the desktop. Now, assume I have to follow somebody else’s arcane naming scheme and I change the .txt to ._form I get info on that file. What file extension does it have? .txt WTF? So, now I go looking for a way to combat this and notice that there is a setting in the Finder Preferences to “Show all file extensions”. Turning that on causes the Finder to then ask if I really want to change the extension of the file that I explicitly changed the file extension on. Funny – I thought I already turned that on. Did it get turned off by a system update? I wonder. Either way this caused a 5 minute project to become a 1 hour proj...

Freebies galore.

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 22:28:00 +0000

I’m guessing I must have had some spare positive karma lying around because I just had an influx of free stuff that still has me just wondering what I did to deserve it. Video A friend of mine gave me his old Canon ZR70mc Digital Video Camcorder. The only thing missing, and I’m thinking that based on what the manual says it was not included in the original packaging, is the DV cable to import the video via firewire. Wow. We’ve been wanting a video camera for quite some time but have been hesitant due to the cost. Now we’ve got one. I’m floored by this. I guess the only catch was that the CCD was blown out but since it was a manufacturer defect it is currently being fixed for free by Canon. Look for puppy movies as soon as I get it back. Photo The same friend gave me an old Olympus Camedia C-2020 Z, 2.1 megapixel camera. Again, wow. Yeah, I have a 4MP Nikon and my EOS 20D, but this one can be subjected to torture that I wouldn’t put a purchased product through. Right now the two projects I have in mind are ...

Is this a normal coding enviroment?

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:55:00 +0000

Or: Editors, Editors Everywhere. Go Nuts I know I’ve done an “Editor Roundup” before, but: Doing work in a variety of languages has had me jumping editors and IDEs looking for the single perfect editor for handling PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL and the occasional Bash script. I recently gave up and just settled on having preferred editors for particular languages. My reasons may be petty in some cases, (ie: purely cosmetic), but in the end it seems to all boil down to personal preference. If you’re interested in an outline of how I’ve settled in then by all means read on. I think I may have my list of editors down to 5: Zend Studio, skEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextEdit, CocoaMySQL, Aqua Data Studio and Textwrangler. Zend Studio: PHP I was really hoping that Zend Studio was going to end up being my all purpose text editor but it leaves me wanting in HTML and Javascript editing. While it is a fantastic IDE and overall good for managing an entire site’s worth of files I don’t like it for much outside of PHP and li...

Turn off FTP. Go Secure!

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 07:18:00 +0000

If you use FTP to connect to your Mac, TURN IT OFF! While FTP is nice and convenient its not terribly secure. FTP over SSH A little known fact is that if you turn off FTP, but turn on Secure Shell Access in the Sharing Preferences you then can connect to your Mac using Secure FTP (SFTP) – Wikipedia entry. Regular FTP is left off and an SSH tunnel is then required to connect via FTP and is done over port 22. You’ll need to make sure this port is open on any firewall inbetween your Mac and the rest fo the world. OS X will automatically open port 22 on the local firewall when you enable Secure Shell Access. You do have that local firewall enabled, right?

MySQL speed up tip for OS X

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:19:00 +0000

So, while it was nice to have MySQL on my server and on my laptop I had always felt that it was a bit pokey as far as response times go. Turns out I wasn’t wrong. And its easy to fix. The OS X version of MySQL that you can download straight from MySQL AB does not install a my.cnf file. Yep, its running with no optimization. There are two ways to rectify this for a multi-user environment and 1 way to make changes user specific. The user-specific method doesn’t address a web-server being pokey so I won’t even mention it. The correction is easy and dependent upon wether you want to effect the entire server (will effect multiple installs of MySQL) or just a single install of MySQL. Most of us only run one instance of MySQL on our machines so this first method will be the easiest and also allows for a bit easier access to the my.cnf file for later tweaking. Locate your mysql install via the command line – mine was in /usr/local/mysql-super-long-name/. Once in the directory issue this command sudo cp support-fil...

Javascript, IE and Generating Tables

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 22:31:00 +0000

It seems that when generating tables in JavaScript IE requires that you generate a tBody with that table or else nothing at all shows up. See, when loading a page browsers will generate a tBody automatically and slip it into the dom. That’s why even when you don’t have one in your page you still have to dig through them when traversing the DOM. The only catch is that other browsers do this for generated tables as well. IE doesn’t like to do it on the fly, hence, a generated table without a tBody is a no show. I guess I must have skimmed over one or two things while learning Javascript. I have a bad habit of stopping reading when I “feel” like I can do what I’m setting out to do at that moment. This time it bit me in the ass for a few hours. So, remember kids, when generating tables always generate a tbody…

Don't pay for that download manager, silly boy!

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 16:31:00 +0000

Not where there’s DownloadThemAll (dTa page at Mozilla Extensions site) available for Firefox. Normally stuff like this would just go in the links, but this is cool enough to dote on for a while. I guess this would be one of those official endorsement thingies – I’ve been using this extension on both Winders XP and Mac OS X and its been perfect. Other download managers cost upwards of $20 and offer a ton of features, but all most of us need is something that downloads files and does it fast. And, this fits the bill nicely. I’m not gonna write out everything it does, you can get that from the link, but I’m currently managing 700k – 1.3mb / sec while downloading the 919 MB XCode Developer Tools. DownloadThemAll is gonna have it ready to use in about 30 minutes total. Can’t argue with that one bit. If you do a bunch of downloading, go get this… and for god’s sake don’t pay for a download manager!

Side Scrolling in Adobe – keep your hands on the keyboard

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 23:01:00 +0000

Scrolling up and down is easy. If you have a scroll wheel mouse or a laptop with trackpad scrolling abilities then vertical scrolling is a piece of cake. If you have a PowerBook/MacBook or a Mighty Mouse then side scrolling is easy too – simply drag two fingers or roll that little ball left or right and you’re scrolling sideways. The pain in the patootie is when you don’t have easy side scrolling. Thankfully there’s at least easy ways to do it in a few Adobe programs. InDesign Hold down the option key while scrolling and you’re scrolling sideways. This one has a bug on Windows though: if you want to go from scrolling one way to another then you have to click inside the document inbetween directions. Weird, yes, but so is Windows (it sucks). Photoshop Hold down the control key while scrolling and you’re heading sideways. Hold down option and you’re scrolling diagonally. Illustrator Sorry – no workie. Acrobat Also no workie. Though terribly inconsistent it is nice not to have to reach for the scrollbars to g...

Speedy and Secure AFP

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:05:00 +0000

One of my long time complaints about using AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) has been its speed and my inability to get a secure connection. Well, all that changed this morning as I found some hints that fixed both speed and security issues. And it was under my nose the whole time… The problem is that for some reason OS X Server, at least my install, is not advertising that it can connect AFP via SSH so the trickery has to happen on the client side. Initiating the connection from the client is the same – use Command-K or choose ‘Connect To Server’ from the Go menu. Before sending your credentials click the cog icon in the lower left corner of the window and select Options. In here, deselect ‘Allow sending password in clear text’ – this will ensure that if a secure connection can’t be made it won’t fall back onto a plain connection. Next check the box ‘Allow secure connections using SSH’. But here’s the kicker – turn off ‘Warn when connection does not support SSH’ – the problem with secure connections was that th...

Temporary Puppycam

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 10:05:00 +0000

The PuppyCam is back for a while, if not a bit worse for wear. The camera is having some exposure problems that I can’t quite get fixed because the driver isn’t letting me properly change settings and the auto settings wants to overexpose the scene. While its not the best scenario right now it does use existing equipment and gets the page functional again. I may have a plan to replace it though. To buy or not to buy I’ve been wanting a network addressable camera for quite some time. That would really give me freedom to put the camera just about anywhere since it doesn’t require the camera to be nearby like this Logitech QuickCam does. I’m just debating wether I want to spend money on that because the el-cheapo ones start around $80 and I can’t just buy the cheapest one. That wouldn’t be right. Possible interim improvement I had an idea this morning that I’m gonna have to play with. Our little Nikon Coolpix 4300 is sitting mostly unused and I’m gonna have to see if Evocam can use that. If it can the autofoc...

Potato Recipe

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 15:29:00 +0000

This recipe can be considered heart attack on a plate. Its simplicity defies its taste and deadliness. This one is a calorie demon! But it is good. Kitty’s Potatoes 6-8 Large potatoes 2 Cans cream of chicken soup ½ Pint sour cream ½ Cup butter 1 ½ Cups grated mozzarella cheese ½ Cup grated parmesan cheese ½ Cup minced onions Boil potatoes until a fork enters the potato easily. The potatoes want to be firm, not soft. Combine all the ingredients, minus the potatoes, in a large bowl. When potatoes are done, cut into slices. Lay down mixture and potatoes in layers in a 9" x 13" pan. Cook for 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Let sit for 10 minutes before eating. Refrigerate leftovers – this reheats very well. Enjoy.

My, what a big tongue you have

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:31:00 +0000

Snapped a few of Bear after playing for a while. He was quite pooped and that tongue seemed to have a mind of its own.

Vintage Racing Pics

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:54:00 +0000

I had a chance to photograph my dad’s racing club this past weekend and had an absolute blast. It took me 2 days to edit down all the photos. I took more than 650. Its just so easy to do when shooting digital. I’ve put together an Flickr gallery for those who are interested. Check it out and let me know what you think. They’re not all of just the vintage racers. There was drag racing the night before and some of those pics are in there as well. View the Flickr gallery here Be sure to lemme know what you think.

6 years and counting

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 23:04:00 +0000

So today marked 6 years of being married. Holy hell where does the time go? Just yesterday we were scraping by in a 500 square foot apartment in Canon City and now we’re doing well, have a house and a couple of furry kids. 10 years ago, when I met this crazy lady, I never would have imagined we would have carved out a life this good together. Just goes to show that you never can predict what your life is gonna be like – it just kinda happens.

Puppies on the porch

Sat, 13 May 2006 11:55:00 +0000

Its getting so nice out here in the evenings we can just spend some time enjoying doing nothing. And, of course, I can have the camera handy… I’ve been struggling creatively lately so I figured 2 things can help. Just pick up the camera and use it, no matter what for, and just shoot everyday things to get rolling. Its working so far. I’m starting to get back into feeling like myself again.

Oh, crap. No wonder I've been feeling neglected…

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 22:56:00 +0000

And here I thought nobody loved me anymore. In my ongoing attempts to hold off comment spam I went ahead and screwed up the comment script and accidentally created a condition that would never evaluate to true and thus would never allow a comment to be posted. Damn…

Ajaxy goodness and Safari form behavior

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 22:52:00 +0000

Don't do this: This pre-dates the appearance of Javascript libraries that nicely wrapped up cross browser Ajax behavior. Consider this a nice peek in to the early, ugyly, days of Ajax content loading. Yeah, so I’m about a year behind everybody else on this one. I finally wrote my own little Ajax class. Most other classes out there were way too much for what I needed and I also needed to get my feet wet in OOP programming for Javascript so this was a keen little exercise for me. Then I went on to tackle the fact that Safari’s form labels don’t act like form labels in the other browsers – they don’t bring focus to their associated form element when clicked. Seems like a minor issue, but when you really think about form usability it is nice to be able to click on the name of an element to select it and not always have to hit the element itself. This is particularly handy for radio buttons and checkboxes. Read on to find out how I finally caught up to last year. Update: Now that I go browsing through old code...

Tabular image layouts in print and on the web

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:13:00 +0000

NOTICE: This article pre-dates nicities such as CSS Flex-Box and newer Javascript techniques, so read this as a historical curiosity. It is no longer modern by any stretch of the imagination. For a long time I’ve been lusting over a way to neatly arrange a block of images on paper the way it is so easy to do on screen. Or, at least, they way it has become so easy to do on screen. CSS actually opened the door to me finding a nice way to do this. I know this is vague, but if you’ve ever had to arrange images in a grid in print you’ll like this (and maybe even be ahead of me on doing it!). To clarify, here’s what I’m after. At work we have several publications in which we show off all the logos of the vendor product that we distribute. We typically show them off in a grid and they change often. That means that keeping an updated arrangement is a pain in the butt. Common thinking (for me at least) would be to draw out a grid to fit into or, in the case of newer page layout software, make a table so that all t...

Watch Those Teeth!

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 11:36:00 +0000

I was having a rough night last night since a hard drive failed on me and it was the one that housed my unwieldly music collection. I was pretty frustrated. I ended up going to bed already half asleep. I wasn’t in bed more than 2 minutes when I heard something funny and the bed started to shake. The sound was a slurping sound and coming from the dog that was lying between me and the wife. As I look down there is a leg in the air and I could see it shaking from the gyration of the dog’s back hips. The dog was masturbating in bed! I had no idea what to do. I tried telling him to stop. When that failed I just grabbed his head and slowly pulled him away from his groin. Had I been more awake I might have been disturbed by it. Fortunately he stayed lying down and went back to sleep (something I’d not be able to do if I were so inclined to be masturbating in bed). I’ve never thought about it that way I’ve never had a problem with the thought of masturbation – Ok, aside from somebody making it a perverted act by p...

MySQL Class Updated for PHP 5 part 1

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:42:00 +0000

I’ve updated the SQL class to use some native PHP 5, namely constructors and destructors and include some backward compatibility so PHP 4 does not freak out when it loads the class. I’ll hopefully be making this 100% PHP 5 native soon enough as I’ll actually have a native PHP 5 environment to apply it to. Namely the class makes use of register_shutdown_function and call_user_func_array to simulate constructor behavior on PHP 4. So by doing this: function dbConnect($settings=array()) { if(phpversion('tidy') < 5) { // construct $argcv = func_get_args(); call_user_func_array(array(&$this, '__construct'), $argcv); // destruct register_shutdown_function(array(&$this), '__destruct'); } } I can now use __construct and __destruct in a PHP 4 compatible script and have the script be a little more PHP fun. The main advantage is that this script can close the db connection by itself now instead of having to do it in the page. Hopefully this is useful to somebody… You can view the entire source here.

Time is not on my side

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:37:00 +0000

I actually have a couple of things to post but am running short on time and energy. Hopefully I’ll get the first one up soon, and then post more pics of Hawaii. I have yet another lined up based on a conversation I had while on vacation in Hawaii but that has yet to be started. Bah, I need more time and a ham sandwich.

Porsche Illustration

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 23:10:47 +0000

This started out as a personal project to learn the advanced features of Adobe Illustrator and turned into a 20+ layer monster. Even now it brings my computer to its knees with layers on layers of gradient meshes and transparent color building.

Hawai'i Is Beautiful

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 19:04:00 +0000

Hawai’i is absolutely beautiful. And we haven’t even really left the Waikiki area yet except to do a seaplane ride (which was fabulous). This place is a total tourist trap but the water and weather are wonderful. Here are a couple of pics so far: Tomorrow we’re up Diamondhead and out to view some dolphins. On Monday we’re renting a car and heading up to the north shore and Huanama Bay (I think I spelled that right, maybe). I think we’re gonna have to look into moving here…

Well, that was easy…

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 07:38:00 +0000

For a while here at work I’d been struggling with the best way to deliver content to Excel users so they could further manipulate or repurpose the data. The best thing I’d found had been to deliver an Excel content header on a tab deliniated string of data from the database. Well, in a stroke of “hey, idiot, why the hell didn’t you think of that sooner” I think I’ve found the perfect solution: HTML. Long story short: Excel can open HTML files and format the data. More importantly it can retain the proper, and complex, formatting from HTML tables. So rowspans, colspans, header rows, some CSS etc… all get translated from HTML. So all I had to do was create a properly formatted HTML table of my data and deliver it to the browser with an Excel content header and Voila. Styled, formatted data sets delivered to happy little Excel users. Who’da thunk it would be that easy?

Traveling Again – need recommendations

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 20:34:00 +0000

Lucky me! I get to go to Hawaii at the end of February. On top of that my birthday present from Puddles, a Canon EOS 20D, will be here early so I’ll not only have it for the trip I’ll have time to familiarize myself with the camera before we go. This is the part where I need help from my faithful readers – or whatever is left of you after I took my long break. I need recommendations of non-touristy things to do on Oahu. We’ll be staying in Waikiki, aka: tourist hell, but we’ll be at super nice hotel, the Moana Surfrider. We’ll be there shortly after the Pro-Bowl so hopefully the bustle will have calmed down by the time we’re there. We do have a couple of plans already, one of which I don’t know if it’ll be able to happen or not: We were recommended the Sharks Cove Inn for dinner since its a nice place to much and watch the sun set. Its not too far up the coast from Waikiki so it won’t be to hard to get to. Hopefully it won’t be to hard to get into to eat. We were also recommended Hanauma Beach, a wildlife ...

A simple email couldn't have hurt…

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 19:46:00 +0000

Did you see it this morning? I wasn’t here. No, not physically – the domain was gone. My registrar failed to tell me that they changed their payment system and now required more information to bill credit cards than before. My domains for top-frog.com and puddlemonkey.com expired because the registrar failed to inform me that to continue the auto renew schedule that I needed to now provide the security code from the back of my credit card. On top of that it had to have been a recent change because I had two domains, topfroggraphics.com and fuzzycoconut.com auto-renew back in August of last year. That said – if you own domains checking in on them from time to time might not be a bad idea just to make sure everything is still OK. Fortunately for me I was re-registered and running again before 10am.

Nokia Cellphone Wallpaper Format

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:36:00 +0000

![Fuzzy Coconut wallpaper for Nokia N-Gage](/assets/articles/Png.jpg) It may seem trivial to some but I spent some time tonight figuring out the best file format to use when making a wallpaper for a Nokia phone that's running the Symbian OS. I noticed artifacts on my first attempt and just couldn't have any of that. The image needed to be smooth like I made it. Those little lines were threatening to rub me the wrong way. Maybe I’ve got too much time. Maybe not. Read on if you dare… I take no responsibility for you absorbing useless information if you read this. I couldn’t find a definitive answer online about the kinds of file formats that my new (used) Nokia N-Gage would accept as file formats when uploading a wallpaper. The only thing I could find was that it could take RGB JPEG files. So I made myself a fun little wallpaper and uploaded it. ![Symbian OS hates JPEGs](/assets/articles/Jpg-dk.png) Upon setting it as a wallpaper I noticed faint vertical lines through the image (Illustrated at right on a da...

Bash me a PDF

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 21:19:00 +0000

UPDATE: Being a linux n00b I didn’t think that even though Ghostscript 7.07 can support everything I’ve done here it doesn’t mean that its been compiled with everything needed to do the job right. My test server at work and my production server both run GS 7.07 but the production server is lacking the EPS Crop support – so I get nothing… While this script works well on OSX and a custom built linux box I can’t guarantee that my production servers, which are not owned or managed by me, are set up correctly. So I’m resorting to purchasing a license for PStill. Bah! I was so close too. Now, on with the original story: Let me start this off by saying what I know about bash scripting can be written on the head of a pin in 24pt type. I’m building a customizeable PDF system at work where our vendors can add their logos to our datasheets and use them for marketing our services that they resell. Of course I want the end result to be the best it can be so naturally I want the user to be able to upload EPS files for p...

It just wouldn't be christmas without…

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 15:32:00 +0000

A bloody dog fight… You won’t be thanking me for this pic. More details soon. Update: So, 9 stitches and 1 sedation later bear is home and sleeping it off. He not only had the tear in his ear but had a puncture wound in his face. Hopefully he learned something from this as it was a fight that he started…

The Benefits of Working Early

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 16:48:00 +0000

I’m typically out the door at 6:30 or so in the morning to get to work at 7:15. I like that work schedule as it gets me home by 4:45 or so in the evenings. One other benefit is the sunrises (which I haven’t been taking pictures of – dumbass!). They’re wonderful. I do so love the early work schedule.

Beaker!

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:02:00 +0000

The Clubhouse 54 Traveling Postie made it my way a while back and I finally got around to taking a pic or two… this is the best one. It was shot with our little ol’ Nikon Coolpix 4300 and didn’t turn out too bad. I manipulated the flash with a piece of paper and heavily edited the lighting in Photoshop. It actually came out decent…

HTML Formatting with TextEdit

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:46:00 +0000

I imagine that I’m not alone in my job duties of having to format long passages of text into html for inclusion in a web site. A lot of time can be wasted hand formatting lots of text with tables and lists. I was pretty surprised when I found that TextEdit in OS X 10.4 Tiger could save XTHML Strict pages with ISO-8859-1 or UTF8 character encodings and with embedded CSS. I stumbled on this ability in TextEdit while searching for an easy way of converting to numbered html entities instead of using named html entities (For what its worth, XML files don’t like named entities outside of the standard 5). Hopefully I’m not going into something that the rest of you have found and that is painfully obvious by writing this. It just takes a quick trip into the preferences to set up the correct settings for your environment (as illustrated below). Set your HTML output type, character encoding and type of CSS styling, open your document and save as an HTML file. (story continues after image) The file is constructed com...

Alternate Syntax for PHP Control Structures

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 09:45:00 +0000

I posted a link to this in my links section but get excited about it every time I use it, so I have to post a blurb on it here just in case any PHP geeks that read this didn’t click the link. Its cool, dammit! Really, it is. No more curley braces for if, while, for, foreach, and switch statements! C’mon – I know you’re interested. So we’re all used to writing: if($this == $that) { // do this } else { // do that } That in and of itself isn’t too bad. But when we get into this: if($this == $that) { if($this > 1) { // do other } elseif($this =< 1) { // wat? } else { // more } } else { if($that != 0) { // do that } elseif($that > 0) { if($that < 10) { // whoa } } else { // panic } } It can get a bit hairy matching up all those braces. I don’t know when this was added, but PHP has an alternate syntax for controlling these statements that eliminates the curley brace. if($this == $that): // do this endif; We’re able to eliminate matching curley braces with an easier to find endif; statement. Now longer and ...

Racing Photos

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:47:00 +0000

It happened about 3 weeks ago now but I should probably post the pics anyway. I my father started racing a 1967 Porsche 912 and he had a race up here in Denver at the Second Creek Raceway – one of the last groups to get to run on that raceway before closing down. I won’t babble too much, I’ll just tell ya about the pics. The first one here is my dad’s car. The 2nd and 3rd aren’t anybody I know but they ended up as cool pics. The shots are bit soft. I couldn’t track these guys manually and my old camera, A Canon EOS 10s, just couldn’t push the autofocus on my lens fast enough to get hard focus. Couple that with putting a doubler on an older Tokina 80-200 f/2.8 to get a little extra reach and the pics end up being a bit soft. S’okay though – not bad for not having shot seriously in quite some time.

Blog? I have a blog?

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:23:00 +0000

Wow, it has been more than 3 weeks since I last posted. I think I got the comment spam filter fixed though. It is ugly, but it works. Um. That is all.

Speedier Spotlight searches and exact matches

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:02:00 +0000

I just read a “hint” about spotlight for speeding up searching via Spotlight in OS X 10.4 Tiger. It seems that no matter how quickly you type that spotlight will try to make matches as you go along. The hint I read comments that you can copy and paste your search term from another location to only allow spotlight to search for that entire word. Well, it is in fact much easier than that but wasn’t something that I had really thought about until considering how utterly convoluted it was to type out your word, copy it, and paste into spotlight. The answer is simple – start of the search with a quote mark. Spotlight will only return exact matches, and will return them even before you close the quote, so you really only need to type "bobblehead to find your famous bobblehead photo. With Spotlight’s reaction time it is actually faster to write out your entire word. Now that I’ve been forced to think about doing this it just might become my default method of searching with spotlight – I typically know the wo...

Camera Toss

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:00:00 +0000

I heard some whispers around the internet about a fun photography exercise called a Camera Toss. It entails setting the camera at a moderate shutter speed and throwing it up into the air. I saw a few samples and they were fantastic. So much so I had to try it for myself. Attached are six samples of what I ended up with. While I didn’t get the same results as some that I saw I am very pleased and encouraged by the images that I did get. I found that an exposure of 1 second @ F13, ISO 100, to be good. Now, before you try for yourself, please be careful. There is more to consider than just dropping the camera. The motorized mechanisms for zooming the lenses are pretty delicate and if you land hard on that, even in the palm of your hand, you can potentially damage the camera. I’ve found with this one, a Nikon Coolpix 4300 (I know, I need to get a real digital SLR) that if I suspect anything has bumped the lens too hard that I can turn the camera off and on and it will right itself. If you suspect you’ve done a...

It has been a while

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 09:01:00 +0000

So, wow. It has been more than 2 weeks since my last post. I’ve been busier than hell and combine that with the return of the NHL and our watching the original Firefly series on DVD I’ve just plum run out of time lately. I’ve got 3 large projects running concurrently – a PDF datasheet generator for work, an AJAX class for home and work, and a large form processing script for both home and work. Add on top of that all the little things that come and go and, well, time flies… I really hope to be posting back soon on a regular basis – I miss it. But for now I’ll just have to relate a small tidbit that I ran over a rabbit last night on the way home from my parent’s place and I feel really bad about it. He (I’ll assume it was male since it was stupid) was stopped in the middle of the lane I swerved to get around him and he ran right underneath the car. Poor little guy. So, until next time, this is Gippy the Rabbit Killer going back to work.

Serenity Rocks

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 23:14:00 +0000

We just got back seeing Serenity and I have to say that it rocks. Hard. I got a little discouraged before seeing the movie by reading some reviews that harped on it for production value. To those people I say – Hogwash. Just because Lucas didn’t speed things up 300 times and sacrifice the blood of 40 children making new technology doesn’t mean it isn’t good. The technological aspect of the movie was fine. On top of that it was unobtrusive. Unobtrusive is good. The movie was about the story, not how many explosions happened or what overpaid producer / director team decided to rape moviegoers. I guess I can actually talk about that story for a little bit. Much more than a made for TV movie I didn’t see as many epsidoes of the television series as I would have liked. I saw about 3 or 4 and loved them. I was pretty bummed when the series got pulled because it was a great story with likable characters. Beyond that it was a believable world. The fact that it was in the future was not stressed and not made a cent...

Keep that shadow!

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 01:30:00 +0000

If you’ve ever had to do composite work in Photoshop you’ve no doubt ran into having to use a photo of an object that has a shadow on it. I get this frequently – companies will do nice cut outs of their products and put them on white backgrounds but then throw a drop shadow of one kind or another on it that really interferes with using the image in combination with other images. Masking it is easy, but what if you want to keep that shadow? Do you recreate it? Do you try to extract it and use it? Here is a super easy method of making use of an existing drop shadow in an image. Updated 2005/09/25 to include how to keep those black background reflections. Caveat Emptor This isn’t a magic way to pull a drop shadow off of a complex background – this is a way to to pull shadows from white background images. The technique can be altered to be used with images that have simple colored backgrounds, but for the most part is limited to white or other plain background images. I’ll show one example of using it on an im...

Star Streaks Photo

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 02:12:00 +0000

This is a photo taken at Dillon Resevoir just outside of Dillon, CO. I actually took this photo when out trying to catch a meteor shower but messed up my dates and went out a day early. I caught no meteors on film that night… Andy spent the evening in the car hiding from bears. I believe that this was a 30 minute exposure. It was taken with a Canon EOS 10s with a Sigma 24mm f2.8 lens.

Colorado Avalanche Schedule in iCal

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 01:00:00 +0000

I bit the bullet and entered this manually into iCal. I don’t really know if anyone here is an Avs fan but here it is. It has dates, times, locations and TV channel. It was made on Tiger but should be backwards compatible. Windows users can import the file into Outlook, Palm users can import the file after changing the file extension to .vcs Colorado Avalanche 2005-06 Schedule

Yearg!

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 05:40:00 +0000

'tis the day, mateys… talk like a pirate. Talk like a pirate or walk the plank!

Line In Passthrough in OS X

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:48:00 +0000

I was really kind of upset today to find out that I couldn’t easily pass audio through from my line in to the built in speakers on my PowerBook. I was at work and plugging away in the Lab which means I’m working on my Mac since there is no outside access to the lab via the network. Since all my music resides on a server at home and my upstream bandwidth really stinks (that finger is pointed at you Comcast) streaming from the home server wasn’t really an option. I figured it would be easy enough to just plug into the line in and let it pass through the built in speakers. Nope. Why? One of the reasons I didn’t want to use iTunes at all was that it would try to sync with the iPod if I hooked it up normally. That would have invoked a long drawn out process of changing preferences or waiting for connections to time out since all the music it would be trying to sync is far, far away. Plus, simply using the line in should be easy, right? Since I am going to be in the lab for a few days I wanted to get this workin...

Gravatars Enabled

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:36:00 +0000

I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to join a trendy web thingy. I was kind of enjoying being basic and clean. But I got sucked in. Gravatars have been added. So, clean up those gravatars, boys and girls, and be sure that they’re transparent because your grav just might end up on a shaded background. That means you’re gonna look funny with that non-transparent gravatar… *cough*Joey*cough*Tom*cough* And, for those that don’t have a gravatar, we’ve got a nice generic frog to keep your spot warm. Go ahead, sign up now, you know you want to.

MySQL Class Updated

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 22:23:00 +0000

The change is minor but has significant meaning to the script. I added two functions – escapeData() and buildQuery(). The significance of adding these is mainly in the escapeData() function. Instead of encouraging the user the use addslashes before using submitted data or, worse yet, encouraging the user to rely on magic_quotes, the escapeData() function uses the mysql_real_escape_string function to escape the data per the MySQL server’s instruction. In this case the escaping is more in tune to what the SQL server needs and is also consistent with the character encoding that the database uses. Character encoding is picky when storing binary data in the database, so this helps maintain a proper matchup of data encodings. And example of usage would be: $query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM table WHERE email=%1 AND name=%2", $this->escapeData($email), $this->escapeData($name)); The other is buildQuery(). buildQuery ties in directly to escapeData in that it uses the escapeData function to put together an escaped que...

Text editors galore

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 23:45:00 +0000

This is a post spurred into existence by not being able to post my complete views in a comment box on Jon Hicks’ recent article about an ideal text editor for OS X (I hate to name drop but didn’t have much choice here). I’ve been wanting to write this for some time and his post was the kick in the butt I needed. So, without further procrastination, here is my rundown of the current crop of text editors for OS X and why I like, dislike, use or don’t use them. The only order I’ll work in is that I’ll start with the editor that gets the bulk of my work, skEdit. skEdit My editor of choice (right now) is skEdit. The main criteria for me on making this decision was that is has a project manager, Snippets are a welcome time saver to doing regex replacements, and the price was good at $20. The snippets were the icing on the cake. In case you don’t know, snippets in skEdit are a really simplified way of applying regex like transformations on sections of text. They’re one of those things that rank as being a ‘best t...

Gippy Pages turns 1 year old…

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:51:00 +0000

September 11 marks a few treacherous days in history: The Battle of Brandywine in 1777, the crashing of airliners into the world trade center in 2001, and the founding of the Gippy Pages in 2004. No, I don’t claim to be as influential and significant as those, but it does go to show that bad things do happen in 3s. Even if they are sometime separated by more than a hundred years… Feeble beginnings This site started off as a way for me to host a title generating image script that I couldn’t do on Top Frog Graphics site because that server didn’t have the correct version of the GD graphics library that I needed to use. From there it became a way to show off the (now suspended) Puppycam after we got Bear and Dozer and to play around with PHP and CSS. How the hell did it come this far? What started out as a small technical learning project has turned into something that I really love doing. Though I have decent communication skills I’ve never really seen myself as a writer. A year after filling this blog with ...

Holy crap I need some motivation

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 22:25:00 +0000

I’m down and feeling lazy. I’m having a hard time applying myself and concentrating on projects. I’m looking for easy ways out. It could be that I’ve not been able to really finish a project at work that I’ve needed to do for some time. It’s all been rush stuff that other people decide are more important. I need a kick in the ass. I’ve got great stuff to do, using RSS feeds as a way for resellers to show the most up to date info on products, a blog so our c-level folks can talk to resellers, redesigned product pages that make our information much easier to browse, a redesign of the crappy Support Wizard system (yes, that’s the real name – stay away from it if you’ve been looking into it), a redesign of our eStore from the standard templates, etc… I need a way to shake the funk – I’m a bit down on work because I don’t feel like I can get things done. Its not that I dread going to work, there’s really only one thing wrong with work and it is Bill Gate’s fault. I just can’t seem to find a groove that gets me ...

Abandoned Car Photo

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:04:00 +0000

To continue my photography posts I’m posting an image I took while at school at the University of Northern Colorado. I can’t remember what year it was taken – I didn’t document that for any of my college photography. Photo was taken with an old Canon FT QL that my father gave me, probably with a 50mm lens, and for sure was on Fujichrome Velvia. I wish I still had that old camera…

No More Carpooling

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:21:00 +0000

After 5 years of carpooling, first in a 1995 Camry and then in a 2002 Tacoma, we finally bought another car. This past Saturday we picked up a 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX. One word will suffice in describing this car. Wow. It looks just like this one. Compared to the truck Our truck actually has more horsepower (280hp vs. the 227hp in the WRX) but the truck lacks the transmission to be a racecar and the large tires bleed off a bit of power as well. Not that I’m bothered by any of that, mind you. The WRX is a little demon. But that is where the similarity ends Though both vehicles have lots of horsepower, that’s where the similarity ends. The WRX is quieter than the truck, which will take some getting used to since I’m so used to guaging a shift off of engine noise that I’m going to have to get a feel for the WRX now. And speaking of getting a feel for it: the turbo in the WRX definitely lets you feel that it is there. If you’re gunning it around you really don’t care, but if you’re not prepard or are trying to...

Making fun of a 4 year old

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 00:16:00 +0000

These conversation snippets are from conversations with my Nephew. I really wish I could remember more of them as they’re always thoroughly entertaining. Adult: You’d better stop fussing in the chair or you’ll fall out and break. Then what would we do with you? Nephew: You have to throw me out with the trash? Adult: So, girls have cooties, huh? Nephew: Yeah. Adult: Your mom’s a girl, ya know. Nephew: No she’s not. Adult: Yes, she is. So’s your Guma (grandma). Nephew: Nuh-uh! Adult: Yep, your mom is a girl. Nephew: No she’s not, she’s my mom! Adult: What’s your name? Nephew: Joshua Thomas Adult: Why is that your name? Nephew: Because that’s my name!

This week is gonna suck

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 22:59:00 +0000

[ there used to be an article here. I have no idea what happened to it ]

Going to start posting images

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:47:00 +0000

I’m going to start posting images here in an attempt to get myself more excited and maybe actually motivated to go out and shoot more. I don’t get out and do it enough and as of late I’ve found myself doubting my abilities as an artistic photographer. So this is also an attempt to boost my own ego a bit and remind myself of what I can do, and of how much fun it can be. I’m starting off with this image because its fun. It was an afterthought as I was out doing other things for an internship and ended up with a shot that never ceases to crack me up.

I'll not make that mistake again

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 23:05:00 +0000

Or: How Gippy stunk up the neighborhood I’m not sure how to start this one. It could end up being funny but I don’t think I’m that good of a story teller. But here’s my best shot: I didn’t get around to mowing the lawn last weekend due to a stomach bug that took me by storm. With all the rain we’d been getting lately I figured I should get it done today. And all went well from the pooper scoopin’ right up to the clean up. The cleanup started OK but a decision that I had made 3 weeks ago came back to haunt me and the neighbors. I had finished raking up the clippings (we use an old-school push mower) and was ready to take the trash out when the crisis started. It started rather innocently: I couldn’t get the trash bag out of the barrel. This is typical since these trash bags are rarely sturdy enough to handle a full load. I figure I’ve got it all in line when I tip over the trash barrel to dump the tied off bag onto the walk. And that’s when disaster struck What I didn’t realize was that over the past 3 or 4...

What's wrong with this picture?

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 19:21:00 +0000

![Shawn Parker](/assets/articles/me.jpg)

Browser Stats

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 23:58:00 +0000

As if it wasn’t a given, most of my hits come from Mac users. I hear a lot of rumblings around that points to Safari not being the browser of choice among many Mac users due to this bug or that bug but it still dominates my browser list. IE comes in at 3rd in the list, surprisingly. I can’t think off the top of my head who those windows users might be… In any event, for those who care (and to bore those of you who don’t) here is the browser matchup for the Gippy Pages: Safari (42.8%) Firefox (31.8%) MSIE (11.5%) Unknown (5.1%) NetNewsWire (4.1%) Mozilla (2%) Camino (1.2%) Opera (.4%) Netscape (.2%) Konquerer (.2%) Others (.1%) Now, the presence of NetNewsWire in the list makes me wonder if Safari is on top due to common usage or because people use it’s built in RSS reader to preview and then view full articles which would garner more hits attributed to the browser. Unfortunately AWStats doesn’t distinguish between versions of OSX so I can’t count who is on what… I’ll have to look into a hack for that. Eith...

Is it really that mighty?

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:21:00 +0000

So, this whole post might end up being 100% personal preference, but lets explore the new mouse from Apple, the Mighty Mouse. I have to wonder just what is going on over at Apple and if maybe I’m the only one who sees fault in the basic design of Apple’s current lineup of mice. I really haven’t enjoyed an Apple mouse since beige was done away as a case color. Ever since I thought that Apple has been messing with something that should be more ergonomic than they’ve chosen to make it. An oval, to me, is not ergonomic. Consider the shape your hand makes when it is lightly cupped (like it would be when fondling, er, handling a mouse). It is not an oval, is it? Logitech has the right idea in its current lineup of mice – the mouse should be an asymmetrical shape that gently fits into the hand not something that the hand must adjust its shape and natural stance to accommodate. Now, this issue was not as prominent, and maybe in some way actively reduced, in the old ADB mouse designs. Those mice tapered off at the ...

RSS Snafu Fixed

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 10:13:00 +0000

I noticed a snafu with the links in the RSS feed this morning. I forgot to update the links in the RSS feed when I changed domains so when a link was followed to read the full story the user was not presented with the full story. That has now been fixed. If a story felt incomplete recently you might try looking at it again – there just might be more to it 😉

Getting to know vim

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 22:41:00 +0000

Since OS X brought Unix into my everyday life I’ve been fascinated by command line text editing. Mainly for remote tweaks and working directly on the server. However, the more I learn about vim the more I like it… vim is one powerful little editor. This is actually my second exploration into vim but I’ve unfortunately lost my notes on the first one. That’s why I’m blogging this – so I have it backed up… vim started out as a mystery to me as it is one of those programs that if you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll be immediately lost. I found the documentation of little help as it is written rather cryptically and is very hard to get around. I ended up scouring the internet for tips and tricks for just getting started. I’m now to the point where I’m comfortable editing directly in vim without wasting time figuring out what I’m trying to do. vim Basics So, for in uninitiated, here is a primer: i - enter insert mode esc - exit insert mode These are the two basic commands that will get you typing in VIM. Now...

IE 7: this is a little disappointing

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 22:24:00 +0000

The Internet Explorer 7 seems to be a basic functionality release. All the talk on the IE Blog about standards compatability didn’t seem to leak its way into this release. This version is actually seems worse than IE 6 at page rendering and compatability. The text to follow is a highly biased review (hey, I’m a Mac bigot after all) as I sit and play with a fresh install of the beta. I apologize now to anyone who gets an RSS update each time I edit this. I’m going to update this article as I discover more and find more around teh intarweb. Page Rendering The complex spiral page over at Eric Meyer’s site gets completely mutilated – but this is nothing new to IE users. Compare that link in your standards compliant web browser to this screenshot. I tested a list of knows bugs over at positioniseverything.net and here is what I got: The peekaboo bug seems to be fixed. The disappearing list background bug persists. The guillotine bug is fixed. The unscrollable content bug persists. The duplicate characters bug p...

That's just embarrassing

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 14:22:00 +0000

Just 24 hours after its announcement the Microsoft “Windows Genuine Advantage” initiative was cracked. And it was cracked by none other than Javascript. This is not only embarrasing for Microsoft that this was cracked but embarrasing to show that they used an easily manipulated technology like Javascript to control the check process. “This week, Microsoft started requiring users to verifiy their serial number before using Windows Update. This effort to force users to either buy XP or tell them where you got the illegal copy is called ‘Genuine Advantage.’ It was cracked within 24 hours.” Before pressing ‘Custom’ or ‘Express’ buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter: javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all') It turns off the trigger for the key check. This really baffles me but at the same time it reaffirms that Microsoft will never get it right. Not only was it punishing the legitimate users by instituting this process but now it shows that it has no real knowledge of what it takes ...

Gippy Pages = top-frog

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 21:15:00 +0000

Well, I finally got around to it. Using the advice of Tom and xSmurf I’ve finally gotten this site a domain. I had www.top-frog.com just pulling duty as a place to stuff, well, stuff. Now it is the new home of the Gippy Pages. So, if you’ve actually bookmarked this monstrosity, please update your bookmark to the new address. Just for the record, too, Andy’s site has moved to www.puddlemonkey.com. I bought that url for her a while ago but it was suffering the same fate with no DNS to point a domain name with. Thank you ZoneEdit! And thank you Tom and xSmurf.

A couple of Firefox fixes

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:46:00 +0000

This is more a note to myself than it is a tip. I’ve lost this info several times so I’m just leaving myself a note here since this gets backed up regularly. Both of these tips can be performed by entering Firefox and entering ‘about:config’ in the address bar and searching for part of the strings to bring up the lines that need editing. The side scrolling isse Two fingered scrolling on the new Powerbooks causes Firefox to go forward and backwards when a horizontal scroll is performed on the trackpad. This can happen inadvertantly so it is easier just to turn the feature off. mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0 mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines to 1 This allows vertical and side scrolling to act as it should. HTTP Pipelining When using Firefox on a broadband connection pipelining can help speed up the browser. network.http.pipelining to true network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 50 network.http.proxy.pipelining to true

Fire Up Firefox

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:23:00 +0000

Though I prefer to use Apple’s Safari for everyday browsing I keep Firefox on hand because it represents a major player in the browser market that I need to test against and because it has a wealth of extensions that make web development easier. Of the many extensions for Firefox I have found a small set of extensions that really help me on a daily basis: Fangs Screen Reader Emulator, Javascript Debugger, TextMarker, View Rendered Source, Web Developer. One that was pointed out to me just today is fireFTP. And, of course, we all need to get our RSS fix so when I’m in Firefox I use Sage to get that fix. Making development easier All of these extensions have made my life easier at one time or another and they’ve made themselves indispensable. And in the case of the Javascript Debugger that has happened rather quickly. I’ve only recently taken on Javascript like I should and this has quickly turned into a great little tool for finding out where I screwed up. Screen Readers is something that we all should be c...

A Moose once bit my sister…

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 00:24:00 +0000

My, oh, my, how I had forgotten how good that movie really is. And when you see it with 8,500 other eager fans you can count on having a good time. The venue was Red Rocks Amphitheater, the movie, of course, was Monty Python and the Holy Grail (aka: Monti Python ik den Holie Grailen). Granted, a few of the subtleties of shadow detail are lost when viewing outdoors but when you get the sound of clacking coconuts from all around you all is forgiven… what a wonderful way to see this movie. She’s got huge… tracts of land! The show started just after dusk, and after a live concert by a local brass band who did a whole Monty Python themed night, complete with a sing-a-long to Sir Robin’s tales and the Camelot skit. The amount of people not reading the words during the singing was disturbing – they really should have been reading along with the movie screen… Look at the bones! I was a little worried at first that I had blown the night since I waited so long to get tickets. Fortunately there were plenty of tickets...

Training dogs, training humans

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:37:00 +0000

One thing that I never, ever, thought about when we got dogs was that not only would they need training but that I’d need training too. I need lots of training. Before getting Bear and Dozer I had pretty much been around dogs until I graduated high-school. I thought that since I had been around dogs so much that I knew how to handle them. I didn’t. Unfortunately it has taken a series of high-stress events to bring this to light. I guess I learn rather slowly. The problem? Us. It turns out that I didn’t know as much about dogs as I thought I did (typical male thing, probably) and my behavior could have been better in being an alpha to them, a leader. Seemingly harmless events and treatments turned out to be bad for how they see us and thus how they react to other people around us. Little things have made the difference: how we walk with them, in what order everybody gets to eat, and where they get to sleep are just a few, but I think a few of the most important. So what do we do about it? It turns out that ...

Isn't she lovely?

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 22:58:00 +0000

Yes, she is. Puddlemonkey at the FDR Memorial in Washington DC.

Basic Emailer Class

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:25:00 +0000

So, I ended up on a project that required a lot of mail notifications to be sent so I went ahead and whipped up a class for sending emails via PHP. They didn’t have to be pretty to start off with so this is merely a plain text email class at the moment. HTML and Attachments are slated for future additions but I don’t have time to pop 'em in just yet. So, if you need one, check it out Update: link removed as it is old code and of no use to anyone The class is easy to use. It requires some settings to be passed to it at runtime so there’s no hard coding and each use can be unique. Give it a recipient, a sender, a subject, and a message and you’re off to the races. It does have a bit of power in being able to use text files as email templates so you can reuse code easily if you need to. Templates can be customized at runtime with variable replacement. Simply set your items to be replaced with double brackets, ie: , and pass replacement values to the script and you can do some nice variable data emails. There’...

The fcXHTML Widget is Live!

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 23:09:00 +0000

After about a month in development (not counting the time that we set it down and didn’t work on it) the FuzzyCoconut XHTML Widget is here. I have to say that this project wouldn’t have come to fruition without the initial push by John but after a lot of tweaking and critiquing Fuzzy Coconut, made up of John, Joel, Harold, and me has finally produced a product. There’s a lot about the back end of this that I haven’t even tried to understand yet since its all pretty much JavaScript and XMLHTTPRequest, something I’ve played with very little. But tonight I can’t begin to explain how excited I am to see our widget on Apple’s Dashboard Widget website. The widget has also been submitted to a few other places so we’ll see what kind of response that we get. I’m using this myself just about every other day so I have to think that some people will find it useful. It’s being let out under a donationware license – we’re not requiring any money but we appreciate any contributions that help fund our server that helps us...

Preparing for fully compliant XHTML

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 19:27:00 +0000

Well, I’m playing around with delivering actual xml content for xml aware browsers, or maybe I should say I’m playing around with delivering xml content to everybody but IE, and am realizing how much I don’t know about xhtml. So much changes in document structure it will take a while to find the right balance of old and new and a little bit of browser sniffing for IE & older browsers to keep full compatability. I’m going to start playing with this site soon and trying to achieve that balance. It’ll be a challenge since my forte is not front end display. In any event, it’ll give me something to break this site with. In the mean time, here is what I’ve learned up to this point. This is in no way a complete tutorial or official writeup – I haven’t even tried some of this yet. This is a note to myself in preparation for making the move. Hopefully this spurs some good commenting to make this a nice little primer on transitioning to a pure xhtml delivery. I’m sure I have some errors in here so please correct...

Another baton? What will they think of next?

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 23:19:00 +0000

So, it seems, I’ve been passed another baton. This time on system setup. I use a 15" powerbook so there’s not much of a thrill there. The desk is still a mess from moving the server but I do have a pic of the server for those interested enough to look. So, I guess the system specs are in order. The Powerbook This is a 2005 15" aluminum powerbook, 1.67ghz, 1gb of Ram, 80gb hard drive, 64mb video, airport extreme (though my wireless is still on the b spec). The system is, of course, running Tiger. The only thing special about its setup is that it has Apache 2, MySQL 4.1 and PHP 5 installed. In its server setup it is a mirror of my production server. It got me in trouble once when I was doing stuff for work where we still use PHP 4 since that is what the web host uses. I have it partitioned so I can dual-boot into Yellow Dog Linux but until they get the trackpad supported in this version of the PowerBook that partition will remain empty. When I get the desk back in order he’ll have access to a 19&qu...

Darn that DynDns…

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 12:26:00 +0000

I guess I really should set up some automatic scripting to renew that dyndns account… not sure yet how long I was down, or if anyone noticed, but now my little corner of the world is back up and running. That is all. Full report on the vacation to follow.

On Vacation

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:51:00 +0000

Well, after 3 years we’re finally taking a vacation. Before that it had been about 7 years since we’d taken a vacation. We’re going to DC until the 9th. We’ve got a ton of things planned. We’re gonna see friends from college (Stacy) and friends from the internet (John, Halbie, and Regan). We’re doing the obvious tourist stuff like the Smithsonian. We’re also heading out to Arlington to see my Grandfather’s burial site. I have about 20 rolls of film and plan to shoot it all. We’re also taking the digital so we’ll have a snapshot camera as well. I just can’t wait – I love to travel and I love to meet new people. This week I get to do both! And look out Halbie, I’m bringin’ an iPod packed with Punk and 80’s Pop tunes!

Converting Color Images to Grayscale

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:14:00 +0000

This is an old technique but one that I think far too few people know about. The process of converting color images to grayscale is not as easy as simply selecting grayscale from PhotoShop’s Image → Mode menu. Changing to grayscale by that method compresses the image’s natural balance, and even if the natural balance was preserved color and grayscale images are vastly different in how they react to color so special care has to be taken when discarding the color information in an image. Getting started So here’s how to do it. It is not much more work than simply changing to grayscale but does take a bit of critical tweaking. And here is our original image, yep, that’s bear and dozer from when they were young. I chose this particular image for a few reasons. First of all it is a digital image. Digital images have a compressed dynamic range as it is. You can get a smoother range of shadow to highlight from most scanners but they still require special care. Also because it has a large amount of similar hued co...

A couple of Recipes

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 02:48:00 +0000

This is mainly to remind myself to give these recipes to a couple of people. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try these as they’re fantastic recipes. I make no claims to be the creator of these recipes – they were handed to me, source unknown. Kansas City Barbecue Sauce This Kansas City style Barbecue Sauce recipe is fantastic on ribs and goes strangely well with plain old potato chips. ¼ tsp. ground allspice ¼ tsp. ground cinnamon ¼ tsp. ground mace ¼ tsp. ground black pepper ½ tsp. curry powder ½ tsp. chili powder ½ tsp. paprika ¼ cup white vinegar ½ tsp. hot sauce (Tabasco) 1 cup ketchup ⅓ cup dark molasses Sift together all the spices, stir in vinegar, then add hot sauce and ketchup and dark molasses until well blended. Serve warm or at room temperature. Sauce may be stored in an airtight container in refrigerator for 2-3 weeks or in freezer for up to 6 months. Roberto’s Pizza This is by far the best home made pizza I’ve made. The crust is especially nice. The sauce Makes 3-4 pizzas 32 oz. can crus...

MySQL Abstraction update…

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:16:00 +0000

Yep, the script needed updating already. I left out a routine in the arrayAssoc and arrayNum functions to account for an empty result set. So if you’ve downloaded it, grab this new version Update: link removed as it is old code and of no use to anyone. Did anyone actually download and use the first one?

Site Search Added

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 16:23:00 +0000

As it sits now it is a bit crude, but in no way rude. The datebox has been replaced with a searchbox – this has been my plan all along but I just finally got around to implementing it. The search program is htDig and it works wonderfully. It is a spider based catalog system with a ton of configuration options. Installation was a bit tricky as I compiled straight from source, but once the unix mumbo jumbo was all done the install was perfect. I’ve completely bypassed the standard form output and customized all of it to fit into the site template – doing so meant pushing an exec command to a shell script but its fast and complete – so I have no worries. It looks a bit raw now but I plan on sprucing it up a bit. But for that we’ll all have to be patient. I think I should go pull some weeds now, they’re getting a bit tall out there on the corner…

More gettin' my OOP on: Aggregation

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:30:00 +0000

I promised myself that I’d write about something else but this has me so stoked that I just can’t keep it in. One of my biggest problems with getting into large PHP application programming with OOP was the sharing of functions. Inheritance just wasn’t doing it the way I wanted it to. I knew it was possible but hadn’t gotten the hang of it until I found Aggregation. Sweet, sweet aggregation… Serious $geek++; coming up So you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about. Unless you’re seriously into php you’ve probably already glassed over so why not head over to Chipotle.com and witness a very neat flash website. For the rest of you that have any kind of remote interest in PHP and OOP, hopefully you come back and read the rest of this. What aggregation is not: anything related to agriculture. What it is: a way to share object functions across objects. You can safely create a library of general functions and share their functionality within other objects wherever needed. This is the code reuse that ...

My MySQL Abstraction Class

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:03:00 +0000

We all do it, and its a foundation of providing dynamic web content. The database call is almost everywhere now as dynamic pages are becoming the norm and not the exception. More and more I’m making database calls and my old class just wasn’t cutting it anymore. If you’d like to just dive in and see the script, Dive in and take a look. History My first MySQL Abstraction class was actually written by a friend and slightly modded by me to add some error reporting functions. I took that version because at the time it was more than I knew not just about OOP but about MySQL functions in general. I’ve used it for a great many things but have gradually outgrown it and found it to be a bit rough around the edges. The author admits that it was one of the first ventures he had into OOP. It seems that many of us make our first ventures into PHP OOP with MySQL Abstraction classes – probably because we use databases so much. So, having outgrown that, I decided to make my own. Wish List I want a lot out of a MySQL Abstr...

I've got it, now what the hell am I gonna do with it?

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 20:53:00 +0000

So, I traded and older 802.11b router for a new 8port 10/100 switch (thanks, Alden) and now I should probably get around to moving the server into the basement. I need the switch because my 4 port router is almost out of ports and also I need to get 2 devices attached through the basement and I only want to have the 1 hole in the office floor. I now get to decide how I want to handle the wiring and figure out where I’m gonna get power for the switch in the basement. The central location I’d like to put it doesn’t have nearby power so I’ll probably end up doubling back over some cable runs to get everything wired in. No biggie, I guess. Cable’s not that expensive and the distances won’t cause any kind of signal issues so I really just have to stop whining and get it done… whine, whine, whine. Ok, I’m done now.

Just what is a half question?

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 22:52:00 +0000

I’ve been profiled. I have no idea how this business started or even what effect it will have on me in the long run but here it is over at Tom’s site. I still wanna know who called me old and creepy. Oh, and Tom, looks like the copy / paste missed some spaces and line breaks… yeah, I’m a bastard like that.

Do you tip for take-out food?

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:51:00 +0000

I’ve got a nagging feeling that my position on tipping at restaurants when you pick up food for take-out is a social faux pas. I don’t do it. I just don’t see what I should be tipping for. Typically when going to pick up carry out all you’re doing is being handed a plastic bag with your food and a bill. I pay for most things by debit card and there is always that little nagging tip line on the receipt and in some places there is a tip jar next to where they ring you up. I feel odd when handing back the receipt with no tip on it but by the time I get out the door I feel better – probably because I’m not face to face with someone who typically augments a base pay with the day’s tips. I figure that I’m getting the base level of service – the advertised food and a container to put it in. That’s worth the price on the menu or I wouldn’t have ordered. But I haven’t been served, nobody has brought me a refill or asked if I need katsup. So I logically thing that there shouldn’t be a tip. And this is but a stepping...

Holy crap!

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 13:58:00 +0000

So they did it. Apple’s goin’ Intel. Not much to say at this point 'till we see the new system specs and what the overall hardware compatability is. During the keynote they spotlighted that Mathmatica was ported in just 2 hours. This is a very very good sign that the trasition will be relatively easy for any developer. I’m curious to wether the Mac can now take advantage of other hardware that is specific to Intel… like, can I go get an off the shelf TNT nVidia 6800 dirt cheap? Only time will tell and I still have some crow to eat. But I will say that the thought of a Dual 3.6 Mac has me a little frisky. Not to mention the centrino and other mobile units… mmmm. And, no, I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. I’m as surprised as anyone else. But I also see the benefit in using an architecture that is moving forward. Apple’s not stupid. We all know that the Pentium line can’t go forever how its been going so there had to be something else, some promise of expansion, that pushed them over the edge. Not just IBM no...

Mozilla 1.1 Alpha Available

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:07:00 +0000

If you’re feeling particularly geeky, go and get Deer Park Alpha1 to get a sneak peek at Firefox 1.1. That is all.

The order of things

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 21:30:00 +0000

Though I’m not a particularly suspicious person now – I’m more a creature of habit than anything else – when I was younger I often wondered if the order in which actions were performed would have any bearing on the outcome of the event. My clearest memory of this is in reference to G.I. Joe action figures and comic books. At the time we were living in Europe. We lived just outside of Brunssum, NL. My father was a Navy Commander attached to what was then AFCENT (Allied Forces Central Europe, Netherlands). I was about 11 when this takes place. A ritual treat to me was a regular trip to the Air Force Base just across the border in Germany – the name of which escapes me now – where we’d do the whole station-wagon full of groceries thing. But before going to the Commissary we’d hit the PX and the book store. This is where my little pea brain would start to wonder: would the outcome be different depending upon my choice of initial destination? Where to go first? At the time the hot ticket items for an 11-year ol...

I don't believe it

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 16:58:00 +0000

The rumors are flying: Apple to switch to Intel. I’m gonna put my 2 cents in now: I don’t believe it. Apple can’t survive another huge architecture switch Who says they’re talking about x86 cpus? Apple can take the PowerPC anywhere they want from what I understand Apple loves control: Even if they did switch I doubt they’d switch to a “normal” x86 chip They’ve got way too large an investment in the PowerPC architecture Apple doesn’t announce major changes like this very far in advance. It would absolutely kill Mac sales over the next year – nobody would want a processor that is being phased out. So my vote is in. I don’t think a switch is gonna happen. I think it’ll be a collaborative effort on adding more PPC fabrication capabilities or maybe that Intel has bright ideas for where to take the PPC next. Its no secret that IBM is not enthused about the low yield and profitability of the Macintosh variant of the PPC970, aka: G5, so it would stand to reason that Apple (who is also not happy with Intel’s progre...

Searching for the perfect proofing solution

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 15:39:00 +0000

The dynamic nature of the web makes updating websites and content a snap to do. You make the change, upload and its live. Got a typo – log in and edit directly on the server. Beauty. But what happens when you need to make a major change to a site and have it proofed by people who don’t have access to your test server? My quest for the perfect proofing solution unfortunately still has me wanting more. The drawback to proofing at work is that our network is private and many of the eyes that need to look at pages before they go live are outside the network. One of my issues lies in that our work website is set to print like a datasheet – not be representative of what is on screen. It actually works very well and we’ve gotten some kudo’s about the print format from some of our regular users as well as from people inside the company for its easyily read format. So what’s a boy to do to get an accurate screen proof out without tiling screenshots? I kinda felt up against a wall until late last week I got a revela...

Let's hear it for scripting!

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 18:19:00 +0000

Ya know, 3 years ago I never thought that command line could do much more than system administration tasks. Whenever people talked about writing scripts to do tasks I could never think of a task that I’d use the command line for in a normal days work. Well, now I’ve found something. I actually wrote and first used the script about 4 months ago but it wasn’t until recently that it became a normal part of my toolset. Where it all began It turns out that using PHP from the command line can save me a ton of time and hassle when processing images for our eStore at work. We need the images processed in 2 ways. We need to have 40 px square thumbnails and the larger image can be no wider than 400 px if horizontal or no taller than 250 px if vertical. On top of having to make two of each image I’m typically given 10 or more images at a time to process. I started doing them with Photoshop’s scripting ability. Speed didn’t concern me since I was doing such small batches. But then came the day I was given something ou...

Closer still

Sun, 29 May 2005 17:34:00 +0000

We have a shower in the bathroom! The whole ordeal of getting a shower in this bathroom started when we ordered an acrylic clawfoot tub which cannot support the weight of overhead shower systems that are attached to the water valves. Something about the whole thing being too heavy. Well, after finding that out we went for water access that came over the wall of the tub – but that also ruled out the attached shower assembly because of weight issues. Um. Shit? So, after much debate and 3 returned products, we’ve got a shower. We went back to the original setup and got an all included exposed shower assembly where part of the weight of the shower system lies on the water pipes that come up over the tub. I’ve already made it a but sturdier by installing a cross beam in the attic where the one side attaches so that I could drill directly into wood (and that side is mighty sturdy) and the other side uses wall anchors that came with the setup. I’m not thrilled about that side but it’ll hold until I can add anothe...

NHL is shooting itself

Sun, 29 May 2005 00:48:00 +0000

So ESPN reports that it is not picking up its $60M option to retain some exclusive rights for next years hockey season. It has declined further comment but promises a clarification in the coming week. I don’t like it. No matter how you look at it, from the player’s side or the owner’s side, there’s not enough money going into the NHL, and in taking this long to settle the expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement they’ve up and lost a ton of money. I can only imagine what advertising premiums they’re gonna lose as well. Not to mention fan support. The only reason I had any kind of extended Cable TV coverage was to get hockey, but now I think I may have learned to live without it. I used to love to watch hockey. The love / hate relationship with the Avalanche was a hard thing but overall was a lot of fun and on the whole Hockey is a fast and very dynamic game to watch. I don’t miss it anymore. I think that might be a bad thing. Ah, maybe I’m just grumpy 'cause I missed an entire season of Hockey, bu...

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat…

Sat, 28 May 2005 21:57:00 +0000

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat ! How I wonder what you’re at ! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea – tray in the sky. ~ Lewis Carroll I can’t say where I originally heard this, but it is frequently in the back of my mind and came to the front tonight while on a walk with the dogs. We have a lot of bats around here and Andy and I used to go out to the part just to watch them. We haven’t done that in a while but tonight got buzzed by a bat while walking the dogs. We’ll have to spend more time in park at night. Bats are fun to watch.

Temporary Email Addresses

Thu, 26 May 2005 13:15:00 +0000

I don’t normally comment on something that should be posted to the links section but this seemed worth writing about. Pookmail is service that offers temporary email addresses. Any emails sent to that temporary address will be forwarded to an address that you specify when signing up. The address expires 24-hours after creation. This is such a wonderful concept. How many times have you signed up for something that you have to supply an email address for but don’t need it permanently? Spur of the moment site registrations? Or that one time registration to get the free e-book? Now you can sign up for things and not get onto spamming lists. Simply sign up with a pookmail address and don’t worry about it. I never would have thought about providing this service but at the same time I wonder why it didn’t pop up earlier.

Taking one for the team

Mon, 23 May 2005 20:35:00 +0000

48 hours in a weekend. I worked for 30 of them. I didn’t go to bed Sunday night. Holy crap, why do I do these things to myself.

That there musical baton thingy-ma-bob

Thu, 19 May 2005 11:34:00 +0000

Well, surprisingly enough I got passed the musical baton that’s been making its way around teh intarweb. It started out that Joey was passing it to me as a stolen item but then this John Oxton character went and made it official ;p. I have to admit that there was a sense of fun associated with being a rebel, but I guess I’ll have to put down the hair grease and put the leather jacket away. I’m keeping the '55 chevy though. So, without any further bad humor, here it goes: Total volume of music 43.88GB, 11238 songs, 31 days. Most are encoded at 128k AAC. All this resides on a file server and I keep about 13GB on my 20GB iPod. Last CD that I bought The last CD that I bought was Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance (iTMS link) from the iTunes Music Store. Song playing right now Paranoia! Cha-Cha-Cha by The Soviettes. Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me Posession by Sarah McLachlan Yellow Ledbetter by Pearl Jam Cecilia by Simon & Garfunkel I’m a Fake by The Used Bright Ey...

Let the voices speak

Fri, 13 May 2005 21:33:00 +0000

Whatever it is that is inside waiting to get out – let it out… For me its odd imagery that I often pick out of random noise patterns – like the faux marble coating on the bathroom stalls or in stucco. More often than not I let the image fade away and just go back to what I was doing. I’ve got to stop doing that. I get weird and wonderful images wandering through my head all the time but I haven’t seriously let them out sinse college. I’m thinking I should start that back up again as it is quite liberating. It has a sense of regressing back to a childhood state where nothing was finite and all was possible. Something that I think I lost sometime after I graduated college and I think I lost a bit of my creativity along with it. I’m not sure what brought it on, maybe it was the realization that my creativity needed to now support my life that put pressure on it to be professional and straight forward. That there was no longer room for whimsical or pointless. Well, I’m now longing for the pointless again and I...

Those Pesky Icon Files

Thu, 12 May 2005 21:56:00 +0000

Now that I’ve been playing with Tiger for a while I keep finding new uses for Automator. So far its just two things but there’s a few more on the drawing board. However my first hurdle was to get rid of that pesky little robot icon and replace it with something more becoming of the purpose. Don’t get me wrong I don’t have anything against the little guy, but he’s not very appropriate and when you start accumulating little applications like this it is counter intuitive to have a duplicate icons in a folder all identifying different objects. The reasoning Since I’m opting to keep my iTunes library on a server it is always down to sequence when launching iTunes. I want to avoid those pesky exclamation marks that pop up when a song is played and that song is unavailable to the system. So the server share needs to be mounted before the song is played. This gets tedious to mount the share each time to do this. This is where Automator comes in. It is a snap to make a routing that I can run to mount the server and...

Might as well face it I'm addicted to blog

Tue, 10 May 2005 20:55:00 +0000

Hi, my name is Shawn and I’m addicted to blogs. Not so much the personal blogs, but anything informational, both useful and useless. I just can’t get enough. I’ve got RSS readers both at home and at work and religiously check them periodically during the day in the hopes that I’ll pick up some useful tip on either web design or on using the Mac. The last time I counted the list was at 67. That was last week so there might be one or two more in there now. I don’t know what it is, I just like reading articles on how to do things differently or better than I am now. I often times skip over the personal ramblings of the author (if they mix in personal stuff) and just get to the meat of it. Yeah, there are exceptions to this but I’m only interested in personal stuff if I know the person. I’m not sure if its an affliction or not, but I’m addicted. No, I don’t think I need help or an intervention or anything like that, but I could use a few more hours in the day to read and write more… Now, in case any of you are...

Busy busy busy…

Tue, 10 May 2005 12:23:00 +0000

I haven’t made a post in 8 days yet it feels like I’ve let this site fall into an abyss of obscurity. Odd the way time feels when you don’t really pay attention. I’m bad at judging the passage of time anyway but it seems that lately anything I let sit for a while seems to fall away so quickly that it feels like I’ve left it to rot. What is really odd is that I haven’t been able to catch up either, I think its an odd feeling of being overwhelmed and not having a way out. I think I just need to get organized and prioritize some activities so that I can start to get a few things finished. There’s some things at home and at work that have lingered for a while and are starting to make other projects feel like they are a futile effort to get started. I just need to finish a few things… just a few. Learning So, hopefully I can get mentally squared away and back into the swing of things. I’m still nose deep in learning PHP5 (and loving it, by the way) I haven’t been able to put it to good use yet. I have the basic...

Command line goodness

Mon, 02 May 2005 00:22:00 +0000

Just learned these and thought I’d log it for posterity (and so I don’t forget). I’m always looking to do things, fun things, in the terminal and thought these were cool. The first is a way to easily add that long, long path to your next command in Terminal. Say you’re looking to see what’s in a directory and you do: ls -alh /etc/httpd to see all your config files for apache. Now, you don’t want to type the path in again, so lets use the !$ command to auto append the last word you typed to the next command. So the last word you typed was: /etc/httpd without the trailing slash, so don’t forget that the added string is literal and we need to make sure the new string is complete, so we write: vim !$/httpd.conf.bak From that Terminal will build the full command as vim /etc/httpd/httpd.conf.bak It doesn’t get much easier than that. /etc/httpd was but one example, just image not having to dive back into typing /usr/local/program/build/db/conf/ or whatever stupidly long path you need to type. Beggining and End of...

South Park Shawn

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:09:00 +0000

Saw this first over at Mr. Scott’s site, so I can’t say I’m the first. But I thought it was hilarious to do. Notice I’m not wearing any pants – the possibilities for accurate self representation are definitely there. Check it out over at Planearium (page no longer exists). Make one, post it here using the image tags. It’s what all the cool kids are doing, really, I’m a cool kid. Thanks for the link Scott.

Giving Photoshop Two Fingers

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 12:56:00 +0000

Yet another reason to love two fingered scrolling on the new Aluminum PowerBooks. I just found this last night by accident. If you already knew, well, then, WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?!? It turns out that photoshop will allow you to scroll the levels (and other sliders that are accompanied by manual imput boxes) with two fingered scrolling. The proceedure is pretty easy. Open an image and then open the Levels dialog box. Click into one of the input boxes above the histogram. Now, mouse over to the image and scroll up and down – the levels slider that you selected will then proceed to move left or right with your up and down movement. I tried this around and it seems to be tied to scrollers that also have manual input dialog boxes to duplicate input like those found in the Color Balance settings, the Threshold and many other dialog boxes in Photoshop. I tried this with the system fonts panel to try and bump up font size in TextEdit but that did not work. I have yet to try this elsewhere. One of my peev...

My first OOP

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 11:55:00 +0000

The next logical step in my education of PHP is to learn PHP5’s implementation of OOP. I started that this morning and wrote myself a short, useless script using a couple of the new features in PHP5. I learned how to use static variables and constructors. Not bad for my first hour. :: cue child’s voice :: I made this: Class myCounter { static $counter = 0; public $id; // constructor runs at function open function __construct() { self::$counter++; $this->id = self::$counter; } } Class myObj extends MyCounter { function showMyId() { return $this->id . "n"; } } $one = new myObj(); $two = new myObj(); echo $one->showMyId(); // prints: 1 echo $two->showMyId(); // prints: 2 Pretty much all it does is inherit and increment the myCounter Class each time the myObj class is instantiated, but still its pretty cool. I haven’t even done anything constructive with OOP and I’m already excited about it. Now onto Polymorphism.

Tom needs comments on his site

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 15:26:00 +0000

I’m gonna get in trouble for this. This is a commentary on Tom’s recent article entitled Not so new Tiger. Since Tom doesn’t have comments up on his new site yet I’ll add some notes here about this article. While some good points were raised there are a few other things to be considered. And, no, I’m not picking on you Tom, I just found a few things to comment on. Spotlight First, Spotlight technology is not new to Unix based systems. Only thing they did was, slapping together a nice GUI interface, and letting the GUI query the Index every time users type; sort of like Javascript’s OnChange. slocate, and locate are both Unix Admin’s favorite tools that “transparently” indexes the machine and stores them. Yes, locate and slocate have been available for years via unix, and they are my default method for finding items on a unix system (I even set up cron scripts to run updatedb on a regular basis) it is far from being a spotlight equivalent. Spotlight will not only catalog the hard drive it will also catalog ...

Tuna Dogs

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 06:02:00 +0000

Our dogs like tuna. How’s that for a cheap augmentation to their meals. They tend not to like plain dry kibble anymore so we’ve started mixing their morning meals with something to get them to eat. We also buy some wet food to mix in with their morning kibble but nothing seems to go over quite like tuna. Salmon doesn’t do too bad to get them excited either. The dogs just like fish. I can’t really argue either – we can get a 12 pack of Tuna at Costco for ~$6.00 so we end up paying ~$.50 a can. Significantly cheaper than dog food and just as good for them. And then it takes a turn for the worse I’ve been wondering just what they’ve taken a big interest in over on the flagstone at the front of the house this morning. I couldn’t see it when I first went out – it was too dark, but now I’ve fished something out of Dozer’s mouth that Bear just about tackled me to get. The best I can tell is that it is a frozen wad of dog puke. At least, that’s the best I can tell by the smell of it. So, while they have good taste...

I guess I learned it wrong

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:38:00 +0000

Globals. When I first started learning PHP it was well after the push to ship PHP with register_globals off by default, so I never learned to use them. However, I also thought the $GLOBALS variable was off limits as well. I was wrong. It seems that this wonderful little variable can do more to help with variable scope than I ever thought possible. Consider this code. $var = "global"; function edit($n) { $GLOBALS['var'] = $n . " edit"; } edit($var); echo($var); This code returns global edit when run. The $GLOBALS array is only made up of variables defined and set by the script – it doesn’t contain super globals like POST and GET vars and thus are safe from code contamination that might occur from someone trying to change variable content in your scripts. Wow. I’ve got a whole new world set out in front of me now that I’ve learned references and that $GLOBALS are available. Maybe I should be a little embarrassed that it took me this long to discover these two basic, basic gems of PHP but I’m not. For being s...

Passing by Reference

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 15:18:00 +0000

Being a self taught php programmer I tend to learn something every time I run accross an article outlining different techniques. Lately I’ve been learning about references. At first I thought “so what?” at the thought of using a reference to a variable instead of the variable itself. But once I thought about it some more it made more and more sense. Passing by reference, in case you don’t know, means that you can make a statement like: $var1 = 1; $var2 =& $var1; $var2 *= 2; echo($var1); In this instance the last echo statement will print 2. Right now, if you’ve never used references before you’re thinking “yeah, so what?” Well, let’s dive into a more complex example. function manipulate_var(&$num) { $num = $num * $num; } $var = 4; manipulate_var($var); echo ($var); This example returns $var as 16. So instead of declaring a global in the fuction or calling and setting the variable via $GLOBAL['var'] we can simply set a reference inside a function that effects the original variable. This is something...

New Pope

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 23:29:00 +0000

Am I the only one who couldn’t care less? Probably not, but still, I sometimes feel like I am. I wrote and rewrote this post many times because each time I started to ramble and my disdain for the church comes out each time. I have a hard time coming to terms with the place of religion in a modern society and I really should write out my feelings on the matter because sometimes all I feel inside is disdain for the church and all that it has done (and not done) throughout history. I have a lot of similar feelings about politics (and politicians) and can see many parallels between politics and religion, and not just the influences they have on each other. I wonder if it would be productive to follow up and write out and organize my thoughts on religion & politics, wether I would have anything different or even coherent to say on the matter. Wether what I have to say is more based on feeling than fact or based more on how religious and political leaders treat those who they are sworn to serve. They are su...

Humans 3, mice 0

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000

The last two died quicker than the first, they had the benefit of being wacked by some pretty heavy handed traps. But I still feel bad. What an undignified way to go. Wacked. Then thrown away. At least larger animals get eaten when killed. These poor little dudes just got dropped in the trash. And they’re so cute too.

Seeking Book Suggestions

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 15:22:00 +0000

So it seems that I’m gonna have to learn some javascript for work. Our eCommerce package is a proprietary piece of shit that runs on MAS and Providex and is the slow and has a very odd construct in the way is processes information. Take for example is method of repeating a table row based on a template. The template contains code like this (greatly simplified to show only one item):  <tr> <td> ~~IWAA_UT_UDF_IAA~~ </td> </tr>  So by initially reviewing the template you’d think that the entire contents of what is inbetween the comments would be evaluated to replace the specific information. But it does not. For some reason the table row has to be there for the loop to work. So I can’t strip out the table and use CSS formatting in its place. The only way to get this info would be to grab it via javascript and reformat it. Simply the stupidest workaround I’ve ever seen (to date). It looks like I’m gonna have to do this with the...

Minor Site Update

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:07:00 +0000

Added the 5 most recent “Around n’ About” links to the end of the RSS feed and shortened the feed to 5 entries. Not sure if anyone is really interested in the stuff I pick up around the internet but I’ve been wanting to put it there just to put it there for a while. I shortened the stories to 5 entries because I don’t write enough to make 10 a benefit. If I were pumping out multiple entries a day then 10 would be useful. That is all.

The Good News Is

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 05:57:00 +0000

The bathroom has walls. And the bads news? The bathroom has walls that need to be primered and painted. I have to say I hate painting, but at least there is nothing in there that I have to worry about so a few things are taped up and then its gonna fly. The first coat of primer took me 4 hours last night. Tonight’s coat should take significantly less time but I’ll still have to go through and hit the corners with a brush which is what takes most of the time. The rolling goes quickly. I’m sore today from last night. Mostly due to rolling the ceiling. But I did get a pole for the roller (hey, no wise cracks about that!) so that made it MUCH easier. I don’t know why I wasn’t using the pole the whole time. It made rolling so much easier overall that thing is never gonna leave my sight. Well, off to work. My wrist is starting to get sore just from typing this so I can see today being an uncomfortable day in front of a computer. That is, If I can stay awake all day.

Site Housekeeping

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 22:11:00 +0000

Got a few improvements done on the site. Most notable being setting a cookie for comment data so you’ll be remembered the next time you come back and comment. As I write this I realize that I should enable the choice to be remembered or not, but for now it’ll remember everybody. I’m not too worried about it remembering everything since the data in the cookie is encrypted using mcrypt. Each time you comment you’ll be assigned a new key and the data will be re-encrypted. There is a way I can make it even more secure but I’ll leave that for a future update as well. Other site improvements were for me. I finally got the admin interface flushed out so that I could edit existing stories without a trip to phpmyadmin – I can do it right here in the site which responds much faster than phpmyadmin does. Pretty much all that is left on the admin side is to make a way to add categories for both the links and the stories and a way to add links. The only holdup is my laziness. And now that I think of it I need to fix so...

Pre-Order your Tiger

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 10:35:00 +0000

Amazon.com has Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger available for pre-order. Pre-orders are offered with a $35 discount that brings the cost down to $95. Not a bad way to lessen the yearly OS X update tax as it has come to be known. I’m not sure if I’ll pre-order but I will be on top of 10.4 once released as a developer release of the next major update showed that a major hinderance of mine was solved: when pulling items from an NTFS volume to OSX there is a strong chance that the long filenames will be lost in favor of the shorter 8.3 filenames of the earlier DOS eras. This is not limited to transfers from NTFS to OS X – it happens from NTFS to NTFS as well so it is a larger windows error. But the fact that it gets fixed with Tiger makes bringing work files home much much much much easier… That’s not to lessen the importance of other improvements like spotlight, improved mail.app and RSS reading in Safari, but I have to say that this is the improvement that will make my life that much easier.

Puddlemonkey is online!

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 22:03:00 +0000

Puddle’s blog is finally functional. Check her out at Linkie Poo [edit] Link fixed 'cause I got it wrong the first time.

Just Do It as a coding practice

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 21:01:00 +0000

From time to time I’ve found that a project can be rather overwhelming that it is hard to find a place to start no matter what kind of planning is involved. And no matter how hard I try I cannot get it the way I want it without a lot of tweaking and often times by the time I’m done I want to rewrite everything to fix all the mistakes that I’ve made. I’m starting to think that this is a natural evolution of writing code. Well, at least for me. It seems that no matter how hard I try I always end up with code that I completely want to rewrite or at the very least need to go back and overhaul to make cleaner so that the code is more compartmentalized, easy to read, and more efficient. It doesn’t seem like the first time around really leaves a product worth dealing with for much longer than it takes to rewrite it. This is a pretty time consuming cycle but also no matter how hard I try it seems that this is just what I need to go through. I’m not sure if it is poor planning, relative inexperience as a programmer...

MySQL Administrator now on OS X

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:38:00 +0000

Happy day happy day. Not only is it my Birthday but MySQL Administrator has finally been released for OS X. This is THE complete server management tool for MySQL servers. User management. Performance tools, monitoring. Its all there. I’m not sure how much it will do for you if you don’t have total control of your MySQL server but for those of us that have to maintain servers this is a wonderful addition to the arsenal. Now, if they’d just port over the Query Browser all would be perfect.

Server Upgrade

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 22:39:00 +0000

The server got an upgrade tonight. It produced a little down time but its all good now. We’re now running on a Dual 1Ghz MDD with 1.75 GB of Ram. I’m already seeing a great speed improvement in the page load times. I think the old iBook was just a bit overwhelmed with the image generation that needed to take place. Another thing that is better is the MySQL security. The old server was a bit lax in that I had one main user for all the databases. Now the users are segmented into ownerships and can only be edited by those who have been given privileges. This means that different users can log into the same phpMyAdmin and only see the databases they have privilges on. So my users, the rest of the Fuzzy Coconut team, will be able to see their personal databases and the master FC database but won’t be able to play jokes on other’s dbs. And it really wasn’t hard to do for such a slick scheme. It’s pretty darn secure too. The only username and password that is somewhat in the open, meaning that it is hardcoded int...

Meyer on IE7

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 08:30:00 +0000

I don’t normally post links on other stories I find, but I thought this one proved worthy of a comment. Eric Meyer weighs in on IE7 and our hopes for standards support. Eric brings up some great points and provides links to a couple of good reads. Most of all he preaches patience and understanding towards a team at Microsoft that has been slashed down to a few trapped souls who are all that is left of an IE development team. Unfortuately, while Eric brings up some great points both about IE and about us as developers it also does not bode well for increased standards support in IE7. Think about it. If the focus of this release is security and there is an anemic team workingon the project what are we to realistically expect in the time frame that MS is talking about. I doubt we’ll see what we want and I truly feel sorry for the guys who have to pound away on this release and then eventually get a pounding for everything that was left out – and maybe left out due to reasons that were not their own. I guess o...

Spoiled on Gentoo

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:20:00 +0000

Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition. I’m fearing it. I have to do an install at work to run a test server and I’m not looking forward to it. Since I’ve started using Gentoo the RPM based distro’s seem like such a pain in the ass. A little background for the non-geeks. Linux packages typically consist of just what is needed to perform a certain function. Because of this when you install one package you probably need others to do this, they have dependencies. But if you don’t have a dependency installed you can’t install it later, it has to be installed before you install the one you’re after. WIth RPM based distros this can be a pain in the ass especially when you want to install 3 things but you have 30 or more dependencies. And the crappy thing about RPM based distros, unless I’m missing something here, is that you’ll find out about dependencies one at a time. So you’ll have to try a build 30 times to find you have 30 dependencies that you need to get first. And sometimes dependencies have dependencies. This...

How far should you go?

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 08:26:00 +0000

Just how far should we go towards not caring about IE in our web design? I think even though we hate the browser we have little choice in dealing with it as a browser. That said, proper coding has its merits no matter what the platform. Now, I’m gonna pick on someone. Tom has built a nice looking site. However he’s not compatible with Windows at all. Really. While Opera and FireFox will view his site just fine neither can post comments. IE cannot even see enough of the site to read the contents. I even tried Links on Linux and got a “cyclical redirect” error (something I’ve never seen before) when trying to post a comment. So this begs the question: how far should we go in our advocacy of our favorite platform and doing things just in spite of “The Evil Empire”? Despite our hatred of Microsoft and the complete and utter pain that MSIE can be at times is it really to our benefit that we completely brush off an entire platform? I think not. While I’m getting into the mindset that standards compliant coding a...

Collaborating with ease

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 08:12:00 +0000

With Fuzzy Coconut coming into focus (yes, every pun included) we decided to have a live meeting to flush out some ideas and get the ball rolling on the project. But with all of us residing in 3 different time zones our options looked a bit limited. Well, that was before thinking about it. The four of us each have laptops with built in microphones and we all have broadband. Put that together with Skype and SubEthaEdit and a trusty plaintalk microphone we were all able to talk with each other and type into the same document all using free software and services. Not bad really. We probably have a few configuration issues to figure out with Skype but overall its voice quality was very good despite our one disconnect and our need to wear headphones to help cancel echo. I think SubEthaEdit was the star of the show though. We could all type within the same document, each have unique highlight colors to see who wrote / changed / deleted what, had markers to see what parts of the document others were looking at, a...

Microsoft solicits for bugs

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:06:00 +0000

So it seems that Microsoft may actually be serious in its bid to shore Internet Explorer in version 7 and actually make an up to date product. IE Blog is soliciting for suggested fixes for possible inclusion into IE7. They mention some popular IE7 bug fix sites as points of reference in their article as well and claim to be attentive to their development, so they should know what is wrong already. In browsing through the comments it looks like the majore bases are being touched on so I think if MS can pull it off they can make a solid browser. They recently lost a lead developer (I’ll have to see if I can dig up the story – it happened this week) so it’ll be interesting to see if they can stay on track and get this update out soon. Hopefully MS can get it done right. They surely have the resources and with the talk that they’ve got going on have proved me wrong (thus far) in my doubts about what IE7 will mean to the designers. Granted, it isn’t out yet but it looks like they’re gonna try and get the render...

Why blog?

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 09:22:00 +0000

Blogging is all over. Blog software is free and highly customizeable. So why am I doing this? Well, its for my own education and sanity. I don’t really expect anyone to read this, but I seem to have gathered a bit of readership just in doing what I find to be both fun and educational. Education Doing this is teaching me a lot about web design, html semantics, css and php. The experience that I’m getting by being able to try anything that I want, no just what somebody wants, is teaching me more than I could have expected. Sanity Writing things down is pretty soothing. It takes a load off the mind to be able to write something out. I’ve done this in the past in a few different forms, one of them being to write a scathing email to someone and just not send it, to get things off my chest. I’ve never had a focused effort to do so and provide an outlet on a number of different levels and this has been a wonderful way to just spur a thought process on something that requires development. For example being able to...

Making life easier with exec

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:45:00 +0000

Don't do this: running exec off the file system is a security hole, expecially if you're taking user input to run the command. Just... don't. I’ve been playing more and more with the php exec command to do stuff – I got my first taste of doing this with running htDig as a command and pulling its results into an array. So I decided to find out if using exec to do directory listing would save any script length or not. Well, as you can see in this file there is little difference in length and a tradeoff or two to get there. Initially the script looks more compact and there is definitely less individual things going on. The scripts are so short though that trying to benchmark them is pretty futile. Initially I can see on area where the old route would have the advante: file size. The php way of getting the file size needs to be computed no matter what so wether you want to write in KB, MB, or B you run no extra cycles to do so. The exec command returns KB only so if you needed to do anything different when li...

Pimp my site

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 13:03:00 +0000

Read an interesting article today on css signatures. And is has a great idea in it. The concept of a css signature is to label your body with an identifier that is unique to your site, like: <body id="top-frog-com"> This way someone can use a custom stlye sheet to change something they don’t like about your site. Granted, few of us would really like for someone to strip a bunch of formatting from out sites because we have a vision on how we’d like to present our data – but how many times have you run accross a site that had one, or maybe two things that bugged you but otherwise you like the site, or for some reason or another you need to change the size of just one type of text on a certain site, or maybe someone writes great articles but their background image makes it unreadable. That can all change if css signatures get the following that they should have. With that simple id in your body tag someone could create a user style sheet and very easily change something they don’t like and keep them on you...

MultiViews – is it that hard?

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 06:26:00 +0000

I’m getting close to getting a simple blog up for the monkey. She’s been wanting a blog so that she can get some freeform writing done and just plain have fun with publishing a bit of content – even if it will only be read by a few people. I have the framework done, it is very much a mirror of what I’m doing here, but with a few enhancements in code to fix a few blunders I made over here. Still not perfect, but closer to better than this one is. But when I uploaded the site to my 1and1 server the site fails. Why? MultiViews are not enabled on the server. So I contact tech support and ask them to look into it and what do I get back? An email saying that Mod_Negotiation is working just fine. Well, no, MultiViews is enabled by Mod_Negotiation but MultiVeiws has to be specifically stated in the directory options for a site. The server is running apache 1.3.x so the problem lies, most likely, within the httpd.conf (or apache.conf, depending on the install) and will most likely be in the virtual host listing for...

Stupid people means free iPods

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 07:54:00 +0000

Yep, I said it. Contrary to popular belief stupid people can contribute to society – to me in particular on occaision. Our little family is the owner of a semi-used 20gig 4th Generation iPod. It was free. Free, how about that? Well, the reason it was free is what is extraordinary. To preface this – I’ve barely cracked open the manual to my iPod. I found it intuitive and easy to use. A co-worker here in the office said the same thing – she was given an iPod as a gift and she only needed a manual to figure out one or two things about using it with the computer. Other than that it was simple and easy to use. That said – this almost new iPod was given to my wife because the original owner, who received it as a gift, could not figure out how to use it. Yep. He was so perplexed by in in fact that he actually threw it in the trash because he thought there was something wrong with it. It was his wife that fished it out and gave it to my wife – yes, no joke, he actually threw it in a trash can. So, now, thanks to s...

Clearing Floats is easy?

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 06:04:00 +0000

Seems that there is an easy way of clearing floats, one that seems to be surprising to so many people that it is hard to beleive it is that easy. SitePoint.com has the writeup about how adding overflow: auto; can cure all that ails ya with clearing floated objects. They provide an example of the theory in action and it sems to work very well. Who knew, it is easy…

Netflix is evil

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 22:34:00 +0000

Damn, ever since we’ve gotten Netflix we’ve been renting movies that we wouldn’t normally have watched. A few days ago it was Requiem for a Dream. The only two redeeming qualities of that movie was some nifty camera work and Jennifer Connely’s bush. And you really don’t get a very good look at her bush either. The movie was pretty depressing but was another one of those movies where you could see the bad things coming. It was rather predictable. Tonight it was Dancer in the Dark. It started out as a promising movie but by the time it was half way through I already felt like had been running for 4 hours. It was painfully slow and filmed documentary style so there was nary a stable shot in the whole movie. And though I like Bjork’s voice there was nothing good about the musical scenes. The lyrics weren’t much more than conversation set to music – not a whole hell of a lot of effort went into making the music something more than part of the script. Now, those two aside we’ve also got some knuckle draggers com...

Get it while its hot!

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:51:00 +0000

The newest scoop on the Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe. I really can’t wait to see this especially since WETA is doing the costumes. In case you don’t know, WETA did the makeup and characters for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I would be a nice guy and mirror this but the damn thing is 33mb and I just can’t foot that kind of bandwidth. On a similar note: An interview with the movie’s visual effects supervisor.

Note to self

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:45:00 +0000

I haven’t read this yet, but am leaving it as a reminder for me to read it as I need to bone up on my JS. Unobtrusive JavaScript. Now I really need to get my links box working so I don’t have to put this into an article… Also leaving a note to read A Tribute to CSS Selectors. More stuff I need to bone up on.

Now Taking Bets

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:15:00 +0000

So, today Microsoft announced a new version of Internet Explorer is on the horizon: IE7. They say they’ve listened to their customers and are respoding to a great deal of end user input when putting together this update. I get the feeling that they’re gonna put in a bunch of security and Windows integration options and not touch the rendering bugs that have plagued the browser for years. So, here, I’m officially taking bets on what level of standards compliancy we’ll see in the new version of IE7. Will it fix rendering bugs? Will it fill out compliance with the CSS 2 specification? Will it properly handle XHTML & XML? Only time will tell I guess.

An Official Gippy Endorsement

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:57:00 +0000

I’ve been testing out many a search script to find something that will run fast, comprehensively index pages, and be highly customizeable because I sure as hell wasn’t going to write one myself. My search took about 36 hours of time dedicated to installing and running different search applications. I finally found what I was looking for in a free program called htdig. Even though I haven’t yet put it into production Htdig has proven to be everything I was looking for in a search script. I will spider a site, it respects robots.txt files, you can specify areas of pages that are not to be indexed (handy for excluding common navigational elements – be careful though – it won’t follow the links in these areas either so be sure that anything you comment out is able to be found through a sitemap or something) and will display results by relevance and apply a 5 star rank to listings. The script is by no means a simple setup as it requires compiling on the server. This can be a major drawback if you host doesn’t a...

Is Gippy a corporate geek?

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 19:00:00 +0000

Well, good news came down the pipe today at work – I get to shed the Jr. Web Designer moniker and start referring to myself as Web & Graphic Designer. This is a huge step as I started this job with just a working knowledge of Adobe GoLive’s automated workflow and have since moved on to programming XHTML, PHP and CSS all by hand and have gained the ability to run a command line Unix box and install and manage a multitude of services on it. I guess I could just sum that up as $geek++; The surprising part is that I’ll be making a bit more than I asked for in this move. What I had asked for when discussing moving up in the company would be at the very beginning of what this position deserved to be paid and what my boss did was push for me to get a bit over that. So not only do I shed a putrid Jr. moniker I gain a handsome new salary. This now brings up a very sticky question. Just how long do I stay with the company. I’ve never really been comfortable with the corporate environment and how the whole proces...

Eastwood Philosophy

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 23:23:00 +0000

Heard this tonight and loved it: Take your work seriously and don’t take yourself seriously and you’ll do well the rest of your life. ~Clint Eastwood Good advice.

New, New and New

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 13:55:00 +0000

It is a weekend of new stuff. New computers, new yard and a new trainer to help us with Bear. First things first – the wife and I splurged this weekend on new laptops. I’ve been wanting to go mobile for a while and the new 15" G4 PowerBook upgrades were too much to resist. While we were there we caved in and bought a new 12" PowerBook for the wife. To justify this we’re selling the old gear. So if anyone is interested in a 12" iBook G4 with 640mb of Ram or a Dual 1Ghz MDD with 1.75 GB of Ram and 110GB of hard drive space please inquire within. I have to say this new PowerBook is very cool. The scrolling trackpad is uber-cool as is the backlit keyboard. The backlighting is very well done, it will not only light the keyboard but dim the screen as well. The amount that it dims and glows depends upon the amount of ambient light still available. If the room is pitch black you really don’t need that much help to see the keys so it only lights up a bit, but if there is a reasonable mix of light and...

Damn Dictionaries

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 23:48:00 +0000

I don’t claim to have the widest vocabulary on the planet, but I do have a decent range of words that I can readily use. That said – I had to look up quandary the other day to get the correct spelling. In doing so I noticed something stupid in the definition. a situation from which extrication is difficult especially an unpleasant or trying one; Now – who really thinks that someone looking up quandary is gonna know what the hell extrication means? In case you are wondering: To release from an entanglement or difficulty; disengage. Is it me or does this seem truly odd. Why use complex or rarely used words to describe other complex or rarely used words? I don’t get it. I had to look up a word that was in a definition of a word I was looking up. A dictionary should use basic language to describe its contents as those of us who do use them a lot don’t want to have to go galavanting across the dictionary to a) get the definition we’re looking for and b) to just plain satisfy the curiosity of knowing what that w...

For now he stays…

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:05:00 +0000

Well, I guess we can’t give away a dog with issues. Nobody wants him. Everybody thinks he’s cute but he’s still here. I guess that’s OK, it would be strange here without him. So, now that its apparent that he’s here to stay, we’ve opted to start on with a behaviorist. The wife took him to a new vet on Friday. Though bear did freak out during the visit the vet concluded that it was still a good visit. She got Bear to warm up to her and Bear even let her examine his belly. To put a long story short – he has fear based anxiety. So she’s prescribed him some drugs that are supposed to keep him calm and help with the behavioral training which starts next week. Fotunately we should only have to use the drugs while we’re working on his behavior. I hope we don’t have to keep him on it as I’m not a big fan of long term drug use for anyone, dog or human. As I write this Bear is curled up on the ottoman staring off into space. I asked him if he was ready to go to bed, a question that is normally answered by him trotti...

Regex

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:51:00 +0000

`eregi_*` is long dead. Long live `preg_*`. But the expressions are the same. Regular expressions have always been (and will most likely continue to be) a challenge to construct. This site is using a system for parsing bb code in the posts that I swore to generate myself and am only permitting myself to seek help on it when I’m absolutely stuck. I guess that’s why it is taking so damn long. But there was a breakthrough of sorts yesterday. I got the URL parsing to work correctly with the help of Google. The only bad part, and partly embarrassing, is that I’m not completely sure how it works. I went in search of help and found a few examples of people doing similar things and pretty much read their code to see what they were doing. Then I came across something that ended up helping. So, now, my URL parsing looks like this: <?php // replace URLs $text = eregi_replace("\[url=([^\[]*)\]([^\[]*)\[/url\]","<a href=\"\1\">\2</a>", $text); It works beautifully, and making a variant to insert off site link...

Holy fried brain, Batman!

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 00:40:00 +0000

Haven’t had an update in a while. Work has been grueling. Home has been busy. My brain is fried. Work has been balls to the wall with upcoming National Sales Conference, a company rebranding, and the website having a Feb. 1 release date. I’ve found myself among aspects of NSC that I neither have time for nor want to be involved in. But that “other duties as assigned” portion of the job description really finds inappropriate times to rear its ugly head. The company is undergoing a rebranding – hopefully there is a focus on advertising and message behind it – and I’m the department zip bitch. With everyone else being on thin-client I’m the only one who can unzip files since I have a real computer (if you can call a windows box real). On top of that there was a color issue on the pocket folder that caused the boss to lose a gasket and come close to blaming me. She simply didn’t understand some of the processes involved and was trying to grasp the concept of the pressman running hot on Magenta. It also turns o...

Ploddin' along

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:53:00 +0000

Got some good news at work in between the hammering of different things to do (very few of which fall within the actual job description). I talked to HR today and found out that what I’m asking for in a raise and title change is completely reasonable. In fact, what I’m asking is the entry pay level to the updated position. So, not a bad request for me to make. It would be a nice jump in pay and would change my title to “Webmaster / Web Designer” which would be a little more accurate than “Jr. Web Designer” is. I gave them what my ideal job description is and also a list of my current duties. The current duties list covered everything from Web Design to being the A/V bitch. There were a ton of different duties listed, and I thought of a couple today that I had forgotten so I think my justification for earning more is in that list. I do so much around the department, and so much outside of my job description, that they should have no reason to complain about paying me more. But, now that I’ve said that they’...

The decision has been made

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 23:59:00 +0000

We’ve been agonizing over this for quite a while now and have finally come to a decision. We’ll be seeking a new home for Bear. It is a combination of many things like his misdirected aggression towards his brother, Dozer, and his insecurities which lead towards other aggressive actions such as attacking other dogs and us. His actions on one occasion had Dozer hiding behind Andy. Dozer typically has no problem standing up for himself but Bear had gotten himself so worked up that he was uncontrollable. On a separate occasion he tried to bite a neighborhood dog. The dog, named Sam, wouldn’t hurt a fly and was sitting calmly by his owner when bear lunged at him. And just today Bear tried to get at Sam through the fence. Then when he can’t get to what is on the other side of the fence he turns his frustration on his brother. Just the other day he bit me 4 times while I attempted to brush him. Dozer took it like a man and just looked at me with that “why me?” expression while I brushed him out. Bear has also ni...

DORK!

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:34:00 +0000

Got a phone call at work, which is rare in itself, and it wasn’t even really for me. I got this phone call because I’m commonly referred to as the Webmaster at work. I think that is wrong but I don’t turn it down because maybe one day they’ll start paying me like a webmaster (ha! fat chance!). This phone call was about somebody having a problem with logging into a webinar. Hm. Webinar. Webmaster. I guess that’s close enough for the receptionist. Now for a point of reference: our webinars are outsourced. We don’t control the hardware or software, all we do is use it. So when this guy was claiming that he could not log in, that the system was telling him that no webinar was available, and that somebody needs to fix the system I immediately took a step back. Not literally. Now. The extent of my knowledge of this system is user management. I’m currently the only person who has rights to view all the user information, add/delete, control billing, etc… so by default I get all the questions even though I’ve never...

Transition Time

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 18:58:00 +0000

Since I kinda don’t have time to drop a whole new site into place, and since this is my testing server, technically, I’m going to be phasing in this new look over a few days. Well, hopefully over a few days. The reality is I probably won’t have the transition completely done for a while. But my goal is a few days. So, lemme know what you think so far. I’d love to hear it.

Everybody should have one

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 09:23:00 +0000

Think about it, everybody wants thier own playground, someplace they can put funny or even stupid things and not have it completetly associated with official business. Hence I registered fuzzycoconut. I just couldn’t resist it on the name alone – it’s just too funny. The domain might get used later if a collaborative project comes together (which it looks like it is going to – damn exciting!) but for now it is a placeholder for being goofy. Now, to think of something goofy.

Humans 1; Mouse 0

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 05:56:00 +0000

We woke up this morning to find that the little sticky trap that we’d bought worked and caught our mouse. The unfortunate part, and I knew it was coming, was that he was still alive. Plastered to the glue, breathing heavy, trying to get loose. Basically he was scared out of his mind. The next decision was what to do with him. One suggestion was to let him freeze to death. It is all of 18 degrees outside right now, so he’d be sure to die within an hour or so. Another option was to kill him. This is the more humane thing to do and was actually easier to deal with. Despite the way I carry myself and how my personality is – I’m a softie when it comes to animals. I just can’t bear to do them harm. But in this case it was the best thing to do. The little guy wouldn’t go in the no-kill trap so we had to glue him down. I took him outside in a plastic bag – which was probably even more frightening for the little feller – put him under a box I could get my foot into and squished him. I made sure he was good and flat...

The future of PuppyCam

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:14:00 +0000

Hm, I’m getting pretty disappointed at the lack of good php editors for Windows. If I can’t find one I’m gonna be tempted to take down PuppyCam so that I can use that computer at work. I’m not just talking about features but about look and feel. Nothing on the windows side feels a good to use as Smultron, SubEthaEdit or skEdit. It is rather disspointing because these are great applicaitions, skEdit in particular, and I just can’t find anything I like as much as it on the Windows side. So that leaves me with the temptation of taking the iBook to work with me. Currently the iBook drives the PuppyCam because it is wireless and I can put it anywhere I want. If I decided to start using it for work then we’d lose PuppyCam. So, the quest is on to find a good Windows PHP/XHTML/CSS editor so that I don’t have to sacrifice PuppyCam.

More style – less continuity

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:07:00 +0000

Found a neat scalable box technique the other day and thought I’d give it a whirl. So, now I have a bit more graphic appeal but still no unified vision. I really need to sit down and figure out a design for this site. I dig these boxes, but now the navigation seems like it should be different than these boxes and that I should have a header – basically, if I’m gonna get all graphical & shiznit on this main body then I’d best pick up everything to match and dump the minimalism. It just takes me so damn long to design for myself… On top of that I need to get my date system for these posts fixed. Like an idiot I made it with a separate field for date and time – compeletely ignoring the MySQL datetime option. I’m such a moron.

The Suspense is Killing Me

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:33:00 +0000

Long story – short, open ending. I was approached by IT a while back about a job opening that they wanted me for. But considering the shift in focus, a required increase in knowledge of Windows systems integration (icky-poo!) and what I considered inadequate compensation for the level of responsibility that they were demanding I decided to stay in Marketing in my current role of Junior (yeah, quit laughing) Web Designer. At this point I was way overdue for a yearly review and knew that there would be an increase of compensation accompanied by a title change to bump me up to plain old Web Designer. So I went to my boss, who had been brought into the loop on IT wanting me to move over to them, and discussed changing my title and upping compensation. I don’t feel any guilt or aprehension in asking for this since I do much more than my job description includes and have added a level of efficiency and convenience to the department that it never enjoyed in the past. I’ve also hardly used the word no when someone...

My wife is a dork

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:18:00 +0000

Got a phone call from my wife this afternoon. She was pretty frantic and upset. She had gone to lunch, come back to the office, worked for a while and was getting ready to head out to a dentist appointment. It was then that she realized that she could not find her purse or her keys. Now, I have to admit that at this point my reaction was mixed. I was concerned because it is a huge undertaking to take care of everything that you lose when you lose a wallet or a purse, not to mention keys. But there was a part of me that was upset because I had finally found time to bury myself in coding a website. I quickly got over it, it was a fleeting thought, but I still thought it… Anyway. Since we just have the one vehicle I had to scrounge a ride from a co-worker. Not too hard to do and Linda was a good sport about it despite being frantic at work herself (she’s got some pretty huge undertakings and isn’t getting much help where she needs it – from upper management). I arrive at the wife’s workplace and check to make...

um, what the fuck?

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 10:34:00 +0000

I ran a red light this morning. For some reason I thought it was my turn to go. Oncoming traffic had the green and the turn light and I think it was a lull in activity that got me to go – I probably thought by the lack of people turning that the light had turned and it was my turn to go. Pretty frightening. I’m a good driver. I’m not saying that I obey every rule of the road, or that I’m right in everything I do but I don’t get in accidents, I’ve had one ticket and one accident in my life. I’ve avoided accidents where others were not able to – I know how to handle cars and don’t doubt my abilities one bit – no matter what the weather. What bothers me about this is that my memory is rather horrid – so I just hope my attention is going as well. I feel alert and I think it was just the habit of seeing oncoming traffic stop and normally getting a green light that led me to go. But it is still rather disturbing that it happened at all.

Here ya go Joel

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 18:24:00 +0000

Well after 4 hours and damn near putting my head through the wall: I have an RSS feed. It didn’t take me long to actually build the file and get it to validate – it was a testing snafu that took me a while to figure out. It seems that my RSS aggregator on this site will not load a local RSS file. Figuring that out was 3 of the 4 hours that made up adding the feed to the site. So now Joel and anyone else bored out of their skulls can get the daily update on this site. It is plain ol RSS 2 without any of the bells and whistles – mainly because RSS is simple, so why futz it up with all this extra crap that few people actually use anyway. Get it while it’s hot: RSS On a side note – while doing the testing on this I loaded up the Sage RSS reader for FireFox. Damn – that’s pretty nice. Too bad FireFox looks bad on the Mac. The font rendering just doesn’t cut it and I don’t like the look of form feilds – they lack contrast and are hard to find quickly. But still – Sage was stinkin’ cool.

This is one to follow

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 21:46:00 +0000

Somebody with too much time on their hands (really, I’m not jealous) has developed a plugin for Mozilla Firefox called Fangs. It is a screen reader emulator for FireFox. It seems that there is currently a bug in OS X in which the window cannot be closed but it is a great tool for checking accessibility. Can’t wait for this to get out of beta.

That was quick…

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 16:55:00 +0000

Swapping out a water heater is pretty darn easy for someone who knows what they’re doing. After only 3 hours of work we now have a new 50 gallon water heater that is double the efficiency of the old unit. It really wasn’t that hard to top the efficiency – the old one was 20 years old! What was scary was all the brown sludge we drained out into the street. To think that we drank that water – we should have replaced that thing sooner but its just one of those things you don’t think about until it breaks. Another scary thought was the buildup on the inside of the input and output valves – I’m guessing our water pipes look the same way since they are all older than that water heater. We’re probably losing a ton of water pressure there. So now that we’ve opened up that can of worms, we’re probably gonna want to replace most of the piping in this place before we redo the basement. Then we can have Scott do it and spread the work around to our friends. We can get the plumbing and electrical done by guys we know a...

That's why I keep doing it…

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:50:00 +0000

Well, after turning in the work for this client and picking up more work (hey! don’t look at me like that – lemme finish) my client turned around and gave me an old printer since she recently upgraded. I am the proud new owner of an Epson 1520 inkjet printer. I know what you’re thinking – the Epson 1520 doesn’t work with OSX. Well, partially right. The printer doesn’t automatically work with OSX, but this one has the Ethernet print server in it so I was able to turn on DHCP and get into the printer via LPR and print using GIMP drivers. Not officially supported, but it works. I haven’t tried color yet, nor have I tried any postscript rendering, but it will spit out plain text. I’m excited – my color options up to this point were either sending stuff with my wife to work so she can print a copy on their Xerox Phaser 7700 (nice, nice printer by the way) or print 8.5 x 11 comps and then print small areas at full size to show detail. Now I don’t have to deal with that. And if I can drum up about $350 for iProof...

This is why I stopped

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 09:36:00 +0000

I stopped doing freelance work for a while because I didn’t have time for my own endeavors. Now I’ve picked up a yearly project that I like to do. Or that I used to like to do. I think now that I’m making good money at work and that I have a wife, home and two dogs that I want to have time for other things now that money is not a burning need. So why did I do it again if all I do is complain about how much work has to be done and how the photographer is a moron and underexposed everything and didn’t take any color balance into account when shooting? Who knows. I think deep down I still like making that extra money because now it becomes play money instead of grocery money. This particular job doesn’t serve to teach me anything new but there is one that does. One that I’ve been putting off. It is one that could possibly make money for just outputting clean code and having good organization. But I have been dragging my feet on it. I think I’m scared a little on how much commitment it will take. I’m having fu...

Still the best

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 11:02:00 +0000

Well the Coding Monkeys have done it again with their latest release of SubEthaEdit. At the risk of sounding like a paid advertiser – I’m really excited about the block edit feature. It allows you to select a block of code and apply the same changes to each line by typing directly – no futzing with a dialog box. In all fairness I saw this first in a program called TextMate, but TextMate was odd in its setup and not very friendly to use. If you do any kind of coding (all 3 of you that actually see this page) check it out. It encompasses many different coding languages and has command line integration. Very handy stuff. Though I still think it should have a file browser or project window/sidebar – it is still the most comfortable coding application I’ve used. I find myself in Zend Studio a lot because it has a file browser and project manager, but I’d love to ditch it completely for SubEthaEdit. Think they’ll listen? I can only hope.

System upgrade

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:00:00 +0000

Well, finally got this computer upgraded to 10.3 Server. And since the version of PHP that comes with 10.3 Server is a bit lacking I upgraded the whole bit and took the plunge into PHP 5. Everything seems to be OK so far. The server admin software is a bit lacking for in depth server configs so I actually had to dive into the httpd.conf file to get everything how I wanted it. It might have something to do with wanting to run this site out of a user Sites folder but a couple of minor tweaks and all is good. Everything seems to have transfered over just fine – my main concern was SQL and my Avatar script but both are performing splendidly. My next endeavor on this box is to get internal DNS set up so that I don’t have to keep up HOSTS files on 4 different computers. Significantly easier than running scripts to change hosts files based on location too. Maybe I’ll tackle DHCP as well. The admin tools look straight forward enough but even from what little I know about DHCP and DNS they look a bit simple. I wond...

Florida Appeals Court to FOX News: It is OK to lie!

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 13:40:00 +0000

As it turns out the Florida Court of Appeals ruled that news organisations are not bound by law to truthfully report stories they air. In a ruling last year, the Florida Court of Appeals awarded 24.3 Billion dollars in damages and compensation to FOX News when it overturned a previous ruling that held FOX News liable in the wrongful termination of two of its employees. The previous ruling stated that two employees were wrongfully terminated when they refused to air a story that FOX News had demanded they alter. The alterations to the story would have taken out facts and replaced then with, well, lies. Get the full story The premise under which the initial ruling was overturned was that the FCCs regulations which state that news organisations must truthfully relay the news is not law and thus not punishable in court when broken. I find it hard to believe that this story didn’t get more coverage even considering that FOX News had the backing of four of the major players in the news industry. The implications...

It's here…

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 15:57:00 +0000

Halo 2 is sitting in my bag as I wait for these last agonizing moments of the day to pass. I played a bit of it earlier and I simply can’t wait to play more. I’ve read a bit of the reviews but not much as I want to play it before I let other’s reviews taint my opinion – but from what I have seen it is simply spectacular. Gameplay is as fun as the last one, graphics are better, and the grunts still have funny little phrases. I don’t anticipate being very productive at home for the next 3 weeks. Which sucks a bit since I just gave up my hiatus status and took in some freelance work. I’m gonna have to find some time to get work into my Halo schedule. Here’s to dual-weilding fun!

Bronchitis Again

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 07:56:00 +0000

I really can’t beleive it – my bronchitis came back. My brain is so confused right now as to which way is up and what it is like to not cough all the time and not have a constant headache. Add on top of that work being, well, a let down, I’m not feeling that great about where I am right now. The only constants I have in my life right now are that my Wife loves me, my dogs fight with each other, and the house is here when I get home. Andy and I have talked about the possibility of me going freelance once the work website is done – but I’m starting to doubt that it will ever get done. They’ve outsourced the re-imaging of the company at work but I fear that the content that I’m going to get from that is going to be less than complete and I’m going to be in a fight to either get the content I need or put out a mediocre, unorganized product. When I was hired there was so much talk about wanting to make the website something special, and on top of that make it a useful marketing tool – not just a half assed repo...

Go out and vote!

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 06:15:00 +0000

Do it. You know you want to.

Facelift

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:15:00 +0000

I think this is more along the lines of where I want to go with the look. Simple and subtle. Clean and quick. I really should get to using this how I originally intended – and that is to write and get things off my chest. Things like Dan Parnell. Dan, Dan, Dan. Two words. Let Go. It’s easy – let go. I just don’t understand the drama that some people need to create. I fully understand that the mind can be a strange place – I recently felt out of place in my own skin (that’s a story for another post, maybe once I’m completely over it) – but I don’t get Dan or his behavior. He’s been given every chance to be a part of several online communities yet he continues to piss of the people around him and do stupid things that he should know better than to do. I guess I should leave it at that. He’s sent a cease and decist letter to the Clubhouse forums, which is absolutely absurd, so who knows what he’ll do about a blog post that nobody else reads. In other events – I’m getting sick again. I can’t remember getting s...

Even more progress

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 22:18:00 +0000

I finally figured out how to get lists into and out of the db without using html in the db. WooHoo! // find all lists in the text preg_match_all("|(\[list\])(.*?)(\[/list\])|s",$text, $matches); $i = "0"; // run each list foreach($matches[2] as $lis) { // break out each list element $eachli = explode("[*]", $lis); // start list string $listring = "<ul>" . PHP_EOL; foreach($eachli as $key => $li) { // first array element is always // empty and we don't need it if($key > 0) { // build list elements $listring .= "<li>" . $li . "</li>" . PHP_EOL; } } // close list $listring .= "</ul>" . PHP_EOL; // insert new list text into original text $text = str_replace($matches[0][$i], $listring, $text); $i++; } Ha! I write this like someone’s actually gonna read it!

Voting my conscience

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 22:12:00 +0000

Like a lot of other people I know I will not be voting for Bush in the coming election. But I also cannot in good conscience vote for Kerry. This leaves somewhat of a dilemma since none of the 3rd party candidates are worth casting a vote for either. So after much deliberation and with the prodding by the wife I think there is but one thing to do. Vote for Kerry. There is no candidate worth my vote. But there is a cause worth my vote. Bush must be removed from office. So with that being said I hereby proclaim my intention to vote for John Kerry. I still can’t believe I’m gonna do this. But I’ll be gaining piece of mind that the person I voted for is not: In bed with big business. His quick action to secure the Bin Laden family and his ties to Enron are too much for me to believe that his nose is clean The speed with which the oil was secured in Iraq and the ignorance taken in planning for the total war in Iraq cannot be ignored either. It is hard to say what he was trying to do – secure oil, or maybe secur...

Getting closer still…

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 23:51:00 +0000

I’m moving ever so slowly on this site – I just haven’t had the time that I’d like to to work on it. But I have got some done, like the admin section. I can now add stories via a form instead of having to drop into phpMyAdmin each time. Next I’ll have to make a way to edit stories that way too – shouldn’t be too hard now that the new story form is there. I should only have to change a MySQL query and make a list of stories to chose from to edit. I did get some work at the dog park today. Okay, it’s not a dog park, but we’re kind of making it that. But anyway, talked more with a gal that needed someone to slap a friend of hers into shape with her email. I probably should have told her “I don’t do windows™” but I guess work is work and being the first time she asks me for help I couldn’t really turn her down. Could be a stepping stone to more work as she seems to have a lot of contacts. But that again takes away from personal time. I quit doing freelance work and put Top Frog on hold so that I could have mor...

Almost usable

Wed, 22 Sep 2004 21:10:00 +0000

This site is almost usable. Comments work, and small overall improvements and nicities have been added. Site still remains xhtml compliant, much to my surprise. I guess I can still learn in my old age. So I guess this means that I should start to use it for what I originally intended: as a way for me to just get my thoughts out and have a place to babble. So, that should commence soon, but right now I’m still creating entries in phpMyAdmin – I need to create an entry page so this is easier and automated, and so I can do it from outside the home. I also need to change the URL scheme for the stories – right now they can’t accomodate multiple entries on one date, but that is easy to change and I should have that completely in place soon. Maybe even tonight. Sometime after that I’ll see about putting in PuddleMonkey’s site so she can use it too. She’ll have to edit the look though – I’m not doin’ that for her. Well, at least make her beg a little bit 😉 Hm, that last bit makes me want to implement smilies… I s...

PuppyCam is back!

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 06:15:00 +0000

The PuppyCam is back up. Fortunately, there was no damage to the camera so it is functioning perfectly. They’ve been given the run of the house while we’re away. They let themselves out the doggy door so we can trust them not to poop in the house. At least, we hope we can… The cam will shut off at 5:00 MST, about when we get home from work, so, sorry, no watching us… just the pups. EDIT: seems that keeping it up and running may be a more interesting feat than I thought. I have to find a way to get the webserver closer to the camera so I don’t lock down another computer to running the puppycam.

Moving along slowly…

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:35:00 +0000

Got a bit more done, though less than I should have. URLs in entries are now translated into links, I’m showing comments, the titles page is nicely formatted now. Next implementations are gonna be: adding comments, a page where I can add stories instead of doing it via phpMyAdmin (I wanted a working system before i did that, then I wasn’t changing the page every time I changed or tweaked the system, and trying out a [more] tag to cut off long posts on the front page. If that [more] tag works, then you shouldn’t see anything below this paragraph. This is more text… It should only show up on the Archives pages

Just when I thought I was on top of things…

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 21:53:00 +0000

There is a new version of the Flash Image Replacment Technique that i am using. I’ll try to get that implemented soon as it looks to have good features. Grooooovy stuff.

Progress…

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:14:00 +0000

Well, things are chugging along, I’ve added categories and overall cleaned things up. I made a booboo though, I mismade the setup for the sidebar and main block, so I can’t do a footer like I’d want to. Either that or I’m stupid and can’t figure it out. Either way, it has to be fixed. Going back and having to redo things sucks, so it may be screwed up for a while so I can get other things implemented. On a positive note, I did implement an FIR technique on this site – it was pretty easy too. Someone else did all the work, I’m just using his technique. It’s a bit weird in that if someone does not have Flash installed they get some rather large headlines, but I can live with that for now. Oh, and this site still looks like ass in WinIE.

I feel so dirty

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 22:24:00 +0000

I have a Windows™ machine on my desk. An old HP Omnibook. It’s staring at me as it does a virus scan. I’m sure it is plotting my death as I write this. I only want it for testing purposes and to have a wireless machine to sit on the deck with. And it was free, so what could I do? Throw away a perfectly usable machine? Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Why didn’t you put Linux on it? Well, I did, but I couldn’t get wireless to work on it, so I guess I’m just not geek enough to be able to do that. Though I would prefer to be looking at a gnome desktop than Winders. And I know where to get some a Unix toolkit, so I think I’ll be ok. If I disappear though, it was probably that machine that killed me…