Pain in the Tech :

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Posted by on December 31, 1969

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# at 11/30/-0001 12:00 am cst

THE BEST EVER!
It plays, my soul dances.

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# at 11/30/-0001 12:00 am cst

i love this cd , and of course i love R.E.M.
Mike
Peter and
Michael

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# Henry Todd at 11/27/2003 1:40 pm cst

"What if the news and updates were feeded into this one location" �� Matt, I don't think "feeded" is a word. Perhaps you meant "fed"?

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# Matt at 11/30/2003 6:17 am cst

You are right. Thanks for pointing that out.

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# Beverly Haynes at 12/29/2003 8:08 am cst

Cameron Rose welcome to the family. I can�t wait to hold you. Where did you get such a pretty name??

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# Sherrill at 12/29/2003 2:55 pm cst

What a cutie!! (Oops, I did the "ee" thing, too. Sorry.) Congratulations to Daddy Dave and to the rest of the family. I�m sure that Cameron loves her new home and her new family!

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# kara vormittag at 1/2/2004 8:17 am cst

josey wants to know when she can come and visit! congrats on the new addition.

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# shell at 1/19/2004 11:11 am cst

I loved the movie it made me cry and for a movie to do that means that is was really great, i suggest everyone goes to see it

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# Peach at 2/7/2004 4:28 pm cst

First of all, i think the big fish is a metaphor for two things. One thing is what you had mentioned, that the father was the big fish. But remember how the big fish was caught? With a wedding ring. Maybe it could also be a metaphor on how you "catch" the woman you love. You marry her.

Second of all, he never had an affair with that woman. He had walked out on her, don't you remember? Well, at least that's what I understood. As for the giant... i really have no idea exactly what that is symbolism for. But overall I agree with you that it was one amazing movie.

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# anonymous at 2/24/2004 6:07 pm cst

I think that Spectre is a heaven or Eden. Everything about the place is perfect: the grass is so perfect and green that nobody has to wear shoes, there is always freshly baked pie, and nobody has a care in the world. The people in the town are angelic and innocent because they have not been exposed to the harsh truths of our world, which is much like young Edward.

When people are young, everything is brighter, happier, and better. Young Edward arrives too 'early' and therefore cannot enjoy his stay; he has not fulfilled his life yet. The shoes hanging on the wire are like binding contracts stating that the people there must remain because nobody can leave without their shoes on right?

When Edward leaves, he breaks this contract and in a sense alters this peaceful Eden. The others are awoken from their innocent fantasies and snapped back to the harsh realities of real life. When Edward arrives too late, he is older and more knowledgable and now views things in a dimmer light. Spectre is in ruins because the people did not know how to deal with these new realities.

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# Other Cameron Rose at 3/2/2004 9:00 pm cst

I just stumbled into this site. My name is Cameron Grey Rose and I live in Seattle. I wish my namesake good luck in her new home. And I am grateful I can show people pictures of the dog named after me.

ps there is a adult film director named Cameron Rose. Watch out. I learned this the hard way.

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# michelle at 3/8/2004 7:40 am cst

here are the ansewers:

1. We are currently voting for who runs to represent the democratic party in the race for president, which ever party is not holding the role of president does this, yes the vote is still in november.

2. To run for president there is a certain age that you have to be and you must be a citizen of the us who was born here, the other stuff i dont know.

3. You win a state in the preliminaries, which we are going through now, the citizens of the state vote for who they want to be the canidate for the party to run for president, by the time it reaches us all of the other canidates drop out, it is important to win a state so you know where or not your chances are to winning in general, it is a test of the campaign. in the end though it is the party who will say a definte yes or no if someone is to run against the current president.

4. There are several different parties that run against the president, and you will see that when you go to vote in november, but mainly there is 1 real party that runs against the president.

5. to learn about the different canidates i am sure that they have websites that you can visit, if you do a simple web search i am sure you will get the ansewers you are looking for.

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 5/29/2004 2:03 pm cst

Column view has been an option since the OS X Public Beta. In fact, I believe it was a view option in the Mac OS X Server 1.x Finder. It's been a while since I've used it, so I can't recall.

You are right about the process of creating new documents — in most cases. If you keep a document-based application in the Dock, whenever it is clicked it should create a new empty document if none are open (in the case of open applications). This is specified in the Aqua HIG for creating application windows.

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# shell at 6/29/2004 6:12 pm cst

Just to let you know that there is a lot of planning that goes into where a company will place their next store. If the market in a particular area will not support another store, then they will not place it. When a store opens, they survey the area for traffic and survey people in that area about the possbility of a store opening. These are just a few things they do. Despit the fact that some may feel coporate america is money sucking, they too have a business to run like just like anyone else and if they position a store in an over crowded area, the store will not do so well and fail. Also another little tip, dont get sick to fast of stores popping up, becuase with in the next few years you will see more stores leaving their traditional mall settings to go to areas such as village crossing. Oh, and by the way Home Depot is spread out a lot more than other stores and you and i both only know of 2 stores at all that are anywhere close to our houses. Coporate america is also responding to the needs of the consumer wanting more convience, mutiple things in one area, less driving less trips all over the place, consumers want to have everything in one place, that is why walmarts with grocery stores and same with kmarts do well. You can get your grocerys and undies in the same place. Technology too has now forced these stores to offer a wide variety, you can buy anythin on the web and they need to compete with that. In conclusion, as a marketer and further coporate american, what is happening is to meet the demands and needs of the consumer, and everything is done with a great amount of research prior to actually breaking ground.

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# shell at 7/2/2004 1:47 pm cst

I would run for president

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# Theresa at 7/3/2004 6:46 am cst

I've heard Seabisuit is a Field of Dreams type movie -- it makes guys cry. Why would you rent Phonebooth??

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# Matthom at 7/3/2004 7:26 am cst

I admit it... I have a crush on Colin Farell...!! Oh geez I said that out loud! No... I rented Phone Booth because, as Shell says, I have a "thing" for phone booths. I think they are intriguing. Well... the fact that there are NO MORE of them - that is intriguing. I guess that could be one of the reasons...

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 7/8/2004 12:06 pm cst

Is there any particular reason you aren't using AAC? Better quality than MP3 at the same file size�

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# Matt at 7/8/2004 12:32 pm cst

I thought the AAC format was a "locked" format. I was under the assumption that I would have more freedom with my digital track if it was in MP3 format, rather than the AAC format... Of course I am probably very wrong.

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 7/10/2004 5:58 am cst

The AAC files encoded by iTunes (via QuickTime) are completely unencumbered - no use restrictions other than playback support not being nearly as widespread as that for MP3.

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# daniel at 7/13/2004 3:51 pm cst

i would play the california lotto. Then I think i could do more things that I would not fail at if I had a bunch of money.

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# ACJ at 7/14/2004 9:42 pm cst

I've used a nice PHP driven style sheet in the past that would cook up a random colourscheme on every page load (one that works and not one that makes your eyes bleed, mind you). It worked absolutely great untill I switched to XHTML1.1. For some reason, my PHP driven style sheet won't play with my site since. Too bad, really. There's probably some restriction on the file type that can be associated with XHTML1.1 as being a cascading style sheet, but I couldn't find anything about it in the W3C specs. Perhaps it's an Mozilla bug. I'll look into it again this week.

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# Amanda at 7/16/2004 6:16 am cst

I say keep the books! You never know when you'll need or want them...or even better, when someone else may need or want them. The beauty of reading books is that when you're done, you can share them(or in your case, before you've read them). Knowledge is power...pass it on : )

Plus, if you let someone borrow a book you haven't read, they can give you the info and then you can decide if you want to read it yourself.

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# Matthom at 7/16/2004 8:06 am cst

You're right... I can't "part with them" that easily. They are timeless entities.

Sometimes just opening a book and reading a random page makes me feel better. Why give that up?

The garage sale is going on, and the books are still in my closet. :)

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# Theresa at 7/19/2004 7:41 am cst

I've had an old cell phone sitting in my house for weeks now. I used your first listed website, and am getting some money back. Thanks for finding it!

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# Chad at 7/23/2004 8:08 pm cst

Indeed, common sense is out the window with Word, and also with Excel. Word is constantly doing things on its own, as if it has the ability to reason and know when you are already having a bad day, only to decide to try and make it worse. Necessary evils suck.

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# Jim Amos at 7/25/2004 5:13 pm cst

Just thought I'd let you know that in firefox 09 Win XP your stylesheet is not being picked up at all. It might be something to do with the way you've 'optimized' it by removing a lot of the whitespace. Not sure.

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# Jim Amos at 7/25/2004 6:00 pm cst

Ahh, here it is. Good to finally see the styles. I like your header image. Bevelled fonts don't always work but in your case I think it does.

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# Matthom at 7/25/2004 7:14 pm cst

Thanks for the feedback, Jim. I wasn't sure if that bevel looked right.

I'm a big font fanatic, and I love the font that's used. "Folio," it's called.

...mmm, I could stare at that font all night.

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# Matt Thomas at 7/30/2004 11:11 am cst

Hello Matt Thommes,

Thank you kindly for stopping by my site and dropping me a line. There are so many Matt Thomases in the world! Google thinks nowadays that I am the #1 Matt Thomas on earth and that's pretty nice. But you are Matt Thommes and I have to say it helps your chances. Google says there are 35,000 pages that say Matt Thomas but only 11 that say Matt Thommes. So good on your ancestors for adopting the more unique spelling.

Ok I'll be on my way now. Nice site Matt Thommes. Good luck on the job hunt.

Peas out
Matt Thomas

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# Jim Amos at 8/1/2004 3:40 pm cst

Is this of any use: http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2004/june/smarttext

Of course, most of us just use blogging software like MT or WP, saves us from these kinds of headahces. I admire you for doing it yourself though.

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# Matthom at 8/1/2004 6:11 pm cst

Very helpful, yes. Thanks.

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# amanda at 8/2/2004 12:31 pm cst

I agree. It seems everyone has jumped on the web design band wagon. And, when asked the same question myself,("what do you do") the instant response is 'web designer'(although I am always certain to add 'freelance' to reclaim that special uniqueness because to me, that somehow emphasizes the fact that I must know more than the average joe).

All of your points are valid. Almost anyone can design a web page. It's all the other things that come in to play that make a web designer(or should we say web marketing specialist?) good at what they do. In the end, you are delivering a product that is expected to get results. With out any intel on how to design and implement an effective site, it's very difficult to produce the desired effect.

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# Jim Amos at 8/2/2004 6:53 pm cst

Lol and here's me wondering if you two are the same guy! I was beginning to get confused.

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# Chad at 8/2/2004 7:52 pm cst

Hhmmm.....interesting, been thinking about trying out Netflix. I live out in the boonies, so getting to the video store is kind of a hassle sometimes, plus I forget to return the damn things. BTW, what did you think of Something's Gotta Give? I hated that movie, all of the whining and crying...cry me a friggin' river, lady.

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# Matthom at 8/3/2004 5:12 am cst

Yeah, there was too much crying, on the part of Diane. I think she was good in the movie, though. And Jack... he put on a good show too.

The movie was a bit "drawn out," but it had it's moments.

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# Chad at 8/9/2004 6:17 am cst

That's pretty slick. Unfortunately for me though, I have to work on Windoze. One day I hope to have the extra cash to be able to get a Powerbook though, I hear they are pretty feature-packed and powerful (maybe that's why they call them Powerbooks, eh??)

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# Matthom at 8/9/2004 6:40 am cst

Well, the Powerbook is not mine. It's my girlfriends. Lucky for me, I can use it often :)

And, you're right, they ARE expensive, but she does monthly payments on it, which comes out to about $50 per month. Which is not that bad.

If you're considering buying a Mac, I strongly recommend the payment plan option, because then it's affordable. Of course you have to make payments for three or four years, but you could pay if off more quickly over time.

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# Jim Amos at 8/15/2004 1:37 am cst

Maybe he is just busy with work, and don't forget he has a lil mini-zeldman on the way too. I sometimes wonder how bloggers like D. Keith Robinson and Paul Scrivens find so much time to keep us posted.

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# Jim Amos at 8/15/2004 2:15 am cst

Yeah, firefox is where it's at. Definitely.

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# Matthom at 8/15/2004 2:58 am cst

Jim, I like Firefox, but I also can't wait for Safari RSS, and Mac OS X Tiger. I am guessing Safari will only get better.

By the way, I love your "War on Web Standards." Great stuff. Except... your intention seemed harmless, but you still managed to rally purely political comments... which I guess is not a surprise.

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# Chad at 8/16/2004 8:23 am cst

Wow man, this all sounds too familar to me. I grew up in northwest Florida, near Pensacola. A little town called Milton. I have weathered plenty of hurricanes and tropical storms, my parents many more than me. They have had their house flooded and their roof destroyed. You can see all of the pictures you want on TV, but it can never prepare you for what it is really like when you are there living through it. Sorry your vacation is sucking. Just be glad you get to leave.

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# Matthom at 8/17/2004 2:08 am cst

It was not your typical rain storm. You could actually feel the pressure that was being put on the house. The windows were very close to being shattered. We had taped them, so they ended up OK.

The vacation is much better now. The storms are gone, and I am in Daytona Beach, just enjoying the waves. We are going to try for Disney again this Friday.

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# Matt at 8/17/2004 11:34 am cst

I use firefox as my main browser. I can only believe more people will be converted when it hits version 1.0.

It's nice to see another matt*.com :)

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# Jim Amos at 8/20/2004 3:10 am cst

Hey is that a gecko? (*Starts whistling the Geicko theme*)

Funny, the word 'old' just doesn't have the same meaning in America as it does back home in England.

Still, it looks like a very nice place to visit, and any history is always interesting.

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# Matthom at 8/21/2004 10:02 am cst

No, that is a chameleon. They are so cool. In Florida, they are very common sights, in grassy areas. In Chicago, we have ants. Florida has chameleons.

I've never been to England, so I'm not sure how it differs, in terms of the word "old." I would LOVE to visit there someday, though.

Since you live in Ohio - from what you've seen, how does America's history differ from England's?

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# Lacy at 8/21/2004 11:22 am cst

We spent a week in St. Augustine last summer - it is a BEAUTIFUL place, isn't it? Where we stayed wasn't so touristy busy - it was a relaxing and quiet week! (and I loved going over all the bridges and seeing the different "islands".)

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# Becky at 8/23/2004 2:46 pm cst

How's it going with Netflix? Are you still enjoying it? I've seen over a hundred movies since joining in January.

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# Becky at 8/23/2004 2:48 pm cst

I face the same dilemma. I use Access at work, but I have a Mac at home. Have you ever tried using FileMaker Pro on the Mac?

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# Matthom at 8/23/2004 2:59 pm cst

Becky, I've tried FileMaker Pro on a Mac, and it is great - no doubt. But Access is so SMART. I just love how simple it is to create form fields that dynamically pull data from the database. Plus the fact that it coincides so easily with Microsoft Excel, and Word.

I've been learning so much about it.

By the way, do you have a non-Netflix blog? I love "NetFlix Fan," but maybe you have a personal one?

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# Matthom at 8/23/2004 4:23 pm cst

Becky, I do enjoy the luxury of (almost) always having a DVD on hand to watch. Makes my evenings more enjoyable.

But sometimes I think it's more of a "chore." A friend once told me she seems like it's an "obligation," because if she doesn't watch a lot - she feels she's not getting her money worth.

I have to agree slightly.

I DO love NetFlix Freak! Best software!

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# Trent at 8/24/2004 11:03 am cst

Check out Markdown - a very useful text processing tool. As for the acronym tool, MovableType and Wordpress have plugins that auto-create the abbreviations, so it depends on what blogging system you are using.

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# amanda at 8/27/2004 5:21 am cst

Hi Matt. Use NoteTab Light. It's a free program for HTML, CSS, and plain text editing. Plus tons of other things I haven't even got to.
http://www.notetab.com/ntl.php
On the bottom of the screen are the tabs for each kind of document you want to use. Under the HTML tab, in the left hand menu, click on 'unordered list' and it will then ask you how many items you want in the list. Ta da! There you go.

I've been using this program for about a month now, and it's awesome. Hope this helps you out!

Amanda

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# Matthom at 8/27/2004 5:43 am cst

Trent and Amanda, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I am looking into both options.

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# Chad at 8/27/2004 9:03 pm cst

Cartography is great, isn't it? I too love maps. As a matter of fact, I just got my copy of the new Geology of South Dakota from the SD Geological Survey. It's a beaut. I used to make maps and still get to on occasion at work. Begin shameless plugI have some of my maps I've done over the years up here.End shameless plug

If I had my way, I would write code and make maps all day long. I could never run out of ideas for cool maps to make.

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# Matthom at 8/28/2004 9:23 am cst

Chad, very cool. Is that just a hobby of yours, or did you actually work in the industry?

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# Chad at 8/28/2004 11:51 am cst

I'm a geologist by training, but worked in the GIS/cartography realm for a while; I titled myself "Map Monkey". Now I built GIS-based models that simulate water-quality in rivers/streams, so I get to make watershed maps on occassion (but not as many as I would like to).

BTW, I think that your "Remember personal info" may not be remembering me?? Or perhaps I'm doing something wrong??

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# Matthom at 8/28/2004 12:12 pm cst

No, I am doing something wrong. It's not you. The immediate problem with my site is that I don't rely on blogging tools, such as WordPress or Movable Type. I do it all myself.

So, when I notice certain enhancements made to sites that are powered with blogging tools, I try to add those enhancements to my own site. Unfortunately, it's not always easy or straight-forward.

The "Remember Personal Info" is just a few JavaScript functions, but I am having trouble getting it to work.

I am toying with it, but nothing gives. In the meantime, maybe I should just take that option off for now, since it's not working.

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# dale at 8/31/2004 4:13 am cst

I've noticed RSS to be very useful for my websites too. The user adds it to their news reader and when ever something new is posted on my site they know about it within a few seconds (or whenever they next turn on their reader) and therefore go and visit the site.

It is like "pushing" the information to them (of course it is their choice to use RSS). A very good way to get people coming back.

It's like a general email to the world, but there is no chance of spam. Fantastic!

BTW: I like your blog site, nice work for coding it yourself :)

yay! mod_rewrite too! Great!

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# Matthom at 8/31/2004 5:00 am cst

It's like a general email to the world, but there is no chance of spam. Fantastic!

Never thought about it that way. Good point.

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# Chris Moritz at 8/31/2004 8:08 am cst

Sounds interesting. I'm a big dork for politics; always interested in an informed and pleasant debate.

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# dale at 9/2/2004 3:12 am cst

Poor man's trackback :p

HERE

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# Matthom at 9/2/2004 6:36 am cst

Yes, thank you. I am a poor man, indeed. :)

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# shell at 9/2/2004 9:38 am cst

Hi Honey,
I love driving! and you know that, even when there is traffic and it is stop and go, i guess it is my way to relax. The only thing i get mad about is when i am driving behind someone who is driving slow and i cant get around them RRRRRR

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# shell at 9/6/2004 8:54 pm cst

I Love You too.
Thank you for a wonderful day, you are my soulmate and the one who knows me best, without you my life would not be complete. (crying)

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# dale at 9/8/2004 1:26 am cst

I think firefox is pretty ready for general public. My parents both use it, I was like "don't use IE because there is security issues" and that was it. The interface of a web browser is pretty much the same (different browser, or even operating system).

For workplaces, firefox *might* not be ready. Things like it doesn't listen to windows domain settings etc. Although that is a good thing ;)

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 9/8/2004 10:45 am cst

If I'm remembering correctly, Zoe has a similar message summary interface. It does make it easier to locate specific messages, particularly in lengthy threads.

http://zoe.nu/

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 9/10/2004 12:13 pm cst

Thanks for posting this - I'm a Photoshop novice and this is one of the things I've wondered how to do without having to edit on a pixel level.

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# Matthom at 9/10/2004 1:29 pm cst

No prob. Now if I could only figure out how to do the same thing in Flash!

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# dale at 9/10/2004 6:31 pm cst

Cool Thanks for that :)

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 9/12/2004 7:16 pm cst

"In the midst of a war � our nation at war � why on Earth would anyone want to change leaders, during this time?"

Isn't this the argument Big Brother put forward in Orwell's "1984"?

"Who will do whatever it takes to hunt the merciless killers down?"

Who pulled special forces troops off Bin Laden's trail in Afghanistan to prepare for the invasion of a country that didn't attack us, had no operational ties to the group that did, and posed no threat to us?

"He hunted down the prime terrorists�"

Except for the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and its mastermind Ayman Al-Zawahiri. I guess if you make an exception for the two most powerful people in the organization� Then there is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi�

"�and anyone who harbored terrorists."

Hussein-controlled Iraq was not a hotbed of terrorist activity prior to our invasion of the country. Al-Zarqawi was based in northern Iraq — territory controlled by the United States through the military enforcement of the no-fly zone. Pentagon plans to eliminate him were repeatedly tabled because some feared that killing Zarqawi would weaken the case against Iraq. Zarqawi is responsible for hundreds of deaths in Iraq that could have been prevented had he been eliminated when the opportunity presented itself. Instead, because of political considerations, a killer was allowed to carry on as he pleased.

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# Matthom at 9/12/2004 7:41 pm cst

Daniel, thanks for your input. I never read "1984," but I'm sure you have a solid comparison. Does that mean you agree with that one point, or no?

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 9/12/2004 10:54 pm cst

I adamantly, vehemently disagree. One of the premises of 1984 is that there is a perpetual war, a war the authoritarian regime ("Big Brother") claims that only it can win. I highly recommend 1984.

Incidentally, I'm also looking at the Interaction Designer's mailing list at the moment - one the members has the following in his sig:

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

Can you honestly say that the Bush administration hasn't used some of these tactics to justify four more years in office?

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# Amanda at 9/13/2004 5:57 am cst

I absolutely have no qualms about changing leaders during this time of war. In regards to your comment about the threat of terror hovering over America, I believe it to be over-embellished by the media. Can you think of a day in the past 3 years or so where you haven't heard anything about a 'possible' threat of terror attacks, or that security has been stepped up in 'the event of' an attack? I think the media has been a contributor to America's paranoia of terror attacks.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be on our guard, but I don't think we need encouragement from the media to constantly be on the edge of our seats, wondering when a tragedy like 9/11 will happen again. I suppose I choose not to live in fear of such an event happening again. I trust that our men and women overseas are doing some good and their presence is somewhat justified, but does Bush honestly think he can single-handedly oust every terrorist organization there is? I think our goals need to be re-aligned with a more realistic approach that does not involve American occupation of another country.

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# Matthom at 9/13/2004 6:37 am cst

Amanda, good points. I agree that the media suffocates America, and like you, I don't live in fear of a next attack. But I know in the back of my head that it could happen again.

I also don't think Bush is trying to single-handedly oust every terrorist organization there is. More or less, he can only do so much.

In general (thoughts to myself) - I don't want John Kerry and John Edwards in charge of this country, if and when disaster strikes again. I just can't come to terms with that.

I don't know. It's my gut feelings. Call me crazy.

I appreciate everyone's feedback so far.

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# dale at 9/14/2004 2:49 am cst

Funky. Is is possible do just do a general RSS for comments over the whole site?

If you'd like help with your sql problem just let me know I can have a look. ;)

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# Matthom at 9/14/2004 4:47 am cst

Thanks Dale, I will certainly ask you if I can't resolve the issue.

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# matt at 9/14/2004 5:07 pm cst

I normally don't like to post about my political views but I guess I'll bite. I personally feel that the terrorist threat on American shouldn't be the only reason to vote for Bush but I think that what you stated in "The Bottom Line" is one of the more compelling reasons to vote for Bush.

I know he will do whatever it takes to protect this country. I know he will be aggressive, and forceful, when dealing with these hideous people. I know he will stand up, and face fear "head on."

At this point, I would rather go with what I know rather than hope that John Kerry will do better when it comes to fighting terroism. I will leave the discussion of the merits of both canidates stances on other issues for another place/time.

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# Matthom at 9/14/2004 5:33 pm cst

At this point, I would rather go with what I know rather than hope that John Kerry will do better when it comes to fighting terroism.

Good point, Matt. My thoughts exactly.

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# dale at 9/15/2004 8:37 pm cst

Yeah. My forums currently have over 17,000 posts within less than two years with no problems. Then you have places with millions and millions!

For my blog the only problem would be the unix timestamp, it only goes up to the year 2038. aw :(

I'm sure they'll come up with something by then.

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# Theresa at 9/17/2004 10:01 am cst

I'd like an invite if you still 'em! Even though my alumni address is great because I don't get spam, it's going to look weird in a short while.

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# Joshua Street at 9/17/2004 3:31 pm cst

My dentist has a TV mounted in the roof. It's kind of odd, because that's the only TV I think I've watched for... quite some time now. That's normally playing MTV, and he's got speakers setup and everything... yeah, so he's a yuppie dentist :P It's all good!

On a more technical note, how do you think noise cancelling headphones would work with an intermittent sound like that of a dentists drill? I've never used them, but I'm curious...

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# Matthom at 9/17/2004 4:52 pm cst

Hmmm. There would be no way that headphones could sound out the dentist's drill. Impossible.

My dentist DID let me use the headphones though, the other day. I can't say it helped a lot, but it was certainly something I've never tried before.

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# Amanda at 9/20/2004 7:04 am cst

No kidding. I just bought a spanking new laptop less than a week ago, which claims to have a 60GB hard drive. Ha! That storage is actually split between 2 hard drives, one with the recovery info on it, and a mere 14GB leftover which leaves the other hard drive with a wimpy 40GB.(Where is the other 6GB, I have no idea) I totally should have gone for the 80GB. Thank god for external drives!

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# dale at 9/21/2004 2:26 am cst

Really Simple Syndication. Why? Because it sounds more funky :p mmmm Syndication.

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# Matthom at 9/21/2004 7:53 pm cst

mmmmm Summary. RICH summary. Dark Chocolate summary.

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# Matthom at 9/22/2004 4:26 pm cst

It really pisses me off! My iPod is significantly less potent - without those 2 Gigs. Not to mention it seems like it "rounds down" the available storage.

I just realized that manufacturers or companies could actually LIE about the amount of storage available, just to get consumers to go out and but the bigger model - AFTER they purchased the smaller one.

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# shell at 9/23/2004 9:28 am cst

There are a lot of stories about that cemetary that are unique and interesting, there is a book that i read called haunted chicago and there are many stories about that cemetary in it. Also a very rich man named mr.pullman, he designed and built railroad cars is buried there. He was a very selfish man and when he died he was buried with lots of jewels, gold and money so no one else could have his fortune. But the funny and odd thing is that to make sure no one robbed his grave his casket was put in several cases i believe the final one made out of steel so on one could get into it.

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# Amanda at 9/25/2004 7:20 pm cst

I live just a few blocks away from there and have passed it while on my rollerblades...I've never been inclined to enter the gates, however.

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# Joshua Street at 9/26/2004 5:45 pm cst

Or, alternatively, computers become able to better interact with the material, through improved digitisation methods (OCR, etc.)

I think that for me, if my filing on computer was represented in a physical realm, my paper organisation skills would be far, far better. I don't really think it's that bad, aside from the space-saving aspect of it all, of course.

The only thing you missed in there is that paper can't be indexed, it isn't searchable... that's the biggest drawback, for me, that paper has when compared to a digital medium. That said, I disagree with the comparison of mediums like this -- there's no reason for one to necessarily replace the other. It's far more sensible to suggest that both have applications, and can or may be used to augment the communication of the other medium (for example, a book, with an online reference system with a fulltext index -- you get the best of both world; a physical, tangible copy of the book, and the ability to search it).

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# ucosty at 9/26/2004 5:56 pm cst

Just one question, would you rather read a book or the pdf equivalent of it? Reading large documents [on a computer] can be cumbersome at best.

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# Matthom at 9/26/2004 7:39 pm cst

Joshua,

I guess I am more concerned with the "space saving" aspect of digital text. And like you said, you can do so much more with the digital version, like fulltext search.

So, in a sense, I wasn't truly comparing - one cannot replace the other, like you said. I was more or less welcoming the transition - or, better yet, wondering if that transition will ever happen.

Ucosty,

I would rather read a book. A PDF has no "feeling."

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# Stuart at 9/26/2004 9:03 pm cst

Paper will never die. It's too tasty for words. *begins to devour yummy paper* Ahem... The positives I find with the digital counterpart of paper is that it's so much easier to find your work on a PC than in a not so tidy stack of study notes. Then you have the ability, as you said, to do fulltext searches, which is such a great time saver especially at the moment as I 'study' (procrastinate) for my HSC.

Oh oh oh and i'd be thinking less about reading large documents as cumbersome as such... more like extremely straining on those peeperlike things that situate themselves a tad above and to either side of the nose.

/me goes back to procrastinating

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# dale at 9/27/2004 5:20 pm cst

I suppose this brings up the topic. Should users register to blog sites? I know wordpress supports the option but many don't use it. Would it be easier to handle comments if there was some kind of login system? Although I think people like blogs because they can post once and don't feel like they need to say anymore.

I like that commenting system and have been planning to add *something* like that in mine. Although if I get around to it is another thing. :p

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# dale at 9/27/2004 5:36 pm cst

/offtopic

Cool you got trackback working :D

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# Matthom at 9/27/2004 5:42 pm cst

Dale, I can SEND trackbacks, but I can't RECEIVE them. I need some way of storing the trackback information in my database, and then displaying that as a comment, in the order that it was received.

You're not off the hook yet. I will still be bugging you about it. ;)

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# dale at 9/27/2004 10:42 pm cst

The way I do it is I have another field called trackback in the database. If it is a normal comment the field = 0, if it is a trackback it is set to 1. Then you just check it as you display the comment and change it as needed.

Wordpress does it differently. It stores the trackback inside these tags: (is that going to display?) and checks that when it reads it out of the database.

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# Joshua Street at 9/29/2004 8:28 pm cst

Hmm. Dale, your trackback sending is broken... observe the post here: http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/09/26/freetel-are-evil#comment-110

"Spam by $_POST" -- looks as though your PHP is a little muddled...

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# Stuart at 9/30/2004 7:25 pm cst

Brand awareness is pretty damn important for those site names which are quite widely used. Take for example, Terminate, the name is used quite a bit. So to counter being one of the others I developed the 'brand' which you can see as the upside-down 'i' come-explaination mark.

Speaking of which, are you going to create a bookmark icon for your site :P

I generally didn't notice it, until you mentioned bookmark icons ;)

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# Matthom at 9/30/2004 7:39 pm cst

I have a bookmark icon, and it's in the right spot in my web directory, but it doesn't show up in some browsers.

It's strange. And frustrating.

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# Stuart at 9/30/2004 11:17 pm cst

I figured out why. I just read your sites source code. You don't have 'shortcut icon' defined in your head tag. Put this into your head tag:

Should work then :P

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# Stuart at 9/30/2004 11:18 pm cst

argh....

[link rel="shortcut icon" href="/resources/terminate-icon.ico" /]

replace [ ] with < >

obviously! :P

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# Matthom at 10/1/2004 5:01 am cst

Thanks... I tried that.. hope it works.

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# Stuart at 10/3/2004 3:11 pm cst

As they say. There's no place like home

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# Josh Street at 10/4/2004 5:36 pm cst

You know, I would, if it weren't for my lack of teleportation device... working on it ;)

Enjoy!

P.S. Yeah, I think the iCal thing *is* a tad odd... I run my life from electronic organisers, too, but not when I'm sitting down to watch a movie. Hehehe.

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# Josh Street at 10/4/2004 5:52 pm cst

Hmmm. Is your website doing some really trippy thing with mod_rewrite? Your favicon looks as though it were being included, or something. As an aside, you should change [link rel="shortcut icon" link="favicon.ico"] to [link rel="shortcut icon" link="/favicon.ico"], so that it works from ALL pages -- the preceding slash means the URI is relevant to the root of the current website. So, on this page, my web browser is looking at http://www.matthom.com/archive/2004/09/29/01/favicon.ico for the favicon, when in fact it should be looking at http://www.matthom.com/favicon.ico instead.

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# Matthom at 10/4/2004 6:01 pm cst

Gracias. My favicon has caused nothing but problems, anyway. But your tip might help, in some way.

Thanks again.

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# dale at 10/6/2004 4:13 am cst

Ah good old mysql. You just install it and watch it work its wonders. Although a good tweaking can really bring its performance up.

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# dale at 10/6/2004 3:58 pm cst

Yes, hold down Alt while you're selecting the text:

"my wonderful link. Please"

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# Matthom at 10/6/2004 4:57 pm cst

Excellent, thanks Dale.

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# ucosty at 10/7/2004 3:50 am cst

Don't try this in xwindows tho... all you will do is drag the window around the screen :).

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# dale at 10/12/2004 1:57 am cst

Paste Special is very useful. Although normally I'd just paste it into notepad and then copy it out again. Although your way is easier :p

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# Greg at 10/12/2004 5:51 am cst

Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for. Super tutorial!

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# dale at 10/12/2004 7:43 pm cst

You should read this (if you haven't already), mainly the comments.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/ENUM.html

enum column type allows for a more strict set of input values, which could be good or bad.

Overall I don't think your choice should affect anything too much.

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# Matthom at 10/12/2004 8:27 pm cst

Thanks for the link and feedback. You're right, though. It's barely worth consideration. It's not going to affect anything drastically.

Therefore, I am going with char(1).

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# Joshua Street at 10/13/2004 4:12 am cst

Because I'm lazy, and can't be bothered looking it up, is enum case sensitive, or could you have got away with using the column type you specified in the post for both upper- and lower-case characters?

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# Matthom at 10/13/2004 4:54 am cst

Josh, enum is NOT case sensitive. But you bring up a good point. I will have to look into that.

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# Chad Cooper at 10/13/2004 6:23 am cst

Ahhh, a man of my kinda thinking. Always coming up with ways to get around the quirks of Microsoft products. I will keep this in mind, I have that problem alot also. But a shortcut key would be sweet as pie, wouldn't it? I am a HUGE fan of Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V. Sometimes my left pinkie finger gets sore from going over to the Ctrl key so much.

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# Chad Cooper at 10/13/2004 6:31 am cst

So did this happen to you? The same thing happened to my mother in law a few years back. The deer ran right into the side of her car, fell down, shook it off, and got up and took off. Whodathunkit??

Yesterday morning on the way into work I saw a deer that had just gotten hit lying on the side of the road. A truck was pulling up to it, presumably the person who hit it. Luckily my 2 year old son didn't see it. Bad way to start the day, huh?

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# Matthom at 10/13/2004 9:34 am cst

The deer did more damage to our car, than we did to it. It was huge. And yes, it just got back up and continued across the road, like nothing hit it.

We were lucky to not have been killed.

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# Stuart at 10/13/2004 6:34 pm cst

I'm out of getting them. This year alone I caught the flu, I have only just in the last 2 weeks gotten over it. But yeah, the shot only works for one strain so say for those rare cases like myself who catch two different strains of the flu, it kinda would be useless. *sigh*

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# Stuart at 10/13/2004 6:35 pm cst

Argh just to relieve confusion, I forgot to mention that I had caught the flu twice. I think I edited it out.

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# dale at 10/16/2004 3:59 pm cst

Very interesting idea. I'd see no problem entering it into a database.

I've only really worked with php and the problem with this is the script only runs when someone visits the site. We'd want this to occur every X minutes. I think there is a php program that runs php scripts outside the web browser. I shall have to look into this.

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# roxy at 10/26/2004 12:30 pm cst

I wish the cubs were there but I am happy for the Red Sox!

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# Matthom at 10/26/2004 12:38 pm cst

I agree. It would be pretty electrifying if the Cubs were playing the Red Sox in the World Series. Ouch. Hot.

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# Jim Amos at 10/27/2004 11:51 am cst

But what I'd like to know is - are we still going to have all this bloody spam? ;)

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# Joshua Street at 10/29/2004 5:43 pm cst

DEFINITELY HTML tags!

I'm using a User Agent which doesn't support styles (or, I've chosen to disable them, or something). I load your website, and what would have used to have been a header displays like any other normal text.

If that's acceptable, then you shouldn't have been using headers to start with (because that would mean they were never intended to function as headers, but instead as simple styling devices for text with no STRUCTURAL meaning -- what semantics is all about).

So, consider the semantics of header tags (they're designed to create structure in a document, as with all headers), then consider what a website would look like (and structure like) if styles went and jumped overboard, or the website was being read aloud by a screen reader.

Additionally, there're search engines to consider: content in headers (within reason) is given greater weight than normal text -- if your "headers" aren't semantically headers, and just styled text, then search engines (which don't care about style sheets!) aren't going to index your content as well as they could, and your ranking will reflect poorly because of that...

Josh.

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# Matthom at 10/30/2004 6:43 am cst

Josh, I agree with your ideas.

But, something bothers me when I have a GROUP of lists, and I use HTML header tags for each. I just don't see how - semantically speaking - each header tag applies DIRECTLY to each list.

It almost makes more sense to include each header WITHIN each list, but that is not possible with header tags.

Don't get me wrong. All your points are correct, and they make sense. I'm just kind of curious, is all.

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# Josh at 10/30/2004 8:36 pm cst

Okay, fair enough... I see your point. I think you're wanting to be able to tangibly LINK elements, like using label tags for form controls. Whilst this is good where it's applicable, think about your webpage as though it were a text document (because, more often than not, that's what it is)

TITLE
Heading 1
Heading 1.1
Heading 1.1.1
List goes here.
Heading 2, etc.

Logical structure exists, and the reader may safely *assume* (unless the list has a legend or caption below it directly associating it with something, in which case they *know*) that the list falls under the content section 1.1.1

I see what you want (I kinda do, too!), but there aren't really facilities to deal with it (so far as I'm aware) in our current markup. At any rate, it's not 100% necessary, given logical document flow would dictate a connection, anyway.

My $AU0.02 ;)

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# Matthom at 10/31/2004 5:05 am cst

I suppose what I'm really looking for is a "list header," much like a table header.

The table header would be <th>. So... I guess I'm looking for <lh>, which obviously doesn't exist.

You're right about the document flow. The headers would dictate the next item in the document, and that's natural for the reader/viewer.

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# Michael Dale at 10/31/2004 3:13 pm cst

SELECT first_name, last_name, count(first_name) AS count, count(last_name) AS count2
FROM persons_table
GROUP BY last_name having count > 1 AND count2 > 2

DISTINCT will just pull out the value once. So if I had two Matts I would only see one.

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# dale at 10/31/2004 3:14 pm cst

opps. Change

count2 > 2

count2 > 1

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# Matthom at 10/31/2004 8:08 pm cst

Excellent. Thanks.

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# Chad at 11/3/2004 8:46 am cst

How bout this Matt: Do you need the day in there? You say if you remove the day, then it works?? Could you write a function that removes either the day (what you don't want) and gives you the date (what you do want) or maybe just remove the date and put that into a new field? Do this using LEFT, RIGHT, or MID...is there a TRIM function in Excel?? You will have to use some logic since the days are all different character lengths, but nothing too bad....maybe worth a shot...

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# Matthom at 11/3/2004 4:15 pm cst

Yes, I would have to somehow use a function that removes the day - or, in this case, the first entire word after the first comma:

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

I would need to remove everything from AFTER the FIRST COMMA - backward. I don't want to have to go in and manually remove each one.

I looked for a TRIM function in Excel, but there's nothing obvious right now. It will come to me...

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# Matthom at 11/3/2004 4:18 pm cst

Oh wait... I just figured it out!

Text to Columns!

Under the Data menu, there is an option called "Text To Columns..."

I could then break up each cell, using the comma as a column delimeter.

Bingo!

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# Chad at 11/4/2004 12:31 pm cst

DOH! I shoulda thought of that! Text to columns is sweet, ain't it??

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# Josh at 11/6/2004 4:31 pm cst

Agree 100%. For a little more about the semantic use of <br /> elements, I wrote something a while ago about semantic indentation, which is (when correctly used) dependent upon the application of break tags in a semantic manner.

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# Matthom at 11/7/2004 4:54 am cst

Thanks Josh. Your reference is much more in-depth... good stuff.

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# Matthew at 11/7/2004 6:29 pm cst

Have you seen Shrek 2 the graphics are awesome.
Especially the sky becomming a storm I was in awe.
What's funny is HP payed millions for it to be made and people after seeing ads for Shrek 2 where HP was advertised asked after the film what's HP? For eg) Talking to Dad. That's funny people don't know what HP and the AD for HP didn't say what HP was? Father's response: Most people as you call newbies do know HP. (Then hear Mum and sister ask what's HP?) =).

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# Matthom at 11/7/2004 7:15 pm cst

Matthew, I haven't seen Shrek 1 OR 2. Everyone says I should. I suppose if I like The Incredibles, I would like Shrek too (pun intended).

I like your HP story. Yes, there are far too many acronyms these days.

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# Stuart at 11/7/2004 10:58 pm cst

Ever since I saw the first trailer for The Incredibles, i've wanted to see it.

It sounds great, but are you saying it's better than Finding Nemo?

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# Matthom at 11/8/2004 4:22 am cst

Stuart, it IS better (in my opinion) than Finding Nemo. The Increbibles doesn't have that "baby" element. Finding Nemo was great - but it lacks the substance that The Incredibles has.

The Incredibles is geared more towards adults, where as Finding Nemo is more towards kids.

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# Matthom at 11/8/2004 4:48 pm cst

I wanted to share a news item from today:

Incredibles tops Nemo.

Rightfully so.

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# Amanda at 11/8/2004 6:14 pm cst

Norah Jones doing Christmas.....I am right there with ya on that one. She is one of my all time favorites and her voice and style beg for holiday music.

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# Matthom at 11/8/2004 7:41 pm cst

(nodding) Yep.

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# roxy at 11/9/2004 8:52 am cst

I liked the incredibles and loved the annimation, however, i felt that it was a bit long and i started to loose interest and one point. When it comes to comparing Finding Nemo to the Incredibles, i think that you should not, there are two totally different stories there and the content of the message they are sending should not be compared to the work that was done. If you take away the story and look at the film for its computer graphics then you can reasonably compare them. However, i feel that if you did compare them in that sense you would see that the movies are very similar, yes one maybe more advanced than the other as over the years technology advances, but i think they both have the quality that we have learned to looked forward to in pixar. I can wait to see the next one - Cars-

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# dale at 11/11/2004 2:21 am cst

"trackback"

http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/192

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# dale at 11/17/2004 6:56 pm cst

My current system has very few comments which is bad. Although the new thing should be much better.

settings.php
//remove ^ E_NOTICE for full error reporting

//uncomment to display errors in browser

//adds prefix to the table names. Allows for multiple installs in one database

functions.php

//start the timer, works out page generation time

//stops the timer and returns the time it took for generation. Level of accuracy can be changed

//checks if gzip is enabled, if the server supports it and the client supports it. If so output gzipped content

//checks if gzip is enabled and server supports it. Use for admin panel stats or something

//checks if the user has come from another link on the current site. If so any actions to go back will take them there (i.e certain post etc) otherwise take them back to the root of the site.

#FINISH THIS (move to another file?, cookie array)
//remembers users information, handles guests

#FINISH THIS
//handles registered users info

//adds slashes to a value. Protect yourself from SQL injection attacks!! No one likes them. This will add slashes to an array too. Recursion baby!

#FINISH THIS (work out custom session name or something, option for use only cookies?)
//starts the session

//lets get the details about the site out of the database

#FINISH THIS
//modified wordpress trackback. Shall code my own after the hsc ;)
//submitted patched version to matt. Port trackback thing. Wordpress now patched
//SQL STUFF HERE

//serialize an array and put it into a cookie

//return the array from the cookie

//deletes a cookie

//display links bound to a certain category

//makes title into one that works nicely in a url

Not sure how useful it is without the code :)

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# Matthom at 11/17/2004 7:14 pm cst

Excellent, Dale. Love it.

It is more useful than you think. It inspires.

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# a.h. at 11/17/2004 8:06 pm cst

Ok, I admit it, I have NEVER commented any of my code. Not even my HTML. But, since I am a PHP late bloomer, I definitely know I'd better get my act together because I have worked with ColdFusion before and I know how easy it is to 'lose' code.

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# Matthom at 11/18/2004 4:04 am cst

Amanda, yes - losing code and forgetting what some code does is frustrating... can't wait to see your comments

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# Chad at 11/18/2004 11:16 am cst

// test to see if we are not on the homepage

// if we are, then echo the welcome statement

// categorical listing - only displays the title and excerpt

// post listing - lists the entire single post

// opening statement included with the 5 most recent posts

// nothing matched the query string

// set the allowed order by columns

// if order is not set, or it is not in the allowed list, then set it to a default value. Otherwise, set it to what was passed in.

Also, here's a post with some heavily-commented code.

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# Matthom at 11/18/2004 4:56 pm cst

Like it, Chad.

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# ucosty at 11/20/2004 4:12 am cst

I'm more of a C coder [switching constantly between game development and operating system development]

These comments are old. They are from my old CMS system which was left incomplete and shoved into several sites before being ceremoniously replaced by wp.

// strip url of such things as '..' and '.'

// find if page exists and include it if it does load it

//display newsitems + comments
//(shit the is fugly ass code)
//i should really investigate css+xhtml soon
//gah!!oneoneone

//now substitute stuff such as page breaks, comment blocks, spam... mmm spam

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# Matthom at 11/20/2004 6:33 am cst

UCosty, I like the personal comments - or "notes to self..."

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# Chad at 11/23/2004 8:23 am cst

Sounds like a great idea....I look forward to hearing more about this for next Xmas.

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# Amanda at 11/25/2004 6:59 am cst

Excellent album. My favorite song from here is 3x5. Fabulous lyrics.

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# Joshua Street at 11/30/2004 9:54 pm cst

Snazzy summary. You're missing information regarding content encoding and MIME types, though -- the latter of which is a requisite for Strict and 1.1, from memory. Anne always has a lot to say (or rant!) about this particular issue, and there was a lengthy discussion about it on WSG a few weeks back.

Other than that, good job!

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# Matthew at 12/1/2004 3:35 am cst

That's fantastic. Good work that's exactly what I needed.
;)I've been learning HTML and looking at PHP now.
Thxs for puting that up. I really appreciate it. Cheers.

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# Blizt at 12/1/2004 6:15 am cst

When you use \n in a single-quoted string (') it will not be parsed as a newline, remember that.
And btw: look in to short-tags ;) (for php.ini/htaccess)

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# Matthom at 12/1/2004 10:22 am cst

A good point made by 'HTML dog' today, regarding using Strict over Transitional doctypes.

http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000078.php

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# Christopher McIntyre at 12/1/2004 5:55 pm cst

Thanks for that. I've been trying to figure this thing out for months on and off. Easy to do without the anti-aliasing other ways but this is one sure method to get the job done right.

Thanks again.

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# Matthom at 12/2/2004 8:00 pm cst

What IS the htaccess script that I need?

And, everyone, please ignore the 'echo' example from above... I totally messed that one up. Like Blitz said, I don't need the newline (\n), and I don't even think I need to escape those double quotes... but I could be wrong on that one.

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# Stuart at 12/4/2004 1:01 pm cst

Great song, great album. Although my personal fave on that album is City of Blinding Lights.

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# Matthom at 12/5/2004 6:15 am cst

Yes, City of Blinding Lights is great too.

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# dale at 12/6/2004 2:32 am cst

mysql_fetch_array() is a very cool function. I use it all the time.

Although I don't use phpmyadmin I use a program called MySQL Control Center which can be downloaded from the Mysql website. I think it runs on most operating systems.

It supports profiles of different servers etc which is good because I use more than one. Plus I think I like the interface better than a webpanel for some reason.

But both are great programs.

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# Joshua Street at 12/6/2004 2:53 am cst

I also use MySQL CC, on both Windows and Linux platforms. There's something on the MySQL website about it being deprecated, but I'm uncertain... it still works great over here! The ability to manage multiple servers from the one app is a huge plus IMO, but you can't beat web apps for convenience sometimes...

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# Amanda at 12/9/2004 5:17 am cst

I wholeheartedly agree. In order to have the maximum productivity, you have to schedule things out. I even take it one step further and do it on a day to day basis. I plan my morning, and then before lunch, schedule things that must be done that afternoon. And as I think of things, I write them down. I am an endless trail of post-it notes and little reminders. But it works for me!

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# Matthom at 12/9/2004 10:06 am cst

Try voice recorders, too. They work wonders. No need for pens, paper, etc.

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# Josh Street at 12/14/2004 1:04 pm cst

Google is doing it (and GMail has been for a while now). I'm not sure how it works myself yet (haven't had time to play), but it looks damn cool!

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# Matthom at 12/14/2004 6:12 pm cst

I wish we all had more time to "play." December sucks.

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# dale at 12/15/2004 11:55 am cst

hehe, thanks for that. Took a whole 1 minute to do. Wow I now have a CSS guide on my ipod! :p

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# Amanda at 12/15/2004 8:40 pm cst

Oh yes, the winter blues. One thing I try to do is remove myself from my familiar surroundings. Usually, this constitutes heading directly to the adorable little coffee shop that is just across the street with a book in hand and a taste for a warm drink. It helps tremendously just to get out of my apartment for a while. I too am looking very forward to spring!

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# roxy at 12/17/2004 6:11 pm cst

I am not the biggest fan of winter months as matt knows. I am always running from one warm place to the next. Yes, the first snow fall is beautiful but after that is it nothing but a cold mess. I would love to be able to get out there and enjoy nature, but my toes get cold faster than normal so i get to enjoy nature through the window. What gets me through the coldest months are the thoughts of spring, that first day when you walk outside and smell the fresh southern spring air, it is the thought of the first walk on a warm night with the one you care about, it is the joys of the future spring and summer that keep my mind a drift during the sub zero days. I found summer type movies such as Blue Crush keep me going, also if all else fails a trip to orlando to see my sister and thaw out.

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# Anne at 12/18/2004 12:51 pm cst

When you have an image, that has (to make it simple) the word "Contact" written on it the ALT attribute value should read "Contact". However, some people like to make it "Information on how to contact us". Now that is not alternate content, that is additional information and should be put inside a TITLE attribute.

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# Matthom at 12/18/2004 3:17 pm cst

Thanks, Anne. That helps a bit.

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# Lachlan Hunt at 12/19/2004 1:12 am cst

Hixie explains it best with his and alt text and tooltips.

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# Lachlan Hunt at 12/19/2004 1:15 am cst

Oops, I screwed the markup in that comment, sorry, you'll need to fix it. It should say:

Hixie explains it best with his mini alt text FAQ and alt text and tooltips.

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# Matthom at 12/19/2004 5:55 am cst

Thanks for the links, Lachlan.

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# Tommy Olsson at 12/19/2004 11:05 pm cst

There's an easy way to check whether or not you have used good ALT attributes on your images: view the page in Lynx. You can also use Opera, which makes it very easy to toggle images on and off, but I think the effect is even more apparent in Lynx.

It may be somewhat surprising to see that many images will be better off with alt="", i.e. an empty ALT attribute. If the image doesn't convey any vital information, there's no need to bother text browser users or visually impaired users with the fact that there is an image that they can't see.

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# dale at 12/20/2004 2:25 pm cst

I think storing HTML in the database is good. Although not everything. You can convert new lines (\n) to

using a cool script from photomatt, Extended autop which can be found here: http://photomatt.net/scripts/autop That is what I use in my blogging system.

Storing HTML in the database means that you can store almost anything and you are not confined to functions that you have coded yourself, such as bbcode ([b][/b]) which is what I currently use.

Then if you want to remove certain html from posts (such as comments) just use this function http://sourceforge.net/projects/kses/

Hope that helps.

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# Matthom at 12/20/2004 4:29 pm cst

Dale, cool. You make a good point. After all, there is no harm in storing the HTML in the database, because if I want it removed, I can just use a function that strips out the HTML elements.

And, I also use that "autop" script for when comments are inserted.

However, the problem comes up with images, and other such HTML that just doesn't belong in the database.

And what about paragraphs that have a class applied to them? What if that class is changed down the road?

These are things that are making me question my whole approach of storing FORMATTING elements within my content.

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# Matthom at 12/20/2004 8:03 pm cst

Tommy, thanks for your input.

I read Ian Hickson's FAQ regarding alt text (thanks to Lachlan above), and I have a better understanding.

However, what constitutes as "vital information?"

Just curious. This is where the fine line is drawn for me - from a vague understanding to a firm understanding. I am getting there, though.

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# dale at 12/20/2004 8:04 pm cst

Mmm formatting is a good question. You COULD write a bb-like-code thing to do div styles.

So [quote]bla[/quote] which then gets converted to the right html. But you'd still need to do this for all your different styles and tags etc.

If you did need to change something from the database you could just write a script that takes the div tag out of the database and changes it to the new div style.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle formatting is. Both storing HTML in the database and using BBcode isn't the best. Although I don't see a way around it.

I'd head the HTML in database way...

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# Tommy Olsson at 12/20/2004 11:19 pm cst

My way of doing it goes something like this:

I'll mark up the page and enter ALT texts that seem reasonable. Then I'll check the page in Lynx to see how it turns out when you're not "distracted" by the images. More often than not I realise that those ALT texts aren't very good at all. They tend to be descriptions of the image, rather than a textual equivalent.

In some cases I rewrite the ALT text so that it works better, in other cases it dawns on me that it's better to use an empty ALT.

For people who use graphic menu buttons and such, the ALT text should just say the word(s) in the button. Diagrams will need a brief summary as an ALT text, and then a comprehensive description via LONGDESC. A photograph is iffy. If it's just a picture of the author with his wife and their dog, posing in front of their sailboat, it should probably have ALT="". People who can't see the image probably aren't interested in knowing what they are missing.

If the purpose of the picture is to illustrate something about the main point of the page, it's different. Say I'm including a picture of myself on my "About" page. The point is to give people an option to view my ugly mug and put a face to the name. In that case, I'd use ALT="Tommy" and a LONGDESC pointing to a description of my grey hair and scraggly beard. :)

Sorry for getting long-winded, but the point I'm trying to make is that you need to test your ALT texts by seeing the page with the text equivalents instead of the images. Only then can you get a fair idea of how well they work.

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# Matthom at 12/21/2004 4:19 am cst

Dale, good enough. Thanks for your input.

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# Matthew at 12/26/2004 11:18 pm cst

What a wonderful idea Matthom. My suggestion is for you to email information about your idea to the developers of Mozilla Firefox. The whole point of open source is anyone can influence a project ie improve it, and it will not be ignored (hopefully or they reply with no).
BTW I just encountered a bug with your webpage for this blog, for making this comment. I'll email you now with an image of my experience, while I encounted the problem.

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# Matthom at 12/27/2004 4:21 am cst

Matthew, thanks for your feedback. You have a good point. I will make an effort to email Firefox developers.

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# Dale at 12/29/2004 4:06 pm cst

I thought the idea of a website being accessible was that it worked on any browser even if that happens to be IE.

Although my site doesn't look quite the same in IE as Firefox it still has all the features etc.

Yes IE's lack of Standards support is dodgy but I think we'll have to put up with it until IE7, which I'm hoping is going to be very good.

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# Matthom at 12/29/2004 7:33 pm cst

To me, an "accessible" site is one that contains as much semantic markup as possible. But yes, the markup is exactly the same, no matter what browser you use. The only difference is how the browser interprets that markup, and that browser's support for CSS.

If only IE wasn't such a headache...

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# Sadish at 12/30/2004 7:48 am cst

if it is purely for display purposes, you would have used < b > < i > something < / i > < / b >

but < strong > and < em > are different .

if your web page is read by a screen reader software, for the blind people, it reads your raw html / xhtml and when it sees a strong or em tag, it says it LOUDER than the other words so the user gets the meaning of it.

thats the idea.

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# Matthom at 12/30/2004 3:08 pm cst

Sadish, if it is purely for display purposes, I would NOT use <b> or <i>. I would use CSS, like you're supposed to.

<b> and <i> are soon to be deprecated HTML elements that have no semantic meaning whatsoever.

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# Sadish at 12/31/2004 12:00 am cst

you are right on that too...

the main idea I wanted to convey is, 'strong' and 'em' are has more meanings to themselves instead of just visual representation.

Thanks.

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# Dale at 12/31/2004 11:18 pm cst

Yep new years eve has come and gone. But what fun :)

Us Aussies are always ahead of everyone :p ;)

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# Matthom at 1/1/2005 12:31 am cst

Fun is happening now.

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# roxy at 1/4/2005 6:09 am cst

So if i go to one of those other sites (ie napster)i have to pay a fee which is probably like $10 a month and i can only listen to my music on my computer cause if i do us anyother source to play it (ie burn a cd) I have to pay, what a rip off, so in the long run the website is costing more than it would to go to i tunes and get the song for 99. What a joke!

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# Chris Moritz at 1/4/2005 6:37 am cst

Call me old fashioned, but I just can't get behind the idea of "renting" my music.

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# Chad at 1/5/2005 7:27 am cst

Yikes! Looks like someone was using FrontPage, huh? Dirty code makes me feel dirty (and not in a good way), and I can't stand it either. Lately, I find myself constantly validating my local code, and I'm also really getting into using \n and \t more and more. I hate looking at my parsed code and things like ul's not being lined up all pretty.

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# Matthom at 1/5/2005 7:42 am cst

Chad, I agree.

I love using new lines (\n) and tabs (\t), as well. I like viewing the source and seeing nice, clean, structured code.

God, was FrontPage a disaster, or what?

At least Macromedia is serious about Web Standards. I don't use Dreamweaver, since it's too slow - but the code it produces is top-notch.

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# Joshua Street at 1/6/2005 4:22 am cst

I'd always drawn the distinction differently...

Acronyms correspond directly to letters (GUI - Graphical User Interface) whilst Abbreviations aren't so true to form -- take the example of abbrev. -- it's an abbreviation of abbreviation. As opposed to your approach of phonetics...

I'm too tired right now to think enough to find evidence either way, but I don't know I agree with you so far as the definitions go... sure, there's a difference, and as such it's important to use the different elements, but I'm (in a tired state) disputing your definitions... *shrug*

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# Matthom at 1/6/2005 4:59 am cst

Josh, are you referring to the definitions in the English language, or the HTML elements?

Because, you're right - they might differ a little.

I'm almost 100% positive that my definition (here) of the HTML elements are correct.

As far as the English language - I can't be so sure.

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# Joshua Street at 1/6/2005 12:29 pm cst

Well, I just briefly flicked over the W3C recommendations for XHTML 1.0, and couldn't see anything. I just checked a dictionary, and my (English language, not XHTML spec) definitions were correct:
Abbreviation
Acronym

I'm still unconvinced about the difference in spec terminology, but remain open to links.

Anyway, amidst this (kind of pointless, for all the practical difference it makes -- sorry for wasting time!) debate over terminology, in terms of actual usability I think it's best to define and redefine a term as much as is realistic rather than not too much -- another idea is to have an appendix of acronyms at the end of a (more lengthy) document, taking advantage of target hyperlinks from the content body. This allows you to not only define terms, but also give explanation/annotation as required.

Josh

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# Matthom at 1/6/2005 3:53 pm cst

The W3C has nothing on <acronym> or <abbr> elements?

I was thinking more about the English language definitions for each word, and you're right - an abbreviation is nothing like it is defined in HTML.

Maybe I'll try to find some links with better information...

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# dale at 1/8/2005 1:39 pm cst

Oh wow. Those are some seriously nice photos. Great stuff!

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# Matthom at 1/8/2005 2:27 pm cst

Thanks! You can't go wrong with icicles. They are great portrait elements.

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# Joshua Street at 1/8/2005 10:13 pm cst

Well, from a marketing perspective, they're probably figuring that people within the same household are less likely to sign up for their own accounts anyway than people who live alone/elsewhere. By doing this, they're encouraging ALL members of the household to use the service (albeit with the same account) -- probably resulting in increased usage.

If people off-site are using the same account, then billing falls to someone else who the off-site users of NetFlix *may* consult with before spending money -- this delay isn't something healthy for NetFlix, and can be avoided through effectively forcing separate geographic locations to use their own accounts (and billing info).

Just a theory...

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# Matthom at 1/9/2005 6:33 am cst

Josh, you're right. It's just "wishful thinking" on my part.

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# Theresa at 1/9/2005 4:44 pm cst

I totally agree. This movie's a lot of fun. Best part: they're making a sequel. This always has the potential to be a disaster, but I don't worry too much about sequels after watching Bourne Supremacy. Did you see that one yet?

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# Matthom at 1/9/2005 5:28 pm cst

Theresa, I did see Bourne Supremacy - and I can't wait for the third sequel to that series. Very exciting too.

I didn't know a sequel to The Italian Job is in the works. I know the movie is based on an old movie...

I'm looking forward to it.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 1/11/2005 3:44 pm cst

Those are great - I really like the 2nd one, especially, with the trees so sharp in the background and the icicles out of focus.

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# roxy at 1/12/2005 7:16 am cst

I cant wait for basball to start again and to sit at the bar and watch our beloved cubbies. I did not know that matt clement was traded, it is sad to see him go. Only a few more months until we can go to the greatest ballpark in the us.

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# Joshua Street at 1/13/2005 11:20 pm cst

Tools -> Options -> General -> Fonts & Colors -> Always use my: Fonts [] Colors []

Should do it just fine... or have I misunderstood the question? You shouldn't need extensions...

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# Joshua Street at 1/13/2005 11:21 pm cst

p.s. that's in Firefox 1.0/Win

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# dale at 1/14/2005 12:25 am cst

I think there is a plugin for firefox that allows you to setup your own custom CSS file for each site (the css file loads off your HDD), although I cannot find it at the moment.

I've also heard this feature is going to be part of firefox some stage in the future.

Bit off topic, but I run Safari because firefox seems a little slow on my mac. Plus the scrolling is weird and the middle mouse click doesn't seem to work. Do you notice this?

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# Matthom at 1/14/2005 4:16 am cst

Josh, that's just what I was looking for. Thanks. That is pretty much the same location (Preferences > General > Fonts and Colors) on a Mac, as it is on a PC.

Dale, you bring up a good point. Firefox seems strange on a Mac, doesn't it? I noticed it too. However, I still use it because Safari doesn't have KEYWORD browsing, and that's a feature I truly take advantage of, in Firefox.

To speed things up, I tried this - I'm not sure if it worked, but it was worth a try.

And the middle mouse click thing annoys me too. Honestly, I think Firefox runs better on Windows. Same with Opera.

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# Josh at 1/18/2005 1:38 am cst

Not being a US-ite, I haven't really paid THAT much attention to what Google does with addresses and all that... but isn't there some way to look up that kind of data using it? It'd be an interesting exercise to grab their XML SOAP kit and see if you could build a web interface to that data direct from Google. I think there's a limit to the number of SOAP queries you can run a day, but it'd be more than you'd realistically need. That way, you get your data for free, and it's updated live (unlike something distributed as an Access database). Just an idea, as I've never played with SOAP myself and don't have the slightest idea how to do it, or even if the data Google has would be right for the purpose. But, if you need absolutely up-to-date data or feel like some fun with pulling data from remote SOAP queries, it could be worth a look...

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# Josh at 1/18/2005 1:40 am cst

p.s. This link is worth a look:
http://www.xmlrpc.com/googleGateway

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# Matthom at 1/18/2005 3:36 pm cst

Josh, thanks for the ideas.

Simple Object Access Protocol is definitely something I’ve been yearning to learn more about. You may have just given me some inspiration to begin. (Another good link on SOAP.)

As far as zip codes, I am sure you are right with the fact that other distributed systems might already have the information available for exchange. This would be a much more "wise" way of approaching my zip code database.

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# Peter at 1/20/2005 1:56 pm cst

A1 = "Monday, January 1, 2004"

Put this formula in anywhere:

=VALUE(RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-SEARCH(",",A1)-1))

The output will be the date in numerical format. Reformat the number so that it shows as a date.

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# Jeff at 1/20/2005 5:54 pm cst

As far as I know, they're quite similar (in fact, most sites just say RSS for both, like Apple). Pretty much they're just syndication formats that people want to read, and might want to use. Usually I don't think it really matters, most feed aggregators support almost any format...

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# Stuart at 1/22/2005 3:16 pm cst

Scary about photo. It makes you look like you're about to attack the camera or something even worse. Nevertheless a good photo.

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# Matthom at 1/22/2005 8:35 pm cst

Ah, but the Stitch shirt must make me seem somewhat harmless... ;)

Maybe I'll try to smile next time.

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# roxy at 1/24/2005 9:10 am cst

I was looking at I-life and I - work yesterday when i was picking up my baby (my powerbook not a actual child) I like keynote, it seems to be able to do more than powerpoint, there seemed to be more options, i liked it very much and a nice altenative to powerpoint. I also saw the new minimac which i strongly believe will get more people to cross over to macs. I have both a mac and pc and i dont like the pc at all. My newest project is to get my parents to get rid of their beloved pc and get a mini mac, it will make their lives so much easier

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# Matthom at 1/24/2005 6:02 pm cst

Keynote and Pages are two very intriguing programs. I really want them.

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# roxy at 1/24/2005 6:13 pm cst

so i will go 1/2 with you so we can both get them

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# roxy at 1/24/2005 6:15 pm cst

I found that i could not find somethings i wanted on i tunes either

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# Amanda at 1/24/2005 8:25 pm cst

Matt, I use RealPlayer for my music....Their music store has Volume II(9.99) but not Volume I.

And, they do support you i-fanatics. : )

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# Matthom at 1/25/2005 3:18 am cst

Amanda, can RealPlayer music downloads be played on an iPod? What is the format that the music file is in? Is it MP3, or something else?

Thanks...

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# Amanda at 1/25/2005 5:24 am cst

The music downloads as RealAudio, but I think when you set up your MP3 Player it will convert it. They advertise that they support iPod players, so you shouldn't have a problem.

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# roxy at 1/28/2005 11:47 am cst

Oh how much i love that place, even though there are not a lot of exciting and thrilling rides at epcot (whic stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow)there is something about that park which seems to make dreams more vivid. My favorite part of the park happens at night when the lights go down, it is then that the show begins. Illuminations, EPCOT's fireworks is so amazing that one must see it for themselves. I can't wait to go down there again, there is something about that place that strikes a fire inside me and inspires me to create. Someday i will be there, inspiring others to imagine and dream.

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# Chad at 1/29/2005 10:24 am cst

Is that a file format from that old sissy Microsoft Works suite? Remember that crap? Pretty much worthless to anyone who knew anything about writing a real document. Surely there is a way to open it in Word without losing the formatting...

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# Dale at 1/29/2005 1:13 pm cst

You're very lucky to find such a good host. 1 hour backups is amazing!

So far my site hasn't been hacked, but anything is possible. It's always a good idea to keep backups.

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# Matthom at 1/29/2005 3:08 pm cst

I think in XP there is...

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# Josh at 1/29/2005 3:44 pm cst

Hey, why don't you use their affiliates programme for linking to them? Sucks about the exploit, but that's pretty insane backing up! Spose it's just an hourly Cron job or something, still though... that's neat!

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# roxy at 1/31/2005 5:09 pm cst

I love to hear the star spangled banner sung live or performed live it always gets all the hairs on my arm to rise. The song means so much that words cannot explain, it is a feeling of knowing that song stands for so much of the past and future of our great country.

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# Jeremy Flint at 2/1/2005 1:17 pm cst

You can�t just "out step" PowerPoint�s versatility.

Have you used Keynote? I was able to open it up for the first time and create a full presentation without reading any documentation. I tried to do the same with Powerpoint, but felt like I couldn't find the tools I needed fast enough.

And you can�t just create a program called Pages, and expect millions of Word users to take notice.

Actually, millions of Word users will take notice. Those that use Word on the Mac. Word on the Mac is slow and it costs money. Apple has introduced an application that you can get for under $100 that comes packaged with Keynote 2, and it is still compatible with Word.

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# Matthom at 2/1/2005 4:24 pm cst

Trust me, Jeremy - I am an Apple fan indeed. You don't have to convince me of an Apple product.

I just think it's kinda bold for Apple fans (including myself) to believe that "Pages," and "Keynote" are going to be the new standards in desktop publishing.

Don't get me wrong - I hope they are. And I know they have the "ability" to be - BUT I am also a realist.

I don't doubt the quality of Pages and Keynote - and as soon as I get iWork, I am sure I will be nothing short of amazed.

But I believe there are more PC Office users, than Mac Office users, and therefore, I don't think these Apple products will put much of a dent in Microsoft Office.

Over time, maybe. But right away? No.

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# Chad at 2/3/2005 6:54 pm cst

Man I love Google. I can't even begin to fathom how much I have learned from sites I have found through Google. And this is pretty cool too, but I haven't jumped on the text messaging bandwagon yet. Yet.

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# Farheen at 2/4/2005 12:07 am cst

From what i've read and heard, Google has made good and innovative use of their information. But i'm in the UK and Google SMS hasn't reached us yet. My only complaint is that if it doesn't find anything, it doesn;t text back to let you know. It simply leaves you hanging, thinking to yourself "is there something wrong with the network or has google failed to find what i am looking for?".

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# Mat. at 2/4/2005 4:06 am cst

That's just awesome. Seem too good to be true. Do you have to pay for that service?

Also this amazed me a few weeks ago.. BTW(By The Way) Google has a search engine for every platform as well.

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# Matthom at 2/4/2005 4:24 am cst

Farheen, I have had that happen once. I just never got a response from my query. I, too, thought something was wrong with the network. Maybe Google needs to include a response that simply says "no results found."

However, I have had it respond with a "Did you mean..." In other words, if you spell something wrong (which is quite easy on a cell phone keyboard), Google will spell check, just like it normally does on a computer.

Mat, as far as I know, there is no fee for the service.

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# Farheen at 2/4/2005 12:22 pm cst

I'm sending this page to Google. Let's see if they have anything to say.

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# roxy at 2/4/2005 1:24 pm cst

I just tried that, that is so cool, and i always used my t zones to look up info.

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# dale at 2/5/2005 4:10 pm cst

Optimizing SQL queries is important.

I use left join a lot to join two tables together for certain information.

For example. On my blog site in the bottom right of each post there is the number of comments for that post. These comments are stored in a different table, but I want to get the information out in one query.

This is what I do (cut down version):

$query = '
SELECT posts.*, COUNT(comments.post_id)
AS count
FROM posts LEFT JOIN comments
ON posts.post_id = comments.post_id
WHERE (posts.version = 'published')
AND posts.blog_id = 1;

Also I use it for my RSS comments. You mainly want the data from the comments table but you also want the main name of the post, and it's link.

Also you should try and use SQL for things such as sorting and if possible DATE calculations, because they are much faster than doing with PHP. It also means that the array you are passing back to PHP is smaller.

So the point is, to try can get as much done as possible with one query. While keeping the PHP load as low as possible.

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# Chad at 2/7/2005 5:10 am cst

I keep telling my wife I want a Powerbook, and she tells me "No you don't". She had a Mac years back and says I wouldn't like it. Matt, what kind of a learning curve would a Windows user have starting from scratch on a Mac? From everything I read, working on a Mac sounds so much more efficient than Windoze. MS Office pisses me off daily, but in my line of work, it's a necessary evil to use, since everyone else uses it.

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# Matthom at 2/7/2005 11:05 am cst

Chad, there's not too much of a learning curve (especially for someone like you who already is extremely familiar with computers) - but your question intrigues me. I may do a full blog entry on the topic... It's a good idea.

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# roxy at 2/7/2005 5:38 pm cst

chad, i made the switch 2 years ago and it was not that hard to change. I love my powerbook and prefer it over our pc.

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# Matthom at 2/7/2005 5:45 pm cst

Roxy, what do you like about your Powerbook, over your PC?

Was it a hard transition to make? What did you learn from your transition?

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# dale at 2/9/2005 1:11 pm cst

1. Depends, although probably email.
2. Email set to check every 1-5 minutes
3. Depends too. Some days I'll do heaps of emails while others won't be as much. But I'd still say email.

I don't think one can replace the other. One is personal while the other one everyone can read. (too many ones there :p)

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# Chad at 2/9/2005 2:19 pm cst

1. Email usually
2. Email. I use gmail, and have it open all the time.
3. Email

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# Josh at 2/10/2005 2:13 am cst

I can't answer honestly at the minute as I haven't got an RSS reader on these workstations, but I think I'd check blog feedback first (respond if required), check email more often, and write email more frequently (to people I know and would generally email regularly, otherwise it's probably blog feedback).

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# Chris Moritz at 2/11/2005 11:07 am cst

I'd love to use CSS table-layout, but until they add rowspan and colspan, it's just too limited to be of much use.

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# Matthom at 2/11/2005 5:27 pm cst

I thought colspan and rowspan were added as "presentational hooks" anyway.

I’ve never come across a sitaution (while using tables for tabular data) where I needed to use either attribute.

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# Chris Moritz at 2/12/2005 8:28 am cst

Nope, in CSS tables, there is no equivalent of colspan and rowspan. This confuses me, as there are dozens of cases where you'd need them. Oh well.

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# Josh at 2/12/2005 3:40 pm cst

Unadorned? That could be a bit boring, couldn't it? :P Perhaps in conflict with "passion for your words", too... other than that, sounds snazzy.

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# Matthom at 2/12/2005 3:48 pm cst

Yeah, that "passion" part I just threw in there, because I couldn't think of a better way to end it. ;)

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# Amanda at 2/13/2005 11:32 am cst

I too, watch the extras after the movie. I usually go for the gag reel, or deleted scenes first. Then I may to go the trailer. On a rare occasion, I may actually watch the movie with the directors/actors comments on. Although, I've never made it all the way through the entire movie, as it gets boring after a while.

As far as getting more/changing extras, I don't know what I'd add, but I'd probably remove the actors' bio's. I don't think anyone reads through that.

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# Amanda at 2/13/2005 4:54 pm cst

Matt, for whatever reason, the role of Peter Pan (on stage) has traditionally been played by a woman. Hollywood chooses men. I have no idea why.

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# Matthom at 2/13/2005 8:34 pm cst

Well... she was really good tonight. It was Cathy Rigby. This was the last Peter Pan in Chicago (for now). So she put on a great final performance.

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# roxy at 2/14/2005 8:17 am cst

I loved the show, the drum circle and the indian dances were awesome. The whole show was amazing. next up sweet charity. I cannot wait!

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# Matthom at 2/14/2005 3:22 pm cst

Roxy, I can't wait for Sweet Charity, too. Christina Applegate will be cool to see on stage. Should be good.

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# Roxy at 2/15/2005 7:41 am cst

Sweet Charity is a pre-broadway launch, so it will be exciting to see something before it goes to broadway. I hope that it is good. Christina Applegate has done shows that envolve singing before, she was a pussycat doll (like the ones that were on Las Vegas last night)

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# Matthew at 2/18/2005 6:10 am cst

Interesting, worth considering. I like the idea.

Have you made this idea up, or is this is a new thing for blogs?

Anyways, I'm sure if you set up a forum. Me and many others would post on your forums. Just a thought. =:-)

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# Amanda at 2/18/2005 7:52 am cst

Matt, I think it's a great idea. You can bet on the fact that if there were a topic I was interested in, I'd contribute.

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# Matthom at 2/18/2005 9:48 am cst

macosxhints.com and The Web Standards Project are examples of sites/blogs that have many authors.

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# Josh at 2/19/2005 6:09 pm cst

Good article, but one clarification: there is a limitation on how many characters you can include when using POST (or there generally is), dictated by the webserver (or by PHP). From memory PHP has a 2MB limit by default? although it's possible to increase this.

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# dale at 2/19/2005 7:29 pm cst

Passing variables with $_GET and $_POST is good but only for certain things.

I use $_COOKIE for storing details such as Name, Email, WWW in the comment area. This is good because you don't need to store anything on the server side.

Where as $_SESSION is good for storing more secure data. It's like a cookie on the server side.

Remember to ALWAYS check data coming from a user, you may need to filter it etc to stop people from hacking or breaking things.

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# dale at 2/19/2005 9:25 pm cst

I've always liked the idea of multi user blogging.

I wrote something quickly about it last year:
http://www.bluetrait.com/archive/2004/09/14/multiuserblogging/

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# Chad at 2/21/2005 11:48 am cst

I totally agree with you on this. I took a (very) short course on ADA compliancy a few weeks back and they harped on how important both the title and alt tags are. And I like the exact time tooltip also...may have to implement that myself!

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# dale at 2/22/2005 11:50 pm cst

Filezilla for FTP
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

For text editing I use...mmm I don't remember it's name. I'll need to boot the windows box :p

Most of the time I use Dreamweaver for PHP coding...

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# Stuart at 2/23/2005 3:11 am cst

I haven't seen this film yet and I really want to see it. Tell me what it's actually like, i'm interested.

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# Matthom at 2/23/2005 4:11 am cst

Excellent, thanks.

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# Chad at 2/23/2005 7:25 am cst

I use Notepad2 to edit all types of text files. It recognizes commom file types and formats the look of the file accordingly (colored font, italics, etc.). I use it to edit all of my .php and .css files, as well as .txt, .dat, .prn, .csv, etc. It handles line breaks properly also, unlike Windows Notepad. And Notepad2 is FREE, lightweight, and very robust. I used to use Dreamweaver to edit my .php, but it is so clunky and such a memory hog, I can't stand it anymore. Plus, using a text editor to write code keeps you more "in touch" with what you are writing.

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# Chad at 2/23/2005 12:41 pm cst

Dude, throw that Windows 98 junker out the window! That was the worst OS ever created! Oh, the horror!

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# Matthom at 2/23/2005 3:55 pm cst

Chad, I wish I could. Unfortunately, I'm quite stuck with it.

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# Matthew at 2/23/2005 11:24 pm cst

What about GIMP? GIMP is free (open source) and as nearly the same as Photoshop when it comes to features. BTW (By The Way), GIMP runs on all platforms ie that it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

GIMP on Mac

- GIMP

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# Matthom at 2/24/2005 7:04 am cst

Matthew, thanks for the reference. I never knew about GIMP. It looks cool.

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# Timothy at 2/24/2005 2:07 pm cst

Don't know what server software you are running but at work and at home I am on Redhat (not my workstations, my servers). I use SSH (http://www.ssh.com/support/downloads/) Gives me shell access and ftp client. I do my editing in emacs on the server. Cuts out the FTP middle man and makes for faster developing (save-reload instead of save-upload-reload) Plus your server does the work rather than waiting for things to upload.

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# roxy at 2/25/2005 12:03 pm cst

If you want to use my laptop you can so you can have the comforts of working with photoshop cs, i hate it when i have to use other versions now that i have gotten used to cs.

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# roxy at 2/25/2005 9:05 pm cst

I would have to disagree the hotest tickets for this summer are cubs tickets!

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# Matthew at 2/26/2005 8:46 am cst

Definitly worth switching to Mozilla Firefox. I noticed there are no bugs for tab browsing when, I switched from 1.0 to 1.0.1.

There's still only one bug left, if you go over 19 windows for being open at a time. Mozilla Firefox will crash on my Linux box while on Windows XP you have to create a new profile for having more than 9 Windows at one, which is an annoyance.

Conclusion: Worth switching to Mozilla Firefox 1.0.1 as long as your not a tab browser or open window lover. =p

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# Matthew at 2/26/2005 8:49 am cst

And had forgotten to mention. RSS feeds via live bookmark on the toolbar is extremely awesome.

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# Joshua Street at 2/27/2005 11:26 pm cst

Good, because apparently the start attribute has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Someone on the WSG mailing list pointed this out last year, citing an example where it needed to be used, something to do with legal documents and the way sections in those are marked up... and headings wouldn't suffice, I can't recall why. It seemed a valid (hah... that's unintentional) point at the time!

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# Roxy at 3/2/2005 7:59 am cst

Matt, I am sure that the reason why they sent you a postcard is because it is the one way that they know how to get ahold of you. And yes believe it or not many people are not in to doing websites, the school that i just graduated from which has all the technical bells and whistles asked for information on believe it or not, paper. I am sure that there some reason why they want you to call, maybe there is a survey that they want you to do, or they just might want a paper hard copy, remember computers do crash and they are not perfect. whatever there reason is i think that you should call them, maybe there is a long lost friend that will call you and will use that directory to get your information.

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# dale at 3/4/2005 3:35 pm cst

Firstly it is possible to store images in a database, or even another file type. It just isn't recommend. The encoding used in say mysql will increase the file size by 20%. Yet it is possible.

It depends on what purpose your images are for. For your example, a product catalogue, this is probably the best way to do things.

For images used for styling of your site then you probably wouldn't do that. It still pays to have a good physical structure of your images.

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# Amanda at 3/9/2005 6:14 pm cst

I get ancy sitting all day too. When the weather permits, I will usually walk to some place for lunch rather than drive.

Unfortunately, the setup I have at work wouldn't be conducive to standing while working, so when I get the chance, I'll wander around the office just to get some exercise.

On another note, I used to have the Jerker desk. I hated it. There was not enough room for all my gadgets and things. However, like a goldfish that will grow to a size allowed by it's habitat, I think the larger the desk I have, the more gadgets I will have too.

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# Matthom at 3/10/2005 6:50 am cst

Ah, but that's the challenge - to make use of the limited space... The question becomes, "what do you REALLY need?"

Of course, it certainly helps if you have space saving devices, such as flat screen monitors, etc.

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# Creford at 3/11/2005 5:36 pm cst

How wonderful it is! Today, I had seen the film - "The Incredibles" this afternoon, My father also had seen this film in this evening. This cartoon movie is powered by Disney-Pixar.
In this film, I love the people's sensation, scene, bugbears. The scene is so sublime.
With the great imagination.

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# dale at 3/15/2005 3:41 pm cst

Cool, I'm looking forward to it! I love new stuff!

I think bloggers have a problem keeping anything the same! I probably to a "major" update twice a year. Ha.

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# Amanda at 3/16/2005 4:26 pm cst

Very cool. Although, I wonder why all of the new fonts names start with a 'C'.

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# Chad at 3/16/2005 6:56 pm cst

Looking forward to it. Keep us posted.

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# Timothy at 3/17/2005 7:42 pm cst

If you set the variables prior to the include statement, the variable are accessible in the include. It seems that the way the include concept behaves is that it really just becomes part of the file you are using. This is advantagous because it allows you put put your includes outside of the reach of the web server giving you further security by limiting access of files to malicious visitors.

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# dale at 3/23/2005 6:26 pm cst

With my old blog I only did summaries, they weren't even really that. Just the first few words or something.

Since I've rewritten I now offer full RSS feeds, but I don't give the option for the short version (although short and full feeds can be turned on and off from the database).

When someone posts a new item I always visit their site. Most people put a far bit of time into designing their sites, so it's nice to give them a few more hits because of it! ;)

Categories can be good too. I have some code rewritten to handle it but I haven't finished it yet.

Speaking of an indicator of where you left off in an RSS feed. Wordpress sort of does it. Not on its RSS feeds but on the front page. When you click "read more" it will jump you to that section in the post.

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# Matthom at 3/23/2005 7:04 pm cst

Interesting ideas, Dale....

I wonder how WordPress does that.

Is there just a simple <a id=""> element at the spot where the previous page left off?

However, it seems that a miscellaneous anchor element would be floating inside a paragraph... I don’t see the semantics in that...

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# Chad at 3/24/2005 7:56 pm cst

Personally, I prefer to get only summaries in RSS. I have hundreds of feeds, and very limited time to scan them, so I have to do it fast or I can never get it done. I usually have several hundred unread feeds at any given time. I can't remember how WP handles the "Read more" feature, and my core WP code is so hacked up now, who knows how I have it set up (I don't anymore). I also don't really use categories that much, but that's because I don't want to maintain them and well, I'm just lazy about some things. When I redid my Archives, I just decided to do it by date and not bother with categories. Get your hands on some WP code and you could figure out the "Read more" really quickly Matt.

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# Greg at 3/24/2005 10:52 pm cst

Check out
http://www.vbaexpress.com/kb/getarticle.php?kb_id=18
and http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

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# Joshua Street at 3/25/2005 5:17 pm cst

Yeah, that's how it works. <a id="more-271"></a> is one such example, taken from this post on my weblog. I believe the numeric identifier is based on the number of characters into the post, although this is speculation.

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# dale at 3/26/2005 3:02 pm cst

I had the same problem when I changed over to my new permalink model.

My old one looked something like this:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/289

Where as the new one is:
http://www.bluetrait.com/archive/2005/03/26/unicode-character-set/

It was a bit of a pain. Since I kept my old id numbers when I converted the database I decided on a mod_rewrite rule to redirect the old url to the new one, like this:
http://www.bluetrait.com/?id=289

Now that doesn't have the nice new format but. All links on that page refer to:
http://www.bluetrait.com/archive/2005/03/26/unicode-character-set/

So hopefully after a while the old redirects will die down and google will pick up the new ones. There are no places where I directly link: http://www.bluetrait.com/?id=289 or the old style.

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# Amanda at 4/2/2005 8:10 am cst

I also find it a bit awkward to include a signature with e-mails. When I'm dealing with a relatively new business contact, I'll include my signature, which has my full name, web address and phone number, and after a solid relationship has been established, I'll just sign my first name. I don't think it's necessary to include a signature on every e-mail.

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# Matthew at 4/3/2005 3:48 pm cst

It's ashame they don't have it for Australia. :( Anways, I know you will like and find this hilarioushint Mac and wannabe hacker version of Google.

Anyway, sorry Matthom. I had not replied for a long time. I'd been flooded with work......

Best regards.

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# Matthew Brundage at 4/4/2005 10:09 am cst

You enjoy this song because -- somewhere deep in your subconscious -- you know that it reminds you of Pet Sounds.

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# dale at 4/9/2005 3:21 am cst

Happy Birthday! Hope you had a great day.

Mac minis look cool. I've not yet had a chance to use one yet though :(

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# Matthom at 4/9/2005 7:32 am cst

Thanks Dale.

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# Roxy at 4/10/2005 8:05 pm cst

I was so suprised too how nice he was. How he acted now makes me want to watch the games to cheer him on. It is so nice to see pro atheletes being kind to their fans

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# Matthew at 4/13/2005 7:43 am cst

Happy Birthday. :) Just found out now.

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# dale at 4/16/2005 2:56 pm cst

I'm having the same problem too. It won't accept my password and when I try to reset it I get the following error "You have entered an incorrect email address".

Doh.

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# Matthom at 4/16/2005 3:29 pm cst

Dale, try the answer to the help question, "Why is My Account Bouncing?":

http://bloglines.com/help/faq/#bouncing

It seems to pertain to the issue, somewhat.

Oh, and all of a sudden, my account starting working again.

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# dale at 4/16/2005 5:42 pm cst

Yep it's working again:

http://www.bloglines.com/about/news#83

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# Matthom at 4/16/2005 6:32 pm cst

Ooh, good find.

I'll OPML, just in case. I don't like "downtimes" for my feeds...

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# Amanda at 4/18/2005 10:44 am cst

I was totally surprised too. I'm interested to see how the integration works. I thought Macromedia was huge, but I guess Adobe is making drastic steps toward being THE industry standard across the board!

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# Timothy at 4/18/2005 8:36 pm cst

I think you may have missed the point to the hype. The fact that you can get satellite images from google is not the rad part about it. You've been able to get them from many places for a long time. The root of the hype is in the incredible interface. Dragging maps seamlessly without reloading. Zooming in and out nearly flawlessly. The fact that its so easy to use is what makes it awesome.

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# dale at 4/19/2005 1:23 am cst

So how is Wordpress compared to your custom script?

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# Matthom at 4/19/2005 5:37 am cst

It's smooth, that's for sure. I'm always torn on whether to keep using that system - and just customize the templates, or keep doing my own.

I just hate customizing templates, though. Going in, and trying to figure out someone else's code is not fun.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 4/21/2005 10:09 am cst

Yeah, I remember Mapquest having satellite images. I also remember it had a really nice feature where you could select alternate routes. I think there was one for avoiding highways, and a couple others. In my opinion, that was the one feature that really made Mapquest stand apart from Yahoo maps. But like the satellite photos, they removed that functionality. I have no idea why. I would love if Google added that functionality to their site. So many times the route you're presented with is not the best, because of traffic patterns or something else too complex for the software to take into account, so it would be really nice to be presented with alternative options. Ooh, what would be really cool is to ask for a route that passes the most restaurants or gas stations or something.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 4/21/2005 10:18 am cst

Happy belated birthday! Too bad the Illini didn't make it all the way, huh? I remember being in middle school in 1989 (I grew up in Champaign) and how exciting it was to be in the final four, and then how bitterly disappointing it was to have the ref make such a biased, unfair call which cost us the game. I didn't actually see any games this season, but it was great knowing how well we were doing.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 4/21/2005 10:29 am cst

I'd just split on the slash like your second example (or "explode" as I guess PHP calls it), then loop through each element in the array.

title = "matthom :: ";
for (i = 0; i < url_array.length; i++) {
title += url_array[i];
}
echo title;

And maybe replace dashes with spaces.

But you've probably already thought doing it that way.

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# Matthom at 4/21/2005 3:40 pm cst

Matthew, Jennifer - thanks for the birthday wishes... I appreciate it.

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# Matthom at 4/21/2005 3:48 pm cst

Jennifer - I'm sure Google will add MUCH more functionality soon... And we'll forever forget about MapQuest...

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# Timothy at 4/21/2005 6:50 pm cst

$row = mysql_fetch_object($result); echo "column_name\" ... >\n";

If you use mysql_fetch_object instead you will have an easier time managing the information. Then you are referencing the column name instead of its position. It's visually easier too.

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# Timothy at 4/21/2005 6:52 pm cst

Try it again

$row = mysql_fetch_object($result); echo "<a href=\"$row->column_name\" ... >\n";

If you use mysql_fetch_object instead you will have an easier time managing the information. Then you are referencing the column name instead of its position. It's visually easier too.

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# dale at 4/21/2005 7:14 pm cst

With mysql_fetch_array you can just use the column name.

For example

while($array = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo $array['facssn'];
echo $array['facfirstname'];
}

Much easier

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# Chad at 4/21/2005 7:23 pm cst

Yep. You're right, aerial photography in mapping apps has been around for a while. But take it from a true map geek (it's what I do for a living), Google maps is the coolest and fastest online mapper yet. Funny that you called this post "Bird's eye view", since that Mapquest map of where you work and some of Google Maps stuff actually use Quickbird high-resolution imagery. Really cool stuff. Check out the sample imagery.

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# Amanda at 4/22/2005 5:01 am cst

I love that place too! I like the 'make your own stir fry' thing they have going on.

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# Matthom at 4/22/2005 5:42 am cst

Amanda, I have yet to try the "make your own" option yet... For some reason, I am hesitant. (Maybe I just don't want to get up, once I have sat down...)

In any case, the menu items are tasty enough to keep me going back.

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# Matthom at 4/22/2005 6:04 am cst

Timothy, Dale... what happens when you are issuing an INNER JOIN (or equi-join), and you have two columns with the same name?

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# Timothy at 4/22/2005 10:34 am cst

I suppose you would have to alias the fields that have the same name. I know there are some issues with aliasing and joins in mysql because of the order that the information is aquired but I can't put my finger on it exactly. I believe it works sometimes. It's all in how you design the queries.

The biggest benefit that I see to mysql_fetch_object is that it's two less characters to type. Other than that there is really no significant difference. It all comes down to preference. I had confused mysql_fetch_row with mysql_fetch_array.

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# Timothy at 4/22/2005 10:51 am cst

I have thought about this myself. When I get to about the thousandth line of code it becomes hard to remember which queries I have written already and if they are already there than why should I write them again. Most of my applications at work are relatively simple, but in the larger applications its important to maintain that information. I have thought about seperating them into a queries.inc.php file (or whatever) and them just including it in the other files. Then I can call the same query everytime.

Ideally I think the best solution though would be to build an object. Then you wouldn't have to worry about it. I slept through my OOP class though. Woah is me. I'll have to teach myself again.

I think separating your comments from your code is a step in the wrong direction. It adds a layer of extraction that really does nothing more than make your code look more streamline when in fact it will be harder to figure out what is going on when you revisit it later. Furthermore, when you leave your job and someone else comes in they are going to have to read your code. The more layers they have to deal with the more difficult its going to be for them to pickup where you left off.

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# Matthom at 4/22/2005 11:02 am cst

Timothy, I'm not too familiar with OOP, either (although I should be)... It might help this situation.

I think separating your comments from your code is a step in the wrong direction.

I'm sure it is... but nothing is stopping me from trying new things. This is one of those things that I can never really be "settled" with, so I'm always going to fight it, until I find a better way.

Your mention of mysql_fetch_object is interesting. I'll have to check that out.

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# dale at 4/22/2005 2:28 pm cst

If you have two of the same name you do this:

tablename.columnname

SELECT post.id, comment.id FROM post, comment WHERE post.id = 1;

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# Matthom at 4/22/2005 3:40 pm cst

Dale, will "dot syntax" work when referencing a column via mysql_fetch_array?

Using your original comment example:

while($array = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { echo $array['tablename.facssn']; echo $array['tablename.facfirstname']; }

Would that work?

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# dale at 4/22/2005 4:12 pm cst

Yes I think so.

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# Matthew Brundage at 4/23/2005 9:33 pm cst

Collective Soul is one of those bands that toes the line between genres. We all know they are capable of really rocking out, but they rarely do. Please don't give us any more duets with Elton John (as in their 2000 album Blender).

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# Matthom at 4/24/2005 5:30 am cst

And trust me, these days... they don't come near rocking out. I saw them last year at the House Of Blues, Chicago, and they were pretty soft. They claimed they were all "dads" now, so they've "mellowed" a bit.

I'm like, "give me a break. Play like you know how." But no...

Yeah, where did Elton John come from?? Kinda weird.

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# roxy at 4/24/2005 7:27 am cst

I can't believe that you think stir crazy is better then Lins Garden. That is some national chain that could not possibly have better food than an authentic chinese/asain place. I am speechless.

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# Roxy at 4/24/2005 7:37 am cst

The exhibit was amazing. It was soo cool to see inside what are bodies look like, not only was it science but it was art too. I thought it had to taken a lot of talent to remove specific areas of the human body without damaging others. I simply amazed by the exhibits that showed only the nervous system or the circulation system, how they seperated these with out damaging them I am in aww of. If this exhibit comes to a city near you, I strongly suggest you go see it!
If you ever get a chance to come to chicago, I also suggest that you go to the museums. We live in an amazing city where all it takes is a 15 minute drive and you are at so of the most amazing museums in the world.

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# Josh at 4/29/2005 12:32 am cst

Not quite sure about your markup there, in terms of how non-visual UA's (screen readers) or non-graphical UA's (Lynx/Links/users with images disabled) would be able to access it, but your final outcome is pretty darn attractive.

I haven't tested your markup in Links, but personally I'd be inclined to go with something more like this (taken from my contact form):

and use CSS to set the label size to 1px height, or hidden display by some other means -- and THEN apply styling to your input element. I think this would be a more accessible solution, but haven't fully tested yours, so take this criticism as tentative. Having said that, I know for a fact this alternative would work fine in other agents.

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# Josh at 4/29/2005 2:55 am cst

On second reading, my first comment was pretty negative, sorry... I got caught up in markup and forgot to say that I love the design of it, and think it's an excellent technique to use -- one I hadn't even considered before (not the background, changing the size of the dialogue to fit it below the text... brilliant!)

Just out of curiousity, what happens when the user resizes the text? Does it go over the background?

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# Matthom at 4/29/2005 4:13 am cst

Josh, you're right - the markup is wrong.

The <label> elements should surround the actual label, and not the text field.

And, these designs were just me being rather unproductive one afternoon - I don't think they would float in the real world.

Thanks for your thoughts.

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# tk at 4/29/2005 12:27 pm cst

Avril is the best singer in pop rock if she wants to sing christmas songs she can and she will do it well.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 4/29/2005 2:46 pm cst

Hmm, I've never had a problem using labels, you just have to make sure to actually include some label text somewhere, or of course it won't display. Also, you don't need to include the for="id" if the input is nested inside of the label tag - you only need it if the input is seperate.

Pretty cool background labels - I would have never thought of doing that. Very original.

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# Roxy at 5/3/2005 8:45 pm cst

There is still one more show left, little shop of horrors

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# Farheen at 5/3/2005 8:54 pm cst

20 to 100 messages a day!!! Is it increasing or decreasing???

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# Matthew at 5/4/2005 3:35 am cst

I have yet to purchase Apple’s latest OS, Tiger, so I haven’t had the opportunity to try the latest version of Safari.

Well I have. =p

I recently had a visit to a Mac shop with a few friends.
The whole one button mouse thing was really annoying. Ironically enough a Microsoft USB mouse is a common solution to the problem.

Anyway's Safari looks better but I noticed it ran really slowly with Tiger on a Mac mini. Maybe, because it was on a Mac Mini.

Enjoy Mozilla.

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# Matthew Brundage at 5/4/2005 11:47 am cst

Track 11, Caroline, Yes, is a thinly-veiled answer song to the Beach Boys' Caroline, No.

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# dale at 5/5/2005 12:17 am cst

Safari 2 runs much faster on my ibook than version 1.3.

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# Matthom at 5/5/2005 6:43 am cst

Matthew, I thought about your previous comment as I listened to this album... There is a slight hint of Brian Wilson in the lead singer's voice...

That is so awesome if the lead singer actually knows that - hence, why he named that song Caroline, Yes.

I wonder...

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# Josh at 5/9/2005 2:05 am cst

Cool :) I dig the new layout... one criticism, though - there's no way to see how many comments are on an entry from the blog index page...

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# Matthom at 5/9/2005 8:07 am cst

OK, I just added that. I wasn't sure if I wanted it there, at first, but it's OK, I guess.

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# Dale at 5/9/2005 5:55 pm cst

Tiger is a far bit faster than Panther, that in itself was enough of a reason for me to upgrade.

Like the new site! Although not sure if I like the way the commenting system works. Are you going to give us a run down of the code changes? How much has changed (code wise) from your last version?

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# Matthom at 5/9/2005 7:32 pm cst

Dale, sure, I will talk about the code changes... over time.

What suggestions do you have for the commenting system?

The biggest change in the commenting system was the addition of the "feedback" directory, as an extension of the permalink:

/archive/2005/05/09/02/feedback/

Before, I had an anchor link within the permalink page:

/archive/2005/05/09/02/#feedback

This new approach, I'm pretty set with.

Although... the fact that the feedback now appears on an entirely separate page (/feedback/), was an issue I was concerned with.

That's why I also included all feedback in the right column of the permalink page, as well as on a separate page.

Not sure how this will work out.

I'm certainly open for ideas.

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# Timothy at 5/12/2005 8:40 pm cst

I'm not terribly concerned with my security or privacy with google. Seriously, if they want it they're gonna get it anyway. Gmail? I use it cause its good. Simple as that. Like you said, it makes email easier. As for search history, its pretty helpful when I get home from work and I want to revisit something but can't remember how I found it.

I am disturbed though about accelerator. It sucks cause all of those apps that have been built using links as delete buttons are screwed. They are so easy. I have built alot of things at work with them. I sometimes use a different method that I'm going to go write about on my blog right now actually. Not only that but it sucks cause it would totally botch your site stats too.

I think that google desktop search is a far more intrusive product though.

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# Amanda at 5/13/2005 5:19 am cst

Thanks for this post Matt, I will definitely use it!

The new site is looking good too!

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# Dale at 5/13/2005 7:56 pm cst

This is meant to be good. Although I've never used it.

MD.

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# Dona at 5/14/2005 12:01 pm cst

That has happened to me as well (getting notice that a film is coming then getting notice it was returned before it ever got to me), without the message explaining why.

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# Dona at 5/14/2005 12:09 pm cst

I'm reading The Devil in the White City now and wish I still lived near Chicago. (Grew up in Elgin).

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# Dona at 5/14/2005 12:12 pm cst

My dentist offers headphones for listening to music during drilling.

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# Dona at 5/14/2005 12:15 pm cst

I thought the plane would crash on the way back as well. Do you think it was set up for us to think that? I've discussed this with other people and no one else I talked to thought the plane would crash. They all thought the beginning of the movie was just to show how "out of it" he was.

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# dale at 5/16/2005 11:15 pm cst

Well Tiger has the following drivers:

HP Laser 4 Plus v2013.111
HP Laser 4 series - Gimp-Print v5.0.0-beta2
HP Laser 4/4M PostScript 600DPI

I've not used that printer so I don't know if it works. But it looks like tiger supports it.

I've had success with other HP Lasers

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# Matthom at 5/17/2005 5:39 am cst

Thanks, Dale. That helps.

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# Matthew at 5/19/2005 7:47 am cst

Oops. I should of left my comment here.

*embarrassed*

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# Matthew Brundage at 5/23/2005 7:48 pm cst

'Ring out the Bell' marks the songwriting and singing debut of Travis bassist Dougie "Doug-E-Fresh" Payne. A humble and competant song, Dougie sings as if he has one lung. Travis are known more for their emotional, drawn out vocals than for their harmonies, and this vocal performance almost begs for a counterpoint.

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# Matthew Brundage at 5/23/2005 7:55 pm cst

This song is deceptive -- it sounds like an introductory song, but is just a tad too long for that. Yet it is not developed enough to be considered part of the album proper, which starts on the first strum of 'Happy Kid'. Still, it is catchy and energetic enough to be one of the standout tracks of 'Let Go.'

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# Matthom at 5/24/2005 7:59 am cst

I agree. It's almost like it's incomplete. Like someone just "pulled the plug" on it.

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# Nick Finck at 5/24/2005 9:11 pm cst

I just got my first Mac not to long ago. I upgraded to 1.5 GB of RAM, which I thought was still not enough. Of course, this is because I am used to working on a Windows system and it has 2.0 GB of RAM which runs like a snail with a crutch... no, seriously.

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# Matthew at 5/25/2005 1:55 am cst

Yep that explains a lot. I recently had a bad experience with a Mac Mini when it comes to performance.

Time to save up for an iBook or powerbook. BTW, how much RAM can the Mac Mini have?

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# Matthom at 5/25/2005 5:26 am cst

Nick, how could 2 GB of RAM not be enough? Perhaps I will upgrade my Mac again, just to get it over 1 GB - seems to be a safe point.

Matthew, I'm not sure how much RAM a Mac Mini can have - and that's one reason I am hesitant in purchasing a Mac Mini - I want to be "assured" that I can easily add more RAM, whenever I feel like it - and with ease. My desktop G4 makes it easy to add RAM - just open it up, and put the new RAM in. The Mac Mini seems "locked up." I'm not sure how accessible the "inner compartments" are.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 5/25/2005 9:43 am cst

Up until a couple months ago, I was still running on 128 MB RAM on my Windows machine. Though I hardly ever run very intensive applications on my home machine, so it's not that bad. Though it was pretty awful anytime I ran IDEA (Java IDE).

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# Timothy at 5/25/2005 12:48 pm cst

My biggest issue with your idea is that IP's are not going to be unique to every machine that comes to your site. At the college I work for, we use NAT to assign IP's. So internally my IP is 10.1.1.1 and my boss is 10.2.2.2 by if you were to look at my IP externally we are boss 207.1.1.1 (whatever). So there are cases when it will get confused. Not a huge deal but it would certainly be more irritating than not remembering anything at all.

As far as the issue with sending the cookie before the HTML, I am supposing that when I submit this comment it will go to another page perform some jiggery pokery and forward me back here using the header: location blah method in PHP. If you set the cookie right before you redirect, you won't have a problem. The issue is once you send HTML the header information must already be on the clients computer. So you need to get it there with the header.

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# Matthom at 5/25/2005 1:59 pm cst

I am supposing that when I submit this comment it will go to another page perform some jiggery pokery and forward me back here using the header: location blah method in PHP.

Well... the jiggery pokery is performed, but once that's done, I redirect the page using JavaScript. Perhaps this is a weak approach, but it is the only way I know how.

Your mention of the PHP header:location method is probably a better approach, and I might try that.

This may help me out with the cookie problem.

Thanks, Timothy.

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# dale at 5/25/2005 8:45 pm cst

Well you could gzip your pages first. This zips the page, checks for any setcookie info and handles that out first before the page is created. But you probably should fix your code to support cookies...let me know if you need help.∫

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# Nick at 5/26/2005 12:58 pm cst

If you want to see another cool real estate related google maps hack check out http://www.cytadia.us where you can map your search results on a google map.

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# Matthew at 5/29/2005 7:57 am cst

Matthom goodluck man.

Send him your domain. That's all the credentials you'll ever need. :-) j/k

Lucky, my employer rang me up. =p

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# dale at 5/30/2005 1:04 pm cst

No problems here. I enabled php on a friend's tiger install yesterday. Just make sure you have uncommented the correct things in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and restarted apache.

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# Matthom at 5/31/2005 4:13 pm cst

Thanks, Dale. I might just try a re-install of PHP.

I restarted Apache, to no avail.

I also searched for some info on which lines are supposed to be uncommented in the httpd.conf file - but found nothing quite useful - other than this.

Hopefully I'll get it working soon.

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# dale at 5/31/2005 8:40 pm cst

You need to un-comment
#LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
and
#AddModule mod_php4.c

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# Josh Street at 6/3/2005 6:03 pm cst

application/xhtml+xml - as just recently alluded to on the WSG mailing list.

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# Matthom at 6/3/2005 6:13 pm cst

Perfect... thanks Josh.

I wonder how much of an effect changing text/html to application/xhtml+xml would have on my entire site.

Maybe I'll give it a shot here...

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# dale at 6/8/2005 5:21 pm cst

Try this

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# Jennifer Grucza at 6/9/2005 10:00 am cst

One thing I like about radio is that it can introduce me to new music I haven't heard before. Or to different recordings of pieces than the ones I own (speaking of classical music, here). It injects a little more variety into the music I hear.

Though I know it's different for a lot of non-classical stations - they play the same two hours worth of music over and over throughout the day. I get annoyed if I hear the same piece on classical radio within 2 weeks.

Plus I don't have an FM transmitter for my iPod yet, so if I want to listen to music in the car, it's either radio or CDs. And NPR programs can be pretty interesting listening, too. I never watch the news on TV, anyway.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 6/9/2005 10:14 am cst

Hmm, I've never had mine crash while actually listening, but I have noticed that sometimes when I turn it on, it takes a little while, shows the Apple logo, and my clicker settings are gone (annoying!). Usually when the battery has been run down a lot, or I haven't turned it on in a while.

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# Matthom at 6/9/2005 4:15 pm cst

Jennifer, no FM transmitter yet!? ;) You don't know what you're missing.

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# Timothy at 6/13/2005 8:52 pm cst

I have, at last count 105 username/password combinations. All stored in my head. Ouch.

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# Amanda at 6/15/2005 8:07 am cst

I met Ronnie Woo Woo a long time ago at John Barleycorn's...it was quite an interesting meeting. He was trying to dance with me, told me I was beautiful and asked if I would be back there next week. Yeeeeeahhh....This was before I knew who he was, I thought he was just some guy posing as a Cubs player, and it was really kind of weird. My friends and I still laugh about it today.

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# Amanda at 6/22/2005 6:22 pm cst

I am totally a summer person. I can handle fall/late spring but I can't STAND being cooped up inside with the windows closed, breathing recylced air, dry skin and static electricity. I agree that winter is pretty for the week of Christmas - New Years, but after that it's totally unbearable. All I can think about is how much longer until I can play outside.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 6/23/2005 9:48 am cst

I prefer "split" to "explode", which is what Java and Javascript and some other languages use. Don't think there's any built-in "implode" functionality in Java or Javascript, though... just have to iterate over the array yourself or write a function to do that.

To remember explode vs. implode, I think I'd just think about taking one string, exploding it into many little pieces (of an array).

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# Roxy at 6/23/2005 7:50 pm cst

I have to agree with Amanda, I am a total summer person. You can go out and enjoy the warm (currently extremely hot) weather. You can leave your house without a jacket and you and not loaded down with layers of clothes. I love the tan that i get too, it is nothing like a warm summer glow on your skin. Dont get me wrong I love the changing of the seasons but once we are into the heart of the fall and winter seasons i am bored and look forward to the days in which i can again wear my flip flops and feel the warm summer air.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 6/29/2005 9:55 am cst

All new albums are released on Tuesdays? I had no idea. How strange.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 6/29/2005 10:04 am cst

I'd cache the content in-memory, maybe refreshing or clearing the cache every so often. Assuming there's a way to hold objects across requests in PHP, which I would hope there would be.

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# Matthom at 6/29/2005 4:22 pm cst

Yep, always been that way, since I've been alive. But... I can't find any good documentation (or reason) why this is. I think it's just because people are more "relaxed," or "in tune" on Tuesday's - the madness of the beginning of the week has subsided, and things are under control.

So, what else to do - spend money on music!

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# Justin at 6/30/2005 12:02 pm cst

http://forums.devarticles.com/archive/t-5039/XHTMLPHP-error

This should solve your .htaccess php/xml problem. I had the same issue.

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# savire at 7/5/2005 4:48 am cst

Have Reviewed http://www.google-watch.org/ Sacry isn't it. But still i want to try that one. So Plz give me that craziest email accounts. Errrgghz ...

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# Jennifer Grucza at 7/5/2005 9:53 am cst

I like to have all my music on my iPod. Instead of limiting what's on my iPod to a playlist, I just use the playlists on the iPod to determine what will get played. E.g. I can choose the "Baroque" playlist on my iPod, and press play, and all I hear are the Baroque pieces. I set up a bunch of smart playlists, so I just choose whichever one suits my mood.

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# adiboy at 7/6/2005 7:23 am cst

ref http://www.matthom.com/archive/2005/02/22/01

hey if you need a good net editor try notepad 2 it is very good for people who do programing. well give it a try it is free

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# Jennifer Grucza at 7/7/2005 3:12 pm cst

How about a thesaurus (like dictionary.com's sister site, thesaurus.com)? Not quite the same as looking up the whole definition, but if you can find a similar word, then it can work.

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# Matthom at 7/7/2005 5:02 pm cst

I see what you mean, but I still think most dictionary/thesaurus sites are not helpful enough. Considering they are on the web, they should use the power of the web, and not limit themselves to just looking up a word, like I would with an actual, physical dictionary.

The way I envision a dictionary site is a database with a word (term) column, and a definition column. Why can't they make it so I can match a search term with the definition column, instead of only searching through the terms?

For example, let's say the word persistent slips my mind. All I can think of is the phrase 'not giving up.'

And the sentence in my head would be, 'I am not giving up.' Except I'd like to replace the phrase, 'not giving up', with a word (which I can't remember at that point in time).

I could search for 'not giving up,' and it could return all words that associate with that definition. And perhaps 'persistent' would show up.

Anyway, I think I am running in circles with this point.

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# Andy at 7/7/2005 5:26 pm cst

Great! Simple, easy to follow, I used it to customize my header image on my website. Thanks.

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# walt sims jr at 7/8/2005 4:02 pm cst

Thank you,

I would very much appreciate having a Gmail account

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# Craig at 7/10/2005 10:36 am cst

I gotta tell you -- this really saved me some time. Thanks!

Cheers \~/

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# kaolin fire at 7/17/2005 2:29 pm cst

Actually, enum can be case sensitive.

When retrieved, values stored into an ENUM column are displayed using the lettercase that was used in the column definition. Before MySQL 4.1.1, lettercase is irrelevant when you assign values to an ENUM column. As of 4.1.1, ENUM columns can be assigned a character set and collation. For binary or case-sensitive collations, lettercase does matter when you assign values to to the column.

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# kaolin fire at 7/17/2005 2:30 pm cst

Nice blockquote style!

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# Jennifer Grucza at 7/18/2005 10:01 am cst

Well, I don't know about rock/pop concerts, but for classical music played in a typical concert hall, I believe the seats very close to the stage do not have the best acoustics. It depends on the hall, of course. My college's auditorium had really weird accoustics - sometimes seats only a few feet away from each other would sound very different.

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# Josh Street at 7/20/2005 3:22 am cst

Nice -- It's a very clear corporate site that rapidly communicates their products... but I do have four brief criticisms:

Markup/usability: I'd personally like a "skip to navigation" link to be closer to the top of the document. I think you've positioned the content well for SEO reasons, but it's VERY un-user-friendly for users either without CSS (in this market sector, your biggest consideration would probably be handheld/mobile users, rather than very old computers? I think?), or who are using non-visual UA's.
Document titles: What you've implemented works well (for SEO, anyway - screen readers may have a fun time trying to pronounce hyphenated words, but I'm no expert on those so I'll leave that alone), until you get to the product pages. For example, http://www.awardingyou.com/products/?id=2 yeilds a title of "products?id=2" - which isn't great for users OR SEO. Rethink your URI strategy to include the product names (and increase your search engine relevance through this!), or, at the very least, pull the product name from the database and use that in the title field.
Curved corners: I don't mind the look generally, but they're a bit pixellated due to the nature of indexed GIF files (no variable alpha). I'd say that's fine, but for the fact your site is fixed-width and you're using separate GIF files wherever you've got the curved corners - really, you should be using an RGB image with the background manually set so you can antialias the curves nicely (assuming you're not planning on changing the colour scheme, of course). I don't know if you were planning on changing this eventually, anyway... just pointing it out.
The header image. You appear to be loading two versions of this, though I can't figure out why? Maybe it's a relic left in the code, or something? Anyway, you're using an indexed GIF without transparency, which is fine (indexed reduces the size) - but an indexed PNG would be better. I quickly played with the graphic and got it to about 34.5KB as an indexed PNG (as opposed to 40.5KB as a GIF). There's also a few stray pixels in that which you should clear up (on the left of the central glass award, above the line, and towards the top edge of the grey background to "Engravers" - there's two specs there). Obviously because there's no transparency in the image, using a PNG causes no problems for IE.

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# Matthom at 7/20/2005 5:04 am cst

Josh, thanks for the suggestions. I am certainly still developeing, so these things, and others, will be taken into consideration.

Due to the frantic proposal to get this "up and running," I had to skip some things that you mentioned, just to get the site up.

But now that I have it up, I can go in and start looking at those aspects.

Curved corners: The method I am using here is mentioned in Web Standards Solutions, by Dan Cederholm.

And, the gif image is actually the space outside the curved corner, not the curved corner itself. This allows me to change the background color of the curved corner element with CSS, as opposed to changing it in Photoshop, every time I want a new color. It's the exact same thing that's on this site, except the curves are a bit less defined on the corporate site - perhaps I will alter that.

Thanks for the feedback.

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# Tim at 7/20/2005 8:01 pm cst

Welcome to the world of computing. Thats what happens you need upgrades and bug fixes. There aren't new features in each of the third digit increments. It's why they increment the third digit and not the first. First digit increments are for major releases. Besides I would rather have my browser upgraded every five seconds than my shit hacked. My firefox for windows has a thing that alows me to just click a little alert in the top right hand corner and it does all the work for me. No unpacking or applications folders.

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# Tim at 7/20/2005 8:33 pm cst

Here you go brother they must have seen your entry and updated the Firefox 2.0/3.0 Roadmap. They have decided to skip the 1.1 major release and go right to 1.5 to reflect the sheer amount of security updates

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# Jennifer Grucza at 7/22/2005 9:51 am cst

Does PHP do regular expressions? In Java, I would do it this way:

searchResults.replaceAll("(?i)php str_replace", "php str_replace");

The "(?i)" tells it that it's case-insensitive.

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# Matthom at 7/22/2005 10:07 am cst

Jennifer, PHP does indeed do regular expressions - and that is certainly a great solution for the case sensitivity issue.

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# Joshua Street at 7/22/2005 7:33 pm cst

You could explode (the PHP function) the search string first so you can catch instances separately. Would also help when actually building your raw search query (i.e. in SQL) for the database... explode then add "AND" between terms, or whatever. I don't know if MySQL already does this, though...?

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# Mehmet at 7/28/2005 5:07 pm cst

Glad u had fun in st.augustine.I came to st.augustine in 1993 and a resident here since 93 love it here as well :)

Mehmet (St.Augustine Beach)

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# jeff at 7/31/2005 8:35 pm cst

UltraEdit by ian mead rocks www.ultraedit.com

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# fuul at 7/31/2005 8:45 pm cst

I am not sure what version of SQL you are using, but in T-SQl, you use the "MAX()" function, like this:

SELECT max(myColumn) myMaxValue FROM myTable

This grabs all the values in that column of the table and returns the row with the maximum value.

This works fine as is unless you also want other columns in the row at the same time, in which case you have to "group by" any column that is not being grouped together by a function like MAX (MAX is a "grouping" function.)

So if you had the following data, and wanted the most expensive fruit:

WierdTable
----------
ID, Type, Cost, Product
--------------------------
1, Book, 10.00, Why SQL sucks
2, Book, 15.00, Why SQL rules
3, Fruit, 12.00, Apple
4, Fruit, 2.00, Pear
5, Tool, 34.00, Wrench

You would have to use:

SELECT MAX(cost) maxcost, prodtype FROM wierdTable
WHERE prodtype = 'Fruit' GROUP BY prodtype

Which would return:

maxcost, prodtype
-------------
12.00, Fruit

of course, that doesn't tell you which row had the most, so if you want that, you have to join or sub-query back to the table again to get the entire row of the fruit that cost 12.00:

SELECT * FROM wierdTable
WHERE prodtype = 'Fruit'
AND cost IN
(SELECT MAX(cost) maxcost FROM wierdTable
WHERE prodtype = 'Fruit' GROUP BY prodtype)

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# Jeremy at 8/1/2005 8:12 am cst

You know, I got a missed call at work over the weekend from that number. I Googled it and found your entry here. Maybe it was an auto-dialer gone wild.

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# Jeremy at 8/1/2005 8:14 am cst

Ahh.. more Googling, check this out:

http://ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff126328.htm

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# Matthom at 8/1/2005 8:21 am cst

Nice... good find Jeremy.

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# Amanda at 8/3/2005 8:10 am cst

I don't know what's up with Netflix either....I sent a movie back last Thursday, from my home, and still haven't received my next movie. It's a bit frustrating....

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# Jennifer Grucza at 8/3/2005 10:10 am cst

Hmm, I would say the 987.654.3210 is the lazy form, since it's easier to reach the period on the keyboard than either the hyphen or parentheses. If I'm trying to be pretty, I tend to go for the parens, but lately I've been getting out of that... There's not much reason for the area code to be separate anymore, at least in my area, because you have to dial the whole 10 digit number anyway.

I really don't like the +1 because it just seems confusing to me, like it's supposed to be an international number or something.

Then there's the really lazy way: 987 654 3210. Just use spaces.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 8/3/2005 10:15 am cst

Yum, I love donuts. Especially Dunkin Donuts. I love their lemon-filled and coconut varieties best.

And I prefer the donut spelling personally. Even though I usually hate spellings like "tonite" and "lite".

But yeah, it's too bad they get stale so fast.

I bet I could eat four in a day...

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# Jonathan at 8/3/2005 11:21 am cst

With the last formula, if you format the cell to only show the whole number, it will round it up a couple days before the birth day and you won't have the good person's age. Here's the exact formula you should use to find a person's age:

=DATEDIF(birthdate,now(),"y")

You won't find anything better than that ;)

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# Matthom at 8/3/2005 2:05 pm cst

Hee... guess I'm too nit-picky about it.

Personally, I hate phone numbers - they're like IP addresses - who remembers a random string of numbers? I can't believe I ever did.

The worst is when radio commercials repeat them 5 times in the same commercial. Argh! Stop wasting my brain space on useless information.

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# Matthom at 8/3/2005 2:10 pm cst

Amanda, that doesn't seem right. You should probably let them know that.

They are (usually) really good at responding to inquiries and suggestions. The last couple of times I submitted a complaint, they responded within the same day, and corrected the problem.

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# Tim at 8/3/2005 7:36 pm cst

I am forced to use this alot on dccc.edu. I think its the wrong way to approach linking to whatever on the site but unfortunately we have a high volume of work and getting a department to change the wording of their documents is nothing short of a task saved for Sisyfos. On a personal site or a small scale site its easy to avoid, but on a large scale its nearly impossible.

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# Scott at 8/4/2005 6:22 am cst

It's actually simpler than that:

select count(*), first, last
from yourtable
group by first, last
having count(*) > 1

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# Tim at 8/5/2005 8:35 pm cst

I actually don't understand the whole SMS craze. It seems like more trouble than its worth. At dccc.edu we have a system of school cancellation notifications. People can give us their phone number and phone provider and we send them a message if school is cancelled. We don't use SMS though we just use email. It's really easy and gives us the ability to reuse the script that sends the messages for other things too.

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# Josh at 8/8/2005 7:00 pm cst

I like change.

Groan :P I nearly laughed, because I don't think the pun was intentional ;)

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# Josh at 8/8/2005 7:15 pm cst

Well, in .au, we're only just starting to see phones on the market that can handle email, whilst SMS has been well and truly with us for at least five years.

Further, as far as I'm aware, Australian providers don't have any number-to-email system in place... I know 3 (our only pure 3G WCDMA network at this stage) offers their customers an @three.com.au address, but it's not a phone number, it's an account of the user's choice (most commonly a word, I'd imagine).

There's plenty of reason to still use SMS here.

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# Tim at 8/8/2005 7:48 pm cst

Glad I could share my crack with you friend. Now smoke up. I love that Application. I use the blog this feature like its delicious cake. Can't get enough. It's even easier to blog when you are only posting about an image quickly. Now come to the dark side of wordpress my friend. COME TO THE DARK SIDE.

(This comment was brought to you by a night of painting in an enclosed area)

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# Matthom at 8/9/2005 5:36 am cst

Tim, I haven't used the "blog this" feature yet... I should try it.

Hope the paint fumes didn't get to ya, too much. :)

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# Matthom at 8/9/2005 5:43 am cst

Heh :)... No, it was definitely not intentional - I didn't even notice it, until you pointed it out.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 8/15/2005 12:47 pm cst

Can you add a CSS rule for td's like overflow:auto? You'd probably need to have an explicit width and maybe height too, I guess.

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# Matthom at 8/15/2005 6:02 pm cst

I don't think there's any way around it. I can't have a specific height - that would severly limit my data.

The only thing I can think of is somehow having the long string get "cut off" - while the table remains intact - because I'd rather have that, than the table expanding.

There is an old CSS property called word wrap, which cuts off a long string - and keeps the content in place.

I actually use that on this site - in the right column.

The property is deprecated - and it mainly targets IE, but it seems to work, in some situations.

I could try that, but I also might try toying with the overflow property, like you mentioned.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 8/17/2005 9:29 am cst

What version were you upgrading from? I don't think I deleted everything first when I upgraded last time. And as for all your HTML changes disappearing, that's what the "themes" are for, I guess.

I'm like you, though, in that I wouldn't really want to use it in a situation where I'd want to be making a ton of changes in the code. Though I think that's mostly because it's written in PHP (sorry, this just seems to be a very poorly designed language to me). If I want to change the arguments I pass to a method or find the definition of a method, it's impossible to find what file it's in!

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# Peter R. at 8/22/2005 5:57 pm cst

Questions from a novice PHP user:

Why is it that I can access values of variables on the page referred to in "action" on the form without making reference to $_POST? In other words, if my form has:

<form action="results.php" method="post">
.. and selected "region" has a value of "6"..

Why is it that on results.php I can simply:
echo $region;

without using $_POST['region'] ? In fact, $_POST['region'] does not seem to be carrying a value.

Also, is there a way to combine this method of posting values AND having PHP code verify form data? The forms that I have seen with verification of data have an action which refers - not to the results page - but back to the page containing the form.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Best regards, Peter

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# dale at 8/22/2005 11:10 pm cst

I do that based on a php function so that clients don't need to have javascript going.

Also it is a good idea to check input because the javascript stuff can be changed.

/off topic:

Have you been getting any spam through your contact form?

Also you have "" at the very top left hand side of your website, I've had that issue before, something to do with Dreamweaver I think.

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# Matthom at 8/23/2005 5:26 am cst

In fact, $_POST['region'] does not seem to be carrying a value.

If 'region' is the NAME ('name' attribute) of one of your form elements, it should be accessible via $_POST['region'] - without a problem. The only thing that could prevent that (that I know of) is an older version of PHP - which only accepted $HTTP_POST_VARS['region']. Notice the difference in the variable names.

I think PHP 4 (I could be wrong) started supporting the "short" format - $_POST['region'].

But... if you CAN access the form values by just using the variable - $region - that should be the easiest way, anyway.

The forms that I have seen with verification of data have an action which refers - not to the results page - but back to the page containing the form.

The action attribute for the <form> element can request any file - including itself.

Either way, to verify the form data with PHP, simple write some if statements, which test to see if a certain value ($_POST['region']) is not set, IE: == ""... or you could do: if ( isset($_POST['region']) ) { code }

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# Matthom at 8/23/2005 5:48 am cst

Have you been getting any spam through your contact form?

Ever since I added the security check, spam has dwindled considerably. However, I still think it's capable of getting through.

Also you have "" at the very top left hand side of your website, I've had that issue before, something to do with Dreamweaver I think.

Well... I don't use Dreamweaver - so it can't be that... I don't like it, though. I wish I knew how to get rid of it.

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# Preston L. Bannister at 8/25/2005 11:37 am cst

Same Uploadr problem (fault on startup) running current Uploadr on XP Pro.

http://www.flickr.com/forums/bugs/10856/54816/

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# Andrew D. Weiss at 8/26/2005 7:52 am cst

I just missed a call on my Cell phone from the same number, when I called it back it was "Omaha Steaks" from which I have ordered from in the past. I just asked to be removed form the list, it was no problem.

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# Stuart at 8/30/2005 6:44 am cst

For the mini radio idea. How about an aerial attachment for your ipod and some kind of update that adds a radio menu with the ability to change stations, save them, etc. That'd be awesome.

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# Mark Fletcher at 9/2/2005 11:05 am cst

Thanks for your comments about Bloglines. We do actually support both weather and email subscriptions. When viewing your feeds, in the left pane click the 'Add' link at the top. That'll bring up the add page which will let you create weather and email subscriptions. Hope this helps!

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# Matthom at 9/2/2005 2:06 pm cst

Mark, thanks for stopping by. Looking forward to future improvements with Bloglines...

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# dale at 9/9/2005 6:55 pm cst

I find awstats to be more than enough for stats information. I would think your host would come with that.

It's free too.

Altough it does have a nice interface :)

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# Matthom at 9/9/2005 7:32 pm cst

Dale, thanks for stopping by... Yes - I'm sure Dreamhost comes with and/or supports awstats... but there's just something so appealing about independent developers. I like the "candy" appeal of Mint.

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# Josh Street at 9/9/2005 9:27 pm cst

AWstats is susceptible to referrer spam, so its statistics are a little more skewed. Of course, some would argue that Mint's JavaScript dependence makes it skewed, but from my own site's stats (heh, ironically attained by AWstats), I've found that slightly less than 1% of visitors actually browse with JavaScript disabled.

Mint is useful in that the JavaScript dependence means it's only getting real human figures, rather than other stuff. I don't think it needs to be the be-all and end-all of statistics solutions: personally, I'd use it in concert with raw log analysis software, such as Analog or AWstats. It's useful in its own way, as well as being very good looking and extensible (via the Pepper API that is an integral part of Mint)

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# Gintautas Rugienius at 9/10/2005 1:23 pm cst

Do you have a video of that song that you can send me?

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# dale at 9/13/2005 4:35 am cst

Sounds like lots of issues in the hosting world.

Did you pick up on this:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

Interesting read

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# Matthom at 9/13/2005 5:29 am cst

No, I did not pick up on that. Cool.

The U.S. is full of chaos, eh? How much to live in Sydney?

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# dale at 9/14/2005 12:56 am cst

Random question.

For this post why is "The power of jeans" a similar entry?

How you do work out that section?

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# Matthom at 9/14/2005 5:50 am cst

Hey Dale... The ‘Power of Jeans’ and this entry share the word "power" in the headline. Even though the entries aren't really "similar" at all. The query just checks the headlines, and compares.

This is a perfect example of why this isn't my final solution for this feature.

Most times, headlines are pretty descriptive of the entry - so it works fine. But other times, headlines are vague, and tend to "allude" to the topic, rather than absolutely describe it.

Maybe you have ideas??

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# Jennifer Grucza at 9/14/2005 9:52 am cst

Yeah, I had wondered why I couldn't get to some of my favorite web development blogs yesterday. I figured something must have been up with Dreamhost, since that's the host that everyone is always pushing.

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# TOny at 9/16/2005 10:01 am cst

I know it has been a while since this was posted.. but I believe it's Omaha Steaks. I ordered from them once and they call me repeatedly also. I answered a 402 once and it was them, I'm assuming it still is.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 9/22/2005 10:16 am cst

They really compare programming to a microwave or bicycle? Or are they just using microwaves and bicycles as examples of objects, and you want something a little more real-life? (Like here's a Post object. A Post includes information such as Author, Date, and Content. There are also Category objects. A Category has a name and a collection of Posts. There are methods on Category like addPost(), deleteAllPosts(), etc. And so on...)

Converting existing code shouldn't be too bad, I hope. I would start with grouping all related functionality. Going with the blog example, take all functions related to posts and group them together, and do the same with categories, non-post pages, users/authors, etc. Basically any table in your database could be a type of object (a class), and each row in the table would be an instance of that object.

Here's an example I found on Google of using PHP for a simple Post class: http://www.php-editors.com/articles/simple_php_classes.php

Sorry I don't know about any good PHP OOP references, but if you have any questions about OOP in general, I'd be happy to help.

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# Tim at 9/22/2005 11:31 am cst

There are two boks that I recommend, Professional php5 I have been reading it off and on for a while and going back and reading sections over. The books is well written and interesting. Crash course in OOP. The long winded, metaphysical crap is important though because you have to learn how to program in the OO way of thinking. Its a very different mindset. Unfortunately I don't have a reason for OOP at work because everything we do is very piece meal. I do however recommend it. Very solid, very down to earth with only a little bit of bullshit.

The one prior to it in the series is also good beginning php5 is excellent. You will guarenteed skip the first handfull of chapters but there are topics like PEAR and source control that really benefited me.

Hope this helps.

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# Matthom at 9/22/2005 3:50 pm cst

Thanks Jennifer and Tim.

I'll be sure to ask both of you questions, when I get stuck with something...

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# Stuart at 9/26/2005 5:06 pm cst

Just out of interest, how do online dvd rentals work?

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# Matthom at 9/26/2005 5:35 pm cst

Hey Stuart... it's simple - you have an online account of your movies - it's called a "queue," which you can add and subtract movies from. The first movie in your queue is the one that goes out - whenever you send a movie back.

This is all done by postal mail - postage costs are included in the monthly rental fee.

You can keep your DVDs at home as long as you want.

Each DVD comes in a self-return envelope, with a sleeve-protector.

I wish Australia would "catch up" with this stuff ;) ... I'm just kidding..

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# Josh at 9/26/2005 6:40 pm cst

Just for the record, we do have DVD rental services here... I just don't think they're particularly widely used as of yet. WebFlicks, Quickflix, HomeScreen and BigPond Movies, just to name a few. All offer free trials, but I haven't personally tried any of them yet (don't watch enough movies/haven't got enough time to) nor do I know anyone else who has.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 9/28/2005 9:40 am cst

Hmm, interesting idea.

Here's another question: how would you represent something that had no rating yet?

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# Matthom at 9/28/2005 12:19 pm cst

Jennifer, that's interesting - because iTunes HIDES the stars, but Netflix just shows them "grayed out."

Representing that in a more "creative" way is definitely something to explore.

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# Andy at 9/29/2005 8:42 pm cst

I doubt that it is really another person, there might be a cookie that is messing it up. That seems really odd that they would make a public RSS feed for something that is only useful for one person. I've heard about Greasemonkey, in that you can customize some CSS and JavaScript on websites. Some even condone your modifications, but mostly it is considered a tweaker's tool. I think Wired covered it a couple months ago.

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# Josh at 9/30/2005 5:09 pm cst

Yeah, no joy on Linux here in either mplayer or xine. Alas, no Mac boxes, either! Will see if the latest QuickTime version is any good later today -- Sydney time, of course... October has started here, it's about 10am :P -- this movie doesn't even work in the future!! ;-)

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# Matthom at 9/30/2005 8:03 pm cst

Ah yes. Do you find it strange that when you leave comments here - they are actually left in the past? YOUR past, that is. ;)

October is only a couple hours away, here...

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# terry chay at 10/2/2005 2:34 pm cst

Anyone have any suggestions of what codec would provide "joy on Linux"? I have a DVD, but it is way too big to stream. :-)

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# Theresa at 10/2/2005 9:13 pm cst

Ahh that's so fun! What other songs can you do??

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# Moe at 10/3/2005 4:27 pm cst

it's Orchard Bank and it is ALL OVER ripoffreport.com....don't answer it!

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# Becky at 10/5/2005 7:37 am cst

I like that Netflix also has a "not interested" button. For me, that's the best way indicate the movies I hate.

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# Matthom at 10/5/2005 8:57 am cst

Becky, it seems that movies rated as 'not interested' don't show up in my ratings total. I wonder how those movies are "grouped," and if they are used to generate suggestions (or lack of suggestions, in this case).

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# Theresa at 10/5/2005 7:25 pm cst

But is a hurricane that's moving really "inanimate"? Ah ha! :)

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# Matthom at 10/6/2005 3:50 am cst

Theresa, I mean inanimate, as in non-living things. You're pulling my leg, aren't you? :)

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# Josh at 10/8/2005 9:57 pm cst

Yeah, I agree, it does look a little broken. Having said that, the worst part of it is getting started (especially when importing an OPML list) -- it gets better once it gets over the fact you've just imported a whole bunch of feeds at the same time, they're all unread, and it needs to inform you that there are no new posts for all of them. Grr.

Hopefully it'll soon improve, though. Goodness knows GMail has since it first came out.

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# Doug at 10/9/2005 12:55 pm cst

It gets better! Right click on a text field on a search engine and select add keyword search. Then you can type your keyword followed by a search term in the address bar and your search will be executed.

I would love to see this feature in Safari; I would also like to be able to see JPEG EXIF data in Safari. Trouble with Firefox is the lack of colorsync or other colour profile support.

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# sawit4times at 10/9/2005 8:46 pm cst

He was Too big a fish for that little town.
-he was a fish, wife also fish/woman-in-the-river

The Giant greatly emphasized the validity and truth (though distorted) behind the tale, with his appearing at the reality funeral.

just my view.

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# Peter at 10/11/2005 2:57 pm cst

Also a novice PHP user.

I am trying to store an SQL statement across pages so I can reuse it at a later stage.

I use this

However since the statement usually contains single or double quotes so after a few pages the statment appears

SELECT * FROM `products` WHERE `name` like \\\\\\\'%l%\\\\\\\'

Originally it was

SELECT * FROM `products` WHERE `name` like '%l%'

How do I avoid this alteration? Obviously the SQL statment cannot be run in this format.

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# Andy Atkinson at 10/11/2005 10:13 pm cst

Great tip. I use the built-in "dict" all the time to search dictionary.com, I'll definitely have to add my own. Now someone needs to come up with a way to store this on a web page (like the google personalized search page) so that you can execute those queries from "any" browser you might be on. You could the search would be saved in your search history for later as well.

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# Matthom at 10/12/2005 6:01 am cst

Yeah, great point. I thought of this as well. For example, let's say on a personal site I am developing - I have a bunch of "admin" links, which are straight-forward text links. Instead of using a URL in the href attribute, I could just use the keyword that I already created for that URL.

Using the Netflix example - instead of linking directly to Fever Pitch:

<a href="http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=70023958">

I could, instead, link to my personalized keyword:

<a href="netflix fever pitch">

But, obviously that would only work in Firefox.

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# Becky at 10/13/2005 7:26 am cst

One more great reason to use Firefox! Thanks.

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# Stuart at 10/16/2005 7:41 pm cst

I'm sure you could get them to perform. They'd just ask for a large amount of bling bling to do it. ;)

Jack Johnson would be good, dunno about Franz Ferdinand though.

I'd personally love Eric Clapton and the Foo Fighters to play at my wedding. Clapton is much like Jack Johnson in the way he plays. The Fooies on the other hand... well I don't really have a reason.

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# Matthom at 10/17/2005 7:31 am cst

Yeah, Foo Fighters would be amazing - but they are almost too 'over the top,' for a wedding. Clapton, of course, would be phenomenal too.

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# Matthew Brundage at 10/17/2005 9:31 am cst

I've always thought that The Shore sounded (intentionally) like Richard Ashcroft from The Verve. The Shore have even been labelled as Brit-Pop, which is strange, being that they're from California.

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# Theresa at 10/17/2005 9:11 pm cst

Hello! U2 anyone??

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# Sue at 10/18/2005 7:28 am cst

Actually, I think you can save a step here. In Firefox, if the URL is one word - epicurious, wikipedia, netflix, google, froogle - you don't need to set up the keyword at all. Just try wikipedia hysteria in the Location bar and hit return. Magic!

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# Matthom at 10/18/2005 7:51 am cst

Sue, thanks for your feedback. However, I'm not sure I follow what you mean. Isn't the URL always one word? The wikipedia hysteria example works, but I'm not sure it works for any text box. But what do I know? This is all new to me.

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# Anonymous at 10/18/2005 12:04 pm cst

How about a writeup for GIMP?

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# Melissa Della at 10/18/2005 12:05 pm cst

Hey, I just wanted to thank you for this tutorial. I�ve been trying to figure out how to get a nice rounded border, and I found this entry via Google; I was able to translate your steps to Photoshop 7.

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# Josh at 10/18/2005 5:46 pm cst

I recall Eric Meyer has voiced this concern before, as well, though a link eludes me (oh! the irony!) :P

On an unrelated note (and I'm sorry if it's been around for a while, I'm a guilty RSS subscriber!), really like the new design. My only qualm is with the kerning on the text in your "matthom" header and compression artifacts... it'd go well as an indexed PNG.

Quickly whipped up one:
http://www.joahua.com/matthomheader/full_logo_hifi.png 5029 bytes, PNG, indexed
http://www.joahua.com/matthomheader/full_logo_hifi.jpg

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# Matthom at 10/18/2005 7:04 pm cst

Josh - I just did these minor CSS changes today - so it hasn't been around for a while... Some of it was done rather hastily - and I agree with you on the header - the kerning needs to be tighter. I don't even think I want Futura as the font. I'll have to play around with it some more tomorrow.

What benefit does a PNG do? (out of curiousity - cause I don't know :)

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# Josh at 10/18/2005 7:35 pm cst

Well, it's not lossy for a start. So you don't get compression artifacts like on compressed JPEG images.

This can of course mean that the file sizes are larger, but, as with GIF images, it's possible to use an indexed palette with only the colours you need, which saves significantly.

Also, PNG's compression algo is better than that with GIF images, so if you have two identical indexed images in GIF and PNG format, the PNG will give a smaller filesize.

It's best to use indexed images where they are graphically simple and/or don't have many colours. This means logos are generally good candidates, but you'd be mad to do it with a photo, because it would be larger (as palettes are defined in the file itself) and look worse (as the limit to the number of colours in an indexed file is far less than in another format).

So, summary: PNG can be indexed or true colour (up to 64 bit, 16bit/channel - RGB+A - alpha is optional), has lossless compression, and compresses better than identical GIF images. It can be used as a JPEG replacement for photographs, but the filesize will probably be larger than a decent-quality (carefully compressed) JPEG would be.

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# dale at 10/19/2005 1:51 am cst

I'm not sure about the colour of your right side bar. It's a little too dark for my liking, although I think the site looks better over all.

Good stuff.

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# Matthom at 10/19/2005 5:35 am cst

Thanks Dale... I tried many different colors for the sidebar - I wanted something "red/orange" - and everything else was either too strong (deep red), or "bleached out," such as pink.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/19/2005 9:57 am cst

Hi Matt - I think the color of the sidebar is ok, but maybe you could flip the color of your text to be a light color for better contrast against the darker orange.

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# Matthom at 10/19/2005 12:05 pm cst

Jennifer, thanks. A lighter text color in the sidebar probably would help...

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# Matthom at 10/20/2005 6:45 am cst

I, too, enjoy the Sony Street Style headphones - for a variety of situations. The sound is really incredible, out of those, too.

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# Josh at 10/20/2005 4:35 pm cst

It was offended you didn't accept the offered receipt, duh! ;-)

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# Matthom at 10/20/2005 5:01 pm cst

Apparently :) I have a vague feeling it still wouldn't have said Thank You, even if I accepted the damn receipt. Ah well!

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# Amanda at 10/21/2005 5:26 am cst

Perhaps on the receipt it says thank you... ; )

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# Matthom at 10/21/2005 9:31 am cst

Amanda, maybe it did - you're right. :)

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# Andy at 10/21/2005 2:20 pm cst

Oh my gosh, you have the same elbow while driving AND while using the computer? I have several different elbows I cycle through so that one doesn't get overused.

Just kidding. I still have wrist problems, now I've tried a keyboard drawer and bought a split keyboard for home as well. Maybe you should try mousing with your right hand for a couple hours, and cycle back and forth in 2 hour blocks or something. My temporary solution has been Tylenol and alcohol (not necessarily together).

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# Matthom at 10/21/2005 3:24 pm cst

Yep - believe it or not, I use the same elbow, in the car, and at work. Crazy, huh?

Damn RSI's. I'm only 25, and already falling apart.

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# Mark Fletcher at 10/21/2005 5:06 pm cst

Hello. Actually, the first number in Bloglines is just the number of unread articles. The second number is the number of kept new. I think that's how you want it, right?

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# Matthom at 10/22/2005 3:27 am cst

Hi Mark. Yes, I confused the first number with the total of everything - unread plus 'kept new' - but as you said, the first number is, in fact, only the unread.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/24/2005 10:17 am cst

An ergonomic specialist who plays bass in my orchestra told me to try putting folded towels under my arms to help support them. (You see, my occupational therapist finally came in to look at my workstation and she told me to make sure my elbows were not too bent - more like a 110 degree angle instead 90 degree. But doing this meant my elbows were floating above the desk, which does not feel very natural.) And the towel works pretty well - I can be relaxed and in the right position at the same time.

You might want to try towels just to see how they work, since they would be a bit firmer than a pillow, and so maybe more supportive.

When I'm driving, I've started using my left hand more (it's my right hand that bothers me), and sometimes I move my left knee up so that my left arm rests on my leg.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/24/2005 10:27 am cst

I try to limit reading of non-work-related blogs to lunchtime. Work-related blogs I'll read when I'm building or waiting for something. Occasionally I have blogged about some technical issue I'm having at work, but usually I write blog posts at home.

I can see an argument for blocking blogs due to productivity concerns (though sometimes if you're looking for a solution to a problem, the answer will be something somebody blogged, and it would be bad to block access to useful information like that). But leaking company information? That seems silly to me. You can leak information just as easily at home. Either trust your employees, or fire them and find ones you can trust. If you can't trust anyone, then you have issues. :)

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# Matthom at 10/25/2005 7:33 am cst

Very interesting ideas... thanks.

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# Matthom at 10/25/2005 7:42 am cst

This Wired entry is what got me thinking...

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# Josh at 10/25/2005 5:03 pm cst

Why do bands think that people have the patience or time to sit through all that crap?

Because most people use Internet Explorer, which is generally far less crappy when it comes to this stuff.

At the very least, I wish Firefox would come out with some sort of plugin that saves all browser tabs, continuously, in case of a locked-up computer, or browser.

There is, it's called Tabbrowser Extension. Amongst other things, it also allows you to re-order the tabs (like you've been able to do in Opera for goodness knows how long already), bookmark sets of tabs, open a bookmark folder in multiple tabs, etc. IIRC, it DOES attempt to save the tab state on exit, but seeing as Firefox is an unstable piece of crap with Flash, obviously it's not going to have the chance to save. The solution is simply to save your current tabs before going to a band site. Or use Opera, which is nearly as good as IE in that regard ;-)

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# Matthom at 10/25/2005 5:43 pm cst

Excellent. Perhaps my Flash comments are ignorant and 'one-sided,' since I do choose Firefox over IE. So, I digress.

I've been using a particular Tabbrowser extension for quite some time, although I don't know if it's the same as the one you referenced. It allows me to set some pretty handy stuff with tabs, but not re-order, which I've missed since my days of using Opera.

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# Josh at 10/25/2005 5:50 pm cst

Okay, looks like I screwed up. The tabbrowser extension is reportedly buggy and crap (I stopped using it coz it gave me problems some time I upgraded Firefox), and there's an appropriation of it that's better with much the same features, called Tab Mix. Seems like there used to be an English version there, because the link from the Tabbrowser site was to tabmix.html.en, but that now redirects back to the straight .html version. Doesn't look too hard to understand, though... I'm giving installing it a go now.

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# Josh at 10/25/2005 6:05 pm cst

Got it. Looks okay, it's in English once you install it without any problems (though I had to save the XPI onto my computer, then load the local URI -- it didn't even warn me when I clicked the link, it just didn't recognise it as an extension. Bizarre.)

You go into the Extensions menu, then click Tab Mix → Options → Tab → "Restore the last session when starting Firefox".

Should work okay... probably is a bit dubious when crashing, though.

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# Matt Thommes at 10/26/2005 7:10 am cst

A writeup for GIMP is certainly possible. Thanks for the idea.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/26/2005 12:34 pm cst

Hmm, sometimes you just feeling like browsing, though...

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# Josh at 10/26/2005 4:29 pm cst

Yeah, I'm with Jennifer on that. I've been thinking about radically changing the way my own blog is organised, too -- because it's a personal site, and I can get away with that kinda stuff (redesigning on a whim). I don't particularly want to sever links, though.

An essay could be (has been) written on this, but the value of the web is in its hyperlinking structures. Google got to be the number 1 search engine by, amongst other things, its PageRank algo that draws heavily from interrelations between sites.

You might have just meant eliminating internal links, but I think that means the same thing. It's just defining the boundary a little closer to home. Right now, I know that your "Base", "About", "Blog", "Music", "RSS", "Archives" and "Contact" pages are important because they're prevalently linked to sitewide.

Good usability architecture might dictate you trim that a bit. (Particularly RSS, in this era of browser auto-discovery thanks to <link rel='alternate'>)

Perhaps that also means getting rid of the "Archives" -- I personally agree this is a useless feature in light of the search-centric browsing habits we're just beginning to better understand.

Chronology has to play a part, though, if you continue to "blog". Your blog hasn't ever been unrelated articles -- for example, this piece was obviously foreshadowed by your entry, "Blog entries become history too quick".

What you failed to do here is establish a relationship back to the preceding piece in hypertext. There's your automatic "related" link in the sidebar, but that failed to catch on to what you were really talking about.

An anachronistic web log is kind of self defeating. If you were just creating standalone content/articles, that would be different. Maybe something like A List Apart's structure? Issues, with two or three featured posts? (Note its use of columns: in the present issue, 206, there are two new pieces and one "Editor's choice" rerun.)

I imagine this could slow your production of content, though -- and it would probably make you want to focus more, and each post would need to have a clearly defined point and parameters. Which is, IMHO, not a great thing for a personal weblog.

You're moving back more towards the idea of a 'zine, then, which is far more defined than the anarchous stream-of-consciousness blogs so often are.

So... I think its a good idea to challenge the accepted structure, but keep in mind users will still want to browse (heck, RSS will be chronological and there's nothing you can do about that!), and that it will probably influence your perception of your site (and hence posting habits).

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# Andy at 10/26/2005 7:22 pm cst

Vaporware!

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# roklobsta at 10/27/2005 3:48 am cst

very cool! i love firefox and i love netflix. oh the joy of having netflix in my search bar! bliss!

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# Matthom at 10/27/2005 5:33 am cst

Josh, very good points.

In the immediate future, I'd just like implement a search feature, that searches through blog comments, as well as posts - because I also feel that valuable comments (like the one you just left) are just as important as my own content - for me to search through, that is.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/27/2005 1:22 pm cst

I'm a little unsure what you mean about Javascript returning true for a checkbox... do you mean if you're testing input.checked? You're not really getting the request parameter like you are in PHP or other server-side languages.

In server-side languages, it's usually enough just to test if the parameter was in the request (i.e. if it's not null, then it was checked).

An interesting note is that checkboxes can actually return any value you want them to. "on" is simply the default if you don't specify a value.

For example, input type="checkbox" name="mycheckbox" value="foo" checked="checked" would return a value of "foo" when you retrieved the request parameter on the server side.

For single checkboxes, it isn't that useful to specify a different value, but you can do some neat stuff like having a bunch of checkboxes with the same name and different values... For example, if you wanted checkboxes for every state, all named "state", but with their values set to "MA", "IL", "IA", etc. Then on the server side, you could ask for the "state" parameter and get a list of all selected states. It's very useful if you have a dynamic number of checkboxes.

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# CBK at 10/27/2005 2:11 pm cst

Tune the low-E string down to D. That's the only change.

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# Matthom at 10/27/2005 4:14 pm cst

Sorry... yes, I am referring to the value of input.checked.

Good points - yes, if you have more than one checkbox that the user can check, then including the value attribute is essential.

Then on the server side, you could ask for the "state" parameter and get a list of all selected states.

What do you mean by the "state" parameter? Are you referring to an array? I'm just curious - because when getting the values of all selected checkboxes, normally I use an array (in PHP).

So, the name attribute in the <input> element would be something like state[].

Is that kinda what you were getting at?

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/31/2005 9:35 am cst

I'm pretty sure my bank (Bank of America) has online banking on Sundays. You can use an ATM on Sundays, right? Seems weird if you could use an ATM but not online banking. Even if they don't process the transactions until the next business day, you should still be able to use it. Can you not even see your balances?

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# Jennifer Grucza at 10/31/2005 9:37 am cst

The way I would do float:left is to take a box (maybe paint it a nice color), then attach it to my right arm. That way when you're looking at me, you can see the box has been floated left of the content (me). Actually, though, the rest of me wouldn't be flowing underneath it, so many it's more of a negative margin.

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# Matthom at 10/31/2005 1:29 pm cst

I can "log in" most Sundays, but every once in a while, it'll be down for maintenance - and it only seems to happen on Sundays. Just my rant.

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# Matthom at 10/31/2005 1:35 pm cst

Actually, though, the rest of me wouldn't be flowing underneath it, so many it's more of a negative margin.

Yes, but I still see what you are saying. Maybe if the box was on your right shoulder, that would mean some content is to the right of the box, and some content is below.

Of course, your legs are two columns, so you might want to apply a clear: left (or clear: both) to that structure. :)

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# Jennifer Grucza at 11/2/2005 11:20 am cst

Hmm, actually I'm pretty sure these are incorrect usages of commas. They actually make the sentences feel more awkward to me, putting pauses where I wouldn't expect to see them.

I think this sentence:

Never underestimate the power of commas, in sentence structure.

flows much better without the comma (while you might emphasize the word "comma", you wouldn't pause after it):

Never underestimate the power of commas in sentence structure.

Again, I would take out the last comma in the next sentence. (Also, I'd change "allow" to "allows", since it's the "brief pause" that is doing the allowing):

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, which allow readers to absorb the content, with ease.

would change to

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, which allows readers to absorb the content with ease.

Google "overuse of commas" or "misuse of commas" and you'll get plenty of hits. :)

Here's one page on how to use commas: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/commas.htm. An important note at the bottom of the page reads (emphasis mine):

Yet the biggest problem that most students have with commas is their overuse. Some essays look as though the student loaded a shotgun with commas and blasted away. Remember, too, that a pause in reading is not always a reliable reason to use a comma. Try not to use a comma unless you can apply a specific rule from this page to do so.

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# Matthom at 11/2/2005 11:38 am cst

Jennifer - very good points.

One of your corrections:

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, which allows readers to absorb the content with ease.

... is perfectly fine. I like that subtle change. And, my grammar was wrong - so good catch.

Now that you made that change, I'd almost change it again, to this:

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, allowing readers to absorb the content with ease.

It was that "double 'S'" that bothered me:

allows readers

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# Matthom at 11/2/2005 11:39 am cst

Ooops. I didn't realize that now there's a "double 'ing'." :)

reading, allowing

Oh well. Your first correction is best, I think.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 11/2/2005 3:33 pm cst

The "allowing" version occurred to me to. I think either is fine - the doubled "s" and "ing" don't bother me - I didn't even notice them, actually. :)

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# Nell at 11/3/2005 12:11 pm cst

It's Omaha Steaks. I won't buy from them again 'cause they keep calling me.

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# Matt at 11/3/2005 1:07 pm cst

Nice articles Andy, this will come in handy when I have to do the same thing for my parents. Also, I was trying to do a similar thing last year and learned that you can have more then one person logged in at a time on a Windows XP machine, but it requires some registry hacking - UltraVNC looks like a much safer approach.

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# Jennifer Grucza at 11/4/2005 11:01 am cst

Good work - it's definitely useful functionality, isn't it? :)

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# Matthom at 11/4/2005 1:29 pm cst

You bet it's useful - thanks to associative arrays, and PHP's krsort!

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# dale at 11/4/2005 2:40 pm cst

Great stuff, if I get time I shall upgrade my seach to be as good as yours!

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# Josh at 11/4/2005 3:15 pm cst

Hehe, yes, and I'd upgrade WordPress' search to be as good as yours if... it wasn't such an enormous piece of software and that I'd never get it merged back into CVS and hence it'd break as soon as a new version came out ;-) Actually maybe someone has written a plugin for this... hmm.

Irrespective of that, your search is cool! :P

With the array do you do one query then append the results of the second query? And then sort it? I'm noticing that the using commas example search doesn't group comments vs posts, so... sorted by relevance?

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# Matthom at 11/4/2005 3:42 pm cst

Josh - yes, the results are sorted by relevance, which comes from the query.

So, I have two separate queries - one that searches my blog posts, and one that searches feedback. Both queries are dealt with separately.

For both queries, I loop through the results (for), and each time through the loop, a new array item is added to an array called searchResults_array. The array item is added as an associative item, with the key being the relevance number, and the value being all of the HTML output, merged together as one string, with hash marks ( | ) designating the table cell.

Once all of the search results are pooled into the array, I then sort the array by key, in reverse order ( krsort ). The key, remember, is the relevance from the MySQL query.

After that, all that's left is to implode each array item at the hash mark, into separate table cells.

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# John at 11/5/2005 3:52 am cst

Hello, This is a nice and useful article. I have a question though that I could not find an answer for. My father is behind a firewall at his company and their administrators won't open any port so I can connect to his computer. I figured that if somehow his computer initiated the connection to my computer than I will be able to control his computer. But I have not seen any tool that does this reverse connection. Are there any solutions to this?

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# Patrick at 11/5/2005 3:56 am cst

No longer have to steal office WebEx This will keep me honest when helping out friends and family. Excellent article and looks to be a solid product.

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# Dexter at 11/5/2005 4:25 am cst

Hello, There is a patch available in order to allow concurrent connections on Windows XP with Remote Desktop. Although is does not allow the user logged in locally to see the other user's screen, it still gives a lot more flexibility. Look for something like 'teminal services windows xp patch' on Google. I still find Remote Desktop much faster than VNC, and no install/configuration is necessary. And there are ports of the Rdesktop client for almost all OS that I know of as well (Linux, BSD, OSX...). Dexter www.dexterphoto.com

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# MTriper at 11/5/2005 6:18 am cst

You should try www.logmein.com, it has been a lifesaver for me when machines are behind firewall and NATs with no port forwarding.

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# Andrew at 11/5/2005 6:18 am cst

Yes, UltraVNC allows you to do that.

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# Bob at 11/5/2005 6:20 am cst

Used this very successfully with my Mother in Law. I went one step further and generated a SINGLE CLICK installer preloaded with my IP address that she could just double click and back connect the the UVNC Viewer I had running. No need for her to find an IP addresses or do anything but launch a small program. Check out the SINGLE CLICK Packager: http://www.uvnc.com/addons/singleclick.html A little less secure, but for a short fix it up session it was the best option going. My IP stays pretty much the same thanks to my router, so the SINGLE CLICK package on her desktop stays good. If my IP changes, I just generate a new one and email it to her or put it up on a webpage, send the URL and tell her to RUN PROGRAM FROM HERE and it connects up just fine!

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# jack at 11/5/2005 7:09 am cst

Great article - but it is certainly worth mentioning that use of the DS encryption plug-in provides decent protection for both the password handshake and the session.

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# HaYaBUSA at 11/5/2005 7:48 am cst

Great article once again. my family is soo HUGE and they live all over europe, and it turns out that om the only one that knows how to use a computer and i use WEBexPC ( http://pcnow.webex.com/MyWebExWeb/MyWebexPortal.portal )i registered long time ago (about 5 years :D) when it offered a free service and now i can add 10 computers on a "network" and log into them like in remote desktop. But i think this should work on any OS because its java based. Sry for bad english if there is any. --BUSA

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# TeacherMan at 11/5/2005 8:11 am cst

Great write up! Question though. I am a teacher and all my students have computers, and at times, I would like to take control of their machines. To demand their attention, show how to work an app, knock them off the internet or email (novell) when they shouldn't be on it. All with a single click. I have about 25 desktops I want to control. Can the Ultr@VNC achieve this for me? Thanks!

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# Cnmsales at 11/5/2005 8:32 am cst

Remote Support System. http://www.download.com/Remote-Support-System/3000-7240_4-10447877.html Great tool. Takes about 2 minutes to create the exe file. Then send it to your friends and family run the server on your end and bam instant connection. This software package will allow you to create a single exe file that a client can download off your Web page. When executed it will automatically connect back to you (through firewalls) and allow you to provide remote support. You now can provide support for clients you've never even met, transfer files and directories, chat with the client, reboot the remote PC with auto-reconnect, reboot the remote PC into safe mode with auto-reconnect. A customizable invoice for the session is generated automatically. The program is free for non-commercial use only. New in version 1.5.1 is the ability to draw on remote client's screen, and a pager / attention bell to get their attention when needed.

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# P.E.LAM at 11/5/2005 8:51 am cst

Anybody know of the way to access VNC through port 80? fyi, my company block all the port except 80 and https port.

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# Chui Tey at 11/5/2005 9:02 pm cst

RealVNC viewer has a listener mode. The VNC server initiates a connection to the listener. Here's a sample batch file for your mom, with a few more tweaks, it can go out on port 80, by default it is 5500: start /MIN winvnc4.exe PAUSE Hit Enter when you see VNC in the lower right corner winvnc4.exe -connect "vnc-client-ip-address"

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# Chris Ahlers at 11/6/2005 7:05 am cst

Hi, Thanks for your helpful article. Is this technology available for other verisons of Windows? I believe my mother-in-law has Wiindows Millenium. Thanks, Chris

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# Nate at 11/6/2005 8:39 am cst

The SINGLE CLICK package is the way to go. I created one that connects back to my IP and then installed it on the computers of everyone in the family. It makes it a piece of cake when they need help - they call me, and I have them click on the icon to share a desktop.

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# Anonymous at 11/6/2005 3:56 pm cst

But this will make impossible setting up the wireless connection. What's the point?

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/6/2005 4:26 pm cst

Actually it depends. I have found that when I am using Windows XP to manage my wireless connection, I do not get wireless "drops" with the WZC service disabled when we do not have encryption enabled. The problem I am having now though is figuring out how to prevent wireless "drops" of connectivity when we have encryption enabled (since we need the WZC service enabled when encryption is enabled). I believe that the manufacturer's driver would manage the wireless connection and I would not need the WZC service, which would hopefully prevent the signal drops that WZC causes as it searches for new access points. I plan to do some testing with this soon. On my iBook, there is never a noticeable service drop, with or without WPA encryption enabled.

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/6/2005 5:58 pm cst

Hello John, thanks for the compliment. As other visitors have pointed out, there is another version of UltraVNC called UltraVNC SC that lets users initiate connection requests outward. I haven't played with this yet, but since the user initiating the connection needs to traverse the firewall to make the outside connection, it makes sense that the remote user would be able to connect by following the reverse path. [UltraVNC SC](http://sc.uvnc.com/index.php?section=12)

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/6/2005 6:03 pm cst

Hello Chris. Yes, UltraVNC says on their main page that it runs under Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003. [http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/](http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/)

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# John at 11/7/2005 6:37 am cst

Thank you for your suggestions. UltraVNC Viewer (in listen mode) does the reverse connection that I was looking for. The only problem is that my father's company firewall blocks all non-http traffic (I set VNCViewer to listen on port 80 but it didn't work, as the firewall stopped the non-http traffic). Is there a way to make UltraVNC (or another program) use http requests for the transfer? (Just like Yahoo Messenger's option "Firewall with no proxies") Thanks

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# Jennifer Grucza at 11/7/2005 9:25 am cst

It seems to me that this is a simple bug on their side. Hopefully not all feed readers have the same behavior. Have you tried emailing them to ask about it?

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# Jennifer Grucza at 11/7/2005 9:30 am cst

You might want to take a look at the UNION command in SQL. With it, you can select data from multiple tables, so long as the columns you're selecting have the same datatypes in both tables.

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# Matthom at 11/7/2005 11:06 am cst

Indeed, Jennifer - that would be my answer! Thanks for pointing that out.

Only problem... upon checking just now - my server's current version of MySQL is 4.1.14.

UNION begins support in version 5, right? At least I think that's right...

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# Matthom at 11/7/2005 11:12 am cst

Ooops, no - I'm wrong. UNION is supported in versions 4, and up. So I'm set!

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# Josh at 11/7/2005 3:11 pm cst

Yeah I'll confirm that Liferea doesn't have that problem. I'm opposed to absolute links because, reasons of moving domain names aside (which is 'bad' because it breaks permalink structures across the web), it's actually less accessible.

If you save a web page with relative URIs to your computer, it'll work fine. If it has absolute URIs then it's going to be broken. Note I don't just mean your local computer but also mirrors/cache servers, like MirrorDot et al.

Plus, yeah, from a maintenence perspective absolute URIs suck. Ever launched a static site having used absolute URIs during development? Pain.

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# Nate at 11/8/2005 6:46 am cst

Hey, I did some research into Dexter's post above and found a very cool hack out there. It allows you to run your XP box as a full terminal server so you can have multiple simultaneous connections as well as shadow a session. While I might still use Single Click VNC for support, Terminal Services is great where you need to connect to a computer even if there is someone working on it. Here is the link: http://sig9.com/articles/concurrent-remote-desktop Again, I have done it and it works great. -Nate

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# Jennifer Grucza at 11/10/2005 9:50 am cst

I definitely agree that working side-by-side with other developers makes you better, particularly if you're working with really talented people. It's the same way in music, I think. When you play with people who are better than you, it lifts your own level up as well.

Being able to bounce ideas back and forth, debating the merits of one design vs. another, is invaluable.

Good luck on your new job!

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# Matthom at 11/10/2005 11:10 am cst

Thanks, Jennifer. And thanks for all of your help with web-related stuff... I'm sure I'll be using your advice and examples in the very near-future, as well!

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# Steve at 11/10/2005 11:46 am cst

I work in the IT department of a large company, and if I caught an employee trying to compromise our firewall like that, they would be in hot water. Seriously, your dad most likely would have signed an acceptable use policy for company computing equipment when he started working there that prohibits just this kind of thing.

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# Josh at 11/10/2005 3:34 pm cst

So, uh, are you gonna say what (where) the new job is? Same kind of context or will you be in a team or...

Just curious... :)

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# Josh at 11/10/2005 3:36 pm cst

http://tinyurl.com/ is great if you want to share your wishlist or something. Obviously it's not a solution for the WHOLE of Amazon, and they really need to fix that, but for limited application it looks worthwhile.

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# Matthom at 11/10/2005 4:19 pm cst

Josh, how dare you ask me that.

No I'm just kidding.

I'll talk more about it very soon. Right now I just want to do nothing but stare at the wall for a couple days. (I really needed some more time off, in between starting a new job.)

I will be in a team, sort of - but I will still be doing PHP work - maybe some ASP (ahh, the horror!), and definitely a LOT of MS Access, which I love. Maybe a lot of work in Access will finally push me into the .NET realm. (As if it's necessary). Notice my anti-Microsoft-web-technologies attitude. I just can't understand why .NET has to be so deeply involved and bulky. Why does Microsoft believe that ending development of ASP was a good thing? I don't need a framework, I just want to jump in and start coding, like PHP!

Woah - where did all that come from? I dunno.

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# Andy at 11/10/2005 4:54 pm cst

Josh beat me to it, but I actually did it for you:

http://tinyurl.com/dnvhl

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# Matthom at 11/10/2005 4:55 pm cst

Thanks Josh... I agree TinyURL is helpful. But like you said - for the WHOLE of Amazon - this is not the way to go. After all - we're looking for semantic meaning in the URL - not some other application interpreting it.

So, if I send everyone my Wish List as a link with the words tinyurl.com/... in it - that doesn't explain (to the naked eye) what the hell I'm linking to. After all - what does tinyurl mean to anyone?

Sorry for the slight rant. I'm more talking to myself, in this case.

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# Josh at 11/10/2005 5:46 pm cst

Yeah I agree. It bugs me not knowing where a URL will take me, which makes me opposed to TinyURL in a way. For things like your wishlist, however, I reckon it's a viable option, even if it's not technically ideal (for a variety of reasons, including dependence upon another provider, non-semantic URIs, extraneous DNS lookups, etc).

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# Josh at 11/10/2005 5:49 pm cst

Ahh cool. Just don't get too sucked into the whole .NET thing! From what I've heard of it from various WSG people, it's nigh on impossible to get it to play nice with markup. Nice to see you're anti-Microsoft-web-technologies, though :P

Have fun in time off... though I'd be inclined to try something more exciting than staring at a wall! (But then again, it's summer on this side of the world and I'm about to go on holidays, and in winter/towards winter I'd be prone to staying inside lots and reading, too!)

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# Matthom at 11/10/2005 5:50 pm cst

Thanks Andy - yeah, works fine. I have to admit it's pretty nifty.

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# Daniel J. Wilson at 11/10/2005 5:52 pm cst

Because it discards certain audio frequencies, AAC uses less space than ALE and AIFF for the same duration of audio. I use AAC at 128 kbps with variable bit rate encoding. My hearing isn't anywhere near perfect (14 years of drumming will do that), so I willingly sacrifice a bit of quality for substantial storage space savings.

The Lossless Encoder is just that - it retains all audio signal data, but throws out the overhead that comes with CD audio. If you want an exact reproduction of the CD audio and to conserve storage space, ALE uses about half the space of AIFF.

AIFF is also lossless, but retains absolutely all audio data and requires significantly more storage space than AAC and ALE. AIFF is mostly used in audio production, I believe.

I suggest listening to a few tracks encoded in all three formats and then considering how much disk space you want to dedicate. Given Apple's strength, I'm sure all three will be fully supported well into the future.

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# Matthom at 11/10/2005 6:55 pm cst

Thanks for your ideas, Daniel.

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# Andy at 11/11/2005 3:29 pm cst

You should see if there is a firmware upgrade available for your router. They are easy to do if you have not done one before, and they have fixed several issues I've had in the past.

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# Andy at 11/11/2005 3:35 pm cst

I agree about semantic meaning. I wonder if there is a service out there that lets you generate a categorical URL that might help--this still isn't getting at the core issue, but what if there was a Wordpress/CMS plug-in that let you generate third-level "tiny" URLs. You could just setup a HTTP redirect for this too I suppose. Here is an idea: setup "wishlist.matthom.com" to redirect to your long ugly Amazon (or the tinyURL I pasted above) and mail that out to family and friends. That way, you are even Amazon/website-independent!

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# Matthom at 11/11/2005 3:49 pm cst

Brilliant, Andy! (It sure helps that Dreamhost comes with unlimited sub-domains for many of their plans.)

I wonder if many other hosts offer this. Probably.