Lewies Blog

I went into work today. On the way in, I got two phone calls on my cell. I thought they were from my resource manager and got a bit upset that she would repeatedly try to catch me while driving. When I got to work, I noticed that one was from my co-worker and another was from an unknown number.

I noticed my co-worker wasn’t there so I tried calling him back. I got his voice mail and just left a message. He walks in later and explained that his car spins out in the weather so he needed a ride. He took a cab in. I agreed to take him home after work.

Work was high-paced today. There are so many things that I’m trying to get done. I observed tables in the new database to determine if indexes should be applied. None had indexes to begin with. I documented descriptions of each table and column was used for. I created a small data-dictionary report of the schema with a Data Dictionary Report Generator ASP script that I had created a while back. I checked all of the changes into VSS.

I created a database from another project for a new client today. I began looking at a bug reported for that project, but by that time the roads outside were turning white. My co-worker and I had agreed that it was in our best interest to leave. I called Angel to let her know that I was on my way home and she asked me to stop at the store if it wasn’t too bad.

I spun a bit but my front-end drive helped us out and my traction kicked in while sliding down inclines. Once we got on the main road on the outer-loop of the belt-way the roads cleared up.

My friend enjoyed the ride home and got to listen to my XM radio. We listened to one of the comedy channels. A comedian started going on that you could almost swear that he was preaching, but we were laughing at what he had to say. I dropped my friend off across from a library in Alexandria that I had donated many of my computer books at about four years ago.

I drove on down South and stopped at Wal-Mart. I tried to call home to ask Angel what it was that she wanted me to get. I got no answer. I walked in and got two buckets of cat litter. That is all I could remember. I also got some small pizzas and a package of Whiskas Temptations Chicken Treats for the cats.

I went home and fell asleep.

Barb pointed out a little web page that lets me create minifigures that look like Lego brick figures. I created two that look like my wife Angel and me.

I logged into my online banking account and saw that I had a deposit from Wal-Mart for $0.02. I don’t know why they owed me some money. I didn’t make any formal complaints to them. I just thought it was odd that they would go through the trouble to compensate me for two pennies. But then again, my brother had a collection agency after him once for 5 cents. I guess Wal-Mart was avoiding my harassment before I found out about it and socked a collection agency on them.

My blog feed has been successfully geo-coded and made available for blog-mapping and local-blogs.

Personally, I think A2B is much better and gives you more control over your coordinates. I’m also finding that this new BlogMap site isn’t friendly with browsers other then Microsoft’s. Ugh!

One nice feature is that this guy offers a service to pull a list of blogs that are close to your town. Rite now there are 4 blogs other then mine within 20 miles. The List is in an xml format.

I would just like to thank my good friend, Aurorealis. A few days ago, she started talking about Firefox Extensions. The next day, she listed the most useful extension that she had.

I hadn’t used any extensions except the StumbleUpon toolbar. I was ignorant about them. I went on over to the extension website and took a look around. Being a developer, I found some tools that suited me just fine. I installed the HTML Validator (based on Tidy) extension. It was pretty wild to use it, but it didn’t take to XML pages too well.

I later downloaded another extension known as Checky. This one is more my style. It doesn’t just validate HTML - it also validates section 508 compliance, CSS, RDF, RSS, Links, Meta Tags, and more. This little program looks like a dream come true.

Thank you Aurora.

Ok, now XML is like a very small database. You can change it by opening the file up in a text editor such as notepad. No big nasty servers or binary files for you to mess with. Just edit, save, and you are done! It just so happens that my XML file is full of URLs that sent visitors to my own website. I call them referrers.

So what is XSL? XSL stands for extensible style sheet Language. XSL can transform an XML database to another format - usually HTML web pages. I have been spending a lot of time refreshing my memory with XSL and learning a few new things.

My goal was to create an XSL file that would display a list of referrers to my website. Next to each referrer would be the number of times someone was sent to this site. Easy enough - except that my referrers were listed individually for each day with a count of hits. Take the following for example:

You’ll notice that http://blogexplosion.com/members/surf.php appears twice for the 56th and 57th day of the year. I needed to add these two numbers up (3 + 4 = 7) and sort by the sum of the urls after they have been grouped. It wasn’t easy, but I finally came up with a solution.

The solution had to do with generating id’s for XSL keys. I won’t go into it here, but if you are interested, the following may be of some help:

On my little adventures, I also had to figure out how to chop a URL down to size if it was too long. All this XSL stuff is getting me tired. Take a look if you are interested. Nothing special unless you are a programmer I guess.

I came across this article while looking at a post on The Gadget Guy - Reinventing the Wheel. It appears that Michelin has come out with an ingenious idea. It appears that they use spokes from the rim that give the same resistance as pneumatic tires. They call it The Tweel.

Actually, it gets even better. The spokes can be adjusted and tailored for each individual car. Both the lateral and vertical siffness can be tailored. They can be adjusted for easier comfort while riding, “and” better performance while handling and cornering.

Think of it … Never having to fill your tires with air. Buying a tire for comfort or handling will not be a choice - you will get both. Never checking the tire pressure. No worries about flat tires. I can’t wait for the future.

Well, I spent the better half of today creating a little hit counter out of PHP for my blog. Everything is XML based since I don’t have a database. The counter displays the number of hits to my blog within the past 24 hours and the past 30 days … To the hour. After 24 hours pass, I should be able to keep better track if my numbers are going up or down. Same goes for 30 days. Perhaps I should change it to a week.

Now that the graphical hit counter is done, I need to start making some charts. I would like to see a sort of zeitgeist of keywords people have been using for each month. I have to check out those rreferrers as well. I’ve had it with only being able to see the last 10 rreferrers to my website. I feel like I’ve missed out on so much data with the free hit counter services.

Well … I’m off to do some more programming with PHP and XML. Maybe I’ll use some XSL to help with the reports.

Today, I discovered a little web site to generate anagrams. Anagrams are phrases that can be arranged into another phrase using the same letters. I plugged my name into the field and got a few odd phrases. Actually, most were odd and didn’t make sense.

Original: Lewis E. Moten III

I’m in oil sweetie
I won itemise lie
I smite lo wienie

Like many of my friends today, I grew up along with the video game generation. I had a Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, and even an old Atari 400. I had spent hours just playing games all day.

Tonight I found a great link through Totally Snookered that has just about every video game that I can remember. http://www.everyvideogame.com/. They have games that run on java emulators through the web pages. Everything is there from Nintendo, Sega, Gameboy, and even games that you would find in an Arcade.

I spent a couple hours playing games like Blaster Master, Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, Stargate, Dragon Warrior, Startropics 2, Boulder Dash, Star Trek Next Generation and more … The thing that isn’t cool is that you can’t save your games progress. There are some problems with some of the games.

Sound quality is not all that great. Sure, you are only talking about 8/16bit systems with bad sound to begin with, but the emulators seem to have some problems. However, it is good enough to take you back to those old days.

Games take a while to load. I don’t know if it is taking a while to download, or load up the game itself. I think we need a progress meter.

Games are not quick to recognize keyboard commands. I would press my arrow keys a few times and still be waiting for my character to move. Some games were ok. I think a game controller would be really handy. It’s odd using a keyboard for these games.

All in all, I had some fun. It brought back memories.