Posted August 25th, 2008 in Uncategorized | by Dave
Today’s our sixth wedding anniversary, and it’s been a little over nine years since our first date. That just blows my mind. It’s also Amy’s first day of class, so we did our celebrating Saturday night. We had dinner at The Melting Pot (fondue was delicious, service was bad), followed by a trip to the all night flea market at the DuPage County Fairgrounds. I’ll post about the treasures we got later.
Sunday was my Dad’s birthday party (his birthday is tomorrow). In addition to his present, I brought him a 17″ LCD monitor I’m not using anymore, and I got his McAfee AntiVirus updated. Now, if I could just find a way to get him off dial-up.
Amy got me a pedometer, and I’m going to try to get more walks in. The part of the Illinois Prairie Path that I like isn’t lit, so I guess waking after midnight isn’t a good idea. I’ve thought about getting up early and getting a mile or two in before work, but I’m really not a morning person. I guess I’ll figure out something. Anyway, I signed up for an account at mapmywalk.com and set a goal for 20 miles in the next 30 days. I think I can squeeze that in.
Posted August 21st, 2008 in Development | by Dave
Remember WebTV, that clever set-top box that was going to bring the Internet into Grandma’s living room in the 90s? Like everyone else, they had proprietary HTML tags that only their browser supported. In retrospect, that might not be such a bad thing.
I shudder to think what would have happened if their <blackface> tag became part of the HTML standard.
Seriously, blackface? Was Al Jolson the project manager behind this?
Posted August 18th, 2008 in Development | by Dave
I highly recommend this podcast from IT Conversations. It’s by Ken Beck, “the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit”, and one of the earliest supporters of Test Driven Development. Ken was asked to share stories with the audience, and gave some great advice in the process.
One part (about 58 minutes in) really stood out to me, as it ties into my post on developers getting “religion”:
That’s why I like that word “responsible”. “What is the responsible thing to do in this moment?” That is a wonderful, wonderful question to ask. “How would I do this if this was my money?” Boy, that’ll focus the mind on documentation.
Listen to Test Driven Development, Patterns and Extreme Programming at IT Conversations.
Posted August 18th, 2008 in Uncategorized | by Dave
Some subject lines from my spam box the other day. I don’t know why I felt like sharing them. Hell, I don’t know why I was reading the subject lines in my spam box in the first place:
- Nude Couple’s Feud Ends at Waffle House
- Go to the disco and let your love stick glow!
- subject 9815712
- I Will Not Zap The Mosquito
Posted August 14th, 2008 in Development, Uncategorized | by Dave
As they say, I had an itch to scratch.
When someone registers on a site and you want their address, it’s good practice to have a “state/province” selector. Building that requires you to have a list of states somewhere, usually in your database, and usually in a table called “state”.
So, I whipped up a little site called statetable.com, which generates the SQL script you need to create that table. It can also include Canadian provinces, US territories, and even US Minor Outlying Islands (atolls & reefs nobody really gives a damn about). Don’t want SQL? It’ll spit out a CSV file you can open in Excel, OpenOffice.org Calc, Numbers, etc.
