web

Dapper

Posted on by grahams

I used Dapper to create something which the world has needed for quite some time.. An RSS feed for The Digital Bits. Dapper seems like a really cool tool, although it took me a little while to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing with it.. I’m really curious, though, to see if it continues to work over the next few weeks… I’ve used a few scrapers before trying to get a feed for the Bits before, but they always break eventually (or right away).

I don’t think I’m really exploiting the power of Dapper, yet, though. It seems it is more intended for scraping sites for crazier “mash-ups”, but for now this is all I needed.

Microsoft Spies

Posted on by grahams

I have become extra-sensitive to surveillance and reconnaissance issues since working for Goodrich SRS, but today caught me completely off guard. I was driving home from work and I noticed an SUV coming towards me with all kinds of strange equipment on it’s roof. It looked like two cameras 90 degrees from each other pointing towards the front corners of the car. It’s possible there was another pair of cameras pointing towards the rear corners of the car. The car was also equipped with some antennae, and had some companies’ logo on the sides that sported some text about surveying or somesuch.

After the car passed me I continued to look in my rear-view mirror and noticed that the entire back window had a huge Microsoft Windows Live Local logo across the back. My guess is that MS is doing some of their “Street Side” imaging of storefronts, etc.

Winning Nerd!

Posted on by grahams

Once again, I won two tickets for Monday’s Red Sox game at work! I’m taking the day off of work, since it is an 11am game, and I’m taking with me because he’s a huge baseball fan. So that should be a good time. I also found out that I get to delay my tax return by one more day and turn it in on the 18th due to the New England holiday Patriots’ Day, which also rocks.

For some reason I decided today to abuse myself and create an RSS feed for my CD collection. I was screwing around with some SQL and decided it would be a pretty easy thing to throw together. It is back-ended by my OpenDB installation, and just like my CD list, it caches the query results so it only queries the database when the table has been modified. Anyway, the feed gives you the last 15 albums I have purchased (or been given), I have no idea if anyone cares about this shit, I just thought it’d be fun. Let me know if you are using it, and let me know if you have any problems.

I want a GPS.

Posted on by grahams

GeoCaching sounds so freaking cool. Anyone got a GPS they aren’t using anymore?

I am gonna finish reading this chapter then I am ‘Quil-ing it and hitting the sack.

BTW, I tweaked my styles a bit more, so that the ‘comments’ (or talkback) stuff is always displayed at the bottom of the ‘entry cell. I did this because if someone had a short entry, their picture in the sidebar would expand the row, but the talkback links were way up by the entry, leaving all this blank space. The new way looks better….. I made all my styles public, so if you are at all interested (even to use them as a starting point), let me know…

G’Night…

friends redux

Posted on by grahams

After much procrastination and many complaints, I finally made my friends page look like my journal page. The only stylistic difference you will probably notice is the width of my journal seems smaller than my friends. Well this is because of Jerry’s wide-ass cartoon from a few days ago spreading out my table…. In a day or two it will be back to normal.. :P Anyway, let me know what you think of it. I am not 100% pleased with it, but I am approaching it…

Happy Birthday Jerry!

tension, excitement, stress, and web page revisions

Posted on by grahams

tension: Pending phone interview with a certain Silicon Valley company on Wednesday. I really hope it goes well..

excitement: I think it is occuring to me that I am almost done here… It’s about time.

stress: Classwork compounded with tight deadlines at work. They are not totally overboard, but I am keeping busy. I am hoping to get a bit ahead of schedule this weekend.

web page revisions: I added a schedule to my webpage, among other minor revisions. I was originally planning on adding graphics and stuph to it, but I think I like it as all plain text. What do you think?

Bride of LiveJournal

Posted on by grahams

I have slowly been integrating the data here at LiveJournal into a new homepage for me at CSH. The journal back-end will continue to be LiveJournal, but I wanted to start playing around with PHP, CSS, and maybe XML in my homepage, so…

You can check it out here, although once I am ‘finished’, it will replace my old page.

Let me know what you think of the design in the comment forum, suggestions are always welcome!