Got Wills

I’ve been using Google Buzz since it was activated on my account yesterday and I really like it… but, I usually do like cool new stuff from Google. The real question is going to be, “Can I get my friends and family to start buzzing, or even follow my buzz?” So far, that answer is a resounding, “No.”

I have 1 family member and 1 friend that has joined buzz and followed me. I also have 1 family member and 1 friend that have followed me, but don’t seem to have buzz’s themselfves (not sure how that works). Anyway, I’ll ride the buzz and see what happens. At least there’s a lot of good technical talk on there right now (Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, and Kevin Rose, just to name a few).

New Server Setup

First of all, this blog is now running on it’s own machine, powered by Debian 5.0 aka Lenny. The installation had a few problems, of course, which will be discussed in a later post.

Google Wave

Well, I finally got my invite to Wave, and I’m loving it, although, it would be a lot better if more people I know used it. I got my wife to use it (somewhat reluctantly) but almost nobody else I know has or even wants to wave.

I’ve got 6 invites left, so if anybody wants one, let me know in the comments before any of my facebook friends or coworkers do and they’re yours. Make sure you use your correct email address. Also, the invites don’t go out right away and I’ve heard that gmail accounts generally receive them faster than other email accounts.

I’m also working on a Google Wave client for Windows Mobile. It’s still very early in the development stages, more about this later.

Navajo County Web Site Redesign

Once again, the powers that be are asking for a Web site redesign. I like a lot of their ideas and am looking forward to it. I’ve started by making the width 960 pixels, but haven’t had time to do much else. We’re going to try moving the menu to the top of the page (above the header).

The county has signed up for a facebook and twitter account, so now I need to find a way to incorporate badges or something for those into the redesigned site. I’m also creating some javascript tools to make the text bigger or smaller, show a printable or emailable version of the page (it already prints without the background, header, or sidebar).

New Site for NAYFL

I’m creating a new site for the Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League (NAYFL). I’m building a database to store scores and schedules, which I’ll use to automatically update the standings on the site. I think I’ll be writing the site in PHP, I was thinking about going with Ruby on Rails, but I don’t think there’s enough database integration to the site to warrant that. I’ll post more details about the database setup later.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for Google Wave to go public… I just hope I get an invite in the first wave, but I didn’t hear about it until just a short time ago. Google is supposed to open it to the public (limited invites, though) a week from tomorrow.

Open-sourcing it and allowing federation will be what makes it big… Honestly, how long do you think it will be before Microsoft takes it and tries to one-up Google? I was wondering how it was going to work with Internet Explorer, as IE doesn’t support HTML 5, but it seems Google has built a Chrome Frame plugin for IE.

I first read about this on Erictric, who argues that Wave is starting to fizzle even before it’s open to the public. I must say, I disagree. I think, come next week, it’s going to be all over the blogosphere and twitter… and then, yea, wave.

Well, I just finished redesigning and updating Holbrook Youth Football’s Web site. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but I think it looks 100 times better.

All of the image editing was done in GIMP and I used JetBrains’ new Web IDE to develop the whole site. It worked great, my only annoyance was that it creates xhtml files with .xhtml as the extension. Testing it in Internet Explorer with that extension got me a download, rather than a rendered page. It was probably a problem with IE (and may only be because I was accessing local files), but with most of today’s users still using IE, I need it to work.

I’ll be taking over the development of Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League’s Web site, as well. I’ll probably start the redesign on it in a few days. As of right now, it doesn’t even come up in Google when you search for the name of the organization… I’ll have to try to remedy that.

Let me know what you think and a big thanks to all of the sponsors and volunteers for helping Holbrook’s youth.

For those of you who, like myself, are just now boiling eggs for Easter, here’s what I use… There’s a trick I saw on Emeril Live a long time ago that has always given me done and easy to peel eggs that aren’t green in the middle.

The “Lucky 13″ Boiled Egg

1. Put the eggs in a pot of cool water over high heat. Bring them to a boil and let them boil for 2 minutes.
2. Take them off the heat and cover for 11 minutes.
3. Put them in an ice bath or some really cold water. (If you don’t use ice, you’ll need to change your water a few times while they cool.)

Voila, the perfect boiled egg using Emeril’s “Lucky 13″ method.

 

Well, I finally figured it out. It appears that the OpenID plugin is not compatible with the Contact Form ][ plugin I was using.

 

It's always worked great with registration and stuff, but never worked for me to use it as my OpenID server. I had figured it had something to do with me not having curl support built into PHP.

I just figured I'd check the error log today, right after I tried it again, and saw a lot of errors with various plugins. Well, I don't know if I can live without all those plugins, but let's deactivate them and see if it works. Wow, it worked...

After activating them again one at a time, I found it was Contact Form ][ that was causing the problems. Great, I went and found a different contact form plugin, Contact Form 7, and it is working great, as is OpenID.

I was just reading through the April issue of Website Magazine and found an article about Dofollow Blogs. I wasn’t aware of it, but most blogs add a rel="nofollow" attribute to links inside comments. I checked this blog, and lo and behold, it did the same thing. I didn’t like that at all, link love is one of the few benefits you get for reading and commenting on blogs. So, I immediately went to work to fix this.

The first solution I found was a plugin (more like 10 of them). I was scanning through them to find one that would definitely work with Wordpress 7.1 and stumbled across an article on Perishable Press that explained how to do it without a plugin.

So I SSH into my server and find that the file mentioned in the article doesn’t exist in this version. Hmm, this article was written in 2007, I imagine Wordpress has changed some since then. So, I take a guess at which file might hide the functions with the offending nofollow… and what do you know? I found it my first try.

So anyway, here’s the good stuff you’ve been waiting for. To make your Wordpress 2.7.1 blog DoFollow just edit the file wp-includes/comment-template.php line 148:

From:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

To:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external' class='url'>$author</a>";

Basically, take out the nofollow and preceding space.

To future commenters (and past commenters), you now get some link love. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.

Just changed my theme… again (don’t know if anyone noticed, I changed it 4 days ago, as well). Anyway, after some minor reconstruction, I think it looks pretty good.

I do still need to do something about the pictures being too wide for the content column and I’d like to get another picture of the kids up there. I’m sure I’ll figure something out, when I have a few spare minutes.

I’ve had my new Omnia about a week now and I really like it. I don’t even miss the physical keyboard of my Q9c (I really thought I would). The haptic feedback and xt9 spelling correction make the onscreen keyboard very functional. Of course, you’ll want to shut off xt9 when typing non-standard words (very easy with a key dedicated to it). The virtual mouse makes it so that I almost never need the stylus, but I have it hooked to my keychain (just in case), instead of the loop on the side of the phone. I’ve also mapped the menu button long press to a little program that switched the d-pad thing between normal d-pad and virtual mouse functionality.

I’m really hoping that Verizon Wireless makes good on their promise (if, in fact, this statement is from a Verizon Rep) to open up stand-alone GPS for the Omnia, but even if they don’t, there will be custom ROM on the web that will do it soon after the first update.

Here’s a list of software I’ve installed, so far (with links).

• S2U2
• S2V
• Adryn Modified Black ST2 Theme
• G-Alarm
• Seismo – Cool, but gives error on shutdown – need HTC dll’s
• Google Maps
• Google Mobile Search
• WMWifiRouter
• Kaisoft Bubble Level (trial)
• Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Internet Sharing
• MoDaCo AppToDate
• PHM Registry Editor
• pocketMax lunarTilt – gives error on shutdown – need HTC dll’s
• Pocket Rar
• Resco Bubbles (first 5 levels free) – Really fun game…
• QuickMark
• BeMario
• YouTubePlay

I’m also using the Samsung Today 2 today screen item (not available on Verizon Omnia by default, use registry hack to get it).

S2U2 handles my caller id and generally works great, although there have been a couple missed calls due to it wiggin out on me.

Sound quality is fantastic and it feels solid in my hand… I just carry it in my pocket and it doesn’t appear to have any scratches or anything, yet. We’ll see how that goes.

A standard mini or micro USB port would have been nice, but I’ll live with the proprietary one they gave me.

Well, a couple of months ago, I made Navajo County’s Parcel Search start getting data from the new Assessor’s database. They have moved from the Arizona Department of Revenue’s CCIS to Colorado Customware Inc’s RealWare product, affectionately known as CCI. All things said and done, it wasn’t too bad of a process.

Obstacle 1

Where is the data located?

With a lot of help from Mohave County’s Systems & Database Admin, Gary Waters, this step wasn’t too bad. I realized what I needed was the DataMart schema… but I didn’t quite understand how I was supposed to populate it. Gary kept telling me about this job they have that populates it nightly, but I couldn’t even find (in Oracle Enterprise) where Oracle keeps it’s jobs. I eventually found a query that would list them for me, but we had no such job.

The next day, or thereabouts, Jeff, one of the other Navajo County programmers, noted that he had found a DataMart application and had populated the schema. As he was explaining how to install it (it’s included in the advanced RealWare install), I realized I had seen it there when I was installing RealWare on my machine, duh. Oh well, all in a day’s work, I guess.

With the help of the SQL scripts that Gary sent along, I started to piece together how the data was arranged in the database. On to… (continue reading…)