Data transfer tool

The tool is coming along, working with our content queen to setup an interface that will be easy for her to use.
I've ditched the ajax idea, in favor of a simple "checkbox" system. I've also thrown out the idea that I should move _all_ the data associated with each title at that moment. Instead I'm opting for just moving the title/product data. After all the titles are moved, I'll write another script which goes through the title data, and copies awards, talent, characters, images, collections, franchise and anything else left in the old structure.

As each title is moved, I'm marking it in the original table as is_moved, or is_removed based on if they wanted to move it, or throw it out altogether (mistakes that weren't deleted in the past).

We will see how it goes, but I'm fairly confident it will work. We have some new stuff going up on Stargate, something from the third party vendor. It's cute.. but not great. Luckily I'm OFF.. until the 2nd.. so I probably won't get time to post, as I'll be drinking heavily with my mate who's staying with me from Austin (oh and playing video games of course).

Woot! BFN

Running

As many of my friends know.. I've taken up running in the past few months. Today (actually yesterday) I reached my 100 mile mark!
Nike Plus

Woot!

BFN

Dates, Times bane of my existence

Seriously tired of trying to work out why my time and date stuff isn't working. It's not working.. and I can't work out how, unless I go to the site at the time it's broken. Herein lies the problem.. I then _break_ what's going to happen the next day.. at a different time.

Woe is me!

I've decided to take all the variables governing dates and times and stick them at the top.. then try and populate them with a variety of numbers, to see if I can replicate the error.

Anyone have any good ideas for dealing with this? Some sort of "fake time" tool?

OK.. wistful thinking I know...

BFN

Winding down

Finally things are starting to wind down towards the Holidays. Stargate is off until 4th Jan. MGM HD is.. well.. my part is done. Unfortunately there are some snafu's keeping us from going live.
This means I get back to the main site! Woot! Actually I'm quite excited to get the whole thing kicking again.

Writing a tool, for our content people to use. It basically does this:
Shows an alphabetical list (limited on the page to say.. 50?) on the left, with all the current "property" titles. In the old DB this meant everything that was a product. Not a good way to arrange stuff. On the right is two blank lists. First column you choose to add one title from the left, second column you can add to from anything else on the left list.
What this does is define a "master" title, it's data is copied to the new table structure as a title, and it's merchandise (if any) is added as a product. Then the subsequent titles have their data added to the product of that main title.
Simple eh? I am thinking of doing it ajax style, so less page reloading (except when you run out).
It will need another tool to pick up loose ends.. titles with names that vary so much they weren't near each other on the original list. A way to take them, and move them to the new structure.
Once all this data is moved, we can finally start looking to recoding the tools, and the front end. JOY!

BFN

Move uploaded file.. where? not there!!!

A plan we'd had for integrating tools from all the different sites together has come awry.

It is entirely possible that I am doing something wrong, so if anyone has insight, do please feel free to show me to way!

I was creating pages where content folks can edit some basic things on the page for mgmhd, and upload images.

The problem I ran into was that our main tools has it's own domain. The folder where these files lives happens to not be in the same path as the folder where I want to put the images. I can't work out how (using move_uploaded_file) to put the image where I want it to go.. it keeps trying to put it under /tools/foldername/image.jpg. Oh well.. mgmhd gets it's own tools! Yayz0rs.

BFN

A spec? No WAY?!?!

Yes way. Today.. I wrote a spec. I'm dragging my poor coworkers kicking and screaming into the right direction. No one specifically has a problem with specs, they just believe there is no time to write them. I disagree. Strongly! I have wasted an inordinate amount of time working on projects that because they have no spec, we've constantly been asking questions, and making plain old guesses as to how they are supposed to work. Sadly my guesses (although often well informed) are only correct about 50% of the time (this is not a statistical number, just a .. well.. a guess).

To be honest I enjoy writing specs. I know.. weird huh? I find as I start the document, I start to see the pages and the code grow in my head. I can work through things I just know are not going to work right then and there as I type. Writing the technical spec is usually where I work through most of the thornier problems, and I get it down to pseudo code, it just appears in my head! I like to have everyone in the team review the spec once it's completed (I send it out pretty much as is, without any real proofing) and those who actually read it give me all the feedback I need (typo here, rename this thing, what is this?).

Today I wrote a spec, and those that read it (the important people) worked out we were seeing the problem completely differently.. and the design was going to be wildly different from the back end. What a relief to work this out now!! I know I'd saved at least a small amount of time, and that made the fact my fingers hurt from typing, totally worthwhile.

BFN

The wonders of photoshop

Actually I use GIMP.. but our designer type person here uses Photoshop. In fact.. he used it to create these pictures of Steger! (With the help of my trusty Nikon Coolpix camera).

We really do work here.. honestly!




BFN

Stolen Sandwich.. the perils of a shared fridge

We went up to the break room earlier today, and found this note stuck to the fridge. Sorry for the quality, my mate took a picture of it on his camera phone.




Click for a larger view.

Mantis, my new pest control

I've been umm'ing and arr'ing about getting some bug tracking software setup. I never seem to find the time, until today. I considered installing bugzilla, but i'm not all that hot at server admin type stuff, so was worried to read things like "backup backup backup".
I set my browser to go to google, and typed in "bug tracker php". The very first (non paid) result was Mantis. Sounds good to me! I read a little about it, searched on whether it had a ton of bad reviews or not, and was thoroughly impressed with what I saw.

After downloading it to me desktop, I decided (in my infinite wisdom) to try installing it locally first. I have Xampp running locally, so I thought it would be a breeze. Not so. I can't remember the errors I was getting specifically, but it was enough for me to give up and go straight onto the server install. That sounds dangerous doesn't it!! "Oh dear it won't run on my safe little local environment.. lets break the server!" But really, I don't expect a whole lot to run locally, Xampp can only do so much for this windows machine.

Turns out on the server I had a bunch more success. I had to patch the version I downloaded (small mysql typo/bug) but aside from that it went off without much of a hitch. With all the messing around I did, I'd say it took me about an hour from searching for it to having it running.

In the past I've avoided bug trackers because they've seemed over cumbersome, like a whole extra step I have to perform, along with the hundreds of other tasks I have to do every day. I am reformed. I'm tired of hunting through my notebook searching for a note I made 6 weeks ago on the bottom of a page which I think had a diagram of a server on it.. maybe not.. darn where is it?!

I've been using Mantis now for a grand total of 3 hours. If anything comes up, I'll be sure to post again about it. Since most management attempts fail because no one participates, I've decided that this is 99% for me, and 1% for everyone else. Even if people send me an email, an IM, a phone call, I'll put them all in Mantis myself, so I won't forget!

I'm really looking forward for the satisfaction of marking a bug as done.. I can't wait!!

Mantis is at http://www.mantisbt.org/

BFN

It's fixed!! (amazon etc)

I am very happy to say.. it wasn't my fault for once! Woot! I have no idea what/how it was fixed.. but it was. I got a response from our host saying they think they found it, and try it. First time.. no, not fixed, second time, no, third time, no (This is where I started to panic.. this is day two by the way), fourth time, no, fifth time.. YES.

The error is completely gone. SOAP works perfectly (I think I will reimplement it) REST works perfectly.. everything is perfect. I wonder what was broke?

BFN

Temporary failure in name resolution

Yep.. what the heck is that?! Temporary failure in name resolution...

I think this is why the Amazon links stopped working, it also explains what happened to a couple of the feeds.
This code:

$request = 'http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=xxx&
Operation=ItemSearch&SearchIndex=DVD&Actor=Brad%20Pitt';
$response = file_get_contents($request);
echo htmlspecialchars($response, ENT_QUOTES);

Gets this error:

Warning: file_get_contents(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Temporary failure in name resolution in /var/www/html/includes/amazon_cart_small.php on line 16

Here is the most annoying part.. NOT all the time. I google'd it, tried a few things, emailed support at our host.. still nothing. Any clues?

BFN

REST did not solve anything..

Seems there is seriously something wrong between us and Amazon.. we're not speaking.. sometimes.

My favourite kind of error, the intermittent kind! I'm ignoring it for now, sadly we will lose revenue while buy links are down, but I can't see a way around it yet. I'm having similar, although not as fatal errors with REST as I had with SOAP.

On a completely different note, I found a link to a member of my Clan from Tabula Rasa (video game) who actually makes a podcast.. huh: http://rumheroes.mypodcast.com/
The funniest part is this post: http://rumheroes.mypodcast.com/2007/11/Photonic_Cramps-57445.html

Whoa nelly.. People really like this stuff.

BFN

SOAP problems making me go REST

The Amazon buy links have been live on the main site for almost a month. Yesterday they all stopped working. Strange.. I took them all off the site, so it's now like they were never there.

On further investigation (googling the error) it turns out _lots_ of websites are experiencing the same problem. The question is where to go from here. I read some more about ways to communicate with Amazon, and it turns out that REST is supposedly faster than using SOAP.

Luckily I'm familiar with some of the steps involved in setting this up, so perhaps later today we will be live again with buy links for the main site, and they won't take 15 minutes to load!

BFN

Stargate updates are live!

Finally.

Woot!

Tired.. sleepy.. so glad it's Friday! OMG.. it's not *cries*

I guess tomorrow will be the "whoops it broke" day. Give me strength!

BFN

No new Stargate.. yet

We had planned to launch today, but for some unforeseen circumstances, the launch has been put off for a few days.

It was finished though!

I was a little excited at some of the new things we got to do, but I guess only a few more days and you can all see it yourselves!

Loui and I had free tickets to a pre-screening of Beowulf today, but traffic worked against us, and by the time we got there it was going to be a long wait in a queue. We quit while we were ahead, and ate some sushi for dinner.

Unfortunately no interesting code to report today, all bug fixes and what not.. boo hoo!

I met some of the people working on Stargate Worlds, and they have promised to let us have a peek at the closed beta, so I'm hoping they remember me (I snagged a business card from someone who seemed important!) when the time comes for me to play!

BFN

Amazon unbox episode links

Ah ha!! I think I have it.. well sort of. Not as wonderfully automatic as on mgm.com, but passable. I've added an extra field for each episode, which unfortunately will have to be manually entered when the episode is added (and ones already up will have to be retroactively done) for the ASIN. This is the ID Amazon gives for each and every product in it's catalog.

Using the ASIN, I can do an ASIN Search using the AWS API, to get the buy link for each episode. It won't be ready for launch, but as soon as our Content Queen gets a chance, she'll have the arduous task of adding all the ASIN's to our DB, then the buy episodes will work!

In the meantime, I am hoping that Amazon does something to it's IndexSearch in the AWS API to allow me to search for "Stargate Atlantis Missing" and find the right eps. Oh well!

BFN

Stargate site updates go live tomorrow

All the work our designer, and front end developer has put in (with a tiny help from me) will go live tomorrow! That's the plan anyhow. It feels like whenever we get mostly done with something, TPTB push us in an entirely new direction. It's hard to make a kick ass site when you don't know what the goals of the site are. Is the site supposed to sell more DVD's? To sell more digital downloads (iTunes/unBox)? To get more people to watch SciFi? To get more people interested in general?
Who are we trying to get to watch Stargate? Is it people in their 20's? 30's? It's hard to go in a solid direction, and then be able to gauge our success without any particular goals.

Anyhow, we're at a point where a new version will be out of the site. It looks good, not a whole lot has changed, there is no new content, only some new looking bits.
The part I'm most excited about is the amazon unbox buylinks on the episodes. I ran into a snafu however. It seems that Amazon UnBox doesn't let you link to a particular episode, only to the entire series! Not even just to a season!

This afternoon I'll be messing around more with SOAP to see if I can get it down to episode by episode purchases, otherwise the whole thing will be rather simple (one link for Atlantis, one link for SG1!)

Anyone linked directly to episodes on Amazon Unbox before?

BFN

LOL cats.. crack me up!

Although the stargate lolcats translation isn't as fun (mostly because parts of it are nonsensical) it's still funny!

http://lolinator.com/lol/stargate.mgm.com/

and mgm.com .. which is better imo:

http://lolinator.com/lol/mgm.com/


BFN

People's Choice Awards

SGA is nominated!! Go vote!

http://www.pcavote.com/pca/

BFN

Error Handling.. Mail server bashing

As my last post suggested, I've been working on error handling.

To finally put things in order, and stop error messages from showing up anywhere at all (although I think I've decided to put them back into pages for the dev servers at least), I put together a super simple function that captures the errors, and sends me an email.

error_reporting(0);
function myErrorHandler($errno, $errmsg, $filename, $linenum, $vars)
{
$dt = date("Y-m-d H:i:s (T)");
$errortype = array (
E_ERROR => 'Error',
E_WARNING => 'Warning',
E_PARSE => 'Parsing Error',
E_NOTICE => 'Notice',
E_CORE_ERROR => 'Core Error',
E_CORE_WARNING => 'Core Warning',
E_COMPILE_ERROR => 'Compile Error',
E_COMPILE_WARNING => 'Compile Warning',
E_USER_ERROR => 'User Error',
E_USER_WARNING => 'User Warning',
E_USER_NOTICE => 'User Notice',
E_STRICT => 'Runtime Notice',
E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR => 'Catchable Fatal Error'
);
$user_errors = array(E_USER_ERROR, E_USER_WARNING, E_USER_NOTICE);
$err = "Error.\n";
$err .= "\tDate: " . $dt . "\n";
$err .= "\tError Num: " . $errno . "\n";
$err .= "\tError Type: " . $errortype[$errno] . "\n";
$err .= "\tError msg: " . $errmsg . "\n";
$err .= "\tScript name: " . $filename . "\n";
$err .= "\tScript line num: " . $linenum . "\n";
$err .= "\n\n";

// if ($errno == E_WARNING) {
mail("something@gmail.com", "Critical Site Error", $err);
// }
}
$old_error_handler = set_error_handler("myErrorHandler");

I realise it sends me a bazillion emails when I'm not limiting it warnings or errors, but it's alright now, I setup a gmail account to handle it all.
I actually got a stern email, followed by a stern phone call from IS.. they said I was "causing emails to bounce" because of the volume I was getting from the server. So incredibly pathetic imo.. even iMail over at Impress could handle it.. c'mon.. like 120 emails an hour.. that's NOTHING!!!

Anyhow.. volume on those emails has gone down as I've fixed the obvious stuff. I guess once I get it down to one or two a day, I'll switch it back to my actual work account email for real emergencies.

BFN

Beowulf and Error Handling

For starters I need to rave about the movie. Brian was able to snafu some tickets to the premiere of the movie Beowulf last night in Westwood.
We found the place to pick up our tickets rather easily, considering the throngs of people, and the security guards blocking off major portions of the block leading towards the theaters. There was no line at all, and we got our tickets with assigned seats.
As we went to cross the street, a security guard checked our tickets, and let us through, much to the envy of the large crowd straining to see people on the red carpet.

Suddenly I realised we're there, right in front of the theater, basically next to the red carpet. For the life of me I couldn't remember who was in the movie (I mean who did the voices) except for Angelina Jolie. The paparazzi were not going nuts, and it was early, at least an hour before the movie was to start, so I could only assume they weren't there yet. We were sent over the movie theater B. I guess that's where all the non actors went, which was fine by us, much less fuss! We picked up our free sodas, popcorn, and cool 3D glasses, found our seats, and settled in.

I won't write too much about the movie itself, as many of my friends actually want to see it, so here is the non spoilerish opinions. My eyes had a hard time at the start, as I kept trying to "refocus" on things that my eyes were telling me were close, even though they weren't. It was kind of annoying. Eventually (after about 20 mins) it stopped, and I was fine, no more focusing issues. I think the movie was beautifully drawn, the characters were interesting, and the fight scenes stellar! Sometimes it looked a little "2D with something behind it". Reminded me a little of a popup book, but mostly that wasn't noticeable.

We left just as the credits started to roll, and beat the bulk of the crowd outside. We crossed teh street, and stopped to watch the people leave theater A. After a short while, the paparazzi started screaming, and it was time for Angeline Jolie and Brad Pitt to leave! They came out across the red carpet, and jumped in a Toyota Prius! Yes.. seriously.. there were big huge limo's lining the street, and they got into a Prius. Besides the fact it had blacked out windows, it looked pretty stock standard.

I want to thank Brian for so kindly inviting me to go along, it was a very memorable event, and one I was glad to have been at!

Now onto the _really_ interesting stuff.. Error handling!!

Actually.. I'll post about that later ;)

BFN

The pumpkin collapse

I knew the pumpkins wouldn't last long, but I was shocked to discover yesterday as I was tidying up for Rover to do his thing (the Roomba) that Loui's pumpkin was leaking. Upon closer inspection, the entire inside was covered in mold, and it was collapsing in on itself, while excreting some kind of clear liquid.

I promptly brought over the garbage, and slid the now squishy, almost completely collapsed pumpkin in. Not until I disturbed the pumpkin did I get a whiff of the smell! EWWWW!

Even though my pumpkin had yet to start this downhill slide, I threw it out as well. We carved pumpkins on Wednesday, and by Sunday it was moldy and rotten. That was a TON faster than I expected!

Tonight is the premiere of Beowulf the movie! My friend Brian (link over there on the right) got us tickets to the premiere event in Westwood, so I'm really looking forward to that this evening.

Right now my day pretty much consists of error handling. I've been extremely lax with this in the past, sort of crossing my fingers and hoping it wouldn't happen to me. Well it happened, and a little too publicly for my tastes. Today I hope to implement my error functions, and bring the ugly errors to a standstill (at least on live servers).

JoY!

BFN

Tabula Rasa in stores today!

Everyone rush out and buy a copy, it's brilliant!

I had the privilege to play in the beta, and also the pre-order and now it's available for everyone. It's scifi meets mmo, mmo meets fps, guns over spells, fast paced skirmishes over drawn out sequences.

I've enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to you all letting me know your names in game, so we can party!

BFN

ps. I just noticed something interesting.. tonight is the Stargate Atlantis episode on SciFi of "Tabula Rasa" now that is a WEIRD coincidence!

Stargate posters from Comic-Con!

TV marketing (who very kindly took me backstage at comic-con to meet some of the cast) let us know today that they had some posters from comic-con for us.

They are HUGE! Nice big shiny ones, on a hard back. One for Stargate Atlantis, and another for Stargate SG-1.

I will post pics as soon as I take some, they are wonderful! I had to take down some of the non-Stargate posters in my cube to accommodate them, and will need to invest in some strong tape.

On a side note, they had looked at getting me an extra set of hands (freelance style) but I'd convinced them I don't need it. I know, I know.. stupid right? Well not really! The team will be getting an extra front-end developer, and an extra designer. This will mean that I will actually be getting projects sooner, so instead of having 4 hours to do something that takes a week.. I'll have 5 hours!!

BFN

BFN

Virgin pumpkin carving

Both Lou and I were virgins.. to pumpkin carving at least!

So tonight we popped our cherries. Together we each carved our very first pumpkins, and i've decided to post the fruits of our labor!

We were both surprised at how quick, easy, and not at all messy the process was. Honestly we both chose very simple designs, and next year we plan to do something much more difficult.

Here are our most awesome pumpkins:

First up is my pumpkin above.


Then Loui's classic design above


Loui posing with his extra head!!



Me.. cuddling with mine on the floor.

Besides various costume issues this year, I'd say it's been a most interesting Halloween!

BFN

Happy Random Costume day!

The title of today's blog comes courtesy of my friend Brian H. Quite frankly I think it sums up today the best!

Today I was supposed to come to work in my costume, but in the end I chickened out :(

My costume in the end looked quite a bit too military.. the only thing really showing that it was from Stargate Atlantis was the patches on my sleeves! Even though I work on the site, I am pretty sure most people here wouldn't have understood, and would have thought I dressed up as a security guard (which is what I was mistaken for last weekend while wearing the costume).

I will put it on tonight once I get home, and take some pictures, so you too, can enjoy my security guard costume *sigh* If only I could get my hands on the pattern for the jacket they currently wear on the show! Either that, or find a good tailor to create a pattern from a photo.

Back to creating a tool to manage features on MGM HD. Currently it's done automatically, except I have to go in and alter the code everytime they put a movie waaaaaay outside the primetime slot. Awesome! Now someone is going to be personally responsible for managing it (not me).

BFN

Google Adsense now up on Stargate!

It's barely 10.30am Monday morning, and I have already achieved so much!

I ate a delicious bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich (gave half to my boss.. better for my butt) followed by received the "you're approved" email from google.

Since I'd run through setting up google ads (I test all such fun things by adding them to my own sites, you'll notice google ads further down the side on this blog for example) it was pretty simple to zoom through, and setup the code.

We already had an interim ad running in a leaderboard space on Stargate, so in it went!

Imagine our surprise, when the first ad to appear was for an RPG game.. really?? RPG.. that's all they have related to Stargate? Second ad we got was.. Queer as Folk jewelry?!?! Wow.. finally the third refresh yielded an ad for Angel. Finally a TV show in the Scifi genre. After that the ads were ringtones, more RPG, more Queer as Folk jewelry. I hope once people realise we are advertising on the site, they will bid for space on it. That would be neat!

This morning I checked into our Amazon Associated account, and was pleased as punch to see we'd made money over the weekend!

I'd say that's a success, and nothing broke, so I'm glad we went live on a Friday afternoon after all.

Traffic was soso this morning, I was late to pick up James, but nothing dramatic. Ran two miles again this morning, faster again, with my shiny new running shoes (My last pair developed holes).

BFN

Amazon buy links at mgm.com

Something good happened last week! After much back and forth over bank accounts, authorizations, email account setups that seemed to take forever (really long.. I think 3 weeks?) yesterday finally was the culmination of all that effort.

It only took me about an hour to write the code to put in the pages (I followed the instructions someone had kindly provided at DevShed.com), a couple more hours to test and improve, then on a Friday afternoon (worst time on the planet to go live) we pushed it live!

Although it doesn't seem like a very noteworthy moment.. it marks the turning point for our group, when we actually start making money! We don't think it will be much, but it is a lot better than simply sending people to Best Buy, from whom we get no profit share at all.

In the near future I hope to also add Amazon UnBox buy links to our catalog, especially for the Stargate Franchise although I think they will probably be linked someplace else first...

Just this last week we had a major outage. One microsite went down in the outage, as did one section on Stargate.mgm.com. It doesn't sound that major, but it had the potential to take down a lot more than that! We learned from the incident that we need to implement a failover plan not only for the hardware the databases sit on, but also the file storage package on which the data actually sits. To be honest we thought it already HAD such a failover. Turns out we were wrong. I hate "learning" things through serious outages, but it had the advantage of moving it to the top of our priority list.

Picture: My traffic fun..

BFN!

My very own logo.

The time has come, where I now have my own logo. My very own! My twitter name is kangamoo, and I use that "nic" in lots of places, so the very gifted designer here at work (James) has made me my very own.

I even have a smaller version for an icon:

Woot!

BFN

Stargate Atlantis renewed for season 5!

We just got the press release saying Stargate Atlantis has been renewed for a new season!

YAY!

Quote from Press release:

"SCI FI is proud to bring Atlantis back for another season," said Mark Stern, Executive Vice President, Original Programming for SCI FI. "Atlantis truly came out from under the shadow of its sister series this year and proved that it’s a hit in its own right. With this season’s exciting new characters and vibrant storylines, Atlantis also shows every sign of matching its sibling’s longevity."

"All of us at MGM are pleased to be extending the Stargate legacy with 20 new original episodes of Stargate Atlantis for our friends at SCI FI," said Charles E. Cohen, Senior Executive Vice President Finance and Corporate Development, MGM. "Viewers the world over clamor for exciting new stories of space exploration, distant civilizations and the marvels of technology, all of which continue to be delivered by Stargate Atlantis."

BFN

Browser testing..

http://browsershots.org/ is very neat!

I checked this morning to be sure that my code worked on mgmhd.com. Had to switch out the featured movies. It didn't work. Oh well! I've fixed it now. Nothing better to do on a Sunday morning!

BFN

MGM HD and it's feed

I should say, MGM HD and it's lack of feed? As much as I like taking a pretty picture of a schedule, and having to retype it, and format to upload into the database, then go through and correct all the typos (or plain wrong titles) to make sure my fuzzy titles matching logic works and the titles actually appear on the schedule... I can't wait to get the feed!

Looks like it will be further away now than originally anticipated, so I am steeling myself to entering another day at a time for the schedule.

I shouldn't gripe.. but we have so many other things planned. We're still only half way through the enourmous conversion of the old DB structure to my new design. The design was completed, signed off, and the new databases created back in June! Not to mention all the updates and revisions we have for the Stargate sites.

I have my fingers crossed for a new season of Stargate, but partially because one of the higher ups noticed the extra effort I was putting towards the project, oh.. and all the posters in my cube *grin* and suggested I might go up to Vancouver to see if I could find some more content for the site or something like that. Woot! I'd even buy my own ticket ;)!

So.. in the meantime.. let me retype this schedule.

BFN

MGM HD.. what day is it? wait.. what time is it?

MGM HD site creation has certainly been an interesting experience. From what I understand the feedback on the TV Channel itself has been overwhelmingly positive. Which is great for us, because it means we're dealing with TPTB while they are in a good mood.

I can honestly say I never ever read a TV guide in my life. I don't know why, I just never needed to know when my shows are on, because I always had the power of advertising to let me know, and now my cable box tells me what's on when.
I thought someone had made a mistake, and messed up the "dates" on the excel spreadsheet I got, which had laid out (in a way no one could possibly script to get the data out of it) that each "day" starts at 6am, and goes through until 5.59am the following day.

Apparently that's how it's done in TV Guides, and TV Stations. Silly me to think that 12am marks the start of a new day! This has created tons of problems for me creating the schedule. As on the feed and schedule.. the date is correct literally, and the time is also correct. This means two things. I have to constantly be checking to make sure that today really is today.. it really is today if it's after 6am. Before 6am, I have to reset all the variable like it's yesterday.

My head hurts.. seriously my code has turned to complete spaghetti.. it's almost incomprehensible that I can't use plain regular old dates.. I have to always be checking the time to work out if it's really today or not.

The other snafu created by this crazy system is getting them out of the database in the right order, for the right "day". My query ended up like this:

select * from schedule where (air_date='".$now_date."' and air_time >='600') or (air_date='".$tomorrow_date."' and air_time < '600') order by air_date, air_time

Lovely aint it?

It's live, it appears to work, now I just have to wait and see what happens at the end of the month, and the end of the year. Lets hope I got all those calculations right!

BFN

Tabula Rasa - Commando!

Love the way my character looks in Tabula Rasa..

MGM HD is feedless

At least for the time being, there is no feed for MGM HD. How was I to make a website with a schedule without a schedule??

Yikes.. I basically took a layout of the schedule, and created a version that I could import sans feed. I had to write a new version of all the pages, to process a title as the key. A title is not a very good key, for tons of reasons, but mostly because people tend to misspell things, to use different punctuation, or to just plain get the title wrong.
I spent a large time yesterday going through and "fixing" all the title names. FUN!!

It's done.. I have to go over it again with the printed schedules I brought home, but for the most part my code worked!! I shouldn't sound to surprised.. but I am ;)

Today's task was to get the search working. This can mean many things, and because I am again working with no spec, and no direction.. I've made it up. The search just submits via get directly to mgm.com. I assume this is what it's supposed to do, but I could be wrong.. it's happened before!

I heard from a friend that I've not spoken to in year this last week! Am excited to be back in contact, and hopefully will see him next time I go home.

well.. BFN!

Ratings for Stargate Atlantis Season 4 Eps 1

Finally a result is in, and I didn't win our pool over the rating for the season premiere episode of SGA. As reported at gateworld.net, it's a 1.2.

http://gateworld.net/news/2007/10/season_four_premieres_with_1.2_r.shtml

My guess was a 1.7 which turns out to be far off, but is super sad, because how it does in the ratings in the next two more eps (or one more) will determine if the show is renewed.

*le sigh*

BFN

Stargate is not over

We were supposed to spend all of September making updates and changes for the Stargate website. October 1st there was a meeting with TPTB and looks like we'll be focusing on it for at least another couple months.

Means our other projects, and most of my "goals" for this year (to get my bonus) won't come to fruition. That makes me super duper sad. Oh well! I do happen to like the Stargate franchise tons, so I will at least get to implement some of the ideas I have to improve the sites.

All the scripts and tools are done for MGM HD, now we just await the mysterious "feed" which we won't see until the day it goes live (or perhaps after!!)... Love developing blind!

Today I will be creating a function to go through the synopsis of each episode, and find the character and actor names, and surround them with links directly to each character page. FANCY! Well not really.

BFN

ps. I'd like to say, I am not responsible for Team Stargate.. but sorry to those who couldn't pick their province in the first week, that was my fault *blush*. I'd also like to point out that that "game" on the site wasn't us either.. third party marketing fluff.

wget is easy as pie

Impressed with how easy it is to use wget at the command line.

So cron scripts are done, everything is put in MySQL just fine, now working to match our titles, with the titles from tribune. We use the stars master title ID for our titles, but tribune has their own very special ID. The tool it quick, just searches on the title itself and the year, and gives likely matches to the user. The user checks the boxes of the ones to associate with each other, saves to our property database.
Not sure exactly what to do about ones that don't match.. in theory they should be in our database. Probably just put a text field so the user can manually add the stars master title id (we call it the smid).

Team Stargate is up. It has garnered the exact reaction I expected. Curses to marketing folk, you give me a bad name :( We're so often forced to create the interface for half baked ideas, but it really gets frustrating when we bear the brunt. Especially since they are not even employee's .. we get the bad name, they have the bad ideas.. WTF!!

BFN

Import delimited file into DB

At first I was a lil worried about how I was going to make this happen at the command line. I am very comfortable with the command line, but it's been a while since I've used perl or other suitable languages. I had _no idea_ how I could possibly get a delimited file from the command line (in a script run as a cron) into Oracle, so I set that aside, and opted for MySQL.

First I wrote a script in perl. Just a quickie, to make sure i'd be able to ftp down the file, and insert it into MySQL. No luck.. none of the ability to connect to MySQL. *snap*.
Route two was to try and use the LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE commands in MySQL.. I couldn't seem to get it working at the command line.. no idea why, but I then went down another path.
Route three I found that PHP on the servers was CLI version! WOOT! Since PHP and I are most firmly aquainted, I wrote a quick script, also trying the LOAD DATA path. Some luck, but wasn't doing everything I wanted.

Final Route is just a good old read file and an explode, followed by a loop with an insert statement. Easy as pie.

Now I think I might have to use Oracle after all. Don't tell my boss ;)

BFN!

Great photos!

My friend Matt took a trip to Europe and took some great photo's!

Here is the link to the goodness: http://web.mac.com/mattmaggard/Europe_in_the_Fall/Europe.html

Aren't they great!

BFN

Remote content

Sadly the blog fell by the "i'm busy" wayside this week.

It didn't help that I didn't do anything particularly interesting.. .. ..

Only one this was moderately interesting. On the site, we have terms of use, and a privacy policy. Other sites within the realm use the same one, but previously someone just emailed them the content, and they repurposed it for their site. This was great.. until we updated them recently, and found many of the satellite sites are now out of date.

I created a version without a header, or footer, or styles. I've put the files in an easily accessible place, and have supplied the other sites with some simple code.

I wrote some pretty functions and stuff to go around it, but the code basically was this:
$this->data = join('',file($url));

Woot!

BFN

Where did the week go??

Wow.. it's lunch time Friday, and I'm setting to go home for the week already.

I managed to get away with only doing annoying stuff at work this week, so nothing interesting to report here.

Next week is going to be more interesting, as I start working on the Stargate site updates, and Stargate Street Team things.

FUN!

BFN

Busyness vs Postyness

I've been doing tons of stuff, just nothing worth blogging about. How sad!

Going to Pageant of the Masters today in Laguna Beach. Woot!

BFN.

My power is recognized!

For some reason, fans of the show think that someone besides me, creates, and monitors the results of the polls.

http://forum.gateworld.net/showthread.php?t=46382


You may now refer to me as the all powerful!

Accepting ideas for new polls.

BFN

Movie Poster!

The brilliant designer that I work with created this poster of Matt!

Oracle doesn't like autoincrement

Well, it's not that it doesn't "like" it, it just doesn't do it.

Here's what I am gonna do instead, loveingly stolen from http://www.lifeaftercoffee.com/2006/02/17/how-to-create-auto-increment-columns-in-oracle/

First let’s create a simple table to play with.

SQL> CREATE TABLE test
(id NUMBER PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR2(30));

Table created.

Now we’ll assume we want ID to be an auto increment field. First we need a sequence to grab values from.

SQL> CREATE SEQUENCE test_sequence
START WITH 1
INCREMENT BY 1;

Sequence created.

Now we can use that sequence in an BEFORE INSERT trigger on the table.

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER test_trigger
BEFORE INSERT
ON test
REFERENCING NEW AS NEW
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
SELECT test_sequence.nextval INTO :NEW.ID FROM dual;
END;
/

Trigger created.

This trigger will automatically grab the next value from the sequence we just created and substitute it into the ID column before the insert is completed.

Now we’ll do some inserts:

SQL> INSERT INTO test (name) VALUES ('Jon');

1 row created.

SQL> INSERT INTO test (name) VALUES (’Bork’);

1 row created.

SQL> INSERT INTO test (name) VALUES (’Matt’);

1 row created.

SQL> SELECT * FROM test;

ID NAME
———- ——————————
1 Jon
2 Bork
3 Matt

Because the sequence is updated independent of the rows being committed there will be no conflict if multiple users are inserting into the same table simultaneously.

Later.. how do I get this value out??

BFN

strtotime in PHP doesn't work on dates before 1970

I learned a new lesson today! The PHP function strtotime does not work on dates prior to 1970.

Isn't that awesome!

Since we have super special date format from Oracle, I had to turn 23-NOV-54 into Nov 23, 1954.
I did it the long way.. don't ask me why?!

$pieces = explode("-", $propRDate);
//make the month mixed case
$propRMonth=$pieces[1];
$propRMonth=strtolower($propRMonth);
//don't know why, but it doesn't work to just to ucfirst, I have to strtolower first.
$propRMonth=ucfirst($propRMonth);
//now lets make the year's 4 digit!
if (($pieces[2] > 0) and ($pieces[2] < 20)) {
//then it's 19
$propRYear="20".$pieces[2];
} else {
$propRYear="19".$pieces[2];
}
$propRDate = $propRMonth." ".$pieces[0].", ".$propRYear;

Anyhow.. fun fun,

BFN

Restructure, Redesign, better, faster, stronger!

Today is the day, when finally, after all these months working here (jeez almost a year?!) I'm going to finalize the redesign of the database.
This redesign will allow us to properly associate movie titles with each other, and with their products (DVD's, theatrical releases, blu-ray etc).

It is a momentous occasion. Only real problem now is when the DBA checks it over.. *le sigh* Me being a developer and not a DBA means usually real DBA's think my DB's are crap.. even though they make writing a website for me real real easy!

BFN

Back from Comic Con

Had a great time down in San Diego at Comic Con. Got to see the Stargate SG-1 Movie panel, and the Stargate Atlantis panel on Friday. On Saturday I went with my friend Brian and saw the Family Guy panel and spent some time looking at the exhibit hall.

I was excited to get the opportunity to go backstage before the panels, and meet some of the Stargate peoples. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Joe Flanigan, David Hewlett, Jane Loughman (David Hewlett's Fiance), and Amanda Tapping.

I was, as expected, stunned into silence, shook hands, said Hi and that was about it. I didn't even manage to get a photo.. oh well, I've got the memory!

On Saturday while down at the Exhibit Hall, I visited the MGM booth, and got this lovely pic:

Comic-Con San Diego

Tomorrow night we leave for Comic-Con. Already scoured the timetables, and created a document that I can print out and carry around with me to remind me where to go and when.

Hoping feverishly that I will be able to get backstage to meet the Stargate folks before their panel, and then to get some autographs later in the day. Also hoping that they decide to go to dinner with MGM people, and I get to tag along. Well.. at least I can dream :D

BFN

Docstoc

Through linkedin, I received a message about doing some dev work. Even though I'm not interested in the work, I liked the idea of this business:

docstoc

This is from their blog:

Docstoc.com is a free online document exchange database and social networking site that allows users to store, search, and share virtually any type of document (word, excel, powerpoint, pdf, illustrator, etc…). Similar in concept to Flickr.com (for photos) and YouTube.com (for videos) Docstoc.com will be the online community for sharing all types of documents. The users will post, categorize, and rate thousands of documents that can be reused by other users for a variety of purposes.

Sounds interesting huh?

BFN

6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers

I haven't tried all of these, although I plan to try them on Monday! Personally my favourite for firefox is the webdev toolbar, lots of goodies to make it easier to debug/write pages.

Anyhow.. here's the other guy's list: 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers

BFN

Tabula Rasa - Beta

I was very excited to find yesterday in my email, an invite to join the beta of Tabula Rasa! I have been eager to try the game out, ever since I saw my first demo of it at E3 a few years ago.

I have started the download.. we're at 3%. I will update once I get into the game!

Tabula Rasa

BFN

Microsoft site W3C Compliant?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindows%2Fproducts%2Fwinfamily%2Fie%2Fdefault.mspx

Methinks not...


BFN

Me as a Simpson character

Me as a Simpson character.

Article about the iPhone

I'd like to preface this link with a comment. I am posting this not as an iPhone basher, as my mate has it, and it looks neat. Mostly I am posting it cos it's pretty damn true, and extremely funny (as long as you're not an apple fanboy) Enjoy.

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so if your face

BFN

PHP Twitter class

Just saw this class on the PHP Classes site, and plan to implement it on my website (jeninason.com) tomorrow. Mostly because I'd much prefer to use something that looks like it matches (with my stellar design skills) than the standard "badges".

http://jeninason.users.phpclasses.org/browse/package/4011.html


BFN!

How to define Web 3.0

Found this article very interesting at defining where things are heading.

http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/how-to-define-web-30-2/

BFN!

Publishing solved.. for now

As I've mentioned previously, I've been working to improve how the publishing to stage and live servers works on the main content management system.

I've just finished up with the changes, and this is how we went:
Changed the button "Insert to Stage" to "Save". On the titles, and the dvd's this either inserts to both stage and production with approved as no to both, or updates stage, setting stage to approved as no.
Another user can go to an extra page I made which checks the titles, and dvd tables, for all records that are active, but approved is no, and they can select "approve to go live". This updates stage to approved is yes, and production as approved is yes, and copies stage record to production.

The only places it's really different is for images related to the titles, videos, buy links and the such. These only have "save" and it updates and sets as approved on stage and production always. We decided that this stuff since it was part of the titles or the dvd's anyhow, should always go live, and doesn't need separate approval.

Now it's Friday at 3pm, and I've finished everything on that rather major project, so don't want to start anything new.. What to do.. What to do..

BFN

Funny

Someone actually told me yesterday that my myspace page was bland. There was "nothing to look at there, and no music". I shuddered.. EWWWW I can't express how much I _hate_ the pages slathered in useless noise, and images. Yuck.

Today I found this comic which really expresses how I feel about people and their dumbass myspace pages. So there! Credit for the comic going to http://xkcd.com/ Great comics, check them all out!

BFN

HTML & Email regular expression

For some reason this interface refuses to let me type in the title field.. strange.. hopefully it will let me edit it later!

Two things were the highlight of today. HTML. Argh! Trying to make something look good when you cut and paste it from a browser into outlook. It sounds easy. It's not. Our regular front end developer was out sick today, so MM and I tried as well as we could, to edit the HTML. After an hour or so, we just started the page over, and voila.. no more error!

We still don't know why it didn't work, but after wasting so much time trying to find out what was broken (basically we could see a small black line on the right of the email) we knew we could fix it just by rewriting it.

Sad.

My other highlight was a solution to a problem I'd solved in a different way. Regular expressions do my head in. I mean I can do them if I must, but usually I just find another way. A couple weeks ago I'd been asked to hyperlink an email address in a string as a mailto. I put the email in a seperate field in the database, problem solved, although not as "fancy" as i'd liked, it certainly meant for cleaner data.

My mate Brian today (Link on right to io intermedia) asked me how to pull a link out of an href without using a regular expression. I made some suggestions, but I think he already sorted it out, just needed to say it out loud (type it?). I told him about the email link thing from a couple weeks ago, and he sent me this link: http://textsnippets.com/posts/show/179.
ARGH! Lol.. it seems so simple, and I feel like a n00b. Oh well.. hopefully it helps me in the future!
Here is the code:

function extract_emails_from($string){
preg_match_all("/[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+/i", $string, $matches);
return $matches[0];
}

$text = "blah blah blah email@address.com blah blah blah email2@address.com";
$emails = extract_emails_from($text);
print(implode("\n", $emails));

BFN!

 

CMS process woes

On Monday, we decided to implement a new way of publishing content through the CMS. Our current CMS was pretty much a direct PHP version of the last Java version, with no revisions as to functionality.

The old version was terrible, we should never have copied it, but time was a serious factor.

In the old system, the content supervisor adds a new title, checks "active" and checks "approved", then clicks "add to stage". On the next screen, they can "add to production". This caused problems because they would just check both active and approved, then add to stage, and immediately add to production, sending content live that had never been proofed, or tested at all.

From a backend standpoint, checking active and approved set those fields to "y" (yes it drove me insane that they used y and n instead of 1 and 0, but that's a whole extra set of annoyances). Adding to stage literally inserted or updated it into the stage database, then adding to production inserted or updated production database.

So we changed it. But now we have more problems. Don't you just love doing things half assed? :P Now I'm back to the drawing board, going with the pro's and con's of having two seperate databases, and a way for another person to be in the mix, and approve the content.

BFN!

- Actually we get off at noon today (Tuesday before the 4th July), and they gave us Thursday and Friday too! I mostly liked won't post again til next Monday. Have a great holiday!

Software: FastStone Photo Resizer

I needed something to quickly resize massive amounts of photo's from my camera.
Previously I'd used photoshop, and it's neato Web Gallery feature, but since I've rewritten my site using PHP, and it's a single page entry to all my photo's, there's not reason to create an HTML page.

I tried this software out because I'd found it recommended on someone else's blog, and for the life of me I can't remember where, but when I find it, I'll edit this and give kudos to the person who showed me the light!

Loved it, In just a few minutes, I'd located the folder I wanted to resize, given the specs for how much smaller I wanted the images, and let it run. Now all my photo's are ready for FTP to my server.

Just what I wanted! Thanks FastStone, steller software, and freeware to boot!

BFN

Oh and the link to their software is: FastStone Photo Resizer

Newsletter creation tool

Almost time to go and present the wonderful newsletter tool I wrote and posted about earlier.

It's been finished for more than a week, just took some time to setup the meeting and what not. Lets hope it all goes well and I don't have to re-code too much of it.

Sadly Vancouver trip is shelved :( Prices kept going up and up, and wasn't loving the choices for flight times. Perhaps we'll find something else to do, or I can spend some quality time watching more Stargate SG-1 (still not caught up to current season.. not by FAR!)

BFN

Vacation: Vancouver?

Considering Vancouver as next week's destination instead.. I've been there before, beautiful city! Not sure how much we can amuse ourselves for 3 days?

BFN

Deluxe Field trip

Yesterday afternoon we went on a team field trip to Deluxe facilities in Burbank. It was educational.
Deluxe does the encoding for our trailers, and VOD stuff for iTunes, Amazon, Walmart etc. During our tour we visited the 'vault' where they keep all the media. I found on a shelf near the door the Stargate Atlantis episode "McKay And Mrs. Miller" on tape.. sadly I was being watched at the time (probably cos I oooooh'd too loudly) otherwise I would have snagged it (maybe not.. but I would have liked to!).

Considering going to London next week with my friend Deb, it's only $1500/person flight + hotel.
BFN

Off-Topic, Dr McKay phone message

http://jeninason.com/JenniferMessage.wav

Best Practices for content to go live

Over the time i've worked at MGM, we've been having some problems with how things go live after they are entered to the content management system.

The idea of "stage" and "production" seems to be confusing to the users. Since I made it on mgm.com a two stage click ("Click here to submit to stage", then "Click here to submit to production") the users simply click through both pages, and consider it an inconvenience (can you please remove the two pages and do both at once?).

To this end I think I will implement a "two user" policy for content to go live. The person who enters the content can submit the content for review, and the other person tests the content, then has the ability to send live. Of course I'll put in an extra user (me) who can do both ;)

Why don't users test the content? This is the question that has bugged me the most. Every single week I find someone live that wasn't tested (I can usually tell because the page is broken :S ). Constantly we reiterate how important it is to just go "look" at the page once you send the content live and see if it's even there!!

Users...

BFN

Bad code day

Ever have those days when you just didn't enjoy your code? You get a project with no spec, a very basic design which doesn't describe what half the stuff is supposed to do, an html version of that with no working links, so no clue where they all supposed to go, and a really really short deadline (do it today!).

UGH

BFN

Changing file extensions

When we moved the main site from JSP to PHP, we wanted to make sure that if people had old links, they would still work.
To this end, most of the pages ended up with the same filenames, the only change was the extension. Initially there was a mod_rewrite rule created that would push all people going to *.do to *.php. For some reason it stopped working. No clue why?

My experience with mod rewrite is extremely limited. I'm happy to say I'm somewhat baffled by regular expressions. It takes me an inordinate amount of time to write them.

As an interim solution, I updated the conf so that *.do would be executed as *.php. Almost all of the requests for .do pages were for one particular page, so now we have two copies of the same page. Not an ideal solution by far, but at least they aren't getting 404's anymore.

In my efforts to try and fix this problem, we decided to make some changes to our 404. Previously it simply redirected to the homepage, as we didn't have time to work out what we really wanted it to do. I updated so the 404 is a php page, and I check the URI and redirect the user to the search page, with what they request as a search query. It's quite slick, and handles proper movie names.

For a sneak peek (not live yet) try one of our movie or tv show names after the following url: http://vendor.mgm.com/movie name Unfortunately it doesn't handle the "lack" of spaces yet. That's going to be handled once my new DB design is implemented.

http://vendor.mgm.com/rescue dawn or http://vendor.mgm.com/stargate atlantis

BFN

25 Web Sites to Watch

A mate sent me a link yesterday which I found particularly interesting.

It's a list of 25 Web Sites to Watch.

There are some links on the list that i've never heard of, but also some that I just LOVE! OpenDNS for example, where I created for myself a bunch of shortcuts for sites I go to a lot. This site for example is "blog" in my address field. Time savers like that seem frivilous, but I love them!

I also have come to love Squidoo, Meebo and Yodio amongst others. Anyhow, it's a great list to see just what's going on out there, and things to watch out for!

BFN

EnginSite and Rapid PHP 2007 are tied

After a couple more days using the new editors, EnginSite is no longer in the lead. It is now tied with Rapid PHP.

I am liking the interface with Rapid PHP, with only one misgiving so far. I don't like it when I move my cursor to the end of the line, it doesn't wrap at the EOL. It just keeps moving to the right! I know this is a small thing, but I'm used to it wrapping, so it's disconcerting, and I keep typing on the wrong line!

Perhaps I should read the documentation for EnginSite, because I can't seem to find the File Explorer. Well.. I found one, (File Manager) but it's not showing for me anything on our network drive, which is where I do all my work. It only lets me browse through files on my C drive.

I've decided to give them both another week, alternating days of using them.

BFN

Email validation review

A few days ago I posted a super simple function to validate email. Upon review, i realised that it didn't take into account .info or if they have @ipaddress.
Both of these are quite valid, but would be denied by that function.
Here is what I use instead:

function is_email_valid($email) {
if (!ereg("^[^@]{1,64}@[^@]{1,255}$", $email)) {
return false;
}
$email_array = explode("@", $email);
$local_array = explode(".", $email_array[0]);
for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($local_array); $i++) {
if (!ereg("^(([A-Za-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-][A-Za-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~\.-]{0,63})|(\"[^(\\|\")]{0,62}\"))$", $local_array[$i])) {
return false;
}
}
if (!ereg("^\[?[0-9\.]+\]?$", $email_array[1])) {
$domain_array = explode(".", $email_array[1]);
if (sizeof($domain_array) < 2) {
return false;
}
for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($domain_array); $i++) {
if (!ereg("^(([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9-]{0,61}[A-Za-z0-9])|([A-Za-z0-9]+))$", $domain_array[$i])) {
return false;
}
}
}
return true;
}

Sorry about the formatting for the longer lines doing the regular expressions, but you get the drift?

BFN

Comic-Con!

Registered for Comic-Con today! Just going for one day, but looking forward!

Nothing.. no code

Sadly I have nothing to add today. This morning we discovered that the connection to both Oracle and MySQL wasn't working. I called our managed services support. All the sites that were database driven were down for (we think) about 4 hours!!! It turned out one of the power cables on something got loose.. seriously.. a power cable.. loose.. thousands of dollars for a loose power cable.

SHEESH!

BFN

EnginSite is winning

So far.. EnginSite is winning. I like the interface, and the feel. Lets see how it performs for a whole week (and possibly on my new machine once I get it).

Ate too much fresh spinach at lunch *gag*

BFN

PHP Editors, random snippet

I've been searching high and low for reviews and trials of as many applications there are out there for writing PHP. I found some promising ones, but nothing has leapt out at me yet.
Currently I use HomeSite. More simply because it's what I used 10 years ago, than any other reason. Now I think I'd like to try an IDE.

Here are the apps I'm reviewing:

1. Programmers Notepad 2
2. Zend Studio
3. EnginSite
4. PHP Coder

I'll post my reviews once they are completed.

Code snippet for email address validation:

function is_email_valid($email) {
if(eregi("^[a-z0-9\._-]+@+[a-z0-9\._-]+\.+[a-z]{2,3}$",
    $email)) return TRUE;
else return FALSE;
} 

BFN!

New mini CM

I have been tasked to create a mini CM. Basically it's just to add new pieces to create a monthly email. I'm creating the tables in DB Designer 4 (even though I have Visio Professional now.. I can't seem to stop using the freeware one). The design is very simple, text fields, char fields, is_active, order for the pieces. A master table which has each month and it's pieces in it.

The moderately interesting thing about this task is that I need to generate two versions. One which will be emailed to a subscriber list, and another to remain on the site with forms to request more info and links to trailers which actually work. The links to trailers on the email only link back to the links from the one on the site. Does that make sense? Oh well.. babbling again!

Another task I'm currently working on is sweepstakes code. I'm not going to cover that here, simply because I'm just going to reuse code I've written for use on the Stargate site.

On my slate for this week:

• Setting up http cache for a new site under Akamai
• Blue Hornet API syncronization
• Updates for the tools for all sites
• Adserver config (openads is VERY cool!)
• Redesign of the main database for MGM.com

Hopefully I'll get to cover the code I use for most of this (excluding Akamai and Blue Hornet.. since I doubt that's relevant to anyone else).

BFN

Nothing yet.. but

Well it's a bit early today for me to have anything to post. I checked on Friday night, and the date code I'd written Friday worked like a charm!
Everything appeared on schedule, and it still there (as it should be until Thursday, when I make sure it actually disappears).

I've been trying out google's adsense. I added it to my rather empty, and quite useless personal site. I think my site only exists just to try out technologies for the web that I actually implement properly on the sites for work. My site (in case you didn't actually just come from there) is jeninason.com

I added the google adsense "search" option to my page. Having a weird CSS error, where the outline for the text field is missing. I was going to ask Steger to give me a hand, but unfortunately he's feeling under the weather today, so won't be here!

Will post later again once I've actually done some real work :P

BFN

What I hope to do here

I thought it would be good to start with what I plan to do on this blog exactly.

Every day I work on web sites, whether I'm making little fixes to bugs, or writing entire applications. Here is where I plan to document my progress.

I'm pretty much self taught with web development, I've been writing the back-end of websites for 10 years now! When I discover new things, or simply want to be able to lookup for myself where I've done something in the past, this is the place I'll come.

Each week day I plan to write a short description on what code I wrote (if any) and what it did, and perhaps filename(s) for my own reference.. at least code snippets for others.

Often I find small niggling errors that I can't find the answer to. I'm positive that someone else must have seen it before, but get frustrated trying to find the solution. I google for the answer, and all I get is uber geeks belittling people like me asking questions on forums. Here I hope to write up solutions to these simple things, and hope that people offer me feedback.. especially when I ask questions!

The question now is.. what did I do today?
1. I updated my personal website with some text. Basically it's been horribly neglected, and it's only real purpose is to post my photo's for family and friends.

2. Wrote some code and fixed a SQL select statement for picking live content (checking to see if it's active, and if the start date is passed, and the end date has not passed) from a small content manager I wrote (in a hurry).
I had to do a sort of work around. You see the users who enter the content into the CMS enter the date/time as local pacific time. This creates a problem, since the servers are set to GMT. The problem isn't quite solved yet, but this is what I have now:

putenv("TZ=US/Pacific");
$now_time=date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
$query="SELECT id FROM tablename WHERE is_active=1 AND (datetime_start < '".$now_time."' and datetime_end > '".$now_time."')";

I know putenv isn't the best way to do this, but I am working in PHP4, so the new timezone functions in PHP5 aren't available to me.

Well that's it for today, and it's Friday, so no more posting til Monday!

BFN