Quotes

Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane.

- Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), on why New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin failed to follow the city's evacuation plan and press the buses into service, Fox News Sunday, Sept. 11, 2005

This quote has been randomly selected, I have no control over the quotes displayed here.

The world just got a lot less funny.

The world’s comedy IQ dropped by about 150 points this Sunday at 5:55 in the evening. When the man who many would call the greatest comedian of all time died of heart failure. Forever his death will be mourned as recordings of his great successes remind us of his ability to make us laugh and smile.

George Carlin, to me, was the greatest comedian ever to attempt the art. He is survived by his Wife, daughter Kelly, and a seventy-one year long legacy. It is a crushing thought that the last we shall ever hear of him lays within his recorded works. His work entertained generations, and though he has passed away now I trust that with his recorded pieces he will continue to make future generations laugh for decades to come.

Goodbye George, I really would have liked to have shaken your hand.

DelawareOffenders.org

For the last view months I have been working on a project behind the scenes. If you are close to me then I’m sure you could not get me to shut up about it, but otherwise you may not have heard about this project. The reason for my secrecy is simple, I was not ready for it to be view by the mainstream yet. Besides, during this development process there were days when the site was unavailable, in fact, during the update process the site was unavailable for an amazing 45 minutes to an hour. This of course has been fixed in the live release.

DelawareOffenders.org is a public sex offender registry written with the express purpose of simplifying sex offender registry operations. With DelawareOffenders.org you can perform a search using Google-Like search syntax [Note - during development the results were compared to Google and they were actually equally accurate]. This allows for a more stream lined search experience.

The most well received tool on DelawareOffenders.org definitely has to be the area search engine. The area search engine allows users to search their area for known sex offenders using an intuitive mapping system. The user simply enters an address, school, college, or library that is important to them. The system then presents the user with a very easy to use mapping system displaying registered offenders within one mile of their query. The types of offender addresses included are the offender’s home, school, and work address. With all of this information available on an easy to use map families can protect their children and themselves better than ever.

I hope everyone enjoys this new service and it helps keep Delaware residents safe. I have already heard from an individual, working at a private school, that they used the registry to catch a sex offender attempting to enter their building. If you have any success stories with this registry please send them, I would love to read them and perhaps make a testimonial from your experience. Be Safe!

 

– Michael

Hilarious

A Brief Update

I would like to bring everyone up to speed with what has been going on in my life since I made my last post. It seems that a bullet list would apply best here.

• I am attending classes once again, hooray! It is taking a lot out of me to try and get back into the swing of college life.
• I have decided to switch providers for my dedicated hosting needs. It is in my humble opinion that GoDaddy lacks in it’s ability to operate a virtual dedicated server host. The systems were out of date frequently (even after I warned them), they at one point in time installed a kernel update that broke the fstat() implementation thus breaking my mail server. I have had to reprovision my server due to their mistakes in the past, and now they are finally forcing an update to Fedora Core 7 (a year after my request). The time has come for change. I will be over the course of the next few weeks switching to Linode.com, the services they offer are spectacular from first glance. I am a little bit nervous about the downtime I may incur (I have already had one and a half brief outages [one may have been due to my route]). They appear to be a great host though, and their customer support is fantastic. As an added bonus, now I can run Debian! Hooray for me! (and it is up to date too).
• I will be starting work (again) on the platform for my car computer soon. The name of the platform is CupHolder, once progress has been made I will post updates about this project at www.cupholder.org. However this may be quite some time with school and all.
• I am strongly considering whether I should take on writing a sequel to Earthbound (truly the greatest game in history IMHO).

Well, that’s all folks!

 

PS.

Since this blog ties into my MySpace page on a few levels, perhaps I should make WordPress dispatch a MySpace bulletin after I post a new blog entry? Just a thought…

A Holiday Project

After quite a lot of boredom lately, I have found myself doing a good bit of web design. So I started to wonder who could use a web page. That’s when Steph told me that our wedding photographer was using a MySpace profile for her photography business.

I began designing a web site for her in my free time, and she bought a domain name for it. The site uses Javascript for the effects, but is completely usable (and appealing) without it. I chose Javascript because of its wider support, as opposed to Adobe Flash. MooTools offers a great framework that allows for a substantial amount of effects.

The site back-end is written in PHP and is completely custom, with the exception of Gallery2. Gallery2 already has so many features and capabilities, it would have been stupid for me to reinvent the wheel. Her portfolio and the slideshow at the top of the page are both rendered through PHP scripts that call upon Gallery’s API. This allows her a simple method of managing both the slideshow and her portfolio.

I’m sure there are still some glitches that will have to be handled, but as for now it’s done.

Here is the link.

MySpace Friends Plugin

Neat!

So a few days ago I decided to put some attention on retrieving MySpace friends lists and rendering them for appropriate display on WordPress pages such as this. For a while I considered page scraping, than I considered MySpaceIM, than I considered page scraping using an XML parser tweaked for rendering messy HTML.

All of those ideas would have worked fine, except MySpaceIM that is. After some research into MySpaceIM’s chat protocol, it does not appear to show a list of friends and images unless they too participate in MySpaceIM, useless for now.

But wait! Why reinvent the wheel? After some searching on Google I found that many people had already written rudimentary API’s. The API I decided to use can be found at:

http://foafr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5

This API had more functionality than I needed so I stripped it quite a bit, then I rewrote much it to both clean it up and render it work better for my needs. The API now connects to MySpace and downloads a friends list, saves it to a MySQL database along with a timestamp (so as not to bombard MySpace). The data in the MySQL database is returned providing it is still considered fresh enough to be valid. My database is refreshed only if it is three hours old.

After all of that, I threw together a WordPress widget and stuck it on Mine and my Wife’s pages, and tested it on Firefox and Internet Explorer.

To the author of the original API: Great job!

To anybody that would like the source of the Widget and modified API, please leave me a comment (give your email address) and I will consider posting the source code.

 

Mike

New Theme

The new theme I have chosen should load quite faster than the old one. The old one had far too many images embedded within it, causing it too load unbearably slow, even on high speed connections.

I made several modifications too the theme to make it 100% complaint with:

XHTML 1.0

CSS

RSS

A new contact page is also available. For comments relating to a specific post, please use that post’s comment forum. For site comments, use the Contact page, or the comment forum on the sidebar (both go too the same location).

Mike

Live Writer

I am not one to post frequently to a blog, and that is something that I would like to change. Sadly though, my urge to post usually expires as soon as I open Firefox. This time however I took things a step further, I decided that perhaps my postings would become more frequent if it was a bit ‘easier’. I decided to explore what options lay about in the realm of desktop blogging software.

For those that are unfamiliar with desktop blogging software, it is simply software which allows you to post to your blog using an installed application, instead of going through the entire login procedure. After browsing for a bit I found that most of my Google results took me to various non-free applications. This simply would not do, I was not necessarily looking for open source, but I was not intending to pay for such a trivial need either.

Almost hidden in the clutter of one of the many software reviews I was reading, lie Windows Live Writer. Now first off, my opinions of Microsoft software lean both ways *growls as he is forced to turn off sticky-keys for holding shift too long…*. It is in my humble opinion that they have written some impressive applications in their history and for that they deserve credit. However, I also have numerous negative view points towards them (and others) as well, just far too many too list here.

Windows Live Writer appeared too be an aesthetically beautiful application. The fact that it bared the copyright signature of a large corporation ultimately gave me the instinct impression that it would have the functionality I craved as well. Once more it appeared to be free. That sealed the deal.

I set-off downloading the application, filled with a bit of worry that it would only support some propriety blogging service. After completing the download, I scanned the application for malware (yes, I even scan Microsoft software) and proceeded too install it. With Microsoft pushing for migration to Windows Vista, it was no surprise that the application and it’s installer had the look and feel of something running behind the Aero theme. The installation was complete.

I followed the instructions in the account setup wizard, and was thrilled to see that WordPress was supported. I entered my pages URL and waited. Strangely, while waiting for the procedure to complete I decided to browse for some more reviews, and instead of my Firefox window coming up, the entire Windows GUI began flashing (almost as if refreshing) repeatedly, odd. To my dismay I then heard the sound of a Windows error message! The client failed to resolve the hostname of my blog.

I first of course attempted to resolve the host myself, perhaps my DNS server was not running, nothing like a 4:45AM debugging session. No, all was well. My newly installed copy of Norton Internet Security was blocking the applications queries. So after disabling it, the install went off without a hitch.

Very pleased, the application started smoothly taking me straight too a form for a new post. I quickly browsed the menu’s and I must say I am thus far completely satisfied, this is one point for Microsoft I suppose. I now lay here typing up this post merely as a test of the software’s abilities, and so far it has passed.

So perhaps now, my post will be more frequent. As for now, it is 5:20AM, and I do believe I am keeping my wife up, so I will say good night now, before I incur any injury.

Mike

‘MySpace’ is right here.

MySpace is a great site for people to network, but as a blog, it’s terrible in my opinion.

So why do people continue to use MySpace, when there are so many other blog services available to them? Probably because the mere idea of losing their current social network terrifies them.

Today I decided it was time to convince people to visit me at my blog. Until now my MySpace page has been a blank slate, not even a picture to show. So I stuck a picture on my profile, as an indication of update, and set off on my adventure.

I placed a DIV overlay on my page to cover up all of the hideous tables MySpace has to offer (leaving room for the sacred banner though, let us not break the Terms of Service). And one large font link later, it was done. Okay, Okay… It’s not pretty, but who cares, it looks better than before.

Unfortunately though, the fears of a million MySpace slaves ran through me. How would this effect my (anti-)social lifestyle? No friends list, no friends. I am all alone now, ‘MySpace’ is a lonely one. I guess this means it is time to go off on another adventure, this time though with a friend… The mighty XSLT will accompany me now.

I have decided to create a web scraping MySpace API to download and extract the contents of my friends list, and prepare them for absorbition (I give up on spelling that word for now) into my page. Few have completed this task, and the ones that did, were met with disaster as MySpace constantly changed their format. I hope to combat this using XPath and XSLT with a SAX capable parser like TSaxon. If anybody has any ideas, feel free to leave a comment.

Doubt I will continue with this project? Well so do I.

Goodnight.

Can you hear me now?

No you can not!

In case you have not already been so informed, it is true. I have deactivated our mobile phones. I am sorry, but these phones were costing me nearly $175 a month. The price tag was far too high for four phones.

Will we be contracting with a new provider? Probably not for a while. We honestly do not see the need to worry about it at this time in present, we are all pretty busy right now anyways. We are considering the possibility of a pre-paid phone, but too be honest, most of the local providers suck. Alltel seemed like a good choice, but in spite of all of the commercials I see, they cannot activate a phone in Delaware. That sucks, because I was willing to flash the firmware of my mobile to Alltel, oh well.

So, in conclusion, Verizon Sucks!

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